NYT : Want to See the City After Dark? Grab a Paddle and Try to Keep Up

July 31, 2005

By ROBIN SHULMAN

The water was black and flat, and the guide's voice echoed across the eerie quiet.
"This is the largest public housing complex in the country," began Richard Melnick, an Upper East Side doorman by profession and a river historian by inclination, as his kayak skimmed up the East River past the Queensbridge Houses.
Beside him in their own kayaks, his audience struggled to synchronize their pace with his and listen for his trivia over the splash of paddles. It was just past 11 p.m. on a Saturday, and they had launched their skinny boats planning to get all the way around Manhattan in the dark.
New York, with its mix of tourists and locals full of specific obsessions, offers tours of all kinds. It is possible to see the sights by helicopter, Circle Line boat, double-decker bus, bicycle or foot. Each method comes with its own charms and, truth be told, risks - from crashes to ticket swindles, police searches to muggers.
Add to that now, the kayak tour, whose most distinctive variety could be the nighttime circumnavigation of Manhattan. That, of course, has its particular perils: big boats, tricky currents and plain old fatigue.
Nationally, the number of kayakers has nearly doubled in the past six years, to 8 million from 4.2 million, and in New York, a new boathouse location has opened every year for the past three years to provide free kayaks to the public.
Manhattan's Downtown Boathouse, the largest group, launched at least 30,000 trips last year from three sites, said Tim Gamble, a volunteer director. This was the first season that the new Long Island City Community Boathouse at 44th Drive in Queens offered free kayak trips, and its inaugural nighttime circumnavigation.
The group attached lights to the kayaks and even to their life jackets. The kayakers coordinated in advance with the Coast Guard and the police harbor unit, and brought marine radios to notify other boats as they approached a major channel. One of the kayakers had binoculars to scout for big boats.
The trip began when three veteran paddlers from the TriBeCa location of the Downtown Boathouse - which disapproves of such trips - radioed from the water around 10 p.m. that they were approaching Long Island City to pick up the main group.
They climbed from sleek sea kayaks up a ladder like strange lagoon creatures, with waterproof lamps like miners wear on their foreheads, cellphones in dry pouches strapped to their upper arms.
After deep heaves on cigarettes, the TriBeCa kayakers helped the Long Island City group lower their boats to the water - largish, bright-yellow beginner's Malibu 2 XL's.
One by one, 13 people climbed down the ladder into 10 boats. Dayoony Lee, 27, a tourist from South Korea, had never held a paddle. Bill Sinclair, 64, a teacher of English as a second language from Roosevelt Island, had worried that he was too old for such a trip. All were assured that at any time they could quit, dock, and take the subway home.
Kayaks are light, and they move fast. The currents helped them move north on the East River, alongside the northbound cars on the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.
The rhythm of the paddle can be hypnotic: arms always working for the perfect figure 8, hands dipping periodically into the warmest air just above the water, which retains the day's heat.
"Can I put out some information?" yelled Mr. Melnick, a co-author of the recently published book "The East River." He listed the former names of Roosevelt Island: Long, Hogs, Blackwell's and then Welfare Island.
At the Willis Avenue Bridge on the Harlem River, headlights spookily flashed overhead as vehicles clattered and banged across its panels, exposing their underbellies to kayakers looking up.
When the group docked at a new boathouse at Swindler Cove around 2 a.m., cigarettes and Goldfish crackers were exchanged.
Back on the river, Mr. Melnick told of the city's efforts to shape its waterways. The shoreline has been landfilled, dredged and sea-walled. Chunks of land have been cut off from one borough and reconnected to another. Riverbanks have been linked by dozens of bridges or tunnels.
Industry facing the waterfront has spewed waste into the water, although the 1972 Clean Water Act helped clean it up.
New York was settled as a seaport, but over time its residents turned their backs on the rivers, and left their banks to factories, refineries, power plants, highways, and low-income housing projects.
From his kayak, Mr. Melnick pointed out the city's unwanted backyards. Near the Washington Bridge, a shanty village where chickens clucked and dogs barked. At 207th Street, a yard for sleeping subway trains.
Only a few places on the river seem isolated or pristine, Mr. Melnick said as he swept by a forested area of northern Manhattan. "It might as well be Tennessee!" he enthused, though the area faced high-rise apartments in the Bronx.
Almost never on a night trip does it get really dark. The city's collective lights emit a yellowish glow. And then the specifics of billboards, digital news signs, a fluorescent-lit subway train depot, and - dimmer than the rest - a swollen moon.
The turn onto the Hudson River enveloped the tiny boats in waters choppy and wide. They were speeding south with the current just after 5 a.m., when the announcement came: there's a tired paddler; we're pulling in at the 79th Street Boat Basin. The three Downtown Boathouse kayakers moved ahead, and the weakest paddlers were paired with stronger ones.
As dawn broke around Midtown, a seasoned kayaker said she planned to dock and quit, so she could catch a more convenient subway train home to Bay Ridge. The group docked at Downtown Boathouse and discussed what to do with her kayak. Waiting in her boat, Ms. Lee stared glumly at the gulls, the gray-blue sky and sea, and then announced that she, too, wanted to take the subway home.
The remaining boats curling down around the tip of Manhattan made a strange convoy: John McGarvey, a Long Island City boathouse volunteer, towed one of the extra kayaks. Erik Baard, the boathouse director who had organized the trip, towed a second extra kayak, empty. Even Mr. Melnick, the informal tour guide, was so tired that he had become silent.
"This is the most involved circumnavigation I've ever done," Mr. Baard said.
The group pulled in around 9 a.m., nearly 11 hours after starting, feeling various mixtures of exhausted and exhilarated.
"I feel great," said Mr. Sinclair, who had feared he would slow the others down, with a smile that made his tired face glow. He used to drive a taxi, he said, and he knows highways and bridges, dead-end streets, most every nook of New York. But he hadn't realized that his mind's map was missing water. And now he had drawn that layer in.