Evensong III (20 Dec 2023)

 It’s one thing to read scientific papers and articles, watch news reports about climate change. It’s another thing entirely to walk the landscape in mid-December, three days before the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, and see the pink, ready buds forming on pruned hydrangea and peony bushes. It’s 53°F/11°C in the early afternoon. The internet tells me we’re having a bomb cyclone in New York City, a weather event that sounds terrifying but really means the wind and rain are exposing the pain points of the city’s civil engineering. The power blipped overnight several times; there are inches of water making streets impassable, spilling over the planks of footbridges, reminders that the coast is right there, that the inlands are wetlands. That this is an island.

Nonetheless, if it’s a day for writing then it’s a day for walking. I have an agreement with my environment that I will write it. I made this promise, have spoken it aloud and often to the natural world. And when, at the page, the words are stuck or my brain too fogged I walk and the land opens my mind and the words come. The questions to write into come. This is my covenant with the landscape (cityscape/seascape/desert/jungle/swamp/mountain/vale/cave) and I’ve never been left wanting for words when I take a walk.

I walk into the questions: What is this place made of? Who uses it? For what? Who was here before? How was it used then? What is the natural system? What are the changes been that I can know? What are the changes that can’t be known? What might happen next? Who are the ghosts? What do they want to tell me? What does this place want me to know? What does this place want me to say about it?

The questions are my ways in and it doesn’t take long for the information to come. It’s raining today, though, so the pages of my notebook, my notebook itself, are wet and the softness of my pencil and the softness of the paper dissolve into each other, white pulp blooming. Something like mud. Like land into water, or water into land. There are mysteries in the murkiness of it all and the paper responding to the wetness, making it impossible to write more than a few key words, like gathering the ingredients needed for making a cake.

A song comes and I sing it: who are the ghosts? What are the ghosts? Where are the ghosts? What can I know? Where should I go? And the merriness of this spontaneous, ridiculous song did work. And here I have to quote my beloved Herman Melville’s narrator in Moby Dick, “Now let us to the story,” because I wandered into the Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden campus, which was adorned with plaques and maps and all sort of information that did its best to erase and whitewash what was really going on.

I bring up Melville because, to my surprise, I met his brother Thomas near the entrance to the campus. Thomas Melville was a Snug Harbor governor in the late 1880s and the house he lived in is now part of the national historic register, and the historical marker database offers the inscription on the plaque. As I read up on the history of Snug Harbor two days after my walk, (now on the eve of the Winter Solstice), I am learning that the ghosts there want to tell me many things. As always, the answers to my questions offer ten thousand threads to pull; the fabric of the narratives wanting, waiting to be told has the potential to be the thickest most vibrant tapestry. From the Snug Harbor Archives Blog: “There is no firm number but estimates conclude that over ten thousand retired mariners spent their final years there and were buried at Sailors’ Snug Harbor.” And this is only the second layer of what’s really going on.

From the same archives blog I’m shocked to learn that this space, a mere fifth of a mile from my Staten Island closet, was the second choice for this campus. “The original plan was to have the Snug Harbor built in Manhattan on the Randall farm but the executors bought 140 acres of land in New Brighton on Staten Island overlooking the Kill Van Kull and used monies from leasing the Manhattan real estate to create one of the wealthiest charitable institutions in the world.  The Manhattan property today is what we would call Greenwich Village including Washington Square Park.” Before coming to Staten Island I, too, stayed some nights in Greenwich Village near Washington Square Park in an apartment on Bleecker. Once again I find myself on a well-worn path.

I wander into the skeleton of a rose garden where a bronze heron is forever about to take flight from a reflecting pool. The rain brings the water level to the lip of the slate tiles and a skin of bright green seeds and debris coats the surface; the water reflects nothing.

I walk the pruned Allée, the pruned pleached hornbeam trees as skeletal as the rose garden. In this cavernous avenue I think of Bunny Mellon and her allée of crabapple trees. I am haunted, always, by the Mellons. Paul, Andrew, Bunny. They have been my benefactors of cultural knowledge since childhood. Choate, Oak Spring, and many other research and arts programming that exists because of Mellon endowments. I once made a pact with Paul, too. I am always talking to ghosts; they find a way to answer.

What else yields to me on this walk? A list:

1. Black Gum trees
2. Sweet Gum trees
3. Another reflecting pool flooding. There are 4 gothic faces with maniacal expressions frozen in stone reflected in the water, which spills over like the unstoppable madness of this contemporary moment.
4. A gray squirrel friendly, unafraid, coming near me, waiting.
5. A great blue heron rising from the natural pond. I follow, going deeper along the muddy path.
   
   It all feels like Spring, yet we have the darkest days to go.