Berry Bushes

Andrew and I drove to Warwick late this morning to explore the City Park--which despite its baseball diamonds and playgrounds is much more like an arboretum than anything else. It's a small peninsula shaped like a manatee's face (that downward-pointing bulbous nose that also brings to mind a young male elephant seal, you know?) framed by narrow coves and gazing southward toward Greenwich Bay. The flat tip of its nose is a slim beach, accessible by an equally slim road or--as Andrew and I found--the walking trail.

Well, it's really a walking/biking trail, paved and with a white stripe painted down its center. Bikes to the right, pedestrians to the left. One way. Of course half of the (two dozen or so) people we encountered had completely ignored all this, and were walking on whatever side they liked in whatever direction they liked.

It was a three mile walk, and the path was never straight and flat for more than a few steps at a time; it's all low hills and twists and dips. The trees were incredibly green and tall enough to give me a cramp in my neck (because I apparently like to look up at the tops of the trees more than at the not-straight-and-level path I'm walking, like an idiot. Miraculous I didn't pitch over into the bushes at least once).

Through the trees you can gradually see one of the coves widen from streams into real bodies of water, complete with very loud birds and very quiet sailboats. It was gorgeous.

After about two miles, I noticed that some of the bushes we passed were sporting some kind of berry--I think raspberries, though I didn't want to taste them to find out. Just in case.

Another hundred yards along I heard a very cautious crash, crash coming quite close to us on the other side of a very tall and thick wall of bushes--including raspberry(?) bushes. The signs at the beginning of the trail warned us that we're sharing the peninsula with deer, coyotes, and pheasants, and I was determined that we'd see all three of them today. So of course when I heard what had to be something large and four-legged coming toward us, I had to get a look. Except I couldn't. Because of the giant wall of raspberry bush. And whatever thorny bush it was sharing space with. We spent a good five minutes trying to find a hole in the wall to look through, and although we did see a number of cute little birds moving expertly through the thorns, we couldn't figure out what big thing was moving around back there.

So naturally I started imagining all kinds of wonderful nonsense, mostly about mythical creatures and magic and walls between worlds made of raspberry bushes and thorns.

I can't wait to get back there.