1000 Urban Miles, Part I

Or six and a half miles to start with… I walked down Clinton Street, still fairly leafy, with yellowing Ginkgo in particular still hanging on, but no female trees along this stretch; their tell-tale fruit, crushed upon the sidewalk, did stench up other sections of my route. The fig growing on a side street is almost completely bare; I suppose the next time I pass it wall be swaddled in burlap to help it through the winter, as in years past. Carroll Gardens, with its deep front yards, most atypical for western Brooklyn, marks the border between brownstones and clapboards, with the formerly working class housing and industrial zone beyond; moving downhill here is like passing over a tree line; the mature trees, so many arching London Planes cathedraling the streets, simply end. I crossed the Gowanus at 9th Street. The blocks on either side of the greasy green Superfund Site, which canalized the old wetlands behind the once and future island of Red Hook, were barren of trees and smelled like it. Two of a million trees looking lonely on the corner of 3rd Avenue… But you get a great sense of the local geography here: it’s a long slow rise from 2nd Avenue to Prospect Park West (9th Avenue) up 9th Street to the top of the hill, Prospect Park on the heights of the Harbor Hill Moraine. I only went part way up because my target was that other green moraine-topper, so I turned down 5th Avenue, along the flank of the glacial pile now, and walked to the 25th Street entrance of Green-Wood. I exited an hour later at PPW and 20th Street, the Monday holiday meaning that particular gate was open, where I again flanked the slope along 7th Avenue before descending again into the valley of the Gowanus and the slight uphill on the other side to home. Pigeons and Sparrows, of course, but also gulls, the screech of a Bluejay, and the white flash of a Mockingbird’s wings, until I entered the greenland of the Green-Wood, where the raucous Monk Parakeets announced an expansion of life. A Kestrel flew overhead to land briefly on a ridiculously thin-looking branch, one claw over the other. In the distance, a big raptor. Something, also, over the Gowanus on the way home: flying like a Accipter, flap-flap-glide, but me without my bins.Unknown cypress cones with seeds.

I started the 1000 Urban Miles Challenge last Monday. Since then I’ve walked 23 miles in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Read more about Liam Heneghan’s project and do it yourself. It only takes a year, or 19 and a quarter miles per week. You don’t have to be in a city. The idea is to walk consciously, aware of the natural world all around you, as with Liam’s inspiration, Irish naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, an indefatigable walker. I have essentially been doing this for some years now, and reporting my findings here for nearly four years, but without having any real notion of how far I have walked. As I type this, I realize I mean the actual milage AND, rather more importantly, all the other ways, too. White-Throated Sparrow finding a gravestone good for a lookout. #1000UrbanMiles is the Twitter tag if you want to play that way.