Keep On Truckin

Renting a twenty-four-foot box mounted on a two-axle truck is always more than one bargains for, but even more so in a city where myriad obstacles to productivity, safety, and security are enshrined into law. 

Simple questions like "where can I park this truck?," are met with simple answers like "nowhere, if by 'where' you mean a street."

The truck depot tells me that thieves, the clever ones, know if a truck is empty or full by the look of the tires. I admire anyone who is good at what they do, I simply wish they could put that effort into something not quite as disruptive as stealing all our belongings while the truck is parked illegally on a deserted commercial street from 9pm till 5 am. 

I don't think any of us are aware of how many overpasses there are in NYC that are too low to accommodate a 13-foot tall truck. Twelve-foot, eleven-inches is common enough, but thirteen -that's a nasty number, so nope, not doing it. Do you know the anxiety of approaching an unlabeled overpass? NYC happens to produce a map highlighting all the probable impacts, and would you be surprised to hear that some appear (although the map is poor enough in detail that one cannot be sure) to be on highways like the BQE?  

We've all experienced how difficult leaving NYC can be, even if only for the weekend in a rental car. This is like that, except loading the car takes three days, you can't park it on the street, people are always beeping at you, you just might run over a pedestrian or drag a parked car 20 feet if you're not careful, and you never really know if you're going to crash into a bridge. 

I do not envy truckers, but they probably have sweeter rides. My truck, a GMC with 160,000 miles to it, rides like a pogo stick, has a slippery bench seat and the floor has a shiny, sticky residue harboring crumbs from someone's last long distance dinner. There's a Wendy's straw deep on the dashboard. The thing rattles so much, the objects in mirror are experiencing a 9.2 earthquake. 

It's not all bad. I'll miss the once in a blue collared moon favor called in by my father. In the past that might have looked like a climb up a power plant smokestack to get a needed photo. Today it looked like buying donuts and coffee for a guy named Charlie (who refused a good tip) so that I can park the truck in his company's lot over night. I'll be there tomorrow at 7am sharp, after a bus ride and 18 block walk, to get it outta there. If I'm lucky, he'll agree to my pushin' it by asking if I can leave it there once again tomorrow afternoon, loaded with my apartment things, until 7am sharp, Friday morning. 

Then I can pack the truck full of vastly more studio belongings in anticipation of one night of illegal street parking on a deserted industrial block, all set then to leave Saturday morning, driving headlong into a snowstorm beginning in Pennsylvania and getting nasty by Ohio. 

Tenacity

The last few days have been the hardest, after ten days of packing both apartment and studio, but this morning, well, just before noon, Betsy made her way out of Brooklyn, in our van, via the tunnel, up the West Side Highway, which hardly lives up to its name, to the GW Bridge, and then on to I80 westward. 

In the back of the van are various items that cannot or should not freeze, things that, along with the cat, Betsy must haul into a roadside motel. Among these are three houseplants -a Norfolk Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a Pothos or Philodendron (Epipremnum aureum), and a purple Oxalis (Oxalis triangularis). These have been with us so long that I often confuse their origins. The pine may have been a gift, the Pothos possibly a specimen from my greenhouse project at Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Oxalis a yard plant bought when I was living in New Mexico. All three should survive the move, after all, they've survived considerable neglect in our apartment, but I do think the Norfolk Pine will suffer under the unrelenting low humidity of the Minnesota house. I am no daily mister, so maybe a spot in the bathroom will suffice? 

Several days ago I clipped the Pothos so that it, along with two other plants, can be easily moved between van and motel in an old plastic laundry basket. When I slid the white-stained terra cotta pot from its roost of a dozen years, I was surprised to find that the vine, above, was not rooted in any soil at all! It was and is still rooted only to the painted wall. Is it gleaning moisture from the air, the walls, the paint, or is it not in need because it has entered winter dormancy, a time of exceptional drought tolerance? 

I would leave it there, for the next tenants, if I had half the belief that the landlord would appreciate its tenacity. Instead, I will pry this talisman from the wall paint and carry it along. 

Silent Night

Larry's trees, sometime in early December, after a brief snowfall.  

I haven't spent Christmas Eve in Brooklyn since 2001, but this year it was necessitated by packing both studio and apartment. We bubbled and glassined, crated and boxed delicate painted, ceramic, steel, and fabric objects until seven thirty, at which point, if we were going to cook, we needed to cease. After a stop at the grocery store, the van did not start. I jumped out, did some fixing (at least it was warm), and got it going. Cooked a quick meal, then collapsed on the couch, surrounded by piles of boxes and bubble wrap, escaped into a Nature episode about Tibet on PBS while the upstairs people banged and harangued with heavy heels, dragged furniture, and the whining of a motorized toy for the man-boy. 

______________________

Today it is Christmas. We are going for a long, quiet day at my cousin's place in Carroll Gardens, no packing, a day of rest. Betsy is scheduled to leave tomorrow, in our van, with cat, and things that cannot freeze (my paint and houseplants, for instance). I am scheduled to continue packing, until Tuesday, when I pick up the twenty-four-foot-box truck, and begin to load the apartment. If I complete this mission according to schedule, I will drive out of Brooklyn on Friday, January 2, with every thing we have in tow.

I believe I just saw a little sun on the wall, in the cavity of an emptied bookshelf.

Taking Out The Trash

Our pails, a silent sentry, as instructed -three feet apart, at the intersection of the woods, road and drive. A hawk, circling high overhead, issues its gritty reeeeeeeahh. The road, here, is quiet and I am noise.

Downslope, down road, toward the late autumn sun, down low.

Removing the trash and recyclables is a journey by any New York City standard. I, for one, was fond of dropping my trash right out the window into the pails below, but not here. No, trash removal has several steps, one of which is rolling the bin down slope, toward the culverted passage between one wetland and the other, then upslope to the road.

To my mind, it is cold out, for November, maybe six degrees F, yet the empty-handed return along the tenth-of-a-mile drive frees my senses for seeing, and I found myself trailing farther down slope, into the wetland, along a deer trail.

The wet lowlands contain the most attractive sites on this land, but the green season mosquitoes chase me out too quickly. In the white (or brown) season, I take time.

The drainage opens up, like a park, onto the wetland, the edge of which is favored by deer, coyote, turkey, and me.

Although the ground has yet to freeze, the wetland is firm enough for walking. I've explored its perimeter, before this moment, in December or January.

The wetland is, by its nature an amphitheater, a concavity, surrounded almost completely by upland elevated fifty to a hundred feet above the occasional water line. On its western flank is the headland of an esker that carries southward to frame lakes that were at one time deeper and larger. Our (Rex's) house sits on land that was likely a small island or peninsula, long ago, near this lake's northern boundary.

Recent heavy rains have been quickly eroding the steeply sloped land to the northwest and northeast, washing out sediment that fills the small wetland due north of house island. Soil and organic matter have been filling this basin for thousands of years. Trees have taken root in drier spells, then were soaked out in wetter ones. Water enters the large wetland at three points -east, north, and west, converging, then heads south toward a pinched outlet that funnels the water to a small, nameless pond, then farther on to Dutch Lake, and finally into Harrison Bay.

The cattails (I haven't yet identified the predominant species) have exploded into their fat and furry season, regal and rough. Finally, my camera and fingers are beat back by the cold and I head back into the woods.

The bones of the land are most clear in winter. 

A History of Surveillance

A history of our Friel Place garden, front and then side yard, over the last eight years or so as seen through the changing lens of the Google van-o-scope.

Final Touch

I hadn't been to the beach farm in two months. It was hard to go, out of busyness as much as emotion, but it was time, or rather time was running low, so this past Sunday, blustery, cool, and unfavorable to contemplation as it was, I went.

The buckwheat never got turned under which, in retrospect, appears a good practice given no other fall planting. The tangle of light carbon comes to be an effective mulch, keeping down weeds and shielding the soil from eroding winds. It should be turned under next spring.

In our other, short-lived plot, the unharvested fennel bulbs died back from frost and have since re-animated. I let them be.

Just down the row, under the blackened skeletons of tomato vine, speckled romaine has sprouted. The spring romaine must have successfully self-seeded, something I have yet to see in any lettuce I've sown.

Adjacent to graying, dry fennel stalks and the soggy flesh of decayed eggplant, our parsley is embracing a return to normal temperatures. I pinched some.

From the shed I collected some belongings, a bin, two types of spreaders. I left my wheel dib prototype hanging along with rarely-used garden tools and Wolf's jug of wine.

On this last visit to the beach farm, I was visited by what I think is a young eagle. I missed and will miss the autumn congregation of migratory birds and their electric cacophony. 

Finally, the beach farm was a great place to bbq with friends. I think this post by Marie, of 66sqft, brings it home. We had some great neighbor gardeners -Jimmy, Wolf, Joanna and others. They'll water your garden when you are away, rib you for your weeds, then offer you a cold beer, and they always took heed of my experiments and that is how I earned the nickname: the professor.

Two plots available. I recommend F12.

Taking Out The Trash

Our pails, a silent sentry, as instructed -three feet apart, at the intersection of the woods, road and drive. A hawk, circling high overhead, issues its gritty reeeeeeeahh. The road, here, is quiet and I am noise.

Downslope, down road, toward the late autumn sun, down low.

Removing the trash and recyclables is a journey by any New York City standard. I, for one, was fond of dropping my trash right out the window into the pails below, but not here. No, trash removal has several steps, one of which is rolling the bin down slope, toward the culverted passage between one wetland and the other, then upslope to the road.

To my mind, it is cold out, for November, maybe six degrees F, yet the empty-handed return along the tenth-of-a-mile drive frees my senses for seeing, and I found myself trailing farther down slope, into the wetland, along a deer trail.

The wet lowlands contain the most attractive sites on this land, but the green season mosquitoes chase me out too quickly. In the white (or brown) season, I take time.

The drainage opens up, like a park, onto the wetland, the edge of which is favored by deer, coyote, turkey, and me.

Although the ground has yet to freeze, the wetland is firm enough for walking. I've explored its perimeter, before this moment, in December or January.

The wetland is, by its nature an amphitheater, a concavity, surrounded almost completely by upland elevated fifty to a hundred feet above the occasional water line. On its western flank is the headland of an esker that carries southward to frame lakes that were at one time deeper and larger. Our (Rex's) house sits on land that was likely a small island or peninsula, long ago, near this lake's northern boundary.

Recent heavy rains have been quickly eroding the steeply sloped land to the northwest and northeast, washing out sediment that fills the small wetland due north of house island. Soil and organic matter have been filling this basin for thousands of years. Trees have taken root in drier spells, then were soaked out in wetter ones. Water enters the large wetland at three points -east, north, and west, converging, then heads south toward a pinched outlet that funnels the water to a small, nameless pond, then farther on to Dutch Lake, and finally into Harrison Bay.

The cattails (I haven't yet identified the predominant species) have exploded into their fat and furry season, regal and rough. Finally, my camera and fingers are beat back by the cold and I head back into the woods.

The bones of the land are most clear in winter. 

Two Kinds Of Night

In the dim and deep grey-blue of early morning I saw the beast ambling along the tree line and thought myself silly for thinking two people could be running out there. Six points, eight? I flicked on the light, startling the animal then twisting its neck backward and up to come to terms with the sudden contrast. We stood absolutely still for a minute, then I turned out the light. He trotted across the creaking snow and I laid back in bed to wait out the last half hour before the four-thirty alarm.

Arriving home after two hours of airport, three hours of airplane, two hours of subway, and nine-point-five hours of work, under the red-yellow street lamps, a temperature fixed above fifty, a coat unnecessarily heavy for coastal, Mid-Atlantic December, I surveyed the garden. A rescue had taken place; a reader, a Hudson Clove customer, Toby, had come at some point to do the digging, the bagging, the carrying, and replanting in a new garden and I thought, good, one less thing.

I have since extracted the climber rose, climbing hydrangea, and my grandmother's tea, all hastily spaded and ripped from the earth, delivered to their temporary garden in Williamsburg, but not without acknowledging the irony of saving on the purchase of new plants by driving 2500 miles to attempt their relocation.

There are still several plants in the garden and they are free for the taking. Email me: nycgarden@gmail.com.

In The Beginning

God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and God said, Let there be compost, to replenish the earth; and then God said, But you must choose it, and make it in all seasons, and you must site it appropriately, for ease of doing it, and for aesthetics of sight and scent. And God commanded it, so it was done, there, behind the wood pile.

The Animals

In the absolute dark of early morning, along the tree line, coyotes were illuminated by headlights. Two hours later, as the light began to swell, deer browsed the leaf litter where Rex's bird feeder had been strung, and squirrels scamper about playfully all day, while various birds make appearances (although less so since the feeder has come down). 

Turkeys are plentiful, crossing the yard dutifully every day, but are hard to approach on the squeaky, newly fallen snow. 

The Animals

In the absolute dark of early morning, along the tree line, coyotes were illuminated by headlights. Two hours later, as the light began to swell, deer browsed the leaf litter where Rex's bird feeder had been strung, and squirrels scamper about playfully all day, while various birds make appearances (although less so since the feeder has come down). 

Turkeys are plentiful, crossing the yard dutifully every day, but are hard to approach on the squeaky, newly fallen snow.