Rebecca Egan McCarthy

For $3,600 in Fort Wayne, Ind., you can buy a 1961 Crestliner Del Rio—a wide, cherry red runabout, with cream accents across the interior seats and a gleaming chrome outboard motor. $15,000 will get you a 1992 Carolina Shanty: a sweet, if somewhat grimy looking houseboat, ideal for lake fishing.

A pirate ship, painted pitch black, is selling for $49,000 in Callao, Va., and in Norwood, Mass., a Tritoon Peterbilt—the tractorhead of a truck, jerry-rigged into a pontoon boat—is yours for $52,250. A photo with faintly Biblical intimations shows the truck barreling across a lake towards the viewer, looking foolish but distinctly terrifying.

These and other small miracles can be found on the Dock Deals Instagram account. I have no idea how to repair or operate a boat, but I love Dock Deals for the tiny window it offers into another life—a life in which my circumstances are effectively the same, but I have a $2,500 tug parked on the Delaware River or a $6,500 Tiki Toon (described in the caption as having “a 30 beer Saturday written all over it”). The low price point encourages fantasy—no point in buying a 15-year-old Hyundai Sonata for $10k when that money could get you a 1988 sailboat with living space for two to three people.

The account was created by Scott Stevenson in 2020 after friends told him to quit sending them listings all the time. When he left work to stay home with his two small children, he started posting more consistently. When we spoke over the phone this summer, Stevenson described the particular world boats unlock for him—both a means of community and escape.

“Why do I like boats? We go down to the harbor and I got my boat neighbor there. We take a look at what he’s got going on, and then maybe we all go get gas on his boat or we get gas on my boat. It’s not like golf, where you ditch the kids at the pool and see them six hours later. It’s everybody. It’s my wife. It’s my kids. It’s our friends, and we all just get to enjoy it.”

Stevenson lives in Grosse Point, Mich. on Lake St. Clair and grew up around boats, coaching high school sailing and working briefly as a harbormaster in college. He said he was about eight years old in a sailing class when he realized how far a boat could take him.

“You kind of figure it out, you’re like, ‘I can leave right now. I can sail to Canada,’” he said. “You could totally change your life.”

Therein lies the appeal of Dock Deals. A boat can be shared with all of your family and friends, but it’s also one of the last ways you can effectively disappear. Turn off the AIS system, blink out of marine radar, and you can quietly make your way into international waters before anyone notices you’re gone.

For me, personally, part of the attraction is that some of the boats look barely seaworthy, reminiscent of a period when nearly everyone I knew was willing to risk life and limb for a cheap place to sleep for the night.

Around the 2008 recession, New York City’s youth started going in on marine life: buying aging boats together and parking them somewhere the authorities wouldn’t bother to hassle anyone—namely, Superfund sites. In 2010 on Newtown Creek, a narrow, tidal waterway that separates Brooklyn from Queens, you’d find the 270-ton Schamonchi, a decommissioned ferry that used to transport passengers between Martha’s Vineyard and New Bedford. On the Gowanus, where a century of industrial waste had left a legacy of toxic sludge and three-eyed catfish, people docked houseboats.

They were by no means the first to sidestep high rent prices in favor of the waterways—a Times Union article from all the way back in 1922 profiled people living in houseboats on the Gowanus—but they were arguably the most theatrical. A number of them had been associated with the Swimming Cities project, a fleet of 30 rafts built out of trash that crashed the Venice Biennale in 2009, and were constantly evolving as residents and their friends added a massive mirrored fish skeleton to a pontoon boat or tried to connect five boats to create one massive living space. One guy named Orien McNeil enlisted the artist Duke Riley to convert a decaying tugboat in Rockaway into a functioning bar—“the bar opened at low tide, and as the hours passed, guests eventually found themselves waist-deep in water,” the Times explained, in McNeil’s obituary last year. “They swam out before the tide rose too high.”

I knew the Boat People tangentially. My friends moved into a massive, beautiful apartment on 11th Street, just two blocks from the Gowanus, in 2009; it was zoned industrial and rented illegally, so prices stayed well under market rate as we all cycled in and out of there over the next 15 years. We went to parties on the ferry and McNeil would call my friend, who anchored the apartment and with whom he was clearly a little in love, asking if he could come over to shower whenever he fell into the canal.

For the most part, the boat people were denigrated as hipsters by the media—then, one of the worst things you could say about someone in New York. Girls were shocking the neighbors (still mostly light industry at the time) by sunbathing on the houseboats, the New York Post griped. Adam Katzman, who owned one large houseboat on the Gowanus, caught a stray: accused by New York magazine of growing up in a wealthy suburb and purchasing his home for $1 million with parental help. They issued a correction after Katzman clarified that he’d bought the boat for one dollar.

At the time, I had dropped out of college and was working at a network of Irish bars across South Brooklyn, insular enough that when I banned someone for a week for bad behavior at one bar, they would show up—hat in hand—to another looking for a drink. I was irritable as a rule and inclined to be annoyed with the boat people myself, but I never could pull it off. They threw great parties; their decaying ships were bizarrely beautiful; they had endless short-term schemes and no long-term plans; they all seemed to be hurtling towards the water, arms wide open.

The economy began to recover eventually, but New York did not become an easier place to live. Rents continued to rise; the residents of the Schamonchi were evicted by authorities. My friends were evicted from the apartment on 11th Street a few years ago, a good 60 percent of the bars I worked at during those years have shuttered, and by 2021 the Times was sounding the alarm that New York’s “outlaw boats” were on their way out. The party was over; the curtain had fallen, the ferry was sinking—last I checked, it was still lying half submerged in the creek. People moved away; people grew up or did not or circumvented the question of growing up entirely.

While it lasted though, it was nice just knowing those freaks were out there, tinkering on their little ships, hoisting up reams of mosquito netting, blasting music across the city’s fetid canals, a living situation sustained only by force of will and bureaucratic confusion over whether the waterway fell under the purview of the Department of Transportation or the Small Business Services Department.

So now I look at Dock Deals. A 1988 Sea Sprite Bow Rider—encased in brown vinyl with a libidinous quality that I worry would turn the owner into someone like my friend’s Uncle Tony, who claims he invented the word “taint”—is selling for $3,500. A tugboat with a full kitchen to park somewhere out of sight on the river, where I now live in Philly. I suppose this is how most people feel about their extreme youth—you try desperately to escape it and then later find yourself poking around online for a boat big enough to bridge past and present, the living and the dead.

Every once in a while, though, nostalgia breaks containment and an ordinary object appears as if a signal flare. Over the summer, my husband and I were down at the Jersey Shore when a decrepit, little Tiki Toon toodled by blasting Louis Prima’s “Oh Marie.” It was too dark to see who was aboard, or hear much outside of music and the sound of laughter, but the feeling was akin to seeing an old friend you’ve fallen out of touch with and failing to recognize them at first. They dress differently; they’ve gained or lost weight; they’ve changed their hair or they’re losing it. They’re a mystery until they speak; then this kind of magic trick occurs, their features change entirely and years disappear when you realize they’re someone you love.

The boat drifted past and I grabbed my husband’s arm, insisting abruptly that we had to go out, we had to go dancing, we had to find a very loud bar.

“We’re going to be old someday,” I said, although what I meant was we were going to be old someday if we were lucky, unable to explain clearly why I was suddenly on the verge of tears over the sound of a stranger’s party drifting out across the bay.