The Raft

In 1943, George Stonier – using one of his many fishy pen names – wrote a gleeful burlesque about a trainload of male poets, both living and dead, journeying west out of Paddington station. He even skewered one of the very poets who then published the story in the journal he edited – Penguin New Writing, (issue no. 18 1943).

This got me thinking about another mythic journey: a What If voyage of creative women. What if a gang of imagined accomplished women – composite figures – undertook a legendary voyage up the Hudson River in a makeshift, definitely not river-worthy raft?

What could possibly go wrong?

This is a partial account of what happened along the way as they chug north from the Brooklyn waterfront toward Poughkeepsie.

The Raft
Eight blue drums, high-density, food-grade, repurposed from the kosher deli on Amsterdam Avenue. Reek of garlic brine and dill.

The launch from the pier below the roar of the BQE as it tears through the Heights. The heavy swell from a passing barge heading out to sea almost dooms them before they leave the ramp. The clatter from helicopters lifting up from the helipad across the water drowned their voices with steady regularity.

The voyage – up the East River – under the bridges Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Williamsburg, east of Roosevelt Island, hugging the shore through Hell Gate, under High Bridge – The Circle Line almost capsizes them – to the northern tip of the island, dodging the deadly whirlpools, the standing waves, and rip tides where the tidal strait collides with the river, under the Henry Hudson Bridge at Spuyten Duyvil.

Planks and barrels lashed tight with skipping ropes in square knots, stretching under the strain. Grey splintery planks, swollen dark by the water. The drums ride low, the planks a fluctuating deck in choppy waters.

A five-horsepower Briggs and Stratton lawnmower engine drives a blade that whirs and chugs with the rise and fall of the water, while above it, a vintage scooter sits strapped like a figurehead on the stern.

For when we make landfall, the writer had explained.

She sits above the curve of the barrel at the bow, a navy blue wool watchcap pulled down over her ears, eyeing the water as the flow pushes north. It’s not the tide, it’s not the wind, but something. Something.

Beside her, the painter with a bricklayer’s trowel scrapes the nutritional labels off the drum sides, smearing a streak of grit-crusted coal-tar, carving a jagged grid into the plastic. Her hands are stained with the muck of the work as she buries the ash and the dust of the camp, and the enduring weight of the dead.

The wind off the Palisades is raw.

Another leans over the side, white bucket in hand, monitoring translucent glass eels – tiny, thread-like bodies slipping through the weeds like transparent ink –  tracking migrations through industrial runoff, counting the pulse of the life of the river. She says: The water does not forget the iron.

A poet stands at the back, steering with a rough-cut oar, hair cropped close to the wind, boots planted square by the upright barrel, looking past the apartment towers, looking for the border where the land could split into a nation of women.

A sculptor holds a line, hand down in the dark current, ready to put on the black rubber flippers and go over the side to fathom rocks.

And the last – a cartoonist – is at the mast, humming a sea-shanty, her hands wrapped in thick wool, hauling the paint-soaked canvas sheet tight against the wind from the west.

Between them: books, grants, two one-woman shows, a residency, one trust fund (modest), a by-line in the New Yorker, and a villa in Tuscany.

The raft came after.

Suddenly – a sound from the dark belly of an upright barrel. Not a thump. Not a knock. But a flat scraping. A dull scratching.

Ready for anything, they brace their boots and with a chisel break the heavy plastic seal. The lid pops with a hiss of stale garlic and sour brine.

And – Oh my god! exclaims the painter with trowel raised – It’s a McPoet!

A head pops out above the barrel rim, shivering, blinking at the raw sun, and wearing a hand-knitted scarf. A deus ex machina arrival via the pickle vat. She adjusts her spectacles, sees the grey river, opens her notebook – miraculously pristine, fragrant calfskin bound in black – to draft…

She registers the setting, notes a small ironic detail, takes the cap off her fountain pen, and starts to write an epiphany, fully enjambed with white space.
On cream.

Use your trowel! shouts the unflinching writer. Swat her before she names the Turner light!
The trowel, heavy with coal-tar and crusted grit, is ready to scrape the polished prosetry right off the page.

The McPoet looks up at the tall, angry painter.

Is this project funded? she said. Do you have a permit for these eels?
She steps back, observes the rusty scooter.
Vespa? Or Lambretta?

At this, the writer steps forward, spluttering, a gargoyle glare atop an ink-splattered insulated boiler suit, eyes narrowed, It’s a Mark 2 Brockhouse Corgi, you tourist.

Her growl echoes back from the Bear Mountain riverbank. She loops a cord around the scooter flywheel and gives a sharp pull against compression – Brap! Barrrap! The tiny tailpipe spews an oily cloud of two-stroke exhaust into the McPoet’s face. Her scarf – still damp with pickle juice – feeds itself into the drive chain of the mower.

The engine whines, labors, chokes on the wool. The raft loses headway and begins to yaw in the mid-channel current. The eel count is interrupted. The raft rocks and drifts.

Damn her!
Slap her with your flipper!
Bat her with the oar!
Get her over the side!

An arm, deliberate, smooth, does not raise a tool. It uses the heavy lever of the shoulder and, with one clean move, sweeps the McPoet entirely off the raft, over the side, into the river.

Splash!

Unaccountably, she does not sink. The air pockets inside her quilted down gilet are a flotation device. She drifts in the brackish current, bobbing like a discarded styrofoam cup or a bottle with a message inside, still surveying the landscape. Gurgling, Show me your Boater Education Card she begins to float away.

Quick! Get the boat hook.

The writer reaches with the iron-tipped pole and thrusts it downward to push her beneath the surface. There is an urgent need to sink her, push her into the depths of anaerobic mud before her adjectives take hold.

But before she sinks forever, a majestic replica sloop glides out of the mid-river channel. The crew spots the struggling, well-prodded, vinegar- and riverwater-soaked figure and hauls her up over the gunwale. The deck is packed with fourth-graders on a school field trip. The children, shivering in the March wind despite their thick orange life vests, sit cross-legged, enraptured by the loudspeaker lecture on the indigenous Munsee Lenape, Wappinger, Schaghticoke, Mohican, and Haudenosaunee inhabitants of the riverside of yore. Spellbound by history – such is youth – they hardly notice the gasping McPoet flopped on deck beside them

The sloop sails toward harbor. Midstream, the raft is slow in the water, the crew urgently wrenching green, greasy wool from cogs, fighting the raw, cold headwind, determined to make landfall in Poughkeepsie before the light fails.

But she is already ahead of them. Breaking the laws of transit, an Uber from the Peekskill dock speeds her north up Route 9, past the retail plazas, the deserted malls, and the Galeria. She does not stop to visit Dia but goes directly to the waterside park café.

She plots.
She sits by the window before the raft even passes Beacon, drafting scathing litigation, phoning her connections:

Buy the Brooklyn boat ramps.
Redirect the East River.
Call the Coast Guard.
Evict the eels.

She drips river silt onto the clean tiled floor and orders a pumpkin soy milk latte, an elderflower spritzer, and an avocado toast with a drift of sprouts. She opens the Notes app. Begins to type:

With my back to the Walkway,
the mud at Waryas Park is
a hard-won ledger…

Meanwhile, beneath the sliver of shelter of the makeshift, paint-stained sail, the high-pitched hum of a high-end, battery-driven portable espresso machine. It was inside the vinegar barrel with the McPoet. They kept the machine and not she who fouled the engine, interrupted the eel count, put the vessel into a yaw with complete indifference to the operational consequences and basic river safety. They drink the dark espresso. They fix the chain. They get back to the work.

The engine block sits heavy on the frame, signifying nothing. The oar with its green cordage does not speak. It does not witness, it does not grieve, confess, or hold its tongue, nor bear the secret burden of everything that has been lost and found in the mud. It is an oar.

And the best thing about the raft is the empty pickle barrel. And the best thing about the pickle barrel is what it does not now carry. The sheer, empty weight of it, the hollow space inside, the perfect roundness that knows exactly what roundness is on a hard-working Tuesday afternoon, as if it were in a poem when the wind is a hammer that strikes on the drum, and the fuel in the tank is as thick as the mud. But it is not in a poem. The knots will hold.

On the raft, the Briggs and Stratton rattles the planks. The skipping ropes groan and squeak against blue HDPE drums. They drink their thick, briny espresso, leaning northward, their lips chapped, their hands calloused, their eyes clear. The raft moves – as rafts do – by tide and wind, grease and muscle, cutting through the gray wash of the Hudson on any afternoon, sailing straight into the clear confusion of dark light.

The tide will change,
the engine will die,
they forgot to bring sandwiches.