The City from the Water

The boat moves slowly when you are close to the city. There is no hurry once you have arrived where you meant to be.

Manhattan rises in the distance. From the water, it looks smaller than you expect — a row of buildings on a strip of land, edged by the harbor on both sides. The mind has trouble with it. The city you have walked through, gotten lost in, stood beneath, is the same city now small enough to hold in your eye.

She comes into view slowly. Green against the sky, smaller than she ought to be — and somehow, because of that, more herself. I had seen the Statue of Liberty in photographs all my life. Standing on the water, looking at her across the harbor, was something different. Not the picture. The thing the picture was of.

The Verrazzano crossed the sky behind us. A bridge so long it seemed to keep going after the eye stopped following it. Boats moved on the surface of the water — small, deliberate, going somewhere.

It is strange to be near the largeness of the world and to feel calm in it. I had expected to feel small. I felt held instead.