Jackson runs down a hill outside of Bozeman, MT

Scale is a sense that can be easily manipulated by the mind—vast distances appear short in excitement; minutes pass excruciatingly slow when the opposite is wanted. The perception of the size of objects—and even oneself (see: Ken Kasey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)—may differ than reality: a result of empowerment, cowardice, ease, difficulty, or really any range of emotions and preconceptions. I have experienced my fair share of distorted perception in reflection of my feelings, but recently I have noticed a shift that is born of necessity: the expansion of the grass patches in city parks stretched to match the unending prairies of big sky country.

The last three years in New York City have challenged me both in ways that I had anticipated and in ways that I never would have thought. I foresaw the issues I would have without easy access to wilderness—or even any idea of it; there is a connection and a reliance that forms when growing up a stone’s throw from such an immense resource as endless forests and wetlands. What I had not foreseen was the longing for open space. I was a child of the closed canopies of temperate summer and the overcast crowns of Michigan winter. But the enclosure of a city is different—it is less ephemeral, it is static. It is also a hell of a lot louder. And as a result, I have come to miss the power of an empty horizon—to miss how it feels to stand on the edge of the timbered dunes facing Milwaukee and see nothing but blue and white. I think of the similarities between two edges of nothing—the shimmer of Lake Michigan’s waves and the rippling grass of the Great Plains. My dad has been a full-time resident of Montana for quite some time now. I have made the pilgrimage by car to Bozeman many times, moving from the north woods of the upper Great Lake States to the prairie potholes of North Dakota to the vast plains of Eastern Montana and eventually the Rockies—a pilgrimage both glacial and orogenic. That is to say, I have spent much time in open space. With each subsequent trip I have gained more appreciation for the way the sky seems to never end in the open country—the stillness of the wind. To my surprise, I have been experiencing the emotions of such grandiose expanses here in Brooklyn. Not because New York City’s most populus borough is an endless tract of prairie, but rather as a result of the manipulation of scale.

Over the last month I have sat and watched the dogs and their owners galivanting in long meadow, just south of Endale Arch in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. They’re dusty and beautiful. Sitting on the edge of this meadow framed in by the last old-growth forest in King’s County and rowhouses, there is no horizon in the distance. At least there wasn’t at first. I wrote the following poem in recognition of how this landscape has changed in front of me with each subsequent moment. It seemed endless, the slight topography giving my brain the excuse to extrapolate, the trees and buildings vanish into the sunset each evening. The tufts of grass follow the wind creating the unity seen in the movement of great lakes and plains. The nearly-wild dogs droning the country give life to the endless space: the bison of the bygone area, the controversial hooves of wild horses. It becomes forever:

Prairie

I have found an obsession with the way small hills roll through the grassland—

small undulations forming troughs just deep enough to obscure a large dog’s back,

its bristles becoming prairie grass.

There is a meditation weaving through such waves—

trace the ridges with your eyes and lose the perception of distance,

gain the familiarity of the grass moving in the wind.

Welcome to this world

Once the change of scale started, I tried to open myself to it—to allow it to come to fruition as a compensation my mind is making to the tightness of large building, the lack of wilderness. The wild opens in front of me as I sit along the edge of long meadow and settle into my creation. In the following poem, I write about the sun setting in this expanded world—the lone dog playing in the park has become a coyote, a reflection of my ideation of allowance and the essence of open sky:

Coyote’s Evening

This landscape won’t wait much longer—

the light is too ephemeral in this hour; it creates

infinite topography,

the shadows paying as much attention to the rolling hills as

to each clump of grass—each clover is painted with

two sides of the same story.

Coyote walks across the crest of a ridge, casting

A languid figure that moves swiftly in ripples and

dispersed inflection.

Dust emerges where such entities meet, the paws and soft earth,

only to be wrought into the wind by the friction created

when touching a mirror.

Perhaps this is the only thing to exist—

the world’s sky compressed to fit above the meadow.

Watch as it slowly turns orange and disappears.

Anthropologists have hypothesized that human dispersal out of Africa and into Europe, Asia, and eventually the Americas was partially driven by curiosity—by wanting to know what’s over that next hill. This may not be a uniquely human quality; perhaps this is why we have jaguars rediscovering Arizona and a wolf shot by coyote hunters last year in Michigan. Perhaps this is why some lost dogs stay lost. I like to believe this to be true—curiosity as a staple of life. Living in the city, I have never wondered what may be lying ahead on the next block or around the next corner. But when given the chance, like those before me, I could wander the woods or walk the plains for hours. It is now that I have realized the life ring my mind has tossed me: that grass patch in prospect park is the Great Plains and each small ridge conceals more than wallows for the urban dog—they hide an incomprehensible distance, thunderheads, streaming wind, coyotes, and an escape from the rat race that borders the park and is infiltrating my life.

It will be a year and a half before I move out of Brooklyn for good. I will miss much about the city, and I have picked up on many things here—including the importance of urban ecology and park systems to the health of the city and its inhabitants.

Through the meadows of the park, I am beginning to learn that the world can be found in small representatives of itself, over and over again.

To Frame a Meadow

On My First Publication and Gaining Familiarity with the Landscape