12.24: A Walk on the Wilderness Side

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24  Continuing Wilderness Weekend Adventure

When she opens eyes the sky is lightening and she knows it must be between 5 and 6 AM. Time to light a fire, she thinks. She gets up from bench, collects twigs and, with Dan's old Sunday New York Times newspaper sheets, soon is shoving them all into the cookout fireplace, under its grill.

   Reaching into backpack, she draws out a Campbell's can of pork & beans and, as she does it, gives thanks to the innocent pig that got sacrificed to greedy, thoughtless, unhealthy human desire that she would not normally wish to promote by buying such a can. But, since Dan paid for it, she thinks it OK for her to use it up. Using a can-opener, she opens the can around its top, removing the cut circle of tin and places the Campbell's on the grill. Stooping down to the oven space beneath the grill she strikes a match and as it flares, she directs the flame to several edges of the paper. Each edge catches fire and the flames draw together engulfing the twigs and in minutes a crackling fire is shooting up surrounding the Campbell's can in red flames.
   She drags a medium size stone from nearby and sits down on it. Grabbing a twig, she stirs the pork & beans. Little bubbles are already visible on its red-brown sauce surface and soon more bubbles rise to its top faster and faster. She takes the can off the grill, setting it on a small table-rock and pulls out her next reading, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, and sits timing her reading of each page to a chopstick-in-mouth of bean or pork or a small blown-on-to-cool spoonful of sauce as she enjoys, page by page, Edith Wharton's writing.

   “This Wharton writes so good you don't need to get what in hell she is meaning.” Ali likes to speak loudly where no one can hear her.
   It is a comment on a certain type of writing that is so rich in prose poetry that you just enjoy it without needing to understand.

 Twenty minutes later, Ali takes her last swallow of the Campbell's Pork & Beans, licks the sauce off her spoon, and closes the book. The sun is now also rising over the eastern treetops. The day – a Saturday – beginnt she thinks in her pidgin German.
   After putting out the fire and cleaning the area, she stands, gets her stuff together and starts down the slope walking over rocks and soil and between raspberry bushes with ripe red fruits she stops to pick and eat, exclaiming as their juice spurts onto her tongue “Um, tart and good!”

   Scrambling over a rock-ledge fence she is at the edge of a pond, with its entering and exiting brook. It fits her definition of "pond" by being a 20-or-so-foot (7-meter) long bulge in a narrow brook that has flowed down southwest from the Bronx River and will empty into Van Cortlandt Lake below. It seems to have formed here from an obstruction to the brook due to an old roll-top desk blocking outflow. It fills a small depression in the soil. Some Parks Department workers years ago bricked the shore around and shoveled out the depression so that she is able to sit on the edge of the pond - its far, or west side - her legs dangling in the cool brook water, looking up into the branches and leafage of the forest.

   She scoops a little of the water and sips, saying, out loud, “Wow! delish! But I’m not surprised. The Bronx River flows down from Kensico Dam in the eastern Catskill Mountains.” She looks into the clear depths and gets a good feeling.

Soon she is off and hiking following the brook. It runs about 100 (c.30m.) feet to the west of the Golf Course fence.

   “Hey, diddle dee dee, a hiker I shall be!” she sings as she walks along the brook. “I feel absolutely free as a bee and happy as a tree, how silly is me!”

After 10 minutes the brook runs under a road. Ali crosses and rejoins the brook. Ahead she can see the wide expanse of Van Cortlandt Lake.

   As she approaches the lake, the brook widens. She hops across it, tiptoeing over projecting small rocks and now she is almost there. To her left the south part of the Golf Course shows its 9th hole green and, off it, a brown dirt road on which, now, 2 golfers with white carts walk down past a dirt path just in front of her and over a small foot bridge where the brook empties into the lake amid high sword grass now brilliantly green with a few white lilies here and there. Ali says a hello then she turns towards the Lake now gleaming in the 7 AM July morning sunlight before her.

Arriving at the northeast curving corner of the quarter-mile flattened circle of lake, she stands viewing the smooth, sunshine blue surface of water as 3 white, long-neck swans glide silently on it. Nearer inshore, in the green, long sword grass she spots swimming brown ducks followed by a swarm of baby ducks and they are pecking in the water for food as they go. Towards the far south end on the same side as she, Ali sees a George-Washington-Slept-Here 150-year-or-so-old Revolutionary-War, 2-story, white wood, half-timbered  house she guesses is for the golfers. Many geese peck the grass in front of it, here and there for food. And turning her head right and gazing across west she sees an old, faded, red-painted iron railroad bridge from the days a 1-track line ran into New York City from its northern suburb, Yonkers. It is now just a road where a kid sits fishing. She heads there.

The kid in red cap with front visor to shield eyes from sun is on ledge edge of the bridge and holds a green hand-line whose baited hook he'd just cast into the water that runs under the bridge.
   “Hi Kid! Whatchya catchin' here?” 

   “Sunnies.”

   “What bait?”
   The kid points to a bag of wet flour dough on the ledge to his left. Just then his wood float on the water's surface starts jiggling and then it gets pulled under the water in a sudden jerk. The kid pulls back and the line is jerking about under the water surface and now Ali sees a shiny hand-size, slim oval  
fish swimming left and right in short lunges and as the kid pulls it in and up out of the water onto the ledge it flaps wildly. It looks to Ali 4 inches (10-cm) mouth to tail and 2 1/2 inches (5-6 cm) high, bottom of belly to top of back. Out of water, it shows a wet gold-green body and orange belly and in mouth a very small metal hook in upper lip.

   The kid grabs it tightly in his left hand and, with right index and thumb, deftly twists out the hook and drops the fish into a bucket of water down on the ground to his left with five other fish darting about.

   “Whatchya gonna do with the fish?”

   “Bring ‘em home. I gotta big tank and keep 'em as pets.”

   “You mean they can live in a tank?”

   “Yeah, I used to keep guppies too but dese fish ate 'em all up. Dese're hunter fish. Took ‘em less'n a hour to get rid a ten guppies. Dey do sudden lunges, catch the guppies and swallow ‘em.”
   “Wow!” Ali exclaims. “Where can I get a hand-line like that?”
   “Hi Jinx Sport Store, west side Jerome Avenue.”

   A plan is hatching in Ali's head. “Thanks kid.” She heads home.

     For next, click 12.25 Seminar about Time