THE CROSSING.(The Talk of the Town)

Marcey Tree in the Wind Stefancik is a receptionist at the Honda dealership in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, and the chief of the Turtle Band of the Ramapough, a Native American tribe based in northern New Jersey. Whenever Marcey crosses the Hudson River, she does so in a car, on the Tappan Zee Bridge, usually to drive her husband, Tony Moon Hawk Langhorn, a housing cop, to his job in the Bronx. But the other day she became the first Ramapough in a very long time to cross the Hudson in a canoe--although for a while it seemed iffy whether she would go through with it. First of all, the remnants of a hurricane were due in the area that afternoon, and, second, Marcey is not a water person. "I can't swim," she explained. "Everybody thought I was kidding, but I wasn't."

The man who was in charge of getting Marcey across--and who had come up with the idea for the trip--was Bob Walters, a glazier and river activist from Yonkers. "I don't think Marcey's ever been in a canoe before, is my understanding," he said. Walters is always looking for ways to get people out on the river, and, having recently learned that Indians regularly crossed the Hudson at Dobbs Ferry, thousands of years ago, he decided to persuade some New Jersey-side-of-the-river Indians to pay a visit to some modern-day New York-side-of-the-river Indians. Walters called in his paddling buddy, Bob Morrow, a doctor in the Bronx, to help out.

The plan was to convey Marcey from Snedens Landing, on the river's western shore, across to a little park in front of the Metro-North train station in Dobbs Ferry, on the eastern shore. There she would be met by the mayor of Dobbs Ferry and by the Stonefish family, descendants of the original Lenni-Lenape tribe, some of whom once lived in the Dobbs Ferry area, and many of whom now live in Canada. The Stonefish family were in town, anyway, for a powwow that Marcey had organized in Ringwood, New Jersey, and Walters had persuaded them to extend their trip. "We basically just paid for another night at the hotel in Mahwah," Walters said.

The fleet ...