Taking the Long Way, Part II.
Hudson River Greenway
Here’s part two of my series about walking from the top (minus Marble Hill, thanks to all the historians who corrected me on reddit for pointing that out) to the bottom of Manhattan. If you haven’t read it yet, part 1 is here. This won’t make much sense to you if you don’t read it! Parts 3, 4, and 5 will be clickable links when they’re published in the coming weeks! Onward and upward. Southward?
2. HUDSON RIVER GREENWAY
I could have stayed in the forest all day, but I forced myself to stay on track. Below me the Hudson River Greenway marked the edge of the land where it met its namesake, a ribbon of green sandwiched between the urban sky-slither and the river’s sinuous curves. I bushwhacked my way down the trail-less hillside. A thorough scan disclosed no way to cross under or over the highway (this turned out to be false; I could have avoided the following escapade with a little more searching). The trail at the water’s edge, a real-life game of Frogger between me and its beckon. I hopped the fence, ignoring the grind in my right shoulder, and took a moment’s stock of the situation. Several things then happened in rapid succession. I will try to catalog them below as I experienced the thoughts and actions. I will not repeat this stunt. Do not follow my example here.
Cars approached from my left. This is what we expect from a smallish multilane highway. No surprises yet.
A break in traffic yawned before me. If I sprinted, I’d make it across the road with feet to spare. A combination of social anxiety (not wanting people to see me hooliganing around as a pedestrian in a pedestrian-hostile zone), goal number 4, and a sense that this gap was both rare and closing quickly caused the most dangerous decision I would make all day.
I darted off into the fray. The first two lanes went off without a hitch.
The blast from a car’s horn in the third lane tangled my feet around each other, nearly causing me to faceplant directly in front of it. Since I didn’t (still don’t) want to become roadkill, I fought to maintain my footing until I was out of the road. Instead of faceplanting onto the pavement, I crashed full force into the metal barrier on the far side of the highway.
New Yorkers have a special gift for pettiness that comes out when their punctuality is threatened. Arguments about who made who miss a subway connection cause another missed connection. Disputes over stolen parking spots take longer than finding new parking. Even still trying to suck air into my deflated lungs with a bruised diaphragm, I did not want to be on the receiving end of a diatribe about my foolhardiness and its consequences for the driver. I scrambled over the fence and off into the bushes on the other side. To the red Toyota Camry driver who crossed the Henry Hudson bridge on May 30th at 10:47ish AM: this is my official apology. I’m sorry I got too close to you. I hope I didn’t make you late. I won’t do it again.
The southbound lanes went well after I picked my way down a few rocks.
Why did JT cross the road? To get to the Hudson River Greenway. Once there, I’d have a straight shot for a mile to the George Washington Bridge. Of course, I didn’t make the shot straight. The mixed-use pedestrian pavement abutted a rocky shore on its west, my right. Again, evidence of humanity was everywhere. Arcane conglomerates of unfathomable use littered the barrier between water and land. What could the function of milk cartons nailgunned onto wooden pallets possibly be? The monstrosity so resembled medieval stocks that I daydreamed of tough NYC mobsters conducting interrogations on a shoestring budget, demanding their lackeys cobble together instruments of cruel and unusual punishment with whatever they could find in the recycling bin, or risk being put into the pallet stocks themselves. I snapped out of my daydream right as Brando was about to put the hurt on someone with his diy torture device. And they say only hippie liberal types know how to upcycle!
So transfixed was I that I hardly noticed my departure from the path. But I had wandered onto the rocks, and something had come glinting into my field of vision. Hidden mob treasure, perhaps? I reached below the fearsome amalgamation and plucked it off the seaweed-slimed rocks. An unmarked silver dog tag on a fine link chain, beaten to look as though someone very strong had squeezed it very hard, lay in my hand, trying very hard to look as though it had not called out to me to pick it up.
The necklace was caked with algae, more green than lustrous, but even through the grime, the unmistakable blue tarnish of real silver peeked past. I placed the pendant in my pocket, to be boiled and worn on a later date. Maybe it was military surplus, maybe it was a surplus bit of someone’s life, a reminder people too close to be without, places too far to have a reminder so near, love too abundant to be hammered into dead metal. Just another question about a stranger’s life. Just another question I’ll never get an answer to.
II. SECOND DETOUR
It’s July 3rd, 2022, and the rains have been as heavy this year as the summer has been hot. A drop of water hits a stalk of corn on a commercial farm in New Paltz, New Jersey. It rolls down the ear, touches the ground, and soaks into the soil. As it joins with other droplets in the ground, it picks up some excess fertilizer. The fertilizer is Yara International Procote, a common industrial chemical blend including nitrogen, sulphur, potassium, and phosphorous. Quickly becoming a tiny stream, the water empties into a runoff trench, then an agricultural drainage pipe. It connects with more pipes from more farms carrying more rivulets with more fertilizer, then into the raging Walkill River. The river is bursting its seams, brimming with runoff. As the rains die down and the Walkill meets Rondout Creek, a lone Cyanobacterium absorbs more than triple the amount of nitrogen in one hour from the overflow that it would typically consume in a lifetime.
Cyanobacteria are naturally occurring algae that use photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy. They are harmless in small quantities and are present in every body of freshwater at over 55°F. Their populations remain under control because the elements they need to reproduce are uncommon in their natural habitat.
Time to gear up for some serious nerdery.
The chemical our friend the Cyanobacterium needs to reproduce is nitrogen. If you remember your basic chemistry, you might be wondering why I would say that nitrogen is uncommon. It is, after all, the most common element in the air we breathe (roughly 60%).
However, the type of nitrogen that Cyanobacteria need is not available in the air. Atmospheric nitrogen is in the form N2—two nitrogen atoms bonded together in a triple non-polar covalent bond (basically, just a powerful bond; imagine chain links). Good luck to any organism trying to break a bond that strong without some heavy-duty internal machinery. Cyanobacteria need single nitrogen atoms to form chlorophyll, the essential macromolecule to convert sunlight into food. They can’t do anything useful with N2. Instead, they require NH4+ or NO3- (aka “fixed” nitrogen), which has a less stable chemical structure. The algae can then break off individual nitrogen atoms to make its chlorophyll and have enough energy to grow and eventually split into two Cyanobacteria.
Coincidentally, plants need fixed nitrogen too, since they also contain chlorophyll and we need them to grow to create our food. In the wild, nitrogen is fixed by animals (which output usable nitrogen in their excrement), or nitrogen-fixing bacteria (which turn atmospheric nitrogen into fixed nitrogen as part of their energy production). No self-respecting bacterial colony or herd of cows can ever create enough functional nitrogen for any commercial food farming operation. After just a year or two of industrial farming, the soil is so depleted of nitrogen that additional fertilizer is necessary, hence the Yara Procote. When this fertilizer ends up in rivers warmed by climate change, we start to see some problems.
Our Cyanobacterium is overwhelmed by the sudden influx of its favorite chemical. Its photosynthesizing systems kick into overdrive and in just a day, it has split into two. The next day, it doubles again. By August 17th, there are more than 30 trillion Cyanobacteria at the confluence of the Wallkill and Rondout creek1, meeting the DEC requirements for a harmful algal bloom.
Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are colonies of Cyanobacteria that paint rivers, lakes, and ponds in beautiful radiation-green swirls of color when nitrogen levels get too high and the water gets too warm. They’re typical in late summer, and as the seasons get hotter, they’re becoming more and more common more and more early, sometimes occurring as early as July. They look pretty, but they’re extremely dangerous. The Cyanobacteria in HABs make more than 200 toxins that are harmless when there are only a few of them around, but with 30 trillion, well, that’s a different story. They produce microcystins, which can cause pneumonia, cancer, or even death. They produce toxic alkaloids, which can cause kidney damage or death. They even produce neurotoxins deadlier than Novichok, the deadliest man-made nerve agent. That same nerve agent was used by Russian intelligence to poison opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 before his eventual death (read: assassination) in a Russian prison in 2021. These neurotoxins in HABs cause respiratory failure, paralysis, and you guessed it, death, even in tiny quantities. The safe level for Cyanotoxins per the EPA is 8 parts per billion. The level measured in New Paltz around August 22nd, 2022 was more than 2,500 times that.
On August 17th, 2022, a kayaker in the Wallkill noticed strange green scum on the surface of the river. When she returned her kayak to the rental shop later that day, she mentioned what she had seen. The employee there knew enough to be worried and called the New Jersey State Department of Environmental Control that same day. The kayak shop shuttered for weeks. The DEC called a pause on water rights from the Wallkill for all farmers in the New Paltz area, further disrupting the already COVID-stressed food chain.
By September 7th, no blooms were visible in the Rondout or Wallkill. The algae had used up its supply of nitrogen and burned itself out. No cyanotoxic injuries were reported to the EPA. New Paltz was lucky. Lucky especially in comparison to the recent Great Lakes HABs. But the existing algae still washed downstream, eventually meeting the mighty Hudson near Kingston. Miles further, several million Cyanobacteria found a home on a battered silver dog tag that flared in my hand.
I stuck the necklace in my pocket and continued along the Greenway, passing more trash contraptions along the way. A few lone fishers waved as I passed. Snippets of their conversations in at least three different languages floated around me.
Still New Jersey hunkered across the river, ready to open its maw and spit out another helping of toxic bacterial sludge, ready to shove all which we can’t bear to see but must use to persist right down our throats. The sailboats on its surface offered only serenity.
Next week: Taking the Long Way, Part III: Hungarian Pastry Shop
I actually did the math here. 20,000 Cyanobacteria/cubic ml of water is classified as a HAB. The section of river affected by the 2022 HAB was 1 km long, 15.24 m wide, and 1 meter deep on average. Calculating 20,000 bacteria • 10,000 cm long • 1524 cm wide • 100 cm deep where 1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 ml, which it does, we need at least 30,480,000,000,000 (3.048•10^13) Cyanobacteria to make a HAB that covers this part of the Wallkill. If the bloom did start from a single alga, as we are imagining here, then its doubling would follow the equation 2^x=3.048•10^13, where x is the number of days the algae would take to reach the population we computed. To solve, we take the natural logarithm of our number of bacteria and divide it by the natural log of our base rate. ln(3.048⋅10^13)/ln(2)=44.79. Round up to 45, the HAB was first spotted on August 17th, we need to find Day 0. 2^0 is 1, so we know that on Day 0 there would have been 1 Cyanobacterium. August 17th minus 45 days is July 3rd. Boom.
I can't wait for the next one to come out. And I'm so glad you DIDN'T DIE while crossing the road.
Part III ?