The snake found us before the book did. Before the myth. Before the title. We were just looking for an apartment.
It was 2002. Jan and I were living in a tiny place in the Village—sleep sofa, kitchen too small to turn around in, a window that looked onto a bamboo-covered courtyard. The air was thick that summer, heavy with steam and sirens, and we were due to fly back to Switzerland in a few days. No lease, no plan. One last Sunday. One last hope to find our affordable New York sanctuary.
I discovered the book at Revolutionary Bookstore. Bound galleys, a book not yet officially published. A study of Native American Manhattan: how it was before the white men and the concrete skyscrapers took over. In it, the Lenape’s Sapokanikan trail – and Minetta Creek, in both its real and mythic incarnation. A stream that once curled openly through this part of the island, a watercourse so old it predated every avenue and ambition.
Still flows underground, the book said. Buried, but not dead.
The name—Manetta—comes from the Lenape, meaning “devil’s water.” They said it whispered. Drove people mad. Early Dutch settlers threw waste from their tannery into it, and still it flowed. In the 1800s, the banks were lined with brothels, boarding houses, a black enclave that city records tried to erase. Washington Square itself was once a potter’s field. More than 20,000 bodies still lie beneath it.
There was only one spot Minetta water still bubbled up: in the lobby window of the white brick elephant 2 Fifth Avenue – in a dirty, pathetic plexiglass tube. If it even was Minetta water. (By now, the tube has been removed, and Minetta only surfaces sometimes to flood a basement here and there.)
On that Sunday, Jan and I passed 2 Fifth. Jan, whose instincts for apartment hunting are nearly mythic, turned to the doorman and said, “Where’s the open house?” In a building that size, there was always an apartment for sale, right?
“20L,” he said, without blinking.
We went up. We walked in. We didn’t walk out the same. We moved in.
The book – RIVER AN AMERICAN DREAMING – started to bubble up in me, a long time coming, persistent as water, breaking through everything.
That’s how these rivers work. You don’t go looking for them. You fall in. You follow their flow.
And just like the river, I’ve been running ever since.
