M and I recognized B from our years skate-dancing at Prospect Park’s Wollman Rink the day after the tornado hit. In the old days, she ran the rink, but for the past several years she’s been on grounds, and I often exchange waves with her during my alternate-day runs.
Today, with a push broom half her size, B is vainly trying to clear the park’s north end road of debris.
“Careful, be sure to look up,” she says, pointing to the tree canopy above. “Watch for loose branches.”
We are crossing the road, not fearing the debris, rather the bike racers, who are zipping along the roadway, picking their way through sizable branches, twigs and mounds of leaves. Runners, too, the serious are legging it up the north-end hill. To our left is a giant uprooted tree, drawing rubber neckers to its underside like a Mayan calendar.
It’s the morning after the twister came through Brooklyn; a day and a half from my twenty-miler. And damn, my foot is still tender.
“I thought this part of the park would be closed, B,” I say. A biker zooms past, only an arm’s length away.
B scowls at the biker: “Well it hasn’t been open long.” She continues to stare. “These bikers.”
“How’s that?”
“Some of us have been here since dawn, when the park was closed for us to check out the damage. But the rudeness of these bikers. They were screaming at us when we told them they couldn’t go in the park, that we didn’t even know if there were trees covering the road, or branches ready to come down in the slightest wind. Just screaming at us. I’d never heard anything like that.”
“The runners too?”
“Yeah. But the bikers. They just had to get in the park. The language they used. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it,” she says, as three bikers converge at the top of the hill, racing to get to a narrow passageway of debris. The workers would like to clean it up, but the traffic is making it nearly impossible.
“They think they own this park. They really do.”
*
A twister with 85 mph winds swept through our Park Slope backyard, at the dinner hour Thursday of Week Seven, literally ripping a 50-foot bell-canopied maple from the ground. A tree grows in Brooklyn, planted seventy years ago by a lifetime homeowner, it’s as large as ours, a magnificent red oak that mercifully escaped damage. Although judging from the trajectory of the tornado, it had more to do with Lady Luck than anything else, who also played a part in keeping two-thirds of our 200-pound deck wall attached to the house. A charge from the Steeler front line wouldn’t have done as much damage.
I’d already decided to take the day off running; M and I were going to write in the morning. But we got sidetracked by the tornado. A strange quiet on the street at night and in that early morning; nine years and four days since 9/11.
M and I were at work when it hit, and our daughter K was in a café. But our neighbor D was home. With tornado winds at a southside window, he struggled to close it, while winds literally send cups and vases and keepsakes from shelves a dozen feet away. On Friday morning, he looks shaken as he tells us his story.
In the park, I tell M I want to see The Tree. Since a big oak on the south side was cut back, it has been my favorite. An English elm at a kiddie playground uphill from Garfield Place, its branches soar over the roadway, I’m not one for estimating, but I think as much as sixty feet in the sky. It seems everywhere in Park Slope, a tree is down. Chainsaw chatter; wood chips in a blender. On Seventh Avenue, a rooftop angel fell from a church and crumpled the roof of a Arctic ocean blue car like a bag of chips; down the block at the Episcopal garden, a hydrant-size angel has lost her wings, which lie symmetrically before her.
In our neighborhood, no one was hurt. To date, the only known fatality is a motorist in Queens. She had pulled off a parkway in the rain, and had just changed front-seat places with her husband, when the wind swept a tree branch from across the parkway and it crashed on her car, killing her.
M and I climb up a side of a glade and see The Tree. It has lost hundreds of pounds of wood, but it is still standing. There are others who love the tree, paying homage, when I ask the park forestry staff if it will be okay. Some of the tallest branches are down. I have never been able to see so much sky standing at its base. It is going to be okay; we’ll make sure of that, the man says, as I start to tear up.
Behind me, the bikers zoom along. And the joggers. But there will be no running for me today.
Next: Running for Your Life: Week Eight
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