Day 13, Aug. 9
Inwood Hill to Manhattan
Sleep was short, for we needed to get up at 4:30 a.m. to pack up our wet tents and gear and board buses for our return to the Inwood Canoe Club where our boats were waiting. We munched on snack foods on the bus in lieu of breakfast, for we were scheduled to launch at sunrise. We hauled our stacked canoes and kayaks out of the boathouse and onto the dock and pushed off into the river in the rainy dark, where we held water for several minutes until we could muster in two-row formation. So it was maybe a half hour before we were finally on our way. Soon the thunder of traffic on the George Washington Bridge boomed above us and then we faced a stiff headwind and choppy water. We were making headway, though, until, within maybe a mile of our final destination, Pier 96, at 57th Street in Manhattan, the tide turned against us, tearing upriver through the river’s channel. At one point one of the safety boat paddlers, who used narrow “Greenland” paddles to propel, apparently with little effort, his sleek cedar strip kayak, pulled alongside my boat to tell me I had to paddle harder. I told him I didn’t think I could … but I knew he was right, that I had to, because I was at a standstill in the tidal current. What saved me, in the end, from the ignominy that I secretly feared all along, that I would somehow not be able to finish this journey, was the advice of some of one of the Haudenosaunee paddlers, to hug the sea wall. The current was less ferocious there and by staying close to it, weaving in and out of docks and small marinas, I was able, with other struggling paddlers, to finally reach Pier 96, where a purple and white Haudenosaunee Confederation flag snapped in the wind over the crowd of people gathered on the dock to welcome and help exhausted paddlers out of their boats. I overheard one of the other paddlers say that this was the hardest thing she had ever done, physically, in her life. And I told Rebecca, who was there at the dock to greet me, that I felt she spoke for me as well.
In the blur of events that followed our landing at the pier, where we swallowed a hasty lunch, were welcomed by the Dutch ambassador and then crossed town to the United Nations for an observance of the International Day of Indigenous Peoples, joined by the Dakota Unity Riders, a couple of things stick in my mind. First, to the amusement of all paddlers in the hall, the words by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, who congratulated us before the assembly for “rowing thousands of miles” down the Hudson! Though we laughed, the truth was it almost felt, for many of us in that last arduous hour of paddling, like we had indeed come thousands of miles. But most of all I will remember the words of Onondaga Faithkeeper Oren Lyons that brought the meaning of the whole Two Row Wampum Reenactment experience into sudden focus for me. He reminded the UN Assembly that human activities like hydrofracking and the burning of fossil fuels threaten the earth and future generations of people. Things look pretty bad, he said, but “I know they’re gonna get better. I saw that will on the water.” When I heard those words, I felt a jolt of realization about this journey, which had forced me to press hard against my own limits: now I knew what it had all been for. ++
