By the water

The smooth cordgrass looks as though it belongs here, at Pier One, which is now the oldest part of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. Pier Six opened second, a five minute walk from where we live, and Pier Five will soon follow suit, as the barren warehouse wharfs are transformed into contiguous waterfront park.

Though native to our region of rising and falling salt water, the cordgrass here was planted. I remember when it was little rows of plugs, and quite funny looking.

I think Walt Whitman would like it, now. I am reading his Specimen Days and Collect. I have never been a fan of the poetry, finding it too rhapsodic (maybe I should try again), but his prose is riveting. He writes about the places I know, a-century-and-a-half ago. Washington DC - during the Civil War - and Brooklyn. He writes, too, about Camden, NJ, where he convalesced in a farmhouse and walked down a farm road every day accompanied by a swarm of bumble bees before sunbathing beside a spring gushing sweet water.

Camden. Perennially named the most dangerous city in America.

He writes about ice fishing on the salt marshes of Long Island. He writes about hearing songbirds migrating past midnight. In Brooklyn. He loved ferries.

I love ferries. And songbirds migrating past midnight. In Brooklyn.

But I digress.

These pictures were taken after the historic storm and its surge.

The sumac weathered it, the intertidal cordgrass was submerged and then reappeared.

The world goes around, and around.