City Park, Rolling Forest

            “Wendy Park. Who would ever know this was here? It’s a beautiful view.” I’d seen the bicyclist squinting at his phone on the side of the road as I was driving down the narrow road that ends in the park, passing the marina, a yacht club, and a water treatment facility, and had wondered where he was going. The park on Whiskey Island is crushed into a pocket of land between the lake, the Cuyahoga, and train tracks, accessed by one gravely two-lane road, and used the most by locals looking to play beach volley-ball. It was mostly empty this afternoon when I was answering the man’s questions.

            “No, there’s no other road out but the one you came in on, there’s no way to cross the river. Cargill’s salt mine is right up there. “ Like many city parks, Wendy Park is nature that has been built around people; the beach is made mostly of asphalt and slag, and the path through the little patch of trees has been there longer than the trees themselves. Wendy Park and Dike 14 are two examples of new city parks that have been converted into recreational and wildlife habitat space, though people have been doing that for years; Fairview park around the corner from my house in Ohio City was converted from a city water facility almost a century ago. Where people have destroyed all greenspace, they remake it out of what space they have.

            Though it seems like there’s a world of difference between Hyner Run State park in PA where we were working this weekend and this little city park, in one way there isn’t at all; in both places, humans have intentionally groomed the area to return to some state of wildness, and preserved it as such. Though the woods at Hyner Run stretch for miles and roll almost seamlessly into equally wild private property, and we had to cut our way through laurel to access the trails, the entire area has been logged not too far back in history, and the current logging and fracking industries are interested in the land. People established state and federal park systems in the area to allow the forests to grow back specifically so that they could be enjoyed as forests, and the park services protect the land’s resources even when surrounding, private owners can’t. On our way into maintenance on Saturday morning, people were teasing about slashing the tires on the trucks containing fracking liquid that we passed, or tearing down the flagging in a field slated to be cut.

            “Just to put a cog in the wheel, you know? Look at all that destruction, it looks so ugly. And these pipes. It doesn’t seem right.” But just after we passed these operations which, ugly as they may be, are necessary to our current economy and society, we were able to walk on trails in wild spaces that have been deemed just as necessary to society, both preserved for wildlife and opened up for human interaction with it.