NewsHour essayist Roger Rosenblatt with some thoughts on dead ships.
Winter is the season for living with the dead.
The thought occurs as one looks out on the bones of ships in the waters around Staten Island, New York's other insular borough. The skeletons of ships rise out of swamplands and mud flats, hulls atilt, bodies drilled with holes. Hundreds of them, long out of use, maintain a presence here, the insistent remains of sailing ships, side wheelers, tugboats, barges, a history of sea life in America, and trade and progress, half-submerged around an island. This is the Witte Family marine scrap yard on the Arthur Kill, a boulevard of water between Staten Island and New Jersey. New York Harbor was once full of ships like these.