Location 3:

On the Water, Saturday and Wednesday

New York has some dirty water. I was writing about it. There’s a stretch called the Gowanus Canal that runs right through Brooklyn. A hundred and fifty years ago people scrabbled in the Gowanus creek for oysters as big as dinner plates and then they sold them. The creek ran from the picturesque sounding Buttermilk Creek off the East River and down to the sea. On Wednesday afternoon I was on the water of New York harbour looking for Buttermilk Creek with Ludger Balan, a talkative swift-of-logic environmentalist who is really into the canal. We were in his red speedboat – one of those big ones with a steering wheel, windscreen and little roof – and gunning around the harbour. Ludger likes to drive fast so were thumping over the waves under the first October sky with the wind cold. Thump, thump and we bounced over the wakes of ferries and huge ships and it was one of those times when the water runs in your eyes and the engine was loud and the sky was grey and there were the skyscrapers at the end of Manhattan just standing up looking very hard indeed. We pulled into the Red Hook Container terminal, a gnat zipping around a huge ship, the Princess Dolorosa or something, a huge green ship stacked with twenty and forty foot containers that looked like matchboxes, hoisted and stacked up there in all their colours and in no particular order. Ludger thought he spotted the start of the creek under a green official sign but we couldn’t be sure. Off to the right was the huge floating corpse of an old Staten Island Ferry, painted yellow but peeling to brown, its hundred windows smashed and darkened, a big soggy shell. We gunned out, all perky, onto the wakes and choppy waves, thumping, me slipping around all over the place as Ludger slowed and speeded us up, my notes are strewn all over the page, spattered in splash. I had to bring in the rubber floats that hang off the side of the speedboat because they were slapping around the side of the boat. Desperate to be seaworthy I staggered around as Ludger looked impatiently over his shoulder, wanting to speed on under the grey sky and find the Buttermilk.

We found it behind another official green sign. A dark hole disappearing under a street and a fence. There was a red truck parked absently next to the river and a warehouse. The creek is now a concrete tunnel under the streets of Brooklyn that emerges in the pump station that drives the water along the canal.

I was at the top of the canal on Saturday, also with Ludger but this time we were in a smaller boat with a few members of the interested public taking part in, you guessed it, National Estuaries Day. Not like Wednesday it was hot and we sat in the boat and Ludger told us it was all an environmental disaster. The pump machinery dates from 1911. It has a big propeller that drives the water along and into the sea, like something off the Titanic. They replaced the propeller in 1999. It had broken down in 1962. Thirty years or more of stagnant water had sudged the canal, sudged and gudged and yudged the canal, filling it with typhoid and cholera and hepatitis and quite truly, unutterable heaps of shit. Now they say there is twenty feet of toxicness on the bottom of the canal before you get to the natural bottom. No my darlings no oysters today. Under the sun on Saturday we puttered along looking at the broken edges of the canal and the seeping rubbish and concrete that is filling it up. We passed under its bridges – rattling car bridges and train bridges – and looked at a tall pile of old broken car parts that reached up to the sky with an advertising stretching up behind and imploring drivers on the raised highway to “Share the Love” as they passed by on their way to Manhattan. We also saw cranes. Beautiful old cranes lifting and sifting from piles of junk, bending over and looking so delicate, tenderly handing huge pieces of this and that to each other, suddenly bending down and ripping strongly into a pile of something and hauling it away to somewhere else. Down on the banks of the canal were the remains of a dead crane, keeled over and gnarled up blacky metal and done over.

But on Wednesday we zoomed. Motoring over, eating up the waves, past the huge empty windows of the Brooklyn Port Authority Grain Terminal, a huge dinosaur skeleton of a building. You just look at its black walls and clouds behind and you get filled with images, great epic filmset images of the New York harbour in the wild old days, flat caps and schooners, providing (someone told me), almost half of the federal government’s income from its customs dues in the 19th century.

In the end, packing up, Ludger went off on a rant against Bush and all that. A fearsome tale he spun up, I think someone should shoot him, said Ludger, as if he had thought out all the options, impeachment, elections etc and thought, no, this one needs a bullet. But Ludger is no lone gunman, Ludger used to make films for PBS. He made a film about the first Gulf War. He’s seen some stuff and he was talking about the courage that people needed to see what was going on – the country is being panned and spanked by this government, hauled into intractable nightmares – and they need to act. And Ludger is saving the canal. At one point we passed an unauthorized pipe spilling liquid from a tile factory. Ludger pulled the boat over and tied it up, ‘back in a minute,’ he said and ran off into the building. I just sat in the boat. I made a phone call. The drain stopped. Ludger came back.

I got off the boat, rocking from our madsplash through the harbour and awkwardly climbed into the yellow school bus Ludger uses to get around. He dropped me off at the subway.