> The county performs the burial service every year in December.
They only do it once a year?
NYC buries a couple of thousand people at city expense every year on Hart Island, in Pelham Bay, where Long Island Sound starts narrowing down to become the East River.
The place is run by the prison system. Prisoners bury the humble dead in trenches, five deep and three across, or something like that. Babies and adults separately, I'm told (why?).
Sheila, the outboard motor wizard who stores my outboards for the winter, and fixes them during the summer when their ultra-refined Japanese carbs gum up, has her place of business on City Island, right next to the dreary dock from which the prisons department takes its living and dead charges over to Hart -- about a five-minute trip, I'd think.
Sheila tells me the ferries go a couple of times a month, so we're getting our poveri underground more expeditiously than LA is. I'm inclined to think this is a good thing -- keeping the poor devils on ice like frozen peas seems disrespectful -- but perhaps that's just New York chauvinism.
On the other hand, LA seems to be more public about the whole business, but in New York it's like a dirty secret. Which is a bad thing.
The dock is depressing, plastered all over with razor wire and dire warnings from the Incarceration Sector -- no anchoring, no tying-up, no loitering. The island has similar warning signs. Prison! Do not enter! A certain grim humor in that.
As chance would have it, I've spent a fair amount of time sailing the waters near Hart Island, and I still sail past it four or five times a year. It always puts me in a thoughtful mood. A very haunted place.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false.