" The adult leader of the Kips Bay Club surfaces a few moments later. Everyone calls him Michael. He is an articulate, gregarious African American, shaved head, Fu Manchu mustache, handsome, bodybuilder type, with glittering eyes. Hanging on to the side of the dock, he answers admiring questions about his outfit: "It's a drysuit, Trilaminate, very comfortable. You can regulate the degree of warmth by the layers you wear underneath. See?" he says, peeling back the top to show his dark gray undershirt. "That's Polarfleece." He explains that his group is part of the Boy Scouts: a "venture" club set up for thirteentotwentyyearolds. He himself is over forty. It isn't clear to me whether he's paid to do this as a youth worker, or is a weekend volunteer. His rap is that the club is a good way to keep the kids off drugs. "When you've got activities, you don't do drugs, right? I take them lob stering and spearfishing out by Rockaway. There are three hundred wrecks underwater out there. You also come across chunks of the old FDR Drive nasty concrete, iron poles that they sunk after the highway collapsed." "So how was your dive?" a blond, slender, fitlooking woman in her forties, Danish or German, with sunleathered skin, asks Michael flirtatiously. "Terrible. Pitchblack. It's okay, I still had a good time." "I think swimming, it's a better sport. Because diving you can't see anything." "You don't go by visibility, you go by feel," says Michael. "It's like Braille. Anyway, this makes a good political statement." "But there was no trash picked up," I object. "How is it political?" Michael smiles, acknowledging the point. "It's more like, 'We dove the Hudson.'" The earnest Hispanic teenager, who has been sitting on his haunches the whole time listening, pipes up, "Michael, can you help me improve my diving skills? I'm trying to go for underwater welder." "That's cool." Later, I wander around the various information tables. Some are distributing membership forms for diving clubs in the area. There is also a "Save the Rain Forest" group, with literature protesting the Department of Transportation's use of "wood logged from tropical rain forests for City construction projects." A gamelan group plays on the makeshift bandstand deck. Inside the Estuarium, as the River Project's exhibit space is called, are research tanks with handwritten explanatory signs, showing the varieties of estuarial activity. In a tank housing oyster beds, fed by water drawn from the Hudson, a nerdy volunteer, railthin, is explaining to several younger girls: "Actually, see, the river is very clean, but there's muck at the bottom, and that's why when you stare down it looks as if it's dirty." This is a somewhat simplistic explanation of the Hudson's turbidity, but we'll let it stand. I have set up an interview with Cathy Drew, director of the River P oject She is a middleaged woman with strawtextured blond hair who alks with a cane, the residue of a serious case of the bends she got while diving When I allude to that illness, she asks me suspiciously, "How much do you know about me?" I tell her I read about it in John Waldman's book, and she is mollified.