January 20, 2004

Using my stealthy cellphone/PDA/camera/apartment, I snapped this picture of an approaching ferry just as the smuggled nuclear device in the wheelhouse detonated.

Fortunately, my device instantly unfolded into a radiation blast shield equivalent to eighteen feet of lead and twelve feet of hardened concrete, and I survived.

Actually, the point of the picture is the ice...all the white gnarly-looking stuff between the camera and the ferry looked interesting to me, but the Fisher-Price two-pixel CCD in the camera decided that it would be more interesting to turn the ferry's docking lights into the sun.

Last year, the entire stretch of water between the New York and Hoboken Ferry terminals was choked with the stuff as it flowed from up north, where we had three to four feet of snow on the ground. The North Cove boat basin was frozen solid. Tugboats were pressed into duty: they jammed their noses into the concrete seawalls near the docks and revved their engines, churning the water to keep it from freezing and the ferries moving. Once aboard, I would sit on the top deck in the bitter wind and watch as we picked our way carefully through floes a foot high and ten feet across, listening to them scrape and bump along the sides and bottom of the ferry. Each one had been bashing against its cousins as it travelled downriver, piling up fantastic frozen shapes made of cracked and crushed ice along its edges. Some of the mini-bergs were so thick that they had that wonderfully blue cast that you see on PBS.

It was hypnotic...if I used my hand to block out the urban waterfront, I could pretend I was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, trying to find a place to put ashore so I could hike up a glacier.

The ferry-ride took 20 minutes instead of its usual ten, but I relished every minute of it. It was a real Look At The Nature! moment.

This year, there's a center channel that's free of ice, but we've still got the rest of January and all of February to get through. I may yet get stranded on a floe, and have to catch and eat winter seagulls until I'm rescued by a passing barge.