CHAPTER TWO

game of all kinds is plenty, and twenty-five and thirty deer are sometimes seen in a herd.…We tasted here the best grapes.…About one-third part of the distance from the south side to the west end is still all woods, and is very little visited. We had to go along the shore, finding sometimes fine creeks provided with wild turkeys, geese, snipes and wood hens. Lying rotting on the shore were thousands of fish called marsbancken [menhaden], which are about the size of common carp.

In 1748, when Peter Kalm was commissioned by Linnaeus to catalogue American native plant life, much of the forest that Danckaerts and Sluyter had traveled through had been cleared and a prosperous agricultural community established. Kalm wrote: “The prospect of the country here is extremely pleasing, as it is not so much intercepted by woods, but offers more cultivated fields to view.” He noticed apple orchards everywhere and at each farmhouse a cider press; cherry trees grew near the gardens, and “all travellers are allowed to pluck ripe fruit in any garden they pass by; and not even the most covetous farmers can hinder them from so doing.”

Kalm’s diary includes a description of the Fresh Kills marshes: “The country was low on both sides of the river, and consisted of meadows. But there was no other hay to be got, than such as commonly grows on swampy grounds; for as the tide comes up this river [Arthur Kill], these low plains were sometimes overflowed when the water was high.” Branching through the marsh were the twisting estuarine creeks and rivulets that fed Fresh Kills. In the days before the Fresh Kills marshes were smothered by garbage, both Richmond Creek and Main Creek were navigable for more than a mile. Boatmen gave the little capes along the route such names as Never Fail Point, Point No Point, and Cedar Bush Point. At the mouth of Fresh Kills was an island alternately called Deadman’s Island or Burnt Island. Throughout the marsh were other “islands,” which were not true islands but simply hummocks protruding out of the surrounding moist and tide-inundated land, many of which were studded with Indian artifacts.

Thirty years after Kalm’s visit, Staten Island, like the surrounding mainland, was engulfed by the American Revolution. It was occupied by the British for the duration of the war. During that period, its hilltops were cleared and used for redoubts and its forests chopped down for firewood. There were still foxes and raccoons and opossums at this time; the last deer of the once-large herds observed by Danckaerts and Sluyter was shot a few years after the war. With the patriot victory, loyalist families from Staten Island fled to Nova Scotia. Farms that had been pillaged by the redcoats were returned to prosperity. A second-growth forest appeared on the hillsides, and the broad, rolling plain along the shore became a smiling pastoral landscape of fields and hedgerows.

Thoreau on Staten Island

This was the Staten Island that charmed Henry David Thoreau as a young man, when he became the tutor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s nephew Haven, son of William Emerson, a Staten Island judge. In a letter to his family soon after he arrived, Thoreau wrote, “The whole island is like a garden and affords very fine scenery.” Along with the second-growth forests that had appeared following the island’s denudation of trees by British soldiers during their wartime occupation, Thoreau, like Kalm, observed “peaches, and especially cherries grow[ing] by all the fences.”

In recommending Thoreau to his brother, the Concord Emerson had written, “I am sure no purer person lives in wide New York; and he is a bold and profound thinker though he may easily chance to pester you with some accidental crotchets and perhaps a village exaggeration of the value of facts.” But Thoreau did not exaggerate in describing his first vivid impressions of Staten Island:

I cannot realize that it is the roar of the sea I hear now, and not the wind in the Walden woods.…Everything here is on a grand and generous scale—sea-weed, water, and sand, and even the dead fishes, horses and hogs have a rank luxuriant odor. Great shad nets spread to dry, crabs and horse-shoes crawling over the sand—clumsy boats, only for service, dancing like sea-fowl on the surf, and ships afar off going about their business…I must live along the beach, on the southern shore, which looks directly out to sea, and see what that great parade of water means, that dashes and roars, and has not yet wet me, as long as I have lived.

Thoreau was intrigued by the evidence of the island’s prior occupation by Native Americans. After visiting a farm on the marshy shores of the Arthur Kill, he wrote home to his sister Helen in Concord: “As I was coming away I took my toll out of the soil in the shape of arrow-heads—which may after all be the surest crop—certainly not affected by drought.”

Olmsted on Staten Island

Thoreau’s contemporary Frederick Law Olmsted began his career as a farmer on Staten Island. In 1848, five years after Thoreau had been exhilarated by his long walks along the island’s southern shore, Olmsted acquired 130 acres overlooking Prince’s Bay. It was on this farm that he first showed his bent for landscape design and construction, although he could hardly have imagined that a decade later he would become the designer of Central Park and founder of the profession of landscape architecture in America. According to a friend, “he moved the barns and all their belongings behind a knoll, he brought the road in so that it approached the house by a graceful curve, he turfed the borders of the pond and planted water plants on its edge and shielded it from all contamination.” Olmsted wrote: “I do exceedingly enjoy the view from my house…bounded by the horizon—dark blue ocean, with forever distant sails coming up or sinking as they bid good-bye to America.”

Olmsted’s pursuit of farming on Staten Island was short-lived, and he sold his farm in 1854. But his relationship with the island was renewed in 1870, when he was commissioned to prepare the Report to the Staten Island Improvement Commission of a Preliminary Scheme of Improvements. His first challenge was to address an important public-health issue. In 1748 Kalm had remarked of Staten Island: “The people hereabouts are said to be troubled in summer with intense swarms of gnats or mosquitoes, which sting them and their cattle.” In 1870 medical science had not yet made the mosquito-malaria connection, and a great deal of Olmsted’s report, which he prepared in cooperation with Dr. Elisha Harris, a pioneer sanitarian, discusses prevailing medical opinion on the origins of malaria. One theory held that the disease was caused by a “granular microphyte: accompanied by a quantity of small spores, rainbow-tinted like spots of oil, growing on the surface of the marsh water.” According to another scientific model, malaria was caused by “certain gases or volatile emanations…which are evolved by decaying vegetable matter under the required conditions of temperature and moisture.”

Staten Island at that time had more than 1,000 kettle-hole ponds, with stagnant waters the report characterized as “malarial nurseries.” These small swamps were not entirely unprofitable; many were used for growing basket willows. However, Olmsted observed that “this condition of saturation of the soil locks up a treasure such as no other suburb, and probably no other community in North America, can possess; it poisons the air and threatens the ruin of the island by prejudicing the public against all parts of it as a residence.” He proposed a drainage system to be constructed by laying a network of open-jointed pipes three or four feet below the ground surface, graded so that the water would flow in descending channels to outfalls near the shore. In addition, he suggested that “free-spreading trees should be common” to provide the shade necessary to guard against “wafted malaria.” The Olmsted report also contained recommendations (none of which were ever acted upon) for laying out major roads and parks.

In 1880, ten years after the Olmsted report, the desired suburban growth had not yet taken place, and Staten Island’s population of 39,000 lived mostly on farms and in scattered villages. Grymes Hill was a fashionable enclave for longtime Staten Islanders, and some 3,000 oystermen and their families inhabited the area around Prince’s Bay. On the opposite side of the island, in Mariners Harbor beside Kill Van Kull, overlooking the green salt meadows of New Jersey, the pride of newly rich oyster captains was displayed in fine mansions along elm-arched Richmond Terrace.

Ecological Remnants

To the keen eyes of a Staten Island naturalist, what had been an ecological paradise was increasingly at risk. Davis lamented in his journal: “Houses appear where it used to be uninhabited. I see the clothes drying on the line where once I saw wild ducks, so I have to abandon a little of my rambling ground every year.” Electric lights, first installed on Staten Island in 1885, shone brightly at the amusement park in St. George. South Beach, which Danckaerts and Sluyter and later Thoreau had roamed, became in Davis’s day a pleasure strip with galleries, dance halls, and saloons. Davis remarked that “the unconscious sand is held at great price” and “waiters rush about with their trays, where once the crows devoured the lady crabs, and the crowd is as lithesome and gay as were the sand fleas of old.” On March 4, 1894, he wrote in his diary that there were “crows holding a convention in the cedars at the highest point of the island.” The cedars were then a prominent feature of the Staten Island landscape. Thoreau had written that “the cedar seems to be one of the most common trees here, and the fields are fragrant with it.” Davis noted, however, that there were fewer crows coming than in years past. Today only an occasional crow is to be seen, and except for one isolated stand, the cedars have entirely succumbed to air pollution and urbanization.

This does not mean that there are no natural areas left on Staten Island, or that there is no one today who wants to spend “days afield” discovering nature’s wonders in the tradition of William T. Davis. For one thing, there are still plenty of mushrooms, particularly in damp, wooded areas. Mycologists such as Gary Lincoff, who teaches a course at the New York Botanical Garden, frequently go on local mushroom forays. Most people would be as astonished as I was to learn what a plethora of fungi—including mushrooms in fresh, edible forms and dry, tree-clinging states—can be found at all seasons of the year in city parks throughout the five boroughs.

Gary Lincoff

The group with which Lincoff is affiliated, the North American Mycological Society, has a long and distinguished history. It was formed in the 1890s by Lucien Underwood, a renowned mycologist and Columbia University professor, and following a period of inactivity, it was revived in the 1930s by William Sturgis Thomas, author of a classic mushroom field guide. The composer John Cage and mycologist Guy Nearing were responsible for its latest reincarnation, which took place in 1962. Cage’s knowledge of mushrooms is legendary (in 1959 he even won one million lire for his answers to questions on fungi on an Italian TV quiz show). His book Silence is a compendium of diary entries combining music theory and Zenlike pronouncements with mycological expertise, mushroom recipes, and anecdotes about the occasional mishap, such as misidentifying and then ingesting a poisonous specimen.

One fall day in 2013, I accompanied Lincoff and a group of about fifteen mushroom hunters to Staten Island’s Clove Lakes Park. As we were assembling near the park entrance, we were joined by one of the society’s members, Vivien Tartter, who couldn’t wait to tell Lincoff about the lasagna she had recently made with puffball mushrooms: “First I dipped the mushrooms in an egg wash and then in bread crumbs; after that I sautéed them in peanut oil, added some tomato sauce, and put them in my lasagna along with some ricotta. Then I took a photograph and posted it on Facebook.”

After starting our climb up a slope, which several members of the group knew from prior trips to be an excellent mushroom-foraging ground, we split apart and went off in various directions, peering around tree stumps, looking beneath dead branches, and poking among the leaves that littered the ground. I followed Lincoff, and soon someone came over to show him a massy convoluted mushroom, identified as hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa), which she had found at the base of an old oak tree. It is a particularly delectable species, as I found out for myself when I got home and sautéed one. On a rotting stump, Lincoff pointed out a dry turkey-tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor), a fungus with a curved end that fans out like the tail feathers of a preening turkey. After a couple of hours scrambling up and down the wooded slopes, everyone reassembled at a picnic table, where we spread out the mushrooms we had gathered—a total of forty-five species from five different phyla. Paul Sadowski, one of Cage’s music publishers and, after Lincoff, the group’s acknowledged expert, conducted a roll call of the ascomycetes, polypores, jelly fungi, crust-and-parchment fungi, and gilled mushrooms lying on the table. It was the end of the season for fresh mushrooms, but there would be plenty of dry fungi in the city’s forests to keep the New York Mycological Society members active over the winter. Then, beginning in May and throughout the summer, there would be edible bounty in the parks once more. Thinking of the morels I would like to gather next spring, I asked Lincoff to add my e-mail address to the society’s mailing list with announcements of walks.

High Rock Nature Center

In the 1960s, Robert Moses in his capacity as transportation czar proposed the Richmond Parkway, a highway that would have run down the island’s hilly central spine, connecting New Jersey and Brooklyn via the recently opened Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. A group calling itself the Staten Island Citizens Planning Committee and its outgrowth, Friends of the Staten Island Greenbelt, were up in arms. Their attempt to protect the designated route as public parkland exemplified the burgeoning concern for the environment and community preservation that would soon lead to Earth Day activism and Jane Jacobs’s anti-Moses Lower Manhattan Expressway protest. The committee members championed a cause that was not parochial but citywide, for this forested site with its established trails and a Girl Scout camp called High Rock was prized for hiking and nature education. On their side they could count on none other than Frederick Law Olmsted, who, during the six years he lived on Staten Island, had written that it would be simple to create a four-mile-long park on the ridge extending from Fresh Kills to Stapleton. They could also invoke William T. Davis and fellow entomologist Charles Leng, his coauthor of an 1896 history of Staten Island. In their description of the island’s physical assets, they maintained:

The crowning glory of Staten Island’s topography and scenery is the forest that springs from its rich, well-watered soil.…Irregularity of contour and excessive wetness have saved such places from village development; and there is hope that some at least may ultimately become parklands, for which purpose they are eminently suited.

Mike Feller, naturalist

Although Friends of the Staten Island Greenbelt and its allies eventually prevailed over Robert Moses, resulting in the protection of the central part of the island as an unaltered natural landscape, Staten Island’s suburbanization continued at a relentless pace. Like waves borne on a flood tide, new housing developments continue to ascend the slopes of the hilly spine, and throughout the island only High Rock Park, the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, Eibs Pond Park, Clove Lakes Park, Wolfe’s Pond Park, Silver Lake Park, and Willowbrook Park survive as representative remnants of the original island-wide natural landscape.

For Mike Feller, who formerly held the title Naturalist within the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, High Rock Nature Center within the Greenbelt was more than a job responsibility. “I remember the first time my family took me to High Rock,” he reminisced during one of the several days he served as my guide to the natural areas on Staten Island.

This was before the Verrazano Bridge was built, and we went across on the ferry from Brooklyn. We were taking my two older sisters to the High Rock Girl Scout Camp. Even though I was only four years old, I have very finely detailed memories of driving to the ferry terminal and leaving the car belowdecks. This was my first experience on water, which made the excursion especially exciting and adventurous. I can still taste the salty pretzel and the orange drink my dad bought for me and what it was like driving off the ferry when we docked at St. George. We drove up the hill and immediately we are on this country road beneath an overarching tree canopy. I can remember what it was like arriving at High Rock, getting out of the car and being surrounded by this unreal buzzing and humming. There was already some apprehension since we were dropping my sisters off for the summer, but this was something entirely bizarre and amazing and like nothing I had ever heard before. I had no idea of what this was. My mother, who was a biology teacher, immediately registered what was going on and got all excited. Her face lit up, which was comforting to me, and she explained that the things on the ground that looked like miniature shrimp shells were the exoskeletons of the nymphs of the periodical cicadas that hatch once every seventeen years. You can’t believe how shrill the sound was and what it felt like to be crunching through these insect exoskeletons as we walked to the cabins where my sisters would be staying.

Feller’s introduction to this entomological phenomenon occurred in 1962. Since then there have been three other emergences of cicada nymphs, and because of the precision of this natural event’s timing, we knew there would be one in spring 2013, which is when he and I first visited High Rock Park together. Lifting a dead tree branch as we started our walk, he pointed to a hole that appeared to be the mouth of a small tunnel and explained:

When the nymphs, who have been getting their nutrients by sucking xylem from tree roots for the past seventeen years, get ready to molt, they burrow little tunnels and come out of the ground. We may see a few nymphs, a sort of advance guard that have already emerged, but the main event, which is nocturnal, occurs during a two-to-three-week period when large masses keep coming up out of the ground every night. During the next five days, the nymphs shed their exoskeletons, and after their bodies have dried out and hardened and their wings have unfurled, they are ready to take flight and mate. If we’re lucky we may be able to see a few nymphs and the holes they have dug.

We were indeed lucky, for before we started down one of the trails leading to a kettle-hole pond, Feller turned over another rotting log, and sure enough we spotted two nymphs. The insects, which looked like shell-encased worms, wriggled about as we put them on the open palms of our hands in order to study them more closely. We could see their antennae, protuberant eyes, and a pair of legs on either side of their bodies. Feller directed my attention to the insect’s anatomy: “Notice how the forelegs look almost muscular and have what appear to be claws at the end. That’s for digging. Now look closer. You see that budlike form next to the body at the other end of the leg? That’s where an inch and a half of rolled-up wing is waiting to unfurl.” Pointing to a fine line running down the center of the cicada nymph’s back, he said, “That’s the suture where the nymph’s shell is going to crack open in order to let the insect emerge.”

When I asked him how localized the emergence would be, Feller replied:

There are different broods, and the ones here are part of what is known as Brood Two, which can be found in several places in the Northeast beyond the boundaries of High Rock. There are also some Brood Ten cicadas here on Staten Island, which have a different seventeen-year cycle, but now, because so many natural areas get built over in each of the seventeen-year intervals, when the nymphs tunnel up to the ground’s surface, they hit an asphalt parking lot or a concrete house foundation. But we definitely should be able to see a fairly large swarm here at High Rock in a couple of weeks.

Newly emerged seventeen-year cicada

COURTESY OF MICHAEL FELLER

When we parted that day, I asked Feller to put me on the seventeen-year-cicada hotline. As promised, two weeks later the call came, and we agreed to meet the next day at the entrance to High Rock Park. I got there early and began to walk along one of the trails. Everywhere overhead—literally everywhere throughout the woods—there was a ringing sound. It is hard to describe: something between a singing steam kettle and jingle bells. I saw more holes in the ground and a few empty exoskeletons, but I was unable to spot the live cicadas making the incessant racket in the canopies of the trees above. My disappointment subsided, however, when I spotted Feller walking down the path toward me. As we listened to the noisy whirring, he described what was going on. “That’s called stridulation,” he explained. “This is performed by the wings of the male rubbing against a tiny protrusion on the thorax. It’s a mating call—not as loud as I remember it back when I heard it on that first visit to High Rock as a child. Then the sound was almost painful. Perhaps it’s because there aren’t as many now as there were then, before Staten Island got so built up.”

Picking up an exoskeleton, which looked exactly like a dead insect, Feller explained that this was just an empty sheath, a casing for the now-emerged cicada that was somewhere overhead. “But you can see the eyes, the antennae, the legs, and everything,” I observed. “This is what is so remarkable,” he replied. “The whole thing is just like a mold. If you could cast it, you’d have a perfect bronze cicada.” I stared in disbelief as he went on:

See where that threadlike suture is split ever-so-slightly apart. The cicada fastens itself onto a branch or leaf and uses its muscular-looking forelegs to start pulling itself out of the exoskeleton. First it hunches backward and brings the head and thorax out. The wings are still very compressed in those little wing buds on each side of the thorax that I showed you when we were here before. Once the forelegs get a good grip, it can climb further up whatever it is holding on to and pull the abdomen and everything else out. Within an hour, the pair of wings that were folded in upon themselves unfurl. Occasionally you’ll see one that got stuck and didn’t make it all the way, but that’s relatively rare. When you think of how hard it is to crack a crab or lobster and remove the meat, it’s pretty amazing that these cicadas perform such a complex metamorphosis and manage to disengage all these fine little structures and completely reform themselves with such integrity. Just look where the antennae, which is barely a hair’s width, and the eyeball inside the protective integument came out and left this hollow form.

I wanted to know what happened next. “It’s aerial sex. The male fertilizes the female; she then produces the larvae. After they have dried off a bit and the epoxylike integument has begun to congeal and harden, they fall to the ground, where they start burrowing to the spot where they will spend the next seventeen years.” As far as the adult cicadas are concerned, their day in the sun is a brief one, for as soon as they have performed their mating ritual, they die. “That’s the cicada life cycle,” Feller concluded. “In a few days you’ll be able to see those well-constructed bodies lying on the ground, if they don’t get eaten by birds, possums, raccoons, or other woodland critters.”

For Feller, nature is more than science, and when he speaks about it he uses the language of aesthetics. He remembers the frisson of frightened awe, or pleasurable terror—the hallmark of the Romantic Sublime—that he felt as a child when he first encountered the seventeen-year cicadas at High Rock when it was still a Girl Scout camp. He says that what Yosemite was to John Muir, High Rock Park has been to him:

There are emotionally cementing moments that can also be intellectually interesting, as in the case of these miraculous insects. A lot of science people are uncomfortable with the spiritual, but nature is where we touch the mystery of life. Look at Emerson and Thoreau—they were Romantics. Then there’s Wordsworth and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as the contemporary poets Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. I don’t think everything has to be super-clinical, nor does everything have to be Sturm und Drang. There is something nice about being in the middle.

The South Shore

Staten Island’s approximately two and a half miles of sandy beaches, from the Narrows to the mouth of the Arthur Kill, together with the adjacent inland neighborhoods, is known as the South Shore. Once a haunt of old-time Staten Island naturalists, this landscape was heavily developed after the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964. Along the South Shore, there are only a few protected remnants of the island’s earlier wetland ecology. These can be found at Wolfe’s Pond and at Crescent Beach, an arm of Great Kills where the Staten Island botanist John J. Crooke bought a piece of land in 1860 and built himself a wooden house on the beach. The area is now known as Crooke’s Point.

Here is how William T. Davis described this part of the island in 1892:

The beach-plums are a great attraction to a shore rambler, and the bay-berries to the white-breasted swallows that congregate on the Point in great flocks.…The branches of the bay often bend under their united weight, and the dark glossy blue of their backs make the group resplendent in color.…Mice are ever running in and out among the tussocks of grass, and the silent winged hawk steals upon them unawares. Then too, the great blue herons visit the unfrequented meadows, and stand sentinel there.…Many sandpipers run along the beach at certain seasons.…They look like little dancing machines, their movements are so rapid.

Glacial pond, High Rock Park

Beginning in the 1920s, 580 acres of the Great Kills salt marsh was used for garbage dumping. After it was filled and capped, Great Kills was converted into a park, which was opened to the public by Robert Moses in 1949. When I first went there in the late 1960s, I saw boardwalk-bordered beaches and ball fields typical of the Moses era. There were also banks of phragmites growing in the still-moist parts of former wetlands. Now part of Gateway National Recreation Area, the Great Kills beaches are occasionally closed when water-pollution levels make it unsafe to swim. More serious has been the discovery of radiation, surmised to be from remnants of industrial machinery dumped in the park before it was decommissioned as a landfill. This finding has caused a large section of Great Kills to be closed to the public for the past several years. The National Park Service’s most recent scientific analysis indicates that the contamination may be more widespread than it was originally thought to be.

Here, however, let us conclude with an appreciation of unadulterated nature on Staten Island by returning to High Rock Park, as I did with Feller in 2013, on a particularly beautiful spring day. On that occasion, we saw migrating warblers in the newly clothed trees, and the ground was covered with woodland flowers: jack-in-the-pulpit, trout lily, Canada mayflower, mayapple, Solomon’s seal (both true and false), spring beauty, and swamp loosestrife. The still air over one of the kettle-hole ponds was broken by the deep, guttural “thunk” of a frog playing bass against the shrill counterpoint of the spring peepers. A Green Heron was stealthily patrolling the edge.

In the William T. Davis Refuge, we saw regiments of male Redwing Blackbirds, their handsome scarlet epaulets flashing as they flew through the marsh, while their shy, brown-and-white-striped female mates, camouflaged in the cattail reeds nearby, searched for food. Startled, a woodcock rose from her nest with a great whirring of wings. There was watercress growing in the clear brook that winds through the refuge and tender, green leaves on the drooping branches of the weeping willows beside its banks. In all the moist places where the old abandoned wells still send water percolating up out of the ground, we smelled the pungent odor of skunk cabbage. On such a day it is natural to echo William T. Davis, who, rejoicing in the coming of some bygone spring, wrote: “The world is indeed a wonderful place and it is good to be alive even if it is only for a little while, and more than half of us do not consider our natural surroundings seriously enough.”