The Third Day of Christmas
I went for a long walk the other day with Tom, my studio partner and husband. We were still in that surfeited, post-holiday disorientation engendered by the
nemontemi and as the weather was unseasonably California-esque, it seemed like quite the thing to do. [Today, however, we are suffering through “feels like” minus 19°F. with hard winds and threat of snow.]
The place we walked is accessible to anybody (now) and I highly recommend it. There is a beachy area (practically our backyard) just south of
Liberty State Park at the edge of NY Harbor, which has recently been opened to the public.
Which isn’t to say that we didn’t used to bushwhack our way in in the old days when the only other living creatures were horseshoe crabs, shorebirds and a bum or two living in some abandoned concrete bunkers. I always thought of it as our own private reserve, but have since learned that lots of intrepid nature-lovers have also claimed it as their own virgin territory.
In any event, the day was mild and fine. Under the low, flat glare of the solstice, we wandered past the brand-new, ritzy golfcourse along a newly-built causeway and discovered that pathways to the interior are open to the public until March (when birds are expected to return for nesting). Liberty State Park is an important stopover on the Atlantic Coast flyby for migrating birds.
I had not been to this beach in over 15 years, when I used to come often to paint stuff I found there.
The most startling change I noticed was the absence of junk and garbage at the shoreline. Whereas we used to collect all kinds of interesting plastic, metal & wooden objects for Tom’s
assemblage work, now there is nothing much besides oyster shells, some of them quite huge. I suppose this is an improvement.
The beach was beautiful and behind it were tidal flats crisscrossed with meandering streams, channels & rivulets: a real-time geology lesson and visual spectacle. I remember reading somewhere that the end-stage of a meander is an
oxbow. The meanders we saw were deep channels in the harbor floor which at low tide were exposed as little rivers.
We arrived sometime before noon and noticed that the tide was still going out. After a couple of hours exploring some of our old favorite haunts and the scene of several of my paintings from the ‘90s, when we headed back, our pockets full of beach flotsam, the tide had definitely turned.
In the course of our small adventure, we saw, perhaps four people. Of course, when we got to the the parking lot where we had left the truck, the rest of the park was full as befits a holiday of good weather.
Way back in the ‘80s & ‘90s I painted a lot of imagery from this area and was glad to learn that the economic forces which have disfigured so much of the shoreline around the Hudson with high-rise luxury condos have not claimed this centrally-located paradise. Many of the “views” are essentially the same with one notable exception.
Posts
