author, creator, mighty fine swimmer
So there I was, standing on the north shore of Governors Island and looking over the water to the tip of Lower Manhattan. It seemed so close. Even though I knew that the original shoreline on September 12, 1609 (when Henry Hudson sailed right past where I stood) was about a block inland, I figured that it was about 4-5 bow shots across. That’s assuming I was a Munsee-speaking, Algonquin native in 1609 calculating the distance. That’s how they did it back then.
On September 18, 2016, I joined a walking tour of Lower Manhattan on one of my research trips to NYC. A very specific tour. A history tour. It was hosted by a tour group called Untapped Cities and called “Remnants of Dutch New Amsterdam in NYC.”
A curious thing happened recently. I was going through an old family photo album my mother had just sent me. The kind with the black pages and little B&W prints with the cute scalloped edges. I had carefully placed the crumbling pages with mother’s handwritten notes in white ink next to a binder I had opened earlier. The binder held my clippings from the day I won the second annual Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in 1983. (I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of that eight-hour, 30-mile circumswim around the island here; you can read more about it on Quora.