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.
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