September 21, 2005

A walk around Hall's Pond

Over the weekend I visited my girlfriend in Boston, and on Sunday morning her grandmother took us to a nearby nature preserve, Hall's Pond. Three and a half acres of pond, marshland and woods are hidden there, in the middle of residential Brookline, MA, just behind the stately brownstones of Beacon Street and about 6 or 7 blocks from Boston University and Commonwealth Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares of the city. When we first approached the pond, a blue heron was at the water's edge, staring at us.

I used to live in Brookline, a little over a year ago, not far from Hall's Pond, and so I was surprised that I had never known of it before, especially because I used to take long walks all around my neighborhood. The twin realizations that raw nature can still exist in a busy city and that it can be so well-hidden got me to thinking about the balance that humans are continually striking not only with the environment but, in a larger sense, with each others' needs for space.

Even though my family moved numerous times (within the same city) when I was young, I don't think I ever had more than an inchoate sense of the way that there are options to consider and compromises that are made regarding the proximity to others, to nature, to the rest of a city, when choosing a dwelling. It wasn't until the fall after my graduation, when I moved to Boston, that I had any real experience of the conscious choosing of a place to live. (I lived on campus all four years of school and, for all their idiosyncrasies, the dorms at Pomona were all similar enough and close enough together to make the choosing of a room not that important of a decision. Certainly choosing a room was far less important than choosing a roommate, say.)

So it was after I first lived in an apartment in a city that I learned peripatetically how a housing decision can affect the structure of one's life; where one walks to buy food and other staples, to catch the T, to send a letter, to get money from an ATM, even the people one meets on a daily basis are dictated in large part by the location of that ultimate destination, the home. I am still occasionally fascinated when I see homes or apartment buildings to think about the lives of the inhabitants and why they chose to live where they do. I am especially curious on long car trips about those who live in America's smallest towns, dotted around the country. What do they do for fun? What is it that keeps them in their little villages? What do they do for a living?

I came to realize that, while the choice of a home is largely a private choice, as a society we—through our elected officials—also choose the makeup and layout of cities. Zoning plans, public transportation systems and routes, availability of green space, and so on all affect the quality of life for the residents of a community. In our urban centers land becomes increasingly precious the more community members there are that must share it, and so the questions of how best to use the land also become increasingly difficult.

Most of the time, in situations where space is in such short supply and high demand, its preservation in natural form seems to some short-sighted city leaders the least effective use of it. I was glad, then, to find that Hall's Pond had been preserved by the thoughtful council-people of Brookline. I found it an apposite complement to the city life and an excellent place to contemplate nature and one's place in it. Or, for that matter, nature's place in the city.

Posted September 21, 2005 08:49 PM. Categories: New Experiences , Week 1 | Permalink