Finding Paradise

Ecosystems That Sustain Love

Twenty-two thousand years ago the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet began to withdraw. It had covered New England and all of New York City in nearly mile-thick glaciers. When the ice pulled back, much of the land that lay just beyond its farthest edge subsided, creating hundreds of miles of swamps, bogs, and tidal marshes, including those that line Staten Island’s Eastern Shore.

from “Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore” by Elizabeth Rush

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I used to always have a camera with me. I wanted to frame paradise––

paradise in the street, on the shoreline, when I sat with my friends, in all my moments of solitude traveling in Mexico or even just through Brooklyn. I was looking for the kind of paradise found in passing moments and in how humans interacted with place.

I was just in Staten Island, the actual place where so many of my stories and poems take place. It is also where all my negatives and prints live, in stacks of photo boxes in the corner of my parents’ basement. It is easy to get lost there–– 

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Monday night I walked down New Dorp Lane to Miller Field, through the dunes and onto the beach. It was dusk. I was, as I often am, chasing the moon, which was almost full. I was appreciating how different Staten Island is now from when I grew up. This neighborhood, once so white and mostly Italian or Irish, has become home to immigrants from Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Now there are taco trucks, late night soccer games, cafés, sprawling home vegetable gardens, a variety of restaurants and beauty salons, and a lot of languages. I still don’t love it, but I like It better. 

People move to Staten Island for a better life. In my extended family, there is a trajectory: Brooklyn, Staten Island, New Jersey, Florida; each step promising something “nicer.” It’s sort of a search for paradise; some people find paradise in suburbs or in resorts that provide a packaged and neat experience for them. I’ve been searching for paradise in my relationships to friends, lovers, and the world around me, and since childhood, I have been curious about the kind of paradise that Staten Island might be without the houses and shopping plazas.

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I grew up longing to feel close to nature, to know it inside of myself, to understand how to access the natural world around me.

I grew up with a barrier between my body and the natural world: suburban (and later urban) life, its superficialities and manicured everything filtering out the natural world at every step––certainly some folks’ idea of paradise–– but I was dreaming about the bay, the wetland, the estuaries, the egrets, and the marshlands. Little did I know that those muddy, sulphuric, grassy wetlands I was so attracted to were hardworking, purifying ecosystems that protected our shoreline.

Staten Island is a green place, a wild place, a sea-level wetland and an island with the highest natural point in New York City. People say that the Fresh Kills landfill, which was once the biggest landfill in the world, would have exceeded the height of Todt Hill had it not been closed in 2001. Fresh Kills was located on a salt marsh that included tidal marsh and freshwater wetlands. Like the rest of the island, the Fresh Kills Estuary was once a biodiverse watershed. The dump caused the disappearance of the tidal marsh. When functioning, these marshes serve to absorb and trap pollutants which prevents them from traveling to open water. They are critical to ecosystems all over the world.

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On Tuesday I walked down Hylan Boulevard, the busy main thoroughfare of this part of the island––across which my Uncle Benjamin says he used to pitch quarters as a kid. As I walked, I noticed traces of paradise in the making, the kind we make on earth––vegetable gardens peeking over fences, rowdy flower gardens, a little Buddha under a giant fig tree, people out walking, and cycling. Many of the little scenes I saw are in newly formed immigrant communities.

I walked to the turn off for the Great Kills recreational area, down a long path, beside the Great Kills wetlands, through some dunes and onto the beach. These wetlands are also a kind of landfill, where medical waste was dumped in the 40s, eventually causing dangerous levels of radiation. The wetlands are fenced off with a sign that reads: “Danger Are Closed Hazardous Material,” but there were starlings flocking above me and a chorus of bugs and frogs. On the beach and path, I saw two spotted lantern flies, the mega invasive insect that all New Yorkers know to kill on site, several dead horseshoe crabs, and a plethora of plastics.

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Writing about cordgrass in Staten Island’s Oakwood beach salt marsh, Elizabeth Rush says, “Cordgrass’s subterranean network of rhizomes is why it is difficult to dig in a healthy marsh. The web of connective tissue running through the soil is dense and strong.” Rhizomes migrate when they are threatened by, for example, an excess of saltwater. She writes that, “If there is space for the marsh to migrate, it will. From each root a new shoot sprouts–– the community, and the home it provides, remade from within.”

Describing a visit to Oakwood to learn about the impact of hurricane Sandy, Rush writes, “this place is both a cursed and holy, the land forsaken by humans and also in the process of being reclaimed by forces beyond our control.”  The part of Rising that is about Staten Island pulled me back there, to the paradise it both was and wasn’t. She helped me understand my fascination (mostly explored in poetry) with swamps, bogs, marshes, bays, and rivers, their vulnerable status on our planet and their crucial purpose in our ecosystem.

Restorative and transformative efforts, both in the human and the natural world, are a kind of rewilding, an attempt to bring our land and our interactions to a functioning state, to minimize harm and prevent catastrophe.

When I was searching for paradise in my images, I was trying to figure out how to frame this imbalance without excluding my awe at the beauty around me. The images nourished me and they absorbed the contradictions in ways that photographs often can. I often placed various types of images­­––of friends, landscapes, and street scenes­­­­––together. They seemed to stretch in every direction thematically, but to me they belonged together. Their connection was rhizomatic: non-hierarchical, paradise everywhere, even in discord. My longtime friend, the photographer Julie Pochron, always talked about my odd framing, “just a little off,” she would say. Maybe I was moving the center.   

I am including a few images from my walk in Staten Island and a few from my archive from when I was framing paradise. I was surprised to see that these images, all shot between 1999 and 2005, still feel so relevant to me. The places and the relationships in these images are fragile, unique, ecosystems.

I don’t know what paradise is, but I know it has to do with care. I know it has to do with growing deep roots and creating home wherever we are, with sitting still, with loving and making love; with the search in ourselves for that layered marsh, that breathing salty-sweet mud pit that has been filtering and holding. I know that paradise is a place full of immigrants building back their worlds. I know paradise seeks the actual communities and also the stories that were here before us. I know it includes all our bodies. I know it is rhizomatic and messy and I know that it is only ever going to be scarred and rewilded, like we are.

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The moon was so full when I was writing this. Whatever the moon is doing when you read this, I want you to go outside and find it (or its absence) in the sky. Think about how your body is connected to the natural world. Think about that which is rhizomatic in your life; your garden, family or beloveds, or the tree you see from your window, or the kids playing on the street outside your house. Find a little space in your night and hug someone or hug yourself or look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I am part of this ecosystem,” and then go out and build it.