Prospect: A Year in the Park

We are impervious

Surely no one would be in the park on an afternoon of relentless rain.

No one except some trios of teenagers hanging out in hoodies. And a guy in bright orange shoes walking a Weimaraner. And two lady joggers. And a horse in a blue raincoat, with a rider whose tresses emerging from her purple helmet were as long as the horse's tail. Not an umbrella to be seen among any of them, including this guy. Am I the only mammal in this park who objects to being chilled and sodden?

The rustic shelter across the lake from the Wollman Rink was the picture of desolation--until one looked harder and saw two guys relaxing there at water's edge as the gulls wheeled past.

On the opposite shore, the other rustic shelter was also populated by shadowy figures using it as a rainy-day afternoon clubhouse.

We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious:
We are snow, rain, cold, darkness—we are each product and influence of the globe;
We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again—we two have;
We have voided all but freedom, and all but our own joy.

                                                  Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Endearing young charms

My St. Patrick's Day Park Plan was to visit the statue of Irish bard Thomas Moore in the Concert Grove. Moore, now largely forgotten, was a wildly popular poet and singer/songwriter of the early Victorian era; at least on this one day, his lyrics to "The Minstrel Boy" were undoubtedly being roared soulfully in bars all over town.

Life, however, had more interesting plans, as evidenced by the limo-lock in the Wollman Rink parking lot.



Yes, once again, it was Asian-American Bridal Monday! Today three glamorous wedding parties converged simultaneously on the grove for photos. This bride was the most spectacular, from her head (a glitter-dusted architectural masterpiece of hair design) to her dainty high-buttoned feet.

But wait! There's more!

A rag-tag band of hippies slogged past a moment later, toting protest signs festooned with bloody handprints. "It's for an indie film," one of the "protesters" explained.

Meanwhile, a few feet away, a wedding photographer perfected the "Flying Groomsmen, Smiling Bridesmaid" shot.

Nearby, a lovely young woman named Tina who was sweeping up leaves and litter observed that this was, indeed, a place where just about anything could happen. I asked her what was the strangest thing she'd seen in her four months on the job. "This elderly man who comes to the park every morning, rain or shine, with his hand down the back of his pants," she related. "He's clean, not a homeless guy; but he comes to the park, and the hand goes down the booty, starts scratching, and then he leaves it there and walks around. Now why would you come to the park to do that?" Tina's job is hard, but, she said, "Every morning I come to work and look at that" (she gestured to the glittering lake beyond the trees) "and I feel good."

Finally, and anticlimactically, I found poor old Thomas Moore up on his pedestal, bedecked with an Irish harp and some pompous carven tributes. His statue gazed down on a very different world than the one that had revered his sentimental verses; but I suspect that Moore, as a grand teller of tales, would have relished the ones playing out around him now.

Believe me if all those
Endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly today
Were to change by tomorrow
And fleet in my arms,
Like fairy gifts fading away
Though would'st still be adored
As this moment thou art
Let thy loveliness fade as it will
And around the dear ruin
Each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself
Verdantly still.

--Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

Fallen

Today was Passion Sunday, when the story of Christ's suffering and death is read from Scripture. Cutting through the southern edge of the park on my way home from the subway, I entered a suitably melancholy grove near the lakeside. Empty liquor bottles and a few sodden bits of discarded clothing testified to its weekend usage, but at almost 6 p.m. it was nearly deserted.







The grove seemed to have an unusual concentration of twisted and fallen trees, many still clinging to life.


In the devotion known as the "Stations of the Cross," Christ's passage to execution is commemorated in a series of episodes. Three of them involve falling: "Jesus falls the first time." Then, a few stations later, "Jesus falls the second time." As a child, I felt an unbearable sense of pathos and shame by "Jesus falls the third time." Today, after immersion in the story again, the trees appeared as a sort of abstract sculpture garden of the Via Crucis, their mighty limbs sprawled across the mud.

At least one other soul was lost in thought at the water's edge. I turned toward home, recalling the final prayer at Vespers: Grant us a peaceful evening and a sinless night.

 

The rides of March

But I did not beware them.

Defying the universal derision of those who know me as an Olympic-level slugabed, I struggled to the park by 8:30 (a.m.) in a damp, chilly wind for the first group ride of Team in Training. (We are raising money to find the cure that will crush leukemia and lymphoma, by riding 100 miles on a bicycle; go here to find out why the hell I would sign on to do this.)

The group is a mix of experienced riders and novices. We novices got a patient, non-derisive clinic in pumping tires, obeying rules of the road, and even getting on our bikes. (It had never occurred to me to tilt the bike toward me before swinging my leg over it.) I was very distracted by the nifty gear and garments on the ace riders--leg warmers, arm warmers, booties, bike shoes that clip alarmingly into the pedals (oh, yes, everyone forgets them and falls over while stuck to the bike, nothing to it).

We took off at last, and for a few yards I felt the exhilaration and camaraderie of riding in a group in Prospect Park for the first time. Then I rapidly fell behind, and spent most of the first loop saying Comforting and Encouraging Things to myself as I struggled around. (Worst moment: climbing the big hill so sloooowwwly that I wobbled, and a passing racer-jersey dude barks, "Ride straight!") A very small child on a purple bike with training wheels passed me. When I finally stopped after loop one, I found a half-squashed worm stuck to my tire, writhing. We bonded.

But loop two was better. Not faster, but less excruciating. I am starting to figure out the "slug preservation strategy" of my body at half-century: It's akin to Robert Klein's old routine where he imitates the car engine turning over on a cold morning.

Pleasedon'tstartme. [shudders]

Pleasedon'tstartme.

[Screeches] PLEASEPLEASEPLLLLLLEEEEEASEDON'TSTARTME!!!!

In other words, warming up feels like anguish, like catastrophe, and then...it gets better. I even went for a loop three...

...with a stop at the Grand Army Plaza greenmarket. Without panniers or a basket on my bike, I was frustratingly limited in my purchases; I would've liked to grab some of these violas.

I was so hungry that I attacked the freebie stations like a goose grabbing Cheerio's from a frightened toddler. I scored Saltines with jam (left) and from "Danny Aiello" (right), a tidbit of turkey sausage. Then I got a hot cross bun from Bread Alone. Hot cross buns are always disappointing, but one feels obliged to consume at at least one during Lent.

Flecked with crumbs of my penitential carbohydrate and sniveling noisily from my exertions in the cold wind, bedecked with my helmet and with one pants leg rolled up, I looked like the Bike Messenger from Hell. Thus, no Greenmarket Dog of the Week; I was afraid that my appearance would alarm any reasonable dog or owner I approached. With a bag of whole-wheat bread slung over the handlebars, I headed home.

Total mileage: approximately 10 miles.

Roo the day

How did it escape my attention that there is a Brooklyn-bred baby kangaroo in the Prospect Park Zoo? Thanks to Gowanus Lounge for alerting us to the naming contest for Pal Joey here; I have submitted "Willink," after the Dutch farmers who owned the land hereabouts. (No word yet on whether the baby, who emerged from Mom's pouch last December, is a boy or girl.) On today's visit, the little shaver spent most of its time with its head in the chow bucket; the 'roos here are basically hopping around right in front of you, a few yards behind some light fencing, with only a mutual respect for the social contract keeping them apart from their human observers.

Nearby, the porcupines were splayed in Jabba-the-Hut-like splendor; one companionably scratched the other's back, which is quite a trick if you have quills.

Does this girl look like a bronze statue, or what? Just before we left, it was sea lion feeding time. (If I ever get too old and jaded to love sea lion feeding time, just take me out and tip me over a cliff.)

 

      

This shot inspired Child and myself to craft our first contribution to our cheap daily fix of idiotic cuteness, I Can Has Cheezburger. If you haven't had the Cheezburger experience, well...it's, um, funny pictures of cats and walruses and stuff, with babytalk captions in fractured syntax. Like this. Hey, if this week has taught us anything, it has taught us that there are worse ways to get your kicks than "LOLcats"!

Unleashed

Cold mornings, even sunny ones, fill me with aversion to the great outdoors. Dogs feel very differently.

I'd heard about the morning off-leash extravaganza in Prospect Park, but never witnessed it. I would call it Woofstock, but that's already copyrighted for some canine carnival in Canada. Dogs frolicked across the green meadow as far as the horizon, while owners chatted in puffy-coated clusters, many clutching hot coffee against the chill.

I'm a cat person, but I love dogs. I love their instantaneous passion to check each other out (this pug and mastiff have clearly bonded in the Noble Vigilance department). I love their endless zeal to do "Chariots of Fire" workouts and their idiotic enthusiasm for a scuzzy ball or stick.

The owners act quite blasé about these endearing traits, and I felt I would have been violating an unspoken code to have approached a group like this, dropped to my knees, and said, Excuse me, but may I snorgle some muzzlepouches?

But, to my delight, it was Labs to the rescue! Several retrievers, driven by their evolutionary imperative to make goo-goo eyes, broke free and approached me. This guy quickly sized up my neediness, dropped and rolled, and got a major belly rub.

Biscuit break! The entire experience felt remarkably reminiscent of  taking kids to an amusement park: their straining at the bit to get in, going on all the rides until totally bushed, begging for snacks, and finally, trudging with reluctance back to the car.

An impromptu poodle club heads homeward. None of us seemed to feel cold anymore.

Random harvest

Well, since a post called "Lost horizon" received a phenomenal number of hits thanks to some high-octane linkage, perhaps there is a charm to the titles of Ronald Colman movies! It's apt,too; near the park's Vanderbilt Playground entrance, what looked like a nose-hair trimmer was wrapped jauntily around a light pole.
Across the bridle path, a fire hydrant was adorned with this castaway, the second entry in the  "Abandoned Mitten Sentinel" series.

Birdsong is ramping up; I heard and saw robins, redwing blackbirds, a mocker, a cardinal, and doves, but none of them deigned to come within range of a point-and-shoot's feeble zoom lens. The Gluttonous Waterfowl were another story, of course, joined today by some pigeons that seemed oblivious to their incongruity amid big web-footed guys. I'm no fan of pigeons, but had to admit that these ones were particularly handsome.

The swans seem almost as ravenous as the geese these days.









There is a goofy bravado in the way the coots want to hang with the big boys. Their bright red eyes and Wite-Out-colored beaks give them a clownish air, but they never stop hoping for full inclusion.

Hope springs eternal, here through a wild rose. I have never understood this poem by Dylan Thomas, but it couldn't matter less (I don't understand the rose, either):

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Hidey-holes

It was mercilessly cold out, and the Child protested violently against a walk in the park. The promise that we would only take a five-minute excursion barely placated her. But within one minute, she spied a squirrel shooting up a tree trunk carrying something sizable--it looked like foil--and popping into a perfectly squirrel-sized porthole about 20 feet up. The Child dotes on squirrels because they are defiant and adorable, so things improved. At left: hole, with squirrel somewhere inside, refusing to reappear.

In the grove of trees just inside the 16th Street entrance, we started noticing all sorts of intriguing tree holes and other curiosities. There was this humongous cavity (perfect for an owl, why are there never any owls in these? Don't they read children's books?)

Presumably these were made by a woodpecker firing squad.

This knob seemed distinctly sphincter-like...

      ...while these roots spread out like gnarled hands.

 

This slash, like a dueling scar, seemed to conceal a nearly hollow interior of the trunk. We think in terms of our deepest-seated selves as being at our "core" and of superficiality as being "skin deep," but trees are quite the opposite; the living tissue of the tree, the whole vascular exchange system between crown and roots, lies just below the bark, while the core becomes nothing but dead structural support. If the tree is hollow as a flute but still able to stand, it can still thrive with a brisk trade in vital juices just below the "skin." For some reason, I find this intensely poignant and admirable.

 In honor of Oliver Sachs, a fern and cycad man who proclaimed in Sunday's New York Times that flowering plants are "Johnny-come-latelies," I present this gymnosperm ("naked seed") gearing up for some flower-free reproductive action.   

Sheepish

That's what I am, having failed to visit the park because I was hanging out with other bloggers, talking about how I blog about visiting the park every day. But it was delightful to finally attend a meeting of the traveling road show that calls itself the Brooklyn Blogade; more than a dozen of us enjoyed the Montenegran hospitality of a sweet little family-run restaurant on Church Avenue called the Old Brick Cafe. (For a lagniappe, we got tiny Croatian chocolate bars.) A very pleasing wealth of writing talent, lavished on a startling range of passions, was in evidence, from familiars like Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (where some nice excerpts are posted), Luna Park Gazette, and Flatbush Gardener, and from new-to-me Brooklyn transplants Shellytown and Midnight Cowgirls (two fresh and original voices I liked a lot). Thanks to Bad Girl Blog's Joyce Hanson for organizing a convivial event in my neck of the woods.

Those sheep, by the way, roamed Prospect Park in the 1890s, and had an actual shepherd—three of them, in fact, working shifts. The shepherds fell quite short in the picturesque-charm department, according to this 1895 story in the New York Times that dripped with tedious archness (the curse of the era's feature journalism). The sheep also displayed a bit too much Brooklyn attitude; they had "tipped over two baby carriages and tumbled out the babies and bundles on the ground" while cadging for snacks, according to the shepherd. (No word of any associated injuries was supplied; the sheep were reported to be fearful of rats, squirrels and dogs, but no mention was made of lawyers.)

I do like the robust language used in Times headlines back then. "Greedy and timid," "inquisitive to the point of boldness"...I am more sheepish than I realized!

The foggy dew

Yes, it was this dark at 1:30 on Saturday afternoon; a cloudbank sealed itself to earth over the park.

If one were even half Irish, it was impossible not to think of this tune:

But to and fro in my dreams I go and I'd kneel and pray for you,
For slavery fled, O glorious dead, When you fell in the foggy dew.

Here is the best version I know, as haunting as the mist itself, via Ms. Sinead O'Connor and the Chieftains—an early St. Patrick's Day present.