Location: India Point Park

So far I feel as if I have not done justice to Providence. What is the point of nature writing? Must it always be environmentalist, politicized, message-oriented? Sometimes I find that some of the best nature writing is purely descriptive.
Today I sit on the edge of the river, on the rocks off of India Point Park. The park to be a small shipping port, with a wharf that welcomed several coal barges per day. I imagine it (perhaps romantically) as one of those quintessential industrial hubs, shouts of longshoremen, clang of metal on metal etc. And when the gears of the Revolution ground to a halt, India point was largely abandoned. Heaps of scrap metal lined the shores until the city decided to turn it into a park.
Surrounded on one side by Rt. 195 and on the other by Providence Harbor, India Point has that sloping, grassy look of municipal parks nationwide. Dog-walking parks and picnic tables and a jungle gym. Maple, white oak, and one lonely sycamore line the one preserve wharf that attests to the place’s history. The other wharves have been blown away or have crumbled into the harbor, their weathered supports still sticking out of the water like strange wooden monuments to nothing. You can see the tide-line based on how far the barnacles and the seaweed reach up their length. The shore is lined with typical New England granite, probably quarried and brought over here by the truckload, dumped into a curving shoreline. A brilliant red tug boat is moored on the wharf and, since no one is around, I jump on board and climb to the top of the wheelhouse. From here I can see the sun going down, it paints a golden swath diagonally across the water. A sea gull rests on its solitary post on an old buoy. It has covered the metal top in a bed of grass and it seems content with its tiny island home, bobbing in the waters off the point. Many birds are hermits by nature.
It surprises me how much this park feels man-made. The quarried shoreline, the planted rows of trees, the plasticized, fake-wooden benches. And yet all of it adds up to a beautiful whole. If municipal parks are the consciously planned intersections between natural and urban, I think we’ve done well for ourselves. There still exists a happy medium perhaps. The seagull seems to think so. It closes its eyes and lets the buoy bob it to sleep.