The gravestones can be seen now, from the far side of Meadow Lake. They rise, chunks of slate embedded into a green hill, into a blue sky, looking like a skyline for a town of the dead. Massive oak and weeping willows once gave the dead privacy, but those trees are no more.
The day after the storm at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, New York, was a lovely mid-September day– it was sunny, the kind of day where a warm breeze blew thin clouds across the sky; where birds frolicked in puddles, where people wandered about to take in the scenery. The scenery here, however, was not that of a park making her grand entrance into fall. It was that of a lady in mourning.
Great caverns had been torn in the ground, the roots of the tall trees that once filled them upskirted. Nearly a century of history in the form of trunks and branches had been lifted, and thrown with fury. Branches were everywhere. In many wooded spots, the grass couldn’t be seen, so covered was it with splinters. Branches covered the U-S Open’s tennis courts, the golf course, the fountains built for the ’39 and ’64 World Fairs. A massive oak had crushed the newly renovated children’s playground, tearing down the basketball hoops. Bewildered Parks Department workers were walking around in their high boots and thick gloves and asking themselves: How the hell are we going to clean this up?
I was in Manhattan when the sky turned green, and the wind picked up, and the water began to fall. Most people were smart enough to gather under scaffolding when shower heads opened overhead. I was dumb enough to keep walking, because I was late. I folded my useless umbrella, hid my headphones inside my bag (you do NOT risk $400 Sony Studio Monitors) and soldiered on. The doormen along East 72nd Street actually asked me if I wanted to come in and wait it out. I did not. I was already soaked. Would a bit more water matter?
I grew up with blizzards. My earliest memory of a storm was the granddaddy of them all, the infamous Blizzard of ’78, which hit when I was five. I didn’t see my father, a telephone lineman, for nearly two weeks. He crawled out a window to leave and shoveled out the back door before he left. My mother couldn’t leave the house, and was stuck inside with no power and three children under the age of five. We used the back porch and its massive snowbank as a refrigerator. I’d seen branches snap, trees fall, even roofs peel off in the relentless wind of a nor’easter. In my lifetime, Massachusetts had enjoyed two hurricanes, one of which I was old enough to cover.
I had not seen what a tornado could do.
Twisters aren’t supposed to hit Queens, which is not exactly situated in Tornado Alley. Twisters are supposed to hit the Midwest, and maybe the South, and stay there. That’s the way it works. California gets the earthquakes, the Northwest gets the rain, New England gets the snow, the Gulf gets the hurricanes.
That, like the trees in Flushing Meadows, has been upended. Weird things are happening. The summer of 2010 was a record-breaker for heat, just as this past winter broke records for cold. A recent article in Newsweek reminds us this isn’t just about temperatures – this is is about how those temperatures affect storm patterns, making those storms more furious.
Being a fool, I took my bike out to the park the day after the tornado. I wanted to see the damage. I knew we were in trouble when I saw several oaks, hundrds of years old, knocked down at the entrance to the park, and a few beautiful pines snapped in half. The bike path was unpassable, covered as it was with the giant trees that once stood beside them. I had to lift my bike over lovely weeping willows. I was not alone. Other civilians were there, wandering around, saying to eachother, this is the worst thing I’ve seen in decades.
Almost a year later, it’s better. It took the Parks Department six months, but they cleaned up, chipping the lost trees into mulch. At one point, the mulch piles were three stories tall. The Home Depot outside the park donated workers, trees, and equipment, planting new, young trees to replace the lost. My duck friends were all accounted for. The shocked and frightened birds have returned — there’s even a woodpecker family living in the heart of the park.
The day after the storm, although I’m old enough to know better, I stood on a trunk to get a better view of the carnage. The branch I was using for support snapped under the weight of my touch. I have the faint scars on my left arm, now, inside the forearm. It looks I was gouged by fingernails. The markings are a good match for the scars on the outer part of my arm, where I was lucky not to have broken my elbow when I flipped over my handbars on the same concrete bikepath. I don’t mind leaving a bit of blood in the park, if it means I’m part of it. Years from now, I’ll return, and stand in that spot, and know a touch of my soul is underneath the new tree planted here, the tree that took years to be able to stand by itself and blossom and sprout green, and give shelter to the slate gravestones across the highway.
