A Red-Breasted Merganser in breeding plumage. The ones we saw still had brownish heads, but in just this kind of late-afternoon light, they looked coppery.
On a lark (as it were), C.Z. and I decided this week to take an afternoon off to visit Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge.
Part of the fun of this trip is the juxtaposition of the most urban of environments (the A train) with saltmarsh waterfowl. The ride through Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens takes between an hour and a half and two hours, depending on how long you have to wait for a Far Rockaway A train. The A subway line is the longest in New York City, and possibly the dirtiest, because it has some of the oldest trains in the system.
When we got to the train platform to wait, we noticed right away that there was a subway musician performing. She didn't look particularly noticeable--black-leather jacket, T-shirt, bandana, middle-aged--but she definitely sounded noticeable. She carried the entire platform with the force of her voice as she sang a variety of blues-y and soul tunes. Most I didn't know, but I recognized at least one as Aretha Franklin. Most subway musicians get ignored, but not this one. People were smiling, doing little dance steps, nodding heads to the music, and clapping at the end of each song. The way she talked between the songs kept people interested, too. I thought at first that the only accompaniment she had was a boom box, but C.Z. told me that there was a man playing a keyboard too (I couldn't see because of a sign). The fact that she looked so ordinary made her stage presence all the more striking. And the city is full of buskers like this, none of them famous, but some with remarkable talent nonetheless, and all with a certain amount of grit.
The A train came, as usual bearing signs for both Far Rockaway and Lefferts. Not knowing which it really was, but seeing more Rockaways than Leffertses, we got on, only to hear an announcement after the doors closed that we had chosen the wrong A after all. No matter. We got off at the next stop and waited for the real thing.
Once on the Rockaway, we settled in for the ride. C.Z. had her iPod filled with music theory lectures she had gotten for her birthday, and she offered me an earplug. We listened to Robert Greenberg explain duple and triple meter as the train clacked along under the East River to Brooklyn. I'm not thrilled with the iPod phenomenon, and we have some pretty strict rules about not using it to avoid social contact, but let's face it, the iPod is a fixture of the rail commute. There are some excellent reasons not to start a cocktail social hour on a New York City subway, and we only talk to other riders on rare occasions. Professor Greenberg had just launched into a Brandenburg Concerto when several teenage boys with typical street clothes entered the train and started yelling something. I did my best imitation of a jaded subway rider who's seen everything already and is only interested in what's on my iPod, while at the same time listening with my free ear and watching out of the corner of my eye, just in case I need to take action. (I've only decided that I really needed to once in ten years, thankfully.) Sometimes there's a fight, or a crazy person yelling threatening things, but usually you can ignore it.
Soon loud dance music in the unplugged ear began to clash with Bach in the iPod ear. Another boom box (or whatever you call them now). And...breakdancing! Oh, yeah, I had seen this before, on the same train. The oldest boys were probably almost adults, but the youngest was about seven. They were amazing--really. I suddenly had the urge to laugh. If only they knew what we were listening to! We are such squares, but we are perfectly happy in our squareness. C.Z. and I looked at each other, grinned, and mouthed, "Duple meter!"
The boys left, and soon the train surfaced into lovely afternoon sunlight. We listened to examples of pop songs from the 1890s, all results of the waltz (triple meter) craze of the late 19th Century. "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," is obviously one, and "The Sidewalks of New York" was appropriate enough for our ride, if a bit old-fashioned, but did you know that "Rockabye Baby" was only written in 1896 (I may have that off by a year or two), and did you know that "Happy Birthday," written at about the same time by two women in Kentucky, was a waltz? Funny how I've never even really considered where some of the most iconic songs of childhood come from. But I guess they were still new in our grandmothers' times.
As we floated over the bay to (meterless) Gregorian chant, I felt that my musical transformation from urban grit to the solitude and peace of nature was complete. Since it was already afternoon and the sun sets early in November, we actually had less time for our visit than it took for our total commute, but we enjoyed it immensely. The weather was still warm enough not to feel raw even in the wind, and the late-afternoon sun warmed the long autumn saltgrass to gold and burnished the brownish feathers of the migrating waterfowl to a coppery red. C.Z. noted that the iridescent pink and purple clouds were stretched out flat and turned down at the corners as though they were painted on a cove ceiling. I joked that she would notice that, because she had spent more time looking at Museum of Natural History dioramas than real open skies, but we both knew that I was only joking, because this very afternoon was one of many occasions when we had taken a fair amount of trouble to make sure we saw the real thing now and then. We walked out to the end of the terrapin trail, now past nesting season and open, where we sat watching hundreds of brant geese silhouetted, felt-like, in sparkling sunlight on water. To the other side, in the distance, we could see the skyline of Manhattan, and especially the Empire State Building, hazily reflecting the setting sun and looking much more like the Emerald City in a field of poppies than our very concrete, utterly real home.
C.Z. left with three new birds for her burgeoning Cornell eBird list, and more importantly, we had that prized feeling of having been somewhere else. That's important when you live on an island, without a car. We shared the last two pieces of chocolate birthday cake on the walk back to the train. Back over the water, now bright red, back underground, and back through Brooklyn and Manhattan, picking up more and more commuters until the train was packed. Before it got too crowded to move, I read Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow Daybook, of all things. She used to live in my neighborhood. Reading Gladys Taber, on a crowded A train, after an short urban jaunt, made me feel that in every circumstance, there are pockets of air, room for family, and chances for joy.
The Red-breasted Mergansers we saw were not fully molted yet, so they looked more like this than they looked like the one above. C.Z. says they look like they're always having a bad hair day.
An American Wigeon. We've seen these before, but they're still a treat.
Northern Pintails! Ours didn't have fully extended tails yet, but the neck pattern was unmistakeable.
And Black Brant. You'd think we'd have seen Brant before, but we just hadn't. Last time we came in winter, it was all Snow Geese. The Refuge can have very different kinds of birds, depending on the time of year.
All images from Wikipedia Commons.
