The Aqua Mustang 73 – AND ON WATER

Well before heading north I am making forays. I go to Central Park, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to the Bronx Botanical Garden, to Bear Mountain to Roscoe with the photographer Wayne Sorce, whom I know because of Philippine adventures and through my recent lover Jocelyn.

The light had been there when I looked out at the green hill behind our house in Connecticut, and when I was stumbling along the shore of Lake Carnegie in Princeton. It was there in a park with a cupid stature in Ljubljana. And there in the marble Toroko Gorge on Taiwan.

And most recently there in Daubigny and Pissaro and Cezanne – and now, as I go beyond Bear Mountain, in the man-made beauty of Vermont, where the Green Mountains have farmers’ squares of different shades of green high in the air.

Like fields I saw from a backseat in a childhood trip through Quebec.

In this spring of ’86 the light had been there when, with a poetic young lady whose harsh Republican father was an Alaska politician, I walked the length of Central Park all the way to the East Harlem corner where at a neglected lake called the Meer men and women fished with worms as if they were in Alabam. And on another day we rode sleepy old horses through Prospect Part.

And the light remaining when I was alone, as I was so much that spring, frequently circling another pond I had overlooked, which had a curving stone bridge, and an island bird sanctuary, in Central Park’s far southeast corner. Or while retrieving memories on a path around a bigger body of water, where so many years back I had taken girls out in rowboats.

Wayne loaned me fishing equipment and I picked up a license in a gun shop on the way in his K car to the East Branch of the Delaware. He went downstream. I stayed upstream, where I stood on a bank watching the antics of a feral cat moving in and out of everything on the bank across the river.

Wayne never kept his catches, never gutted them as I had done when I was a child. I decided I would not at this time in life keep any creature I caught. And then I did not bother attempting to cast an artificial fly, for the fly would have steel hook in it and I realized that not only had I never wanted to kill fish, I did not even want to hurt them.