It's icy cold in New York this morning. Ten degrees, and a north wind. I got to the river at low tide and found a stunning phenomenon. The piers are long gone, but the pilings remain, standing at varying heights, singly or in groups. The piling fields they create are ten yards wide and reach out from the shore over a hundred yards. At high tide almost none of the pilings is visible; at low tide you can see them all. This morning as the tide went out the water on the emerging pilings had no time to dry. Instead, it froze. And now each is capped with an inch of ice, sometimes white, sometimes clear; and every barnacle clinging to their exposed sides is encased in its own tiny ice wrapper. Over a thousand pilings, stretching away into the river, glittering in the hard bright sun.