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Fall 2014
NATURAL RESOURCES PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
Just beyond the canopy of trees
sheltering the view from the road,
past the thorns and poison ivy
lay a tugboat; its profile sharply
contrasted against the bright
blue sky brushed with a wispy
overlay of high clouds. Just
beyond the tug lay the Bayou
Plaquemine.
Named after a
parish in Louisiana, this was
apparently an oil barge. Every
ship had a life. Every one had a
story.
Two structures fifty yards apart
represented the same craft. A
bow jutted out of the water to-
wards the sky while far away a boxy
structure rose out of the water like a
giant fist. This turned out to be the
bridge of a freighter linked to the bow
by a long submerged structure. A
ferry with the rusted “New York State
Bridge Authority” logo crusted along
its side called to them. Water cov-
ered the car deck while directly be-
hind it another ferry resembled the
carcass of a whale washed up on the
shore and picked clean by scaven-
gers.
Moving north, the South Mound of
Fresh Kills Park transitions from
landfill to recreation area. Seagulls
guard the fences that kept debris
from blowing into the Kill while the
channel buoy is festooned with wide-
ly varying materials snatched up by
an opportunistic osprey. Its nest is
decorated with nylon rope as well as
Styrofoam from dilapidated booms
and is knit together with vines and
panty hose.
The former landfill is still visited by
garbage barges but no trash remains
at Fresh Kills. The site serves as a
transfer station; organizing refuse
from city neighborhoods to be pack-
aged into containers to be shipped to
lined landfills in Pennsylvania or Vir-
ginia.
Beyond the barges, the creeks of
Fresh Kills beckon with vistas of
heron and egret-filled twists and
turns. Barn swallows live beneath
the Travis Avenue bridge as well as
under the crossings of access roads
in the nascent park.
Red-Tailed
hawks circle overhead while cormo-
rants skim the water’s surface.
Fish leap out of the water and strike
the side of your boat; probably try-
ing to avoid being the lunch of
some larger fish moving in and out
of the estuary. The pulse of eat or
be eaten underlies the quiet pasto-
ral beauty of the area which gives
no indication of being directly in the
center of one of the county’s most
densely populated urban areas.
Moving back toward the entry point,
our travelers view wide expanses of
goldenrod with hopes that they will
be visited by endangered monarch
butterflies. Water at the shorefront is
clean and clear with perhaps six feet
of visibility.
Zigging and zagging between arti-
facts of America’s maritime past, our
travelers take pictures to share a
glorious morning with fellow commu-
nity members in the future. New
York tourism officials have adver-
tised the ghost fleet on web sites
aimed at British amateur photogra-
phers. Eco-tourism may bring atten-
tion to efforts aimed at saving these
interfaces where industry and nature
meet.
Those of us who live in the outer
boroughs know that there is far more
to NYC than tall buildings and
Broadway shows. Ecotourism would
encourage the preservation of
natural areas because they would
generate revenue and taxes. All that
is needed is for someone to put the
pieces together and make it happen!
Join NRPA today
By Anthony Rose
The sunlight filtered into the Blazing
Star cemetery on a gorgeous Octo-
ber Sunday. Jim Scarcella and Tony
Rose took advantage of one of the
last summer-like days of fall to inves-
tigate the status of the abandoned
fleet off Staten Island’s west shore.
Seventy years after being left to
fester in the shallow waters of New
York harbor, were there any rem-
nants left of these noble craft that
pulled America out of the Depres-
sion and saved the western de-
mocracies from the Axis powers in
World War II?
There were stories that ships had
been eliminated by developers or
had simply dissolved back into
their primary elements after being
pummeled by surf and wind and
time.
There are mysterious oval-shaped
islands beneath the Outerbridge
Crossing. Wooden ships filled with
silt as their hulls slowly returned to
nature. Plants began to grow in the
newly deposited soil while the bulk-
heads that sheltered them continued
to dissolve. Now all that remains of
the forgotten vessel is a grassy out-
line fringed with spartina grass and
mussels.
So Tony and Jim dragged a taxi-cab
yellow kayak across the grassy
coastal plain in Rossville in search of
history. And then, there they were.