John’s-the only shards of greenspace for miles. Brooklyn spits us out into Queens, past cinderblock carwashes and fast food joints and a cluster of graveyards: Linden Hill, Mt. We drive east, through Bushwick’s drab cement grid, then arc over Maspeth Creek and English Kills-tributaries of Newton Creek, a Superfund Site spiked with ten million gallons of spilled oil-these ruined waterways like New York’s trackmarked veins after a century-long overdose. She and Teagan are waiting on the curb in shorts, flip flops, and hooded sweatshirts, their surfboards propped against a brick wall lashed with silver and blue torrents of graffiti. Having already called in sick, I step into surf trunks, load up my board and swing by Dawn’s apartment.

It’s from my friend Dawn, who despite working 70-hour weeks in the fashion industry, is a Texas-bred tomboy-she surfs any chance she gets, in any conditions, with a bad-ass exuberance that I admire. Places that I watch obsessively, via satellite.Ĭurled over my computer at 6:00 AM in my Brooklyn apartment, I’m tracking the storm, reading the reports- chest-high to head-high swells with sixteen second intervals, excellent conditions, go surf now!-when an incoming text sparks my cell phone. Smoothed out by hundreds of travel miles, this energy arrives in the form of perfectly shaped swells at Long Beach, Lido, Montauk and the Rockaways. Her suicide’s wake sends undulations of raw energy back toward Gotham. Like so many of us new to the city, she wants everyone to remember her name.īut even she can’t handle the pressure, can’t make it here in New York, and just days later Ophelia drowns herself in the North Sea. But down below, she thrashes the surface of the sea, capsizes ships in her self-destructive fury. From far above she’s your typical hurricane, a crown of cotton thorns. On September 16th, Ophelia arrives off the coast of New York. None make it very far north, not until mid-September, when Hurricane Ophelia ravages the Carolina coast, floods the Outer Banks with a foot of rain and wreaks 70 million dollars of damage. The storms spin up from the Gulf in alphabetical order: Katrina, Lee, Maria, Nate. Lower Manhattan as the new American Venice, streets turned into canals, the seafloor studded with broken glass. The news warns us that New York City could be the next New Orleans-flooded subways, ten thousand shattered windows. 1) Late summer 2005 and everything’s under water.

Ropey rumpus