I gazed at the horizon on Saturday for the first time all summer. It was aboard the ferry to Manhattan from Rockaway Beach. My mother and I had taken the ferry to the beach in the late afternoon.
I sat portside, atop a box filled with preservers, in the forward section of the upper deck. A guy with a surfboard in a bag at his side sipped from a 16-ounce can of Coors. A young woman across from me read a paperback. She looked up occasionally to photograph the bay with her phone. Some people wore hoodies to ward off the late-afternoon chill.
A steel-gray sky blanketed the horizon. As we made our way north, a sailboat bobbed passed us heading east.
The ferry slipped past the tip of the peninsula and the horizon emerged. Because of the clouds I could barely make out New Jersey on the mainland. It was like staring into a Rothko field of bands of blue. A boat headed north provided a pinpoint of white.
“Inlanders,” wrote Melville in “Moby Dick,” “must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling.” For a few hours on Saturday, I was on the water and loved it.