Wages of Water
Steve Mentz
T his fragment has two parts. The first splashes through the Hudson River one early morning in September 2013. The second took place that same fall, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, inside the canal of my left ear.
In diving into the “wages” of water I’m not suggesting that the world ocean owes us anything. Nor really the opposite, that we owe the great waters a globe without plas-tic, or with less carbon, much as I love such fanciful ideas.
(To clarify: we are heading for a lower-carbon future. The question is whether we’ll burn all the coal and oil in the ground before we get there. That’s what will determine the shape of our catastrophic future.) The wages I’m talking in this case about are personal. Not an ocean inside, though part of this story takes place inside my body. What I’m writing about is salt on skin, the feel and pressure of the world ocean on a fragile individual body, in this case mine.
How does it feel, I ask, to touch the hyperobject?
Ecological catastrophe becomes legible as a matter of scale. Carbon fills the two flowing bodies that cover our planet’s surface, the wet one and the airy one. It’s hard to
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pinpoint one source for all that industrial by-product, but New York will do. The city’s story—colonization, urban growth, industrial expansion, post-industrial “knowledge economy,” punctuated collapses and recoveries—maps onto the history of what Tim Morton terms the “age of catastro-phes.” I don’t fully agree with the lingering Romanticism of Morton’s two points of origin, the invention of the steam engine in 1781, and the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, since humanity’s carbon signature appears legible for around ten thousand years, but I do agree with the con-ceptual potency of his powerful neologism, the hyperobject.
More than human-sized, massively distributed, everywhere present if not always quite tangible, hyperobjects come into view as the massive shadow of global warming and catastrophic climate change. In this twilight it’s hard to distinguish individuals. Claims for human exceptionalism ring false. Nonhuman forces control our future.
But I’m still me, for all that. A body simply body, however vast and rambling my thoughts. I grew up close to New York and teach in Queens now. There’s something about language and consciousness that doesn’t like to give up the I.
These two stories narrate my physical and intellectual efforts to come to terms with global warming and with Oceanic New York. In the first I’m in the water, and in the second it’s in me. In the spirit of adventure stories, you’ll have to wait until the end to see how it turns out.
1. Flotsam
At 4:04 a.m. at the Battery on Saturday 26 September 2013, the tide turned. An instant of stillness—though nothing remains still in the water—and then the flood
Wages of Water 115 came, and the vast Atlantic started rolling up the Hudson.
By high tide at 10:09 a.m., the water level at the Battery was 5.7 feet higher than it had been six hours before.
But by that time I was upriver, flotsam in the current, swimming north.
I jumped into the water at the 79th St. Boat Basin just before 8 a.m. I swam north for five miles, aiming for the Manhattan stanchion of the George Washington Bridge and the Little Red Lighthouse in its shadow. Passing under the span, I reached land near the northern tip of the island at the Dyckman Street Marina. I finished in 2:14:10. The winning time was 1:38.
Long distance swims are solitary events, spent mostly with your face underwater. I went out with the second wave and, feeling good in my new sleeveless wetsuit, soon caught many swimmers from the first wave. There may have been a moment, say around 8:30 a.m. when I caught a glimpse of the tower of Riverside Church at 121st St., when I may have been near the front of the pack. Then a bunch of fast swimmers who started behind me surged ahead at the bridge, and I finished in a crowd.
I’d never swum that far in that strong a current before.
The flood was behind me, which was better than the alter-native but meant that the ocean was crawling up my back all morning, sloppy surges tickling my legs, shifting me off-keel. Travelling north were millions of gallons of salt water, me, two hundred seventeen other swimmers, maybe thirty kayaks, fifteen larger boats, twenty NYPD zodiacs, and a dozen blue-capped “Swim Angels,” who were there to help anyone in trouble. It didn’t seem at all crowded at first.
All that fast-moving water and debris meant turbu-lence. I swam through constant movement: little waves pushing upriver, eddies, wakes from powerboats which left
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us tasting gasoline. Maybe halfway, with the Bridge not looking much closer, I started to feel seasick.
Long swims mix exertion with meditation. Diana Nyad calls swimming the “ultimate form of sensory depri-vation.” I remember a wordless feeling, flowing forward with flowing water. Mobilis in mobili is what Captain Nemo calls it, mobility inside a moving thing. For a little while that morning, I was part of the biggest moving thing in New York. Inside what Tim Morton calls “the mesh,” sur-rounded by a moving environment that buoyed me up and threatened me at the same time, swimming seemed part fool’s errand and part deep-down encounter with reality.
Humans aren’t aquatic.
But when you’re in the big river, heading upstream with the flood, and your arms and legs move machine-like, and you’re churning upstream with New York City on your right and the Palisades on your left, you feel in your disoriented body why “flow” is a good thing to be inside.
2. Excess
The knife entered my ear canal deliberately on the Monday before Thanksgiving. It moved down three-quarters of an inch until it encountered two lumps of bone. These bone masses narrowed my ear canal as rocky headlands narrow an estuary. A passage that was ten millimeters wide con-stricted with these bone-headlands to a single millimeter.
That’s where the knife started cutting.
The skin peeled back in still-attached flaps, flooding the canal with blood and exposing bare bone. The drill started there. Several hours later, the extruding bone was gone.
Wages of Water 117 The bone-headlands grew and made that narrowness because of exposure to water. A lifetime of immersion in oceans, lakes, and rivers, cold water-fingers flowing into my ear canal up to the eardrum. Water didn’t go away when it got inside my head. It lingered, thick and heavy, an alien presence inside my skull. Eventually it flowed out—but for a long time, the insides of my ears have been intermittently wet. I’ve been living with a little salt ocean in my head.
There is a moral to this story.
We love oceans, but they don’t love us. We’re semi-aquatic apes who can’t endure the excess of ocean. Swim-mers feel it: the water is no place to stay.
After the surgery, I wasn’t able to put my head under any water for over three months. Not until the next spring.