This fall, New York City experienced a month-long drought, reported as the second-longest rainless streak in recorded history.

Newtown Creek was clearer than I had ever seen it, as water quality there is heavily influenced by street runoff.

Nathan Austin of the Tidelands Institute sent me a picture of an eel inside the 49th Street sewer tunnel. I was amazed.

So, when Robin Hill suggested a Tide and Current Taxi trip for November, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to explore this rare phenomenon.

As an artist, Robin works with overlooked, rejected, and seemingly inconsequential materials, defamiliarizing their messages and signs through subtle transformation.

If anyone would appreciate seeing eels living in a sewer tunnel, it was most certainly Robin.

We joined Nathan and Larissa McCoy in Nathan’s boat. They wanted to check out some specifics for a possible iteration of  Drain Bramage, Nathan’s annual concert inside a sewer tunnel.

I had told Gus Perry from the Newtown Creek Alliance about the eel sightings too, and he joined us for the trip.

We left my boat anchored in the turning basin and headed toward the tunnel.

The night was perfect—not just for spotting eels but for everything else: a clear sky, a manageable tide, and weather that wasn’t too cold.

We waited for the tide to go out a little so we could fit under the retaining wall,

and we started into the tunnel.

No eels.

But we explored hundreds of feet of tunnel,

discovered an underground spring,

Nathan inspected a connecting passage,

and we toasted a beautiful November night.

In that moment, I felt proud of the creek in a different way—for the human life it supports and inspires.

And it’s nice just knowing that the eels are there, part of the unseen world, unbothered, just beneath the surface.

Flotsomancy is a performance Melissa Brown and I started live-streaming on Instagram during the pandemic.

We take questions in the chat, then I find garbage along the shore and Melissa interprets it using a mix of symbolism from astrology and lithomancy, all adapted to fit contemporary materials like plastic.

Mostly, I think our ‘divinations’ are tongue-in-cheek, but sometimes they seem hauntingly accurate. Like the time we asked a silly question about partying during the pandemic and found, of all things, a velvet rope.

We went out the night of November 4th to try and answer the biggest question of 2024.

I know there have been countless analyses in hindsight about the election, and I dread contributing my own, but when I look back at the flotsomancy video I can see that the message was clear and we misinterpreted it.

The first question was, “What will happen on November 5th?” We found a circle of orange foam surrounding a Styrofoam cup.

In Melissa’s cosmology, foam symbolizes tough lessons, increased structure, father figures, discipline, and bones. For some reason we overlooked the evidence that night and turned away from the subject.

A little later, Melissa asked what would happen in Pennsylvania, then considered the decisive state for the election. I reached down and found a blue can. We were ecstatic, announcing that because it was blue, this was a good sign for Democrats to win Pennsylvania on election night.

But later that night, Ezra pointed out that Bud Light had recently become a polarizing flashpoint, politicized as a symbol of corporate pandering and cultural division.

Also, we were fixated on the color and ignored the material itself. Cans are made from a steel or aluminum alloy, which in Flotsomancy corresponds to the planet Mars, the god of war.

The strangest thing we noticed that night was how little garbage was in the water, and we kept saying that the oracle was silent.

Now, when I look back at what we found, I realize we weren’t listening to it carefully enough.

On a beautifully warm day in November, Anna Tsouhlarakis met me at the end of Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint.

With nowhere else to be until later that night, we floated and let the wind push us far up into the creek.

We heard cheering and music from the bank and realized the marathon was crossing the Pulaski Bridge.

We caught up on life and projects.

I couldn’t believe our luck all day; the flowing tide and following wind, the easy sunlight, and the extra time.

We watched as high-rise apartment buildings gave way to factories and infrastructure.

Anna wanted to float between the recycling barges, and we did; there were more metal piles than I have ever seen, prices must be good for crushed and rusting steel.

Anna fished a card from the creek, a video tape rental membership? in 2024?

It looked newer than it should have been, making me think that lamination might be more archival than I ever knew,

or maybe this membership refers to something else entirely.

I tried to remember the way this part of the city looked when we both moved to New York after graduate school,

but I barely remember how it looked a few years ago.

When huge things change it’s hard to picture what was here.

I guess this is not so different—just a view behind everything, reflecting nowhere.

“Now you’re like a real explorer,” Anna said, “with a Native woman guide at the front of your boat.”

I fumbled around with the joke, trying to draw out something funny, but no words seemed quite right.

That’s just like Anna’s sense of humor—keeping me a little off balance.

She currently has a piece up at Banker’s Anchor in Greenpoint that I feel might do the same thing to the whole neighborhood.

Like this one in Columbus, Ohio from last year, some of her artworks are poignant snippets of poetry.
(image: Anna Tsouhlarakis, The Native Guide Project:STL, for the St. Louis Counterpublic Triennial in 2023, Photo Chris Bauer)

but I sort of like the brutal ones best.
(image: ‘The Native Guide Project: Columbus’ by Anna Tsouhlarakis, in Columbus Ohio for Wexner Center for the Arts)

Jody Graf and I met at the Queens Landing Boathouse for a trip into the Newtown Creek on a beautifully gray day in July.

The wind was perfect for an upstream float.

The tall buildings of Long Island City quickly gave way to gas tanks

and giant arms of the recycling centers at work.

I told Jody everything I knew about the creek, and I was thinking how familiar these sights have become.

Then Jody pointed out something that I never noticed before; a giant rose bush growing happily behind United Refrigeration Incorporated,

and a wonderful mimosa in the J&S Supply parking lot.

I can see why she is particularly attuned.

In 2022 Jody curated Life Between Buildings at MoMA PS1 in Queens, a show that connected the development of community gardens in 1970’s New York to art practices like Cecilia Vicuña and Gordon Matta-Clark’s, who used overlooked and abandoned spaces for performance and installation. [This image is a detail from Cecilia Vicuña’s “Sidewalk Forests” (1981) in the exhibition. Credit: Miles Huston; via Lehmann Maupin Gallery.]

In a beautiful essay about the show, Jody wrote “Look closely at the cracks, the fissures, the gaps, and you might just find something growing there that, in its quietude, speaks volumes.”

We pulled the boat out at Plank Road

and hid it in the bushes.

Passing back over the Kosciusko Bridge, we saw the recycling plant, once again just a small feature on the busy horizon,

 

but it seemed different after being this close.

Here we are at Plank Road after the 3-mile paddle.

I met Simone Johnson at Richmond Terrace Park, just a few blocks from her mom’s house on Staten Island.

There is a pretty amphitheater and a path down to the water, all completed in the last few years.

The weather was hot for June, but cool and breezy by the water.

We were headed to Shooter’s Island.

I thought Simone would like it with her interest in maritime history and marine ecology, but also just the weird remoteness of something so close by, like our trip to White Island in 2021.

Simone spent last fall working aboard the Clearwater, a 106-foot wooden sailing ship that sails the Hudson River to educate and inspire people to protect the environment.

We had a lot to catch up on as we walked. I picked up ceramic chunks, and plastic, my favorite stuff to find on Shooters Island.

“I usually beach-comb for shells, rocks, marine life,” said Simone, “I’ve never looked specifically for this other stuff.”

But on Shooters it is inevitable, the island is mostly landfill, expanded to build ships in the early 20th century.

Here it is in 1930,

and again in the 80s.

There is amazing natural stuff there too, like these scales of a massive fish (or ‘scutes’ of a sturgeon, as we learned after posting the picture to Instagram).

On our way back we talked about how all these things wound up together, this pile of manmade and natural things.

“I don’t know how I feel about balance,” said Simone. “I have met so many different people, all living so differently and in such different geographies. I am starting to wonder if balance is real and can be reached. Can people even have the same idea of what that word means?”

“To me, a lot boils down to worldview, asking what people want and asking “does XYZ have to be this way?” You might get three drastically different responses, but to me, it’s about considering the other person, the water, the marine life, and noticing how we are tipping the scales.”

When she sent her pictures later, it was like she had been on a totally different beach than me, all filled with beautiful shells, and this delicate red seaweed.

But some manmade things did sneak in, like a giant chunk of slag, probably shot out of an iron furnace near this beach 100 years ago.

Here’s what someone sent us later about the sturgeon parts,

and our selfie for the record.