You never know what you’ll find bobbing around in Times Square, washed free by the tides. And when the things you find — like copper wire, tarnished jewelry or old mobile phones with their stores of unplundered rare earth elements — could be worth enough to keep dinner on the table for weeks at a time, it’s worth the risk of jail or a hefty fine to many, including Mr. Turner. As he explains, it’s not like most of them can afford to pay the fines anyway.

There are legitimate safety concerns to be raised over the scavenging. The water lapping at our hull has that peacock-feather sheen — and that same rust-and-diesel stink — familiar to anyone who has taken a ferry through the more legitimate routes bisecting what’s left of Brooklyn and Manhattan. Jagged metal reefs can rip through the hull of a dugout as easily as paper. If the rigging of your boat gets tangled in the cold gray fingers of Prospect Park’s treetop waste, then you’ll be stuck there until the Coast Guard hauls you in aboard a raft made of pink violation slips.

But life here has never been easy, and the designation of the entire area as a protected national memorial site in 2159 was a deeply misguided piece of legislation from the start. It was signed into law by government officials in the nation’s capital of Minneapolis, many of whom belonged to the privileged scions of families who had the financial cushion to leave the District of Columbia and Manhattan before the waters even reached Riverside Drive. And it was always meant as a symbolic gesture to win the hearts of voters in Kansas City and Dallas — never as something that the living, breathing citizens of the five boroughs could reasonably be expected to arrange their lives around.

The rest of the country’s brief, mawkish love of New York stretched just far enough to allow it the status of martyr, a symbolic bumper sticker for all we’ve lost and continue to lose to the rising tides. That balloon burst several years ago, long after the Manhattan sea wall collapse but before the Midwood great white attack. And now the rest of the nation wonders why anybody is allowed to continue living here at all. Should federal aid continue to be given to those who remain in the watery wasteland? What about their children? What about the skyrocketing cancer rates, the overtaxed, underfunded teachers in their weather-beaten yellow sloops? Why not force those who remain to relocate to the relatively dry northern shores of the Bronx, as my own parents and so many other families did years ago?

Albert takes us north up Broadway as the moon wanes, careful to ease into the shadows if the buzz of a drone or distant helicopter gets too loud. His children sing an old folk lullaby softly on deck as we slip between the canyons of looming apartment blocks, lamps burning yellow in windows six and ten and fifteen stories above the waterline: “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor, would you be mine? Could you be mine?”