Mike and Cynthia Parker grew up a few blocks from the Hudson up around 100th Street.
Mike contacted me a before with in idea for a taxi mission that was quite unusual.
He wanted to go see the place where they had burried a family pet.
I asked my brother, Matt to come along as well,
and we set off in search of Stripes’ Grave.
As we floated, Mike pointed out landmarks along the river, and told us about how things used to look back then.
He had never looked at any of this from the water before.
That’s right where Mike and Cynthia used to live.
So it must have been around here that Mike, Cynthia, and their baby sitter, came down to the water with the recently deceased body of their pet turtle, Stripes, in a cookie tin.
As we passed the place where Stripes met his watery grave, the true story began to emerge.
You see, a burial at sea was not the baby-sitter’s original intention.
She first took Stripes and the kids to a nearby park and tried to dig a grave, but the ground was hard and frozen. So they carried the tin down to the water and tried to huck it over a large fence that used to run along the river here.
The toss wasn’t far enough and Stripes ended up in the rocks on the bank. They couldn’t climb the fence either, so they had to leave him there, exposed on the shore.
Cynthia and Mike both feel that as far as funerals go, the ordeal with Stripes wound up being a little inconclusive; without a real sense of closure.
However, they seem to have made the best out of the circumstances at hand.
We made a little toast to Stripes,
and then ourselves.
I thought it might be possible to foat all the way to Chelsea before dark,
but by 7pm, the tide was changing and we were fighting a fair amount of current.
We paddled up to the shore,
and Matt pulled us along all the way to the Boat Basin.
We nestled the boat in with some other dinghies.
I thought it might be safe there for a couple hours.
The river looks different after you have been out there in a boat.
It’s hard to describe, but when you stare out at it, you can feel the pull of the tide and the gusts of wind,
and I can never believe how flat it seems.
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