City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Ten or so blocks later, Virginia took a photograph of us crossing the road to Madison Square Garden, Francesca striding out in front, Persephone-like. We rested in the park. Squirrels scampered over us, looking for food. Donica fed them nuts. The squirrels’ audacity revived us temporarily, but by SoHo we were cold and tired again. Lucy, tiny and compact, looked as if she might simply keel over. My feet throbbed in their boots. The pavement made everything harder, more jarring. People crowded the streets in a buzz about the beauty of the streetscape, excited by the weight of their huge shopping bags. We were by now immune to such pleasures, driven to get this insane venture over with. It was around 6 p.m., near the Wall Street Bull, when we arrived at Number One. We could see the water and, yes, the Statue of Liberty. We had walked close to thirty kilometres. ‘Didn’t you say it was only going to be twenty-one?’ someone asked me. I had. I’d been wrong. No matter. We cheered, took photos for Instagram, and then headed towards a pub on Stone Street, one of the first roads to be paved in Manhattan.

  Two days after our walk along Broadway, my yoga teacher decided that the time had come to discuss the articulation of the feet: specifically, drawing up from the arches to activate your legs, mobilise your core. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘you do this.’ She moved her foot almost imperceptibly, just enough that I could see tiny muscles ripple as she planted it firmly on the ground before stretching herself. She stood taller, lighter—not quite in the league of Menuhin conducting Beethoven’s Fifth with his feet while standing on his head, but still impressive. ‘As a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association,’ Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking.3 It is true that one of the common uses of walking is to permit the writer a meandering narrative. But should digressions be allowed when walking? A few weeks later, on an even colder walk, the question came alive. Sure, an obscure pizza place on Avenue J that makes The Best Pizza in New York might only be a few blocks off Flatbush, but if we had dedicated ourselves to a day of coming to know Flatbush Avenue, was it legitimate to seek experiences outside it?

  ‘The blogs I have read,’ I declared authoritatively, ‘say that if you plan to walk the full extent of an avenue you should not step off the path. That is not in the spirit of the walk.’ The day already promised a carousel in Prospect Park, Caribbean curry, old-style diners, theatres and the high school where both Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond were educated. Wouldn’t it be greedy to expect more?

  I am not a consistent person. My rule, within seconds of its announcement, was challenged by happenstance. As we walked towards the Flatlands Reformed Church—built on the site of a Native American village in 1654 and therefore a goal of sorts—I realised it was off Flatbush. I hesitated momentarily, then turned left onto Alton Place. It was worth it. A plaque in the church gardens told us lots of things, including the fact that George Washington had ridden this road in April 1790. On the same plaque there was a reference to Indian braves, but not to the village that had once been there. A woman offered to show us around the church, a simple white, wooden building. Once inside, I looked up at an ordinary painted ceiling that bore no adornment of any kind, then to the balcony at the back of the church. ‘That’s where the slaves sat,’ the woman, who was African American herself, told us.

  We retraced our steps and turned left onto Flatbush. To our disappointment, it was not long before the avenue was eight lanes wide and lined with shopping malls. All charm vanished. It was tempting to give up, especially as no one seemed to know where the original Flatbush began or ended. But we chose not to be churlish and kept going. Suddenly, to our left, there was a coastal channel lined with houses, their balconies hanging low over the water. Mill Basin. It was only 3 p.m., but the light was pearly-grey, moving towards the pink of sunset. Seabirds circled in large numbers. We walked a bit further and saw a pier jutting out into the water, lined with petrol pumps. Virginia stood for a moment then said, ‘This looks like Metung.’ She was right. How strange to feel echoes of the Gippsland Lakes here in the most populated borough of New York. That has been one of the wonders of Brooklyn. There is so much nature here, albeit nature that is struggling to hold its own.

  Horseshoe crabs are prehistoric creatures that look much as they did half a billion years ago, which means that they are known as living fossils. During their breeding season they used to line the beaches of the eastern coast of the North American continent in their millions. Their spawn sustained whole populations of birds, most notably the wader known as red knot. They can still be found on Brooklyn’s beaches today. When I first visited them, I had been so starved of the beach that a rush of surprise and relief sprang to my eyes. Unexpected tears. The sea. Open sky. A narrow stretch of sand. It was windy and grey, but it wasn’t cold. There were windsurfers and, in the distance, factories. Feral cats prowled the low-lying dunes. I had signed up as a volunteer to count mating pairs of the crabs.

  Our business was to keep track of the horseshoe crab’s numbers so that they could officially be listed as endangered, a status that might afford them some legal protection. The crabs used to thrive on the shores, but today the numbers are modest. An immodest number—half a million or so—are hung up each year in labs and partially drained of their blood, which, once processed and made into a product called Lysate, enables the identification of bacteria in particular pharmaceutical products. The pale blue liquid sells for fifteen thousand dollars a litre. After being bled, about fifty thousand or so crabs each year flat-out die. The rest are returned to the ocean where they ‘fail to thrive’ and drift around half-dead, too weak to breed. There are claims that some labs don’t even bother to return living crabs to the ocean, but just sell them as fishing bait. I’m not sure which is worse, though: the use of such ancient creatures for fishing bait strikes me as appalling in the same way as cutting down old-growth forests to make pulp. Contemptuous in a way I find hard to process. Before pharmaceutical companies discovered the horseshoe crab, they used to be harvested by the million for fertiliser.

  Horseshoe crabs, to be clear, have survived multiple major ice ages and the end-Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago. They were indulging in group sex on the beach—much as I was witnessing on my first evening among them—back when the dinosaurs were roaming. Did dinosaurs roam the beaches? I do not know. I do know this: when mating, the male crabs attach themselves to the females with their ‘claspers’, which are small claws, and then ride out the waves so they can get to smooth sand. If they make it to the shoreline, they secure themselves by digging into the sand before getting down to business. Often a female crab will have several male crabs attached to her.

  Here are some other things I know about horseshoe crabs. They live for decades; they have nine eyes scattered about (on their shell, beside their mouth); the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded in 1967 in part for research performed on the horseshoe crab eye. I know the females are startlingly large—as much as sixty centimetres in length—but no amount of research, no photo, could have prepared me for the awesomeness—I use the word in the old-fashioned sense—of these creatures. They look like thickset barnacled dark-brown dinner plates circa 1970, the retro style of hand-hewn pottery that was back in fashion. I fell in love with the crabs immediately. I picked one up, using two hands and grasping either side of its large shell. She flailed at me all the while, using her claws and legs like spears. I got the message and put her down.

  We picked them up in pairs and brought them in to measure and tag. When we did so, the male would hover close to the female, though one lone guy wandered off in the other direction, cueing gags about a lack of chemistry. The tagging involved drilling a small hole in the corner of their shells, and sometimes the pale-blue blood that makes them so valuable spurted out, translucent. I would plug the hole up quickly with a plastic tag, worried that I had hurt them. I don’t make any claim to know if the crabs feel pain, or think what we’d call thoughts. I wondered, as they rode out the waves of a beach off Brooklyn, were the
y aware of the industrial city pressing down upon them? Did they notice that the tide was high? That the water temperature was eighteen degrees (we measured it) and the air outside a bit cooler? Or that a full moon was rising? They must have had some instinct for all this, for it was the sea temperature, the tide and the moon that were bringing them together.

  There are six companies with crab-bleeding facilities in the United States. They stand to lose a lot of money if artificially produced Lysate (developed by a scientist named Jeak Ling Ding some fifteen years ago and known as Factor C) becomes widely available.4 Some companies, such as Eli Lily, however, have become concerned that crab-bleeding will be restricted in future and realised they need to move on. By 2018 it seemed that some companies were finally prepared to start using the artificial product.

  When I spoke of my concerns about the fate of the horseshoe crab at a writers festival back in 2015, before any respite was on the horizon, Antony Loewenstein, an activist and writer whom I know and admire, asked me to explain my interest. He wasn’t trying to be rude, he said; he just found my concern so random. We are in the midst of the sixth extinction, living, as political scientist Audra Mitchell puts it, through ‘an unmaking of being’.5 More than half our biodiversity was destroyed between 1970 and 2010 and the losses are increasing at a precipitous rate. The rate of extinction is faster than it was when the dinosaurs disappeared. Why focus on these barnacled dinner plates? Why not elephants and tigers, wolves and dingoes? Giant sequoia or mountain ash? Why not Leadbeater’s possum? The regent honeyeater? Orange-bellied parrot? Bees? Frogs? Dragonflies?

  Random. The word interests me. As I get older, I no longer try to find meaning in order so much as draw meaning from randomness. I feel this strongly: things are both random and connected, all the time. Leonard Woolf used to say ‘nothing matters’, by which he meant ‘everything matters’. All of it. The lot.

  Not long after Antony’s question, my friend Helen emailed me to say her grandson had asked her to suggest something ‘random’ he could draw. Helen had said to him, ‘I’ve just read a book about Cyclone Tracy. A lady said she looked out and saw dogs sailing through the air with their chains still on.’ Her grandson agreed, ‘Yes, that is random,’ then produced a drawing of doubled-over palm trees with chooks and dogs flying.

  So we talked about this word, Helen and I. She had found a description of it as ‘the latest buzzword used among mindless teenagers as a way of showing just how utterly irreverent their predictable sense of humour is’. That seemed harsh. To us, the word’s usage meant something closer to ‘weird and not particularly logical’. Helen asked her grandson what he meant by the word. The eight-year-old gave the question some thought before saying, ‘It’s hard to give a definition of a word without using the word itself.’

  On the last day of fall, a group of us walked Brooklyn’s longest avenue: Bedford. It took us from the serenity of the white swans circling at Sheepshead Bay, past kilometres of family homes and dog-walking locals, Brooklyn College and multiple high schools. In the morning, the sun was shining, but in the afternoon the day took on a greyer cast. We walked through what was once known as Automotive Row and past the now-abandoned Studebaker showroom. We walked through Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. We walked into South Williamsburg, home to many of New York’s Hasidic Jews. We did not feel welcome there and walked purposely, swiftly, to indicate we did not mean to intrude upon the neighbourhood. It was a shock to arrive at the divide between South Williamsburg and the north, a border so clear it was if we had arrived in another country, a country full of bikes and bike lanes, bars and street art. Of all the walks we did, this was the one where gentrification, rampant or resisted, was most apparent. Brooklyn has become one of the least affordable places to live in America.

  It would be nice to make some theoretical claim here (many have) that meandering walks represent the creative process. But you could walk forever and not end up with words on a page. That doesn’t seem so terrible to me. I listen to politicians engage in rhetoric, semantics and blatant lies. I attempt to use language to describe various concerns, and fall into apocalyptic cliché. Dad, sitting in a nursing home losing words by the day, was yet another reminder of the ways in which language can fail us. It is images I turn to: a hundred-year-old photo of a man standing atop a pile of bison corpses; Pacific islanders trying to sweep the rising sea from their homes; California on fire. I begin to paint and draw.

  Around the time we did the Broadway walk, an article from the Washington Post described American psychologist Martin Seligman’s experiments of 1967.

  He put a dog into a box with two chambers divided by a barrier that could be jumped over. When one chamber became electrified, the dog ran around frantically, finally scrambling over the barrier to escape the shock. In later trials, evading the shock becomes easier and easier for the animal until it would just stand next to the barrier, waiting to jump. But the outcome is much more grim if a dog first learns that electric shocks are uncontrollable and unavoidable. If animals were repeatedly shocked while tied up beforehand, then later placed in the same box free to roam, most didn’t jump the barrier. Instead, they lay down whining and took the jolt. Subsequent trials confirmed the animals’ same passive, defeatist response.6

  These experiments seem horrendous to me, and the lesson obvious: helplessness can be learnt. The published findings went on to inform CIA interrogation techniques.

  So: walking. We walk to get to one place from another, but in doing so we insist that what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present. They bond us to place, to people. Walking opens our hearts. Thoughts stop swirling in tight circles. They loosen up. Meander. Slow down.

  New York City has invited people to walk its streets for hundreds of years. Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman and Herman Melville not only walked New York’s streets, they also wrote about them, as many have done since—as I am trying to do. More recently, William B. Helmreich, a sixty-eight-year-old professor of sociology at CUNY, walked almost every street in New York City: 120,000 blocks, or about ten thousand kilometres.7 In Teju Cole’s first novel, Open City, walking the streets of New York appears, at first, to be an expression of engagement and curiosity for Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist who wants to embrace his new home. Julius’s walks lead to a series of pronouncements and observations: on the flocking of birds, on failed relationships, on race, on class and on history. But Julius’s digressions take on a bitter edge. Random observations and the rambling narrative structure that sustain them become attempts to erase the past, a past that includes a mistreatment of women. A meditation on gender is not where I intended to go, but it is certainly one of the places Cole does. Sometimes there seems to be no way of escaping it, even when all you want to do is walk or read about walking. It was when doing the latter that I noticed this casual aside from The Art of Wandering, that the walker ‘remains, despite notable exceptions, predominantly male’.8

  I compare this bald statement with Rebecca Solnit’s exploration in Wanderlust of the ways in which women are discouraged from walking, the oft-cited concerns for safety that are motivated by a desire for control. She goes onto posit that ‘Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a criminal category when in public.’ As I read her, I have a memory of a midnight walk one hot summer night, pacing down the middle of Nicholson Street, arms flung wide for no reason other than joy at being alive, the freedom of walking without scrutiny. A privilege.

  Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head, so I argue with Merlin Coverley, the author of that aside. I imagine telling him about Australia’s Sorrel Wilby, who trekked through the Himalayas in 1991, wrote about that experience, and has been walking ever since; of Lisa Dempster’s 1200-kilometre walk through Japan and her book, Neon Pilgrim (2009). I remind him of Robyn Davidson’s extraordinary 3000
-kilometre pilgrimage through Australia’s deserts, enshrined in Tracks (1980), of Cheryl Strayed’s hike from Mexico to Canada, the subject of her bestseller Wild (2012). Coverley, I say, do you not know of Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre? ‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.’ Of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose heroine Elizabeth Bennet walks everywhere, often unescorted, much to everyone’s consternation? ‘I do not wish to avoid the walk,’ she insists. ‘The distance is nothing when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.’

  My preoccupations collide in unexpected ways when I return from such a walk, and listen to a podcast on philosophy and extinction. In it the Australian environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren quotes a line from the feminist theorist Donna Haraway: ‘We need to “stay with the trouble”.’9 She went on to publish a book with that title in 2016.

  Walkers stay with the trouble. The Situationists called their walks dérives to distinguish between the unconscious act of strolling and their more politically charged way of moving through Parisian streets. Women march to reclaim the night. Between 1863 and 1881, William Barak, an elder of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woiwurrung people, walked the sixty kilometres from the Coranderrk Estate to the steps of Parliament House some three times: to call for his people to be paid for their labour; to seek the right for his people to have their own community; to insist on their freedom to keep their children within that community. A hundred years later, during the civil rights marches, African Americans attempted the eighty-seven kilometre walk from Selma to Montgomery on three occasions, despite the brutality of the beatings dealt out to them. Here in New York, fifty years on, people were walking the streets, crossing the bridges, outraged by the fact that policeman Daniel Pantaleo was not to stand trial for the choking of African American Eric Garner. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Garner gasped as he was suffocated. ‘I can’t breathe.’ Breathing becomes harder and harder. There is so much trouble to stay with. Can we, like Thoreau, make every walk a ‘crusade’, a reclamation of our cities, our lives, our land, our planet?