`Is it alive?'
By the first week of September, Holt had arrived in New York from her home in New Mexico and all of the pieces started coming together at a barge yard on Staten Island, where Smithson, a great lover of urban decay, would have felt right at home.
The first arrival was the blackish dirt, almost 50 tonnes of it, from a composting heap in Fairfield, New Jersey, and 18 tonnes of hay bales, which would be hidden underneath the dirt to provide bulk but less weight. Next the trees
arrived -- maple, beech, birch, bur oak, sycamore -- and were plunked by crane onto the barge. A dogwood -- later referred to by everyone as "the unfortunate dogwood" -- arrived looking closer to firewood than living tree and had to be replaced. The willow did not look much better.
"Is it alive?" asked Holt, who arrived on the second day of construction, wielding a camera and a discerning eye, and began politely but firmly to demand changes. "Oh, it's alive," Balmori assured, as the two women stood together wearing hard hats and life jackets, their eyes fixed worriedly on the yellowing tree.
Holt allowed that Smithson might not have worried much about yellowing trees because as fall approaches that is what trees do. The moss on the rock he had wanted had to be abandoned for a similar reason: The summer heat usually burns such growth away.
Anthony Kerley, the crane operator and yard manager for the company that owns the barge yard, looked on patiently, awaiting decisions with a cigarette dangling from his lip. Asked what he thought of the project, he grinned slyly. "I think it's kind of different, you know what I mean?" he said. "It's interesting, for sure."
By early this week, the island began to look not only shipshape but also
remarkably like Smithson's drawing. Shrubs -- witch hazel, chokeberry, hydrangea, blueberry, sumac -- added to the strange verisimilitude. Four extra trees were added, at a cost of several thousand dollars. An ailing sycamore went the way of the dogwood. A
damaged steel panel was replaced. And on a test-run voyage on Wednesday, lo and behold, birds began to land on the island. "The only pity about this is that Smithson isn't going to get to see it built," Shamash said.
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