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We’re here to canoe the southernmost stretch of the Bronx River in all its ecological wonder and industrial despair. The river’s source is Davis Brook in Westchester County, just north of White Plains. From there, it winds down through grassy expanses for 15 miles and then flows for eight miles through the middle of the Bronx before emptying into the upper East River. To be plopped in the river’s midst, in a canoe, on a spectacular day, is tranquilizing. This despite the bobbing tires, the submerged cars, gutted and smashed, and the potent smells.

Paul, my other guide, Majora Carter, and I drove, canoe strapped to the roof, from Garrison Avenue, deep in the South Bronx’s Hunts Point neighborhood, to the put-in spot on the river’s west bank. Majora, an athletic woman of 33, is a part-time canoeist and, like Paul, a full-time employee of The Point Community Development Corporation, one of three groups in the South Bronx dedicated to the economic and environmental revitalization of the area. “We want to showcase the river’s miraculous return from the dead,” Paul tells me. The groups have been slowly gaining success. And last fall, the City of New York announced plans to pour $60 million into a ten-year effort to restore the Bronx River. By February, cranes had hauled many of the junked cars out of the river’s southernmost reaches, and meetings are currently being held to reduce the number of sewage outfalls upstream. (The money will also eventually pay for hiking and cycling trails along the banks and throughout the borough.) The restored river, it is hoped, will be the centerpiece of a Bronx renaissance. It will flow proudly and freely past the original homes of White Castle and Colin Powell, Cynthia Ozick and Grandmaster Flash, Don DeLillo and Yankee Stadium.

With private funds, The Point, now in its eighth year, has created access to the river about two miles north of its mouth. But not without considerable effort: It first had to change the designation of a city street, Lafayette Avenue, to the Hunts Point Riverside Park and then engage in a lot of heavy lifting—literally—to convert the road’s dead end from a dumping ground to a put-in. The nearby half-submerged wreck of a Chrysler minivan serves as a reminder of the past.

To share its love for Bronx River ecology, The Point launched 12 canoe trips from this space last year, which it proudly calls “our park.” The park runs for a sixty yards along the southwestern bank. It’s really just a clearing, but it’s a start, a portal to the river where, impossibly, tragically, none existed before.

We circle upriver, past snapping turtles and nightwings and our put-in, and find ourselves hemmed in by the abandoned Loral plant (where parts of Patriot missiles were manufactured in the 1980s), a cement yard (Paul and Majora know the guys who work there and wave, “Yo, ‘sup?”), and mountains of scrap metal that are strangely beautiful in their ugliness. It’s the river as symbol of life and death, the Bronx being emphatically full of both.

Under the thunderous Hunts Point drawbridge, we get stuck. Not on submerged refuse or in sludge, but in an unruly current. We paddle, but we don’t move. We’re going sideways, backward. The sun is setting; no one’s around. Paul stops scanning the banks for signs of wildlife and paddles with a will. Majora too. Then something—a benign wind from up Gun Hill Road, perhaps—pushes us softly home, to “our park” and the clearing that will be the start of something.

There, standing on the shore, a ponytailed Hispanic man named Eddie and his five children are taking turns skipping rocks. Eddie starts telling us what the area was like ten and 15 years ago. “They’d shoot you dead for no reason, man, for nothing,” he says. “I could tell you stories. You could write a book.” Eddie, who lives in a nearby housing project, now brings his kids here all the time. To play.

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Give Me Liberty, in a Sea Kayak
Dodging tankers, ferries, and the occasional Circle Liner on the Hudson

Bobbing in an 18-foot seakayak off a pier in downtown Manhattan is stomach-churning exhilaration—one of those rare occasions when seasickness feels good. There you are, on the edge of the Hudson River’s shipping lanes, a speck of neon plastic amidst a flotilla of steel tankers, Circle Line cruisers, speedboats, and ferries. You swoop over five-foot swells, the Manhattan skyline rising and falling with every crest and trough. Whether you’re paddling north up the Hudson on a 90-minute shoreline cruise, or out into the choppy chaos of New York Harbor for a four-hour circumnavigation of the Statue of Liberty, you’ll want to go with a guide—at least until you’ve mastered the wily currents and boat traffic. Manhattan Kayak Company leads both voyages ($45 and $75, respectively; 212-924-1788), as well as instructional clinics from Pier 63 at 23rd Street and the Hudson. —K.��.