Newtown Creek is not just a Superfund site but the site of a floating opera, with a libretto by Dana Spiotta.
Afloat in a plastic canoe on Newtown Creek, in remotest Maspeth at dusk, an art professor named Jane Beckwith stroked her paddle and conjured a scene at odds with the industrial setting. “This used to be, like, an oyster bed,” she said. “And there are fish! The fish come in from the ocean. If it hasn’t stormed lately—it just depends on what the state of the water is, but people do fish, and they do eat the fish.
Newtown Creek, to be clear, is a Superfund site, owing to leaky Greenpoint refineries that have added some thirty million gallons of oil to the untreated sewage that streams in whenever it rains with any force. Black mayonnaise is the connoisseur’s name for its sedimentary ooze. Pity the blue crabs. Beckwith was in the bow. Her friend Amy Gartrell was in the stern.
Boating spectators gripped one another’s gunwales to hold position against the southerly breeze. A skein of geese passed overhead in eerie synchronicity with the end of a scene, like fighter pilots after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The libretto, written by the novelist Dana Spiotta, featured tour guides , citizen scientists , and real-estate developers, who promised five thousand luxury units and a floating, glass-bottomed gastropub.
Applause, at the end, came in the form of paddles thumped against hulls. The rower in the dory seemed to celebrate by circling the Jacuzzi bubbles with pent-up vigor. “Hopefully it won’t take as long as Burning Man,” Beckwith said, alluding to the recent mud-soaked traffic jam in the Nevada desert, as the canoes all converged on the lone dock at once. While they waited, the man in the middle couldn’t resist dipping his paddle in search of mayonnaise, but found rock instead.
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