SPRING IN HELL’S KITCHEN

The dark stone canyon walls of Hell’s Kitchen are fractured horizontally, in cracks that grin and leer at hikers. Laurel clings to life on the precipitous ledges where plump mosses drip alongside the last fading tusks of winter ice. Water seeps invisibly through the jumbled rocks beneath the trail, briefly revealing itself as a sparkling stream and disappearing again. It echoes in rocky chambers, trickling and percolating in multiple voices. I bend and listen to the liquid speech suddenly joined by the melodic weet, weet, weet, weet, tsee, tsee of a flagrantly yellow warbler perched in the leafless brush like a light bulb. Other birdsong and the hum and buzz of insects will soon harmonize in an accidental orchestra prophesizing a season of the migrant, temporary, and intermittent.

EXTRA INNINGS ON STATEN ISLAND

At ninety miles per hour, Schafer’s fastball slams with a pop into the deep leathery mouth of the catcher’s mitt. The scent of grilling sausages hangs in summer’s searing heat. Brooklyn’s Bouchard grounds to shortstop, and cheers rise like smoke into the cloudless sky from this cozy concrete horseshoe of a stadium.

Over the outfield wall, massive tankers and container ships carrying bright steel canisters pass as silently as icebergs along the Kill Van Kull. The harbor beyond is herringboned with whitecaps and busy with tugs pushing barges and fishing trawlers with their nets reeled on deck. The boxy ferry crosses and recrosses past the grand green lady as she stands sentry before the City’s shimmering cliffs, its mesas and buttes of masonry, its columns of glass and steel that are filing cabinets of humanity. But the twin towers of dark glass still haunt like the pain of an amputee’s phantom limb.

Anxiety spread like flu on that day when the sky was an azure arc in which a centerfielder could lose a fly. We gathered around televisions repeatedly watching the cartoonish unreality of the plane, the explosion of flames and slowly coiling gray smoke. Fear-contorted faces filled streets darkened by the black rain of debris. Bridges filled with pedestrians. Tearful men and women held pictures of the missing.

Jostled by catcalls and shouts, I’m back with Lovett at the bat. On a hit-and-run he puts the ball in play, allowing Grote to slide safely at third. Tie score and I wonder if Brewer can bunt, can execute the suicide squeeze. He’s an unknown on a roster filled with untested names like Cuello, Nutt, Granke, and Gonell. Any could be the next Ruth whose legendary bat will lift a nation. But Brewer’s caught looking at a pitch on the inside corner, and I get up to grab a sausage against the uncertainty of extra innings.

UNION CEMETERY

Facing east toward redemption, monuments mount a terraced hillside of carefully manicured lawn. Gray slate slabs and reddish sandstones peer with dire death angel faces. Large chunks of sculpted granite are proudly emblazoned with names and dates. Slices of marble boast meticulously carved willows and urns, while obelisks and columns reach without reservation for the firmament. Shaped and engraved, chunks of earth’s hardened crust aspire to immortality.

These honored dead have eternal last looks at the village that sustained life. They share a view of battered wood-frame houses cradled in low green hills, and huge mills that once weaved woolens and spooled cotton. A restless river glistens, threading through the valley for which it provided power and purpose.

Hidden in scrubby woods across the street and just over a rusted guardrail, a narrow slice of land is squeezed between the pavement and the river. Almost lost in years of brittle leaf litter and tangled brush are the broken nubs of headstones, rough pieces of schist that might have been exhumed from the very earth dug to inter the dark-skinned slaves and sons and daughters of slaves resting here. In this unkempt ground the lives of the anonymous dead remain invisible, left for eternity to feel the cascading water’s vibration as it cuts ever deeper into the bedrock.