Tuesday, 01 July 2003 | Skyline

A string of days with unusually nice weather, which inevitably means that whatever it is I'm doing with it, I feel like I should be doing more, packing it away like the last meal before a fast. The other night, I caught a glimpse of the pink, scalloped sky from my position on my fire escape; it was wedged squarely between the tops of two taller buildings and was starting to descend.

Thinking that I must do more with that sky, I jumped on my bike and pedaled toward the "shore," the edge of the East River, the unlucky mobster graveyard. There's a park there (if you can call it that) that I discovered only a couple weeks ago. It's an old ferry port, though all that's remaining are an old brick chimney, a stone path, and something that resembles an expired dock. The park takes up about 30 feet of shore and is wedged between a factory and some other equally unfriendly looking building. Along the shore are charcoal gray rocks where you can sit while the waves lap at you. People bring beer from home (no one's monitoring), strollers, friends, and bikes, and scatter themselves among the rocks and benches and litter to watch the sun set behind the Manhattan skyline.

That night the sky was wispy and colorful, the air cool and breezy, and there was a blimp encroaching on the Empire State Building, which was glowing in the sky and on the water. More people came than usual, but I had a large, comfortably contoured rock to myself. Granted, there was the stench of manure as I was coasting toward the water (it faded once I arrived), I could hear a whinging car alarm in the distance, and the factory to my right produced a constant sigh like that of an oversized air conditioner. But. Half-amused, I was rather easily able to dismiss the drawbacks.