Burning Questions by Alix Kates Shulman

Author:Alix Kates Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

8 • THE JUNK

I don’t know how I heard about the junk in the East River (a junk! from China!), but with the first rumors my childhood longings bubbled up again.

Naturally, in a waterfront town like New York City, most people were blasé about strange vessels, having seen quite a variety. Not like landlocked Babylon, where everyone had to await the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway to know the strut of a drunken sailor. New Yorkers had seen replicas of the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria; the pleasure launches of the Eastern rich; the wrecks of a variety of tankers; the Andrea Doria; that Norwegian fishing boat to which a desperate Russian defector had leaped in vain; and the yacht of some Persian shah who had marched his entire entourage of veiled concubines and turbaned eunuchs across Forty-second Street. Most of those nautical visitors had attracted only seamen and inveterate boat-buffs to the piers.

But when the Chinese junk appeared sporting those three red sails, not even jaded New Yorkers (who took the Staten Island Ferry solely to avoid the heat, who left seaside Battery Park empty on all but the sunniest Sundays, and would as soon take their children to the model sailboat pond of Central Park as attend the live exhibits on the swarming Manhattan rivers)—not even they could take-or-leave the mysterious wooden vessel that began making its way up the East River from the harbor toward Harlem. There it was, a dark silhouette obliterating Welfare Island, blocking out with its red sails (yes, red!) the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge; and as it advanced northward toward City Island, the word spread through the city.

It was definitely the thing to know. “Have you heard about the junk in the river?” “The junk?” “A slow boat from China.” Like the legendary hurricane of ’60 that drove straws through two concrete buildings on Fifty-seventh Street, like the snowstorm of ’61, the blackout of ’65, and the transit strike of ’66, that Chinese ship in our midst brought out the best in us. “Are you taking the kids to see the junk?” park mothers asked, and People’s Radio gave it half an hour live.

As usual, I was among the last to go. Reluctant to accept that I was one of them, I avoided doing exactly what other parents did. I felt no need to give my children ball games, circuses, TV, war toys, candy, or anything nationally advertised. Their Halloween costumes were handmade, their invitations painstakingly hand-lettered. A boat in a river seemed perfectly dispensable. But after the Times ran a large photo of that now historic silhouette in the Sunday paper (drawing hundreds of kids and their daddies from midtown to the river that afternoon) I remembered something precious from long before, something leaped inside me, and I decided to bus across town to the river “for the children’s sake.”

There it was, splendid and dark against the sky. Around it lesser vessels buzzed and chugged, trying to get a close

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