One Easter Sunday morning my girlfriend and I were walking along the Hudson River. Recently they’ve been cleaning up the waterfront, planting trees and grass, attempting to turn it into one long park, so you can walk or bike all the way around Manhattan Island without having to go out into the city. They’ve gotten pretty far along on this plan by now, but on that particular morning they were just beginning, and so the waterfront was pretty rough in spots.
We take long walks, and by 11 o’clock we were all the way up in the seventies, near the Trump Towers, which were still under construction. Traffic was light and there was no one else around, only 
the occasional bike rider. We were passing a little patch of scrub brush and weed trees, a place where there was no floodwall and the banks of the shore were lapped by the waves washing up from the river. The little wooded area was filled with garbage that had drifted up amidst the debris of twisted steel wreckage and ruined concrete pylons. Over beyond a chain-link fence, there was someone rooting around in a pile of trash that had washed up on the shore, pulling at a big mass of rope and seaweed that had tangled around some rusted steel cables. Though I could see that the man was busy, it seemed so odd, so incongruent, that I had to yell down: “Hey, what are you doing down there.”
“Oh, good morning,” the man said. “I’m searching for driftwood.”
“What for?”
He approached the fence. A little man in his fifties, still appearing youthful, thin, with piercing gray eyes, he was dressed in a sort of peasant costume: an old shearling vest, lace-up boots, and an old gray hunting cap with earflaps. “I use it to create art,” he said.
“Kinda slim pickin’s in the city, ain’t it?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said. He picked up a bundle of sticks from the brush nearby; he had tied them together with an old yellow rope. “I’m working on a special project for today,” he said as he untied the bundle. “A nest to use as a centerpiece for an Easter brunch I’ve been invited to.”
The man showed us how several pieces of wood fit together, interlocking, like a puzzle, with the minimum of twisting. He knew how to place them in such a way that they did come together to from a sort of nest, hollow in the center, upturned around the edges.
“That’s really nice,” my girlfriend said. It did look like it would be a pretty interesting—albeit 
unsanitary--centerpiece for a table.
“This is approximately what it will look like, but as you can see I need another piece to go in here—like this.” He wove his fingers into the piece to demonstrate. “Who knows, though?. It’s what I find that determines the actual shape. In the end it may look totally different than this.”
“But still,” I said, “a nest.”
“Yes, of course, still a nest.” He glanced around as he spoke, as if eager to get back to his work.
“You’re kinda far afield,” I said.
He looked at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about.
“I mean, aren’t you running kind of late? That is, if you’re gonna get to brunch. It’s already eleven.”
“Oh, is it that late?! I’d better hurry!” he said. He walked back down to the river to resume his scavenging.
“By the way,” I called after him, “what are you going to put in the nest? Eggs?”
He turned back to face me. “Eggs?” he said, as if the thought hadn’t crossed him mind. “Well, I suppose you could. And certainly it could be used to hold many other things besides.” He appeared to be giving the matter thought. “Things related to Easter,” he said. “Yes, certainly, eggs.”
I guess I hardly need to tell you the punch line. Though I didn’t know the man, I had seen him around before, and that was the reason I spoke to him in the first place. First floor maybe, since he didn’t ride the elevator. Of course he was from the Chelsea Hotel. (Copyright 2006 Ed Hamilton)
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