Welcome to another installment of “Dad, Interrupted.”
“Dad, Interrupted” is a weekly newsletter where I describe, in lighthearted, modestly embroidered stories, my misadventures as a family man. The cast includes my wife, my kids, my friends, my in-laws and assorted chuckleheads I bump into.
This week, I’d like to explore the world of nature, such as it is in Brooklyn. But as usual, I’m going to wander around a bit before I get there. Don’t worry; it’s all connected.
We are a recycling family, and by that I don’t just mean that we separate our paper from our plastic and such. Park Slope has a lively culture of recycling everything. People leave books on their stoops and their castoff chairs on the curb, they drape unneeded clothes on their wrought-iron fences and then prop their kids’ old toys right underneath them.
Often my neighbors will write “Free” on a piece of paper so there’s no mistake, and they’ll even offer tips on caring for the stuff. “A little Brillo and it will look like new!” — that sort of thing.
We are active members of this recycling community. We have found boxes of “Spy” magazine, an elegant wooden statue of an African woman, and a round wooden table that we’ve painted red and now serves as the spot in our cozy front yard where we watch the world go by.
I once found a four-foot tall houseplant sitting on the curb and I happily dragged it home. You see, I am a plant and nature guy, at least I pass for such in this highly urban neighborhood. I didn’t know what this plant was, but I’d give it a close look when I could and then consult Google.
The plant sat in the living room for a week or so and I’d throw it admiring glances as I passed it on my way to or from work or errand-running.
Soon, I sat down to give it a good look, laptop at the ready for identification. Although it took me much longer than it should have, I eventually realized that this plant was fake. This was embarrassing for a guy who didn’t disagree when people said I knew more than the average Brooklynite about plants and nature.
I quickly whisked this fake plant out of the house before my loved ones found out and razzed me mercilessly.
I call this week’s story, “Poacher Alert.” The events it describes took place some years ago. But like my fake houseplant, it’s proof that you can love something very much, even when other people know a lot more about it than you do.
*****
“Do you think we can grow tomatoes back here?” asked Marcy. She and Jim had just bought a house, and they had long admired our yard, with its roses and dahlias, figs and golden raspberries, chard and kale. Now, with a garden of their own, they wanted to do it up right.
“Well, that’s East and that’s West,” I said. “It looks like you’ll get decent sun. But to be safe I’d do just cherry tomatoes. The bigger ones need more light.”
Marcy wasn’t the first Brooklynite to ask me about gardening. For no particular reason, I’ve taken to gardens and I know my way around them. Over the years, passersby have stopped to admire my red-tip photinia. I have grown two ginkgo trees from seed; one is now a 12-footer and the other is maybe 10 feet. Watercress mostly grows by riverbanks, but with some sandy soil and an artfully placed rain barrel, for several seasons I nursed a healthy patch of it right off my patio. Not a river in sight!
So, the nature questions keep coming from neighbors, and generally, I enjoy being the garden guy. But sometimes New Yorkers’ deep ignorance of nature makes me testy:
“Beautiful!” said one admirer of my old photinia bush. “Is it a rose?”
“No,” I said. “The way to tell is that it’s June, and there are no roses on it.”
Then there is the person very close to me who believed, well into adulthood, that sparrows were baby pigeons. There is no gentle way to break the news on this.
Another time, I was scrolling through a Park Slope blog to see what my affluent, liberal and often neurotic neighbors were up to. These items can be very interesting. For example, there was a post from a “digital handyman” who was eager to fix your gizmos, and another from a “Ph.D with a machete” ready to clear out your winter brush. Then I landed on a post from a person I’ll call the Pumpkin Lady.
“We are trying to create a pumpkin patch at our country house,” she wrote. “So we are burying pumpkins in hope that they'll grow in the summer and we'll have a patch. If anyone has a pumpkin they want planted, drop them off.”
I blinked, but the words were still there when I unblinked. The mind reels, no? If, as the Pumpkin Lady seems to have thought, you had to plant a whole pumpkin in order to grow a new pumpkin, then to make a human baby you would have to … what? Again, the mind reels.
At such moments I need a swig of nature, and so I head to nearby Green-Wood Cemetery, which has 478 acres and a crew of savvy gardeners. These guys definitely know a red-tip photinia from a rose.
No sooner do I enter the cemetery’s imposing Gothic gates (it was founded in 1838) than I am chatting with the beekeepers, the pruners, the rakers, and the pond dredgers. And whenever I see something that needs attending to — a fallen tree, a broken branch, a sick raccoon, a visitor parked on the grass, where tires should not tread — I relay this information to the groundskeepers. I’m their extra pair of eyes.
One spring, I was meandering around Sylvan Water, one of Green-Wood’s four ponds. They call all their ponds “Waters” — Crescent Water, Valley Water and Dell Water are the other three. I feel this use of the word “Water” adds a nice spa-like feel to the place.
As I ambled around Sylvan Water I passed some Canadian geese grazing on the bank, and also an egret patiently scanning the water for his lunch. Then I came upon two young photographers.
“That’s a weeping cherry,” I volunteered as they snapped pictures of one of my favorite Green-Wood specimens. “It has soft, flexible branches. That’s why they ‘weep’ like that.”
They seemed grateful for the knowledge. “Uh, thanks, Mister,” one of them said.
“But don’t eat the cherries!” I warned. “They’re extremely sour!”
They kind of bowed as I waved goodbye. I think they were foreign. After I resumed my stroll, I passed the pink mausoleum of the very aptly named Finale family — that’s F-I-N-A-L-E — and then I saw a dark patch. It was an upside-down turtle. He might be alive, he might be dead.
I quickly recalled that a year earlier in Prospect Park – which is just a hawk’s swoop from Green-Wood — some poachers were nabbed with 27 turtles they’d caught in the lake there. Did they plan to sell them as pets? Chop them up for turtle soup? Or, given that this is Park Slope, simmer them for locally sourced turtle étouffée?
No one knows. But maybe because these poachers were unsuccessful in Prospect Park, they had shifted operations to Green-Wood. And maybe they dropped this hapless turtle upside-down as they made their escape.
Whatever had happened, I knew the Green-Wood gardeners would want to know. Also, when anyone messes with the scarce nature we have here in Brooklyn, it makes me so mad I could spit, as my Southern mother-in-law Dixie used to say.
Fortunately, I noticed a Green-Wood patrol car parked nearby. The officer was Bill — I know them all. Bill was still munching on his lunchtime wrap as I tapped gently on the car door. After what seemed like a long time, he rolled down the window.
“Hello, Frank,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Turtle up on the northeast quadrant of Lake Avenue,” I said. “He’s on his back and he’s not moving.”
Bill was quiet. He looked like he was waiting for more information, or maybe he was just absorbing what I’d said.
“I know about the poachers last year in the park,” I said. “Maybe they’ve relocated to Green-Wood?”
Bill swallowed another bite of his wrap.
“Interesting, thanks,” he said. “I hope this is not an imposition — we all know how much you help us here at Green-Wood, Frank — but would you show me the turtle?
“Absolutely.”
We drove to the site. Bill emerged from his car, surveyed the scene, and then looked at me.
“Well, your description was spot-on, Frank, thanks,” he said. “We definitely have an upended turtle.”
“As you probably know,” he continued, “the first job in this kind of situation is to check whether the turtle is alive. In this case, the answer appears to be ‘yes,’ since his legs are wiggling.”
This was true.
“Next, as you probably also know, a turtle’s underparts are unprotected by the shell and vulnerable to predators. So the second item on the agenda is to gently flip him over.”
Bill did this with his index finger. The turtle scuttled away.
“And in wrapping up this event, let me say you were very wise to bring up the poaching theory,” Bill added. “Turtles often flip over in nature and I see no evidence of any poaching activity. But if there was, then we would have followed a completely different method of evidence-gathering and animal rescue.”
Bill returned to his SUV and was quickly on the phone, speaking animatedly. I’m guessing that filing immediate field reports is standard operating procedure.
I headed back to urban Brooklyn, ready to counsel more of my nature-deprived neighbors. Deep down I know Bill and his people are the real experts, but as for my neighbors, I’m afraid I’m all they’ve got.
As I left Sylvan Water, I waved to the two photographers. I was glad to see they weren’t eating the weeping cherries.
Poacher Alert