Longest Night

Rainy-overcast today, as it was yesterday, but on Wednesday evening I watched the sun set far to the south over Governor’s Island in a very clear sky.

From Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Promenade, I have an open-air calendar of sunsets, tracking the Earth’s tilt between the seasons. From behind Lower Manhattan in high summer, when the red-shifting light wiggles through Gotham’s towers, across the plain of New Jersey — Statue of Liberty, cranes of Elizabeth — and then behind Nut Island, as the Dutch called Governor’s. And then back again. “Spectacular” doesn’t begin to describe the views.

And as the sun descended just to the left of Castle Williams, the sky over the East River’s conflux with the Hudson and Buttermilk Channel was suddenly full of gulls. Mostly Ring-billed, I would bet, hundreds of them. I couldn’t help myself, anthropomorphizing them as dancing in celebration of the day’s end. Mostly silent, whirling as in a maelstrom of their own making, for there was little wind; they rode what there was of it for all it was worth. Some did cry aloud, others banked abruptly, almost tern-like in sharp torquing suddenness, and then did it again, and again.

The whirling sky did not last long. Soon they settled down onto the water or docks or roofs or old pilings.

Night had come.