The Hudson River

You lay me by the Hudson. By the Prison.
Searchlight tower gone dark in kiddie park.

You came to Ossining to fetch me back.
Drove to Bronx, 2 am, for Kansas Chicken.

But I couldn’t eat, not behind their bullet-
proof glass. Not by grass, nor rocks, nor River.

Undid my strappy shoes and wet my knees.
We used to tease: fish here have three eyes.

You lay me by the Hudson. By the Prison.
Searchlight tower gone dark in kiddie park.

You came to Ossining to fetch me back.
Drove to Bronx, 2 am, for Kansas Chicken.

But I couldn’t eat, not behind their bullet-
proof glass. Not by grass, nor rocks, nor River.

Undid my strappy shoes and wet my knees.
We used to tease: fish here have three eyes.

This piece is a part of WATERFRONTS, a series of personal essays engaging with the waterways of New York and/or Los Angeles, presented in collaboration with Trop.

Years ago I had a plan. I lived over a hill from the Hudson River, past Sacred Heart Church, past a crumbling downtown and menacing, empty train station. The river in my town was brown and slick, banked with old cranes and unused piers, the bones of heavy industry. A few miles south, men fished in the water, casting lines off docks across 12th Avenue from Fairway, dropping disc-shaped fish into plastic buckets at their feet. They often stood several yards away from one another, not speaking, not looking over their shoulders at the people with shopping carts and their cars’ negotiations of the narrow parking lot. I was always curious whether the fishermen ate the fish they caught or simply poured the bucket back into the river when they’d gotten bored. The fish were small and yellowish, a discolored silver, something metallic and toxic, and I would not have eaten them.

My idea for getting married on a boat in the Hudson River was, in theory, a good one. It had come to me in a flash one afternoon at Shelter Island where my fiancée Karen and I had gone to scout out possible venues for our wedding. We were hoping to have a ceremony that was simple and secular, quirky but classy, something that incorporated our abiding love and affection for New York City, and also something that didn’t cost too much. Most of these requirements, however, seemed to have little chance of being satisfied by what we had seen during our six hours on Shelter Island, and it wasn’t until evening, while the two of us sat on the shore, depleted and dejected, imagining the worst possible cookie-cutter wedding, that we happened to observe a sailboat serenely floating past.

This fragment has two parts. The first splashes through the Hudson River one early morning this past September. The second will take place next week, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, inside the canal of my left ear.

Tell me about memory and distance and time. I don’t quite understand how they converge even now, pushing forty. I used to view distance solely in terms of time, used to think any trip that was an hour north was in the same place: visiting cousins in Bergen County, going on trips to museums in the city, venturing off to my dad’s office in North Brunswick. They were all in the neighborhood of an hour from my hometown and, being a child, I never looked at a map, never gleaned where they all were in relation to one another. I thought of everything with a flawed logic, without a sense of space or geometry. That was something I had to learn. It shifted when I went from passenger to driver, changing my relationship to the roads on which I traveled.

There were four men on that train in 1865,

and all the other passengers just belongings

and the baggage of stranger souls. A Wednesday

evening. No fog. The signal given as the bridge

divided and the sloop went past.

Elizabeth L. Bradley has contributed to Underwater New York, Salon, Smithsonian.com, and Gothamist. "Water" is excerpted from her new history, "New York," by permission of Reaktion Books, London, England (please note Anglicized spelling throughout). "New York" is available for purchase here. 

All these white people with blankets and bottles of wine and bits of cheese were camped out along the river to see the tall ships. It was hot as fuck, New York summer wet, with the stink of garbage and something worse, something I don't have a name for.

The man took off his white t-shirt, then removed what looked like a gold chain from around his neck. Balancing on one leg, then the other, he pulled off his white sneakers and lined them up on the wooden boardwalk. Lastly, he laid aside his cell phone, on which he had just been talking, vaulted over the railing, and jumped. We heard the thud of his body hitting the water and the shouts that followed. No one looked prepared to jump in, but everyone had their phones out, ready to call 911. If the police had cared to ask, I would’ve said he was in his thirties, black, thin and wiry, and here the semi-certainties would have ended.

Liberty was not delivered to us in an envelope
she was shipped from grayer pastures and I
breathed life into you in a new land
I brought you here and into her arms
and I am awash of postcards and trapped lightning
I am scabbed over from the coins tossed into me
my currents were made for larger bodies

It was striper season in the early nineties

on the eastern bank of the Hudson River,

just south of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge. 

My dad, bareback-sloshed with beer and sun,

had his deep-sea pole cast for food. To him

no matter were the toxicity warnings 

on most fish north of the Tappan Zee. 

The evening skyline in late August looks cold from the High Line, but it’s 75 degrees with humidity. People are up here with me—the 22-year-old west coast naïf—but I’m the only one around watching the black sky and blacker water. A loud someone takes a photo to my right and the flash lingers, icy and white, when they walk away. I stand at the railing, pretending to look native, despite my backpack, and not clueless, despite the Google map I’ve got queued up on the phone in my pocket. I’m short a dad double-fisting a hot dog and a Big Bus brochure—which is my actual dad right now in our Times Square hotel.

No one thought much of it when the garbage men went on strike. They had a list of twenty demands pinned to every signpost and streetlamp. Later I would learn that it was a city-wide effort, but at the time, I thought it was only local. One demand was bolded and italicized: We prefer to be called waste collectors.