Shipwrecked in Manhattan

It was a three-hour cruise. We left the dock with 25 people aboard. There was not enough wind to sail so we motored, although Stuart's crew, a boy and a girl, raised sails for the passengers.

There was thick, nonstop traffic on the water: mostly tugs, but also inbound and outbound shipping -- picturesque, but tricky for an auxiliary-powered sailboat. Captains strictly observed rules of the road, and also stated their movements in bursts over the VHF radio. Ventura's radio was beside the wheel and turned on at all times.

"Ventura, this is the Barbara Moran coming up the Buttermilk, passing you two whistles."

"Yeah, Barbara Moran, I gotcha. Two whistles, Cap," Stuart answered.

At the south end of the East River, off Governor's Island, the watery equivalent of the intersection of two interstates, Stuart told me to take the wheel and went below. I thought of David Niven's story of Humphrey Bogart giving him Santana's helm as a ship bore down on that yacht while Bogart went below on some pretext to see how Niven would handle the situation. I guessed Stuart was down in the dark cabin watching me and peering out the portholes at the traffic. But an hour and a half later he came topside blinking and looking around. He'd fallen asleep.

About 9 o'clock the evening started to cool down, and it became breathtakingly beautiful out on the water. The sky and the dark moat around Manhattan turned indigo above and below the glowing horizons, and the water surface on the river and the Upper Bay became shot with city lights. The dark parabolic shapes of the sails cut across the views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Liberty and Ellis islands and the whole twinkling skyline. Passengers flaked out on the deck and cabin roof. The dirty boat turned into a cool magic carpet, and the cruise became, as advertised, fabulous.

Stuart hired me, and I took Ventura out for its lunchtime and evening cruises three days a week until the weather turned in September. I made $100 a day, cash in my pocket. I ran aground off Liberty Island one night, but I got the boat off. A drunken passenger fell overboard, but I got him back aboard. Some nights Matt came out with his girlfriend, Nancy. No matter how hot it was on the steaming streets, or coming downtown on the subway from Matt's apartment on West 87th Street, out on the water it was always cool.

I got to know a much different, ineffably more beautiful New York than the one I'd once hated as a cab driver. I got to know the rivers and their strong tides, and the view of the bridges passing slowly above the masthead. Over the radio came the names of the city's waterfront character: the Red Hook and Buttermilk channels; the Arthur Kill and the Kill van Kull; the Navy Yard, the Narrows, Sandy Hook, and Ambrose; Hackensack, Weehawken, and Passaic; Hell Gate and Robbins Reef. New York took on the smack of seaport, and over this was layered the romance of those million-dollar views. As we rode the tide up the Buttermilk and emerging from behind Governor's Island, the city always came into view like a movie, its loveliest, fabled best self.

I shipwrecked lucky that summer. I found my way back to the sea through Manhattan. Part of what I'd lost when my boat sank came back into my life.

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