Article 4 - "VERONA BEACH STATE PARK" July 2007 edition of First Church of The Streets

    The day that we ventured to Verona Beach was the first spring day that said "travel". Spring got on to a late start. Between rain, mud, cold and threatening nighttime frost, it was as though spring had never been let out of the underworld so it can blow it seeds around. But that winter depth seemed to be nothing but strange fable that I told myself on this day of azure skies. Even though there was a cold wind, it was as the clouds had lifted into the atmosphere, pulling winter up with them. As the skies opened up and awoke, it was as though I finally was awakening with it. Each spring brought this internal resurrection, renewing a sense of excitement to cover as much ground as I could while it was still light, to do it all while I still could.

    The trip was the result of what I call "planned spontaneity". We consulted our map program, staring at it like it was some oracle that would determine our fate. Parks that were in contention included Delta Park, Chimney Bluff and Whetstone State Parks. After all that deliberation, Verona Beach it was. Oneida Lake, the body of water on which the park was located, seemed vast with promise. It was like a swimming hole on the map that one could jump into and melt the summer heat away. Of course, in reality, that sharp wind kept summer at arm's length. But the vision got us going anyway. So, even though it seemed silly enough, the oracle of the computer map had worked its wonders, and we were on our way.

    We got there in less time than the computer said it would take, which led to the feeling of effortlessness that comes when going with the flow and contentment are in sync. There were signs for two beaches: one for the state park of Verona, and also for Sylvan Beach, which from what I could tell was either a local beach or a county one. As we proceeded towards the beach area heading north on NY 13, trees enveloped us on both sides of the road, masking the beach like a hidden treasure, adding to the feeling of entering an oasis of relaxation. It was like heading to the first day of summer camp, knowing that swimming in an ice cold pool awaited me.

    There was road work going on right at the entrance to the park, the kind of flurry of activity of those who were working with limited time before they had to pack up for the crowds. Once past that, we encountered an enormous parking lot that seemed to go on and on, like they were expecting the entire state of New York to show up for a beach concert. In the distance, there was a comfort station that reminded me of day camps simulating log cabins for atmosphere for their buildings. There were all of these picnic tables scattered throughout the tree-canopied landscape. The whole thing looked like some kind of banquet set up for a huge crowd of people, and we'd showed up too early for it. Seeing that it was almost four weeks before Memorial Day, that was kind of true.

    Amidst all of the pine trees in the shade were small patches of playgrounds, all about the size a family of four might have in their backyard of an eighth of an acre. There were those little horse things that four year olds bounce on and eight year olds beat up, including a dinosaur that would fascinate a preschooler and bore the heck out of a tech-savvy fifth grader. There were several slides and a couple of swingsets that for some reason didn't have any swings on them, as though the swings had been fed up with waiting out the winter in the cold and went hitchhiking to Daytona Beach for spring break. The cold wind had that affect on my reasoning process.

    Just the idea of the beach, with the water shimmering in the distance reflecting rays of sun, it was like summer trying to give birth, regardless of reality. Reality dictated that it was still cold, in the fifties Fahrenheit with a sharp breeze coming off the water, and summer was still in the permafrost of hibernation. Beach balls and buoys lined up in the storage room, the highways guys were getting ready for the Memorial Day crowd, and probably somewhere there was someone working out so that they could look good in a G-string when they came here to show themselves off. But it was too early for harvest. Summer may have been trying to get ready, but it wasn't here yet.

    Throughout the park, there were paved walkways laid spread out like a grid over the entire grass area. This would probably be one of those parks that wilderness hardliners like the late Edward Abbey would disdain, with its neat walkways and comfort stations to relieve oneself in. I've read the radical conservationist's book "Desert Solitaire", and I get what he means when he says some of these parks sanitize nature too much. It's similar to what I was reading at the moment, "Midnight Wilderness" by Debbie Miller, a combination polemic and travelogue about preserving the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Miller discussed how important pure wilderness was to one's soul. Maybe it was even more important now than ever, especially in a world that had gone from hands-on industrial machines to virtual technology where everyone lived a click away from each other. In this case, wilderness was a salve to the soul that lived in an alien world devoid of nature; wilderness would be a way of a soul coming home to itself.

    Verona Beach State Park, with its neat concrete paths and mowed lawns and picnic benches and indoor plumbing, would probably not fit either author's definition of pure wilderness. But sometimes, these kinds of parks filled other kinds of needs. With its easy access, at least it was a ways and means for all kinds of people to spend time outdoors, regardless of age or hardiness. Wilderness was great, but sometimes just getting someone outdoors was a big step. At the very least, people could get some appreciation of nature here, sanitized as it was. Not every place of nature had to be millions of acres of untouched preserves. Nature could be appreciated there in the wild, but it could be here too, in the middle of the I-90 Corridor.

    The grid-like nature of the paths made them seem intent with purpose, as though they wouldn't have existed unless they were intended to take the walker to some Special Destination. No winding paths into the yonder. These were straight as soldiers, marching with a purpose. One of the concrete paths lead directly from the main office to the water, and another one led to a comfort station with the restrooms which perplexedly said "Hershey's Ice Cream" right near the men's section. I wondered about the scatological implications of that sign right near the bathroom. Was it an obscene graffito? Or had someone just forgotten to move it? I envisioned a new snack shop being refurbished in the manner of the way many new sports stadiums were being built everywhere lately. I imagined the old snack shop destined to be a restroom, and everything snack shop related had been moved to the new eats area except for this poor forsaken sign, condemned forever to a forlorn life decorating the men's lavatories. Not a demotion that I would be wanting to be making public, that was for sure.

    We headed down the first path and got to the beach part, where we reached a walkway right on the shoreline adjacent to the lake. There was a sleeping concession stand and lifeguard station, unaware in their slumber of my eavesdropping on them. The lake itself seemed dark with silt, and there seemed to be garbage that was on the shoreline that got more prolific right at what was presumably the beach in more populated times. I say "presumably", because there was hardly any sand on it at all. The only two things that set it off as any type of beach was the fact there was hardly any sand there versus nothing but rocks at the other places, and at this place there was a small staircase with a sign that told me to "STAY OFF THE BEACH", which was a bit like going to a mall and seeing signs telling you "DON'T ENTER THE STORES".

    Despite being only a couple of weeks before the season, the whole "beach" was strewn with garbage, like a dump truck had to unload here before getting fined for carrying noxious substances. The place didn't seem like it was ready for summer at all, at least the man-managed side of it. The water didn't see any problem with getting ready, though. There were breakers in the water far in the distance, giving it the feeling of high tide. The small stretch of sand emphasized this feeling. I guess that explained all the picnic tables: they were expecting a big crowd, but it was better to seat them outside then bring them in at the living room of the beach. It was like it was there for decoration: look, but don't touch. The signs didn't help to dissuade that feeling. Not that I was planning to sun myself down there anytime soon with the cans, refuse and what perplexedly looked like bullet cartridges. Like I said, a national wildlife refuge it was not.

    In the distance, a whirring noise got closer and closer. A golf cart approached me as I stood on the steps heading down to the beach and stopped in front of me on the boardwalk. By the looks of it, he worked here. He commiserated with me on the state of the beach, like he was a local guy who couldn't wait for the state to get itself together and clean the place up. Then it was like a realization that he was the worker, as be began engaging in a monologue about how he had to get going with the cleanup work. He seemed either unused to talking to someone on the job, or so used to capturing anyone in soliloquy that he didn't even care about the reaction of his audience.

    After he disappeared, presumably to tell someone else how the beach needed to be cleaned, I watched what was going on with the water. The haze made the land across the water seem like a mirage. It reminded me of the Long Island Sound during childhood summers, where across the bay you could see peninsulas and on clear days the vague shore of Connecticut. I felt displaced from the situation, as though somehow I was transported into a different part of my existence, one of those weird times when it felt like time dissolved.

    The end of the walkway came quickly. This wasn't one long stroll along the beach. It was like the beach began, and then it ended, as though the state was competing for the last bit of available land along the shore. Black stones graced with more garbage decorated this milestone. For a short time, we watched the water, then walk back up on the other side of the park through the picnic area and playground areas.

    Except for a couple of walkers, we had the park to ourselves. And of those, all of them were solo. Two of the walkers were older women wearing long shirts and pants, proceeding in a pace in between speed walking and strolling, as though they were getting aerobics and maximum enjoyment at the same time. They arrived from opposite sides of the park and met in the middle, where they chatted each other up like it was the local diner. Presumably, they were locals who accessed the park like their personal back yard. They seemed like active people, but based on their lack of gear, I don't know if they would have walked fifty miles in the backwoods to get here. The convenience of the park opened it up to more possibilities than if it had been three hundred miles away from the nearest gas station.

    We walked to the other side of the walkway, which appropriately, led to the other side of the beach. We watched a seagull dance its way across the waves, darting in and away from us like it was playing hide and seek. The silt made the water darker near the edges with brown hues. The Erie Canal passed through here, something I found out later on. Maybe that had something to do with the dark silt that flowed through here. Certainly it would explain a lot. But despite its proximity to the city, or because of it, it was nice that there was a park where you could just relax and not hack your way through to get to the trailhead.

    As we sat by the end of the water walkway, we saw a young woman walking with a baby carriage as well as other kids trailing her like goslings on one of the interior walkways. When she disappeared from view, we decided to walk down that trail to see where it went. It dumped into a road, the kind that had a cul-de-sac of suburban houses. We didn't see the woman with her brood anymore. She probably lived somewhere in that neighborhood, and decided it was a nice day to leave the house and go for a walk. The culmination of this trail in the street was nice, but it felt like something was missing with all these woods that there was no trail to go hiking or anything. As far as I knew, we'd exhausted all the trails near the water. Maybe there were other trails somewhere up by the beginning of the park, but they hadn't seemed readily obvious, and we were hungry and tired. Neither of us felt like going hiking everywhere, and decided that it was time to pack up the wildlife experience. Good thing we weren't in the backcountry right then.

    As we left the park, I grabbed some brochures. Three were available at the ranger station, and I grabbed all three. My tendency is to grab brochures describing the park after the trip and not beforehand. Sometimes it is simply that I don't notice where the brochures are until I cover the terrain and figure out where they are. But that's probably only part of it, as many times the brochures are so obvious it's like they are screaming at me as soon as I get somewhere. There's the independent part of me that wants to just experience the place for myself and fully be there. Walking around following the directions of a map, I feel like I am there visiting a brochure rather than actually seeing what's around me. It's like the guide becomes a strict teacher telling me what I'm falling short on by not checking off all the boxes like a good girl. So, following this ethos of reverse exploration, I grabbed the brochures available at the display and got back in my car.

    According to the first one, the park brochure, there were all of these trails somewhere across the street, consisting of eight mile snowmobile courses, three mile nature trails, and four mile cross country ski trails. I don't know where any of this was, because I didn't see any openings for any trails there coming or going to the park. There was a section labeled Park Patron Alert!, warning of a "large and active wildlife population". I didn't see any indication of that either, unless discarded tires could be construed as "wildlife". There were supposedly 1735 acres. Maybe I had the wrong park, because it felt like someone was telling a joke Especially when I turned over the brochure thing, and saw a different park layout than what I experienced. So I don't know what was going on with that situation.

    Of the other two brochures, one was entitled "Save the Skin Your Child Is In!", decorated with two smiling children fully armed against the sun with long sleeves, umbrella, sunscreen being applied, sunglasses and hats. The picture was complete with a loving father figure overlooking them both. In careful prose designed written in the language of quick how to for busy parents, the brochure informed parents that their kids could get sunburned if they were in the sun too much (they must have had some real cutting edge scientist write that one). The other one, which I soon lost, advertised some hall of fame place in a town somewhere else. Me, I was still stuck on the park brochure, trying to figure out where these other trails were.

    When we left the park, the roadwork crew had dispersed. Maybe they were out to lunch. At the moment, the park seemed out to lunch as well. Maybe by the summer there would be a glorious beach with gleaming sand. The buoys we saw stored away would be bouncing like kids in the water. Parents would memorize the brochure on sunburn, and the children would be slathered with sunscreen before they tore away and headed for the water. Surely, it seemed like the park wanted to wake up from the detritus of winter and gleam in the sun. The wind had died down, as though it knew that the time was coming soon. And the walkways waited for the neighbors to convene, the picnic tables for friends and families to come outside and forgo the mall for one afternoon. Summertime was almost here, and Verona Beach salivated to wake from its winter coma to meet it.