Editor’s note: As with many things in my creative life, the idea for this pairing occurred by a coincidence that felt weird while it was happening. While preparing the podcast on climate change that we released last week, I was reading through the material and listening to John Atkinson’s music. With Alice Major’s excerpts, the decisions for which music to use was done in the editing program while listening to the poems and trying out different parts of John’s music. But with “Float,” I happened to start reading the short story around the same time as Long Harbor began playing, and the two pieces just seemed to complement each other perfectly.
This short story grew into JoeAnn Hart’s 2013 novel of the same name and predates it by a few years. It tells the story of a man struggling in his marriage and business while facing the effects of plastic waste in our water. John Atkinson’s Long Harbor is a sonic exploration of the history of the New York Harbor made from field recordings collected along its waterfront in 2021. It stands as a reimagining of its creation, from glacier meltwater to unbridled human pollution to the current attempt to find a sustainable equilibrium. The piece was made possible by Works on Water.
—John Vogel
God Help Us.
The words, writ large in the sand, appeared on the beach after Duncan Leland’s attention had already drifted. It was in the pink of the afternoon, at the end of another trying day, when he should have been attempting something spectacularly proactive to save his sinking business, such as scrambling numbers on a screen or gathering somber consultants around him, but instead, as was his habit, he was looking for answers outside his office window. The sky was clear and blue, the water calm. The serenity of the day mocked the economic storm raging around him. He was now, as Harvey Storer of Coastal Bank & Trust had so coldly pointed out to him that morning, officially underwater. He owed more on Seacrest’s Ocean Products of Maine, Ltd., than the business was worth.
“True that,” Duncan had agreed, “but only at this very moment.”
”What else is there?” asked Storer.
A leveling silence washed over Duncan as his mind slowly emptied of words. He was opening and shutting his mouth like a fish when Storer, sitting across from him at the loan desk, leaned in closer.
“Duncan? What else do you have that might secure this loan?”
Duncan shook himself out of his trance, realizing that Storer’s was a fiscal rather than a philosophical challenge. “It’s all here,” he said, half-standing as he slapped pages of the loan application down on the mahogany like tarot cards. “Look, in the spring, our new line of fertilizer hits the market, opening a revenue stream so robust it’ll be like drinking water from a firehose!” He displayed a spreadsheet thick with projections, but this banker, like the ones who came before him, remained unmoved. Duncan’s vision of rosy profits in the future failed to overcome the devalued assets of the present, and in that moment he saw his business begin to slide away.
