I.
When I lived in Chelsea, the neighbors next door maintained a sort of backyard wilderness, a tangled mess of brambles and bushes and leaves. It was entirely deliberate: a well-kept yard offers few places for birds to hide and nest, and little opportunity for the decay on which insects thrive. In the spring and summer, the leaves trembled with birds seen and unseen, but always heard; and though our bedroom was in the front of the apartment, I would often wake up in the early morning to the sounds of excitable larks and wrens and robins. Unlike the garbage trucks that also woke me at dawn, I always felt very lucky to hear these avian arguments. "The greatest luxury in New York is to be awakened by birdsong," I'd say - forgetting, admittedly, all the other luxuries that I enjoyed.
II.
Last night, in the early evening of a not particularly good day, I stood waiting at the 34th St. station, exhausted and disappointed and having just missed the Q train. Suddenly: birdsong. I had never particularly noticed the green metal rectangle that stretched above the platform and supposed it to be some sort of duct. But now, as I watched, a stranger carefully stretched his hand in front of each vent and massaged the air. Again the platform echoed with the eerie sound of chirping and tweeting and trilling. The official description of the piece, "Reach," by Christopher Janney, claims that the sounds are "meant to evoke urban life" and to encourage interaction between strangers, but the noises I heard denied the city surrounding me. (And if there is one place that "urban life" does not need to be evoked, it's on the subway.) If I closed my eyes - and my nose - I could imagine that I was standing under a green forest canopy, and forget the grimy subterranean tunnel, with rivulets of discarded wrappers flowing along the tracks and trains shrieking against steel. Encased in their ipods, no one else looked up, and the man continued along the platform, pausing in front of each vent, releasing the birdsong, transforming the subway as if by magic.
III. Several weeks ago, I spent a frenetic Sunday afternoon laying down mulch and planting climbing hydrangeas at my sister's house. I have limited time and much to worry about, and I worked rhymically, swinging the shovel down-to-up, up-to-down, down-to-up, as though rowing a scull, deliberately focusing on the catch, then pivoting my hands to release the dirt. The pile grew smaller and my mind emptier.
We worked until the sky darkened. "Look," my sister said suddenly, pointing across the yard. "Fireflies." It was true: I saw quiet, delicate flashes in the shadows of the oak tree. I'd forgotten that fireflies even existed: I don't recall seeing them on nighttime runs in the park or strolls by the Hudson or evenings spent watching the sky from a darkened apartment, and I can't remember Italian or German or Indian fireflies. There may be fewer fireflies than before - birds and bugs alike have suffered as humans have replaced "uninterrupted forests and fields" with primly cut lawns and concrete patios. But maybe they were there all along and I simply did not see them. When I was a child, fireflies had served as the signifiers of summer, and my sisters and I would flit around the front yard, bare feet on cool grass, cupping the bugs in our hands, dumping them into mason jars, observing them, releasing them to the sky as we went inside for dinner. (Once, we squeezed a lightning bug by mistake, and from its tail it sadly dripped a luminous yellow liquid, and we were sorry, and more careful after that.) I suppose I gave up catching fireflies as I gave up doing cartwheels or chanting Miss...Mar-y Mack; and when I stopped hunting for fireflies, I stopped seeing them, too. ... I watched them, dumbly, thinking, "I'm glad fireflies still exist," as though they had been the ones to leave.
When I lived in Chelsea, the neighbors next door maintained a sort of backyard wilderness, a tangled mess of brambles and bushes and leaves. It was entirely deliberate: a well-kept yard offers few places for birds to hide and nest, and little opportunity for the decay on which insects thrive. In the spring and summer, the leaves trembled with birds seen and unseen, but always heard; and though our bedroom was in the front of the apartment, I would often wake up in the early morning to the sounds of excitable larks and wrens and robins. Unlike the garbage trucks that also woke me at dawn, I always felt very lucky to hear these avian arguments. "The greatest luxury in New York is to be awakened by birdsong," I'd say - forgetting, admittedly, all the other luxuries that I enjoyed.
II.
Last night, in the early evening of a not particularly good day, I stood waiting at the 34th St. station, exhausted and disappointed and having just missed the Q train. Suddenly: birdsong. I had never particularly noticed the green metal rectangle that stretched above the platform and supposed it to be some sort of duct. But now, as I watched, a stranger carefully stretched his hand in front of each vent and massaged the air. Again the platform echoed with the eerie sound of chirping and tweeting and trilling. The official description of the piece, "Reach," by Christopher Janney, claims that the sounds are "meant to evoke urban life" and to encourage interaction between strangers, but the noises I heard denied the city surrounding me. (And if there is one place that "urban life" does not need to be evoked, it's on the subway.) If I closed my eyes - and my nose - I could imagine that I was standing under a green forest canopy, and forget the grimy subterranean tunnel, with rivulets of discarded wrappers flowing along the tracks and trains shrieking against steel. Encased in their ipods, no one else looked up, and the man continued along the platform, pausing in front of each vent, releasing the birdsong, transforming the subway as if by magic.
We worked until the sky darkened. "Look," my sister said suddenly, pointing across the yard. "Fireflies." It was true: I saw quiet, delicate flashes in the shadows of the oak tree. I'd forgotten that fireflies even existed: I don't recall seeing them on nighttime runs in the park or strolls by the Hudson or evenings spent watching the sky from a darkened apartment, and I can't remember Italian or German or Indian fireflies. There may be fewer fireflies than before - birds and bugs alike have suffered as humans have replaced "uninterrupted forests and fields" with primly cut lawns and concrete patios. But maybe they were there all along and I simply did not see them. When I was a child, fireflies had served as the signifiers of summer, and my sisters and I would flit around the front yard, bare feet on cool grass, cupping the bugs in our hands, dumping them into mason jars, observing them, releasing them to the sky as we went inside for dinner. (Once, we squeezed a lightning bug by mistake, and from its tail it sadly dripped a luminous yellow liquid, and we were sorry, and more careful after that.) I suppose I gave up catching fireflies as I gave up doing cartwheels or chanting Miss...Mar-y Mack; and when I stopped hunting for fireflies, I stopped seeing them, too. ... I watched them, dumbly, thinking, "I'm glad fireflies still exist," as though they had been the ones to leave.
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