For the love of god, don’t splash me
 
And you can too! The Gowanus Canal is infamously dirty. Actually, “dirty” doesn’t really even begin to cover it at all. An “unholy river of putrid filth,” maybe? It’s a Superfund site, of course, meaning the government has deemed it hazardous enough to merit serious clean-up. The Gowanus, however, isn’t just any Superfund site. The Gowanus Canal was completed in 1853, and has been collecting industrial (and human) waste ever since the Second Industrial Revolution. It’s been a dumping ground for coal gas plants, oil refineries, soap plants, machine shops, sulfur production, a leather tannery, chemical plants and cement makers from the very beginning. And then there’s the raw sewage that sometimes overflows into it from the surrounding inadequate sewer systems. I’m not privy to any special surveys of the waterway, but I like to imagine a layer of viscous sludge at the bottom that has remained mostly undisturbed over the years, like a toxic parfait. Maybe you could slice out a sample and read New York history like rings on a tree or geological striations…. except way grosser.

It goes without saying that the area around the canal can smell like horrifying chemical shit when the water gets too low. Or too high. Or when there’s a storm. Or, really, anything that disturbs the delicate balance of its murky, shitty depths.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Gowanus Canal—it’s one of the great, er, “living” artifacts of US history! Once it was beautiful marshlands full of fish and famously giant oysters, now it’s a vessel for nearly every horrible byproduct of capitalism. And I am not alone in my affections! This summer I will be joining The Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club.

Describing themselves as “a volunteer organization dedicated to providing waterfront access and education related to the estuary and bordering shoreline neighborhoods,” the club makes regular leisure of paddling through the canal. They even have an (endearingly earnest) oath!

We will never bring disgrace to this, our estuary, by any act of dishonesty or cowardice, nor ever our suffering comrade in the ranks.

We will fight for the ideals and sacred things of the waterfront, both alone and with many.

We will revere and obey the waterfront’s laws and do our best to include a like respect and reverence in those above us who are prone to annul or set them at naught.

We will strive unceasingly to quicken the public’s sense of civic duty.

Thus, in all these ways, we will transmit this estuary, not only less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.

 
I never went last year because my ex had a (somewhat understandable) fear of cancer, pissed-off Swamp Things, and/or instant death at contact with the water. But this year, I shall join the Dredgers, those quixotic optimists paddling away on a forsaken and poisoned waterfront.