new york, blue sky

blue sky.   the morning of september 11, 2001 i met my editor tracy devine and bantam deputy publisher nita taublib for breakfast at charlotte, just across the street from the random house offices.  it was one of our many wonderful meetings, talking about books and life--a colleague of ours had just gotten married, and we were catching up on that when we heard a plane had hit one of the world trade towers.

a small plane i thought, it had to be, but how terrible no matter the size, how shocking.  but it wasn't a small plane, and then the second jet hit, and nita and tracy and i hugged goodbye and hurried away into our lives to plan and make sense or no-sense and be in new york city--all three of us lived there--that had already changed forever, only we just didn't know it yet.

impressions: the blue sky everyone still talks about; plume of smoke visible from midtown, constant sirens, walking downtown and seeing people on cell phones--i didn't have one yet.  an hour later, after the towers fell, seeing people in business suits covered with ash.  the next nights: below 14th street, a dust cloud that glowed red after dark, as thick as the foggiest london night. the posters hung by families, their missing loved ones, on the wall by famous ray's pizza across from st. vincent's hospital.  going to the cathedral of st. john the divine, didn't matter what religion you were or were not, just a place to gather and pray and mourn.

the city smelled of smoke and ghosts.  people were kind to each other but also lost it on a frequent basis.  i remember those early days, tuning into local tv news, pre-theme music.  do you know what i mean?  the moment when a tragedy acquires a combination of familiarity and production values, and the tv producers give it solemn theme music and a name.  it takes away the raw.  i hated when that happened a day or two after 9/11.

heading to the west side highway many nights--closed to traffic, it was kept open for search and rescue workers.  people lined the streets, watching pickup trucks, fire trucks, many with out of state plates, drive south toward the world trade center.  i was in the midst of leaving a worse than bad marriage, but the tragedy bound us together for a few more months, and those first nights after the towers collapsed we'd go to the west side highway, watch those rescue trucks in the surreal riverside light.  i couldn't bear for anything else to collapse.

during the early days after the attack, friends helped at the site.  the poet-nun sister leslie went to st. paul's with other sisters from her community, to offer spiritual comfort to the rescue workers.  poet-naturalist e.j. mcadams, then an urban park ranger, spent days in and around the rubble, going into apartments to rescue animals abandoned in the evacuation.   interesting that my two closest poet friends had reason to be there--the city needed poets more than ever.

the week after the towers fell i stood on park avenue south and watched a woman in a yellow dress commit suicide, jumping from a ledge and landing at my feet.  the grief in the city was unimaginable.  had she lost someone in the towers?  or was the city's collective sorrow just too much to bear?

in december my friend, poet, writer, and radio personality colin mcenroe came to the city from hartford and he is a sensitive soul as we all know so we went downtown but mostly we went to the cathedral to watch paul winter prepare for his solstice concert and a few days later there was a fire in the cathedral and everything seemed touched by sorrow, mystical beauty, blue stained glass, and the unpredictability of life.

ten years have passed.  the anniversary unbearable at first, but time dulls, if not heals, the shock and pain.  for years the cats and i have looked out my south-facing chelsea windows to see the towers of light rising up from where the twin towers once stood.  they appear beautiful, mystical, but i love nature, and i couldn't and can't deny that they're magnets to birds that fly by night, fall migrants heading south for the winter--the birds get trapped in the light columns, and at dawn fall to the ground.  after a while i couldn't stand seeing those light towers--they reminded me of death, not hope.  so i stopped looking out my window the last years of this decade of september 11's.

i'm not in ny this year.  i want to be far away, and i am.  the sky is blue, the way it was that day.  there are no speeches or memorials or flags.  there are no columns of light.  but there is peace and prayer and memory, and there are poems, and there is love.  nita and tracy, we were together that morning.  i'm holding your hands, wherever you are.

Nightbirds in Central Park

Nightbirds in Central Park by Luanne Rice

When I was young and under the complete command of my heart, I moved to New York.  I was searching for art and artists and writers and a place that could accommodate my life’s intensity and call it “creativity.”

My friend Brendan Gill, drama critic at The New Yorker, gave me several invaluable instructions.  One was, “Writers always think they have to drink a lot and be miserable, but don’t,” and another was, “Go to Central Park.”  He told me that as Connecticut natives we required a lot of nature to balance urban thrills, and over the years I have discovered that he was completely right.

Although I love Poets’ Walk, the Bandshell, Cleopatra’s Needle, and the allées of crabapple trees in Conservatory Garden, my favorite places in Central Park are the most wild—the Ramble and the North Woods.  The park is situated along the Atlantic Flyway, a migration corridor traveled by birds that fly at night, navigating by the stars, landing at sunrise in the greenest spots they see.  Central Park is a great oasis for birds.

Last weekend was the Bio-Blitz, a twenty-four biological survey of the park.  Organized by the Explorer’s Club, it attracted many nature-lovers to participate.  In all, they counted 838 species.  I had planned to join the Friday night moth-counting contingent, but during peak hours I found myself engaged in a different exploration: walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with two friends from Hartford, one of them thirteen, on a search for the Brooklyn roots of the rapper Jay-Z.

But I visit the park frequently and have remembrances of observations past…  During the Christmas Bird Count on December 19th, 2004, the word went out that a Boreal Owl, rare for these parts, had been spotted in a tall pine behind Tavern on the Green.  I headed over, and stood with Cal Vornberger as he photographed the shy, beautiful bird.  Another favorite time was the night I went owling.  In March, 2002, my friend E.J. McAdams, then an Urban Park Ranger, invited me to join an expedition to track screech owls.  We met at the Boathouse, and our party consisted of several avid birders, including Charles, Lee, and Noreen, famous to people who know the story of Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who for ten years has courted, hunted, nested, and raised seventeen chicks atop the penthouse next to Woody Allen’s.

At night the city is enchanted.  It just is.  You stand at the edge of the park and look around at all the buildings twinkling with lights—the Plaza, the Dakota, the San Remo, the Beresford, the limestone palaces on Fifth Avenue—and New York City is a magical landscape of wit and glamour, and there’s an orchestra of taxi horns and boom boxes, and at any second someone wonderful will come along and ask you to dance.  Just outside the park, New York City is still a place of human dreams.

But walk inside the park’s perimeter, and suddenly you are solidly with nature—the place Brendan warned me that I must find.  After sunset, Central Park is the wilderness, vast and dark.  That March night was chilly.  E.J. told us that to find owls at night, we had to look for unexpected shapes in the bare trees.  We tried to walk silently, like trackers, scanning branches overhead with an unfocussed gaze.

We made our way around the Lake, and our first sighting was just south of Bow Bridge.  As promised, the screech owl looked “unexpected”: an out-of-place smudge in a graceful network of maple branches.  We stood still, watching for a long time, until she flew.  And then we followed her into the Ramble.

A screech owl’s call is the opposite of its name, mysterious and descending, like a backwards horse whinny.  We tracked that owl till we lost her, and then we looked and listened for others.  During that whole night, our group rarely spoke.  We each had our own reasons for being there, in the wilds of Central Park on a cold not-yet-spring night, and I know that I was lost in a combination of meditation, awe, and gratitude for my Connecticut-born connection with nature.

On Cedar Hill, in the east-seventies, there is a stand of red cedar trees where in recent years four Long-ear owls have roosted.  Like other owls, they sleep by day and hunt by night.  By staking out the trees at dusk, it is possible, with patience, to observe the “fly out.”  I witnessed it once; E.J. pointed out how each of the four owls left the trees in a completely idiosyncratic way.  One hopped to the end of a branch, then flapped toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Another zoomed straight up, like the Concorde.  One hulked like a gargoyle, seeming to indict everyone and everything on the ground, and then flew menacingly into the night.  The last waited a long time, as if deciding whether to actually go or not, and then looped west, toward Belvedere Castle.

It is a great thrill and honor to observe the fly-out; only one person I have ever heard of has ever seen the fly-in, and I was with her on the Night of the Screech Owls.  Noreen.  Tall and stately, she has a cascade of bright white hair and eyes that are steady and compassionate.  One New Year’s Eve, it is said, after watching the Cedar Hill fly-out, she decided to stick around the park till just before dawn and wait for the owls to come home.

That’s a much more difficult proposition, because they don’t return all at the same time, and they arrive from different directions, and the sun hasn’t yet risen over the East Side, and the owls fly in so fast you’re not quite sure you’ve seen them.  But according to park legend, Noreen did—that New Year’s Day, she saw the fly-in.

Although I walked beside her that March night, I didn’t ask her about the story.  Our screech owl-seeking group progressed north in silence, over the Seventy-Ninth Street Transverse and past Shakespeare Garden, into more relatively tame park regions as we made for the North Woods—the dense woodlands and steep bluffs in the northernmost reaches of the park.

But we never got that far.  We spotted an owl along Central Park West.  Just across the busy street, the exhibit “Baseball as America” was opening on at the American Museum of Natural History.  The great columned entrance was stunningly illuminated red, white and blue as limousines discharged various Yankees, Mets, and other baseball and museum lovers.

There, bathed in the museum’s patriotic glow, was a screech owl perched on a low branch. To get the best view, we had to actually exit the park and stand on the sidewalk at West 81st Street. People were clustered, watching for Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams and Joe Torres, who were rumored to be attending the opening. We had to edge through the throng, to get closer to the owl. Two crowds of people standing in the same spot, facing in opposite directions.

The owl was oblivious.  He was gray and white, eight inches tall, so close I could look into his ferocious yellow eyes.  In true New York fashion, he let everyone else go about their business while he went about his: killing a mouse.  Wings spread, he slashed downward, hit his prey as it ran, and ripped it apart—gobbling bloody entrails made redder by the gala museum lights.

Most of the bystanders missed seeing that murderous show.  They forgot to glance over the wall into the wilds of Central Park, fixed as they were on the American pastime, on the enchantment of Manhattan, on their own human dreams.

I have my own human dreams.  I have made many of them come true in New York City.  But part of me is still a Connecticut girl at heart, and Brendan’s words are never too far from my consciousness: “Go to Central Park.”  Oracle, sage: thank you for knowing me, for reminding me of who I am.  Nature is in my nature.

Besides, I still have to see the fly-in.

(Photograph by Cal Vornberger: Two fledgling Eastern screech owls, Central Park, North Woods.  www.calvorn.com)