Camping In Brooklyn

An adventure is what you see in it.

For years I have been telling my family gathered in the Holiday kitchen
where we most laugh in any year that my career to-do list includes
camping at the Kennedy Koala Campgrounds. I imagine a yard of bituminous
stained concrete, pitched for improper drainage with rust and leaf
clogged grates, weathered plywood platforms to tie up a khaki canvas pup
tent, wafer thin air mattresses in a brilliant orange that very very
slowly leak out their particulates, an overloud stereo PA system
blasting unintelligible subway commands -- causing us to want to walk in
repetitive circles -- insurmountable chain link fence twenty feet high,
rounds and rounds of razor wire sharp and sinister, surrounded by the
no-man's barrier of a Con Ed substation, Angola type guard towers with
highly-trained female sharpshooters at all corners, monumental search
lights of immense wattage, and an unreasonable parking fee with a
no-exit clause.

Typical city.

I'm reminded always, when reminded of my ambition, of a childhood
excursion with the mobile family to Valley Forge where it rained, and
rained, then rained more and we dug trenches in roots and mud around our
little sagging tent with a broken folding shovel to no avail and ended
up water soaked and sleeping in the car with the windows rolled up.
Cripes! Our feet were not wrapped in bloody rags. There is always, in my
mind, a historical connection between the sacrifice of comfort for the
gain of liberty.

Our first night camping at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn we are kept
awake by the sound of helicopters flying overhead and brightness of
their searchlights in the ever-glowing semi-fog. Is it a training
exercise for the tracking down of urban terrorists? Or are these search
and urban rescue jockeys just having a great time of it? All night they
crackle over an area just east of our encampment. We are tired from
travel and despite a simmering paranoia, this being October 2001, phase
one of our excursion, and us roughing it in Brooklyn, we half-doze
through the rattling sounds. Our dreams are rough and revealing of
things to forget. Afterwards we hardly notice the sheltered rumble of
vehicles on nearby beltway or bridge. In the morning there are birds
singing. We go out for breakfast and admire the feral squawking from the
parrot nest built around the power transformer on the pole at the
parking lot of the dinner.

Binoculars.

In May 2002, phase two the rendezvous, we look up and see the Concorde
ascending low overhead, taking off from Kennedy for Paris. I fancy that
I could be up there sleeping, stuffed into a slim needle with fat wings
with a book and a magazine sheltering our lap, a narrow white tube
rocket with the lowering beak of a sand plover. Another ambition on my
to-do list to get a one-way ticket on the Concorde and to fly away with
nothing more than a rain slicker and a credit card, find myself where I
am and return, we think, returning always to a changed space. Instead of
wandering from this ground to across the Atlantic into oblivion of
increasingly unintelligible hearing we are here standing on old sand
looking closely at scrub pine needles. Technology and nature, immersion
in the contrast between highly complex systems of human order, flying
past, hanging in the air, rushing past in a deep roar. A pestering
thought in the background that we may be acquiring a tick.

In July 1938 Howard Robard Hughes took off from this field in his
Lockheed monoplane to fly around the world in 91 hours and 16 minutes.

Reports of dead crows in distant portions of the Metropolis cause one to
notice the buzzing of all mosquitoes with a slight trepidation. Do we
flee, stand ground, swat madly, or say our last prayers? Will the next
step in our adventure be the terminus of a hospital bed, a plastic
containment tent, the grave and a brief obit? Measure and wash hands
twice, layout and focus, dry palms on pants for lack of towels, clean
finger nails thoroughly. Ten second rule: if your food falls on the
ground you have ten seconds to pick it up and eat it before it is
contaminated. Will we be quite so lucky? Sometimes it pays not to listen
to the news, turn off the television, turn off the radio, throw away the
papers and wing it. Reports that last October there was a potential
threat of a nuclear device exploding in Manhattan puts one on notice. A
threat -- everything wants to kill us. Stand frozen, or tell it all to
kiss off? Some deteriorating forces acting slower than others.

To stop moving in space is to stall, fall and plummet. Kersplaat!

In transit from camp to workshop, or during lunch, some instant that
otherwise is lost in the jumble of the active day, I am told about a
woman that lived in Kiev during the Chernobyl disaster. This is New
York, multicultural, a city where all cities are local, in fact, when I
am told that overnight the green cabbages turned purple-gray, the
chickens and cows and donkeys all died, it feels sad like the next
village over has been decimated.

Survival of the sheltered, the people stay indoors while their vital
stock diminishes in the surrounding environment. At the four-corners
where the houses are built of masonry walls of uranium mine tailings the
people stay indoors. Sleeping in a tent in the density of the ultimate
city is an act of reclamation. If you are dressed for it, liberation of
the city is that you can wander around for days with nothing more than a
wallet or purse or less. One does not need to carry a Bowie knife, adze,
hatchet, machete, water bottle, and sixty pounds of gear with a mess kit
or whatnot. Getting lost is easy, and you can ask directions. Everything
you can want is spread out. Like a computer role playing game you look
down and there before you is exactly what you need for the next level of
challenge. A proof of the theory of human evolution is that there are
homeless schizophrenics living on the streets. As if it is written, "As
a lowly sparrow, so shall ye be nuts." You do not even need a Peterson
guide to edible weeds. Squawk like a parrot and someone will run over
and feed you. The unfortunate sane can get by with simply a photo ID
credit card; it even works to access the locked door to the showers.

Hangar 5, where we are once again undertaking the workshop, was used as
the morgue for American Airlines flight 587 that crashed in nearby Belle
Harbor in November 2001. This is the space where the bodies of the loved
and cherished were brought. This is where the craft was gathered. Our
materials sat here from October to May. Our shelter rafter logs are
piled in the background of the National Transportation Safety Board
photo of a piece of rudder recovered from the water. This is our
rendezvous. We come back to this stage, this historic hangar, where
there has been this unfortunate change during our absence. Oddly, the
sense is that nothing that we left behind moves here ever, all objects
frozen in time and space. The gate, the timbers, the walls, the floor
cause us to think about what they have seen. We shudder that they may
tell us what respiratory decimation lurks silently in the dried pigeon
guano that is swept. A half-nibbled bagel is placed on the floor with a
pencil drawn box around it. Next morning it is still there. Next year?

The Sanitation Department Training Facility is nearby. My friends are so
secretive they want to show me something I wonder if I should worry they
will blindfold me and throw me in the back of a truck and play disco
music. All day I wait, I am sawing rafter logs all day over and over
sawing and my right arm is crooked. At the end of the day they do not
blindfold me. We simply drive over to a building with the glazing busted
out, a fresh weather haven, and here is the Retirement Home for Porto
Potties.

Heaven. The Gates of Father Nelson. An excremental monument. Pink ones,
blue ones, plastic and wood ones, straight and tipped and some of them
sideways and otherwise engaged with each other, cliques of utility, an
encampment of discarded johns in the multiple dozens. An assisted care
facility of the lonely loo, a repository of neglected white houses. A
cultural vortex. A monument to the bare ass in all of us. I am near
speechless and as humbled by the archaeology of the event as if I were
picking up a scruffy penny off the stone floor at the feet of Abraham
Lincoln. There are mirrors. There may be no human creation quite as
noble as the application of a mirror to the interior of a portable toilet.

The next day I play hooky from the workshop and sneak back alone with
the intent to photograph and meditate on the durability of paper
holders. That night at camp, refreshed in my perspective of the
universe, we hear about the Jovies leaving their bible and survival
tracts half-read in an Ohio watch tower (a sedentary place from which to
observe the actions of ourselves and others) and the product evaluation
report that the paper is not quite as good for recycling as Kesey's use
of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Going places we do not intend.

There is a rumor that one of us has been working on an island in the
Atlantic where the sky does not forever glow all night, despite the
interference of stars and an occasional moon, and the meager darkening
sound is the hiss of wind trees, night birds and prowling vermin. A
natural Utopia does not at all seem comprehensible from the picnic table
at this Camp Brooklyn as we gather near the metal fire pit. Thoreau did
not have to deal with alien abductions. How can one survive themselves
without the litter of neighbors?

Touring the barracks and empty buildings where a boy can enter and come
out the other door a grub we hesitate in the mess looking at the
underutilized resources of stainless steel kettles and the triple-decker
pizza oven, digesting that this space may or may not be the world
distribution center for Toys-for-Tots.

Frank L. Baum wrote psychotic stories about Santa and meat bodies and
missing body parts, and here we are touring the back scenes of a
prosthetic laboratory. It does not feel like Kansas, though somehow it
feels very much like the airport at Ottumwa, Iowa where Richard Nixon
served. The large stainless steel oven has bold, yet sloppy, written on
it with black marker, "Girls."

Flashing visions of Hansel & Gretel jump between us with our smiles but
we steal ourselves that we are on a tour with a mission. We begin to
wonder where is the black witch? Where is the old lady, the magician,
the dismembering chrone? Where we are going we are not quite sure. This
could be Paris, this could be Kiev. The large Dr. Caligari cupboard has
writ on it, "Boys."

Enlightenment. For too many years the Chinese thought that the British
in the dark night were stealing their babies and eating them. It is odd
how bits and pieces just sort of get picked up here and there.

We are tittering and bumping into utensils while our guides show nervous
signs of suspecting our professional focus. We are nearly losing it
completely when, leading our way out of the building, we see writ on a
closed door, "Balls & Stuff." This we have to look inside to, with
disappointment, finding an empty room. Everyone savors the adventure of
looking behind the curtain.

GO 05-25-02

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