We skirted Brooklyn on the Belt Parkway, heading first for Coney Island, where Anita had spent many a day as a child, and where, somewhat impatiently, she had been born. Her mother, seven months pregnant, took a subway to the beach one day, and Anita first drew breath in Coney Island Hospital. “Cropsey Avenue,” she said now, reading a sign. “Keep right, we’re going off here.” I went into the right lane, signals blinking, but the exit was chocked with halted traffic. There were  flexplek huren utrecht police. There were flashing lights. Against the side of an abused Pontiac, a young man was leaning palms flat, like a runner stretching, while a cop addressed him with a drawn pistol. ”Welcome home, Anita,” said Anita. The broad beach was silent, so early in the morning, where people in ten thousands had been the day before, and where numbers just as great would soon return. The Parachute Jump stood high in relief. The Cyclone was in shadow and touched by slanting light. Reminiscently, Anita ran her eye from the one to the other and to the elevated railways beyond. When a fossil impression is left in sand by the outside of an organic structure, it is known,in geology as an external mold. One would not have to be a sedimentologist to read this beach, with its colonies of giant bivalves. We walked to the strandline, the edge of the water, where the play of waves had concentrated heavy dark sands-hematite, magnetite, small garnets broken out by the glacier from their matrix of Manhattan schist. The beach itself, with its erratic sands, was the extremity of the outwash plain. The Wisconsinan ice sheet, arriving from the north, had come over the city not from New England, as one might guess, but flexplek huren schiphol primarily from New Jersey, whose Hudson River counties lie due north of Manhattan. Big boulders from the New Jersey Palisades are strewn about in Central Park, and more of the same diabase is scattered through Brooklyn.