Megan Elevado and I met at Floyd Bennett Field for a trip up into Four Sparrow Marsh,
but we couldn’t move the boat against the wind.
We fought it for a while,
then gave up and walked, pulling the boat in the other direction.
Once around the point, I thought the wind would be at our backs,
It was almost too much, and we surfed along on the rolling waves.
We passed the old hangars of Floyd Bennett Field,
and Megan told me about the aviation museum, with planes from when it was a naval air station during World War II.
We got to the other side of Floyd Bennett Field faster than the boat has ever been and left the boat on the Bottle Beach side to walk back across the field on foot.
Megan is an artist and historian who has spent years researching the natural and human history of this place. Megan grew up out here and knows all about the area,
She makes creatures out of clay, real and imagined, avatars and guides for a less human-centric world.
Her installation about beavers, Building Like Beavers, was on Governors Island last year during her AnkhLave residency.
She finally explained one thing I’d always wondered: that Jamaica Bay got its name from the Lenape word for beaver, which were abundant before European trappers hunted them for the fur trade.
As a historian, she looks for non-Western and Indigenous knowledge, and has worked at the American Museum of Natural History, Cooper Hewitt, and the Tenement Museum.
She was just named their 2026 Curatorial Fellow for AnkhLave, a nonprofit arts residency for BIPOC artists on Governors Island.
Also, she told me she wants to build a boat. I told her, if you still want to after today, that’s a good sign.
Later that day, she texted, “It was nice to be reminded that humans are beholden to the elements and we have to know when to respond and change plans instead of power through!”
Thank you, Megan!
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