Across the Mighty, Mighty Raritan

Whenever I travel I strive to be away of the rivers around me. The flow of travel is best organized by rivers. One should be aware of when one is going from one great watershed to another.

I felt in element again being back in New Jersey.  When I lived in Staten Island was fascinated by the hydrology of the intricate of the Hudson and the nearby rivers, such as the Raritan, which was nearby where we were staying, and drains central NewJersey into the Atlantic.

"In prehistoric times, the Raritan was the mouth of the Hudson," I told my companions.

It was a fact I'd picked up in 2002, during my hydrology obsession, from the book Heartbeats in the Muck, which is a very nice natural history of the extended New York Harbor. It's the best book I've found on the subject. If you're interested in that kind of thing, and you are living in the city or visiting the city, it gives a complete different take on everything, to focus on the water instead of the land.

"What's that bridge?" K. asked me, when we were on the pier in Jersey City near our hotel, at the end of the week during our overnight trip in the metropolis.

She was pointing down river.

"That's the Verrazano Narrows Bridge," I said. "It connects Brooklyn with Staten Island. It opened in 1964 and led to a huge housing boom in Staten Island, which was mostly very rural until then."

I explained that the water channel itself, the main one by which the mighty Hudson empties from the upper harbor into the lower harbor, and hence the open ocean, was historically called The Narrows. The name Verrazano was added to the bridge name by a campaign of Italian-Americans to commemorate the Italian navigator (flying under French flag) who was the first known European captain to enter the upper harbor.

Then I added. "At the end of the last ice age, Brooklyn and Staten Island were still connected, and the Hudson came down in a huge flow from melting glaciers. At the time it circled around into New Jersey to come out through the mouth of the Raritan.  Then at once point it just burst through and carved the Narrows."

"It was an event that probably witnessed by human beings," I added.

That last sentence is pretty much word-for-word from the book I mentioned above, that I read in 2002.

I love playing casual tour guide like this. The greatest feeling that comes from having such knowledge is sharing it with other folks, when the perfect opportunity arises to do it.