What's that thing in the water?

Suspended above the deepest part of the oxbow and anchored to bottom and shore, it can adjust to fluctuating water levels and flows. Below the surface, the roots develop a biofilm of bacteria and fungi that help absorb nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus that can feed harmful algae, as well as heavy metals and other potential contaminants. In fall, the biomass is harvested and reused for other ecological projects, as part of a low-maintenance system that supports the health of the Wallkill River and watershed. These modular prototypes were designed by FICTILIS using locally abundant biomaterials, and installed as a research project in partnership with Wallkill Valley Land Trust and with permission from adjacent property owners.

For as long as people have lived in this valley, some of them have lived at its edges — in the swampy lowlands no one else wanted. Near Kingston they were called the Binnewaters, or "Eaglenesters"; across the river, the Taghkanic basketmakers. They were people of Lenape, African, and Dutch descent whose origins got deliberately blurred by the people around them, and who lived on what the wet margins gave them: fish, foraged food, and baskets woven from willow and splint cut at the water's edge. For it they were slurred, studied as if they were defective stock, and written off as a vanishing kind. They didn't vanish. They kept weaving, and kept their footing in the low wet places, generation after generation. When we gather to build floating wetlands out of local willow, we're working in that long tradition — people at the margins, making something useful with the plants of the marsh, together.