Red Hook

We packed a picnic and walked over the reverberating BQE and then took a left on Columbia towards Red Hook.

A beautiful spring evening, cool and temperature dropping.

The street trees and garden trees - such as they are - are loaded with flowers. The pears still have some white confetti in the new green leaves, but now it is the bird cherries (Prunus padus, below) which are snowy with bloom. Like the pears I do not remember seeing them this heavy with blossom before. Why do I think this may foretell of an epic winter ahead?

On Louis Valentino pier I unpacked supper and found to my horror that I'd forgotten the little glasses for our hooch. It was New Zealand hooch and we did what one must. Swigged. Very companionable. Below, leftover vegetables from last night's bagna cauda, in a lemon and anchovy dressing.

Found some buffalo mozzarella and nice out of season tomatoes. With terrace chives.

Some boys came down to the water and did what boys do: threw things. But they looked happy and not totally criminal. It seemed a small town kind of thing to do in a very big town. Red Hook still feels small town. Self-consciously so, and maybe even affectedly so in some cases. But I still love it. The clapboard siding, old brick, cobbled streets, bus depots and docks and occasional bars.

No swimming no diving no way. Never fear. What's the bunker-like building beyond with the nondescript off-duty-cop-like cars in the lot?

There were a few fishermen A sign said that pregnant women and children under the age of 15 should not eat "eels" and other fish caught here. Eels? Really? Don't they only come up rivers to spawn?

He caught a bag.

The pier is at the foot of a very small but sweet park named in honour of a firefighter who lost his life in 1996 trying to save other firefighters in a burning Brooklyn building.

Heading back home after we became chilly on the water.

A headless nodding dog. Not good in a crisis.

Exiting Red Hook.

Streets very quiet, the working waterfront on our left, but hidden.

Towards the end of Columbia one sees the cranes and working parts of the harbour again, and the wind off the water picks up.

Easy to take pictures.

And an end to all over the BQE again. The noise is stunning. More stunning that we don't hear it only a few blocks away.