Pathfinding: Found!

In honor of the end of the summer and the beginning of the school year (starting on Wednesday!), it seemed like an excellent time to wrap up the second major badge project of the summer: the Pathfinding badge.

Only one (required) step remained: to "know something of the history of the place [and] its principal public buildings." And so, in pursuit of the principal public buildings (which the Handbook suggests includes things like town halls, etc.), I visited downtown Brooklyn.

First stop, Borough Hall, which has been (among other things) both a jail and a court. The NY Emergency Response Team was out in full force urging disaster preparedness of all sorts, largely through handing out a lot of hand sanitizer and providing a packing list for a go bag (a concept that just makes me feel to generally uncomfortable to consider creating). Despite my recent be-prepared theme, I didn't explain my current project to those kind folks. They might have thought I was weird.

I checked out the courthouses, too, both the Supreme Court building, guarded by the most bizarre possible triumvirate of statues (Bobby Kennedy, Christopher Columbus, and Moses), and the US Court, which (I'll admit) I first imagined was a movie theater. (That glassy facade just says "let's eat popcorn!" to me.)

Finally, I was surprised (very!) to learn more about downtown Brooklyn's noble history as a hotbed of abolitionists until I spotted the statue of Henry Ward Beecher (abolitionist, adulterer, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe). Beecher's church was a major player in the Underground Railroad in NYC, and raised so much money for the Union Army and for emancipation that the guns wielded by Kansas' Union soldiers were referred to as "Beecher's Bibles." (Who knew I was this into history?)

So, is it time for a new badge?

I think so.

Best trip of the year. Seriously.

Moving on through the pathfinding merit badge, things have finally started to get a little more interesting. One of the requirements I’d been kind of dreading — knowing the directions to and population of 5 neighboring towns — has turned out to be at least a little bit awesome.

Why?

Boats.

Okay, so I reflected on this for a while, and really, being able to give directions to neighboring towns isn’t all that interesting, especially since we’re talking about a requirement that would just end with me saying things like “take the train to Hoboken.” “Take the train to Jersey City.” And so forth.

Clearly, this is a requirement that’s ripe for a little tweaking and so, instead, I decided that the better route would be to find, well, routes to all five boroughs. (And yes. I live in one already. Stop looking at me like that.)

Today, I took on Staten Island. Now, I’ll admit that my only prior knowledge pretty much consisted of two things: driving across the Goethals Bridge to get to other boroughs and one particularly unflattering episode of MTV’s True Life (I can’t find the episode, but the clip here gives you the picture.) I will admit: I was wrong. I was biased, and I was wrong.

Because getting to Staten Island involves my three favorite words in the English language: Free boat ride.

Y’all, I have seen the light. The Staten Island Ferry leaves from the southern tip of Manhattan and friends, it is free free free.

Unlike other excursions so far, I even had company on today’s trip — my college roommate, Tracy, joined me. (She took one of the photos: guess which!) We met up at Whitehall Ferry Terminal and caught a 9:15 ferry to Staten Island. The harbor was busy and the sun was shining — perfect!

Also, please note that, from the water, the ferry terminal looks like a giant, gaping maw.

Once we arrived, however, we still had some exploring to do in what a sign in the terminal calls “The Borough of Parks.” We made a valiant effort to visit the Staten Island Museum (which doesn’t open until noon) and checked out the stadium for the Staten Island Yankees, who also have a Baseball Scout Wall of Fame. (Tracy and I momentarily misread this as the Boy Scout Hall of Fame and then were roundly disappointed.)

We caught our only downside on the return trip, when I tried to speak to some of the crew on the ferry. As they should have, of course, they asked the captain for permission to be interviewed, but he wasn't having it. Maybe I'm a security threat? I do look pretty tough.

The lesson? MTV lies, man. Go to Staten Island for the best $0 you can spend in the city.

Why doesn’t everyone do this all the time?

Oh look, I have a neighborhood

We've entered the really, genuinely un-writeable part of the pathfinding badge: locating things around my neighborhood. I understand where this is coming from, of course. When you were a farm boy growing up, it was intensely practical to know the locations of each doctor in a multi-mile radius. What if you got mangled in a plow? Now, however, recognizing each fire hydrant in the immediate vicinity is a little more sloggy than I'd hoped.

Requirements 5 and 6:
* Know the location of the nearest meat markets, bakeries, groceries, and drug stores.
* Know where the nearest police station, hospital, doctor, fire alarm, fire hydrant, telegraph and telephone offices, and railroad stations are.

But! The 17 ideals of scouting do inform me that one must be cheerful (in addition to thrifty, obedient, and clean). And so, off I went. Meat market accomplished days ago, there were still more locations to visit, and visit them I did. I'll spare you photographic evidence of the vast majority, but please believe me that, dude, there are a lot of drug stores.


There are also a lot of grocery stores, and since my neighborhood is exceedingly gentrified, there are a lot of grocery stores that fall into the realm of the absurd. This one, for example, featured the largest display of materials for the decoration of cakes I think I've ever seen. Man, I sound ridiculous.

There was also a great number of the more average groceries I frequent, but that sort of place was less open to my picture-taking.

In a nod to public safety, I did also visit the hospital (no, not in an emergency! emergency! way), and checked out a series of doctor's offices, as well.

Sadly, I think the telegraph and telephone offices have fallen by the wayside, along with the liveries and blacksmiths. There's a Verizon dealer on my corner, though. Does that count?

One more mark of success for the day: in my exploration, I acquired two delightful things. First, a small kefir, which was perhaps not the best choice for a walk outside on a hot day, but was still cold and tasty, and second, a copy of "Cloudsplitter," which has been on my reading list for forever. (I bought it at a stoop sale, from girl who was maybe 10 and was a hard bargain-driver. Man, I didn't dare to ask her to lower her price.) My husband wonders if I'm on a Civil War kick lately (I'm currently finishing the first volume of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War"). He may have a point.

Tomorrow, we're back into the more exciting section of pathfinding. How exciting? I'm going to Staten Island. Seriously.

Brooklyn horses

As you know, I’ve been walking the trails of Prospect Park in pursuit of the Pathfinding merit badge. Today, though, it seemed like time for me to try out something a little different than ambling around the park. Today, it was time to go for Requirement #4:

“Know in the country in the two-mile radius, approximately, the number of horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs owned on the five neighboring farms: or in a town must know in a half-mile radius what livery stables, garages and blacksmiths there are.”

As far as I can see, there’s no question that I live in a town, which frees me from making a census of my neighborhood sheep. Instead, I set out to locate and visit the livery stables, garages, and blacksmiths.

Now, the garages were the easy part. There’s an enormous number of car services, parking lots, and auto repair centers in the area (though not all of them are what you might expect — Pilates Garage offers no oil changes whatsoever, only exercise. Phooey). Regardless, expect a garage-related post later in the week.

Today’s more difficult task centered on blacksmiths and liveries.

Simply put, there aren’t any.

Once again, we’re hitting on the agricultural thrust of the 1911 handbook. Our 1911-era town would absolutely include not only one livery, but possibly several, horses being a critical part of the business of getting from one place to another. Really, in order to be fully true to the spirit of things, instead of liveries the truly loyal modern-scout (which I am, after all) ought to be seeking out car dealerships and rental facilities. After all, really, the purpose of this badge is to familiarize the scout with the things surrounding him -- how does one get from one place to another, after all? What roads are there? How might one travel them?

This is a pretty valid concern, after all. When I was first learning to drive a car (at the same age, more or less, as the boys trying to earn this badge a hundred years ago would have been), my total lack of directional awareness caused my parents no end of woe. This wasn't just me, either. My friends would call for directions to my house, though they'd been there a hundred times or more. A child won't pay attention to the way we get from one place to another, not really. Part of childhood, or part of an ideal childhood, I guess, is a certain faith in your parents. They know how to navigate the world, both metaphorically and literally. The actual mechanics of moving through the environment aren't necessary, and so they slip by us. Part of growing up, really, and putting away childish things, is that learning of how to move freely from one location to the next. Really, that's how I see the Pathfinding badge as a whole -- not only another contribution to the scouting ideal of becoming an expert woodsman, but also as a piece of encouragement towards growing up and becoming self-sufficient in whatever world in which one happens to live.

In my case, I happen to live in a world in which there are no liveries.

Well, more precisely, there aren’t any within a half mile of my house. Kensington Stables is outside the golden radius, but I paid a visit anyway. They’re located in, well, Kensington, right at the southern tip of Prospect Park. I got off the bus and followed the smell of horse (unexpected in the city), which led me right to the door of the stable. Once there, I spoke to Walker, who's worked at the stable for 18 years and owned it for 16.

“The city grew up around the stable,” he told me, when I asked about operating stables within spitting distance of the Prospect Expressway. The stable itself was built in 1930, 20 years before the highway (and 19 years after the Handbook was written!), and continues to serve mostly locals. There’s no boarding at the stables (on account of a lack of space, Walker tells me, not a lack of interest), and they offer a great number of lessons — there was a gaggle of excited little girls thronging around us while we spoke.

Most interesting, really, was the process of shoeing horses. I’ll admit that, when I arrived, I was secretly hoping to come across a stable and farrier all at once, or at least to catch a hot tip on where to find a forge. Not so much. It appears that blacksmithery, in general, has gone mobile — Kensington’s horses get shod by a blacksmith who works out of a truck. (And what trucks! This guy's blacksmithing trailer looks like an ice cream shop, slaughterhouse, and walk-in freezer all rolled into one.

Other surprising bit of information regarding horseshoeing in New York: due to various permit difficulties, most places have shifted to using a process known as “cold shoeing,” in which the farrier shapes the shoes without heating them (which I thought was a trick only doable by Superman). The forge-free process means that the farrier doesn’t have to essentially have the permits to drive a truck filled up with explosives, which comes out, ultimately, cheaper for everyone. There appears to be some internet debate regarding the merits of each type of shoeing, but Walker assures me that his horses are quite content — from what I could see, I believe him.

Also, I’ll be making these with dinner tonight. Yum.

Exploration, and meat

So, um, how was your night last night? Really. That’s cool. Oh wait, I wasn’t listening because I just won an awesome bugle on ebay.

Now then.

As I’ve been spending more and more time with the handbook, I’m increasingly impressed with what an artifact of an agrarian society it is. Simple things: the agriculture badge’s request that one grows an acre of corn, the poultry farming badge’s requirement that one raise a brood of at least ten chickens, or the gardening badge’s criterion for cutting grass with a scythe.

Equally interesting is the pathfinding badge. This one is a maze of complicated steps, and it’s going to be one of my first badge projects.

Now, the first requirement is that the applicant scout must learn “every lane, by-path, and short cut for a distance of at least 2 miles in every direction around the local scouts’ headquarters in the country.” This seems like a great idea, but I’m not sure how tenable it is in New York — I’d like to point out, after all, that an absurdly huge number of people live within 2 square miles of my house.

(I found a population density estimate for my neighborhood of 68,000 people per square mile. A circle with a radius of 2 miles has an area of (roughly) 12.6 square miles, or 853,000 people. Now, of course, that circle would also contain Prospect Park, whose population (one hopes) is 0, so we’ll subtract the area of Prospect Park (585 acres, or 0.9 square miles), so there’s actually a population of (maybe) 795,600 people. But still.)

The point is, those people necessitate a whole lot of roads. So maybe learning them all is both absurd and (a little) unsafe.

I discovered for myself an alternative task. Instead, I’m going to learn all the pathways of Prospect Park.

This is actually kind of a decent task — according to at least two people I just spoke to at the Prospect Park Alliance, no one seems to know exactly how many miles of trails there are. There appear to be about 4.5 miles of paved roadways/sidewalks, and I’d estimate at least 2 times that many miles of trails (take a look at the runners’ map for more details). This would mean there are maybe 12 miles of trails in the park — this seems like enough to learn in order to qualify for the badge. Right?

So, today, I set out.

It’s a gorgeous day, and some areas of the park were absolutely absurdly beautiful — I’d never been to Prospect Park Lake, and it’s shockingly lovely.





Of course, you can’t forget that you ARE in a city.






There are also some really surprising architectural bits, like a Greek-styled pavilion which, try as I might, I can't find labeled on any maps. I'd love to know its history. Can anyone help me out? (PS: I've had these shoes for ten years. Yikes.)


On the way back, I made friends (I guess) with a woman who told me all about how Swedish and Norwegian people are the most beautiful in the world. (I’m neither. However, my husband is, so I didn’t fight too hard.)


Also, the badge requires me to know the location of all the meat markets within a 1/2 mile radius of my house. Fortunately, there’s only one. I’d never been inside before (I’ve been a vegetarian for something like ten years), but man, I’m glad I went. Gorgeous gnocchi, tons of nice bread, all kinds of good stuff. If you’re a carnivore, stop in. (The bread is extra good news! I wanted to make bruschetta the other night but couldn't find a nice-looking loaf of bread. I substituted in a pizza crust, partially baked, from a pizzeria on my block, and while the whole thing came out nicely, I really would have preferred the bread. So yay!)