Kleiner's Blog

After seeing the ecological restoration at Emmaus Community Park, (which you will be seeing in great detail later this week), I headed to the Lehigh Parkway to take the pictures necessary to create a post of contrasts.

I shouldn’t have gone.
The same lousy feeling came back – the feeling
that keeps me from going to the parks – to the places
I once found my refuge.  I hadn’t taken three steps
from the door of my station wagon before the grass mowed right to the edge of the stream bank smacked the optimism I found in Emmaus right out of me.
I shouldn’t have gone.
That lousy feeling stole my step from me, kept me from walking, left me sitting on a manhole cover staring at the  soil compaction and the dead grass in truck track ruts. Awful, just awful. All of it, sterile, useless,  Nature neutered? Is it a joke?

I don’t know what it is.

I left, shaking my head, pissed off.  Driving back, pissed off, shaking my head, is that a turkey in the road? (Pull the station wagon into park on the roadside)
It just flew to the top of a maple tree.
What the hell turkey flies that high?
Wait, that smell. 
The thick sweet smell of decomposing animal flesh
hit my nose
and nearly knocked the wind from me.
Ah! Yes! Those
were not turkeys, they were buzzards, vultures.
Eaters of death.  

After the sterile park, in the ruts, in the invasive buffers, these “ugly” birds became the gods of nature, the  living embodiment of what was so desperately missing from the Parkway, gods with warm wet beaks of dead flesh and animal stink.

Buzzard gods of The Parkway.

(Tomorrow Emmaus Community Park or Bake Oven Knob – depends on today)