I could always smell food even before it was on Mama, my paternal grandmother’s green Formica dinette  in her Harlem apartment as a child. I’d lie awake on a Saturday morning having spent the night on the foldout bed in the livingroom.  Before I heard her slippered feet shuffling on the worn spots of her brown linoleum, I could smell the crisp apple wood bacon, the griddle cakes, and the scrambled eggs. Mama said it was because I was born with a third eye just like her. She said she knew from the day I was born I had inherited the gift of being able to evoke images, see and smell things before they were palpable because at only a few hours old I was trying to raise my head to see what was around me.

My father had died when I was seven in a car accident a year after he and my mother got divorced.  I’d go to Mama’s after school and on weekends because my mother was always working. She was a teacher at the School of Performing Arts on West 46th Street. I didn’t mind going to Mama’s. I loved her and I loved her food.

At home I never smelled anything except the smell of a can of Chef Boyardee Ravioli burning in the pot my mother forgot about. I lived on Fruit loops and milk in our Brooklyn apartment but at Mama’s I had my fill and then some.

Mama always played music when she cooked. I’d brush my teeth and make my way to her Formica dinette and get baptized in her rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. It was my father’s favorite song and after hearing it so much it became mine. “I was born by the river in a little tent, Oh and just like the river I've been running ever since, It's been a long, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will…” 

Afterwards we’d clean off the dinette and Mama would spread out her photo albums on it.

She’d show me my father’s baby and school pictures and pictures of the two of us together. I always took them out of their plastic sleeve to get a better look at him, spreading them on the table like a set of oversized dominoes. Mama shared the good parts about him that my mother forgot about after their marriage failed.

Though I wished my mother had a different opinion of my father; that in death he had redeemed himself to her; I was at least grateful that she never stopped me from spending time with Mama. So I never told her when we went to Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn to talk to him and put flowers on his grave because that might have ended my visits. But at times I felt that she should know but to avoid telling her I’d stay in my room and immerse myself in words; books, magazines, newspapers.  I devoured them all.  

Twenty years later, no longer worried about spilling secrets to my mother; I am thankful for my reading  habit. If I hadn’t been an avid reader I would never have come across the article in the New York Magazine called, “Secrets of The Deep,” by  Christopher Bonanos. It was about the things that lie beneath the New York Harbor. Under number eleven was a Formica Dinette found in the East River on 16th Street.”

Some things you don’t need proof of when you feel it in your gut. I knew that was Mama’s Formica dinette. I closed my eyes and could envision it with the metal band around its edge and the tubular chairs I sat in awaiting my breakfast on Saturday mornings. I could hear her singing.  

I could see the framed picture of Jesus overhead and a bowl of plastic fruit in the middle of the table and a portable radio on the far end. Mama’s dinette was seasoned with a heap of memories just like her heavy black skillet. Each year that passed even as she grew old she created memories for me even when I grew old enough to stay home on my own and only came every other weekend.

“How’s school Jacqueline?”, “Now help me snap this pound of string beans.” 

“Hope you’re not thinking about a boyfriend yet,” she said when I turned fourteen. “You got time for that now get the jelly jar top to help me cut out these biscuits.”

I could see Mama just as clear as the day sitting there quiet at her end days tired and still mourning my father. I had thought Mama’s Formica table would be in her house until I knocked on her door one day and she didn’t answer and I found out she had gone to Heaven. But one summer day she decided it was time to get a new dinette set. She wanted something bigger for Thanksgiving dinners when her family came over. I went with her to pick it out.

“Not that one,” I said when she pointed to one she liked.

“Not that one,” I said when she pointed to another one.

Finally after an hour of browsing and me saying no to all of her choices she sat down on a sofa and told me what I needed to hear. “I’m getting a new table but I’m going to save my old table for you for when you get your first apartment.”

When the new dinette came, Mr. Earl, Mama’s landlord, having learned she wanted to keep the old one for me, said he would store it in the basement for twenty-five dollars a month. When he and his son came to move it I let my fingers graze the top of the Formica and didn’t want to let it go. Once I even attempted to sneak down to his basement and see it but the door was locked.

After I graduated from college Mama died quietly in her sleep. Mama’s brothers and sisters cleaned out her apartment and I figured Mr. Earl gave them her Formica dinette along with her other belongings. I was glad that when she died I had a boyfriend who loved me as completely as she did. My mother didn’t like him. Mama would and she’d tell me all about his good parts if she had been alive.

I’m ninety-nine percent sure that Mr. Earl pocketed Mama’s money for all the years she trusted him to watch over her Formica table. I am sure along with his son in the covering of the night he loaded it in his old pickup truck and threw it in the East River. As greedy as he was he probably doled out the same fate to countless other tenants in his Harlem building. Miss Leslie in Apartment 309 right above Mama, her oak dresser that she told Mama was in the basement. Mr. Brown in Apartment 211, the golf set he was saving for his grandson. Mrs. Harris in Apartment 413; her Singer sewing machine. Mama’s Formica dinette, and in all probability her neighbor’s cherished belongings, was in the East River.

I had always thought of the river as being agitated and raging but now I thought of it as being calm. Calm because a piece of Mama, labeled number eleven was down there and every now and then she visited it with my father and told him daughter stories, and serenaded him with their favorite Sam Cooke song and all other existence beneath the sea became motionless. 

Shortly after Hurricane Sandy, there was a Squeezable Yogurt Crisis. My six-year-old son, four long days without school, sat down on the floor and cried because I told him we didn’t have any yogurt. Typically I would deal with this crisis by losing my temper. But almost a week into the Mommy & Son boot camp, I mean bonding, I was losing touch with reality, I mean becoming alarmingly calm. I walked out of the apartment and pressed the elevator button. He followed. The whining subsided two blocks later. “Mom,” he asked, “why were you ignoring me?”

What I said next was not planned. “A few days ago many people lost their homes. Kids were left without their beds or their toys. Schools were flooded. Other people have been without heat, light or water for days. Do you think this is a big deal?”

My son nodded.

“Do you think waiting thirty minutes to have a yogurt is a big deal?” I asked.

He shook his head.

It did not feel like a win, nor should it have. I remember how I hated when adults got preachy with me, particularly if they had a point.

The following Saturday, there was a call for Russian speaking volunteers to go door-to-door on Coney Island to check on people, especially seniors, who lived in the high rises and had no electricity, water or a way to get down from a high floor. It seemed wrong not to go and it seemed right to take my son.

“Is this going to be fun?” he asked.

“This is not about you,” I said.

On the corner of Mermaid Avenue, volunteers were sorting donated supplies. I saw familiar faces and while I said my hellos, my son began to pack bagels into Ziploc bags beside another little girl. He became eager to go. We packed water, toiletries and non-perishable food items into our backpacks and climbed the stairs of a 20-something-storey high rise.

“It smells like a bathroom,” my son said.

We were going up the rabbit hole and I had a nagging suspicion that around us were not jars of orange marmalade. The staircase was pitch dark except for the thin slither of light from our flashlight. I squeezed my son’s hand a little tighter and imagined masked guerrillas hiding in the shadows, holding machine guns and machetes in hands they hadn’t washed for a week.

My son, who asks to take a cab for any distance over two blocks, climbed to the 12th floor and chatted happily with another volunteer. I let go of paranoia. We began to knock on doors, asked if anyone needed help and offered “food, water, supplies.” My son copied us, serious and sincere, and knocked yelling “food, water… surprise!” We tried to control our laughter and explained to him that this might not be the best strategy for weary residents who already had their fill of surprises. To my six-year old, surprise is still always a good thing.

Some doors did not open. Other doors opened with hesitation and suspicion. (I’ve since heard there had been another kind of “volunteering” taking place.) “We are fine,” most said, and pointed to other apartments where elderly or people with small children lived. Everyone thanked us even if they didn’t take anything and they especially thanked the zealous six-year-old, who kept trying to give out an extra sandwich or bottle of water. The building had been without electricity or water for almost a week and the temperature was dropping into the 40s. No one complained. As we walked down the stairs, a woman in her 60s was walking up. She asked us if we needed help.

We visited two buildings without power and there were many more we could have gone to. “You are a tough kid,” a woman said to my son. He grew a few inches taller when he heard that. We were all cold and hungry when we got back to Mermaid Avenue. My son waited patiently for his sandwich and ate whatever he was given, no questions asked. We drove back through streets with windowless cars stranded and front yards filled with furniture, appliances and blankets, as if houses had vomited their insides. A stuffed floppy-eared dog stared at us from the top of a reclining chair on the sidewalk.

“Brooklyn looks sad,” my son said.

As the water receded, my six-year old, along with other adults and children got a bit of perspective.

1

Sea turtle guzzles
red bendy bucket handle
how tempting its color.

2
Turtle perishes
and washes onto the shore
with other plastics.

French filmmaker Mathias Frantz and his crew had spent weeks searching the wilder crannies of New York for the quintessence of nature in the city—material that will be used in the first of four profiles of wildlife in major international cities they are calling “Naturopolis.” The week before I’d accompanied them on a boat on the East River where we angled for striped bass in the riptides of Hell Gate and snuck up on a colony of nesting cormorants on U-Thant Island, situated below the cliff-like UN building that towered as a backdrop. One week later we met at River Park, a pocket of greenery in the West Farms section of the South Bronx that is named after Gotham’s only true freshwater river, the Bronx River.

The Bronx River is an urban flowage that is becoming restored mainly through the efforts of the New York City Department of Parks and the Bronx River Alliance of non-profits. River Park sits just below the lowermost dam on the river, one that prevents typical migratory fish such as alewife from ascending farther upstream to spawn. The river is also home to the American eel, a species that was described in the subtitle of a recent book as the “most mysterious fish in the sea.” And mysterious they are, baby eels, having migrated all the way from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean are slowed down, but not always stopped from passing dams. Our crew of agency and academic biologists and volunteers planned on first electrofishing below the dam and then above it to obtain a sense of the relative abundances of eels on both sides of this barrier.

Our colleague Chris Bowser of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wore the backpack electroshocking unit on the first pass. Probing around the rocky shallows with the device’s electrical hoop turned up plenty of eels, together with sunfish, darter fish, and crayfish that were all momentarily stunned while two eager netters tried to gather them before they revived.

On the second pass, my Ph.D. student George Jackman operated the shocker. George has an unusual background for a doctoral student—he is a retired New York City police lieutenant. As such, he sees things that mere civilians miss. As George stepped deeper into the flow to begin “fishing” he eyed a plastic device and reached down and then held up a metal sleeve—the magazine from a handgun. Our crew and the observers who gathered were amazed, making comments about this truly being urban nature. But a minute later the incident became considerably enhanced: George yelled “wow” as he spotted the actual handgun—and then retrieved and held up a10 mm Glock. The assemblage couldn’t quite believe this, and neither could the French filmmakers who asked whether we’d planted it there for Naturopolis.

We hadn’t, of course, but I wondered whether the eventual viewers of Naturopolis would believe that such an iconic urban symbol would have been discovered by accident. The gun’s being found there makes sense, it was located just below the 180th Street Bridge—a perfect place to stop a car and toss a gun into the water. I questioned if its owner threw the gun into the river when it was raging with high water, not knowing that the Bronx River is a “spate” flow that floods quickly when it rains and then drops to low levels, shallow enough to reveal a handgun.

George later gave the weapon to a patrolman, who guessed it was used in a murder and promised to do ballistics tests. The tests showed that the gun was used in a shooting not far from there about a week earlier, and at a time when the river was so high we needed to cancel our fieldwork. This gun had been fired 10 times into the back of its victim. Remarkably, the man survived, this gun is so powerful that it essentially perforated his torso while apparently missing vital organs.

The remainder of the day was less eventful, with many eels surveyed below the dam and only about one-fourth as many above, showing that eels can indeed somehow work their way past the dam. The eel “ladder” we plan to install next year should ease their access to the river’s headwaters as they follow their natural instincts and swim, obliviously, maybe even mysteriously, past whatever unnatural jetsam society leaves along its bottom.

Note: This piece was originally published on the Fordham University Press blog, Fordham Impressions. Underwater New York is republishing it here with permission from the author.

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John Waldman has studied and explored New York Harbor for much of his career, first with the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research and then as Professor of Biology at Queens College. In autumn 2012 Fordham Press will publish two of Waldman’s books on nature in New York City, a revision of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbor and Still the Same Hawk: Reflections on Nature in New York, an anthology of new creative non-fiction by celebrated New York authors.