Urban Naturalist Blog

01/01/09 New Year's day.

It is a morning of dazzling sunlight that reduces the cloudless sky to a pastel blue from skyline to skyline and from the Narrows bridge to the Palisades. Blustery west-northwest winds convey bitter blasts of 18-degree cold diagonally across the river, driving before them obliquely rows of foot-high swells that slam into the river wall and rebound at right angles. The energy of the ricocheting waves, colliding with those incoming, atomizes water, turning it into foamy whitecaps. The open river is a spectacle of royal blue wave troughs surrounded by crests of crystalline celadon crowned with glimmering froth.

In the pile field, the columns interrupt the patterns of the swells, so that the power of wave action is muted. As the river sloshes against the pilings, the splashed water freezes into collars of glistening ice on the few taller posts, dividing the dry, beige sections above from the wet, brown portions below. On the scores of shorter posts with tops just breaking the water surface, the frozen river spray forms sparkling caps of milky white, adorned with green centers, where the algae on the pilings shows through transparent ice.

As I prepare to leave from where I view the river, the pedestrian bridge that arcs out over the Hudson, a sudden wind gust, paralleling the vertical grill-work of the railing, sets the metal to vibrating, causing the bridge to emit a single loud ringing sound that I take as a note of farewell. And then I hurry to find shelter and warmth from the cold and the wind.