Paddling the Seven Seas of Central Park

By Neil King Jr.

Adventures usually start when something gets lodged in the brain. An idea arrives like a fleck of pollen and then spreads feverlike and can’t be extinguished. In this case, I wanted to canoe the lakes and ponds of New York’s Central Park. All seven of them. At night. Simply had to.

The idea started small with just a nighttime paddle of the stately Lake, the first of Frederick Law Olmstead’s watery concoctions, opened to huzzahs in 1859. I would sneak into the park well after dusk through the woods on the West Side, lugging my Kevlar canoe through the trees to leave a yawning wake as I cut below Bow Bridge and made a curving pass by the Boat House. Not a soul would be the wiser. It would all be splendid.

Then the fever spread. No, I wouldn’t just do that. I would paddle the Lake and every other body of water in the park, all seven of them. How I might do that, or when, remained to be seen. But it absolutely had to be not just at night, but on the night of some full moon. That, too, was decided. How else to counteract the Covid-induced Blur that had made all days seem the same?

For months I gnawed and stewed over this little project. I consulted maps and books and lunar tables and took two long strolls in the park, end to end, on covert recon missions to examine fence lines and the best points of ingress and egress. I ordered online a detailed topographic map of the park. Only then did I settle on the route.

Our route on our special laminated map

The paddle would start with the Harlem Meer in the northeast corner of the park, up where 110th Street meets Fifth Avenue. From there I would proceed like an intrepid explorer to The Pool, and then to the fenced in Reservoir, where things might get tricky. I would proceed from the south shores of the Reservoir to Turtle Pond at the foot of the mighty Belvedere Castle and then down through the woods of The Ramble to the Lake with its arched bridge. From there I would cut across to the tiny Conservatory Water where Stuart Little sailed, until I finished up by conquering the Pond with its gloomy marshes and fallen timber. There one might spot a blue heron in the shadows of the Plaza Hotel. 

Having a fellow traveler, I decided, would be wise for logistics and banter, so I called and texted a few friends. They didn’t bite. My friend Mike said he’d already spent a night in a New York jail and once was enough. Then my friend Tyler in Los Angeles, himself a native New Yorker, said absolutely, he would fly out from LA as soon as we fixed the date. We didn’t tarry. 

Our circumnavigation of the Seven Seas of Central Park, we agreed, would take place that next Friday on the night of the winter’s last full moon, which went by many names: Worm Moon, Pascal Moon, Lenten Moon, Sugar Moon, Sap Moon. Clouds were in the forecast, but we had faith the moon would own the night. We decided to call it the Paddle Moon.

We walked our long boats from a parking garage in Harlem, Tyler and I, down Fifth Avenue to the shores of the Meer. I had driven the boats up that morning from their usual resting place along the shores of the Chesapeake. A writer from The New Yorker, Ben McGrath, joined us as a soft-spoken witness to sketch his own rendition of the night. 

I walked them both through a few of the particulars, unfurling copies of old maps for reference: the famous British Headquarters Map of 1782, which showed the island’s original topography—its rivers, hillocks, marshes—in graphic detail, and an 1854 map published by M. Dripps, which laid out well the look of the place as the street grid began to take shape but before Olmstead set to work on Central Park.

Detail of the future Central Park, 1854 “M. Dripps” map

It’s easy to get lost in what used to be, but also essential to know what came before. 

The Meer—I explained, little cellphone flashlight in hand—was once a boggy estuary where Montayne’s Rivulet wandered down from the southwest and met Harlem Creek. Up this way, through McGowan’s Pass, where General Washington and his men came retreating north in September 1776, we’d encounter the Loch, and seek to paddle up that scenic riverway toward the Pool.

None of the park’s lakes and ponds are natural, you see, but they almost all have antecedents—rivers, bogs, estuaries—that go back to primordial days.

We put our boats in the Meer and stepped into another world. It was a Friday night just after dark and the city was hopping around us. Car radios thumped. Horns tooted. But it didn’t take more than a few paddles to realize how different the city was from the perspective of the water. When in a boat, you vanish into the night and can achieve a higher form of stillness. 

I felt immediately removed from whatever risk the city at night presented, cushioned by the watery space around me. Tyler paddled off on his own and vanished within a minute. Being on the water made us invisible to all but the most observant person on foot. I just let my canoe drift and let out a big exhale.

The Paddle Moon rises

When we came ashore on the far side of the Meer, we turned to see the coziest full moon rising over the high-rises of East Harlem. We slid from our boats and went up the rocky embankment with the canoes on our shoulders. We were skirting along the edge now of an ancient escarpment, carved by glaciers long ago and then left alone by the park’s builders. 

It was hard not to feel a little shiver. Here we were, step by step, walking into an evening I had talked about for months. Friends and family had all aired their opinions on what might happen on the night of the paddle—the criminals, the cops, the capsizing, the drowning. All the abstract dangers and perils. Laid out before us as we walked were the soft realities of the night itself, the gauzy moon, the empty park, the meandering Loch up which we paddled next to get to the Pool. 

You embark on little adventures like this to see what happens when imagination and actuality meet. 

From the swampy banks of the Pool, we portaged over grass and rocks to the Reservoir. Our canoes, built by a craftsman named Peter Hornbeck in the Adirondacks of Kevlar with strong cherry rails, were light and long and sleek. Even out of water they had a flow about them. We walked over a high schist ridge beneath the glow of streetlights as a jogger passed near, paying us no mind. The park had thronged with humans just hours earlier, under sunlight, but was vacant now with the moon out.

People had asked, “But what about the Reservoir? Surely, you’re not going to try to paddle the Reservoir.” To which I had said, “Of course we plan to paddle the Reservoir.”

It is, after all, the island’s primary lake, the greatest of the Seven Seas at 106 acres wide and 40 feet deep. Finished at the start of the Civil War to hold water brought down from fresh streams to the north, they first called it Lake Manahatta. It hadn’t been a source of drinking water for many decades.

Tyler went first over the four-foot-high wrought iron fence, and I handed him our watercraft. We both scrambled down the steep stone banks and avoided a disastrous tumble. Another jogger slipped by and didn’t glance our way.

Free on the water, Tyler and I exchanged a celebratory paddle slap and took our separate vectors, gobbled up in a vastness now that you can’t feel from just looking at the reservoir from the pedestrian side of the fence. 

The Reservoir, Epicenter of Emptiness

The city went flat like a splayed picture book and took on an almost natural sheen, as though the lake were the primary thing and the apartment towers and high-rises to the south the afterthoughts. We were creasing a glorious emptiness—the epicenter of emptiness, I told Ben later—and the ducks and geese and other waterfowl didn’t know what to make of these stealthy intruders. “We’ve invaded their space,” Tyler called out from somewhere, invisible against the shimmer. The birds skittered across the water and took flight in little flocks of panic. 

I dug in with a few strong paddles and let the canoe glide. The soft warble of its wake spoke to the greater silence you felt out there, so far from the city. The moon nudged past a lone cloud and splashed its yellowish light across the water. This was not a New York I had ever known.

We took our time getting across, knowing we might not be there again. I’ll confess I took a small sip from the Reservoir, a palmful of water in a furtive act of communion, figuring it might fortify me. We shuttled the canoes back over the fence and did a little dance on the sandy running track.

There was once a second reservoir to the south of the main one, but when they drained it during the Depression to create the Great Lawn, they left just a nub of that lake, now called Turtle Pond. An amphitheater for summer Shakespeare curls around the west end, beneath a castle perched high atop a sheer schist cliff, the park’s highest promontory.

We put in just to the east of the theater and paddled to the other end of the pond, scaring drowsing turtles from their various redoubts. Tyler wasn’t keen on the idea, but I kept telling him we had to exit the pond the hard way, straight up the cliff at the base of the castle. “We’ll be like Gregory Peck and David Niven in The Guns of Navarone,” I said, turning back that way. 

Turtle Pond and Belvedere Castle before the cliff climb

For all my tough talk, Tyler found an easy ascent path and scrambled up the cliff face on the west end, hoisting his canoe overhead, as I struggled 20 yards away to get my first foothold.  Tyler dropped his canoe and came down to lend a hand. I handed him my boat and we completed our assault on the base of Belvedere Castle as Ben, the scribe, jotted notes from the rampart. It was the most gallant moment of the night. 

I had brought hot toddies in a small thermos—brandy, hot water and honey soaked in a satchel of Earl Grey tea. We had sweet olive-oil crackers for snacks. We were puffed with our journey so far, the five bodies of water we had crossed and the unexpected beauty of it. There was a trickle of sadness that we had just two more to go.

“Off to the Lake,” I said, and we shouldered our canoes and cut from the foot of the castle down a steep paved path that was all black ice a month earlier when I’d scouted this route. We took a curving route to a little launch pad, a sort of tiny boat house that was the only time we stepped from a platform into our boats. The spikey towers of 59th Street were so much closer now, more imposing, jabbing at the sky. “Oligarchs row,” Tyler said as we paddled off into a back inlet of the Lake.

I was doing now what I’d envisioned many months earlier, cutting across the Lake in a splash of moonlight toward Bow Bridge. There wasn’t a soul anywhere. Just Tyler far off to my right and the glow of lights in apartment windows. The bridge looked like the elegant, bleached rib of a whale arching over the water.

The Lake going under Bow Bridge

Here, just before the Civil War, New Yorkers in the winter came to skate by the thousands, the start of a craze for gliding over ice. It was a place for lovers to meet away from the eyes of elders, just as it is now when lovers came to paddle the rented boats.

We went under the bridge and passed alongside the Bethesda Terrace where the Angel of the Waters spreads her wings, erected there in the 1870s to celebrate the delivery of fresh water to the city of New York. Just past there a lawn slopes down to the water, and we came ashore there and crawled from our canoes. 

We knew already that the Conservatory Water was empty, drained for an annual cleaning, so we had swapped in the Loch earlier in the evening as our Seventh Sea. Still, we carried our boats down just to stand at her rim and see the sadness of her caked mud, like a desert lake gone dry. 

Now we faced our longest portage through tunnels and over high ridges until we scrambled down a final granite slope past the skating rink to the northern bay of the Pond. We put in just to the other side of the Gapstow Bridge. We had come far to the south and had reached now the illuminated canyon’s wall. The Plaza and all its taller towers loomed high over us and cast their sheen across the water. 

The Pond is an oxbow body of water that once held DeVoor’s Mill Stream. It is the most hemmed of all the park’s ponds and lakes by the city itself, and yet oddly also the wildest and most mysterious, with its tangle of fallen trees and its little wildlife refuge that rarely feels a human footfall. When we came around the bend to paddle west, a mix of geese and ducks took to the air in a panic. 

We crawled out of our boats a little after midnight, suitably pleased with ourselves. Triumphant might be the word. We had no way to know if any human had ever done what we’d just done, paddling the length of Central Park, as best one could, from north to south. It didn’t much matter. We had done it and defeated the Blur. We did it on the very night of the Paddle Moon, which hung fat and promising just above the canyon’s rim as we hauled our long boats back onto land. 

View from Gapstow Bridge

Neil King Jr. is the editor of Gotham Canoe and the author of the forthcoming book, American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal. When not at home in Washington DC, he is very happy to be elsewhere.