Since the floods that’s become easier, because although it was a drowned coastline before, it is now more drowneder than ever. A city, and such a city that it used to take some looking to see it as an estuary. And the third runs south down the middle of the bay, and because of a swamp cutting across its northern end, it’s technically an island rocky, hilly, forested, meadowed, ponded: that’s Manhattan.įorest? Okay, now it’s a forest of skyscrapers. One anchors the moraine of Long Island, angling in from the east: Brooklyn Heights.

One runs south down the western side of the bay, dividing the Hudson from the Meadowlands: that’s the Palisades and Hoboken, pointing to the big lump that is Staten Island. In this great estuary there are some remnant ridges of hard old rock, skinny low long lines of hills, now peninsulas in the general flood. The Atlantic came up and filled all the valleys of the eastern seaboard, as can be easily discerned on any map, and in that process the ocean sloshed into the Hudson, as well as into the valley between New England and the Long Island moraine, creating Long Island Sound, then the East River and all the rest of the vast complicated mess of marshes, creeks, and tidal races that is our bay in question. When the great ice monster melted ten thousand years ago, sea level rose about three hundred feet. It was one dripline coming off the world-topping ice cap of the Ice Age, which was such a monster that the entirety of Long Island is just one of its moraines. People call it a river but it’s more than a river, it’s a fjord or a fyard if you want to be geologically prissy about it. It’s only a mile wide, and yet once through it, hopefully coming in on a rising tide, as it’s much easier that way, like Hudson you will come into a humongous harbor, unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. The Bight of New York forms an almost ninety-degree angle where the north-southish Jersey Shore meets the east-westish Long Island, and right there at the bend there’s a gap. If you’re okay pondering the big picture, the ground truth, read on. Sail ahead a page or two to resume voyeuring the sordiditties of the puny primates crawling or paddling around this great bay.

If you don’t care about such an antiquitarian sailor’s fact, bight me.

A bight is an indentation in a coastline too broad and open to be called a bay, such that you could sail out of it on a single tack. Henry Hudson sailed by and saw a break in the coast between two hills, right at the deepest part of the bight they were exploring. New York, New York, it’s a hell of a bay.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson