With the pandemic, I've been drawn to the overgrown, in-between spaces that interlace my Boston neighborhood. The most enriching of these has been Allandale Woods, a "small urban wild"—so designated by the Parks Commission—where a tangle of trees fills up a series of modest glacier-inscribed valleys, which lie like a bit too much carpet rumpling up between the busy parkways.
It's a feral place, bottle-glass strewn and New-England gritty, stands of slender glowing beeches on the hillsides giving way to reed-choked seeps and brookside jewelweed thickets, remnant blueberry barrens haunting the hilltops. An island of green in the city's hardscape sea, it lacks the native-vegetative richness of big woodlands to the west, but is constellated with the cosmopolitan traces of invasives and exotics—like the twisty little larches near the parking lot, fugitives from the nearby arboretum, who are just now giving up their golden needles as autumn gives way to winter.
My dog, herself the color of November oak leaves, porpoises through the drifting litter, chasing whatever windmills are tenanted by squirrels; my senses hitch a ride as she blurs through the whiplash undergrowth. I know this is a place of invisibilities, too, of uneven access (fringed by pricy townhouse estates, the nearest bus stop a long out-of-woods walk away). It's a place of past trauma, too—the land having once been a private estate and, before that, a parcel of farms deeded to the Weld family by Governor Winthrop, a prize for having fought the Wampanoag who lived here. Stripped of trees and tilled for corn and tobacco, this land would have been worked by slaves, African and Native, before slavery was finally outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783. So this public space, in its feral richness and gritty diversity, also holds wounds and secrets—some lost to time, others ongoing—a condition I suspect no space, digital or otherwise, avoids entirely. How we walk them, how we witness, makes the difference.
With the pandemic, I've been drawn to the overgrown, in-between spaces that interlace my Boston neighborhood. The most enriching of these has been Allandale Woods, a "small urban wild"—so designated by the Parks Commission—where a tangle of trees fills up a series of modest glacier-inscribed valleys, which lie like a bit too much carpet rumpling up between the busy parkways.
It's a feral place, bottle-glass strewn and New-England gritty, stands of slender glowing beeches on the hillsides giving way to reed-choked seeps and brookside jewelweed thickets, remnant blueberry barrens haunting the hilltops. An island of green in the city's hardscape sea, it lacks the native-vegetative richness of big woodlands to the west, but is constellated with the cosmopolitan traces of invasives and exotics—like the twisty little larches near the parking lot, fugitives from the nearby arboretum, who are just now giving up their golden needles as autumn gives way to winter.
My dog, herself the color of November oak leaves, porpoises through the drifting litter, chasing whatever windmills are tenanted by squirrels; my senses hitch a ride as she blurs through the whiplash undergrowth. I know this is a place of invisibilities, too, of uneven access (fringed by pricy townhouse estates, the nearest bus stop a long out-of-woods walk away). It's a place of past trauma, too—the land having once been a private estate and, before that, a parcel of farms deeded to the Weld family by Governor Winthrop, a prize for having fought the Wampanoag who lived here. Stripped of trees and tilled for corn and tobacco, this land would have been worked by slaves, African and Native, before slavery was finally outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783. So this public space, in its feral richness and gritty diversity, also holds wounds and secrets—some lost to time, others ongoing—a condition I suspect no space, digital or otherwise, avoids entirely. How we walk them, how we witness, makes the difference.