My Labor Where My Mouth Is

Early morning, vernal pool, High Rock Park.

With a skin of ice.

The vernal pools are formed in depressions matted with a forest's worth of leaves.

Over the last few years I've made some fuss about parks in these pages and have suggested that one of the best ways for folks to experience nature, to satisfy the need to connect with it, is not only to have a visual experience, or even to sport in our fields, but to actually work with it. I had been wondering how one can get into our parks to practice, participate, work with the stuff of parks. The rule around here is that you cannot really touch, prune, collect, harvest, pull any growing thing in any of our city parks. That's a lot a nada.

But my inclination, a gardener's inclination, is to do those very things. My thinking had completely changed the way I see the direction of future parks, to the point where I had actually proposed to The National Park Service a park in the form of a farm. Of course, as far as I could tell, they had no idea what I was talking about, and acted as if I never sent them that 8 page proposal.

So I needed a more conventional way of working with nature in our parks, but at the same time, I had rejected the idea of working for Parks or any of the various alliances that service them. Enter the New York New Jersey Trail Conference. What's that? From their website:

"The Trail Conference is a nonprofit organization with a membership of 10,000 individuals and 100 clubs that have a combined membership of over 100,000 active, outdoor-loving people."

What do they do? In short, they create, map, and maintain hiking trails in New York and New Jersey. I own their maps, which are the best, printed indelibly on Tyvek. As it happens, they are organizing more actively in New York City these days. Just think about all the trails in all the parks we have between the five boroughs. The NYNJTC has trail building expertise, they have standards for blazing (trail marking), they can organize labor to get things done in ways Parks cannot always seem to manage. I like a small organization.

 Volunteers discuss what was learned on the trail.

Through their work, NYNJTC frames the way we perceive nature and landscape and that is something of which I am deeply invested -through my painting, photography, and even this blog. So it only made sense that I would finally take the dive, commit some of my free time to urban trail projects. Of course, I want something in return, and that is to learn as much as I can about building sound trails, boardwalks over wetlands, bridges over ponds, or stone steps. And maybe I wish for some influence too -the trail should go this way, towards these plants or that vista, how about building a trail in this or that park, or planting these plants in that location.

I love beech trees as they hold onto their ghostly leaves throughout winter.

I also get to visit parks I would be less inclined to for a variety reasons and get to know them intimately. For the coming three months I will be working on trail rerouting and restoration, boardwalk building, and stone step construction in Van Cortlandt Park, which I have never visited. Last weekend I attended a trail maintenance workshop at High Rock Park, also previously unvisited, and part of the Staten Island Greenbelt. Make some time for this park. It's wonderfully hilled with vernal pools in a mixed red maple-sweetgum, coastal oak-beech, and oak-tulip tree forest. In winter, early spring and late fall you can see the ocean as never before from its trails. Isn't that something?

A larger vernal pool, filled enough to be draining over the roadway on which I stood.