Swans on trash island
An ode to Prospect Park during a (very long) pandemic.
Hello and thank you for being here! This newsletter has officially reached over a hundred subscribers, which, wow. I do not know most of you! I am so happy you’re here! Thank you for reading my silly little essays. By the time this newsletter reaches you, I’ll be exactly a month out from my move from Brooklyn to Dublin. I might be sending out a few less of these during that time, because as it turns out, moving to Europe involves a lot of life admin tasks. (Your girl is TIRED.) This tweet sums up my current vibe:
If you have any cool friends or friends-of-friends in Dublin, kindly reach out and connect us because one thing I DO need is a wider social circle there! Okay, that’s it re: updates/asks. On to some Feelings about Prospect Park.
It was the first summer of the pandemic, those long months when everything was closed and no one had anywhere to be. The weather was perfect. My next door neighbor, a photographer, mentioned that there would be live jazz that night at the boat house in Prospect Park. It had been happening every weekend, and she wanted to document what was happening and invited me along. We walked to a bodega and bought Lime-A-Ritas, making our way through the southeast side of the park as dusk was falling.
It was that pre-vaccine time when life ground to a halt and the days ran together. Leaving the house, carrying a cold drink in my hand, and walking somewhere with a new friend felt like the most special, the most exciting things. We heard music before we even saw the boat house, softly illuminated, all the main lights off since every event there had been cancelled. People were drinking on the steps, salsa dancing on the dock, and a four-person jazz band was playing in the corner in front of the water. We sat down to watch. The dancers were quite good. Everyone was masked, other than to take drinks of their beverages. It took my breath away to be around people again. My friend said, you’d think it would be scary to be in a crowd, after everything, but your body remembers how to do it. She stood up, walked among the dancers, asking permission as she photographed them moving in the dark. I went home that night feeling hopeful to be alive, like there was still a world outside my door. That night, like so many others, the park would be my salvation.
I want to write about Prospect Park and what it’s meant to me, how it’s become a living, breathing fixture of my life during these last few years in Brooklyn as I learned to live alone during a pandemic. The dailiness of the park, the changing of the seasons, all the opportunities big and small to be around people when there was nowhere else to go. Prospect Park helped me stay rooted in the world at a time when doing so felt very hard and scary.Â
In the first year of the pandemic I’d go on late-night runs. I wanted to be respectful of others and felt unable to run with a mask on during busy daytime hours. When I wore a mask while running, I’d start to feel like I was suffocating and would go into a panic. At night there was no one else on the main running loop, and I could run the entire park sans mask. Things became a little dilapidated during those months. There would be power outages that plunged sections of the park into darkness. I ran through them anyway, feeling like I was floating above my body in the dark, trusting there would be no debris in my way to trip on. I gulped huge lungfuls of evening air and ran as fast as I could, trying to wash away my omnipresent anxiety. I was unemployed, had nothing to wake up early for, nowhere to go. One day, I realized I had gotten quite good at running.
What I really want to tell you about, though, is my favorite walk. I start by entering through the Lincoln Road entrance, my home street that runs straight to the green mouth of the park. I cross the main running loop, waiting for any bikers to pass. After that intersection I branch left, and then make a quick right, heading towards a stone arch. The air is cool under the arch and every sound echoes. There are fleur de lis patterns carved into the gray stone. Sometimes a musician will be playing an instrument here. If I kept walking straight along this path, I’d come to the boat house next, with its little pond. In the summer, that pond becomes furred over with thick green algae that looks just like grass. Signs are erected warning people to watch out: don’t let your children walk into the water by accident. Pond and lawn merge into one smooth, unified expanse of green.
Instead I walk through the stone arch and turn left, down a smaller dirt path that branches into the woods. This is my favorite route, a little self-contained loop through the forest, wrapping along the water as it meanders to join the larger pond to the south. Here all is quiet. There is a little arbor structure with benches where you can sit and watch the water. Sometimes I’ll see a heron, or a raccoon rifling through discarded trash in broad daylight. Occasionally there are fishermen, although I have a hard time imagining they have much luck in these waters. As I walk further into the woods I come to another arch, this one made of metal, much more dilapidated. Under the arch there is a concrete walkway, and a narrow canal of water that feeds into the main pond. In the right lighting, the water reflects patterns on the ceiling of the arch, and noises bounce back, a different quality of echo than on stone. I’ve seen raccoons nesting at dusk in the wide beams of this arch. I like to stand here and revel in the cool air and watery refractions of light.Â
If I keep walking the rest of the loop, I’ll end up near the LeFrak Center. There will be people once again. There are little concrete inlets along the path that open to the water, and in the right weather people in swimsuits sit there tanning. In the dead of winter water freezes and creeps up in sheets over the concrete. Huge stands of reeds turn brown, then beige, freezing in place. But for now it is early summer. Here is the heron again, taking lanky steps on those surreal disjointed limbs of his. I scare him accidentally, and he opens his huge white wings and flies away. There’s one last island along this trail before it branches off back to the main path. The island is very close, just a few feet of water separating it from the mainland, and totally covered in trash - giant pieces of black plastic sheeting, plastic sacks, bottles and debris. I refer to it, privately, as trash island.Â
These days on my walks I stop and look at a swan bedded down on trash island. She’s incubating a nest of eggs, a process I’ve read will take a little over a month. The swan can’t move during this time, can’t even step away to eat. She’s built up a huge pile of twigs and plants amongst the sheets of plastic and empty chip wrappers. I’m always watching her, out there on her island, her presence serving as a little check-in that I’ve completed my walk. One day the nest is empty. Many swanless days follow. The weather gets warmer. I have less than a month left to live in Brooklyn, take this particular walk.Â
But then a few days ago I saw her and her mate, far out on the water, their babies swimming in a fuzzy gray blur between them. They were so far away I could barely distinguish one from the other. The sun was setting as I watched, and I got to say a little internal goodbye. Lately I am always saying goodbye.