Manhattan approach to Queensboro Bridge

One of the most fascinating aspects of walking around Manhattan—not driving, because you have to keep your eye on things—is the sheer ingenuity it takes to make the island an exciting habitat.

I was strolling along 59th Street the other day just west of the 2nd Avenue approach to the lower ramp of the Queensboro Bridge when I noticed a six-foot privet hedge. Or maybe boxwood. It had been erected on a long run of concrete traffic barriers to conceal a maintenance depot.

Boxwood is common in the city. It’s hearty. Privet not so much. How on earth did they grow this magnificently manicured hedge? On closer inspection I discovered it was an Anchor fence through which strands of artificial Douglas fir had been woven vertically to give it the appearance of a perfect formal hedge. Durable, low-maintenance and fairly weather-proof. I hope somebody got a medal for this.

I marveled at the genius of this simple inspiration when a policeman glanced at me and decided that I wasn’t a terrorist sizing up that elegant Victorian bridge that connects Manhattan and Queens. I assured him I was admiring the fence and he told me he was usually stationed there and had been wondering about replicating it at his bungalow in the far Bronx.

And you don’t even have a deer problem, I told him.

Bingo, that gave me an idea. Tall rows of handsome arbor vitae that act as sound and visual barriers are commonplace in upstate New York, but the burgeoning deer population has wrought havoc on these hedgerows. In fact, deer damage is a big-ticket landscaping problem. Most nurseries can’t even sell some plants because they’re haute cuisine to the deer. True, deer don’t like privet, but it’s deciduous, not too pretty in winter when you need a little color.

So how about this Queensboro Bridge solution? It’s elegant, a lot cheaper than hedgerows and instantaneous. The deer will hate it, not least because they not only can’t eat it, they can’t penetrate it either, so their usual paths will have to altered and that will retrain them.

Hey, Anchor Fence Company, there’s a new market! You can even do the fir-weaving yourself and market the barriers ready-made. —Djelloul Marbrook

Hear me read and talk about poetry

Our national Bradford Pear Tree crisis moves me to these ruminations. The U.S. Department of Agriculture introduced the Bradford in 1963 and it quickly rivaled the sycamore in popularity. Its symmetrical canopy and lovely white blossoms herald spring in hundreds of cities and towns.

But it seems the Bradford has a relatively short life span, fifty or sixty years, and then its limbs become brittle, endangering cars and pedestrians. And, like the gingko, it’s less than fragrant. So now Baltimore and many other cities are removing their once prized Bradfords. The beauty is in bad odor.

Another reason I dislike the term flash in the pan is that it speaks of a consumerist aesthetic. How many times have we seen some foolish critic complain a book or a film or an exhibition isn’t up to the writer’s or artist’s previous work? Who gives a damn? I’m not up to Balzac or Alexander the Great, but that shouldn’t lessen anyone’s enjoyment of my few merits.

I think we should thank it for the joy it has given us, instead of lamenting its fragility. We ourselves are fragile and our lifespan is little more than the Bradford’s. We hope not to be unceremoniously removed, and so we should supplant the Bradford with thanks and respect. —DM

I’ve been dreaming about these banners. In my dreams the oceanic
Arabic script takes off and fills the sky with crystal ships and the carriers of the banners on the ground cheer and wave to the ships.

Why don’t we do something like that in Central Park— a vast poetry festival with banners from all the neighborhoods and their poets? Or in Prospect Park. Or both. Perhaps neighborhood associations could sponsor their poets. Or art galleries could participate. After all, New York’s art galleries have traditionally shown an interest in poetry. Tibor de Nagy Gallery, for example, was the first publisher of Frank O’Hara’s poems, and artists such as Donna Marxer regularly combine art and poetry in their work.

Let’s do this not only in the New York parks so familiar to me, but across the land and the world. Let’s remember that many of the people, including ourselves, who appear in today’s headlines of conflict have also marvelously contributed to the enlightenment and beauty of the planet. Let’s celebrate that in poetry. It will be an easy thing to do: poems in Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Sanskrit—all the beautiful scripts of the earth.

Poetry is alive and well. And not just in academia. Readings and slams are popular, and many art forms, such as rap and rai, which are not usually associated with poetry, do in fact embody poetry. So let’s bring poetry to the beautiful fields of our parks, as the ancient and medieval Arabs did.
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Note: Speaking of poetry, Kent State University Press has posted a link where you can order my book, Far From Algiers. And yesterday my wife Marilyn sent out e-mails making friends and acquaintances aware of this link. The response has been lighting up our Inbox, renewing old friendships and encouraging new ones.         —DM

Something is wrong with this picture. At this point it would be expensive to correct it, but the predicament heightens my awareness that a great many aspects of our culture are missing from the discourse we are reluctantly beginning about energy.

For example, we have been fiendishly building lawns where they don’t belong, because of some misplaced nostalgia for an English countryside which the Industrial Revolution ravaged. Developers habitually cut down trees, grind or burn out stumps, haul in landfill and topsoil and plant costly and inappropriate flora.

They ignore the topography, because they know they can bring in fill. They strip the surface because that makes it easier for their machinery. All this is unwarrantedly expensive and wasteful.

I live in the mid-Hudson Valley. You could argue that lawns are appropriate to the east side of the river, which is fairly flat between the river and the Taconic and Berkshire Mountains. But on the west side of the Hudson River there is little excuse to install pricey lawns, because the terrain is remarkably rocky, dotted with outcroppings and characterized by a famously complex hydrology.

But the cost of creating these anomalous lawns is only the beginning of the story. To maintain them we operate costly and polluting machinery, we pour tons of chemicals into the soil, some of them harmful to the ecology, in spite of assurances to the contrary from their manufacturers.  We fanatically poison the edible dandelion and crabgrass.

We should be landscaping consonantly with the topography, respectfully. Instead we seem to despise the topography, insisting that our properties should look like somewhere else. To this end, we exhaust endless gallons of water and gasoline, while polluting the environment.

This is not thoughtful stewardship. It’s destructive and wasteful. We can use pebbles, moss and rock gardens, among other concepts, instead of look-alike lawns. For the most part, our homes don’t look like English country mansions, in spite of the silly McMansions we have built in the last decade, and there is no point surrounding them by these expensive, hard-to-maintain lawns. We should, instead, study the terrain and adapt landscaping to it.

Developers who mindlessly kill trees and level land to build depressingly similar homes can’t honestly argue that they’re looking for economies of scale because their concept itself drives up costs and guarantees a future of prohibitive and environmentally contrary maintenance. Communities who encourage this kind of construction are poor stewards of the land. They are guilty of exacerbating the fuel and global warming crises.—DM

This is the key to the figures in this famous painting, The Declaration of Independence, by John Trumbull.

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The relatedness of things has always fascinated me, perhaps because where others collect objects I collect images. When my wife, Marilyn, and I lived in Arlington, Virginia, some of the recent immigrants who worked in our neighborhood mesmerized me. One day, chatting with a housecleaner in our apartment building, I used the word Hispanic, and she said, We are not Hispanic, we are Inca. The Spanish were oppressors. Once I had savored her practiced English, I understood what had caught my eye: so many of these people looked like wall paintings of the Incas.

I had a similar epiphany one day browsing through a National Geographic layout about North African architecture. Our own Southwestern architecture bears a strong resemblance to Moorish architecture in North Africa and Spain. Of course it would: the Spaniards brought it with them to the new world. And yet how many of us think of Moors when we think of Mexico or our Southwest? How many of us think of the great Inca civilization when we encounter immigrants?

I was reminded of my love of these synchronicities recently by an e-mail letter from our old friend, Tom Hester, a native of Lubbock, Texas, who worked for many years in the Justice Department with my wife in Washington and has now retired to Silver City, New Mexico. I had mentioned to him that Marilyn and I, like many residents of New York’s Dutchess and Columbia counties, are very conscious of the life and career of Robert R. Livingston, whose great estate, Clermont, is five minutes from our house in Germantown. Livingston, famous for many things, is one of the figures in John Trumbull’s familiar painting, The Declaration of Independence (above).

Tom wrote this splendid reponse:

Somehow it’s coincidentally significant for us west-of-the-Mississippi folk that you live on Livingston’s former property. Livingston was the U.S. ambassador to Napoleonic France who suggested to Jefferson that our country could obtain Spain’s previous territories.

Silver City lies in a half bowl, surrounded on three sides by steep hills and opening out to high desert that slopes away toward Mexico. When the Mimbres people lived here, they resided on a hill a scant fifty yards from where I write this. Their farms lay down below, for Silver City, like Washington, DC, occupies a marsh or cienega. It was a good place to farm the squash, chiles, beans and teocinte that they grew. The streams ran down from the hills, collected in the marsh and then evaporated as they seeped onto the desert. The village was a large one, by Mimbres or Mogollon standards, comprising about 100 pit houses at the time the drought in 1300 C.E. forced the people south towards their kin in what is called today Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Our street, by contouring scrapers or by nature, is terraced. The first house, built in the 1930s, lies to the east, below us. They did not have to fill, except on the back side of their lot, toward Silver City’s downtown and the desert beyond. The builder of our house, which is firmly set on rock, had to fill both the front and back yards: about eight feet in the front and 15 feet in the back. The yard and the rock patio still slope a gentle five degrees or so and we have a retaining wall, pierced with a wide stairs, that separates the upper back yard from the narrower, lower one where we have fruit trees. It is in this lower yard where I’m digging a pool.

The previous owners tended a lawn in the back and a xero yard in the front. I have kept the gravel and cacti on the north side but I have ripped out the lawn and created mounds and valleys for our native plants. Before coming to New Mexico, I had not heard of penstemons (snapdragons), but what peonies are to Virginians, penstemons are to New Mexicans. I have about six varieties blooming in our garden now, and each has a different way to declare: “Here I am! Catch your breath and look at me!” Bees love them.

Mentioning bees: We’ve lots of bees and butterflies, wasps and beetles. We just don’t have earthworms, even in the compost heaps.

Our eleven-year drought broke last year. For the past decade we had an annual average of nine inches of precipitation. Beginning in what is called the Monsoon Season (July and August), we’ve had more than 20 inches, including some significant snowfalls.