Paean to a Public Park
A love letter to my local haunt in the form of a series of memories
At the edge of my college campus is a park I have fallen in love with. This is how it happened:
It is three weeks into nerd camp, and I am on the west side of Peace Park. A name it acquired in 1971 at a grassroots memorial of the Kent state massacre (but I don’t know any of that yet). I have stolen away with my new friends to find a mulberry bush by the stream. There we eat tentatively but with joy. I cannot remember the taste, but I remember the feeling, though I am still too young to realize that this feeling is love. Earlier that summer, we had slept under each other’s beds for no reason at all. We had referred to penises as byromancers. We had re-written the Lord’s Prayer to be about corn. (“Bless us oh corn, on this thy cob… thy kingdom come, thy xanthan gum; on GMO as it is on organic.”) Tomorrow we will say goodbye for forever. Tonight, we eat mulberries.
Three years later I am at college and walking through the park almost every day. When my parents are in town, we eat there. They sit under the park’s largest oak, on a bench that will later be painted white in memory of an iconic campus dog. My sister is there, and we are eating burritos, or maybe Indian. Joe Biden wins the election while we eat, and college boys drive by in a grey sedan with a huge cardboard cut-out of his lily-white head, waving it from the sunroof.
When, for the second time, I have found friends that I love, I introduce them to my parents under that same oak. In my journal, I write that “I cannot express what it is to wake up in the morning and feel the absolute joy of existing.” Though those relationships will end, some in ice and some in fire, it doesn’t matter because that is all in the future. I am in the now and “I am conscious of the bald-faced shamelessness of my joy.”
Months later as these original college friendships are disintegrating, I return to the park. I go just north of the mulberry bush with a new friend (one who will last this time) and we bring a pack of dining-hall Oreos and one blanket. Huddling against the chill of early spring, in the darkness, I hear both our heartbeats. At the time it reminded me of the way that Chekov describes the tide in my favorite short story. A monotonous hollow sound that portends the unceasing movement of life on earth, the unceasing progress toward perfection. Remembering it now, I think of Sylvia Plath whose heart said: ‘I am. I am. I am.” For years after that, we visit the park. She gets extraordinarily good at finding four-leaf clovers while I pick and peel at onion grass.
A year passes and it is deep night. Frustrated and with nowhere to go, I wander to the park. Why am I so verklempt? That’s lost to me. Several such nights had preceded this one, always set off by some agita or another. Everything grated more harshly if I stayed in my dorm. In an embarrassingly angsty mood, I write in my notes app: “I’m disgusted with the pseudo-pastels and clearly defined edges of dorms.” Fortunately, for me, edges and colors are indiscernible in the dark. I find the clover-dominated patch of grass where I like to set up camp (still my favorite in the park), and I lay with my face down toward the dirt. Literally, face down, like a too-perfectly-positioned murder victim in a daytime drama. The smell of soil overpowers me, an odor that is generated, I would like to imagine, by the processes of decomposition and rebirth to which humus is host. Familiar and strangely soothing.
In November 2022, emerging from the art gallery across the street, I walk through the park. Since breaking up with my girlfriend two months before, everything has felt dull. Before the breakup I was a fast walker. Now I meander, always imagining, half in agony and half in hope, that she might cross my path. Indulgently, I think of myself as an invalid. In my journal: “physical pleasure is lost right now, except when my arms, tucked behind my head, go thrillingly numb.” In this state the glamor of the space assaults me. The last leaves of fall are ripping off the trees. The air is dry and cold and the sun is blaringly bright. It is not, in the classical sense, beautiful, but it is so much. The feeling of alive-ness is so intense that the numbness retreats and I start to cry from pure excess of sensation.
During the early months of 2023, I come back again and again, noticing more, feeling more. Becoming intimate, not with a friend or partner, but with the place itself. Mostly I read, I sleep, and I meditate. In my journal: “Today the weather is unseasonably good and it’s made my mood transcendent. I meditated in Peace Park earlier and could not stop smiling. The sun felt so good on my face and the stream sounded picturesque1 and I was lightheaded and if it hadn’t been pleasant I would have called it nausea.”
Beneath the black walnut, I read Underland by Robert MacFarlane, learning that trees are connected by an underground network of fungus (specifically mycelium) which allows them to look out for one another.2 On the white bench, I read Be Holding, in which Ross Gay writes that the very act of looking can be a “mycelial ballet.” This thought is tender enough to make me smile for an entire day. On the crinoid ridden stones beside the stream, I read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. She writes beautifully about trees and says also that “wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration.” My eyes start turning, more and more.
As I read, I write an article for the student paper about the history of overlooked art on campus, including in Peace Park, and about the way that art connects us to past times and across present space.3 In that article, I say nothing about mycelium, but it is the idea that drives me.
If you google “peace park columbia mo” you will see that it is not such a remarkable spot. I once heard a man call it Columbia’s biggest toilet.4 Still, his is a minority opinion. The other thing you will find in your google search is lots of engagement photos. This is remarkably touching. It is a pleasure to know that this place has held so much love that I am not a part of. The scope of it is almost inconceivable.
So many have passed through the park: high strung deans, students playing hooky, the innumerable affianced, the local-legend known as hacky sack man, the Vietnam-era protestors who gave the park its name, and me. Others (sycamore, walnut, oak, etc.) have never left. Though it is only possible to see a place individually, as dimly through a mirror, together we, both animal and vegetable, have known it in full. The press of our feet to the earth, the digging of our roots in the soil, has sprung millions of affections. Our bodies and our daily motions have been brief coherences and articulations of the energy of the park.5 The meta-mycelia of time and space spreads its silver hyphae. If you attend closely, you can smell it, you can see it, you can feel it, and you can fall in love.
A question for my former self. Can something sound picturesque?
Or in the case of the walnut, to send nasty little poisons to the other trees. Solves the mystery of why the other trees give Peace Park’s walnut so much space.
I am tremendously grateful to the editorial staff for letting me publish some random nonsense. BUT, if you find some sad, mangled prose in that article you can blame what they called “journalistic style”
Completely unfair, though the water quality in the stream is perhaps (at times) sewer-esque
In these past three sentences I have paraphrased Corinthians, Walt Whitman, and Wendell Berry (respectively). Maybe this footnote is unnecessary, but I felt bad stealing without a reference. Especially from Wendell, who is alive and might come after me.
Long may you love like this. This sort of feeling---and the writing ushered into the world because of it---it keeps the world going round in no small part, I think. Absolutely gorgeous piece; so much finesse.