Adrian Kinloch boarded the Tide and Current Taxi from the beach at Coney Island.
He was asked to join me by his friends at Underwater New York.
They are a group of artists and writers who are inspired by things that wash up on the beaches around New York, or things that they hear about that are at the bottom of the harbor.
Adrian has a particular interest in cars that have been abandoned by the water. For a project called Liminal , he has traveled many of the same waterways that I have, looking for rusting hulks of cars and signs of dereliction.
He had been to this area a lot before.
But as we passed the rows of homes on the beach at Breezy Point, I wondered if I had planned the wrong part of the trip for Adrian.
Where was the garbage, the industrial mess, the rusting guts of the city?
Adrain Kinloch did not seem to mind.
He soaked in every detail, and he knew all the bridges and all the roads that led to these places we were floating past.
The current pulled us quickly under the Gil Hodges bridge,
and as sun dropped down on the horizon we watched a spectacular show of reflection, waves, and currents.
Suddenly the current stopped.
It would have been a great time to pull over and take a break,
but a high seawall ran along the southern bank,
and it stayed that way for miles.
When I see the New York City skyline again, I thought, it will be coming home from the North, through the Sound, hundreds of miles of water away.
We pulled up to a little park just as the sun was setting.
Adrian helped me stash the boat and we left it for the night. We had traveled over 8 miles, and most of that within the first hour of our trip.
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