I chose a sunny morning when the Hudson was very calm, and, after purchasing a $29 senior-citizen ticket (adults $34, children $21), I found myself among some 400 passengers on a three-hour voyage aboard a white double-decked vessel that was nearly 160 feet long and named “Manhattan.”  The captain, Ed Weber, was a short and stocky individual of 65 who resides on Long Island, and possessed a reassuring smile and an accommodating disposition. I introduced myself and sat behind him as we passed the Javits Center and the huge net that had been erected courtesy of the Chelsea Piers’s driving range so as to prevent golf balls from strafing the river. Captain Weber kept his hands on the wheel and eyes straight ahead while responding to my questions with a reticence that I attributed to his modesty.  As we headed south in the direction of the Statue of Liberty, Captain Weber, a Circle Line skipper for more than 35 years, told me he had never crashed into the foundation of a bridge nor bumped into a barge, tug, ferry, fireboat, garbage scow, freight-car carrier, ocean liner, Coast Guard cutter, yacht or any of the other craft that share the waterway.  He has, however, swallowed some of the murky bluish waters of New York, which vary in depth from perhaps 15 feet near the Circle Line docks to 50 feet below the Statue of Liberty, 90 feet under Hell Gate, and 180 feet beneath the George Washington Bridge. After one of the women who sell food and beverages on board the boat dropped a bag with her earnings into the water a few years ago, Captain Weber donned his diving gear and went down to retrieve it. How to discreetly paraphrase his description of how the water tasted? Like a diesel daiquiri, with a sewage flavor.  Our guide for the day was John Keatts, a 70-year-old, 6-foot-tall Midwesterner who has a degree in mechanical engineering. After serving on submarines in the Navy, Mr. Keatts brought his mellifluous voice to New York and found work doing commercials and playing small parts in musicals, revues and television shows. Since he resembled the actor Jerry Orbach, having large dark eyes, a long face and a sloped posture while walking, Mr. Keatts sometimes served as a stand-in on “Law & Order” for Mr. Orbach’s character, Lennie Briscoe. He started with the Circle Line in the 1980s to supplement his income.  On deck, as the ship cruised at 20 miles an hour, Mr. Keatts stood among the crowd in dark trousers, soft leather shoes with rubber soles, and a white shirt with black epaulets bearing twin gold bars, holding a cordless microphone.  “The Lincoln Tunnel is 97 feet beneath us,” he said.  This got me to thinking about a man I interviewed in the mid-’60s who was in charge of cleaning the tiled walls of the Lincoln Tunnel’s three tubes — each tube having 2.5 million tiles.  He and an assistant would drive two trucks in tandem through the tunnel at night — one truck equipped to squirt 1,500 gallons of liquid soap against the walls, the other affixed with large nylon brushes that swabbed the sudsy surface. After I watched him do the tedious job, the foreman had proudly driven past the gleaming tiles and said, “A tunnel is a thing of beauty, if you know how to look at it.”  We passed the West Side docks and the skyscrapers of Lower Manhattan, headed out toward Ellis Island. “Samuel Ellis is well known in this town,” Mr. Keatts was saying. “During the Revolution, he continued as a strong supporter of the king of England, and when the Revolution was over, so was his tenure on the island. His business was shut down. That will teach him.”  I had last seen Ellis Island in 1990, when it was reopened as a museum and I escorted my then-85-year-old father to a program honoring immigrants. He used the occasion to remind me of how petrified he had been during the ocean voyage that had brought him here, and as he spoke I noticed that he not once faced the water. During the ceremony he took his place on stage and introduced himself to a man standing next to him.  “I’m Joseph Talese,” my father said, extending a hand.  “I’m Antonin Scalia,” the other man replied with a handshake.  “There’s a Supreme Court justice by that name,” my father said, to which the other man responded, “Yes, that’s me.”  “Oh, I’m very impressed,” my father said. “So am I,” said Justice Scalia.  THE CIRCLE LINE sightseeing vessel pauses in the calm water within a few hundred yards of the Statue of Liberty. The ship seemed to list slightly from the weight of so many passengers leaning against the rail that afforded the closest view. With their hundreds of uplifted cameras — their single-lens reflexers, point-and-shoots, camcorders, cellphones — these people from China, Denmark, Ecuador, France, the Netherlands, the Philippines; from Tulsa, Trenton, and Dingmans Ferry, Pa., began taking pictures of the lady that they had mainly known from postcards.  “She’s good-looking,” said 38-year-old Chen Yan of Shanghai.  “She’s wonderful,” said 50-year-old Christine Leusmann of Hamburg.  “She’s bigger than I thought,” said a retired British teacher named Eileen Woolley, who lives in the county of Derbyshire. “Actually, she’s quite beautiful, if that’s any help to you.”  Ten minutes later, as we passed under the Brooklyn Bridge headed north up the East River, Mr. Keatts informed us that if you stood on the bridge in 1883, “you were standing at the highest man-made point of North America.” Directing our attention to the right, he noted that 5,400 ships were built or repaired at the Brooklyn Navy Yard over four years of World War II. To the left: “Here’s the United Nations. We had 51 nations when the U.N. opened here in 1950. Now we’ve got 192.” Again to the right, pointing out the Pepsi-Cola sign, “The company built something astonishing in Queens: Neon!”  “People used to come and take a picture — they’d never seen anything like this before,” Mr. Keatts continued. “And Times Square caught on. It’s cheaper to offer than electric light bulbs — neon!”  We passed under the Queensboro Bridge, which, when I first arrived in New York, had its four 350-foot towers topped by eight 70-foot-high flagpoles; the poles were removed in 1960 following reports of faulty maintenance. I was sorry to realize the voyage was more than half done, as I had become surprisingly relaxed on the water and was enjoying in particular such rustic and often downtrodden views of New York that were getting little or no attention from the amplified voice of John Keatts on the speaker system.  There was the sight of a barge carrying more than 30 bent and battered automobiles that Captain Weber guessed had been stolen and tossed into the Harlem River bereft of whatever might be sold on eBay: wire wheels, stereos, global positioning systems. A New York diver I once interviewed who specialized in retrieving wet cars told me that vehicles dumped into the water were nearly always upside down by the time they had settled on the muddy bottom. This was so, he explained, because the heavy automobile motor drags the vehicle nose first to the bottom and, upon reaching it, the momentum flips the car over on its roof. He also told me that he could estimate how long a car had been stuck underwater by running his hands along the vehicle’s body and counting the number of attached barnacles.  Atop a cliff on the Manhattan bank of the Harlem River stands the 185-foot Highbridge Water Tower, which resembles a medieval minaret and housed a carillon that chimed tunes thrice daily until it was destroyed by arson in 1984. Across the river, within view of Yankee Stadium (or stadiums, both old and new), two young boys hurled stones toward our vessel, failing to reach the mark but prompting Captain Weber to respond to their ill intent with a few forceful honks on his foghorn.  There were rows of rusty subway cars lining railroad tracks in weedy fields, and storage buildings attended by junkyard dogs and surrounded by barbed wire fencing. On a rickety wooden pier, an elderly man in a straw hat stood with his fishing rod extended over the muddy water.  “What fish are around here?” I asked Captain Weber.  “Flounder, striped bass,” he replied.  “Can you eat these fish?” I asked.  “THERE was a Dutch trading town to the right, and they were going to stay there and trade, in spite of the devil,” John Keatts said on the sound system as we passed through Spuyten Duyvil Creek. “The devil in their eyes were pools of sulfur, bubbling pools of sulfur that smelled like the devil.”  Ahead was the George Washington Bridge. Some 45 years before, I had interviewed O. H. Ammann, the Swiss engineer who had overseen the construction of the bridge, which was completed in 1931. Mr. Ammann, who was 85 when we met, had built many of New York’s bridges — the Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, the Triborough, the little green pedestrian bridge across the East River to Wards Island and, largest of all, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge — all of which he could see through a telescope from his apartment at 76th and Madison.  But he was most pleased with the George Washington. “That bridge was his firstborn,” explained his wife, Klary, “and it was a difficult birth.”  When construction of the George Washington began, in 1927, the city was characterized by feelings of affluence and optimism — it was the era that produced the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building and the Waldorf-Astoria hotel; the Holland Tunnel had recently been completed.  But by 1931, when the bridge would open — after 12 workers had died on the job (9 more than would perish building the Verrazano, which was completed in 1964) — New York was a city of bread lines and apple sellers and half-empty skyscrapers. Although Mr. Ammann had designed his bridge with two decks, the diminished economy would cover the cost of only one (the second deck was not erected until 1962). The diminished budget, however, did him one favor: it was easier to rebuff a proposal he disliked to cover the steel structure with masonry.  And every time he and his wife would drive past the bridge in later years, they would nod and gently salute. Mrs. Ammann told me this as we talked in their penthouse apartment, 32 flights up at the Carlyle Hotel — far from the water.  Gay Talese, the author of 11 books, was a writer for The New York Times from 1956 to 1965.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Around the Island. 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A writer with an aversion to the water takes a ferry tour of his home city, and finds a reservoir of memories.