Afloat in a plastic canoe on Newtown Creek, in remotest Maspeth at dusk, an art professor named Jane Beckwith stroked her paddle and conjured a scene at odds with the industrial setting. “This used to be, like, an oyster bed,” she said. “And there are fish! The fish come in from the ocean. If it hasn’t stormed lately—it just depends on what the state of the water is, but people do fish, and they do eat the fish. They shouldn’t! But people claim that this fish is pretty clean because it’s just come from the ocean.”
Newtown Creek, to be clear, is a Superfund site, owing to leaky Greenpoint refineries that have added some thirty million gallons of oil to the untreated sewage that streams in whenever it rains with any force. Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze. Pity the blue crabs. Beckwith was in the bow. Her friend Amy Gartrell was in the stern. A man who had just met them both sat amidships and pointed at a plastic bottle drifting northwest in the current, headed back to the East River, perhaps, and its ebbing tide. “There’s a Gatorade fish right there,” he said.
“Yeah, if we’re lucky, it’ll be chock-full of its caviar—urine,” Gartrell said.
More boats were gathering: a center console with dual Yamahas, other canoes of varying sizes (including one painted to resemble a scaly serpent), some kayaks, a rowing dory, a couple of Hobie cats. “I mean, dolphins come up occasionally, and people have seen seals,” Gartrell went on. “It’s really sad when one of them goes the wrong way, but they don’t stay long.” Beckwith observed that their canoe was sliding toward the middle of the creek, which was frothing like a Jacuzzi. “Amy, are we staying clear of the bubbles or are we going into them?” she asked.
“They say he’s a great decision-maker, but I happen to know he goes, ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.’ ”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
The man in the middle, perplexed at the sight but intrigued, imagined a kind of maelstrom-surfing joyride for the benefit of several dozen onlookers standing on the eastern bank, but Gartrell knew better and steered the vessel away. The bubbles, she explained, were produced by an aeration pipe laid atop the mayonnaise by the Department of Environmental Protection: supplemental oxygen for the aforementioned fish. Alas, studies have shown that it also perfumes the air with bacteria from below.
Pop! went the cork on a bottle in a neighboring canoe, and the man’s thoughts floated briefly to a different sort of fizzy toxin. A small wooden barge arrived at the center of this motley flotilla, tugged there by a nautically inclined artist named Marie Lorenz driving an aluminum johnboat. The barge carried acoustic equipment and was festooned with fluorescent light sticks and suspended jetsam that clinked and chimed. A woman on board held a flute. Another turned out to be a soprano, who sang, “Welcome to the most polluted waterway in America!” The show—“Newtown Odyssey: A Floating Opera”—had begun.
Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene, like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The libretto, written by the novelist Dana Spiotta, featured tour guides (“Don’t touch the water!”), citizen scientists (“Help us heal it”), and real-estate developers, who promised five thousand luxury units (“All sustainable, of course”) and a floating, glass-bottomed gastropub. Satire, sure, but to the man in the middle of the canoe, envious of the nearby champagne and succumbing to a maritime trance as darkness fell, it sounded nice. A stray horn, a searchlight upwind, a marine radio hissing intermittently about bridge traffic: sometimes, amid this dystopian sublime, it was difficult to distinguish the choreography from the merely urban. A performer on the barge lay down with an illuminated stick and wanded it over the water’s surface, revealing clumps of migrating foam but no prospective dinner.
Applause, at the end, came in the form of paddles thumped against hulls. The rower in the dory seemed to celebrate by circling the Jacuzzi bubbles with pent-up vigor. “Hopefully it won’t take as long as Burning Man,” Beckwith said, alluding to the recent mud-soaked traffic jam in the Nevada desert, as the canoes all converged on the lone dock at once. While they waited, the man in the middle couldn’t resist dipping his paddle in search of mayonnaise, but found rock instead. Did he touch the water? Yes, inadvertently, here and there. Did he wash his hands? Nope, forgot. Slightly delirious, he soon regained his balance on dry land and drove off in search of crab cakes. ♦