It was a Saturday morning (March 28) in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan. Grateful to still have a job in this second week of mandated “social distancing,” I also felt weary from a week of Zoom conferences. I had taken to the woods a lot lately, not just for solace, but for primal survival. How starved I have been for something more.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” I said to myself, to no one, as I encountered a bush alight with blossoms. The tiny spiky flowers were the shade of van Gogh sunflowers.
Each time I entered the park, like now, I felt like I was entering Narnia with its cast of talking animals. Squirrels of every age and color gazed at me before scampering from the horizontal ground to vertical tree trunks. Robins sang and popped along on their wiry feet. And when a bluejay flew in front of me, I gasped at its saturated hues.
Narnia came to mind here in the woods filled with 100-year-old trees, wise giants that rose and fell around me in “tree time,” slower than “people time.” Along with childhood memories of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, my mind pulled up bits of Robert Frost poems. Once, I knew whole ordered stanzas by heart. Then I forgot them.
Falling rocks on a low retaining wall made me recall the repeated phrase from “Mending Wall,” the one that states “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” For the first time, I think I knew what Frost meant. Humans try, try, try to build and control, but the earth is witty, waiting until our backs are turned to destroy our serious efforts. As I marveled at the grasses on a hill that weren’t here yesterday, I recalled: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” And always, there were choices of which path to take. So far, I hadn’t taken the same route twice, a puzzle to me, considering my numerous long walks between calls.
It was a magical time to be a single woman walking at dusk amid the ghosts of the old House of Mercy. Girls and women of ill repute were once kept against their will in an asylum here. I think I found the location based on my recollection of old photographs. Inmates escaped only to be returned.
Yet capturing this wild isolated version of me would mean someone would have to get closer than six feet. No one wanted to take the chance of getting close and catching the virus.
A global pandemic gave me freedom from the constant, automatic worry of rape and mugging.
I could breathe.
Then I saw a surgical mask hanging from a branch. All of my good feelings left me. Really? A sputum-filled mask in the land of Bambi?
But a few steps later, I saw a dog run low into the bushes toward the Hudson River. The dog, that had been about 20 feet in front of me, was grey with short legs and a wiry head.
“That wasn’t a dog,” I said out loud.
It was a coyote, yet another sign that man is not the captain.