Central Park yesterday morning was frozen and treacherous and filled with snow and felled trees (and the crews to take them away). But walking through the branches that blocked my path, I though only of that series of questions from Virginia Woolf:

“Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves?”

To walk with wet feet in the damaged park on a Sunday morning before converging with a group of familiar faces is to understand how not be cold and to be aware of the upcoming winter and be unafraid.

I found myself in furthest Queens on Sunday, walking along the freeways and access roads that envelop JFK. Since the area surrounding the airport was originally a marshy wetland adjacent to the ocean, you can still find overgrown places (more than you’d imagine), and picturesque landscapes all offset by the roar of cars and buses on asphalt.

The roar of incoming airplanes, too, and the feel of invisible effluence descending on a poisonous, beautiful scene. We saw a kestrel and almost became tangled in razor wire. After the sun sets, the lights that guide the pilots to the ground form a glowing grid that looks like so many diodes on an illuminated brain.

After hours of walking into the night out in that netherworld, we arrived at the most improbable of places: a village with houses on stilts, across the highway from a strip mall and entirely quiet. It was some time before we began the long journey back home. Sprinting to buses to catch the next shuttle. Driving back on the roads we’d walked. Three trains and then the familiar.

The woods up near Cold Spring are perpetually surprising. I try to head up north every year around this time and the colors are always slightly different, moderated by unknown timetables. On this particular excursion, it rained intermittently while we were scrambling up the rocky trails which made everything seem slightly unreal. At one point, the sky was glowing red in the distance.

Every time I visit these trails, I think of the ghosts that live here and way that the stones and rocks underfoot will eventually lose their formation. Someone warned me against making walking an act of aggressive consumption, and I think there is some merit to the advice. But for me, I think of all these places as haunted and wishing for acknowledgement. Conversations are everywhere if you can bear to take part.

A: What happened to that tree?
B: The dead one with the broken branches? I don’t know.
A: I’ll give you three guesses.
B: Well, I’d say disease. Or sadness. An inability to thrive.
A: You’re wrong on all counts.
B: Tell me the answer.
A: That tree was once all alone in a field, and then a forest grew around it.
B: Should I have known that? I should have known that.

As premonitions go, it’s a fairly open-ended one. But I take all such things to heart, and wonder about the ways  I become closed-minded or inured to new experiences, and how to reverse the trend.

This slightly tragic-seeming structure used to be the warehouse for the New York Daily News, and it always cheers me to see it still standing/looming.

On Sunday, I found myself wind-battered and facing strange shoreline contraptions on the way to Staten Island, where the New York City Parks department was offering their annual preview of Freshkills Park, described somewhat ponderously by the New York Times as the “planet’s greatest act of ecological atonement.”

I was looking forward to seeing the park (and Staten Island), but mostly I was thrilled at the thought of traveling by water through that strange zone of marsh and industry beneath the Bayonne Bridge that often occupies my imagination. Although I didn’t see the wall cloud of myth and legend, I was captivated by the way that the smokestacks and sky created a seamless horizon.

There were layers upon layers of bridges, and the banks that were seemingly most untouched by human contact all contained signs that warned of petroleum pipelines running beneath the surface.

In the park itself, I stood on what used to be the largest man-made structure in the world, taller than the Statue of Liberty. It looked like that most rare of native eco-systems, the prairie, but beneath the surface is a network that will carry methane to the island’s residents.

It wasn’t hard to imagine that I was somewhere far from New York, and for a brief moment outside of time itself, or before the city itself was built. But, of course, the traces of the past will never truly disappear until they fall down.