Taking the Long Way, Part I.

Or; Manhattan top to bottom on foot. Or; here's that sprawling personal essay I promised.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for all your encouragement, questions, and concerns. I’ve had some other big deadlines and projects that have had to take priority, but I’ve finally finished my essay about walking Manhattan top to bottom! There will be a more consistent schedule in the coming weeks. I can’t wait to hear what y’all think. Your comments mean the world to me. Parts 2, 3, 4, and 5 will be clickable links here when I’ve published them.

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1. INWOOD HILL PARK

I got off the 1 train at 207th street and descended the stairs from the aboveground platform, settling myself into tightly packed brownstones that lurk in the shadows of hulking subsidized housing. The typical disorientation of not having Mount Olympus to my east always feels more present when I get off at a subway stop I haven’t used before, but I knew that a park with the word Hill in its name had to be near the biggest, nearest hill. The prominence in question was more suggested than defined. Its sleeping outline was perceptible in the vague sense of an earthen mound that sloped up and to my left. Greenery peeking out between gaps in the buildings further confirmed my direction and I was off. No shortcuts; time to take the long way home.

Ahead of me was the park and the goals:

1. Walk from the northern tip of the island of Manhattan to the southern tip, and:

2. Not follow a predetermined route, and:

3. Learn something profound, and:

4. Do it all in eight hours or less.

I had my boots; they had gotten me through hundreds of miles of technical hiking and scrambling in Utah. I had my applesauce packets; everybody needs to feel like they are eating baby food a few times in their adult life. I had a water bottle; I didn’t even need to carry enough for the whole journey because I could refill it at any old fast food restaurant.

I stepped off the pavement and onto the green blanket grass. Soccer fields sprawled to my left, the people on them in apian clumps around the action. To my right, a small peninsula enclosed a salt marsh. Behind the wetland the Henry Hudson bridge framed the confluence of the Harlem and Hudson rivers. On the next plane of atmospheric perspective the New Jersey Palisades teemed with maples, slightly blueshifted owing to their distance. Straight ahead was the Inwood Hill forest, the only old-growth forest left on the island of Manhattan. Here we take a brief detour to discuss exactly what an old-growth forest is, because if the goal of writing is communication, I want to be sure that we’re on the same page.

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I. FIRST DETOUR

The very first paragraph of every scholarly article I have read about old-growth forests complains that “the hard thing about writing about old-growth forests is that they have no commonly accepted definition.” Don’t believe me? Check out these three examples.¹²³

The perspectives about what constitutes “old-growth” fall into three main categories: social, political, and ecological. The social standpoint can be reduced to uninformed but well-meaning discomfort around cutting down big old trees. The political position is primed by the social. Whenever a political agent can trade in the public’s emotional attachment for polling points, it will. It should come as no surprise that the definitions of old-growth enshrined in law are similarly confused to the public’s disorganized schemas.

Even scientists can’t agree on what old-growth means. Should it be based on the raw age of the oldest trees? Or should it be related to tree width? Maybe it should be defined by the biodiversity of the forest, the number of species it contains. But at the root (ha, ha), the oldness of the growth is best measured by the maturation and senescence of its population of trees. Old-growth forests are stable communities. When a tree dies, adjacent saplings, having been starved of sunlight for their entire existence, drink in the rays revealed by gaps in the canopy and shoot up to fill them. The trees that fall themselves become an entire sub-ecosystem, cannibalized into smaller and smaller pieces by insects, then fungi, and finally bacteria to fix their valuable nitrogen and carbon back into the soil, where it is picked up and repurposed into the next thousand-year-old behemoth. When a tree is felled by fire, disease, or human, the forest has its next generation waiting in the wings. Old-growth is resilient; old-growth will outlast us all. The old growth forest is one that has reached its climax community—its overall ecological profile will stay the same unless acted upon by an outside force.

The young forest has no overstory. A sapling forest will look different if you come back in a few years. The dominant species will shift, the average height of the trees will change, and its visual weight will swell. But revisit an old-growth and you will see a thing over which time has no power. Only people can destroy a thing that tough. Only people would.

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Inwood Hill forest is a stand of towering trees with jumbles of large decaying boles, deep shade pierced by shafts of sunlight, and dense patches of herbs, shrubs, and saplings so thick that to cross between groomed trails is more like tunneling than walking. Its branches are packed so tight that, as soon as you cross its boundary, you leave the city behind entirely. Cell service is minimal. To enter is to step through the looking glass into the dark, wild and touched with danger.

If you think I’m overstating Inwood Hill’s ferity, don’t forget that I come from Utah, and I’m not so removed from its firs and cottonwoods that I’ve already forgotten their power. When I visited this forest, it sucked me in and wrapped me in its cloak the way forests elsewhere simply cannot. Paved paths and guardrails gave way to dirt and unprotected cliffs. The orderly distribution of street lamps yielded to smashed and broken poles jutting out of the ground like trophied antlers.

I switchbacked up the hill. Here I admit I may have blazed my own trail, fighting my way through the thickets with as few leafy casualties as I could manage. Mushrooms grew at my feet in neon orange clumps. I climbed a mossy rock jumble into a clearing where tents huddled in the debris of an unhoused life. Human traces were everywhere. Beyond the explicitly maintained sections of trail, bounded by logs, cobblestones, or metal rails, there were bits of trash (gross), tent encampments (heart-wrenching), sticks arranged in Blair Witch-like concentric circles (unsettling), and even a Citibike left to degrade into unrecognizably rusted hunks of metal (tetanus-inducing).

This beginning to the walk set the tone for the rest. I kept noticing that people had taken a wild thing and tried to make it more accessible to the modern human (never mind that our ancestors did just fine in forests with no paths to speak of, as evidenced by the Native American caves present even in Inwood Hill park). But the forest seemed to laugh at our feeble attempts to beat it back. It happily ate the abandoned Citibike, excreting atop its bones a colony of tiny white flowers. It had no problem breaking apart the cobblestones with endless freeze-thaw cycles and surgically placed vines. Inwood Hill forest only exists because humans decided to preserve it. We keep it alive because we find it beautiful. It, in turn, forever strains at its gilded cage, desperate to expand its borders until it covers all of Manhattan, turning it back into what it was before humans made it a concrete jungle: an actual jungle.

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Next week: Taking the Long Way, Part II: Hudson River Greenway

1. Old growth forests and large old trees as critical organisms connecting ecosystems and human health. A review.

2. Ecological Concepts and Diversity of Old-Growth Forests.

3. Perspectives on development of definitions and values related to old-growth forests.