Last week, The New York Times ran an article on boaters on the Hudson and how the security checks by federal authorities, state police, county sheriffs and the border patrol have multiplied. Being on a boat on the river is about freedom—to go where you want to go, to do what you want to do (except drink and boat). Most boaters are out there to be left alone, to be quiet while fishing, or enjoying the sun. So these patrols have boaters angry. Some so angry they are selling their boats. As a kayaker I can not be boarded. But I can—and have been—stopped. In 2005 I circumnavigated Manhattan with my friend Dawes Strickler. At the end of our tour, we were interrogated by the park police. What follows is an essay I wrote about that tour around Manhattan.

Protecting My Freedom

To kayak around Manhattan is a perverse endeavor: for over ten hours you splash through otter-brown water, and struggle with strong currents while dodging water taxis and large cargo ships. The turbulent water soaks your hands and stings your face and it does not smell of anything familiar, and certainly of anything natural. The uncomplicated pleasures of sea kayaking—the sight of a heron taking flight, the tranquility of an eddy, the vision of a bass cruising through clear water—are absent. To kayak around Manhattan is a meeting of the slow with the fast, the small with the large, the pure with the impure. So what would compel a kayaker to struggle with tricky tides and currents offshore of an indifferent island? The answers are simple: Because it is there, and because she can.

On a Sunday afternoon the phone rang: “I hear you want to paddle around Manhattan,”Dawes said. “You’re in luck, I’m going tomorrow.”  June 20th was a good day to go: the high tides near the solstice create strong currents. Those currents would help scoot us along our thirty-four mile circumnavigation.

I am not sure why Dawes assumed I was capable of this day-long venture, which is a crown for kayakers in the Hudson Valley. People plan and train for months. “You know how to self-rescue, right?” he checked. “Sure,” I swaggered. I’d learned the day before in a paddling class. Dawes did not need to know that. With my new paddle float and pump strapped to my red fiberglass boat I looked like the real deal.

At 2:30 the next morning I rose after a sleepless few hours during which I imagined in vivid detail my watery demise.  The middle-of-the-night departure made me feel as if I were off on a special and dangerous mission. By six we were unloading our sleek kayaks at Liberty State Park in New Jersey. The sky, already a watery white-blue, brought into silhouette several men with fishing poles, standing serene on the ragged dock.  Near the shoreline a hearty jellyfish bobbed in the water where we loaded our boats with extra clothing and food—a stack of peanut butter sandwiches, Gatorade and a thermos of tea. The weather appeared clear; the forecast was the same. But you had to be prepared for anything.

Unceremoniously, we pushed off, stroking toward the sun on our odd but very American adventure. American because all that this journey required was a boat, some determination, and that marvelous sense that this land and water were there for me to enjoy. We could have imitated Huck Finn and thrown a wooden raft out onto these complicated waters and no one could tell us not to. I delighted that we were so free to move as we wanted and did not need a permit, did not have to register, and did not have to pass an exam to show that we were qualified for this journey. And there stood the Statue of Liberty, soaring high as if emerging from the water that buoyed us up, to echo my thrill.

Before us stretched the wide expanse of New York harbor.  I did not want to leave the seeming comfort of shore, so I traced to my right, toward the solidity of the Statue of Liberty. “Pay attention to the buoys,” Dawes called, his voice swimming off across the waves that separated us. A few white buoys marked a wide birth around the Statue, a watery security zone. He nodded toward another girdle of buoys around Ellis Island. “Remember that on our return.” The buoys seemed innocuous, white dabs in the water to guide not defend or ward away.

We ventured into what felt like the ocean, the waves following a deep pattern of rise and swell made unpredictable by the wake of dozens of ships. Dawes and I moved side by side, our light fiberglass paddles flashing in the sun, a warning to larger craft that we were there. Paddling with Dawes gave me a certain confidence. He teaches rock climbing at West Point, and when he speaks no words are wasted. Before leaving he had traced our route on the chart. “This is our mission,” he said, echoing my own sense of purpose.

Crossing the Harbor frightened me. Again and again large boats appeared to aim for us but my scale was off; only once did we have to stop paddling and wait for the large orange State Island ferry to pass. The large ships were less of a threat than the fast yellow water taxis whose wakes sloshed us about. But soon my fear was diverted by the New York skyline, which, viewed from low on the water against a new sky appeared crisp and magical. We made a line for the tip of Manhattan and soon enough we were crossing under the Brooklyn Bridge, which Dawes explained is made from Rosendale cement, the toughest cement in the world. I admired the solid, uncracked foundation of the bridge and despite my own precarious bob, felt the security of the world in that cement.

The East River welcomes a range of boats, barges and tugs. Water planes landed behind us; helicopters dropped onto landing pads in front of us. All this busyness seemed mockingly unaware of our presence. Our slow pace allowed us to notice men on shore performing tai chi in the early light, and a lone fisherman hoping for something to grab the end of his pole. I realized that I was looking at the belly of the city: from these docks everything comes and goes. The belly is a vulnerable spot. But there were no security zones as we stroked north, past the U.N. building, past the lives of thousands of people, many still sleeping.

Just before Roosevelt Island there emerged an anomalous piece of undeveloped land, with a metal tower and a metal arc, which looked like a miniature, faded amusement park. On the wiring, cormorants draped, perhaps nesting. The scene struck me as menacing, or freaky, a meeting of the natural and unnatural. But nothing about the brilliant day seemed ominous, except for my dreams of the night before. My over stimulated nerves calmed as I realized that the images of floating dead rats or a current that could suck me under were only the work of my imagination.

At nine, two and a half hours into our trip and at the end of the flood current, we stopped for a half hour snack on Mill Rock. “This is a funny little oasis,” Dawes said. Smothered in gulls and all their waste, it was a dubious rest, but the twenty minutes out of the boat were welcome. North of Mill Rock, the traffic on land thinned out and the water calmed. A man strolling on a narrow walkway looked at me, then his perception shifted and his face spread into a smile. “Hey,” he said.  Another woman leaned over a pedestrian bridge and called, “Travel safely.” We passed the Roberto Clemente park and kids waved at us, called hello as if we were an attraction in a watery parade.

A sanitation dump appeared on the far shore, the white trucks lined up, ready to unload their day’s catch. The smell, settling hard over the water, overwhelmed us and renewed our energy to slide along as quickly as possible. But that, I realized was the greatest offense of the day. All of the horror stories I had heard were exaggerations, or perhaps fictions.

North and west, we moved in the slack tide, admiring a swatch of soot-blackened Inwood marble, and the Columbia boathouse. In the five hours it took us to reach the railroad bridge into the Hudson, we had had a seamless trip. We settled in the shade on a spit of sandy soil to wait for the ebb flow. An exotic pigeon with white feathered feet landed, hoping for a handout. I fell asleep for about fifteen minutes and woke abruptly to the sound of a bell ringing and then the bridge swinging open to let through a boat. The water lapped the shore as if I were on a beach some place really scenic. I sat up, and Dawes pointed out some barn swallows feeding their baby. On a rock nearby someone had written: This place can get pretty dark…Especially when wrong was done!!!

The Hudson was wide, smooth and empty. We rolled down the middle of the River, the George Washington bridge spanning high overhead, and hit a record seven miles an hour. We passed markers from my past life: my apartment at 158th street, Grant’s tomb, so near my grad student apartment, the 79th street boat basin where I loitered after work through the mid-eighties. We gloated in our good fortune. I should have known better; on water, hubris is a dangerous thing.  It causes waves to emerge. In this case the waves surged from the south, fast and without warning to remind us of our small place in this world. Within minutes the calm became a turbulent sea, waves crashed over the bow of my boat and the wind nearly ripped the paddle out of my hands. I lost sight of Dawes in the trough of the waves, but with or without him, I wanted to work my way toward shore. Waves smashed up against the piers and when I looked up I could see people sitting there, sipping drinks. They looked so calm, so relaxed. They waved. Could they not see my distress, that I felt like a cork in the ocean and was unable to wave back. If I had hesitated in my strokes I would have been turned broadside to a wave and undoubtedly rolled over. Perhaps I should have taken more caution after my dreams.

Dawes waited in the eddy of a pier. “We have to cross,” he said. I dreaded this, the wide crossing of the Hudson, near to several taxi piers, and then the passage back into the deep water of the harbor.  I wanted to give in to my fatigue and my fear but there was no way out, no ride home, no person to take my load. I had to keep moving. I kept the back of Dawes’ boat in view, knowing that if I lost my grip on him I would float off, give in to the waves, be swept north, or under. A few times I called to him to wait, but my voice was carried off in the wind. And then through the simple, determined, repetitive gesture of one stroke after another, I was rounding Governor’s Island. Wanting to take the shortest distance and stay close to land, I nudged next to Ellis Island. I felt an odd security by hugging the flank of this place that thousands before me had also seen as a haven, though for different reasons. I was not, though, thinking much about them or the past, but only the near future when I would pull my boat out of the water and, nearly beaten but triumphant, sit down and rest.

I was near tears with exhaustion when out of the corner of my eye I spied a white boat pass, then circle back toward me.  No, I thought, not the police. “Ma’m, where are you going?” His voice carried across the slosh of waves and the roar of wind. The boat produced a wake that catapulted me toward the stone wall. I swirled, stayed afloat, and, without looking over called back, “Liberty State Park.” If I get there.  In a vague eddy, they rounded up Dawes, who held the side of the police boat, while I clutched his boat and we all rolled in unison, the words Park Police in bold black veering in and out of focus. With the right number of “yes, sir’s” Dawes explained that we knew of the security zone, but we couldn’t see the buoys, and even if we had, it would have been dangerous for us to pass to the outside of them.

We had breached federal security. We had trespassed. We had violated the law. The circumstances did not matter. The officer took our information—name, birthdate, and address— and we paddled along while their boat tagged behind our excruciating slow pace. After twenty minutes the boat approached me. “Ma’m we can’t find you,” he called out. “I promise, I exist,” I said. “What?” Grateful he hadn’t heard me, that my tone that said, what you are doing is absurd, was lost to the waves, I shrugged. “Were you really born in 1961?”  There are many things worth lying about; there are many times when lying is tempting. This was not one of those moments. “Yes,” I said, almost an apology.

For the next forty-five minutes the white boat chugged alongside our weary pace. With every stroke my indignation rose. Wasn’t that broad-shouldered policeman supposed to be protecting me? What if during the time they spent following us a real threat emerged?  What is clear about the attacks in the past four years (from 2001-2004) is that people are being killed and mostly in places where there is a density of human life: subways or trains, office buildings; Ellis Island contains approximately thirty-six building, and one, the museum, is open to the public.

In calmer waters near shore, the officer, stocky with a slick shaved head, handed over a fifty-dollar fine: violated security zone. He could have fined us more stiffly, he explained. I couldn’t hear everything he said but caught “Greatest symbol of freedom in the world.”  Stunned, I shoved the ticket into a dry bag. I knew that this was the moment I would remember most vividly, not the rigorous freedom I had experienced throughout the day. But it wasn’t simply a childish sense of you ruined my fun that made that ticket sting. In my tattered state I understood that they were protecting a symbol of freedom, and that is not the same thing as freedom itself, which is not an idea but a person bobbing in a kayak doing something very American, because she can.