Prospect: A Year in the Park

Will-o'-the-wisps

On the streets outside the park, it was a dark afternoon of remorseless frozen rain and slush, utterly wretched. Just inside, it was eerie and strangely beautiful.



The faint streetlamps brought to mind the tales of the will-o'-the-wisp, a ghostly creature of flickering light that leads travelers astray at dusk.

These creatures seem fond of leading the unwary toward bogs and marshes. Mine brought me to the side of the lake, where not a lamp flickered in the gloaming mist.

I haven't been getting to the park every day by a long shot, and strange to say, this little walk was exhilarating, in spite of the ankle-deep slush.

I missed a jogging banana

Thanks to Louise of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn for passing along this wonderful shot by Tom Martinez of a mysterious jogging banana in Prospect Park. I've been getting over there less frequently during these sub-freezing days--okay, I've been slacking off and chickening out--and this is precisely the sort of thing I've been missing.

Oh, and also glorious hawks, also from the talented Mr. Martinez. I wonder if hawks eat giant bananas.

P.S. Thanks to Louise for organizing a convivial Blogade at "Delicious" in the Slope (their mac and cheese was great). Plans for the 2009 Brooklyn Blogfest are underway, and it sounds like it will be the best one yet.

January thaw

After a week of bitter cold, sunshine and 47 degrees felt deliriously springlike. One expected (wrongly) to see shoots sprouting up through the earth. By afternoon, the blanket of white had begun to recede from the Nethermead.

By the way, what is that hideous complex of buildings that looms over the treeline like a Soviet factory? My guess is, the apartment houses built on Ebbets Field. Whatever they are, they're a good reminder why it's sacrilege to build high along the perimeter of the park.

The muddy bridle path along Center Drive looked as all roads must have looked back in Brooklyn's early days.

Daughter enjoyed the snick, snick sound produced by slow, deliberate slush-stepping.

BONUS MAMMALIAN ARMPIT SHOT

  I love this accidental shot of an antigravity squirrel: toes-free action, convex belly, and ticklish-looking armpit.

Screams of joy

And not only in Washington, D.C. On a particular stretch of hill between the West Drive and the lake, conditions were ideal for slick, rapid coasting, and parents and kids were having a blast. An angular jogger paid them no mind on this frigid afternoon.

Tethered to a nearby tree, this noble dog was the picture of dejection as his guy and the baby sledded nearby.

Happy dog! The humans came to their senses and recognized their need for canine assistance, and he raced ahead of them down the slope.

The frozen lake lay under a blanket of snow, upon which some risk-loving humans had left excursionary tracks away from shore.

Veil of Cashmere

As the snow swirled down this morning, I felt an irresistible need to visit the Park's own Shangri-La: the remote and isolated Vale of Cashmere.

Great idea! It was gorgeous, silent, and almost untracked.
    

Enjoy. And just keep telling yourself, "This is a five-minute walk from Flatbush Avenue."

 

The snow-cloaked branches were a shock; the last time I came here, the pond and its environs were a neglected, verdant swamp.

Note to gardener self: Invest heavily in bamboo for "winter interest."

Nearby, the chilly existential formality of the rose-less "Rose Garden" took on a whole new kind of emptiness in a haze of falling flakes. (Here's the green, summer version; both seem like a good place for the newly minted ghost of Patrick McGoohan to roam with a beach ball.)

As I headed back, I enjoyed a rare city privilege: stepping in virgin snow. Well, at least briefly; in a few yards, my feet met the crisscrossing tracks of a dog and his person, already filling with soft white powder.

More light than heat

The sun is unquestionably stronger and higher at 4 p.m. than it was less than a month ago, but the park's Long Meadow felt like tundra. Why does it continue to get colder even as the days become just a bit longer? My father could have answered that question; he knew all about the motions of the planets, and tried to teach me using a beach ball, a Spaldeen, and a flashlight. I enjoyed the game, but absorbed little of the rotational science. I guess I should learn, since tomorrow opens the 2009 International Year of Astronomy.


Most of the meadow was clear of snow and ice, and the knoll crowned with elms looked majestic and spare.












The beach in off-season is always a wistful sight, even if it's the Dog Beach, cordoned off with snow fencing and sandbags. (This afternoon, an errant pooch would have gone skating, not swimming.)

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this walk in 24-degree cold, except for my frozen fingertips. Peace, solitude, and beauty know no season.

Saengerfest

The portrait bust of Mozart in the Concert Grove sported an epaulette of snow in the weak morning sun. He glares across the grove with as much thunder-browed stoicism as Brahms gazes back from the other side. From the few portraits of the hapless Wolfie done during his too-brief lifetime (shown here, a digitally-lightened detail from a 1777 pic), the rendering appears a bit on the heroic side, don't you think?

The pillar beneath boasts that the statue was "presented to the city of Brooklyn by the United German Singers of the city; first prize at the 18th National Saengerfest held at Philadelphia, June 23rd". A saengerfest was a German cultural festival featuring choral performance smackdowns, and the winners were obviously awash in Teutonic pride. (Most of the other composer statues in the grove commemorate similar victories.)  As the granddaughter of a German classical musician, I sometimes feel wistful here, because of all our Brooklyn cultures, surely the once-massive presence of the Germans is the most thoroughly erased and forgotten. (These bronze, plinth-sitting "dead white males," once a revered tourist attraction reproduced on souvenir postcards, just seem to drive home the point.) And yet, even nostalgia is complicated if you're part German. Ah, yes, the glorious culture of the Fatherland...oh, never mind.

I climbed the little granite staircase up to Breeze Hill, where a real singer's festival was alive and well. In a tangle of shrubbery right next to the road, three of my favorite winter birds—chickadees, blue jays, and tufted titmice—were having a party. 

The blue jay proved surprisingly elusive for a bird that is so big, blue and brazen. Here he peeks at me. As for the titmice, forgetaboutit; they are tiny, grey, and very fast.

What's better than one chickadee? Two chickadees!

Alive of winter

You think it's going to be the "dead of winter" on a 28-degree January Monday, but there's a couple strolling along as if it were June.

The wind cut sharply off the lake, but some sun filtered through onto the ice, which now stretches from shore to shore. A delicate tracery of goose tracks crossed over it.

And while not much seems to be green and growing, the moss on this tree behind the World War I memorial seemed to glow in the late sun.

Those white mountains among the phragmites are actually piles of Zamboni snow stockpiled near the Wollman Rink.

As I headed back to warmth, I thought fondly of Asian Bride Monday, and was relieved to think that no wedding parties could be out shivering in the Concert Grove with their photographers. Then I spied a white stretch limo with lucky red ribbons on it in the rink parking lot. I didn't spot her, but somewhere out there today, a bride was getting hypothermia.

Shredding Christmas

The atmosphere was almost festive at the Park Circle outpost of Mulchfest, where the carcasses of Tannenbaums lay awaiting their fates in a Parks Department chipper truck. (Flatbush Gardener, an enthusiastic supporter, has more photos here.) They'll be doing it again tomorrow, Sunday, January 11, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.; they request that you take the ornaments off. (But it would make a nice movie scene if an adorably enraged young woman—Anne Hathaway, say—dragged one to the event covered in festive baubles popping and cracking all the way.)

A corps of young volunteers enthusiastically swept up stray needles as the trees metamorphosed from sparkling holiday decor into organic ground cover. I wonder if they'd like to help clean up our living room after we reluctantly escort our tree over here tomorrow. (Usually the stray needles adhere to the cats, who walk around looking like hedgehogs for awhile.)

Cold but clearing

After two days of wretched bleakness, some intermittent sunshine brought people back out, even in a harsh wind. This young couple displayed an edgy friskiness. 












Having just spent two hours with lawyers in a Manhattan office-tower conference room, I needed to clear my head. Usually, that means I head for pine trees. With no rain to cower from, it was a pleasure to look up and see branches (and a bag)...

...and to look down at cones, nestled in needles and oak leaves or on a bed of ginkgo leaves.




The wind sighing in the pines overhead was soothing and lovely, and the leaves on this tree (a beech, I think) made a papery rattle that reminded me of wind chimes.

MYSTERY PARK BONUS: A SARCOPHAGUS!

Whatever was this menacing, tomb-like structure on the berm near the 15th Street F station? Clearly, the lid had been pushed askew, and I approached uneasily. What ghastly remains would I glimpse beneath—or would there perhaps be, as Howard Carter gasped when he opened Tutankhamen's tomb, "wonderful things"?

This being Brooklyn, there were fast-food clamshells and a very large sneaker. Oh, well, so much for my Lara Croft fantasy.