This is from Shaun O' Boyle's Modern Ruins website, from the Boatyard Project. Twenty or so years ago, he and a friend photographed the tugs rusting away off Staten Island. They went back a year or two ago, and most of what they had documented--disappearing then--was gone.
I've always been drawn to old things--when I first came to New York: the cast iron architecture of Soho and Tribeca, the fact that NY's newness could never completely erase the old--all the GAPS and Starbucks still couldn't paste over the ephemeral discoveries still out for the taking. Like my vicarious thrill at what these photographers found, poking around in places they probably weren't supposed to be, jumping from one abandoned ship to another.
A few months ago, a friend from childhood announced that her husband had bought an old tugboat, it was docked on the Rondout, and would I like to come up for a weekend? I hadn't seen her in many years, so I said goodbye to my husband (who guessed, probably correctly, that it would not be his cup of tea) and left to join them for a weekend last fall.
The cabdriver who picked me up at the bus station looked like a typical hardluck local (I was probably one of his three fares in the last two days), but, God bless him, he knew what "past the old steamship building & across from the sewer plant" meant. I wouldn't have, and I was arriving at dusk, on a riverbank, basically.
My friend, R, was waiting for me outside. I knew her immediately, even though I hadn't seen her in at nearly 20 years. I leaped out of the cab to hug her, a real Kingston girl, finally, to the cabdriver who wasn't quite sure. He drove off and we picked our way way towards the tug in the fading light. We crossed a narrow gang plank, walked along side a six inch path along one tug (harder than it sounds: we had to scrunch along with our backs to the boat and our feet inching side to side), walked along another narrow gang plank onto another tug, walked the length of that tug, climbed up and over onto another, across a foot or two of nothingness, the bags slogging me far to one side. It was scary, and cold and strange. "OK, be careful, " R said, having now climbed onto the [huge] tug that was theirs. She reached out a hand to help me over and---I was on it. We made our way inside, where it was rather ominously dark and cold ("my husband will be here tomorrow, but in the meantime, I haven't figured out how to fix the heat, " R said). It was also--and I guess this is classic boat life: cramped (the boat slept "16" but more about that later).
We sat around the small wooden table in the middle of the cabin and talked for a few minutes as her old dog stirred fretfully in a corner by the galley ("We should have put him to sleep, but we haven't, and we couldn't leave him back in Rhode Island"). She got us each a glass of white wine, and we wrapped ourselves in blankets to go sit outside on the deck chairs. It was actually quite comfortable out there, staring at the dark contours of the boat, and the sprinkling of lights along the river. R smoked, and we drank our wine, the boat rocking gently in the quiet waters, spilling out 30 years of our lives in the dark November night.
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