Ammi Midstokke: Who doesn’t love a good park?
It has been a long time since I’ve appreciated a good park. A luxury of youth, mobility, and location is that many of us living on the outskirts of the city or familiar with outdoor pursuits have access to green spaces. But a recent trip to the Big City (anywhere with a population over 20,000, as far as I’m concerned) had me in search of a park where I could safely run in unfamiliar territory.
Parks require a certain amount of civility that I lack, not to mention fashion sense. This park was in Denver and, based on the amount of Lululemon and Patagonia, in an affluent neighborhood. The women runners had outfits more color coordinated than a cheer team. Flashy shoes seem a city thing, too, as if street runners had to bring the color because everything else in a city is gray. I got caught staring at fluorescent kicks more than once, wondering if they’d make me faster.
Along with donning some sort of socially acceptable attire, in a park one must leash their dog. Freya was disgusted at this infringement upon her dog autonomy until she discovered that park geese are a fierce bunch of hissing hoodlums. The closer she could be to me, the safer she thought she was from their fowl wrath.
The primary problem with putting a country bumpkin in a city park is I am used to greeting everyone on a path. City folk see thousands of faces a day and it appears that my constant nodding, smiling, eye contact or other acknowledgement is exhausting, if not an invasion of their privacy or podcast. Many of us were doing laps, so I was repeatedly greeting the same people in an ever-increasing display of inadvertent creepiness.
I used to live in Hamburg, Germany, near a central lake in the city. Every morning I got up and ran the path around it, most of it dirt. I was not bothered by the sidewalk section near the cars or the homes towering over the park edges, or the dozens of other people who got up for their morning dose of nature. One gets used to the various kinds of traffic and notices mostly the trees.
My own street had no trees, so running to the shoreline and seeing grass, swans, floral evidence of the seasons – these things grounded me to my place in nature. On weekends, I would take the bus out to the sprawling cemetery (so large, it has its own bus line) and run for miles and miles along the narrow paths and roads, watching new mourners and seasoned ones and the way grief and love tell a story on stones. To not be surrounded by nature meant seeking it out intentionally.
As I turned laps in the Denver park, the day wore on and the crowd shifted. The speedy bright-shoed runners went to work and the playgrounds filled with young children and mothers pushing strollers. The retirees, waiting for the slow-moving path-walkers (safety in numbers) came out to stroll with their small dogs. Blankets were laid on lawns and snacks unpacked. Ages from 0 to nearly 100 were all present and intermingling.
Where else do we have such breadth and intersection of society?
Green spaces in cities are quickly disappearing, particularly in areas of lower income. Yet green spaces and parks offer far more than a place to picnic. They help reduce urban temperatures in summer, can improve air and water quality, and offer habitat for wildlife. They tend to be safe and accessible places for all to access the benefits of the outdoors, like improved mental wellness and physical health.
The more I ran laps in the park, the more it began to feel like a shared backyard.
People were playing pickle ball and basketball. A gardener was preparing spring flower beds. A few dogs were running amok in a leash-free zone. An ice cream truck was preparing to make the rounds. People were even fishing (legally at that!) in the ponds.
It was there that I realized parks in and of themselves are not just pockets of nature in the city, but their own kind of community. Maybe it’s a good time for us to start exploring them more. Sometimes the most amazing discoveries are right down the street.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com