natural complications

Whipped by the wind, the whole family took a trip on foot into Red Hook. At the end of one of these early, raw days of March. The skin of the world exposed, cold wind in the ground. We huddled together and soldiered on, no real destination in mind.

Without all the people to look at, or the glittery/strange store fronts to ogle, the landscape leaps to the front of the frame. Natural beauty is an odd texture in New York: The sky, for instance, is the same one you look at in Jersey, or North Carolina, or Texas even – but it’s not. In New York, there are things in the sky – and sometimes only those things – that either don’t exist in those other places, or exist in a more arresting, disturbing contrast, because there are not a lot of trees (the loveliest poles) or hills or other “natural” things to complicate the view.

One’s idea of what’s natural is stretched here: Before you know it, you think of the blocks-long brick warehouses, the grainy sidewalks, the gutted buildings and brownstones as belonging They are the backdrop, as trees or bushes or lawns or mountains or lakes would be elsewhere.

Red Hook is especially strange. (As I walked down the broad sidewalk across from Red Hook Park, an SUV with dark windows slowed to the curb, pulled over. “Excuse me?” said the driver to me. “What neighborhood is this?”) The slight desolation of the warehouses, worn cobblestones and empty side streets makes the clouds at the end of a blustery weird-weather day much larger. They’re so pink. And so close. And the trees, with their cousins the telephone poles, fence posts and street signs, mark the horizon like shadows, black against the explosion of a sunset over New Jersey, where nature means something totally different, if I remember correctly.