We recently spent a few gorgeous days in New York City, replete with its inimical street scenes, restaurants, and museums. Among other invaluable lessons, I learned that if you know ahead of time the price of a NYC latté, you will not enjoy sipping one. When we left, our camas were just beginning to send up their flower stalks. The flash-in-the-pan interlopers– tulips and daffodils— had already coloured the margins of our perennial beds and were in decline. Now was the time of the undisputed queen of the western Cascades. Early settler’s descriptions of the Willamette Valley vibrate with accounts of deep purple vistas—hundreds of acres of camas. That was then, this is now, and we have so few in our field that I know them individually, and each year flag their locations so I can return in August to harvest the seeds. So far I’ve had mixed success propagating them but this spring when I complained to Frank Morton, one of the valley’s liveliest seed gurus, he told me about stratification and temperature gradients and all manner of scientific stuff. Next year’s plantings should be a resounding success; think of Yeats’ Innisfree where noon is a purple glow (it only works if you substitute our frog-loud field for his bee-loud glade).
So away we flew to Gotham with camas in mind. Early one morning our son Martin and I took the fast and pricey elevator to the Top of the Rock—70 floors on the Rockefeller Center’s GE building. There are, I learned, elevator junkies (and not just in New York) and this ride in particular—with its glass ceiling and little blue lights dotting the track—is iconic. The announcement that this Schindler High Speed Elevator moves upwards at a whopping 18 mph draws gasps (that’s only a little faster than my old tractor, which never draws gasps)—but the trip is nonetheless eye-catching: falling up the rabbit hole. Apparently the same elevator in the Sears Tower in Chicago goes 20mph. I don’t know if it has little blue lights and a glass ceiling. Someone can check, I’m sure.
Looking north from the outside observation deck you see spread out before you all of Central Park—a brilliant vista (no fields of camas, naturally). Glass and steel all around, rivers bordering in the distance, the park is the heart of Manhattan. And it’s big, even where scale is skewed by buildings 800 feet tall and higher. Helicopters buzzed below like dragonflies. All the little lakes, baseball diamonds, rocky outcrops, winding paths—layed out like a map. From our perspective we couldn’t see the snapping turtles or the catfish or the insect larvae just emerging into phase two of their unobserved lives at the edges of the pools. And we couldn’t hear the busking bands—high-school a capella choirs, flamenco guitarists, tuba quartets (probably elevator junkies at night) but the park, even from our perspective, was definitely and unmistakably alive. After breakfast we took a bus to the north end and walked through its 843 acres down to Columbus Circle. That’s a pretty good-sized chunk of land, about a third again the size of Bald Hill Farm (my standard reference point these days for acreage). And I learned more facts. Central Park’s 24,000 trees, while not actually numbered individually, are routinely surveyed (which must take a considerable bite out of the annual $42 million budget), its waterways are monitored for algal blooms (little signs crop up like daisies here and there telling you things like this), and the 9000 benches are serviced according to a fairly tight schedule by what appears to be a tribe of park employees ranging from teenaged offenders working off their public service sentences to elderly repositories of lore gleaned from decades of handling tricky questions –“Are worms wild animals?” (I think the answer was ‘yes but they are not fierce’ but I may have misheard). This tribe also totes away the five million pounds of rubbish each year, fishes pennies, cigarette butts and Coke cans from the four dozen fountains, and leads daily ornithological tours. It’s an urban space, after all. Twenty five million people visit the park every year, not all of them treading lightly. Soil compaction is an issue.
And yet it is still the natural home (however temporary) to flocks of migrating songbirds so large they show up on the radar screens at JFK airport. We caught a glimpse of Pale Male, the celebrated red-tailed hawk that nests high up on a window ledge outside the president of New York University’s office and whose nearly fledged offspring have their own web-cam. Bedrock scraped clean by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet pokes through the grass in dozens of outcrops (“No, Park Officials do not arrange the rocks—they come this way”. . . . it seems the park has to remind its visitors that not all environments are man-made) and sparrows watch for picnic leavings from an enormous Robert Burns erected along the Literary Walk (an equally imposing Shakespeare is not far away—he recently underwent a hot-waxing to remove what sparrows leave behind). The park itself is, in many ways, a living memorial for the poet William Cullen Bryant, one of its most significant supporters and the only one who actually died there; he’s officially memorialized by a monument in a nearby park that bears his name beside the New York Public Library. Early in the city’s development Bryant saw the connection between our mortal destiny and the quickly disappearing open spaces— “TO HIM who in the love of Nature holds communion with her visible forms, she speaks a various language. . .” and lobbied hard for the preservation of a generous parcel in the city’s core.
Burns, for various reasons, would have preferred the pub to either park or library.
The effect of this blend is both inspiring and unsettling—after all, there’s a good deal of somewhat unregulated ‘nature’ happening in the margins—in the ponds, along the walkways, in those places allowed it (no nesting on the monuments, please). Yet the park is not and cannot be, after all, authentically natural, no more than a zoo can provide natural habitat for its residents. It illustrates the bare fact that ultimately we’re given a choice. Here along the Willamette we still have, within reach nearly everywhere we look, an opportunity to avoid reducing our natural lands to mere parks. If we allow a wiser and less invasive dynamic to dictate the terms of engagement with our environment, we may be able to honour Yeats’ closing observation in Innisfree: “ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on pavements grey,/ I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” If we fail to bring this about, if we decline this option and relegate natural rhythms to memory, one by one the species depending on our answer will vanish, taking their music with them. For 42 million dollars annually, Manhattanites don’t get nearly as much for their money as it first appears (tuba quartets and fountains notwithstanding). And not nearly as much, dollar for dollar, as we can reap along the Willamette.
