Walking to decide

Thee Marginal Way, in Ogunquit, Maine

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) walked 34 miles to Mount Wachusett, seen on the horizon, from his home in Concord, Mass

— Photo by Benabbey - Template:St. Benedict Abbey

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

For a few hours last Thursday, it seemed that you could see the buds on the trees open in front of you in five minutes in the warm wind.

The fine weather reminds me of the joys and usefulness of walks. They’re good for the body and the mind. A good walk can help clarify your thinking when you have a difficult and/or complicated decision to make.

My favorite walks:

Walking from our house down a pot-holed one-lane road to rocky headlands on Massachusetts Bay when  I was a boy. It went through cedar and oak woods and by a marsh thick with reeds through which we cut trails  and created little rooms. Then I’d look up to the left at a gray-shingled house on a granite crag in the woods where hawks always seemed to be flying. As the road descended slightly to almost sea level there was a cottage to the right – I assume mostly a summer place – on a beach that extended out to a mussel bed. In those days we didn’t eat these shellfish but used them solely for bait to catch mackerel.

Then, near the end of the road, came a little beach, more stones than sand, on the left and two granite headlands, both with quartz stripes, one of which was an island at high tide on which stood a brick mansion, with a swimming pool, which we thought exotic. It was connected to the road by a  slightly arched bridge. It took me no more than about 15 minutes to get to this place from our house, but that was enough in the salty air to feel refreshed with new ideas.

When I worked in Lower Manhattan, in the ‘70s, I frequently strolled down Broadway to The Battery, at the tip of the island, to stare out on New York Harbor, usually rippled by a southwest breeze. There I might buy a hot dog, with sauerkraut, from a cart manned by an old man with a beard. He too admired the view, though he noted in some sort of Slavic accent that “It’s too bad the water’s so dirty and smelly.’’ This was before the newly created EPA had sprung into action.

The best days for these walks were Sundays, a work day for me. Hardly anyone lived in Lower Manhattan then – it was almost entirely offices, most in the financial sector --  and so the neighborhood had a kind of sweet sadness on weekends.

One day I was walking with my colleague Marty Hollander down Broadway, and he looked over at the new Twin Towers and said: “Someday someone’s gonna fly into them.’’  I’m trying to recall if he meant intentionally or by accident.

Many of my most vivid memories are from walking in New York, though I only lived there for four years, but visited many times before and after. I guess one’s memories are implanted more firmly when one is young. 

Before my Lower Manhattan gig, I’d daily walk to and fro between the campus of Columbia  University, where I was a grad student, and the apartment I shared about 25 blocks south.  When I didn’t stroll up Riverside Park, I’d go up

Broadway, by the Thalia movie theater and strange eateries. One specialized in Mexican Chinese food. On my way back home, the usual hookers stood by at the entrance to a store that sold newspapers and magazines; they nodded with dignity as people walked by.

On the trip to Columbia, I’d plan out the day, sometimes stopping to jot down ideas and reminders.

In Providence,  where I’d come to work at The Providence Journal, then in its last glory decades, I’d hike from our house in Fox Point and later the East Side among the architectural marvels of College Hill to the Journal Building and back again at night – often very late. The homeward-bound trip was fine exercise because of the steep hill. Later on, however, when I became an “executive’’ I found that I no longer had the time and drove. It was frustrating.A

I fixed a lot of problems on these walks, which I did in all weather, including the Blizzard of ’78.

Linda Gasparello: What’s good for us can be very bad for wildlife

Remains of an albatross killed by ingesting plastic pollution.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

When I lived in Manhattan, I pursued an unusual pastime. I started it to avoid eye contact with Unification Church members who peddled flowers and their faith on many street corners in the 1970s. If a Moonie (as a church member was derisively known) were to approach me, I’d cast my eyes down to the sidewalk, where I’d see things that would set my mind wandering.

In the winter, I’d see lone gloves and mittens. On the curb in front of La Cote Basque on East 55th Street, the luxe French restaurant where Truman Capote dined with the doyennes of New York’s social scene, before dishing on them in his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, I saw a black leather glove with a gold metal “F” sewn on the cuff. I coveted such a Fendi pair, eyeing them at the glove counter at Bergdorf Goodman, but not buying them – they cost about a third of my Greenwich Village studio apartment’s monthly rent in the late 1970s. On the sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, in front of an FAO Schwartz window, I saw a child’s mitten, expertly knit in a red-and-white Norwegian pattern that I never had the patience to follow. I wondered whether the child dropped the mitten after removing it to point excitedly to a toy in the window.

In the summer, I’d see pairs of sunglasses and single sneakers on the sidewalks, things that had fallen out of weekenders’ pockets and bags. It wasn’t unusual for me to see pantyhose. Working women in Manhattan, in my time there, could wear a short-sleeved wrap dress – the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg was the working woman’s boilersuit -- in the summer, but they’d better have put on pantyhose, or packed a pair in their pocketbooks or tote bags. The pantyhose would fall out of them and roll like tumbleweed along the avenues.

One summer morning on Perry Street, near where I lived, I saw a long, black zipper. It looked like a black snake had slithered out of a drain grate on the street and was warming itself on the asphalt, its white belly gleaming in the sun.

Now when I walk on a city sidewalk, I still look down, not to pursue my pastime but to preserve myself from tripping and falling on stuff. I sometimes see interesting litter, but mostly I see single-use and reusable face masks.

This fall, as I walked on the waterfront promenade along Rondout Creek in Kingston, N.Y., I saw a single-use mask swirling in the wind with the fallen leaves. I grabbed the mask and deposited it in a trash can, worried that it would fall into the creek, ensnarling the waterfowl and the fish.

In the COVID-19 crisis, masks have been lifesavers. But masks, especially single-use, polypropylene surgical masks, have been killing marine wildlife and devastating ecosystems.

Billions of masks have been entering our oceans and washing onto our beaches when they are tossed aside, where waste-management systems are inadequate or nonexistent, or when these systems become overwhelmed because of increased volumes of waste.

A new report from OceansAsia, a Hong Kong-based marine conservation organization, estimates that 1.56 billion masks will have entered the oceans in 2020. This will result in an additional 4,680 to 6,240 metric tons of marine plastic pollution, says the report, entitled “Masks on the Beach: The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution.”

Single-use masks are made from a variety of meltdown plastics and are difficult to recycle, due to both composition and risk of contamination and infection, the report points out. These masks will take as long as 450 years to break down, slowly turning into microplastics ingested by wildlife.

“Marine plastic pollution is devastating our oceans. Plastic pollution kills an estimated 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, over a million seabirds, and even greater numbers of fish, invertebrates and other animals each year. It also negatively impacts fisheries and the tourism industry and costs the global economy an estimated $13 billion per year,” according to Gary Stokes, operations director of OceansAsia.

The report recommends that people wear reusable masks, and to dispose of all masks properly.

I hope that everyone will wear them for the sake of their own and others’ health, and that I won’t see them lying on sidewalks on my strolls, or on beaches, where they are a sorry sight.

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is whchronicle@gmail.com and she’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Can NYC recover its swagger after COVID-19?

In the energy of midtown Manhattan

NEW YORK

Alistair Cooke, the great British journalist who wrote his weekly “Letter from America” – a paean to the United States -- for 58 years, reserved some of his most lavish praise for Manhattan. When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited America and wanted to see Disney World, Cooke told him he’d never see anything as extraordinary as the Manhattan skyline.

I was reminded of this long-ago admonishment recently, when I had the opportunity to see Manhattan from the water, cruising around the island on a friend’s yacht, looking at that skyline, those fingers of buildings, thrusting toward heaven in a forest of architectural and engineering creativity that has no equal on earth. Dubai may aspire but it doesn’t compete.

Manhattan is awe on steroids.

I’ve savored and, at times, detested it for decades. I suffered its awfulness at the bottom when many newspapers closed and I, an immigrant with no resources, found work as a busboy at the Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street – one of the food-service automats which were once a feature of New York City. They were where the hapless could sit unbothered for long hours without buying anything beyond coffee; where they could stay warm and sheltered in the winter.

I’ve also savored Manhattan in good times, staying at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the best hotels in the world, up there with the Ritz in Paris and Brown’s in London.

It was said when I lived there in the 1960s, that New York was a city for the extraordinarily rich and the extremely poor. I found work in Washington and stayed south; New York became a place to visit.

If it was a hard place to be poor in 1965, the extremes of poverty and wealth only increased with time.

More great buildings, enabled by engineering that allowed them to be planted in smaller plots of land, sprouted in Manhattan. Spindle apartment buildings and sprawling waterfront office developments were built with money that flowed in from hedge funds, tech companies, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, and Middle Eastern oil-garchs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Big Apple felt its vulnerability to a hostile, premeditated attack. Now it is facing its greatest crisis, one that will wound it mortally if not fatally: COVID-19.

New York City has an uncertain future. People are moving out, selling their expensive co-ops at a loss, and buying in less-crowded places on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, and even farther afield.

As I looked in wonder at the city of striving people, epitomized by its buildings that themselves seem to strive to go ever higher, I wondered whether New York is over, destined to a slow death; its apartments in the clouds likely to be abandoned, and its trove of office space to sit empty as a new generation grows into the idea that working from home — home far away — is the norm, the new way to think about work.

The New York Times has looked at the problem and its writers can’t, it seems, bring themselves to answer the question: Is it over?

The city’s impending tragedy will be played out in other cities, but it is in New York that it will be most visible, most painful; the dream most shattered.

Sure, you might say, it was built on greed and now it must pay the price. But it was also built on much else: immigration, diversity, financial acumen, theater, fine art, sweat and toil -- and that most human of emotions: aspiration.

I hope that the new normal will allow cities to recover and New York to swagger forward as it has in the past: difficult to live in and difficult to live without. It’s a miracle of a city, a big shiny apple.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

In Korea Town, one of New York’s many ethnic neighborhoods

Our Woody Allen neighborhood

Woody Allen is making a movie in our neighborhood,  in Providence, this week, and some streets are blocked off. There are an astonishingly large number of vehicles associated with the shooting, including  about a dozen very large trucks and RV's. You can see that making feature movies requires one hell of a lot of infrastructure. The neighbors are torn between irritation about the inconvenience and pleasure that this celeb is making a big movie  in this leafy neighborhood.  (What viewers will actually see will be quiet and  intimate, I'm pretty sure. Woody Allen doesn't exactly make spectacles.)

Providence is an appropriate place, culturally, for Allen to make a film. Rhode Islanders tend to be cynical and pessimistic, yet many  of their surroundings are beautiful.  And it's not too far from his beloved Manhattan.

How weird it seems to me. I remember watching Allen as a standup comedian in the '60's, seeing him play the clarinet at Michael's Pub, in Manhattan, in the '70's, and  viewing most of  his movies,  usually with great pleasure. What a work ethic to get through such a  long and complicated life.

And now he's around the corner.