July 5, 2021 Issue

An excellent Talk story in this week’s issue – Robert Sullivan’s “A Two-Hour Tour.” It’s about an expedition to a sunken island called Oyster Island located a half-mile southwest of the Statue of Liberty. Occasionally, “when the moon is both full and especially close,” the island appears for a couple of hours. This is what happened a few of weeks ago, “when an unusually low tide offered a two-hour window during which a small group landed there to explore.” What a great subject! Sullivan is the perfect writer for it. He’s a Talk story wizard: see, for example, his great “Say Cheese” (September 13, 2010). He’s also the author of three of my favourite books – The Meadowlands (1998), A Whale Hunt (2002), and Cross Country (2006).

In “A Two-Hour Tour,” he writes,

Six people arrived on the island’s west coast in two groups, the first from Brooklyn, via the East River, a few miles away; the second about twenty minutes later, via the North American mainland (New Jersey). For the second group, approaching from Liberty State Park, the island’s desperately low profile made the first group’s members appear as if they were walking on water. By the time the second group arrived, the islandness of the suddenly appearing landform was clear: a parenthesis-shaped beach, thicker and higher in the middle, with rocky bars tapering at each end. 

I relish Sullivan’s details. For example:

A quick investigation of the island’s flora and fauna turned up razor clams; moon snails; lots of oyster shells without oysters; mussels, buried just beneath the surface of the island (seemingly held in place by large rocks, a possible geologic key to the island’s tenacity); a red-beard sponge, or Microciona prolifera; and, on the edge of the lee side, green seaweed that had colonized the inside of an automobile tire, a green harbor within a harbor. 

His description of the explorers’ picnic is terrific:

A picnic was laid out on a blanket on the island’s high point, at an elevation of maybe a foot above the water—though still technically below sea level. The view from what served briefly as Oyster Island Heights offered a panorama of the city: Todt Hill, on Staten Island; the hills of Green-Wood Cemetery, in Brooklyn; the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg Bridges fighting to outdo one another over the East River; the newly constructed hills of Governors Island; and the glass towers of downtown Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Jersey City, all mingling like a single spiny creature.

That last sentence is inspired! The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.