FROM OUR PERCH ON TAR BEACH — our name for our newly discovered, silver-coated tar roof — we watch the baby doves grow. The pair of fluffy dandelion-seed heads bob side by side. The chicks bounce softly between the fire escape of the adjoining building and, for longer stints each day, a thick bough on the tree. When the wind blows, they sway with the tree, sticking to the stretch of branch above the fire escape, presumably to avoid the five-story freefall. Every so often Mom swoops in, usually from the direction of Washington Square Park, and alights beside her babies. Seeing her, they instantly switch from cottony composure to noisy wing-flapping, stabbing their beaks into Mom’s mouth for her gourmet regurgitation. After each feeding, she flies off again.
Melissa designates two old seat covers as “beach cushions” to carry up for dove-viewing breakfasts. Each morning we sip coffee and eat baguettes from Amy’s Bread, the local bakery where Cornelia meets Bleecker Street a half block from our apartment. Inspired by the time-rich Jam, Melissa uses some of her annual leave to add two days to a three-day weekend, and these five spontaneous days off become not only a Greenwich Village stay-cation but also something of the honeymoon we were too busy to take together in our hectic “uni-moon” days.
But what to do on our stay-cation? Ten thousand Big Apple activities beckon. We narrow them down to three. First, activate one of the Internet Age’s crowning achievements: the vacation email auto-response. Second, turn off cell phones and laptops. Third, extract batteries from said contraptions, stashing the batteries far from them. Voila! All stay-cation activities accomplished with five days to go.
Treasonously unscheduled and incommunicado, we idle away day one, a Thursday, leaving the nest a half-dozen times, but only to climb the twelve steps to Tar Beach. The day opens up something of what cultural ecologist David Abram calls “the more than human world.” During our rooftop lunch we‘re mostly silent, watching two flocks of pigeons merge into a single flock, disconnect again, then reconnect, like lava in a lamp, while navigating the surrounding buildings. Suddenly, the flocks separate and begin doing figure-eights. Melissa whispers: “Double helixes!” Later I bring up our French press with coffee, pour it into mugs. The light filters through the muddy pour, through the tree’s green canopy. A red-tailed hawk, wings stiff as kites, soars over Tar Beach toward Washington Square Park. As the sun mellows into its evening colors, we realize we have not seen another face of our species the whole day, just the occasional hominoid shape through an adjacent apartment window.
During our five days, we do go out, following unplanned idle whims. We savor the Met’s sacred Astor Court, delight in Slow Food at Marienella’s on Carmine, and hop the Staten Island Ferry with our old bikes to hit the beach. But the bulk of our activity remains in the tiny triangle between apartment, Tar Beach, and Washington Square Park, where we venture beyond the Jam to a curious chap known as William the Pigeon Guy.
He’s a little Don Draper in appearance — handsome, dark-haired, fortyish, always immaculately dressed in chinos, leather shoes, and pressed shirts — and he feeds pigeons organic almonds from his mouth.
Melissa asks William about the pigeons. He obliges with a torrent of information. For starters, there’s the pigeon named Chico on his forearm. After Chico’s mother was devoured by a red-tailed hawk, William raised the fledgling in a sewing kit in his apartment, feeding him milk from an eyedropper. Chico, now two years old, is distinguished by the beige feathers setting him apart from the others in their blue-and-gray. “Every light-colored pigeon you see around here,” William says a little proudly, “is one of Chico’s kids.”
William is a high-end real estate broker who, between appointments showing clients fancy downtown apartments, chills with the birds. With William, I feel for the first time the surprisingly warm feet of a pigeon. He pours some almonds in my cupped hand, and Chico bounds onto my forearm. Another pigeon swooshes in and lands beside him. They eat, and then simply continue to hang out on me. William gives Melissa some almonds, too, and a bird lands on her. Chico clutches at my arm, seemingly happier with us than with other pigeons.
“They feel safer from the hawks when they’re with humans,” William explains. “They’ll linger for hours.”
Melissa tells William about our Tar Beach aviary, and he rattles off facts about “squeaker-phase” baby pigeons and doves. The reason, he tells us, that you never see baby pigeons in parks is because they grow up in secluded roof nests like ours, reaching — quite incredibly — full size in a matter of weeks. “That’s a four-week-old right there!” William says, pointing to a Chico-sized pigeon.
As Chico’s gizzard mixes and mashes the nuts he’s eaten (William: “They’ve got small rocks, shells, and sand in there to break ’em down, in the absence of teeth”), factoids and even time itself slip away. Chico and I gaze at each other, winged-to-legged, as trumpets resound from the man who plays two horns at once — those tusks! — and a little girl spins a pink hula hoop to the music.
Melissa interrupts my reverie. “In Queens they’re making enemies of the wildlife,” she says. “Here, people connect with the animals.” I nod. William is quiet now, maybe thinking about his next real-estate showing, maybe relaxing, as I am, into the Jam, whose music fills the vacuum left by the tusked trumpeter as he asks for “Do-NAY-tions!” Late-afternoon light lacquers the four old buildings guarding the park’s west end, brightens the purple NYU flags on rooftops, and gilds the arch’s crown.
Tuesday morning arrives: the final Tar Beach breakfast of our stay-cation. Melissa kisses me and leaves for work. Energized by nondoing, I’m determined to work my butt off — within my two-day limit — to get more. It’s as if the Cornelia Street crack dealer teased me with a dose of highly addictive idleness, and now I need to hustle for another fix.
My go-to is Tim Ferriss. His book The 4-Hour Workweek — yes, four, though it’s a playful title, not a literal one — suggests you use two principles at the same time: 80/20 and the Hodgkinson’s Principle. The 80/20 principle says that we accomplish 80 percent of work results in just 20 percent of our time. Conversely, we more or less waste the other 80 percent of our time on a paltry 20 percent of the results. Dutifully, I 80/20 my week and find that the principle holds true. Of all the potential work streams — in international consulting, writing, and speaking — that I could pursue, I distill out this week’s most strategic one in terms of income-to-time-invested and my current level of enthusiasm: a high-end magazine article.
Then I overlay the Hodgkinson’s Principle. Hodgkinson’s says that work expands to fill the amount of time available to accomplish it. Thus, having chosen the one most critical work activity, I corral it into a tight timeframe.
Granted, using these two principles a la Ferriss won’t be ideal for everyone or all the time. This approach is more suited to entrepreneurs and hourly workers able to prioritize their own time and tasks, nailing the most important ones as quickly as possible and thus freeing up time. But almost anyone, Ferriss notes, can create a small sideline work stream and apply these principles; eventually, perhaps, this side income might become one’s main income. For me, thanks to Ferriss and much java, I condense what might have been five days of work into two. Then it’s Thursday again, the cusp of five days off.
That sublime Thursday morning — Melissa and much of the city already hustled off to the office — I continue to linger in bed, reading this gem from nineteenth-century English poet Charles Lamb:
Who first invented work — and bound the free
And holy-day rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business, in the green fields, and the town —
To plough, loom, anvil spade — and oh! Most sad
To that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood?
Who, indeed. Still in my PJs, I rise and breakfast with our ever-larger “squeaker-phase” pigeons — they’ve now ventured along the tree branch well beyond fire-escape safety — then dress and stroll past the magnificent townhouses of Bank Street toward the Hudson’s Pier 45, a park jutting into the river. I’m a little giddy; there’s 148 hours of time-wealth in my crack pipe. I cross the West Side Highway with its six lanes of taxis, FedEx trucks, and buses; cross the bike path with its smattering of bladers, cyclists, and runners; and finally reach the pier-park. As I walk out along it, the West Side Highway decrescendos and the sound of water lapping on pylons rises. Statue of Liberty in the distance. Seagulls crying overhead. The occasional boat sailing by. I come to the end, plop down, dangle bare feet toward the Hudson, and start humming Otis Redding’s “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”
An hour passes, per the Lackawanna clock tower across the river in Hoboken. Then two. I’m still sitting, wasting time. The rest of the morning’s bread, some cheese, and an apple in my satchel, I eat when hungry, at one point singing John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels,” a tune rhapsodizing “no longer riding on the merry-go-round,” but rather just enjoying the way wheels spin. The song brings to mind Lennon and Yoko Ono and their famous Bed-In where, in 1969, they spent a week doing absolutely nothing for world peace.
In the afternoon, Lady Liberty blushes deeper green as the sun angles west. I stand up occasionally to strike the minimal yoga poses needed to contentedly continue my Pier-In. The Hudson swells as the Atlantic tide pushes back on it, and I pull out a copy of seventeenth-century haiku-poet Bashō’s Journey to the Deep North:
Listen! a frog
Jumping into the stillness
Of an ancient pond
Watching the river, I savor that. Then:
A weathered skeleton
in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife
I don’t leave the pier all day. At one point while enjoying Bashō, I realize that this Slow Thursday arises out of an idea I absorbed from Bruce and the Jam: be countercyclical. If the crowd is going one way, do a 180 and saunter in the other direction. There’s abundant space on a pier when nearly everyone else is scurrying about the island.
As the sun sinks into New Jersey, tango dancers gather on the pier. Antique music rises from a boom-box. To the sound of the nineteenth-century bandolon, the dancers stalk their way through tango walks. Swift foot-snaps. Head flicks to promenade. The dancers blend with the hazy sunset, and I’m thrilled to watch the wheel they form spin round and round.
The following day, I return to Pier 45. But it feels different. It’s partly overcast, and fog dulls the Statue of Liberty. The Hudson’s gray, her tide low. Being countercyclical, it seems, isn’t about routine.
So I leave the pier, strolling southward. The breezy Hudson is dotted with sailboats and barges. A vendor sells New York pretzels out of a truck. The West Side Highway stops and starts as the traffic breathes with the lights, which tick in unison from green to yellow to red and back. For a while it’s absorbing, the sensory nature of being a flaneur, or a passive gazer into the life of a city, but I’m restless today. I’m making a routine out of routine’s absence and thereby habituating to nondoing.
This is hardly the idyllic banks of No Name Creek beside the 12 × 12 in North Carolina. In Battery Park, tourist helicopters buzz — wasp-like, aggressive — along the river. A parade of folks vent their stresses into cell phones. One of them, a painfully thin, jumpsuit-clad woman, tugs along a Labradoodle on its leash and yells into her phone, “I’m visibly shaking!” I catch a snippet of the drama: Her doorman failed to greet her, again, and he refused to apologize. “The shmuck should be fucking fired!” she screams, yanking her dog along. “I’m going to the co-op board. . .”
Across a dazed river, a fire burns in Jersey City, billowing black smoke. Twin speedboats blaze north. I’m visibly shaking echoes in my head.
MY SHIRT SWEAT-SOAKED, hands covered with soil, I weed the pea rows of Brooklyn Grange, the world’s largest rooftop soil farm. I’ve been at it for two hours as a volunteer, and I feel marvelous. From this full acre of cropland atop the Standard Oil Building in Long Island City, I can see the glistening spread of Manhattan’s buildings just across the East River. But mostly it’s a big sky feeling. The farm is higher than anything right around it, so I have little sense of the buses and cars and commerce seven stories below.
It’s Saturday, day three of my five-day weekend, and I feel particularly good. As I weed, I realize what John Drake writes about in Downshifting: How to Work Less and Enjoy Life More. Drake, an overworked executive, took the leap into early retirement only to find that it’s not enough to just eliminate the labor that’s causing unhappiness; it’s also key to fill the vacuum with activities that nourish you. I gerrymandered my workweek into a two-day shape, but the Jam and Pier 45 aren’t enough. Enter rooftop farming.
Carrying a full bucket of weeds to the compost pile, I glance over to the far side of the farm at the silhouette of Anastasia Cole Plakias. She is thirty with thick brown hair, and from a football field away, I watch her petite outline confidently directing another work crew. Anastasia cofounded Brooklyn Grange in 2009, along with Gwen Shantz and Ben Flanner. After securing a ten-year lease from Acumen Capital Partners, they went to work: fitting the roof with a thick plastic root-barrier, craning up thousands of soil sacks, and shaping earth into rows studded with tomato seedlings and chard plugs. Slowly, a farm took shape.
Today, the farm, built as a green-roof system, holds 1.2 million pounds of soil — and yes, experts verified that the 1919 building can bear the weight. The farm’s soil is a special mix of compost and porous stones, which eases the load, and in it grows a variety of organic produce sold to Manhattan and Brooklyn restaurants. Several seasons in, the Grange not only turns a healthy profit but has just expanded by 150 percent to new roofs in the Brooklyn Navy yards.
As we work, I say to Julie, a Columbia graduate student and fellow volunteer, “This is the twenty-first-century Victory Garden, brought to scale.”
Julie nods and enthuses about how farmers’ markets and restaurants get ultra-fresh, subway-delivered produce with a zero transport footprint. “This is just a piece of the future green city,” she says, “where a single lightweight thirty-story tower of recycled materials could supply produce for a quarter million people through hydroponics on each floor. Skyscraper agriculture.”
I suggest we start with what exists now, wondering aloud what would happen if just 2 percent of the city’s roughly one million rooftops came under cultivation. Twenty thousand asphalt antidotes, minisanctuaries harboring wildlife, purifying the air, and providing contact with nature.
Then, another volunteer tells me Anastasia logs backbreaking eighty-hour weeks, which reminds me of my own pattern of do-gooding over a decade as an aid and conservation worker abroad. Helpful work, most of it — feeding refugees, starting community-based ecotourism projects, and reporting on injustices in the media — but the insane hours taxed my mental and emotional well-being. I wonder about Anastasia: will her drive to forge the planet’s biggest (best! world-changing!) rooftop farm, while thrilling, also lead to burnout?
After another hour, I take a break and wander over to the chicken coop, where Anastasia is leading a farm tour for elementary schoolchildren from the South Bronx. “Where’s the McNugget?” asks a third-grader in an oversized Yankees cap.
“What do you mean?” Anastasia asks. She’s cradling a six-pound rosecomb chicken under her right arm, and the coop behind her brims with all color of fowl. There’s an awkward silence. The chicken wiggles in Anastasia’s arm. The other kids turn their heads to the kid in the Yankees cap, who struggles to clarify. “I mean,” he says, “what part of the chicken. . .is the McNugget?”
Anastasia explains that one McNugget might contain bits of a thousand different chickens — it’s a “McFrankenstein creation,” she says, of blended-up industrial poultry, steroid-pumped birds pressed into familiar shapes.
“Gross,” a little girl next to me mutters. Anastasia may be petite, but she’s no-nonsense. New York City–raised, she has a missionary’s enthusiasm for urban farming. As she goes on about the phenolic antitoxin chemical preservatives and anti-foaming agents used in making McNuggets, I squirm, concerned that this is too graphic for these little guys. But I soon see that her candidness is working with these kids. Their gazes lock on Anastasia, and I sense they appreciate the truth.
Then the children come up to touch the chicken Anastasia’s holding, and another dimension of Brooklyn Grange opens up to me. It’s an environmental education facility where urban kids can connect with basil on the stem and real chickens without having to travel upstate. But later in the tour, by the beehives, Anastasia says the word “environment” one too many times. A girl with her hair tied back in a dozen braids says: “Why you keep talking about the en-vi-ro-ment? Got nothing to do with us.”
Anastasia shoos away a bee. “Where do you think the environment is?”
The girl sets her hands on her hips and scowls, as if to say: Why do I have to explain every little stupid thing to teachers? “It’s out there!” she exclaims, thrusting an arm, her finger forming an arrow pointing to. . . what?
I trace the girl’s invisible line. It shoots out of her fingertip and over the farm, traversing subway yards, slate-gray warehouses, and the East River. The line vaults the Empire State Building, Times Square, and the doves of Tar Beach. It crosses Hoboken and the subdivisions and strip malls of New Jersey, finally hitting the place where land and sky meet. The end of her line is the horizon.
With a heavy heart, I leave the tour and go back to harvesting rosemary and weeding arugula. My own “white privilege” — the cozy advantages of race and class — are part of what frees me up for rarified pursuits like pier-sitting, Jamming, and rooftop farming. A bunch of chickens and peas won’t bridge the chasm between twentieth-century urbanization and wild nature. Living Slow feels, right now, particularly utopian. I know what the girl means — “the environment” is out there, not in here, in the city — but other layers surface. In Liberia, I once heard the horizon poetically defined like this: Run, run, run toward it; you’ll never reach it. The end of the line — nature — is the horizon. Run, run, run toward it; we’ll never reach it.