Project Remote, an effort to find the spot farthest from a road in each of the fifty states, inspired a search for New York’s remotest place. Photograph by Visions of America / UIG via Getty

The ecologists Rebecca and Ryan Means spend a good deal of their time thinking about the imperilled striped newt, whose survival in the ponds and sand hills of Florida it is their job to insure, but in the after hours they run Project Remote, an endeavor to find and visit the point farthest from a road in each of the fifty states. Using a combination of online geographic databases and satellite imagery, Rebecca Means locates candidate sites, which she, her husband, and their six-year-old daughter then trek to. Once at a Remote Spot, the couple take photographs, record video footage, and note any man-made sights or sounds—a Remote Spot Assessment. The Meanses have so far made it to thirty-three locations; in at least thirty-one cases, human civilization was audible. On a river island in Iowa, the drone of a motorboat reached them. In the Lye Brook Wilderness, in Vermont, they could hear traffic from Route 7.

A large part of Project Remote’s aim is to draw attention to the ecologically destructive effects of human development. Rebecca Means cited the example of, naturally, the striped newt. In Florida, driving pickup trucks through thick mud—a pastime for some residents, especially in rural parts of the state—can destroy the vegetation in which the amphibians lay their eggs. Elsewhere, roads hinder animal movement and communication and cause deadly collisions. (Vultures are one of the few groups that seem to benefit from traffic.) But there is a more human-centric dimension to the project, too—a sense that quiet spaces need to be preserved as much for people as for animals. “What will we leave the next generation? A landscape full of concrete, asphalt, noise, and smog?” the Meanses ask on their Web site. “It’s unbelievable how much remoteness we have already lost, and unacceptable to lose any more.”

Recently, inspired by the project, I launched my own search for remoteness in the wilds of New York City. The official Remote Spot, Rebecca Means informed me, is on the tip of an unnamed island in Jamaica Bay, about equidistant between Canarsie Pol and Yellow Bar Hassock, two other small, low-lying, uninhabited islands. But that spot is surrounded by man-made sights and sounds—southeast Brooklyn on one side, the Rockaways and John F. Kennedy International Airport on the other. To find a qualitatively remoter location, I enlisted the help of Eric Glass, of the Digital Social Science Center, at Columbia University. He produced a map that identifies areas within the five boroughs that are, at a minimum, a thousand feet from the nearest road. They are scattered in small pockets throughout Queens, with some larger ones in the far reaches of the Bronx. But the map also includes a lesser number of spots that are fifteen hundred feet from a road. These are all on Staten Island, with the exception of one in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. (This I immediately ruled out; too much foot traffic.) To conduct my own Remote Spot Assessment, I needed proper G.P.S. coördinates. Rebecca Means kindly provided them, with Staten Island as the new search area.

On Glass’s map, darker colors indicate a greater distance from roads. The darkest spot, on the right-hand side, is J.F.K. Airport; although hardly remote, its center is more than twenty-five hundred feet from the nearest road. Courtesy Eric Glass Courtesy Eric Glass

On a warm, humid afternoon in early September, I set off from the Greenbelt Nature Center in long sleeves, a cap, and pants. (A sign near the trailhead warned of Lyme-bearing ticks.) The path cut through hardwood forest tangled with undergrowth, the foliage modulating the sounds of the city. Leaf litter from the previous year had become crispy and faded, soon to be reignited by a new, gaudy layer. For an hour or so, I followed my phone down well-maintained trails. There were no high-rises in sight—barely any human infrastructure at all, in fact, unless you count the La Tourette Golf Course. Eventually, sweating and exasperated after a few false turns, I left the trail, bottoming out in a grove of hardwoods. There, to my surprise, amid a tangle of young oaks with their pliable trunks, was a doe, about forty feet away. I looked at my phone: my dot had collided with the little Remote Spot indicator.

An ambulance siren screamed in the distance, but, besides that, there was just a patter of raindrops, increasingly, against the high leaves of the canopy. “If this place isn’t wild, I don’t know what is,” I jotted down at the start of my Remote Spot Assessment, sitting on a fallen log. I’d expected to see candy wrappers or, worse, a discarded syringe, but there was none of that. The doe moved twenty feet farther away and grazed. The grove felt utterly remote. If I had brought my tent and unfurled a sleeping bag, no one, I was sure, would have found me for days.

Thunder burst. A motorcycle whined and the rain strengthened, turning into a downpour. Looking up from my notebook, I noticed two newborn deer, each the size of a toy dog like an Italian greyhound, watching me. I began recording a video, as the Meanses do, just as the deer scampered away. Soon the lightning forced me back to the nature center, where, completely soaked, I returned to my car.

To maintain each Remote Spot’s essential quality, the Meanses are keeping their exact coördinates a secret, at least for now. But, as I like to think my little experiment proved, remoteness can be close by; it’s idiosyncratic, too. Many New Yorkers feel it in their apartments—not far from a road, but far from the city itself.