Saturday In the Park
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-September. The air was springtime air—sweet and warm and expectant. A brisk wind broke the spell. This was not April. Fall was readying herself in the wings. Still, it felt like a Godilocks kind of day: just right. I went for a walk.
I headed for one of my favorite trails that snakes alongside a lake in no particular hurry to get there. Those are some of the types of walks I love best—more like rambles. No time constraints, no real objectives, no other mindset than to point your feet in a general direction and follow. It’s something of a stoner’s waltz, minus the weed.
I passed people out in their yards, neighbors chatting with one another. Families gliding along on bicycles together along the path. Others pushed strollers. Couples held hands in a matched pace. The lyrics from that Chicago song, “Saturday In the Park” rose up in my mind: people talking, really smiling, a man playing guitar. No one seemed in any kind of hurry to be anywhere than where they were
A middle-aged couple with a large, burly chocolate Lab came toward me, creating an impasse. We all stopped and laughed as if we’d scripted the meet-cute.
“He? She?” I asked after the dog.
“She,” the woman said. “This is Dolly.” I turned to say a proper hello to Dolly, but she beat me to it. As if on cue, she swung her shaggy head in my direction, the rest of her unbelievably soft body followed—paws up to my chest, rubbery pink tongue going all in for the face slobber. The man and woman apologized immediately as they gently pulled her back. I laughed and shook my head, waving them off. There are worse ways to be greeted for sure, I said, my hands moving with a mind of their own to get in another few scrunches of Dolly’s silky ears before we all parted ways.
Half way up the trail is the entrance for a town boating club. The club facilities sit on the far side of a dam, accessible to members by a walkway with a secure gate. There’s a large parking lot and a sailing pavilion on the edge of what is consider the “upper” part of the lake. You can also get to the club by climbing down the embankment from the main trail and following a path that runs along the shoreline. I decided to take that route.
I found a rock and sat, interested in nothing more than feeling the sun on my face. The wind was considerably stronger on the water. Whitecaps formed cold peaks. A man was out fishing in a small boat, letting himself rock with the current. A flash of something in the air caught my eye. A hawk barreled down toward the water, almost even with my sightline. She was close enough and large enough that I could make out the striations of color along her feathers. And then in an instant she seemed nearly overpowered by the crosscurrents. She propelled herself up, up, no doubt trying to ride the thermals and find a steadier rhythm. Some of the people milling around the parking lot also noticed her, pointing, twisting their entire bodies around to track her up in the sky. Over and over she dipped and wheeled and skidded within the turbulence that none of us could see, but somehow I think all of us felt as we all watched, enraptured by whatever drama we imagined was playing out until eventually she climbed up to that sweet cruising altitude and turned herself into a memory.
I climbed back up the embankment to the parking lot. That day there happened to be a group of college students learning how to sail in the pavilion. White sails numbered and striped in primary colors—green, yellow, red, blue—like pieces of bone china set against a royal blue table cloth. Two to a boat. They set off from the dock slowly, parallel to the shoreline, fighting against the wind and current. At about 25 or 30 feet along, one person swung the boom while the other ducked and yanked on the rope for, what I assumed was, the main sail. Catching the wind at full force, the boat lurched suddenly, racing forward like a bloodhound off her leash. Each team had to tack and maneuver around a series of buoys. Some made it look easy. Others struggled to keep the boat on any kind of course. On more than one boat, I saw both people scramble to the same side, hands gripping ropes, bodies stiff and severe as iron beams leaning backward out over the edge of the boat attempting to compensate for the force of the wind and steer without capsizing completely.
I stood there watching for the longest time. I found myself unable to wander away even though there was nothing particularly remarkable about the scene, which played on repeat as each team came back to the dock and new people climbed aboard. To these young people and their instructors, it was any given Saturday spent learning sailing fundamentals. But to me, it was the culmination to an afternoon that felt like a ballet: the synchronicity of people and bikes and dogs; the sense of an impeccable fluidity as each moment dissolved into the next; the precision of a rhythm meted out by the cadence of wings and the trip-a-let staccato of sails; the joyful rambunctiousness of the wind like an orchestral score rising and falling and carrying us all along with it together.
