Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Into the Wild

Posted by Chris in central park, chris sartinsky, columns, skyscrapers

There is a skyscraper in Bristol, Connecticut, and I don’t know what it’s for, or what it does, besides stand there and look out of place. It is near tiny Lake Compounce amusement park, tucked away next to a (no kidding) lake in between some hills, so that you can’t really see even the tallest rides unless you’re right on top of it. ESPN is also in this area, and so the satellite dishes and the network’s big “campus” make for an unusual sight, but somehow it looks strangely appropriate where it is, in one of the more rural parts of the suburb. I don’t know, it’s so stretched out, like the kind of thing you’d describe as a compound. And something about those big dishes I associate with farms. Who the hell knows why. I just looks farmy and you’ll have to take my word for it, I’m afraid.

The point being, when you’re driving down 229 through Bristol towards Southington and you see that skyscraper, it looks really stupid. Not that Bristol’s this idyllic rural haven — far from it, it’s a pretty ugly town with a bunch of dumpy little plazas and not a lot else going for it except the best Taco Bell I’ve ever been to (seriously) — but it’s certainly not the kind of place to have one lonely skyscraper taking up skyspace. It always made me mad, because even though it’s impossible to drive through Bristol without wishing you were in a city (or, really, anyplace except Bristol, CT), it was like a slap in the face and somehow would give me an itch in the place that houses my little store of Connecticut (non-basketball related) pride. We’re forty-five minutes from Hartford, I’d think, and we don’t have skyscrapers here. So buzz off.

This will all make sense, maybe, later.

In the first couple of months I was here in New York, whenever I had some kind of errand and I had some time to spare, I would go a little bit out of my way to walk near Central Park. The idea being, I am close enough to one of the great landmarks in America that I should take it in every once in a while. Enjoy the scenery, and all. I’ve felt like a fraud here from the beginning, like everyone could instantly see I was some Connecticut hayseed with a lot of dumb ideas about where he belonged and where he wanted to be, and I didn’t know if this whole park thing was an attempt to make that feeling go away — to become more familiar with something that is obviously important to this city — or if it was more an acceptance of my inherent hayseedity — that I am not fooling anyone anyway, and so why not just gawk at all the oversized tourist traps and stop pretending to know a damn thing about anything else.

So whenever I had to go north or south, I would meet up with the park first and walk parallel to it and try to enjoy it, from the outside at least. I didn’t get a lot out of it, though. I always got distracted by other things — my sneakers, for one. They’re basketball shoes with the air bubbles that are supposed to help me jump, I guess, but they burst on both sides, so they make really loud squishy noises whenever I take a step, so here I’m trying to take in park and I’m just being bothered by this sound and looking down at my sneakers. Or I’m distracted by other people, too. I used to get angry walking around with a lot of people for a lot of different reasons (walking on the left side of the sidewalk for example). Here, I can’t take it personally, because there are too many other people around to even consider their humanity all at once. Try it and you’ll overload. And so they become nothing but obstacles — big orange cones with arms and legs that are to be avoided. Being unable to conceive of the humanity of others is the first step on the road to mass murder, I’ve heard, which makes me wonder what these serial killers are like on a busy city sidewalk. Cool as a cucumber, I’d bet.

Anyway, one day I didn’t have work or anything else to do, so I decided to stop dancing around it (the park, that is) and just walk through it. Aimlessly, for a while. I thought this would be the best way to experience it: go in with no expectations and no plans, just follow a trail or two for a little while and see what happened. So even if I came home without seeing anything outstanding, there was little chance of being disappointed, and at least I could say that I had taken a walk through Central Park, which would probably make my mother pretty excited, at least.

So that’s what I did: I headed to the park with the intention of getting lost. I picked the nearest trail, took a right, and found myself back outside the park again within I’d say twenty yards or so. I felt like I had been swallowed by a whale, sloshed around its mouth for a bit and spit right back out before I got a chance to see any of the guts. I was insulted. So I headed right back in, got back to that first fork in the path again and went the other way this time. I was back outside again in five minutes.

This was strange and somewhat frustrating. Don’t all the Park’s paths connect to each other somehow? Don’t they have to? Or was I on some kind of loop that just went a few feet in and then sent you back? I was an utter failure; I couldn’t even get lost in the biggest park in New York. It was discouraging, because I usually have no trouble getting lost. It comes naturally to me. I usually can’t find the soup aisle without wandering around for twenty minutes and wanting to break down and cry in front of the deli counter.

Refusing to be defeated that easily, I walked a few blocks downtown and found a different entrance. I headed in again and found myself at a strange kind of market. There were a lot of tents set up and people were selling weird expensive crafts and jewelry and tacky tourist shirts and food and things. It was weird, right in the middle of the park like that. And it was packed too. There were people everywhere, which kind of shattered my ideal of the Park as quiet refuge from the bustling commercialism and crowds of the rest of the city. So I wanted to get out, but all of a sudden found that the market was bigger than I had realized, and I forgot where I had come from and — you get the idea. This is much too stupid a coincidence to stay with for much longer. Couldn’t get lost in the park, got lost in the market within the park, let’s all just move on.

So eventually I made my way out of that odd market thing and back into Nature. And then my persistence paid off and I was finally lost in the park for real. Ah! This is what I was going for all along, and so I was overwhelmed by how dull it was. I staggered up some muddy paths, found myself at the top of a little hill where there was something that looked like a weather station and an old abandoned bulldozer that I figured might have been sitting there for a couple of days, and maybe the driver had no idea where he had left it. I came up against a couple of dead ends and paths that were too muddy to pass through and then it started to rain, so I found a little gazebo and sat under it with a half dozen other people for a while.

There weird thing was, even though some of the people there clearly knew each other, no one spoke. Or maybe it wasn’t so weird, since who wants to have a private conversation in front of a lot of captive strangers, but it made me feel uncomfortable — this silence — and it was still raining a little when I decided I couldn’t take it anymore and headed out again.

I ended up at the pond. It was kind of nice. There were a couple birds swimming around, but other than that, it was very still. There was a cup of soda from some fast food place floating right near me, but I’m not going to hold that against the park, since you can find garbage anywhere.

I decided, I have seen the pond; that is enough for today. I wanted to get home and turn on the TV or some really loud music.

So it was time to find the exit and I looked in the direction I thought was west and started walking towards those buildings. Only I couldn’t really get any closer, because in order to give visitors the best possible views of the pond, I guess, the path kind of twists and turns around it a bunch of times without really going anywhere. I circled around the pond three times and it started to rain again. By the time I finally started putting some ground between me and it, I was pretty fucking sick of that pond, to be honest.

I realized I was headed east now, but didn’t care, because I knew if I turned around I would end up at that pond again and I might not make it out of there for days. So east it was. I saw a couple of people totally amazed by some squirrel who was just standing there with a nut. These people were absolutely blown away by this squirrel, taking pictures and everything. How lame. Who were these people? Where did they come from?

I finally got out of there back into civilization proper, on the east side, at the southernmost part of the park. I briefly considered heading back inside and getting to the west side through the park again, but decided not to chance it. So I walked west with the park on my right side and the city on my left.

When I got to the end of it, I was at Columbus Circle. It kind of took me by surprise with all the cars zipping around and the crowds of people pushing through and these huge structures of metal and glass rising up in front of me. I had to stand there for a second to catch my breath, kind of. And I thought, this is what is exceptional about New York. Not Central Park and all its lame, half-hearted nature. I’ve seen plenty of nature. Deer come strolling through my front yard back in Connecticut on a daily basis. I’ve been within three yards of them, in fact. (An aside: this is true. I was once locked out of my house, sitting on the front porch, waiting for my dad to come home with the key when some deer came sniffing around, completely oblivious to me. I thought, how pretty, and just sat there for a while. And then I sneezed and scared the shit out of those deer, and they started making some of the most awful noises you’ve ever heard-straight from the bowels of hell. And they got all agitated and started running around, and all I could think was wonderful, I’m going to get severely injured right now and the ambulance is going to come and ask me what happened and I’m going to have to explain that I got pounded by a couple of deer. But they ran back into the woods and I ran off to a neighbor’s house and watched Big Brother with them until my dad got home.) But anyway, I’m not unfamiliar with nature, and I’ve seen enough of it to know that Central Park wasn’t nature, it was just some big fake green rectangle — as much the city’s pretension to something it wasn’t as that big dumb skyscraper is in Bristol. The Park is nice to remind you what this city is not, but that’s only for after you’ve been here for a few years, and are so jaded and immersed in it that a couple puny little squirrels are a sight to see. The things that really deserve to be noticed here are these buildings, and all the people inside their rooms, like little cells, unaware of what an awesome organism they are a part of.

I walked home down Broadway, looking up.

Chris Sartinsky is a writer for the Onion News Network and keeps a fine blog of his own. Read his previous 2.0somethings columns here. Artwork provided by Katie Bassett.

• Read comments
• Post a comment