16. Sarah leads the way out of NYC
Chapter 16 of The Lost City of Desire, my serialized novel
8 CANS BLACK BEANS, SALT, PEPPER, CHILI POWDER, WATER, FLINT, BAG, CLOTHING, CANDLES, SCHEMATICS AND A MAP. PLUS LIP BALM.
{read previous chapters here}
I spent the day wandering, and the night curled on top of a Libray table, using the Oxford English Dictionary Volume I as a pillow. Surprisingly cozy, I thought. I could use a rock for my head if I was sleeping on a bed of pine needles in some forest. That’d work for sure. I could even sleep in the crook of a tree limb, at least till till I fell out! So, it was official: I was going to visit the other side. Sneak in, would be more accurate, as according to Terence it was going to be hard as hell to get in there. The wall, of course, 30 feet high in places, razor wire everywhere, only a few places where a person with permission of the Westerners could come and go, watched by guards. Terence said you could get drone shot just for going near the wall without a pass.
“Like East Berlin back in the day,” he said.
I looked it up in the encyclopedia and sure enough, a wall had divided the city of Berlin, in Germany, for decades, until some of the gates finally opened up one fall day and then the people tore the thing down. Literally, they tore the wall apart. Maybe that would happen with this wall, too, I thought. Although I didn’t know that I’d like that. What if it was hell over there? I didn’t think I’d want that.
“Why would anyone trade our peaceful life for the technological domination they have over there,” I said to Terence.
He gave me a long, slow, funny look.
“What do you mean by that look?” I said.
“Isn’t that exactly what you are getting ready to do? Go over to the techno demon side?”
Right, I thought.
I laughed.
“But I mean any normal person!”
He smiled.
“I would never go except for my folks,” I said.
I wasn’t sure Joe and Carmen really wanted to join me, or if they’d just been talking. I mean, it was an easy promise to make but a hard one to keep. Actually, they hadn’t really even said yes. I assumed it. It seemed like it. So I walked west towards the river, hoping to find them. As I approached the pier, something looked weird. I could see the railroad sign over on the New Jersey side of the river. I could see all along the pier. But I couldn't see their boat. It had taken off. Damn.
Well, I guess that’s my answer, I said to myself. They aren’t coming with me.
It hurt. Looking upriver towards the bridge I felt a deep tug at my heart, something I’d never felt before, and for a moment it was almost like Joe was walking beside me. But of course, he wasn’t. Was this what they meant by a broken heart? I wouldn’t know. My heart had never been whole to begin with.
I hardly knew Joe. I felt ridiculous. I shamed myself. I never had a chance to tell him I liked him. I sat on the edge of the pier for a while, dangling my bare feet over the water. At one point the prehistoric body of a massive sturgeon crested through the surface and I thought, My God, that is the beauty of the world right there, as it disappeared back into the depths. I stood up and dusted myself off and walked back to the crumbling promenade. What else was there to do? I picked up my pack – almost too heavy, but it contained everything I needed:
8 cans of black beans
A glass jug of wheat berries
Salt, pepper, chili powder
a jug for water
a flint and stone and some unreliable waterproof matches
a never used, decades old Patagonia sleeping bag, so lightweight
some underwear, socks, hiking shoes, jeans and shorts and shirts
a rain jacket and a sweater
a bar of soap
candles
the wall schematics
Terence’s map
I looked uptown along the shore. The George Washington Bridge shimmered in a haze far above the sunny water. They said it was too damaged to walk across. I would check it out. And if not, then I would keep going north along the river to the next bridge. I would take that route. I put my palms together in prayer and closed my eyes and said to myself:
Dear God, please watch over me on this journey. Please care for me. Please guide me always.
Then I set off, a smile on my face.
I’d walked a few blocks when I heard a voice.
“Sarah.”
Another voice, louder.
“Sarah!”
Was that Joe? I turned, but didn’t see anyone.
“Sarah, wait!” it was Carmen’s voice.
I stopped and looked around.
“Here!” they called in unison. They were climbing up the side of the next pier. Joe was shirtless, in jeans, and Carmen wore a swimming suit. They’d been on the shore washing their clothes. Their laundry was drying on rocks in the sun..
“We wanted to be clean to start upriver,” Joe said.
“I thought you ran off -- where’s your boat?” I said, giving him a big hug, and pulling Carmen in to join us. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“We hid the boat in the cove at 42nd street,” Joe said. “We’ve traded all the grain for a lot of good stuff. I can’t wait to see what people will give us for it upstate.”
“So you’re going to sail up the river now?”
“Yeah,” said Carmen. “And you’re gonna come with us.”
“But…”
“Don’t say another word. The bridges are too dangerous to cross -- they’re falling apart. We’ll get you to the other side, and closer to the wall.”
“You can walk to the wall from up there,” Joe said. “That is, if you still want to when we get there.”
I felt so happy to see them. “Come have some lunch – we’ve roasted oysters,” Carmen said.
They’d collected about 6 dozen oysters from the shore where the pylons had collapsed, and we ate them hot off the grill, straight from the shells. Delicious, of course, and they filled me up so that when we set off for the boat I felt strong and alive and ready to conquer. We followed the old path alongside the highway and the river, uptown towards the boat. The roses were at their peak from the recent rains, red and taking over everything, rosa rugosa for miles, roses everywhere, roses of love all along our walk. You could hear the waves lapping against the sea wall. So quiet. Imagine the city full of people, I thought, but I couldn’t.
It dawned on me: I’d never left the city before. Imagine that. I’d never left the island of Manhattan. I’d rarely left the neighborhood of Chelsea. I’d often spent entire weeks within three or four blocks of my house. And now I was venturing across borders. I was going where no one went. And I was going in a boat.
The boat was wooden, and flat, with an open hull that now was filled with bundles of goods wrapped in blue plastic tarping. The cabin was small, with a couch and two little beds and not much else. Sunlight came through the glass windows, and altogether it felt like a home. We sat on the deck in wooden chairs and watched the sun set, eating leftover duck and buckwheat, until, pretty quickly, we all felt tired and went to sleep. I took the couch, but a thought kept me awake even as Joe and Carmen slept soundly: If the Hudson River flowed from upstate down to New York and the sea, how would we sail up against the downward flow?
“Ok, up and at em,” Joe said, shaking me.
It was pre-dawn but I could make out his face.
“We want to catch at least some of the incoming tide to carry us upstream as far as it will take us. I figure it will still be running up the river for another three hours.”
Hmmm, I never thought of that.
“I’ve made some tea -- Carmen’s up top getting the sails ready.”
I took my tea to the deck and inhaled the smell of salt and decay, the upstream tide slamming into the downstream river current churning everything up from the bottom. It was a magnificent morning, almost cool, light rising just above the Palisades.
“Untie that bowline at the dock and jump,” Carmen said, taking the wheel. Joe released the other, and suddenly we were drifting into the river, the tide taking us upstream against the milder current.
Joe raised the two sails and we continued our journey, almost sideways, the wind taking us across the river and slightly up, until we neared the opposite shore.
“Come about,” Carmen called.
“Watch the boom -- the sail,” Joe said to me. “Lower your head.”
I leaned down and the boat swerved right and the sail slammed to the other side and we were moving across across the water and up again. I guessed that for every crossing of the river we gained 200 yards upstream. Going under the George Washington Bridge a giant chunk of concrete sailed down and smacked the water just 30 feet from us.
“Fuck you, motherfucker!” Joe shouted.
We could see some figures leaning over the side of the bridge high above like gargoyles. They’d tried to hit us.
“Watch it that they don’t try to hit us on the other side,” said Carmen.
I dove into the cabin to hide.
“That won’t help at all,” said Joe, bringing the boat around again to throw the hoodlums off our path.
“Do you think they really want to kill us?”
“Nah, I think they’re just stupid people trying to have fun,” Joe said.
“For sure,” said Carmen. “Idiots, but what would they gain from killing us?
Puffoon! Another chunk of concrete hit the water with a ferocious smack, but it was at least 70 yards away and we had the wind with us, headed up the river. Already an hour and a half had passed with us tacking from shore to shore. The sun was bright and the river choppy and deep green to brown. Deep forests lined the banks, with the occasional cluster of buildings, roofs high above the treeline. Once in a while when we approached a bank we’d spot a person eyeing us from behind a rock or in a thicket, but either everyone was shy or there just weren’t that many people, I thought.
“Oh, they’re there,” said Joe.
Carmen piloted the boat with such strength and ease, sitting on a milk crate, her muscles taught as she took us in sharp tacks. I turned and looked downriver at the city, the skyscrapers of Manhattan stretching almost to the Statue of Liberty, it seemed, majestic and alive, shimmering with the human pulse. That’s how it looked. In my heart I knew better.
Two and a half hours upriver the tide began to go slack.
“Help me set the balloon anchor,” Carmen ordered me.
“The what?”
“You’ll see. Most rivers have a counter current that runs deep below, near the bottom, upriver in the opposite direction of the surface.”
Joe took the wheel and headed the boat into the wind so it came to a standstill.
Meanwhile Carmen opened a hatch and hauled out a device shaped somewhat like an umbrella attached to a thick rope, with weights to pull it down, and I helped her lower it over the front of the boat, slowly, hand over hand, until, sure enough, about 35 feet down, a current picked it up and it shot ahead taking yards and yards of rope.
“You see that,” said Carmen. “That’s the reverse current, flowing upstream to the head. It’s colder and thicker than the regular water and it acts on its own accord.”
Once the rope went taught, weighed down as it was by anvils, the deep, cold counter current carried us forward, up the river, assisting the sails.
“I discovered this while reading a book about the Bosphorus,” she said.
I looked puzzled.
“The river that divides Europe and Asia.”
“That’s something I never heard of,” I said.
I caught a large bass as we tacked back and forth up the river, past immense forests of 50 foot tall trees. That first night we anchored off the western shore and grilled the bass alongside greens and potatoes from the boat’s larder. As the sun set a whole bunch of starlings filled the starboard sky, great sweeps of geometry unfolding in black brushstrokes against the purple evening. I slept up top, amid the goods, and listened to the sounds -- waves lapping the lapstrake hull. In the night I heard fish jumping, and birds calling and I felt enveloped in a thick and nurturing world.
We sailed upriver for three days and two more nights, and the land seemed emptier than the city, even. Every inch of the shoreline was forested, some with old growth, some with trees that had grown up in areas that were deforested back in the day.
“Most people will hide when a boat passes,” Joe told me. “Out of habit. Better safe than sorry.”
One late afternoon I saw a naked man standing on the shore beneath the shade of a towering catalpa tree, and he just stared as we passed, fingering the barrel of a rifle, butt to the ground, at his side.
“You never know what anyone is up to, really,” Carmen said.
Mostly it was just trees from shore to the tops of the hills, with a few houses here and there but in general all the buildings and roads and decaying factories and effluvient hatches were obscured by the trees and the vines. I loved watching the eagles swoop down from the crowns of behemoths to snatch fish from the water and carry them in their claws back to feast in the branches.
We were headed to Hudson, to sell some of the stuff.
Great work Stephan. You've captured my interest! I look forward to each update. Annie