Location: Swan Point Cemetery

The first thing I noticed upon entering Swan Point Cemetery were the bird calls. They multiplied and grew significantly louder once I was inside the low stone walls. Warblers, blue jays, sparrows, all darting about and making more birdsong than I’d heard since the beginning of the semester. The birds will always find the trees I guess. And there are plenty of trees here. The sign posted at the entryway touts Swan Point as one of the premiere “garden cemeteries” in America. Two questions roll through my mind as I roll through the gate on my bike: (1) what is a garden cemetery and (2) who’s job is it to rank American cemeteries? I soon find the answer to the latter question as I peddle slowly along the winding paths between the gravestones. This is a wealthy graveyard, the markers here are ornate and polished, some of them with large obelisks or marble-carved angels to emphasize the deceased’s eminence. The cemetery really is a garden, though, with patches of flowers and well-tended grass and impressive, stately trees. The paths curve with the landscape. There are a couple ponds with bridges and mausoleums are built into the hillsides. No one else is here, not surprising since its 11 am on a Wednesday. Swan Point looks out over Bishop Cove, an extension of Providence Harbor, and at the far end of the cemetery the land slopes down sharply to the water’s edge. I ditch my bike and walk gingerly down the slope, my feet sinking half a foot into the leaf litter. The sounds of the birdcalls drop off and I am suddenly surrounded by the dull hush of a thousands leafless branches shaking in the wind coming off the cove. I sit and look out for a while.
I came here initially because the concept of a cemetery, and a garden cemetery in particular, intrigued me. Why is it our custom to inter people in a peaceful, natural setting, so unlike the urban and suburban grids in which many of these people probably lived? Initially it was comforting to think that most people want to eventually return to nature, even if it is in death. Doesn’t our society’s choosing to bury our dead amid trees, flowers, and birdsong, constitute a testament to the fact that we still hold these things dear in some profound cultural and spiritual capacity?
And yet, upon closer inspection, I find this somewhat troubling as well. Why can’t we be bothered to make places like this for people who are alive? Why can’t we build garden neighborhoods instead of just garden cemeteries? I know many developers add a tree here and there, especially in wealthy areas, but this is nothing compared to the serenity of Swan Point, which could almost be classified as an arboretum. What purpose do natural cemeteries serve then, simply as pretty (but in the end superfluous) picture frames to accentuate the gravity of our marble memorials?
I find myself questioning again the true relationship of urbanized man to nature. It would seem that we want it present but secondary. We are the stars of this cemetery and don’t you forget it. Our names are the ones etched in stone. The Red Oaks, the Black Oaks, the Holly Trees, the European Larch, even the Weeping Cherry are all supporting actors. We want to control nature yet let it flourish, we want it to comfort us and be dominated by us, we want it more in death than in life. Perhaps cemeteries are a regretful afterthought then, an unchecked box on a lifetime’s to-do list reading: spend more time outside.
Such are man’s ambiguities with regards to nature. We want to be surrounded by it yet remain separate; tombstones standing solid amidst a backdrop of trees and flowers. But what we forget is that the tombstones eventually sink into the Earth and are broken down slowly and persistently. Operating on an infinitely smaller time scale, we assume ourselves to be the ones controlling nature when in fact the opposite is true. We are ants on a temporal ant hill who think themselves the master of the world, not realizing there is a larger world beyond the anthill. Once we are long gone, once the gravestones have sunk back into the soil, once the anthills of man have been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, the trees, the rocks, the birds, the whole biological heart of Swan Point Cemetery will keep on beating as if nothing at all had happened. Cemeteries, then, hold a dual symbolism. For men they are a testament to death, for nature, a testament to life.

Location: Roger Williams Park

Roger Williams Park is an enormous place. It is modeled after its more famous, more expansive cousin in downtown Manhattan. The landscape artist used the same confident brushstrokes to shape each, and it shows. The park is molded around grey ponds and gently contoured hills, imbued with a sort of unobtrusive variance that lets the eye slowly trace the curves of the landscape at its own pace. This way one is never overly conscious of looking at the park, rather the park presents itself to you subtly, so that familiarity is achieved without the awkward acknowledgement of separation between observer and observed. In other words, this park consumes people effortlessly, makes them forget about themselves for a moment.
Roger Williams can be taken in whole or in parts, with enough detail to satisfy the mind and enough simplicity to satisfy the soul. Today the somber apprehension of winter is particularly conducive to the latter. It is the last day of November, the grey sky and steady rain freeze the park into stillness, the molecules in the ground and the trees vibrating less and less as winter approaches. The landscape is so still that every unexpected movement, three geese darting across the sky, a family of ducks circling slowly in the shallows, the gentle rippling of a gust of wind on the water, is especially poignant. A single white birch stands stock still, bent over the water like an old man lost in thought.
There are few actual old men here today, or, for that matter, many people at all. Winter is a time of hibernation and indeed the only species I see during my visit are migratory birds (Canada Geese, Wood Duck, American Black Duck, Northern Pintail). These physical changes in the land and its inhabitants bring about corollary changes in the urbanites who visit the park. There are much fewer now, and those that have come have come for an express purpose, much like the Geese huddled noiselessly in the rain. Park visitors on rainy winter days have come to think, to soak up the spiritual sustenance of a rolling, grey landscape. There is less roller-skating and dog-walking and more sitting and thinking; the people start to blend in with the winter stillness. The hills and the ponds, and the little islands covered in stands of birch and maple welcome them in, eyes first, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Which is funny because the whole park is manmade. The hills, the ponds, the islands, everything. If India Point Park represented a careful shaping and municipalization of nature, Roger Williams Park represents a respectful yet artificial enhancement of nature. The space between the trees, the slope of the banks, the ratio of forest cover to open grass, all calculated to highlight nature’s most aesthetically pleasing and serene elements, without deviating enough to reveal the park‘s artifice. The park is a painting so natural and apparently effortless that we are sucked in without much thought of the actual painter. But where does one draw the line between nature and park? Does human intention and planning automatically turn the landscape into a beautiful impostor? And so what if it does? For those of us who live in primarily urban environments, maybe skillful approximations are the best we can hope for.

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.

Location: Not Mashapaug Pond

Mashapaug Pond is arguably the most controversial body of water in the greater Providence area. The pond is one of the most heavily polluted in the state, the former site of a Textron-owned silver manufacturing plant that closed decades ago but has left a legacy of lead and other toxic pollutants in the soils and groundwater of the surrounding area. Recently, the brand new Adelaide High School building was erected on the contaminated site, and many children have developed asthma and other sicknesses as a result. Since the neighborhood is predominantly working-class and African-American, many see this as an environmental justice issue and have sued the city of Providence for endangering the children.
When I heard about the pond in class I decided immediately that this would be a brilliant place to go to examine the often tense interactions between people, the environment, and urban development. So, as usual, I hopped on my bike, off on another one of my weekly adventures. It takes about an hour to bike from College Hill to Mashapaug Pond and I had forgotten how early it gets dark this time of year. It is around 4 pm and I’m still pedaling. It’s nice to get out of the leafy cloister of College Hill once in a while, and though the scenery is distinctly not nice in the working class neighborhoods I am biking through, at least it’s something different. One distinct difference I notice: there are far less trees here than on the streets surrounding Brown. Apparently their reassuring verdant wholeness I spoke of in the last sketch is a luxury reserved for the wealthy.
Anyway by this time it is getting dark and I still have not found Adelaide Avenue, the road that should lead me to Mashapaug. I bike up and down the street lined with the ubiquitous chain store sprawl that seems to demarcate the boundaries of pretty much every major metropolitan area in the country. Still no Adelaide. So I decide to stop in at a gas station and ask the man behind the counter for direction. “Mashapaug what?” “Um…it’s a pond, it should be right out here off Reservoir.” “Never heard of the place in my life.” And it continues like this for a while. I ask a woman getting into a minivan in the parking lot, I walk into a hot dog place and ask the kid sweeping the floors, I ask a homeless man sitting on the curb, and every time I get the same answer. None of them have ever heard of it. And they all claimed to live in the vicinity. What had happened here? How were all of these people ignorant about this relatively major body of water in the middle of their community?
Even if I didn’t find Mashapaug Pond, maybe I had unearthed something just as important. Back in the early days of America, the water source was typically the accepted center of town. A pond would have been a meeting place, a crossroads, it would have drawn people to its banks on muggy nights in summer. Apparently this had been lost in Cranston, Rhode Island. Perhaps as more and more development crowded the shores of Mashapaug, the collective conscious of the community got paved over as well, and the pond was lost in the sprawl. Perhaps this is what we do to the environment when we treat it as a convenient vessel for society’s refuse, we slowly strip it of its cultural significance. If you had asked the citizens of Cranston two hundred years ago where Mashapaug Pond was, they would have pointed in its direction right away. After all, this is where they went to fish, this was the pond that fed there wells, this was a favorite gathering place for picnics. Ask someone today and they will draw a blank. The only people that care about Mashapaug Pond anymore are those who are concerned about the poisons it hides in its murky, eutrophic waters. It is a socio-spiritual casualty of the area’s voracious urbanization and pollution. It has lost its significance. In our contemporary America, nature that isn’t assigned the aesthetic role of park or garden waxes into obsolescence. A hole has been left in the environmental consciousness of Cranston.
Epilogue: I never do find the pond. It is already 5 pm and way past dark. I wait at a RIPTA station for a full hour. No bus comes. I am put on hold for twenty minutes when I try to call the Transportation Authority. I finally decide to bike back to College Hill, another hour and it’s cold. I stifle my frustration and start pedaling. On the way back I pass a small street sign that says Adelaide Ave. I have to chuckle or I might start crying. It’s too late by now anyway, I wouldn’t even be able to see the water. I continue towards campus.

Location: Brown University Campus

The tree outside my dorm room window is slowly losing its leaves. The winter nakedness proceeds from the top down. Whereas a month ago I had perpetual auburn fireworks erupting every time I picked my head up from a book, now the crown of the tree is bare. Nearer to the base, the orange-red, hand-shaped leaves hold on determinedly, and I silently root for them to hold off winter. On windy days it rains foliage, and each week the barrenness proceeds further down the tree. A similar tree across the courtyard is almost completely bare already. Maybe it’s a different species, or maybe it is a function of its exposure to the wind, and the position of the building that surround.
I’ve been trying to identify my tree but it is more difficult than it seems. Today I took my Audubon Society Field Guide to New England and sat outside in the autumn drizzle, bending down and picking up singular leaves, trying to match them to the pictures in the book. The leaves are star-shaped, with five points, and smooth edges. The veins branch out from the central stem and follow each point to its apex. The trees bark is furrowed and rough, with a dull-silverish sheen in some places. Maybe that is just the rain. I could identify no nuts or pods that might give away my enigmatic neighbor. A sugar maple perhaps? A London planetree? Maybe I need a more extensive guide, or maybe I just more practice. This doesn’t bother me because I am drawn to this tree.
So I sit longer. I have noticed that the rain sends students indoors, which in turn brings the other denizens of Providence out. Squirrels jerk up the trunk of the tree, like furry little robots, heads turning with staccato rapidity. I notice that they never venture too far from the trunk, open asphalt being prime potential predator territory. The house sparrows, passer domesticus, that hop around the base also stay close to their only means of protection, of cover from larger, more threatening birds like the peregrine falcon I saw swoop down over Pembroke green the other day. All the animals I see in fact, seem to orbit around the tree.
This appears strange to me until I consider the fact that humans demonstrate similar behavior. I mean why have we taken it upon ourselves to plant so many trees on campus? What purpose do the great white oaks (quercus alba) on the Main Green serve? As superficial accessories to the looming brick walls? As quaint picture frames for an expensive education? I need to believe it is more than this. Why are humans attracted to trees, even when we derive no tangible benefit like protection or sustenance from them? Maybe we still carry within our DNA the evolutionary memories of when trees really were all this to us, that is we have an animal propensity for them. Or maybe we appreciate them for more abstract, human reason like aesthetics and serenity. Or maybe we don’t appreciate them at all, consciously at least. If you watch the students walking down the shady paths on campus, you will see that very few of them ever look up. This group includes me usually, mornings like this being the exception. Now sitting under the tree outside my window I think about the purpose of planting trees in an urban environment. We don’t notice them when they’re there perhaps, but we’d certainly notice them if they were gone, wouldn’t we? Maybe they don’t literally keep us secure like they do the squirrels, but as I sit here I feel an abstract sense of refuge. Spiritual protection perhaps. Another leaf falls from the tree.

Location: East Bay Bike Path, Bristol, RI

I decided to take the East Bay Bike Path out of town to Bristol to see if I could test the limits of this city. I needed a break from College Hill, I needed some quality foliage time. Back when Robert Frost was king of New England, this would’ve been the way out to the woods, a straight-shot from civilization which stretched one sinuous, pavement limb into the vast forest. Could I find any remnants of that? Maybe islands of natural solace still dot the coast of Narragansett Bay.
After having some trouble finding the start, I cross the river on Rt. 195 and I’m on my way. The path follows the old railroad tracks that used to hug this rocky coast. I switch between staring down at my wheel spinning away the pavement and craning my neck to watch the sky. It’s a grey autumn day and the silence is echoed by the rustling of leaves. My thoughts hang crisp in the air.
I find my first break from the city at a point where the path forms a lagoon, with water on both sides. Off in the distance I can see the skyscrapers of downtown but I already feel hundreds of miles away. The oranges and reds of the maples across the lagoon loom much larger than the distant buildings. Fingers of granite jut out into the bay. I leave my bike by the side of the path, hop a fence, and climb up one of the ridges. It’s covered in juniper, pitch pine and lichen. I climb to the very end of the spit and sit.
I’m shocked at how much I needed this, at how much more complete I feel without the noise of Thayer St. drowning out my thoughts. I bask in the fresh salt air. Across the bay I see some sort of industrial park but it seems not even to exist in the same reality. My little slice of nature is inviolate. I have temporarily escaped (although never completely) the reach of the city.
It’s interesting, now that I live in an urban environment I find I relish every natural moment more and more. I crave unadulterated forest. Maybe, as the world gets increasingly urbanized, every piece of shrinking natural land will become more and more precious to us. Is this our curse, to have our appreciation for something increase just as the amount of it decreases? It’s classic don’t-know-what-you-got-till-it’s-gone syndrome and our species has it bad.
The human tragedy is one of missed opportunities and repentant hindsight. The classic, Greek heroes of tragedy always realized their fatal flaw, their hamartia, just at the very end of the play but never soon enough to save themselves. And so with our people as a whole. Perhaps it is our fate to finally fall in love with the forest just in time to see the final acre slashed and burned. For what could be more human than to destroy what you love? And so the tragedy will end, in a beautiful, ironic apocalypse of contradictions, us holding tighter and tighter to the last vestiges of wilderness as they are slowly crushed under the weight of our uncontrollable progress.
I walk back to my bike as the wind picks up. I look out and see a single swan floating on the lagoon, neck curved, pure white. And I envy it, free of the blessings and curses of mankind. It could float on this lagoon forever, benign, unshakeable. Men and swans are different. Maybe we were always too passionate to have lasted long anyway.

Location: New Pembroke 4 Dormitory, Brown University

I wake up every morning in my dorm. My bed, my desk, my chair, my dresser, my rug, my posters. In other words, I am arrogant. When I think long enough though, my room begins to unravel into its constituent parts. And these will never belong to me.
I begin in what is, for me, the epicenter of the city. This would seem like a logical starting point to take root and twist my veins out into the soil of Providence. And it is in some ways. It is sturdy, it is warm, it is dependable as a place to come home to. It begs few questions.
But it has a hidden history that I am only beginning to expose. I will start, like I do each morning, with my bed. I normally take my comforter for granted. Today I think of the down that keeps me warm. Perhaps a decade ago it insulated the wings of a goose and kept it warm miles above the leafless trees in a November sky. I throw this aside, get up, and pull on a cotton T-shirt. On my shoulders rests a white dusted field in Georgia somewhere, back when my shirt was a just a bundle of fiber nestled in among thousands of its kind. I look into my mirror and I see the beach, the million grains of sand that, before they were melted down, served as a welcome mat for every passing tide. And the trees of the frame; stalwart guardians of the shore for centuries. And now the beach and the forest are gracing my room except they have been squeezed into the shape of a rectangle. All I usually see when I look at them is myself. The same goes for the pages of the books and the posters on my walls. Great forests squeezed into rectangles. The one poster I own of the Grand Tetons is especially ironic. Maybe the evergreens in the picture helped make the paper it was printed on. My eyes travel from my walls up to the ceiling, to the criss-crossing pipes. Back in the day they used to snake down into the Earth’s crust, part of a vein of lead ore, down deep with the earthquakes and the magma. Now they are painted white and hang still from my ceiling, channeling water to my emergency sprinkler. Finally a bag of sunflower seeds on my roommate’s desk. At one point they rested atop an enormous yellow flower that always turned its petals towards the sun.
I stare at my feet and try to rewind the clocks, to bring my room and everything in it back a century. Now my room is filled not with posters but with pieces of tree, not with mirrors but with pieces of beach, not with comforters but with pieces of goose. Why do we never say this? Pieces of cotton, pieces of ore, pieces of flower. Why do I own leather shoes and bottled water instead of the pieces of a cow hide and an underground aquifer, respectively? From now on I’ll try only to see the unraveled pieces. An entire national park has been squeezed into my dorm room.