On clear mornings just after sunrise, if you're standing on the north beach of Sandy Hook with a thermos and patience, you might see a humpback breach a quarter mile offshore. The water shudders, the gulls scatter, and for one suspended instant there's a thirty-ton animal shaped like joy above the surface of the bay. Then the crash, the white spray catching the light, and the harbor goes quiet again. It happens more often now than it did twenty years ago — the water's cleaner, the menhaden are back, and the whales remember.

Humpbacks were once common here. Whalers worked the Navesink Highlands in the eighteenth century, and ships leaving New York Harbor kept lookouts posted through the Narrows. By the 1970s, the sightings had mostly stopped. Pollution, ship traffic, the collapse of the bait fish. But the Hudson estuary has slowly healed itself, and with it, the rhythms of arrival and departure. Now the whales pass through in spring and fall, close enough to shore that you can see the white of their pectoral fins from the Twin Lights.

The design on this tee is a breach in miniature — a wink at the improbable fact of whales off the Jersey coast, and the quiet work it takes to bring a coastline back. Garment-dyed cotton, soft from the first wear, fades like something you've had for years.