Pelham Bay Park, the Bronx, New York City’s largest park, is a forested peninsula in the Long Island Sound. I was there with Neil Pederson, Ph.D. candidate in Forest Ecology and Climate at Columbia University. He had been told that some post oaks trees that were born perhaps 20 years before the War of Independence lived in these woods. Saplings when nascent America was starting to ripple, the land still home to cougars, wolves, and Lenape Indians. More than 200 years later, slope-shouldered with backpacks, binoculars, cellular phones, and cameras, Neil and I were in search of these hoary trees.

Neil had a general sense of where they might lay, out by the water, on the eastern rim of Hunter Island, but he wanted to consult with me anyway. I am deputy director of forestry and horticulture for the New York City Parks Department, and I know the park well. I looked at his small map, and then pointed at the shoreline trail in concurrence, and off we set.

We circumnavigated the vast city-manufactured Orchard Beach, 1.5 million cubic yards of glimmering sand, where sunbathers lay about in the early day. Past a few folks cooking hot dogs already in this a.m., and past the basketball courts, littered with last night’s beer cans. Past the Ranger station, empty this time of day, and onto the Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff trail, Hunter Island, the salt marsh grasses making the landscape yellow, the sky open and blue.

Then the colors turned green and dark. Into the forest we went, where the moisture lingered and puddled in the sweating leaves and humid soil, little hot patches of water in the cracks of the rocks, the vegetation thick and overlapping. The forest of Pelham Bay Park was lush enough and wild enough to be home to these trees that had survived here on the city’s outpost for so long. To find them would be like finding pottery of a lost civilization.

Neil wiped away a mosquito that had just alighted onto his face. We thought we were prepared, covered from head to toe with dense fabrics. How bad could the mosquitoes out here in the Bronx really be? But we were spared nothing, and soon overcome by a swarming mass of angry insects. They came at us with frenzy, a quivering cloud of irritable bugs descending on us, and they exploited our weak points easily—our necks and faces; the two of us were quickly reduced to desperate scratching, like dogs with tics. In the heart of the city the universal web of insects got thin, but not here in Pelham Bay Park.

Half a mile ahead, and through this throng of devils, lay the post oaks.

* * * Neil was willing to brave this urban forest (he spent most of his field time in forests considerably less cosmopolitan) because he was determined to collect wood samples for his dissertation. To come to the city to gather tree data was a bit of a leap of faith, and I imagined, although he never mentioned it, that he was somewhat skeptical about these post oaks.

His partial thesis is that Quercus stellata (post oaks) are prevented from migrating to northern points beyond the Hudson Valley because of their sensitivity to discrete temperature changes—past this line and they don’t survive. Hemlock trees, Neil said, were limited by the temperatures in the month of March. In other words, if March was within a certain temperature range the Hemlock produced substantial seed, root, leaf, and wood. Outside this range and the Hemlock struggled. Neil was looking at this phenomenon in many species throughout the northeast, but today he was focussed on post oaks.

I was very excited to be with Neil. Pelham Bay Park was a significant place for me, where I had discovered the everyday wild—all its intimacies of growth and death—a Manhattan native whose only childhood exposure to the forest was tv and summer camps. The reality of these elderly trees here in the Bronx would mean that a portion of old New York was still alive, a small wedge of habitat where ancient things had persisted. This fact was no less exciting to Neil too.

To get to where we were going we had to whack through mugwort, jewelweed, bayberry, and dogwood, vines, brambles, and exposed roots. We initially took the wrong route (despite my knowledge of the park), upwards and towards the center of the forest, past stately spruces and red oaks, yet through chewed up municipal forest, motorcycle ruts in the dirt and broken glass on the trail. The mosquitoes were so harsh that Neil and I felt nearly broken in spirit, as if we were victims of a plaque—there was simply no end in site. We felt doomed. We switched back through a meadow that was surrounded on its sides by white pines. There used to be a great-horned owl nest in these pines, and I looked up briefly, but saw nothing. This was not post oak territory; they could not compete for space with the hardy white pines, red oaks, and tulip poplars.

We re-directed towards the water, down to the shore, where the trees got smaller and less elegant, and Neil then walked out past a collection of trash (laundry detergent cartons and Coke cans) and onto the barnacle-scarred rocks. He squinted in the blinding sun, put his hand over his eyes, and surveyed the trees. Neil looks like one of the early Beatles, with straight dark hair, a bit of a bowl cut, deep set black eyes, a sharp nose—and their manner too, excited and smart. He looked, at this moment, almost insane, his face disfigured and swollen with pimples and bites, his pants hanging loosely on his hips, his flannel shirt buttoned up to the neck. He turned his head from side to side, and then said, “There,” and pointed. “It’s just the type of tattered tree I am looking for.” Its crown was flat and thin, sickly, and its lower branches were twisted and split, the darkening and debilitating age marks of time.

He headed back into the forest. Between the tree and him, however, lay a glade of poison ivy, fluttering groundcover with wicked intentions. I never get the stuff, but was scared of it anyway. Neil said he was quite sensitive to the poison, but then waded in, and I could almost visualize the moist adhesive toxin saturating his pants. When he got to the tree he looked it up and down, put his hand on the bark, put his ear briefly to the trunk. He turned back to me and smiled, as if to say, “good find.” He then took out his tree corer, felt for a point, and inserted it into its trunk and began to twist, the drill churning through the center of the tree, flakes of sawdust falling to the ground.

Bleached and whacked by salty winds for centuries, this post oak had the typical low branching of a worn down tree; it was bottom-heavy, hunched over, and tired. It had lived its life here on the forest edge, on one side competing for branch space with other trees and on the other side enduring ocean storms. There were scars of fire burns, and cankers, and chipped away bark. This tree stood in contrast to some of the giant white oaks and tulip poplars that were of similar ages. These giants resided in the inner forest away from the direct winds and in soils that were richer than the xeric soils that the Pelham Bay post oaks had evolved in, dry sandy thin and stingy earth that loses its water quickly. They were unglamorous survivors, a rich existence of scars and bruises; and therefore, in this wood was Neil’s best data—of a full complex tree life—a silent diary of good years and stressful years, in which climate might be the cause.

“This is a good find!” Neil said. “Perhaps there’s a bunch more. I hope so. For guys in my field the stressed trees tell the better story. Limited wood growth reveals limits to growth potential. Why? What’s the reason? Where’s that invisible ecosystem effect or condition that keeps this tree, or species, from reaching its potential. Maybe its climate!”

A hot wind came by and blew the mosquitoes temporarily away.

“These post oaks are at the extreme end of their range. In the Bronx, no less.”

The bugs came back on a rebound wind and landed across my face like a fan of needles.

“Come on over,” Neil said.

I looked out at the poison ivy that stretched in front of me and felt a little sick. Some of the thrill of this adventure suddenly left my system; it didn’t seem worth it, the risk of these plant-induced rashes mixed with the mosquito bites. I was less tolerant than Neil of nature’s provocations, which is why, perhaps, I was a forester in the city and not in the wild. However, it was clear that Pelham Bay Park was the wild, so I lurched my foot into the sticky poison-ivy fen, a day out of the office and away from computers and meetings, feeling a bit feral.

When I made it to him, Neil plucked off a post oak leaf, held it up, and asked if I was familiar with it. I loved oaks, bold trees, their leaves sinewy and lobed, unfazed by handicapped soils and reduced metropolitan space. In fact, they were America’s most numerous genus, with 58 species nation wide.

“No,” I said, “I’m embarrassed that I don’t know how to identify post oaks.”

“Then take a look.”

The leaf was shaped like a cross, thick sections and yellow seams, with a globular line running down the middle cutting it in half.

“These leafs,” Neil said, and then choked up a mosquito that had flown into his mouth. “These leaves are beautiful.”

* * *

He turned from me to core again, and I quickly got out from the pool of poison ivy and stepped out on the rocks, the sun beating down on my cowboy hat. I looked out over the Sound. It was dotted and blurred with boats and broken up by small islands, framed by New Rochelle and Great Neck. For an instant I thought of diving in the water to save myself from a death of itching. Down below in the crevices of the rocks I could make out a lone man sunbathing, red trunks pulled up high around his thighs.

When Neil was done he signaled to me, and then started out into the forest, which made me back track through the poison ivy to keep up with him. He said, “let’s see what else is here.” We walked back out to the trail. A couple walked by smacking mosquitoes off their faces. They looked miserable. Neil and I smiled at each other, miserable too, but determined to find out how many of these post oaks had endured the times. He found a specimen that he didn’t like. Our sweet sweaty scents brought the mosquitoes to us like vultures to vermin. It was awful. We put on tea tree oil, to repel the bugs. We walked around, heads titled up just a bit to look at the leaves. I thought that maybe only that one lone individual had lasted the times. Soon enough, though, walking round the bend in the island, out where the shoreline slimmed down to a pencil line, Neil noticed a bunch of “standout” representatives. It was as if he had just hit the center of town, previously hidden by bluffs. They were collected by the water, off the trail a bit, a diminished but leftover community of post oaks.

Neil went coring crazy, going from tree to tree, pushing the borer into the center of the wood, using his upper chest and legs to get the thing in, like a kind of nasty oral surgery, the mosquitoes an angry veil around his head. Neil has collected tree core specimens from over 500 individuals and has measured, in the field and in the laboratory, 250,000 tree rings. He had said earlier, “If tree rings were miles I’d be on the moon.” Then Neil shouted, “a beaut!” He headed towards it. “Classic scraggly, old looking tree.”

I stepped away from him and thought about these trees that it was like finding a missing link. Like I had stepped into the Hunter Island of the 1700s, a time where I would have had to be cautious for bears and wolves, and where I would have needed to be prudent in my steps, an angry Lenape Indian around the bend. It was a time when I would have been dependent on my body and hands in a way unimaginable in my life now; my body rarely tested, but by overeating and a head cold, my hands deft at computer keys and Nextel clickers. It was dizzying, and almost impossible, to think of life back before the Revolutionary War, and how different it was now, all the luscious hardwiring in place. It was life more like a tree, less language, chiefly body, sensitive to very delicate shifts in the air, plodding.

When he was done with this cluster trees, we made our way out to a small grassy island that was separated from Hunter Island by about 100 yards of marsh. We walked gingerly along some skinny planks stuck in the mud. The air was filled with black particles of thick sandy dust. There was that crackling stillness of intense heat, the cicadas hissing, and a hot wind. We walked out to the eastern edge of the island, overlooking the Sound, the rip-rap sharp and greasy with seaweed. Neil and I had been using tea tree oil to ward off the mosquitoes, but it didn’t seem to be working. We put more on anyway. The sun was gorgeous spread out over Pelham Bay.

We then walked to the center of the island, where Neil found a few more trees he wanted to core. As he was hunkered down over his borer I asked what he could hope to find in the trees rings.

“They are the elemental material,” he said.

In the laboratory, using a microscope, the rings revealed telling autobiographical signs, not just of that individual, but of the area too. The width of the ring indicated how well a tree grew in a particular year, which if thick meant that conditions were good—good sun and moisture, moderate temperatures, easily accessed nutrients in the soil, low competition from other species for space and food. The rings could also reveal drought years, severe frosts, bad fires, cold summers, and intense winters. Insect attacks could cause light colored late-wood rings. Everything left its mark.

“A sudden increase in tree growth, a doubling of the ring widths over a 2-3 period, can tell us that a neighboring tree fell over or died and reduced the competition of the surviving tree. We can even guess at logging when a stand shows a sudden increase in tree width—their neighbors have been felled.”

The yield could be great for Neil, the wood samples revealing “forensic” evidence that these trees suffered from weather extremes, and were stopped in their movements north; the evidence he needed for his Ph.D. to be a success. It was his code to break, and this was what had brought him to the Bronx today.

And the Pelham Bay post oak story turned out in part to be this:

The oldest trees date to the 1770s. Neil said, “These trees were saplings during the Revolutionary War. The second age group is 200-220 years old, sprouting up just after the war.”

The youngest trees he gathered data on dated back to the mid-19th century. Neil speculated that it was during the time of the “gentleman farmer,” when the working farms were being abandoned for the city and other pursuits. When this happens, the land suddenly un-tilled and un-controlled, the forest grows back, starts to sprout out among the discarded crops, like people living in underground returning to their homes.

The post oak chronology, Neil said, indicated elevated growth between 1790-1815, 1880-1910 and 1970 to the present. These were moments when conditions were good. For these oaks, however, it was a life chiefly of salty winds (sometimes severe), deficient soils, and rivalry for space from robust competitors. Nonetheless, this oak community has grown steadily in population, in size, and in age since the 1770s.

In two centuries, thereabouts, the area of Pelham Bay Park had traveled from a primitive age to the modern one; the city rose up out of the swamps and forests, on its own evolutionary track. Some of what was left of that time were these post oak trees, such an unlikely but marvelous find in New York City, and now Neil had collected and catalogued their story.

* * *

A jet skier whizzed by, and Neil and I walked back to mainland.

He turned to me and said, “I’ve done a bit of fieldwork over the past few years, but this is the most physically draining ever. There are mosquitoes in northern Siberia, but when I was there I was prepared with a head net. I would have used a head net today if I had one. Siberian mosquitoes act punch drunk and are generally slow moving, but endless and swarming. Mosquitoes in the swamps of South Carolina are fast, aggressive, stealthy in their biting technique and dang persistent. These mosquitoes here in the Bronx are a combination of Siberia and South Carolina.”

I laughed out loud, the entire morning’s accumulation of suffering come to a head.

I then said to Neil, “I can’t stand this anymore. I’m going back to the office, and air conditioning.”

He continued on alone.

In Van Cortlandt Park I knew where the hophornbeam trees lived in a valley of white oaks and tulip poplars. I knew where the skunks made their home underneath a cluster of glacial rocks. I knew my way through a thicket of tangled grasses and muddy soils to the spot where the marsh marigolds flowered. I loved looking up at the night sky over the park, feeling remote, a white astral quietude drawing me closer to tranquility.

In Central Park, I was to help keep order at a Corporate Challenge, a track race around the park to raise money for cancer or some other corporate charity, the rich feeding each other. As an Urban Park Ranger I was a deputized peace officer, uniformed in Smokey-the-Bear hat, gray shirt, green pants, and badge, and was paid to enforce the laws in the parks.

It was a warm spring day, the locust and linden trees in flower, the leaves a rich lustrous green, little moisture in the air, and the sun shone on my cheeks like a beam of resurrection. I hitched up my pants, heavy with walkie-talkie, mace, handcuffs, book of summons, notebook, field guide to Eastern Forests, a pouch with first aid materials, and mini-flashlight, and began my tour of duty.

I was stationed on the drive in the West 80s to require, as best I could, compliance to the narrow margins set by the French barricades, funneling people crossing the drive into this tunnel, herding those who strayed, retrieving those who got overwhelmed or misplaced. Within no time, my feet began to swell and throb and my lower back became enflamed. My walkie-talkie garbled informational nonsense. The runners were grunting and heaving like wildebeest, hot and pale with determination. Occasionally, a supervisor would stop by and check on me, and I would smile at him as if everything was fine; but I longed to be back in Van Cortlandt Park, lost in its forest. The pedestrians—thousands going back and forth, on errands, to softball games, to bird watch, to picnic—resented the barricades and resented my controlling presence. And I wavered between professional politeness (“This way, Ms.”) and irritation (“If you cross over there and get trampled there is nothing I can do for you.”).

The uniform vexed me: I shied away from its real power, suspicious of the rigidity and shallowness of laws, but I also wanted to use it to get people to act in accord; a civil necessity in such a populated dwelling, and I had a dictatorial inclination, my desire for people to see things my way. In fact, I hated these events, feeling like hired help for the cause of globalization, the cheery pastel corporate advertisements lining the drive and pronouncing the goodness of consumerism, everyone so smug and comfortable. I strove to be a good civil servant, helpful and courteous; but I was secretly arrogant and complacent too, as only a native can be: Manhattan was my home, and I felt safe and in-the-know within its shores.

In the afternoon, the sun slanting down from the west, I let my body for the first time slump to decrease the pain in my joints. A woman and her dog then showed up next to me, as they waited to cross the drive. She was lean, taut, with a nose that was slightly crooked, and she wore a blue suede Adidas tracksuit. Her dog was a jack terrier, and he was off the leash.

“You’ll have to put your dog on the leash,” I said.

In city parks, dogs off their leashes was illegal because they could be dangerous to other animals.

“What?” She began to play with the zipper on the shirt of her tracksuit, pulling it down just a bit and then zipping it back up.

“Put your dog on the leash, please.”

“But why? He’s fine.”

She knew the law, but didn’t care.

“Because he’s not under control.”

“Sure he is, he’s under my complete control.”

Again, she pulled her zipper down and then back up. It was very sexy.

“Most of the time, probably,” I said, “but not all the time. Each animal has its moments of independence.”

“What’s your name?”

I pointed to my name-plate, aware that underneath my uniform and behind my badge was the soul and body of a skinny and cerebral individual.

“My dog needs the exercise.”

She had subtle lines under her eyes that revealed the edge point of youth and the beginning of middle age.

“So does everyone else’s,” I said. “You know how many dogs come to visit the park each day? Thousands, probably more, I don’t know for sure. But it’s a recipe for chaos.”

I could write her a summons for $100. “Unleashed or uncontrolled animals in the park.” But it was a time consuming and cumbersome process, and, I felt, a defeat of the moral power I wanted to exert by articulation.

“My dog listens to me,” she said. “I know that there are a lot of dogs that are poorly behaved and can’t be controlled, but my dog doesn’t fall into that category. He obeys, and he has earned this moment of freedom.”

“He needs to seek out prey, to live like his grandfathers, and he will do that here in the park. At any moment, the sight of a squirrel will liberate his domesticity, and he will run wild. In the city, I hate to remind you, we live with our discontents. No running wild, ma’am, for you and the dog.”

“What are you talking about? My dog has the right to be unleashed. Don’t give me an environmental lecture.”

“It’s not a lecture. It’s logic. It’s a question of space. There is too little here. When space gets small and everyone is crawling on top of each other someone is forced down to the bottom of the ladder of respect. For everyone to live unrestrained you need lots of space. The dogs must be restrained!”

“My dog off the leash does not disturb this balance.”

“How can you not agree with me? There are too many of us. It’s too obvious. We’re pounding the planet down into ash. Your dog is us now, a sub-species of human, and he is governed by our rules. He’s no longer in the wild. Leash him up.”

I felt like Clint Eastwood mixed with Edward Abbey.

“No.”

“It’s the law.”

“You, Officer.” And for emphasis she pulled her zipper down a little further, just above her cleavage. “Will never get my dog on the leash.”

A little spittle leaped out of my mouth from shock. I took out my summons book, eager to hand her the $100 ticket, to send her on her way with further debt. But as I was looking at the blank summons I realized that I didn’t know how to fill it out. I had been taught, sure, but I rarely wrote tickets, perhaps twice in my career (as a Ranger, most of my time was spent teaching about the environment), and would have fumbled searching for codes, revealing my ineptness instead of my power.

In the midst of my indecision, she walked away.

“Have a nice night, Adidas Lady,” I screamed at her.

I rankled for an hour.

Dismissed finally, I walked through the Park south, restless, still in my uniform, past the Reservoir and the Great Lawn, through the Ramble and its woody charms, down to the Lake, where the water was unusually clear from spring’s cleansing rains and the turtles basked anxiously in the sun. I walked to a point on the southern end of the Lake, which was shaded by a weeping willow, and I recalled that this was the spot, one of many as a junior high schooler, that I had gotten mugged.

Two black guys, the thing I feared most, had screeched their bikes threateningly to a halt in front of me. They shoved me under the cover of the hanging limbs and leaves, just out of sight, and with their hands stuck in their pants’ pockets and their faces so close to mine I could have stuck my tongue out and licked their noses, said, “You know what to do.”

For a moment I didn’t, scared, helpless, waiting for the first clenched fist to hit my face, the blood rushing to my head, my legs weak. I smelled their potent odors, hot with criminality, hot with the anger of injustice. But they just stood there, like benevolent leopards to my frightened mouse, and as I thought it through, let my senses flow, I emptied my pockets and gave them all my money, maybe about three dollars.

“And,” they continued.

I took my bus pass out from my jacket pocket—the bus pass that let me ride for free and wouldn’t be replaced until the beginning of the next month—and handed it to the bigger of the two.

He smiled, and so did his partner. And then they raised their fists into the air and over my head: big teenage black fists, with rings glimmering on their fingers. I closed my eyes, waiting, then felt a fraternal smack on the cheek.

“Thanks for the business.” And off they rode.

I stared at the willow tree as if it were a dangerous Madeleine cookie, and as I walked out from under its canopy, the memory faded away, back into the residual ether of my childhood.

I continued on to Sheep’s Meadow, and walked around its periphery to a trail that hugged the field’s southern end.

The path was shaded and muted (although I could still hear the whissh of the cars down below on the transverse) by a row of well-grown trees and a patchwork of thick shrubs. I was happy, alone in my own head, on a childhood trail that made me feel extremely comfortable, almost as if back at that point in life where my mother’s presence around the bend was pure sanctuary and connectedness.

Just before I got to the west drive, across from Tavern on the Green, I looked left, and behind a widely spreading dogwood shrub, in a semi-concealed pocket, was a man, fully dressed in a black suit, sitting on a rock getting a blow job.

The woman’s head was bobbing quickly, rapidly. She too was fully dressed, but had a beige cape spread behind her, giving her a shadowy Victorian air. She was on her knees and her hands gripped the sides of the rock for leverage. The man’s back was arched, his arms planted behind him.

I watched, both anxious and aroused. Rarely outside of my own sexuality and allowed to glimpse someone else’s, they looked weird, irregular, intimidating to me. But this of course was how it was, contorted, inflamed, elemental, and dangerous. I admired them, so free to do this outdoors, an act of ancestral rebellion. This sex play was far more necessary for our collective urban health than dogs given an instant of spurious freedom. That was country freedom (my world in the Bronx and Van Cortlandt Park), so take your animal there. Here the freedom was cornered, albeit soft and yielding, alive with slight acts of misbehavior.

Hiding behind the dogwood shrub, I inched closer for a better look, an officer of the law sneaking behind the plants to watch illicit acts. My Smokey-the-Bear hat caught on a limb and was dragged off my head, creating a slight but audible scrape. The man grunted and choked, brushed his long hair from his sweaty face, and looked around. He then saw me, exposed behind the branches, and we caught each other’s eyes. His were like fire. I would have thought he wanted to be watched. The woman lifted her mouth, wiped away some spittle, and gathered her cape around her waist. He then sheathed his penis, and they walked past me, pushing aside the branches. She said, “You twerp.”

I laughed out loud and looked out over Sheep’s Meadow at all the people—my native island people—and felt gleeful, in tune with the world, sole witness to a private act in one of the few concealed open spaces left in the abounding city. I walked to the subway and took it north, and soon landed back in my lonely topography in the far west Bronx.

The sun is burning through the misty clouds, slowly warming up the forest – the forest, my home, that I love so well. Small birds sing loudly from the branches of trees, their lungs filled with sweet yearning. Crows, who kind of piss me off, watch the forest like it’s their own. Insects – buzz, buzz, buzz, it can get to me – buzz around. Acorns, catkins, flowers, cones – all good food. The soil is moist and acid. A chipmunk, that nervous beast, flits about in the ground cover. A forlorn snake is hoping to eat the chipmunk, and he watches from between the grasses, his silky eyes alert. Energy and resources are moved around and consumed in this community; traded, exchanged, purchased, exhausted, and recycled. In this village, individuals, all my neighbors and acquaintances, are heedful and vigilant, because relationships require diplomacy.

And I wonder, what the hell is going on here? I am lightheaded, weary, dizzy, whereas I am usually sharp. The bobcat, on the other hand, pushes his body low to the ground, raises his rump in the air, ready to continue fighting. He is not unscathed, however. His fur is mangled and scratched, soil, bark, leaves, petals mixed between his spots and tawny hair. Blood is painted on his face, my blood. I have not fought without vigor and pride. But don’t you think that there is enough blood spilled? Life, on the whole, should be peaceful, productive; animals should have a broad margin in their residence on earth. I love the sun too much. I love the early night with the young moon streaked across the lake. I love the taste of snail, and frog. I love a good female. But the stupid cat is coiled, ready to spring, like his life depends upon killing me. What a schmuck!

An hour ago, the sky had been dark, tiny dots of moonlight like the spots on a wood thrush. I was face to face with my woman. The bats had gone home, thank god; and I was randy. I was faced again with the need to spill my seed. There she was, one of my many pretty chubby fine-scented females. We had just screwed, but I suddenly wanted to do it again, for good measure, and clearly so did she. A few snout rubs – a little pungent intimacy buoys the mating – and that was enough. She rocked on her haunches, and in I went, her ribs spilling from side to side. I jimmied and jammied, my whole body crystallized into a swinging horse (I love mixed metaphors, being a raccoon) of pleasure and power. I am feeling the charge, the need, the purpose. She is smelling so ripe and feral. This is life, right? And it’s made for reproduction, right? The more offspring you leave the better your chance of conquering the world! Right? Yes, that’s what it’s all about: Triumph! The triumph of the sperm. (Oh, sweet everyday. Don’t leave me yet, don’t let the bobcat take it from me!) Then, wham, seconds later, I reached the turning point, and she ground her teeth and let out a convicted snort. I felt like I had purged my soul, of everything. Then my soul was tired of her.

So I go out into the night to forage. Perhaps some berries, snails, worms (they are low-grade meals, but cheap, real cheap). Maybe even a frog. A hearty meal for a hearty guy. I feel good. Light. Empty. Unburdened. Carefree. I know the bobcat is around. He’s a touchy dimwitted guy. Macho through and through, everything an insult, always wanting to fight, paranoid as fuck. So I keep my sniffer alert for his smell. I try and keep my distance. I don’t need the trouble. Once, we ran up face to face, both eyeing a moist and delicious frog. Usually, I would back off, let him have his way. You know, in this violent world a little humility and retreat go a long way. But I saw that frog first, and I had been thinking frog all night. Frog was in lodged in my taste buds, and I wanted that old juicy green thing. And then, there’s Mr. Bobcat, all smart-looking and orange, his eyes shining, ears pointed and ridiculous. Well, fuck him, not tonight, I said; tonight, he must bow to me. So we both go for the frog, and of course, in our competition, the frog gets away, and the stupid cat blames it on me, and cuffs me in the head. Just like that. I was going to cuff him back, but I said to myself, not now, not yet. So I withdrew back into the woods, feeling, I must confess, belittled and small.

See, I am at the peak of my life. I have several kids and several females. I live in a luxurious leaf-filled den high up in a sugar maple tree. I am healthy, strong, weigh a good twenty-five pounds. I am fit, keen, all-in-all a robust individual. I know what is good. Eating, mating, soaking in the lazy sun from atop a sycamore tree, the sweet taste of aster and cone flower, the wind rushing through the bluestem and goldenrod, a transparent and buoyant mind, a feeling of belonging. The bobcat must know this. How can’t he? It is painfully obvious. He had just fathered kittens (I watch him, always.) He is young, reckless, careless, so much to live for. He too weighs about twenty-five pounds, and lives in a fine enviable home in a crevice between some rocks. So why? Why the ignorance?

I’m happy as a clam (mixed raccoon metaphors, I never pass them up). I just released my gene material into a strong fleshy female. I’ve got the taste of frog in my mouth, a little saliva at my lips. I am strolling, moving about my sweet forest home, headed for the lake, when I get a strong whiff of the cat.

Now, we are, of course, neighbors in this community. We share the resources, walk the same trails, use the same watering holes, hunt the same terrain, frequent the same trees; hope for good weather and healthy vegetation, know the landscape with equal intimacy. It is, dare I say the obvious, our home! We both keep our distance from that strange bipedal animal that loves to build and build and build (making the beaver look minor-league), making a racket, so much noise. They are a flustered group. Clearly, this species is crazy. I’ve seen it before, in fact. Impatient fuck-all behavior; ass-kicking and ass-whopping. But it don’t last long. It just doesn’t. Something unexpected comes along. And then the party is over. At any rate, these animals like to harass us, both me and the cat (we are connected here), and they do seem to have these incredible – I don’t know the word really – things, things that kill you real quick. Many of my cousins have died because of these things. Same with the cat (and again, we have some deep connection here. If only that idiot would recognize this). So, we both keep our distance from these mad individuals.

I smell the cat, but I’m more interested in the other things I’m smelling. Fish smells, fruits smells, worm smells, seed smells, flower smells, insect smells, shit smells, smells of my cousins, smells of those females (shit, can’t get them off my mind), frog smells. I’m an epicurean of sorts. A good eater, picky but also a generalist. I think, so much life has passed. My mother is dead. Never knew my father. I got several offspring. I have eaten thousands of meals, walked thousands of miles, slept thousands of hours, have lived among these animals for years, like them all, even though I don’t really need their company, have looked up into the stars, have felt the soft rain, have tasted peat moss and beetle, have fought my competitors well, have been smart, all-in-all. I have lived every moment as if it were all of eternity.

And then, suddenly, lost in my reverie, the moon a silky veil, the bobcat is standing above me. My great peace interrupted by fear. Weaknesses, enemies, they ruin it all. We just look at each other. This is it, I sense, the showdown. The stupid, macho, thoughtless, over-sensitive, tacky, show-off cat. We just stare. The sun begins to rise, a few faint streaks splintering the night sky. The space between night and day, so innocent and tender, is here. And I sense bad things.

I just wanted to go home. And the bobcat should want the same. I stepped forward, trying to move around him, but he snarled. Nothing to gain. Nothing to settle. But we fight anyway. Fear, fears, fears, nothing else but your fears. Then, soon, nothing is left. All the ripe sweet inside is blackened and tarred, corroded. Nothing stirs but the infinite draining intensity of your inner battle. It all closes down.

And yet, right here, in front of my eyes the sky was turning orange and blue. Those love-sick birds were singing, the flies buzzing, the bees hovering above flowers, crows landing heavily on branches, lady bugs mating, shrews toiling, the soil rumbling with activity, the trees so tall and elegant. What more do I have to say! Do I have to get corny? The flowers, baby, the pretty birds, serenity, the ocean, the universe. Get it Mr. Bobcat?

But the bobcat was obviously in no mood to back down. I moved again, carefully, trying to give off an air of submission; but he misinterpreted, as always, and hissed and then sprung, landing right next to me. And fuck those instincts. I went up on my hind legs and growled. Nature has filled us up with the impulsive. I have no beef here (another mixed metaphor, there are many). I didn’t need reflex here, I needed my logic. But no, nature is too strong, the blood filled with pre-Cambrian days, where thought was non-existent and your only hope strong genes, strong bones, and sharp instincts. Life is different now. We have discovered luxury and pleasure.

We stared at each other. I then lost my footing, slipped just slightly in the leaves, and this triggered the bobcat, who leaped and landed on my back. We tumbled down, over blueberry bushes, over exposed tree roots, picking up seeds, dirt and fallen flowers in our fur; we rolled down an incline, until we landed in the open space between the pignut hickory and the white oak.

So much was at stake, and all I wanted was to go home. But I also felt a bit berserk. Like, fuck this cat. And then he pounced upon me and sunk his teeth into my hindquarters. I howled. I howled so hard the planet swayed. Death was appearing from across the other side. My answer was a resounding no! I wasn’t done yet. I had much to see and feel. Much to observe. Much time to sit and rest. I pried himself loose and turned on the cat, draping myself over his body, my claws in his belly, my teeth on his neck. But the sucker is quick, I have to say that, his youth, his intemperance, his cat ancestry rising up, and he quickly turned me over. We became one, and I could feel his heart next to mine. Meshed together, we tossed around, grunting, beyond reason. Neither one of us, however, could get the upper hand; and we were exhausted (I know I was), and so we rested.

A gaggle of crows watch from high up in a white pine. These crows, they are smart birds, but they love misery, have this sadistic streak. Turkey vultures too. Bad omen when they fly around. The whole neighborhood, everybody, knew something was amiss. Peace had been suspended, and there was an imperceptible halt to things.

I feel the pain and throb of my cut. It hurts and I want to go home; but things have gone too far. The cat is now confident of its prowess and superiority. We stare at each other with aggression and confusion. The bobcat is coiled and ready to spring. He surges, and I lunge too. Our bodies entwine, and claws work the skin. I feel my hot blood pour down my side. I am ripped apart, split. I seize up, yell with pain, and release my grip on the cat.

What have I done to deserve this? Why? Fuck you all, particularly you, Mr. Bobcat. All this, and I mean everything. Every tiny little everything. All that sparkles and breathes. But death has made it over the mountain, down the slope, through the meadow, round the cold lake, past the frogs (no more frogs), through the hemlocks and hickories – to me. See, I still feel the pulse of life in my heart. Many females to screw and many frogs to eat. I have just understood the meaning of life. It was finally made clear to me. We are zero. I don’t meaning anything to anybody. The trees don’t care. The birds don’t care. The insects don’t care. The sky don’t care. Only I do. Only I imagine my life. And all that I carried before is removed, all the sticky weight of apprehension, anxiety, miscalculation, enterprise, and vanity lifted. I am free. Free, it seems, for one brief second. Don’t say I didn’t comprehend. And now this.

I was waiting at the doorstep of the Ranger station in Van Cortlandt Park, the Bronx. I had been an Urban Park Ranger for about three months now, and this was going to be my first tour of the Croton Aqueduct Trail. I was leading the tour with my fellow Ranger, Rich, who was a neatly groomed man with sharp black eyes and a strong square face. He was also a history buff. He was always telling me about the Revolutionary War, how our “American forefathers braved the mighty British to fight for their ideals.” He belonged to a Revolutionary War reenactors group, spending his weekends dressed in ornate war gear, traipsing around as a soldier. “Right here on Van Cortlandt Park’s soil,” he would say to me, “Washington fought part of the war.” (It was alleged that George Washington had stayed with the Van Cortlandt family three separate times during the span of the Revolutionary War.) The park was very much living drama for him. And he loved taking people on tours, getting them to walk back through time.

The sky was a slate gray with a mid-January heaviness, and the air was cold and piercing. The geese honked on the nearly frozen pond, the leafless trees swayed in the wind, chickadees and tit-mice flittered, and the cars on the Major Deegan Expressway, just up the hill from us, rushed violently by. Soon, a group of about twenty people gathered for the tour. They were amixture of families and people who liked to hike and local folks who loved Van Cortlandt and spent endless hours in it. (The Rangers got a kick out of these local naturalists. They were a quirky bunch, attending just about every Ranger tour – lots of times they were our only audience–and latching onto the Rangers as if we were family.)

A small twitchy man with blond hair and eyes burning with obsession – probably the most eccentric of the bunch – asked how he could travel the park from west to east. He was always asking this question, on every tour, which he attended almost every weekend. He was bedeviled by the fact that you couldn’t travel the park from west to east except by taking a dark dank tunnel underneath the Major Deegan Expressway. Because of this, we called him East/West Man.

However crazy, he was responding to a modern phenomenon: ecosystem fragmentation. The first roadway to cut up Van Cortlandt Park was the Mosholu Parkway, which extended west the great long boulevard of the Bronx called the Grand Concourse. Next, in the 1930s, the Henry Hudson Parkway, part of Robert Moses¡| West Side Improvement Project, sliced the park north/south. Moses, for about thirty years, was the most powerful man in New York City. Although in title he was only the Parks Commissioner, he oversaw and commanded the building of the infrastructure of present day New York. He was belligerent and arrogant, and brilliant. He foresaw a world of cars, and wanted to connect the Mosholu and Henry Hudson Parkways. Ignoring local protests, he constructed a cloverleaf of roadways on marshland that a local biology teacher had called, “one of the most beautiful spots, a riot of plant life and birds.” Moses snuffed the habitat out with blacktop. In 1956, the Major Deegan Expressway, named after the man who was City Tenement House Commissioner and state commander of the American Legion, gashed the park again on its north/south axis. Like the protests against the Henry Hudson parkway, there wereprotests against the Major Deegan. A portion of the roadway ran through a swamp rich in bird life. Local naturalists and birders filed an injunction, but Moses said, “We just filled in a little faster.”

The park now was a randomly incised pie. Species that needed deep forest or swampland migrated out of the park to points north. Species that adapted to survive in smaller tracts of land–squirrels, raccoons, crows, sassafras, to name a few–proliferated. This phenomenon was not localized to Van Cortlandt Park – it was national, forcing our bigger and more delicate animals and plants, into smaller and smaller corners. I told East/West Man this tale of human aggrandizement. But his focus was on the present, and he insisted on a path that went east to west. I shrugged my shoulders and we began the tour.

We hugged the pond until we got to the entrance of the nation¡|s oldest municipal golf course, started in 1895, just a year after the Van Cortlandt estate was sold to the city. Next, we walked up a chipped stone staircase littered with car parts, abandoned strollers, beer cans, and graffiti to the Major Deegan Expressway. We hiked along the Expressway for a moment, the bridge and its moorings rattling with every car that zoomed by. In the cracks of the pavement were tough redoubtable plants that could survive in just a speck of degraded soil. These plants ¡V mugwort, ailanthus trees, Japanese knotweed, and many others, most of them introduced from abroad ¡V had come to mark our inner city habitats, out competing native plants and dominating wide swaths of land. This mixture of litter and uber plants was integral to our modern urban landscape.

We left the Expressway, hiked down a patch of land where car thieves stripped their merchandise, scrambled back up a little hill, and then, all of a sudden, we stood in the forest, the tall trees blocking our view of anything resembling the city. Walnuts from black walnut trees lined the trail, American elms stood bolt upright, not yet crippled by Dutch Elm disease, sugar maples, shagbark hickory, and red and white oaks filled out the canopy. To the west was the golf course. To the east was the Major Deegan Expressway. We were in a tunnel of forest, a rich but skinny slice of wild, home to great horned owls, turkeys, downy woodpeckers, Carolina wrens, andeven foxes (whom I had seen late one night on an off-duty nocturnal patrol). We could hear neither the cars nor the smack of golf balls. We were far away from cosmopolitan things, even though the city loomed just behind us.

We walked along the Croton Aqueduct Trail, which started in Van Cortlandt Park and snaked 41 miles north, ending at the New Croton Reservoir in Westchester County. The trail was a result of the city¡|s desperate need for water in the 1830′s. Fires and disease, in particular, made an outside source of water necessary. Construction began in 1837. The design followed Roman principles, a gravity-fed stone and cement tube, which dropped a gentle 13 inches each mile. To maintain this grade, the aqueduct was cut into hillsides, tunneled through rock, carried over valleys and rivers. Like the city¡|s subway system, the extreme points of the landscape were circumnavigated where the more malleable points were reconfigured.

Water first entered the aqueduct on June 22, 1842 at 5 a.m. To make sure the water ran its whole course, an intrepid crew in a small boat sailed the distance, much of it underground and dark, popping out successfully at the Harlem River. Water then flowed into the city, over the High Bridge at 155th Street, into Manhattan, filling up a reservoir where the Great Lawn of Central Park now sits, and then funneling into the large space of today¡|s Bryant Park at 42nd Street. Soon, however, the system was not enough to provide for the city¡|s needs. A new one, triple the size, was built in 1885; it too was ultimately inadequate for the greatly swollen city. Now there exists in Van Cortlandt Park¡|s northeast section, a modern water system, mammoth chrome pipes 25 stories underneath the ground.

We continued north towards Yonkers. A crow cawed and a lone jogger ran past us. A woodpecker hammered at a dead hickory tree. One of the naturalists, a tall bald man who came on every tour, asked me what bird it was. I had seen it many times before, but my birding skills were primitive, and the name did not leap out at me.

“Come on Mr. Ranger, what is it?” he teased me. I knew that the other naturalists could identify the bird, but were not going to bail me out. Everyone waited for my answer. It was either a hairy woodpecker or a downy woodpecker, the downy being more common. I looked for a give-away, but I couldn’t pick up on the subtleties. So, the seconds running fast, I guessed.

“It’s a hairy woodpecker…I think.”

Everyone laughed, and then congratulated me on my correct answer. We watched black-capped chickadees and tufted titmice flit about searching for food. Squirrels raced around. Someone spotted a red-tailed hawk soaring above, reconnoitering the landscape for food. One of the naturalists pointed out the tree that used to house a great horned owl¡|s nest. We flushed out a pheasant and ran our hands over the soft luscious mullein plant. We then reached a stone building, covered in graffiti, which was the aqueduct¡|s weir, from which the water flow was regulated. Next to the weir was a manhole with its cover uncapped. You could look down into the old aqueduct, outpaced by the city¡|s modernity, and see tires and garbage. It smelled of age and mildew.

Then we heard a rustle. A large abstract figure moved behind the shrubs. Down in the little pool below the weir, where due to intense soil erosion and compaction rainwater had collected and had not dispersed or percolated down, was an old red rusting car husk. Suddenly, the car door opened. Out stepped a young boy in army fatigues, face blackened with shoe polish, carrying a rifle. He waved it in front of him carelessly, the gun unwieldy. We all took a step back. When he saw us, he whistled, and out of the shrubs came an army of kids, probably ten to fifteen years old, perfectly blended into the forest ¡V all in fatigues, all carrying paint guns. They stood up above the plants like large animals on their hind legs and looked up at us in confusion.

Rich and I, the Rangers, stepped forward.

“Stop!” Rich yelled. “Get up here.” Thirty kids unfroze themselves and started up the hill, guns placed by their side. Their faces were streaked with dirt and black paint, their eyes white beams behind their darkened faces. Around their waists were utility belts, holding knives, pouches, canteens, and keys. The kids, it seemed, were practicing for the apocalypse.

They filed up onto the trail and huddled together. The tour group was bunched up behind Rich and me. There was a natural antagonism between the two groups.

The kids, in their games, chewed up the land, denuded it, turned it into a lifeless muck. Behind us was a pool of thick stagnant mud, perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes in the summer, which was the direct result of these kids practicing their army routines. We all hated them for this. But, I knew, the city was a violent place, and you had to have some way to let your aggressions flow, to drain the accumulation. The problem was space. Natural lands were scant in the city, and so many people wanted to use them, each group with its own agenda. In the summer, the Rangers were constantly trying to arbitrate between soccer players and dog walkers, mountain bikers and bird watchers, golfers and naturalists, barbecues and hikers, everyone wanting something from the park.

Rich yelled, “This is no game! War is real! People die! During the Revolutionary War, American soldiers were dying every day to make this country. Did you know that? They were driven by the dream of a free nation. Right here on this soil, Washington¡|s men stared down the British. Can you imagine real bullets whizzing by your head? I doubt it. Stop screwing around and leave this place alone. Stay in school, keep busy, but stay out of the park: you¡|re ruining it! And look at what you¡|ve done to the forest here. It¡|s disgraceful.” Then he asked, “Where¡|s your permit?”

The kids were intimidated, their eyes watery, resentful.

A woman with large oval glasses and fat cheeks, buoyed by Rich¡|s lecture, said, “You kids have no respect. This is sacred land, all we¡|ve got left, so treat it right or leave it alone.” There was a murmur of approval from thegroup, and she stepped back into their safety.

Meanwhile, I had called for backup. For a moment there was an awkward silence. Then the kids moved forward, taking a few steps in our direction as if to attack us. The tour group moved backwards, alarmed. But then the kids turned and ran into the woods, tramping over shrubs, kicking up soil. They shouted and screamed war cries, and a few obscenities. Then two Parks Enforcement Police officers arrived on horses. The horses towered over the shrubs, the officers high up in the air. They had wanted to catch these kids for a long time, but had been unsuccessful so far. They listened to our story for a moment and then turned their horses around and galloped down into the dense woods like mounted soldiers chasing their enemies. The games had become a bit more real for these kids.

Then we were left alone again, back in our secluded private forest world. This was not a rare, but also not a common, experience in a city park. If some wanted quiet and solitude, others wanted noise and communion. Both had to be balanced. But it didn¡|t lessen, or cheapen, Van Cortlandt¡|s nature. It was all around for those who needed its offer of rhapsody and nourishment. If the search for a connection to nature was a search for a connection to your place in the greater scheme of things, I discovered that you didn¡|t need to make it a foreign journey: the pilgrimage could be right here in the Bronx.

We were all a little stunned. A blue jay screeched and a squirrel hissed. East/West Man came up to me and asked, “Is this where I can go east?” We all laughed and continued on our walk.

Nature has not been a central element in most New Yorkers’ lives for at least a hundred years. But walking home from the subway, visiting friends down the block, going shopping, a New Yorker inevitably passes a municipal tree. They are peripheral, usually, but sometimes you might smack into one accidentally, or you might hear a bird call and look up at the tree’s branches for it, or you might notice the flowers in spring or the leaves in fall, or you might find yourself suddenly lost for a moment contemplating this tall woody mute; “sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun.” They are silent reminders of a previous way of being.

Gil (not his real name) and his family have been planting trees in New York City for 40 years. His father and his two brothers came to the U.S. from Italy in the 1950s and worked for landscapers throughout the metropolitan area. For a decade or so they worked for seven or eight months here in the States and then went back to Italy for the remaining part of the year. However, in 1961, at the coaxing of Gil’s uncle, they decided to stay here for good and start their own business. With the company in place, Gil’s father, “shipped the whole family over. I was eight at the time,” Gil remembered, “and they tell me I cried for days. This place, New York, seemed so far away and unreal from our small town. I mean, I was being asked to give up my life for this big huge place across the ocean. I mean, it was like I was being kidnapped.”

In the family’s first decade of business, they were hired primarily by the Department of Transportation and the Housing Authority. But in 1972, a bond company brought them in to finish a street tree assignment that had been botched by a previous contractor. With the successful completion of that job, they entered the universe of the Parks Department and their street tree plantings.

This was just a year after Gil had graduated from high school. He wore his hair long, had conspicuous sideburns, played bass “poorly” in a rock band, hung out on the hot Queens’ pavement in summer, occasionally went road-tripping. He had a sense of life as free and untarnished. Yet, he was also a first generation immigrant, with a homegrown business that had catapulted the family out of rural Italy and made them middle class Americans; and ultimately he wasn’t ready to disregard this, and so after a short moment of sleeping late and rocking out he joined his father and uncle in the landscaping business.

For nearly 20 years, along the way marrying and fathering three daughters and cutting his hair and sideburns, Gil learned the profession. Then in 1995 (his uncle had moved on to start a plant nursery in Long Island and his father had retired), Gil’s cousin Frank, who had taken over the business with him, confessed he had waning interest in the occupation. At the same time, Gil was contemplating leaving the legacy to Frank and venturing out independently. Instead, he took over the family enterprise and made it his own.

Now, using the original family yard (where the company’s machinery and plants are stored) in Whitestone, Queens, his entire livelihood depends upon the city planting trees. Thankfully, this is a fairly reliable thing today. However, New York City’s history with trees is checkered, its commitment to them becoming firm only by the early 20th century.

In 18th century New York, public trees were very much a part of the city’s configuration. A century earlier, millions of trees‹whole forests‹had been eliminated to make way for the new settlers. Nevertheless, when the city became established, trees were planted around public structures, on village greens, along streets, and in private yards, as if in compensation for all the ones felled to develop New York. In 1732, Robert Prince opened up America’s first commercial plant nursery in the village of Flushing. Soon after, Samuel Parsons opened up his nursery in Flushing. This allowed for the burgeoning city to introduce trees on a larger scale. Indeed, the city’s growth and success made Prince and Parsons flourish; and their prosperity attracted other nurserymen to begin businesses in the area, making Flushing the plant nursery capital of the U.S. from 1798-1937. (A portion of Kissena Park in central Queens was the site of a former plant nursery and has many wonderful trees left over from that enterprise.)

In 1748, when Peter Kalm of Sweden was sent over by the great taxonomist Carolus Linneaus to inventory the plant life of the New World, he wrote of New York City, “I found it exceedingly pleasant to walk in town; the trees which are planted . . . the Water Beech or Linneaus’s Plantanus occidentalis are the most numerous. There are likewise lime trees and elms, but they are not by far so frequent.” In addition to the trees mentioned by Kalm, the streets and commons were full of weeping willows, European and American elms, silver maples, honeylocust, and horsechesnut. These are all large canopy trees, and those that made it to adulthood shaded the streets with their broad leafy crowns and created the “pleasant[ness]” that Kalm mentioned. New York City then was still a relatively small place, and the public trees were the link to its recent rural history.

By the early 1800s, the infrastructure of the city was in great flux as it grew to accommodate all its new residents. In an attempt to both contain and adapt to this increase, in 1807 the street grid system of Manhattan was designed. In laying this lattice, many of the community trees that had been planted in the 1700s were removed; and the old semi-rural town of New Amsterdam was demolished forever.

As a consequence of the city’s growth and ambition, small was passed over in favor of large, and thus street trees were ignored and instead Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the city’s first expansive piece of landscaped nature, was built in 1838. Almost immediately afterwards, in the 1840s, many influential New Yorkers started voicing their desire for a great urban park. This movement for a pastoral retreat inside the city ultimately led to Central Park, which then triggered the development and preservation of parkland throughout the city. It was not until the late 1870s, under Boss Tweed, that a street tree policy finally emerged‹the city fixed in large stature now getting back to some small details. The showcase of this effort, begun in the mid-1880s, was the formation of the New York City Street Tree Planting Association and the queues of trees planted on Fifth Avenue from Washington Square Park to 59th Street. In 1902, public “vegetation” was put under Parks Department jurisdiction and taken away from the Public Works Department. With the change in authority came new laws. Any mutilation of any sort to any plant was now a crime. In addition, any modifications to public plants or landscapes required a permit; and ultimately the permit would require the replacement of any tree removed.

In part because of the advocacy of the Street Tree Planting Association, and in part because of a general change in attitude about street trees, the city’s residents deluged the Park’s Department with requests for new trees. Between 1910-1919 the Parks Department planted about 110,000 trees and removed just over 100,000. It was by far the busiest tree moment in city history (until the 1990s, in which approximately the same number of trees were planted). In the decade before, just fewer than 20,000 trees were planted and about 5,000 dead or hazardous trees removed. By the time the flurry of planting had died down in the early 20s, there were an estimated 630,000-trees citywide. The city had gobs of money then, not unlike the 1990s, and so the city embroidered itself with green.

But then the creeping vine of financial trouble which culminated in the Depression wiped out street tree planting like it wiped out all other extravagances, which is the category trees fall under during fiscal hard times. From 1921-29, only about 1,000 trees were planted and about 2,000 removed.

Exacerbating things, Dutch elm disease, which had arrived in Holland from the Himalayas in 1918, found its way to New York City in 1930. A fungus carried by a beetle, it traveled over the Atlantic in diseased elm-wood crating. It soon spread to the American elms that lined the streets of many East Coast cities and filled out our forests. By the time the disease was uncovered, the native elm was doomed. Now, just a mere shadow of the species remains, with the largest grouping of healthy specimens in New York City in Central Park, along Literary Walk and along and adjacent to Fifth Avenue.

Robert Moses unified the Parks Department as a citywide agency in 1934 and immediately started planting street trees as part of his redesigning of the city. He planted London planes and Norway maples, tens of thousands of them, his favorite specimens. They are strong, willful, opportunistic trees that thrive in the sidewalks of our city. Without knowing it, Moses came close to creating a “duo-culture,” the two species dominating the street tree forest like two superior athletes dominating a particular sport. On September 21, 1939, New York was hit with a powerful storm. It raged, ultimately causing the death of 12,319 trees. More than half those felled were the internally weak and easily toppled silver maples and poplars. The silver maples and poplars were replaced with London planes and Norway maples, and removed from the roster of trees the city planted.

It was not until the mid-1960s that the city started increasing its plantings again. For more than three decades, starting from the mid 1920s, and in spite of Robert Moses, the number of trees in the city dropped by nearly 100,000. (Interestingly, although the total citywide number declined, the loss was concentrated in Brooklyn and Queens, the boroughs with by far the most trees. Plantings actually increased a bit in the Bronx, Staten Island, and Manhattan.) It was as the street tree planting program was just swinging upward again that Gil’s father and uncle committed to the business.

Driving around the city with Gil is a bit like driving with an urban Johnny Appleseed. Just about every block we pass he points out a tree planted by his family. Heavier in body than in his youth‹America’s liberty has fattened many men‹with sun-dappled Mediterranean skin, black hair, and deep set eyes, Gil isn’t particularly sentimental, but he is definitely earnest. He is apt to say, “I remember when we planted that tree 20-years ago. It’s a good strong tree. Look at it. Look at how it’s grown.” And for a brief moment, as we pass it by at its sidewalk home, we are silent. “There was a tree,” he continued, “that when we were digging out the hole, this is somewhere on Madison Avenue, I think, that this rich woman comes out and says we must bury her cat in the pit of the tree. I know this is illegal, or at least I think so, but she was so sad, she was broken up, and so we fit the cat peacefully into a corner of the pit and then planted the tree.”

Gil very much likes the idea that he has played a significant part in the green up his city. In a way, it is like being a foster parent. He takes his trees from a plant nursery (many coming for his uncle’s nursery), cares for them for a moment, and then prepares them to be on their own in a city pit. He wants them, like any good guardian, to thrive, to be healthy.

Today, he picks me up at the Olmsted Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, where my office is located. I am the Deputy Director for Central Forestry, the unit that oversees the planting of all new street trees and greenstreets, which was former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern’s program to convert barren triangles and medians into street gardens.

A few weeks back, we had visited the street medians along Francis Lewis Boulevard, in Queens, where we are going to plant nearly 100 trees between the Grand Central Parkway and the Long Island Expressway. The over a mile long stretch, with Alley Pond Park flanking a portion of its eastern side, was a grassy worn down strip. Impatient cars wanting to U-turn would trough their wheels across the grass. Jaywalkers would use the strip as an in-between the boulevard sanctuary, crossing from their cars into the park to play softball. The neighborhood is quiet, not lacking in its leafiness, but the median was pronouncedly bare; and the trees that we were going to plant was devised as the remedy.

Gil and I stop to get some tea and bagels and then we are off to the site. He tells me that I will really like the trees he has purchased for this project. A Parks Department forester always goes out to the plant nursery with a contractor to select, or “tag” in landscaper parlance, the plants that will be used on our streets. It is a quality protection that the city has written into its contracts with the private landscapers that work for us.

When I am with Gil, I recline in the passenger’s seat and let him drive. I grew up in New York City, but I was Manhattan-bound for most of my life. Now, working citywide, administering the planting of trees and greenstreets in every crack and corner of Gotham, I know the city in much greater detail. I can travel from the Bronx to Far Rockaway and in between without a map. Even though my relationship with the city has turned starkly ambivalent (I want desperately to leave and try rural life after 40 odd years of existence here), I actually feel closer to it now, knowing it in its full roughness and stretch, the peaks and spikes of Manhattan counterbalanced by the flatlands of its other neighborhoods, all its peculiar communities encased in their niches, all absolutely distinctive. With Gil, however, I am the passenger.

I turn to him and ask him why his family got into the business in the first place. He is quiet, thinking, then he says, “You know I never really thought about that much. But my family were all farmers back in Italy, planting orange trees and olive trees and I guess it was the thing they knew best. When they came here, they worked for other landscapers, learned the business. So, by the time they started our company, they knew what they were doing.”

He stopped for a moment. “I don’t remember what it was called, I think the Great Society, is that right? You know Kennedy and then Johnson, and all this money went into public housing in the city and my family had lots of work. There were all these courtyards and lawns to plant. I mean, this was America and there was money to make regular people’s spaces green and pretty.”

“Did you ever think about doing another type of work?”

“Not really. I mean, it was the hippie time and I had a few dreams of traveling. I loved Joe Cocker, Jethro Tull, and I played the bass, really bad,” he makes sure to say, “but the door was waiting for me and I saw no real reason not to go in. I knew I’d have a family and I had to pay for them. Maybe I am too responsible, but I wanted to be a good man, take care of the things I was supposed to, and the family business was just that.”

“What about the hours?”

“They kill me. Sometimes I feel like I will die with exhaustion. On Sunday nights, when everyone else is resting, I’m going over the next week’s schedule.”

“Are your daughters going to take over?”

“It dies here, I think, the family name.” He pointed at his heart. “They are going off to do other things. I’ll= probably leave the business to some of my workers.”

“Will they take it?”

“Absolutely. They’re hard working immigrants, like I was, and still am, and they know what kind of money is possible here. They want fancy cars too.”

Gil’s back and hands are roughed up from all of the planting and the operating of machinery he has done over 30 years. Gil thinks of retirement in the vague future, but this business pays for a nice life for his three daughters and wife. It even bought him a Lexus a few years back, a pride purchase, the only material extravagance that Gil expresses.

“There was a time when things weren’t as good as they are today,” he said. “My family was young, and Bram,” he turned to me, “I thought, but not really, that maybe there was something else. But what else could I do? This is what I have been trained for my whole life.”

In the 1960s and 70s, street tree planting picked up from the lull in the 50s. The city then required about a third ($50) from homeowners for a tree. Clearly, this policy favored those who could afford it. Mayor John Lindsay, in 1973, committed the city to plant 50,000 trees citywide at no cost to the homeowner. Unfortunately, barely into the program, the city’s finances swerved out of control and the program was only able to continue because of a federal urban forestry program. In the beginning of the 1980s, the city fully committed to trees. In part a response to a Parks Council (a non-profit parks advocacy group) warning that the city wasn’t paying enough attention to its trees, and in part the economy curving back up, the city started using federal community development funds and city capital improvement dollars to fill out the urban forest. What’s more, the city started paying the full price of the street tree.

The current interest in trees is a direct result of the rise in popularity of the environmental movement; nature, first in large rural tracts and then in cities, started to be protected at an unprecedented rate in the 1970s and continues presently. The New York Street Tree Consortium was developed to teach citizens tree maintenance, tree advocacy, and basic pruning. Reflecting the culture change, and with a brand new tree-friendly Commissioner, Henry Stern, the Parks Department started vigorously planting trees along roads and in medians. In the 80s, just fewer than 100,000 trees were planted, second in prodigality to the 1920s, and over 120,000 trees were removed, the decaying biomass being cleaned up.

In 1995, using hundreds of community volunteers, high school, and college kids, the Parks Department performed a citywide street tree census. The tally was 498,470 trees citywide (about 2.5 million trees resides on public land, another 2.5 million trees on private land). The borough with the most street trees is Queens, with 217,111, 43.6%. The borough with the least trees is Manhattan, at 9.2%. The top five species of trees planted on our city’s sidewalks are 1) Norway maple 2) London planetree 3) Pin oak 4) Honeylocust 5) Callery pear. These five species make up more than half of the street tree population, with differing amounts and percentages in each borough.

The census thrust street trees into a new light. Dead trees are now removed within 30-days, thereabouts, making way for new trees. The diversity of species that are planted has been extended to nearly 50 from 32 in the mid-1980s. This reflects a broadening of scope in management, the change an outcome of the new crop of urban foresters and environmentalists educated on the literature of conservation and biodiversity (of which I am one.)

Interestingly, trees historically have not been part of urban planning. The royalty of certain empires (the Persians in particular) had hunting parks built within city limits, but ignored trees as architecture. Roman cities and medieval cities also did not consider trees necessary. It was not until 17th century Paris that trees were used by city designers to beautify streets. The French first used them along the Champs Elysees. The success of this project led to tree lined streets throughout the city, in some cases “greenways” along boulevards and avenues, linking parks. The design of Versailles, in particular, and its long straight lines of a single species of tree became the pro forma civic model. The magnitude of this change in the urban blueprint was enormous. No modern city, if it has the stability and funds, considers building their town without street trees.

The driving force for most urban landscapers was beauty, a French inspired model of uniformity and great canopy. By no means has this aesthetic disappeared‹every landscaper, in one way or another, is trying to insert some natural elegance into the flinty ecology of New York City. Yet, the traditional field of landscape design is now integrated with environmentalists and ecologists, professionals who look at ecosystems (the street tree forest is one) and try and balance it with biodiversity. The idea is: the more diversity of species in an ecosystem the more protected it is against severe damage and disturbance. The storm of 1939 is a prime example. If, let’s say, all the city’s trees were the fragile silver maple and poplar, the entire street tree map would have been erased. That more than 6,000 of the dead trees that next day were just two species speaks precisely for diversity. When there is turbulence (of any kind), inevitably one set of individuals is more vulnerable than another set, for a host of both obvious and subtle reasons. There is protection in variety. So, the crop of conservation-educated students entered the landscape field and saw the street tree maze as an ecosystem and began to move the floral composition away from Norway maples and London planes and create a roadway forest of greater heterogeneity.

Recently, a whole new set of specifications has been written into the city’s contracts with landscapers in an attempt to make life healthier and less stressful for urban plants. Tree pits have been traditionally 3′ by 3′, a tiny box for a large organism. Now, we hope for at least 5′ by 5′, if not larger. Slow-leak fertilizers and nitrogen-fixing fungus are added to the soil that fills a tree pit. Plants are rejected if not of high quality, forcing nurseries to increase the grade of their stock. And there now exists a two-year guarantee period in which all contractors are responsible for any plant that dies because of poor health. None of these changes imply that landscapers, by and large, of previous decades were indifferent to the quality of trees used in their designs. These changes are the result of a more environmentally conscious culture and their concomitant professionals.

Gil doesn’t grumble about these lengthy and legalese contract specifications. Perhaps he feels like a kid watched ceaselessly by his interfering parents. A few decades ago, there was more contractor freedom. There was less accountability. Some contractors complain more. Some find loopholes. One in particular loved showing us he knew the contract better than we did. Gil is no saint or push over. He is, at heart, a businessman. I’m sure he would love fewer controls, more room to play with the sides and make more easy money. But he still makes a very comfortable living because of municipal trees, and he is, like many immigrants, highly adaptable. “It’s how it is,” he says.

We then arrive at the site. Within a few moments a long open truck lumbers down the boulevard. It has about 20 trees on it, all lying on their sides, covered by a big tarp. It is a strange site, the big heavy truck carrying these baby trees who lie apparently lifeless on their side. It speaks volumes for man’s dominion over nature–these trees are totally in our care and at our whim.

Gil leaves me to organize the planting, and I drift off to the side to watch. Another truck is carrying a bobcat and bulldozer. He has a crew of about 8-10 workers, and they get into gear. They divert traffic by setting up orange cones, which creates a small traffic bottleneck and a few driver frustrations. The bobcat is unloaded from the truck and the operator begins to dig holes for the trees. The excess soil and grass from the median is loaded onto a truck for removal. The trees are untied from the truck and when enough holes are dug the trees are then carried by a bulldozer and maneuvered into the pit. Gil is like a conductor, his mouth and hands his baton.

Then, tree by tree, the median is transformed. From flat grassland to sapling forest. For me, sitting back watching, it is a grand moment. Both Gil and I, in our different ways, labor to make the city green. It is what keeps the calm, we think, when there is too much enterprise, technology, and arousal; plants rectify the city in every way, cleaning the air of pollution, giving oxygen, softening the concrete, moderating temperatures, attracting wildlife, and reminding us of our past. After about a week of planting, the entire stretch is now variegated with more than 100 young trees–the City and one of its contractors has mid-wifed the birth of a young woodland.

As it veers towards the water, the trail mixes with wet mossy woods with willow branches hanging over the path like Rapunzel’s hair, patches of skunk cabbage and pitcher plants, and a feathery bed of New York ferns. Soon, the trail takes its walkers into marshland, which is overgrown with reeds, sedges, rushes, and emergent water plants that flowerred, purple, and yellow in the spring.

I was standing on the trail looking out at the swan’s nest, which was built on top of an abandoned muskrat lodge. It was early spring, five months after I had started as an Urban Park Ranger. The skunk cabbage was in stinky evidence and plant buds were swollen and ready to emerge. Robins were back from the south, foraging through the soil. Male red-winged blackbirds sang their shrill high-pitched songs. The marsh was alive, after winter’s long silence, with their chorus.

The female swan was organizing her nest. Her big white body was a little awkward out of the water, waddling, almost toppling, on top of the mound of reeds that was the former muskrat lodge. The swan’s orange beak worked at the reeds, her fat belly dragged. The male was in the water, head buried underneath, feet and butt sticking up into the sky, eating vegetation. But suddenly he turned over and raised his beak into the air.

He kept his nose high for a moment, sensing something that demanded his attention. The female also stopped what she was doing, raised her head into the air, and concentrated on the olfactory message. The male then lifted himself up, started running across the water, and, like a propeller plane, took off. The female soon followed.

Since starting the job, I had observed this swan couple every day, mixing in with the ducks and geese, getting excited when someone came down to the shore and started throwing stale bread into the water. I figured that was why they had flown away so suddenly, the prospect of an easy meal too stimulating.

I turned and started walking down to the southwest corner of the pond, where the water was funneled underground. There was a little waterfall, a pool, and then a steady stream into the pipes that carried the water out and into the Harlem River. A group of people, I could see ahead, had gathered around the fence that surrounded the waterfall and pool. My fellow Van Cortlandt Park Rangers, Mike, Bill, and Rich, were also standing there.

In the pool was an adolescent male swan. He was treading water, his coat saturated and heavy, blood dripping from his wings and face. The resident swan couple was watching him from above, agitatedly swimming around. When I asked Bill what had happened, he said that the couple had attacked the interloper and had set him spiraling down into the pool under the waterfall. Hanging on for life, weak and pummeled by the waterfall, he was trying to keep from being pulled down into the pipes.

Originally introduced from Europe to decorate estates and parks, muted swans (which are silent most of the time but can utter some hisses and barks) have revealed themselves to be fierce aggressors. Some natural resource managers wanted to manage them through a hunting season. But too much of a political stir would be made if killing swans were suddenly allowed. So, we local park managers watched them with mixed emotions: they were beautiful and living, but they also symbolized the determined behavior of an invasive species. No matter how we felt, it was an Urban Park Ranger’s job to rescue injured animals. In New York City, the overt activities of nature – bugs (exempting mosquitoes), bacteria, mushrooms, lichens, and other small things that remained beyond view – were monitored closely by human spectators. No tree fell without being heard. No heron died without a eulogy. No duck vanished without mourning. No hawk fed without fanfare. It put us Rangers in an odd position. Sometimes, we wanted to leave things alone. And sometimes that included an animal’s death.

The crowd behind the fence – the ever scrutinizing eyes of the city – would not stand for our ecological politics. A mixture of joggers, dog walkers, and birders, they felt too sensitive about the park to watch as death sucked up one of its animal visitors. The city parks were very much like museums, living museums, and city residents would not allow one of the exhibits to be discarded. And in this case, we agreed.

Bill and I changed out of our uniforms, taking off our Smokey the Bear hats, walkie-talkies, handcuffs, and badges, and put on chest waders. We fetched a rope and a net. Rich tied the rope around the fence that surrounded the pool and then tied it around Bill’s waist. Dragging the rope behind him, Bill walked into the pond, out to the metal weir that sat on the top edge of the waterfall and jutted out into the pool. I followed him. Bill then tied the rope around my waist and lowered me into the pool of water. The pond, home to so many living organisms, was also a collector of waste, which was ultimately flushed into this pool and its linking pipes: I had been lowered into a toilet bowl. That day, there were several waterlogged logs, tampons, soda and beer cans, candy wrappers, a half eaten hot dog, straws, cups, and a McDonald’s bag. These were the visible things. I tried not to think about the invisible. I was happy to have waders on, protection against the infinite microscopic organisms of disease. But then I realized my waders had holes in them. I could feel my legs and feet submerged in water, cold and soggy. I looked up at Bill for sympathy. He had a round face, big oval glasses, and a sharp manner. He said, “Let’s go,” and handed me a net, which was at the end of a long metal pole. The idea was that I would net the luckless swan and hand him up to Bill, who would then hand him to Rich, who would drive the swan to Pelham Bay Park, on the opposite side of the borough, to liberate him in the Long Island Sound, where there was enough space for the swans to coexist.

The swan was on one side of the metal structure, directly under the waterfall, and I was on the other. Pounded by the water, he was losing strength quickly. There was no way I could navigate the deeper water (and I surely wasn’t swimming underneath), so we hoped to prod him into my range.

Bill jabbed him continuously with a stick. Irritated, the swan started inching closer to me. He kept looking over his shoulder at Bill, and then looking at me. Both of us made him anxious. But Bill was causing him pain, so he ultimately worked his way toward me. At what I thought was just the right moment, I leaped out from my corner, almost falling headfirst into the mucky water, and brought the net down . . . on the bird’s shoulder. Alarmed, he went back to safety under the waterfall.

The crowd sighed in disappointment. I heard one person say, “They’ll screw it up and that poor bird will die.” I looked at all the people watching me.

Mike gave me the thumbs up and Bill called down to me, “Let’s try it again. This time be more careful.”

The swan was exhausted, and I sensed that he was giving up. But Bill coaxed him out of his corner again with his constant jabbing. Slowly and nervously, the swan moved closer to me. I focussed on his orange bill, black brow, and empty eyes; I watched his stomach go in and out with each labored breath. And when he was close enough, I brought down the net over his head and body (the crowd yelped), and flipped him over in the net. He was so heavy with water that I almost slipped into the rancid pool but I was able to hand him up to Bill.

Bill gave the bird to Rich, who rushed him into his jeep and off to the Long Island Sound. Then Bill helped me out of the pool and I stood by the shore for a moment, feeling a little sick to my stomach after nearly an hour in fetid water.

I thought about what had just happened. This pond, just below the Major Deegan Expressway and home to the Golf House, was a tableau vivant of the past. And that was what Van Cortlandt Park was, extant history. Like all things, the park had its biography, and I was learning how to read it.

The pond was the chapter on the region’s wetlands. The northwest Bronx was historically dominated by water. It was sliced up and dotted with creeks, brooks, pools, ponds, marshes, and swamps. Most of the water emptied into either the Hudson River, the Harlem River, and a Creek called Spuyten Duyvil (Spite the Devil in Dutch). In the 1600s, it was a ford just west of Broadway and 230th Street that was the only natural crossing point from the Island of Manhattan to the mainland of the Bronx. It was funny to walk in the area now, with its elevated subway tracks, tall buildings, heavy car traffic, and dry cement land, and think of how the area was, just 200 years ago, so deeply immersed in and affected by water. Everywhere you went, water and its concomitant plants and animals had to be crossed, waded, and avoided. In a grainy picture of the area from the turn of the century, the landscape was dominated by reeds, small islands, slicing creeks, and, in the distance, the low hills of what was to be Van Cortlandt Park.

It was not until the King’s Bridge was built in 1693 that movement between Manhattan and the Bronx could be accomplished on horse or foot, allowing for greater travel and trade between the two sections of the city. To develop the area, the water was dredged and filled in, banned from its ancient routes, and the landscape paved over; its marshes, swamps, small islands, creeks, and brooks gone to history. In the park, Tibbett’s Brook, which started in Yonkers, flowed through its center, meandering around until it finally made its way to the Harlem River.

But when the land was purchased by Jacobus Van Cortlandt in 1699, he constructed a gristmill and sawmill, damning up Tibbett’s Brook and forming a lake, changing the environment forever. The water from Tibbett’s Brook, instead of flowing its course, got bottlenecked and stagnated, the overflow spilling out and trickling its way to the river. The brook became swollen at its knees, rounded out. The run-off was tucked underground in the early part of the century. And it was at this exact point that I rescued the swan.

Over time, the lake started to fill up with sediments, from soil erosion at first, but then pollution and runoff from cars, the nitrogen and phosphorous levels increasing and the oxygen levels depleting. Fish populations decreased, emergent water-rooted plants proliferated, algal blooms became regular, and the lake became shallow and muddy, fertile with nutrients, turning into a pond, which was turning into a marsh.

Despite all these changes and disturbances, the pond and marsh were irrepressibly a place of life, where animals carried on, with appropriate adaptations, like they had for the past five thousand years. Its soupy mix supported a countless diversity of individuals. It was such an active place, a living community focussed on the routines of survival, finding the necessary resources, getting along with their neighbors and protecting their territory, raising families, going to work.

The swan’s conflict was ancient, had happened millions of times before. Today, however, it took place in reduced space, where struggles were more amplified, where tensions rose high, where nature strove to beat the odds, and space was of such value. No more wandering swans intruded on the resident pair that entire spring or summer, as if the message was sent out loud and clear that trespassers would be dealt with. A week later, the female swan gave birth to four cygnets.

In most cases, though, a dead raccoon — even two — found in a city park does not trigger such activity. They are by no means anomalies in the metropolis and don’t usually excite such interest. If a dead raccoon is found in Van Cortlandt Park, a large sprawling park in the northwest Bronx, it will be left alone, perhaps moved out of the way and left for food for the scavengers and decomposers. In Central Park, however, the subject of dead raccoons is fraught. Collecting these recent corpses brought back unpleasant memories of a killing spree last February and March that took the life of 28 individuals, almost half of the park’s raccoon population.

Last year, one by one, morning by morning, a dead raccoon was found. It was baffling and disturbing for the people who work in the park. For most of these folks, raccoons are omnivorous wild marvels. In suburbia, they can be agonizing pests that raid your garbage. Out in the deep country, they are just wild, to be shot at occasionally, but mainly ignored, part of the landscape. In the city, however, they represent, in a way, the country’s forgiveness of the city for paving over so much forest. They are family, living and surviving in New York City with the rest of us, but also deeply separate, long-lost kin who deserve our admiration and protection. And yet it seemed we were bad stewards, watching the population disappear in front of our eyes. In fact, so many dead raccoons were found it seemed like an extermination.

The bodies were collected each day and sent for autopsies to Ward Stone. “We anticipated,” he said, “that they were dying from rabies, distemper, or some infectious disease. But the result of the necropsies took me by surprise. They had all died of bite wounds. In fact, the bites were so hard that ribs and vertebrae were broken.” So who was the killer?

An anonymous caller reported that two men who play basketball in the park were supposedly bragging about their pit bulls killing raccoons. That the unpopular masters of fighting dogs would test their animal’s grit and strength on a raccoon was not that far a leap for any of the park workers to make. Furthermore, when the raccoons were found, their bodies were intact, no half eaten flanks or hanging tendons; no food had been garnered from these animals. Perhaps, some of the Park Rangers thought, a regular round of canine gladiators was taking the lives of these raccoons. The theory was founded on a vivid and unsettling notion: a secret underground fraternity of fighting dog owners. Late at night, they came into the park, had their dogs corner a raccoon, and then watched — even gambled — as it was tortured. It was a thought that was gruesome to many people because it was, in reality, harsh, but also because it made them think of “coon” hunting and antiquated customs. This stuff wasn’t supposed to happen in modern-day Central Park.

Ultimately, from what the evidence allowed, it probably wasn’t. Aside from the supposed bragging of these fellows, there were no concrete facts to support this theory. No chewed up or abandoned pit bulls were found. No tiny Coliseums were unearthed. Plus, there is 24-hour police presence in the park, and they were on the lookout and had seen nothing.

Attention then began to focus on two feral dogs that were living in the park. One of the strays was a rotweiler/shepherd mix, a fairly large male; the other was a medium-sized female mutt. Stray dogs are opportunists who eat what’s readily available. In fact, they had been seen by the Parks Enforcement Patrol (PEP) fighting over a cat, literally pulling it apart end-from-end. Still, park patrons had been feeding the dogs regularly, so it seemed unlikely they would kill a wild raccoon. What’s more, no marks, cuts, or bruises were noticed on the stray dogs. Raccoons are vicious fighters with huge claws and big teeth who have been witnessed taking bobcats. The idea that stray dogs were confronting an aggressive wild animal just for fun — and winning without suffering any cuts — was incongruous.

Yet, neither of these possibilities satisfyingly explained how 28 raccoons could be killed in such a short span. How could half the population have been so easily sneak-attacked? Why hadn’t they simply climbed a tree, at which they are experts? Why hadn’t anyone witnessed this massacre?

With little else to go on, the Rangers and PEP concentrated on catching the stray dogs. They set up stakeout points, and on spying a dog would give chase. Hobbled by big gloves, a lasso-type of instrument that is used to snare larger animals, bipedal posture, and a crowded park, the dogs outran their human pursuers. Even when the male was partially shot with tranquilizer, it out-sped and dodged its trackers.

Then, on March 18, the large male dog that Parks Commissioner Henry Stern had dubbed Wolfgang, was finally caught after three tranquilizers were shot into his body. His female mate, who was not captured, receded into the urban maze. Then, in a shock to Rangers and other Park workers, the killings stopped.

“Secretly,” Adena Schwartz, Acting Deputy Director of the Urban Park Rangers confessed, “I hoped another raccoon would die just to prove that the strays were innocent and that the pit bulls were guilty. We had feelings for the strays. They were just surviving. But still, I was glad not to discover another dead animal.”

What had happened? According to Ward Stone, who had also favored the pit bull theory, “Rotweilers, particularly if they’re mixed with shepherd, have big powerful jaws that could make a bite like those that killed the raccoons.” In addition, he continued, “The raccoons were feeding on earthworms before they died. Mixed in with some garbage, the earthworms were the most recent items in their stomach. To feed on earthworms, the animal had to be out in the open, away from the trees. They got nabbed.”

When Central Park was built in the 1860s, the animals, the ecosystem, didn’t matter all that much. In fact, the wild was to be tamed into a garden experience. To build the park, the span between 59th Street and 110th Street was flattened, all the past it carried upturned, heaved, and removed, all its streams, meadows, and swamps gone to history. But over time feral nature returned. There was too much vegetation, too many niches to be occupied, for nature’s beasts to ignore the wild slowly funneled back into Central Park. However, it was a shrunken and abbreviated landscape that resulted. Species that needed deep forest to survive, from bobcats to bears, migrated to open country, forever banished to more distant places. All the big mammals that would naturally kill a raccoon as prey or competitor were no longer members of the ecosystem.

The raccoon, in contrast to his larger cousins, adapted to life in smaller disturbed tracts of land, and had proliferated. In the reconfigured wild of Central Park, an island of designer forest amid the looming city, raccoons no longer had to look over their shoulder for an eager predator or skilled competitor. As Parks Assistant Commissioner Jack Linn asked rhetorically, “Have city raccoons become so civilized that they have lost their wild behavior?” He continued, “Were the ‘unfittest’ being targeted and the ‘fittest’ left to regenerate a new, and cautious, Central Park population?”

This, at least, was the hope. If humans (as the idea goes) learn from their mistakes intellectually and psychologically, perhaps the Central Park raccoons would learn from their mistakes genetically. A new lineage of raccoon would be spawned from last year’s debacle and it would now go about its business with one eye fixed behind its shoulder, with a new found respect for its feral competitors. If the wild had been bred out of the Central Park raccoon because of the deceptive safety of the big city they were now being tweaked back to their aboriginal state by some domestic dogs themselves “reverted” back to an older way of being.

But then, a year later, two more raccoons were found dead on January 25. And by February 11, ten individuals altogether had been found, each new body signifying the downward spiral of the park’s raccoons. Every population goes through its hard times, but the safety net here was very thin. And unfortunately, many of the raccoons that died last year were pregnant; and thus a new generation of “cautious” animals was destroyed too.

The raccoons, anthropomorphically speaking, had hoped their Central Park life had returned to normal, where open grazing was safe and worries were minimal. But, unluckily for them, the nightmare returned.

All the questions that surfaced last year were repeated. Who was responsible for the whittling away of Central Park’s raccoons? Was it a new set of stray dogs? Was it aggressive pet dogs after all?

That dogs were doing the killing no one disputed. Ward Stone, who again was performing his autopsies on the animals, said, “The cause of death was definitely dogs. There was no rabies or distemper. Their death was caused by bites, canine punctures to the body.” And that the raccoons were caught again by surprise was also the case. “One of the raccoons had cake in its stomach,” he continued. “This means it was close to the ground, away from the safety of a tree. It was caught red-handed.”

This year three stray German shepherd-like dogs (two nearly all black and one brownish-red with creamy white paws and underbody and all between 50 and 70 pounds) were seen roaming the park. Again, the Rangers and PEP were mobilized. As last year, they gathered their nets and poles with the lassos on the end. In addition, they had purchased two tranquilizer guns. A day after the first dead raccoons were found, the “armed” group assembled in the park.

The dogs had been seen living in the north end, on a steep glacial slope behind Conservatory Garden. This area is crowded with small scrubby black cherry trees that are filled with starlings and morning doves in the early light. On all sides of this hill, except east where the Garden led to Fifth Avenue, are dense woods. It is a near perfect place for strays to live and hide out. If they’re being chased, the large trees and tangled shrubs are used to great advantage as obstacles. And there are many nooks and crannies to take a concealed nap.

The Rangers and PEP started their reconnaissance in this area. Auspiciously, a few hours later, the dogs, very much a posse, were seen. Moving in, a Ranger shot one of them with tranquilizer, but the needle fell out and only a portion of the drug seeped into its system. Still, it was enough to make the dog a bit tipsy. Tracking it, they finally had the dog surrounded by the compost mound, which was at the bottom of the hill. The “hit” dog, panicked and cornered, was running towards Jibrail Nor, who is the assistant to Assistant Commissioner Linn. He poised himself with net and lasso, waiting to be a hero. But like a defender made flat-footed by a swift and wily runner, Nor found himself discombobulated and the dog escaped into the woods.

In addition to searching for the dogs, traps, lined with dog food, were laid. A couple of days into the chase, the black dog that Nor almost caught, was captured. Early in the morning, the sunrise streaked over Mount Sinai Hospital and the birds calling loudly, the dog lay still in the trap. As the PEP officers were moving it, the dog started growling and barking. Almost immediately, its mates moved within several yards of the officers and tried to intimidate them with their growls and bared canines. Richard Gentles, Director of PEP, said, “It was quite scary. We were caught a bit off guard, and these dogs were upset and angry. This was their friend, or at least teammate. Luckily, they eventually retreated.”

Later that day, a second of the black dogs was darted; but then escaped into Morningside Park, which is about two blocks northwest of Central Park. The next day, back by the compost mound, the dog was spotted. Ray Brown, Deputy Director of PEP, ran on top of a glacial knob and took aim with his tranquilizer gun. He hit the dog in the rump. “The dog then charged me,” he said, amazed. “I was hoping the medicine would take effect.” Caught off guard, he was somewhat vulnerable, preparing himself for the worst. “But it was just a bluff,” he laughed. “It ran around me.”

Then the dogs disappeared for a while. Early each morning, the traps were checked, but they were inevitably empty. Rangers and PEP continued to roam the park, but the dogs seemed to be gone. Either they had taken a vacation or figured out that Central Park was no longer a hospitable place for feral dogs killing off a now precarious raccoon population.

Then, a week later, another raccoon was found dead and the female dog, with a creamy underbelly and paws, was spotted. She was chased, darted, but at last never caught. The mixture of poorly functioning technology (the tranquilizer gun had been giving the PEP and Rangers headaches) and her determination kept her just out of reach. Then two more raccoons were found dead, bringing this year’s total up to ten, but the dogs were not seen.

Ultimately, the dogs will either be caught or decide to never come back to the park. The experience, though, has taught all involved that stray dogs are a real threat to city raccoons. In fact, Jack Linn had formed a peculiar but intriguing theory. Last year, the female partner of Wolfgang (Henry Stern’s name for the male dog) was never caught. Perhaps, Linn ventured, “she had been pregnant with Wolfgang’s offspring.” He laughed, “It’s Wolfgang’s legacy.”

The population of raccoons in Central Park is nearly bottomed out. Throughout evolution, competitors have fought for space and access to resources. In countless cases, one of the competing populations lost out and became locally extinct. All domesticated dogs come from their ancestor the wolf. In the new urban habitat, dogs are tame and on leashes and raccoons had consequently lost their fear of them. Wolfgang and his successors suddenly and unexpectedly injected some competitive pressure into the Central Park raccoons’ lives and they weren’t prepared. If Jack Linn was right, these dogs, here in our Central Park, were reverting back to wild pack-beings. If true, this experiment was happening deep within the metropolis.

However, the experiment is necessarily doomed. In the country, we hunt raccoons, with the help of dogs. Here in the city, stray dogs have to be controlled to save some of the vestiges of our wild past. In particular, if Central Park lost all its raccoons, migration back in would be very slow, perhaps never occurring. If city parks are, so to speak, living museums of natural history, then raccoons are a rarer exhibit than dogs. Just beyond our view, as we conduct our high-tech city lives, nature’s dramas unfold in their great complexity.

I am deputy director of Central Forestry, the unit of the Parks Department that oversees all the city’s street trees. If a Park Ranger in Yellowstone is responsible for the preservation and safety of that landscape, Central Forestry is no less responsible for the preservation and safety of New York City’s street tree forest. For my job, and my pleasure, I think about New York City’s plants.

And I pictured the flora in lower Manhattan covered in a film of ash. After a fire in the forest, the trees and shrubs and wildflowers are all coated in a dust of embers. The trees immediately adjacent to the Towers, like trees in the direct path of a storm, I assumed would be destroyed completely. But nature is unpredictable. Small skinny trees whacked from all sides by powerful winds are left standing and big strong oaks on the periphery of the squall are felled. When I made it to “ground zero,” I was surprised to see that there were three pear trees no less than 200 feet away from the carnage of the Towers that had survived with just a few blemishes.

Pear trees figure often in my professional thoughts. There are about 500,000 street trees citywide. Each year, Central Forestry adds to this number (it’s not a straight increase—many dead trees must be removed) by money received from the Mayor, Council members, and Borough Presidents. Since 1997, we have planted approximately 12,000 a year. Thirteen percent of this number are callery pears (Pyrus calleryana), the tree most requested by New York City citizens and the fifth most populous tree on our sidewalks. It is particularly widespread in Manhattan, where residents favor its blast of white flowers in the early spring.

In the 1950s, urban landscapers discovered and fell in love with the callery pear tree from Asia. Shipped home, it was genetically tinkered with here in American plant nurseries, and then turned into a splendid street tree. It didn’t drop messy sticky pears on the sidewalk and cars. It flowered richly. And it was unflagging, thriving despite the pollution, the salt used to melt ice, the shit and piss of dogs, and the general ripe debris of the metropolis. For decades, tens of thousands of these trees sprung up along the roads of New York City.

They are not, however, without their weaknesses. They tend to be short-lived and weak-limbed. They have “poor structure,” the branches fragile at the juncture with the trunk, which can make them burst open or fall off during bad frosts and storms. And they have a dark furrowed bark that gets stained and ugly.

But they have, in the long run, proven to be a staple of street tree planting, its virtues outweighing its drawbacks. City residents don’t seem to tire of the tree’s glamorous cloak of white flowers; and when one household suddenly has a specimen on the sidewalk in front of their home, all the neighbors rush to have one too.

On September 25, at the Commissioner’s orders, I went to “ground zero” with two colleagues, Gail and Doug. Gail is the chief landscape designer for the unit and Doug an excellent urban forester. As we traveled from our office in Queens, life, viewed from inside our jeep, seemed regular. At Canal Street, however, the police presence surged, and we were only able to get through the checkpoints because of my badge. As we approached the Towers, the smell in the air changed from its standard car exhaust sootiness to a fire-laden decay. There was a layer of sparkling gray soot on the leaves, on the soil in the tree pits, on the surface of the buildings, on people’s clothes, flaking the streets.

Gail is pregnant, and her husband had banned her from getting out of the car and inhaling the impurities in the air. He had even restricted her from having the windows opened in the car. Being banned from something is antithetical to Gail, and she was near bristling. She is assiduously independent. She tends to trust that her strength and purity of spirit and enterprise will prevail over the world’s rottenness. To have to seriously consider being caged in the car while Doug and I got to venture into the “war zone” was like breaking the legs of a world class runner. She said, “I feel like a dog.” Self-pityingly, however, she accepted her husband’s logic and stayed in the car as Doug and I set out.

After showing my badge and snaking around a line of large trucks, we were told by an officer to go to the second floor of the Burger King to get hard hats and respirators. On the side of the building was spray painted “Morgue,” with an arrow facing south. We didn’t plan on staying long, so we just took hard hats.

If I had been able to ignore or block out what I knew had happened on the 11th I could have looked out at the devastation and come to the conclusion that lower Manhattan had experienced perhaps an earthquake or volcano blast. It could have been a sad, but sinless site. The rescue workers talked about sports and took bets on the next mayor, and looked fatigued and ponderous. In their midst, Doug and I felt awkward, like trespassers. We didn’t really belong. I averted my eyes downward as I passed the sweaty men and women who had obviously been toiling day after and day since September 11th.

But we wanted our look, we had come all this way. We moved closer to the toppled Towers, which looked like an angry frozen dragon. The folded and twisted metal all but snarled.

Then we noticed, on the plaza, perhaps just about 200 feet away from the Towers, three pear trees still standing, alive and unscathed. If you were to have hugged one of these trees during the attack all the falling wreckage would have missed you. It was amazing, really, and I was bit stunned. We took a few more moments to register what we were seeing, and then turned around and left.

The next day, the three of us came up with an estimation of the injury done to the street trees. It was an educated guess. The real damage to the plants in the near radius of the former Towers won’t be revealed until the spring. Most, we gather, will sprout their buds and then their flowers and leaves. Plants have been long adapted to swirls of heavy dust, to eruptions, to fires, to great disturbances. A good rain and a sunny day can usually bring them back to life. By all accounts, if not removed because of the clean up effort, the pear trees on the plaza of the World Trade Center on some sunny day next April will flower their brilliant white again.

Postscript:

Sometime during the week of November 5th, before World Trade Center Number 5 is demolished, the three pear trees will be lifted out of their tree pits and taken to a new home. First, a bobcat will remove the decorative wrought iron grating that surrounds each tree. For the most part, the grating is undamaged and will be recycled in street tree pits in other locations. Then a tree spade, which is a bulldozer with a circular claw attachment, will sink its teeth into the small hollow and lift the tree out. The entire specimen, its roots now hanging and loose like disheveled hair and the root ball a giant head of soil (this root ball will be wrapped in burlap), will be put on a flat bed truck and taken to a gardened spot across from City Hall and adjacent to the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There, the tree spade will dig a large hole and then the pear trees will be fitted snugly into the ground, quiet green reminders of September 11th.