Julia Vitullo-Martin

Commonweal, June 18, 2004 by Julia Vitullo-Martin

Summer would be unthinkable without water--its tempering of heat, its romance, its beauty, its infinite offerings of fun. Yet our benign view of water is a very recent phenomenon, as a walk around many major American cities reminds us. Even as waterfront property is today prized above all other, until the 1960s urban waterfronts were primarily industrial, brutal, and cheap. The rich lived inland, and with few exceptions, only the poor worked and lived on the water.

The archipelago of New York, probably one of the greatest of waterfront cities, is given an excellent if partial walking tour by Phillip Lopate's Waterfront: A Journey around Manhattan (Crown Publishers, $25.95, 432 pp.). Lopate writes of New York's transition from "a working port, to an abandoned, seedy noman's-land, to a highly desirable zone of parks plus upscale retail/residential, each new metamorphosis only incompletely shedding the earlier associations." Still, each metamorphosis sheds enough of the past to let romantic re-constructions become the dominant public impression.

The truth is that New York's rivers remain dangerous, despite all the ingenious engineering to make them serene and navigable. Residents of luxury high rises on the Upper East Side pay handsomely for their safe view of the East River's Hell Gate, where the Harlem River violently encounters water from Long Island Sound. The second strongest tidal current in the world, behind the Bay of Fundy, the East River (really a tidal strait) was tamed somewhat in the late nineteenth century by engineers who blasted the Gate's treacherous rocks. Nonetheless Hell Gate is still too hazardous to allow for the economical recovery of the thousands of ships wrecked in its waters. The tides still obey laws of their own, and they are not the laws of man.

If even wealthy New York City cannot conquer its rivers, one might well ask how individual nations, some impoverished, can control the seas that surround them. William Langewiesche, in his riveting The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos and Crime (North Point, $23, 239 pp.), says they haven't, they can't, and they never will. The world's oceans remain "radically free," and that isn't good. Furthermore, more than forty thousand large merchant ships, not to mention innumerable small coastal craft, wander the world with little or no regulation, plying the open seas and carrying nearly all international trade.

Before 9/11, this kind of book would have traumatized readers on environmental grounds alone--and not just the horrific spills like that of Exxon's Valdez, but the daily, relentless pollution that comes from aging, badly maintained ships flying under indifferent flags of convenience. Today's reader will think immediately of terrorism.

Less than 2 percent of shipping containers arriving in the United States are inspected physically. A few are scanned for radiation, but almost none is examined with anything like the care now showered on airplanes. Moreover, the ships draw their crews from "pools of the poor--several million sailors of varying quality, largely now from southern Asia, who bid down for the jobs in a global marketplace and are mixed together without reference to such conventions as language and nationality." They are abysmally paid, hired by third-world "manning agents," who are in turn paid by owners whose identities are hidden behind corporate structures that exist only on paper. If anything goes wrong, these expendable crews are abandoned to their fates--at sea or on land.

It's funny how even excellent books can pass from public view. I've seen no commentary linking Langewiesche's brilliant, much-discussed reporting with the equally brilliant 1997 fictional account of abandoned crews--Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman (Atlantic Monthly Press, $32.50, 288 pp.). Based on an actual incident in New York Harbor, Goldman's novel centers on fifteen Central American sailors (though only one has ever been to sea) who are hired to man an appallingly derelict ship, the Urus. Each goes into debt to pay for his flight to New York, only to find that none will be paid until they make the ship seaworthy. When this proves impossible, the Yuppie, college-educated owners abandon the crew--whose visas have long since expired--assuring they will be illegal aliens as soon as they step on shore. They are further reluctant to do that because the ship is docked near the Red Hook Houses, a notorious public housing project.

Goldman's tone of magical realism is vividly appropriate for a tale juxtaposing the hope and despair of the bereft crew, who gaze starboard at the Statue of Liberty and the glorious Manhattan skyline, but portside at the threatening Red Hook shoreline. The novel closes with the main character walking off the ship for a better life in America--an old ending that would be forestalled today by Homeland Security officials.

Goldman's basically romantic ending reminded me of John Casey's lovely 1989 Spartina (Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, 375 pp.), a story about an angry man, the boat he's building, and his voyage to self-discovery and redemption. Ultimately, most novels about the sea center on human rage and folly, followed by redemption sought and sometimes won. "Under the spartina," Casey writes, "there was black earth richer than any farmland, but useless to farmers on account of the salt. Only the spartinas thrived in the salt flood, shut themselves against the salt but drank the water." Spartinas grow not far from where the Urus docked, shutting themselves against the salt but drinking the water--and reminding us why we regard the sea hopefully, even as its anarchy threatens our peace.