Prospect: A Year in the Park

At the end: Desire lines and thin ice

My walk in Brooklyn's Prospect Park on the last day of 2008, my "year in the park," was much like my first and many others in between. I cut through the opened fence and the "desire line" worn by feet up to the South Drive. I love that term, desire line: a shortcut, but with the acknowledgment that sometimes shortcuts satisfy a real need, or just make more sense.





I passed a lone dad and daughter feeding the grateful Gluttonous Waterfowl. Few others were about in the falling snow...










...but, as almost always, someone had staked out some peace and solitude in the rustic shelter.

I passed my beloved Blasted Tree, taking comfort as always that it could thrive, even with its core destroyed, because its lifeblood flowed just below the surface of the bark. Who says deep is better than superficial?

A year ago, I wondered aloud in cyberspace whether a year of daily visits to Prospect Park could change my life.  To understand what this year has meant, let me tell you a signal moment—a danger sign, if you will—in my shared history with my mother in her old age. Once sharp-witted and tender-hearted, she had slipped into a deepening cycle of depression and disability. One summer evening, as she sulked on the couch before her array of pill bottles (none of which made her any happier), I suggested that we sit together on the porch and get some fresh air, which blows straight off the park to our house.

Why bother pushing the damn wheelchair out there? my mother responded. There's air in here.

Some folks spend a lifetime searching for the secret to happiness; in that moment, I intuited that I had stumbled on something perhaps even more valuable, the secret to perfect unhappiness. Why move? There's air in here. I carry half my genes from my mother's pool, in which swum a brace of robustly morose and self-obsessed Irish neurotics, several of them prone to dramatic suicide attempts. I do not mock her response as much as you might think; I've done time draped over the furniture, brain bloated with bad chemicals, barely motivated to breathe the air "in here," much less out there.

But the other half of my family tree, like the tree above, seemed to have gifts of astonishing resilience. My father, who never met a human being in whom he couldn't find some interest and goodness. His twin elder siblings, Don and Valeska, who lived to their mid-nineties defying a battery of physical ailments and frailties just to get out of the house, explore their worlds, and (especially in Don's case) take pictures, even when one eye no longer worked and his hands shook. (He produced some wonderfully impressionistic photos in this phase.) They would all have understood AYITP and come along for the walk, in any weather. They showed me another way forward, even into old age, beyond thin ice.

As I mulled all this in the softly blowing snow, music was borne out of the Wollman Rink on the wind. A young couple, poor-looking, with thin coats and no gloves, approached me and asked which way it was. Right over there! They headed off eagerly to skate away New Year's Eve. My thanks to everyone who has joined me on the journey, by reading, linking, commenting, or getting the calendar (still available). This little chronicle of my forays will indeed continue into 2009--I keep finding cool stuff and can't not share it, just as I promised, although for Google's sake I don't think I'll rename it "Another Year in the Park." Give my love to the fireworks at midnight tonight on Grand Army Plaza (I'll be away visiting friends, please send pictures!)...and let's go to the park again this weekend, okay?

Maybe I need a dog

Call forth the Pugs of Judgment: The time of reckoning is at hand!

My "year in the park" is up tomorrow. Since last January 1, when I started this blog on a whim, I have posted on 292 days out of 365, and I've been to the park on approximately three out of four days—well short of the ironclad daily visits that were my goal. I stand in awe of the runners and cyclists and dog-owners who visit Prospect Park like clockwork once a day or more. How the hell do you do it? 

I've had manifold excuses for the one day out of four that I missed. Vacationing out of town and being sick, both valid. But all the rest seem to come down to (shudder) my lifelong struggle with mornings. If I didn't visit the park in the morning on my way to school with Daughter, the chances of my getting there declined exponentially, I suspect. As Calvin said to Hobbes, the days are just so full. Before you know it, the family is looking hungrily toward the dinner hour, the sun has gone down, there's a meeting to attend...and I'd suddenly remember AYITP and cast a fond but hopeless glance across the street (yes, all this was to get my butt across the street) to the vast green precinct beyond the fence.

I'll never be a runner, God knows; I came closer this year to being a cyclist,  but I loathe cycling in the cold. Only one lifestyle modification demands a daily park visit, and that is...a dog. (Although, come to think of it, I happen to know a darling pug—not the park visitor shown above—who has reluctantly agreed to use a litter box.) As a lifelong cat person, I've always pitied the poor dog owners who must struggle out in rain and snow so their friend could answer nature's call. But consider this: I have never regretted a single visit to the park this year. Even in foul weather, even when I had to drag myself, each of those three days out of four was the better for it. A dog demands more than a blog, but it also offers more in return!

Well, it's something to think about, anyway. (The cats inform me that it requires no thought whatsoever, and would I please lay off the crack or catnip or whatever the hell I'm smoking.) Meanwhile, on this penultimate day of my year in the park, no, I didn't get there.  (Spouse is vacationing and I woke up late and we went to a museum in the city and got home after dark.) But I'd like to pay tribute to all the great dogs (and their companions) who cheered me along my journey this year: the Greenmarket Dogs of the Week, the Long Meadow off-leash gang, the Dog Beach swimmers, and all who gave me a slobbery kiss and demanded a belly rub. (Dogs, that is; the rest of you, not so much.) Tomorrow, a New Year's eve wrap-up.

The art of camouflage

After almost a year, why do I still persist in entering Prospect Park not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary?

This young man was launching himself face-first into the sandbox of the Vanderbilt Playground, while his companion shot the stunt with a videocamera on a tripod. The team, Joseph and Dominic, are students at Bishop Ford High School, and told me they were rehearsing a science project on "the art of camouflage." I give them an "A" for that outfit, which is apparently called a "ghillie suit." There is a whole genre of You-Tube videos, hitherto unknown to me, featuring ghillie-suit-wearing people in unlikely situations (such as a Starbucks).

Over by the lake, the mallards were practicing their camo...











...while the geese went through parade drill with precision worthy of Fleet Week.

Fog of peace

On a weekend just after Christmas, everyplace we went, the world seemed to be breathing a languid sigh of relief from bustle and pressure. The Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket had a few vendors, but crowds were sparse; I bought some little rutabagas and mesclun with fantasies of a fearfully healthy post-holiday diet. A fine mist cloaked everything, including the Long Meadow, giving it the look of Ireland.

The Meadowport Arch looked like a watercolor; one could hardly make out that some fool had tagged it with graffiti.

Atop the arch, the noble steeds of victory appeared to charge out of the clouds above the heads of the rutabaga-shoppers.

A Boxing Day present

See what can happen when you miss a day in the park? This guest photo by Meg Groome (found via the keen curatorial instincts of Gowanus Lounge) shows an impromptu shrine in the Concert Grove, at least a few days ago before the snow melted. I wonder if it's still there. Ms. Groome is a bloggeuse new to me; her "Liberty on 10th Street" covers "living, eating and 'gardening' in Brooklyn," three of my favorite topics (especially since I too am a mere "gardener").

Stuffed goose for Christmas

What do you do on a clear, crisp Christmas afternoon, when your candy-pink new Trek bike is practically snorting and stamping to be taken for a spin? Why, you and Dad put on your helmets and head to Prospect Park. There, you feed some holiday cheer to the Gluttonous Waterfowl. Ah, the irony:  Humans feeding geese on Christmas Day, and not the other way around! 

Warmest wishes for a peaceful and joyous Christmas season to everyone who has shared my year in the park! Incredibly, less than a week remains of this year in which I resolved to visit Prospect Park every day. Lots to think about and to be grateful for; also some questions to resolve, like, will I continue this little quest (and its chronicle online) into another year? Stay tuned.

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last. Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows.    
                                                          —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Not a nut in sight (a winter's tale)

Time for a heart-warming holiday tale! 

It was the day before Christmas Eve, children. The path into Prospect Park from Bartel Pritchard Circle lay under lumpy, rock-hard ice, and the sun failed to nudge the temperature out of the twenties by noon. A visitor heard only stillness...and then, the skibbling of tiny feet on the crusty snow.

It was Shackleton the Squirrel, bravely searching for the bounty of autumn's acorns! He and his crew had been lucky this fall; members of their online newsgroup reported severe acorn shortages in other regions, but here the pickings had been rich. Now, however, their buried treasure was locked under a frigid wasteland, and the trash cans stood nearly empty. "If we don't eat soon," Shack cried hungrily, "we'll have to start drawing down the stored body fat in our Buddha-like bellies and plump furry thighs!"

Just then, Shackleton spied what looked like a golden mirage across the tundra-like snow. His buddy, Snackleton, was delicately stuffing something into his little mouth. (Stuffing oneself delicately is not a paradox if you are a squirrel.)

What was this fluorescent-orange manna?

 "I don't know (kronche, kronche)," replied Snackleton, greasy, salty flecks stuck to his whiskers, "but I'm never eating one of those lousy acorns again!" And that is why, to this very day, the squirrels of Prospect Park celebrate the day before Christmas Eve ("Doodlemas") by re-enacting the Feast of Cheez Doodles, complete with the ritual Burying of the Doodle in the Snow.

(In spring, there is another ritual for Not Finding the Buried Doodle, but outsiders to the squirrel community are not generally welcome to photograph it.)

(Scary thought: If I were only a movie star, I could actually get this published.)
 

Frost furled, flame flown

On the day of the winter solstice, 2008, the sun heads down in the West over Windsor Terrace and casts its longest shadows of the year into the Vanderbilt Street Playground.

Not for the first time, I think of Narnia's "Lantern Waste," but there are no fauns in sight, and the White Witch has just begun her reign.

At 3:30 p.m., only the top of Lookout Hill remains gilded, and not for long. Between now and the arbitrarily set date of December 25, the pagan and Christian in me overlap, and no one gets it better than that rascal, G.K. Chesterton:

There is heard a hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.

Never we know but in sleet and in snow,
The place where the great fires are,
That the midst of the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth a star.

And at night we win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.

The gods lie dead where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.

                    —G.K. Chesterton, A Child of the Snows 

EXCELLENT PARK-LINKAGE ALERT:

I shoulda been there, but fortunately the mystic bloggeuse Amarilla reports excellently on the event: the performance of Chekhov's "Three Sisters" in the park's Lefferts Homestead last Friday by the "Rebellious Subjects" troupe. The show went on...in the sleet, indoors and out. It sounds amazing in the way that only things in Brooklyn can be amazing; check out her account (which, in her fashion, segues into an intriguing digression on Aurelius...)

Forest for the trees

Yes, they are local (the people, from Brooklyn, and the trees, from the Finger Lakes), and yes, they are going only one way: home for Christmas. Some of the trees were destined to twinkle in a high-ceilinged brownstone parlor. Ours, a perfectly shaped balsam with cones still attached,came home to a century-old frame house in Flatbush.

Some chose more easily portable specimens, including this rather Byronic-looking gentleman and his insulated companion.

I wonder what the Greenmarket looked like today from this rooftop aerie atop an elegant old apartment building on the other side of Grand Army Plaza?

I didn't notice these details either when I took this shot with freezing hands today. (The streets were so icy that little old ladies were tumbling and being righted by concerned passers-by.) Here's the original shot at right.

Too cold to recruit a Greenmarket Dog of the Week this morning; few dogs were abroad on the plaza. But this brave chef from Bussaco, a restaurant on Union Street in Park Slope, was cooking up curried heirloom squash served with a dab of fresh ricotta. (It was delicious; if that's what he can accomplish in a booth on a hot plate, the chow at his restaurant must rock.) When asked how he was holding up in the frigid air, he replied that he was from Minnesota.

Season's first snowfall in Prospect Park

As "my year in the park" winds down, I am starting to get sentimental. Today, as sleet granules whispered in the wind and bounced off my parka's hood, my mind ran a flashback reel of months' worth of exuberant fun improvised within this lovely structure, the Peristyle: kids rehearsing stately dances for a quinceanera, young people taking a yoga class, families barbecuing in a heat wave on Puerto Rican Parade Day, and a radiant young bride getting married on a golden Sunday last September. This afternoon the Peristyle (sometimes called the "Grecian shelter") stood alone, white on white, as winter blew back in.

Confession: I stayed outside the fence today. 

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards." 

—Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales