Free The Bottom of the Harbor by Joseph Mitchell Page B

worshipers who take part in the rite are given bunches of willow twigs; each bunch has seven twigs and each twig has seven leaves. After marching in procession seven times around the altar, chanting a litany, the worshipers shake the bunches or strike them against the altar until the leaves fall to the floor. The twigs must be cut from willows that grow beside water, the buds on the ends of the twigs must be unblemished, and the leaves must be green and flawless. For generations, most of the willow bunches have come from black willows and weeping willows in the Staten Island tide marshes. In the two or three days preceding Hoshanna Rabbah—it usually falls in the last week of September or the first or second week of October—rabbis and trusted elders go up and down the ditchbanks, most often in pairs, the rabbi scrutinizing twigs and cutting those that pass the test, and the elder trimming and bunching them and stowing them gently in brown-paper shopping bags.
    There is much resident and migratory wildlife in the marshes. The most plentiful resident species are pheasants, crows, marsh hawks, black snakes, muskrats, opossums, rabbits, rats, and field mice. There is no open season on the pheasants, and they have become so bold that the truck farmers look upon them as pests. One can walk through the poke-weed and sumac and blue-bent grass on any of the meadow islands at any time and put up pair after pair of pheasants. At the head of a snaky creek in one of the loneliest of the marshes, there is an old rickamarack of a dock that was built by rum-runners during prohibition. One morning, hiding behind this dock, waiting for some soft-shell-clam poachers to appear, Mr. Zimmer saw a hen pheasant walk across a strip of tide flat, followed by a brood of seventeen. At times, out in the marshes, Mr. Zimmer becomes depressed. The marshes are doomed. The city has begun to dump garbage on them. It has already filled in hundreds of acres with garbage. Eventually, it will fill in the whole area, and then the Department of Parks will undoubtedly build some proper parks out there, and put in some concrete highways and scatter some concrete benches about. The old south-shore secessionists—they want Staten Island to secede from New York and join New Jersey, and there are many of them—can sit on these benches and meditate and store up bile.
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    Mr. Zimmer is a friend of mine, and I sometimes go out on patrols with him. One cold, windy, spitty morning, we made a patrol of the polluted skimmer-clam beds in the ocean off Rockaway Beach. On the way back to Staten Island, he suggested that we stop in Sheepshead Bay and get some oyster stew to warm us up. We turned in to the bay and tied the skiff to the Harbor Police float and went across the street to Lundy’s, the biggest and best of the Emmons Avenue seafood restaurants. We went into the oyster-bar side and took a table, and each of us ordered a double stew. Mr. Zimmer caught sight of a bayman named Leroy Poole, who was standing at the bar, bent over some oysters on the half shell. Mr. Poole is captain and owner of the party boat
Chinquapin.
Mr. Zimmer went over to the bar, and he and Mr. Poole shook hands and talked for a minute or two. When he returned, he said that Mr. Poole would join us as soon as he’d finished his oysters. He told the waiter to set another place and add another double stew to the order. “Do you know Roy?” Mr. Zimmer asked me. I said that I had often seen him around the party-boat piers but that I knew him only to speak to.
    â€œRoy’s a south-shore boy,” Mr. Zimmer said. “His father was one of the biggest oyster-bedders in Prince’s Bay—lost everything when they condemned the beds, and took a bookkeeping job in Fulton Market and died of a stroke in less than a year; died on the Staten Island ferry, on the way to work. After Roy finished grade school, one of his father’s