by Bibi Gaston
In Rosamond’s day, the parkgoer passed through a vast open meadow, around rough outcrops of Manhattan’s diamond-hard schist, and past a newly planted sycamore at the base of Greywacke Arch. Sited at the center of the vast rectangle was the Croton Reservoir, Manhattan’s water supply, now the site of the Great Lawn. The perimeter landscape along Fifth Avenue had originally been designated a deer park in the Greensward plan, a welcome bit of enchantment where the park meets the city grid. Across East Drive, in one of Manhattan’s magic moments, the Obelisk was erected, a gift from the Egyptian government for America’s work on the Suez Canal. On February 22, 1881, thirty-two horses arrived near Greywacke Arch, having dragged the granite obelisk ninety-nine feet a day from lower Manhattan. On a slope overlooking the Metropolitan with views to the street corner at Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, ten thousand jubilant New Yorkers greeted William Maxwell Evarts, then U.S. secretary of state, who asked his fellow citizens an urgent question:
…This obelisk may ask us, “Can you expect to flourish forever? Can you expect wealth to accumulate and man not decay? Can you think that the soft folds of luxury are to wrap themselves closer and closer around this nation and the pith and vigor of its manhood know no decay? Can it creep over you and yet the nation know no decrepitude?” These are questions that may be answered in the time of the obelisk but not in ours.
Every site tells a story. After the first foot of loam, our excavation yielded shards of everything: old terra-cotta pipes, glass bottles, foundations of paths, walls, and cobblestone from the original landscape of the 1860s. One day during construction in the fall of 1991, my father was casing the neighborhood and somehow tracked me down at the corner of Seventy-ninth and Fifth. He always knew more about my whereabouts than I knew about his, and he had a habit of showing up in places unannounced. Perhaps the Upper East Side was like a charnel ground, and that day, in the late-middle years of his eggless, butterless, weightlifting life, he was probably doing what he had always done, performing a kind of surveillance on the old neighborhood, where he had once been the treasured child of the loveliest woman in America. As if there’d be a resolution through repetition. Only this time, he was looking for me.
Perhaps he had just come over from the tenements where he had taken me and my siblings several times in the 1960s when I was about nine, where derelict old walk-ups teemed with indigent tenants who leaned out over fire escapes at East Seventy-fifth and Third Avenue. It seemed to me that the tenants weren’t very happy and there was all sorts of trouble. When I was nine, I didn’t know that Rosamond had bought her Third Avenue walk-ups with the money she made in The Miracle, or that when she died, she left them to both of her children.
So that day in 1991, my father didn’t find me at the corner of Seventy-ninth and Fifth. He wandered into the corner playground just as crews began installing a huge bronze statue of three art deco bears and a set of ornamental gates inscribed with the profiles of monkeys and owls. Between the time I left for lunch and the time I came back, the crews put their finishing touches on the gates of owls. My father appeared, asked about me, then vanished.
“He didn’t look like your father,” the site engineer, Doug Blonsky, said as he described the man who had been at my project who said that he was my father. I knew what he meant. Despite the lineage and those low-cholesterol East Side good looks, he had never looked like fathers who set off for the office each morning in a suit carrying a briefcase. At sixty-two, his business was selling ships’ engines, but he spent most of his time combing Manhattan’s law libraries in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt, thinking about the past and everything that was lost. How could he forget that he was the heir to what might have been a kind of American quasi-royalty? His grandfather Amos and great-grandfather James and even Rosamond had once had a firm stake in Manhattan, not only in its real estate but its history. They’d played for the right team, fought for the common good; they’d placed others above themselves, and played a role in making it a better place. They hadn’t been frustrated playwrights like Big Bill. The Minturns had conjured Central Park, for God’s sake. Gertrude was the granddaughter of Anne Marie Wendell, married to Robert Bowne Minturn, known as a great gentleman and “merchant prince” of Manhattan. Some historians believed that his great-great-grandparents had hatched the first plan to build Manhattan’s first “central park.” The Pinchots had helped erect the Statue of Liberty. They hadn’t grabbed and hoarded their spoils. They stood for justice and the rights of the common man. Amos helped in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and fought for labor laws to protect the rights of women and children in factories. Rosamond and Amos and Gifford gave their assistance and money to the poor; they hadn’t betrayed their own brother. No wonder he was casing the joint; this had been his own backyard.
The perimeter wall binds the park like a ribbon of stone. Though it is a small feature in the scheme of a great metropolis, I have always thought of the wall as the greatest accomplishment of the park and its creators. As the dividing line, the wall protected the soft folds of Olmsted’s Greensward, clearly delineating the edge of the park. The other, the city, could not interfere with its mission to provide for the common relief as the green lungs of Manhattan.
In the years after I restored landscapes in Central Park, my mind kept coming back to the perimeter wall and how my father and I had missed each other that day. If I had known Rosamond’s story, I might have embarked on parallel excavations and learned that she had been born on October 26, 1904, in a picturesque brownstone at 2 Gramercy Park, just one day before the first underground subway line opened in Manhattan. Horns blasted off the piers on the Hudson River and great festivities were under way, but her father, Amos, was suffering from a severe bout of melancholia. Gertrude and the doctors decided to keep silent because he was a very public man. I might have learned that Rosamond was depressed at the time of her son James’s birth; in fact, she wrote that she had brought a child upside down into a “world of sorrow.” I might have considered how my mother had been depressed at the time of the birth of her third child, how her marriage in 1962 was over, and she’d been drinking. I might have seen how patterns of trouble repeat.
In the spring of 1991, I left Central Park Conservancy to join a boyfriend in Philadelphia. But as it turned out, I didn’t waste a lot of time there. After three months of living together, I discovered the letters of a recycled ex-girlfriend in my so-called boyfriend’s desk and notes to new ones as well. I really couldn’t blame him for all the confusion; he had about as much trouble telling me the truth as I had trouble hearing it.
To the tune of two untruths, in late September of 1991, I left New York for Seattle, this time with a thirst for mountains and scenery. I crossed the continent, no pearls, no maids, no big deal. I told everyone I was done with Mr. Philadelphia, but like Rosamond, what I said and what I did were two different things.
In Seattle, a young woman dressed from head to toe in Soho black asked me, “You come from the East, so, just what makes you think you can design in the West?” I responded that a good design training could take someone anywhere. It was an East Coast response, so I never heard back. Several weeks later a landscape architect contacted me about a position with the U.S. Forest Service on the Hood River Ranger District in Oregon. Hood River, he said, was like a college town without the college. One could buy a windsurfing board and a tractor on Main Street. The town has just under five thousand people and only one traffic light. The scenery didn’t require evaluation, it was all spectacular.
I arrived one snowy night in January at the base of Mt. Hood, and for three months I never saw the sun. I would have turned around and gone home if I’d had a home to go to. Three months later, the clouds lifted, and I could hardly believe I was in America. I rented a little house in a ponderosa pine forest at the foot of a volcano with views of two glaciers and the Columbia River. I was surrounded by rhododendrons, century-old pear orchards, and freezing rivers. That summer, I read about wildflowers and the West and ori
ented myself. I learned that Mt. Hood’s splendid tip wasn’t just snow, it was layer upon layer of ancient ice. The pink cast wasn’t light, it was alpenglow. The long spines of bonsaied vegetation weren’t desperate trees clinging to life; they had a romantic name: krumholtz stringers. I thought of myself as exiled in paradise, learning the language of the most beautiful place on earth.
One day in the summer of 1993, my father appeared out of nowhere with his Moroccan bag, his bananas, and his Rolleiflex. He called first, which was odd, from a jet phone flying over Mt. Hood on his way to a meeting about diesel engines near Seattle. “Are you down there?” I heard him say. “Yes, where are you?” “In the neighborhood, several miles away,” he said. Several hours later I met him at Oneonta Gorge, a mossy chasm along a snakelike stretch of road that was constructed in the teens, the Old Columbia River Highway. I was with Laura Starr, my friend and the chief of design for Central Park, who had heard about my father’s dropping in to see me at Seventy-ninth and Fifth and had a name for him, “Père Bibi.” Laura took photographs of the two of us along the highway that day. That night, he stayed in a dingy western-ranch-style motel at the edge of town. The next day he and I drove through the orchards of the Hood River Valley up to Timberline Lodge, where we wandered past the dusty dioramas of Indian memorabilia and the stories of men whose backbreaking labor built the place prior to the Works Progress Administration. We ate an awkward white-napkin lunch beside the huge rustic fireplace. On the way back down the valley, I drove while my father looked out at the broad muscular flanks of Mt. Adams and the nimble, feminine tip of Mt. Hood. That afternoon he was quiet, saying only, “This place is Paradise.”
I thought about how beauty was his synonym for love and how we had both made an unspoken agreement to love beauty when people had failed us. It might have seemed like a ridiculous pact to a daughter who had received nothing most daughters receive, like attention or support, but he and I hadn’t agreed to a standard father-daughter relationship; we had both agreed to be in awe of beauty, and that agreement made me feel a bond as strong as love. He approved of the Columbia River Gorge, what I was doing there, and though he didn’t say it, that made me feel like he loved me. He had seen in landscape what I had seen.
I knew very little about Gifford Pinchot when I took a position on the rural Hood River district, headquartered in a low-slung industrial building nestled in the orchards below Mt. Hood. I had told only two people that Great-Uncle Gifford was some kind of vague relative, because I wanted to fit in to the sea of green rigs and pickle suits, what Pinchot himself called “the outfit.” Anyway, I really wasn’t altogether sure of how many “greats” went before Uncle Gifford because no one in my family had told me how we were related. I feared that if someone knew I was related to Gifford Pinchot, I’d be tagged aristocratic, a spy, a slumming dilettante. They’d ask me why I thought I could design in the West. But what no one knew, what they didn’t need to know and probably didn’t care about, was that I needed to work for a living—I always had—so I counted my days, quietly acclimating myself to predawn office hours, coffee-black, and what seemed like the military.
My year as a Forest Service employee in a hard-bitten timber-felling ranger district passed quickly. I restored campgrounds and trails and tourist destinations. I was asked to design a new deck at the top of Oregon’s largest tourist attraction and her highest cascade, Multnomah Falls, for the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, and it was there, while restoring trails, walls, and compacted slopes, that the memories of childhood summers came back to me.
I hadn’t spoken to my mother for about six months so one day I called her from a pay phone at the base of the falls. “Guess where I am?” I said. “Maine, Mongolia, where?” “Another M word, Multnomah Falls, Oregon,” I told her. She cooed at how I’d moved from here to there by myself and landed a job. She reminded me of our summers out west, how she’d wanted to open a bookstore on the Oregon coast. We spoke for a few minutes about camping and she told me that the reason that I felt like I’d been to the Falls before was because I had, when I was eight years old and I’d just started keeping a diary. I collected books on wildflowers and banners, she said. Indian paintbrush were my favorite. And there was a bird, she said, an amphibious bird that dove through the falls and lived in the cliffs.
“Yes, the water ouzel,” I said. I’d learned about the bird while restoring areas near Multnomah Creek.
“You mean where the Indian maiden jumped to her death?” she asked.
“Oh, Mother, the legend of Multnomah is just one of those tired old Indian legends you hear throughout the West.” There wasn’t any proof that the beautiful daughter of the Multnomah had dressed in white and, thanks to a prescription from the tribe’s medicine man, leaped to her death to calm the Great Spirit and rescue her people from the plague. She didn’t need proof, my mother said.
I was too busy dropping a deck in by helicopter at the top of Multnomah Falls, reconstructing campgrounds with prison crews, and recovering from Mr. Philadelphia to remember the camping trip in 1968 and the Gifford Pinchot raindrop. There was no time to make sense of why this place touched me so deeply, how similar the waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge were to that of the Delaware and Milford. Or that, of the million places that needed straightening, I’d been asked to straighten this one.
The following spring, I fell in love with someone whose history fit mine like a lock and key. He looked like Gifford Pinchot. He was charming like Big Bill. He had three children he’d abandoned like my father. Within five minutes of meeting the Irishman on a project site on April 15, 1993, he told me that we needed each other. I thought he meant he needed the project. It wasn’t long before I realized he needed me to get out of his marriage. We took long lunches together, hiking the slopes of Mt. Hood to share waterfalls and rare plants. He read me poetry and passages from the Gospels about the lilies of the field. He took off his wedding ring and hung it on the dash when he first told me he loved me. He built my projects and together we discovered the elation of making things beautiful and ridding properties of disharmony. We spent hours on a rock by the side of the Hood River rediscovering laughter and stories. But he would never talk about the past, so I wouldn’t, either; we colluded in the silent grief common to families of alcoholics and suicides. Discussing the past was a waste of time; something you couldn’t do a damn thing about.
In time, the Irishman divorced and we lived together as I built my business and he juggled his children and work. I took on increasingly complicated projects, repatriating Native American burial grounds along the Union Pacific railroad tracks, restoring desecrated gravel mining sites ripped clean of their topsoil, designing trails and overlooks, and beautifying trailer parks and picnic areas. I designed benches in meadows of wildflowers and was chased by angry, gun-wielding landowners who lectured me on “the truth about the government.” I pressed on, despite the politics, building and beautifying, eventually winning the U.S. Department of Transportation’s top design award for restoring the Columbia River Highway.
In the years before leaving Oregon, I had two recurring dreams. One was of a deer struggling to break free, moving fast but going nowhere, the other haunted me by day and woke me up at night. I dreamed of the white figure who had come into my bedroom as a child at the Old Mill.
About the time the daydreams started, I decided to move back east, and the Irishman announced he was coming with me. We chose to start our East Coast lives in Florida where there was a booming economy and where we bought a modest bright-pink stucco, Spanish-style bungalow several blocks from the beach in a historic neighborhood. We had started over, but within a year, I was disheartened by Florida, which seemed decadent, wasteful, and overdeveloped, a haven for felons and deadbeat dads disappearing into floating neighborhoods of houseboats. Women lounged around in their tan lines waiting for their favorite electrician while their husbands were at work. The night brought bird-sized bugs to porch lights, and morning brought snakes in the pool; summ
er brought stinging sea lice, and fall, hurricanes named after women. There was no respite in a sea of cars, no waterfalls, no mossy trails, no fields of grass except those infested with red ants. The Irishman saw nothing wrong with Florida that my attitude and a category-five hurricane couldn’t fix. After a while, I became terrified each morning when he’d leave for work, fearing he’d get hurt, leave me with the bugs and the sea lice by myself and never come back.
While in Florida, I received a call from an architect at the Cooper Union in New York. The New York Times was holding a competition to bury a time capsule somewhere in Manhattan, and Cooper’s team decided to bury it in a garden labyrinth at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I went to work researching the history and meaning of labyrinths, a compelling assignment for someone who had spent half her life trying to find her way home. The labyrinth, I learned, is traditionally composed of twelve rings that lead to a center rosette. The path made twenty-eight loops, seven on the left side toward the center, then seven on the right side toward the center, followed by seven on the left side toward the outside, and, finally, seven on the right side toward the outside, terminating in a short straight path to the rosette.