Years ago, my parents won a day trip in some sort of silent auction, a boat trip that would take us all around the island of Manhattan.

We are not so much a clan designed for boating, long-footed people with bad inner ears, but it was free and there would be lunch, so we went, my parents and I and Mr. S and Gen, and we kept our eyes on the horizons.

I have thought about that day many times, because man did they get some good provolone. …Just kidding. …Partly kidding; it’s the best tomato-and-cheese on rye with yellow mustard I ever had, that sammich, sitting cross-legged in the back of a small craft as we went up the Hudson and over along Spuyten Duyvil Creek (one day I’ll spell that in one shot without having to Google; it’s not today) and back down the Harlem River, looking at the shape of the city, the actual land of it, the hills and dales that once formed it, and at the same time the people of the city as they jogged along the water, tried to fish, threw and lost Frisbees, smoked pot under overpasses and happily waved back at us.

Purring past Highbridge Park, I was thinking of the last pages of The Great Gatsby, as I suppose every Princeton English major (ret.) is required to once a week at a minimum, “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world.” What must it have looked like to them, before it looked like home to us?

Dirk and I have recently become ensorcelled by the NYC Ferry, which we can step onto after a 15-minute walk from our house and take almost anywhere in the city. Which anywhere doesn’t matter, because it’s the riding-around part we like, how much we can see of the city’s great buildings and little islands while one of us is drinking rosé through a sippy straw. Last Friday we took the Rockaway line, under the Verrazano, past an anchored container ship so huge we felt like Voyager passing Jupiter, to visit Floyd Bennett Field. Once upon a time not long ago, you could just walk into the old barracks beside the hangars and see everything just left there, tidy enough still but increasingly slumped by disuse. I’d hoped you still could.

And maybe you can, if you dress in a tick-proof outfit and pack a pair of clippers. Stern signs from NYPD say no, but even those have rusted, and the sapling-height weeds tell a different story, namely that nobody’s even looked back there since Daylight Saving started. I didn’t go in last week, but I did think again of the end of Gatsby and the way Nick describes Gatsby’s “incoherent failure” of a house, still standing empty when Nick leaves town, the grass grown long. A neighbor kid has left a graffito on the steps. From there Nick goes into his final musings about the Dutch explorers, holding their breath “in the presence of this continent,” and Gatsby’s dreams and the green light, and of course those boats against the current.

“Steeped in rue, steeped in rue,” our high-school English teacher used to murmur when we reached the end of the novel. And it is, one of the great deep-sigh endings in literature, but as the years go by I’m more taken by that image, barely a half-strike, of the land beginning to take Gatsby’s house back. That idea is an obsession of mine both in theory (I don’t think I slept for three days after seeing Life After People), and in practice as a homeowner. Outside wants in, badly, and it won’t take long to get there if you let a building alone for a month or two. Homes left empty, died in or walked away from, have a spooky grandeur. Documents are made nests, seedlings sprout on roofs. Rotting beams give way without fanfare to create a skylight. Maybe this is the fate of Gatsby’s misbegotten McMansion — that after the story ended, the trees reached in through the windows and made it something else.

What you forget about Gatsby, or what I’d forgotten, is that it takes Nick a while to get out of the story. First he has to try, and mostly fail, to fix Gatsby in someone’s mind besides his own, pages and pages of Wolfsheim and the rest all too willing to let the grass grow up and obscure him in their minds. But then of course we know right where to part the leaves and find him.

Happy birthday, Don.

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