Review: A Year in Rock Creek Park: The Wild, Wooded Heart of Washington, DC

Abstract

Choukas-Bradley, Melanie. A Year in Rock Creek Park: The Wild, Wooded Heart of Washington, DC Staunton, VA: George F. Thompson Publishing, 2014. 240 pp., illus., maps, photographs. ISBN: 9781938086243, US$29.95, paper. Photographs by Susan Austin Roth.When walk through the bottomland forest and into the upland woods, may be deep in solitary reverie but am never alone (p. 7). Naturalist Melanie ChoukasBradley (with beautiful photographs by Susan Austin Roth) presents a colourful ode to Rock Creek Park, ...a welcoming sanctuary for millions of city-dwellers who feel the need to commune with Nature (p.7). Through vivid descriptions and poetic musings, Choukas-Bradley documents the 'natural events' of a year in the park. The detailed daily entries are divided into four seasons and record the changes that take place over the course of the year in this crucial urban habitat for birds, wildflowers, trees, and those seeking solace from the bustle of the Washington, DC area. While the author describes the physical and aesthetic as well as emotional refuge in lyrical detail, what sets this book apart is the undertone of the imminent threat to the habitat from global climate change.In Part 1, Winter, the author begins with her reluctant move from their rural family home in Comus, Maryland to be closer to the city, and how she initially felt exiled from Nature (p. 13) until discovering Washington's Boundary Bridge Trail Network- named for the border between D.C. and Maryland-and Rock Creek Park. Quoting from Thoreau's 1854 Walden, I went to the woods because wished to live deliberately., (p. 17) the author explains that she wished to do the same thing but had to remain in the city both for work and her family. Yet she is able to live my life in communion with Nature, here in Rock Creek Park, where.I feel have lived in the woods all along (p. 17). She describes both the personal significance of the sanctuary through its whitened winter landscape, the storms and sleet, different paw prints in the snow, and the melting of the creek ice at the beginning of spring.With its rich descriptions but clear warnings about the fragility of the author's beloved sanctuary, the book serves as homage to an ecosystem, while demonstrating its fragility. Choukas-Bradley writes:What is winter if not the chance to rest in a state of semi-hibernation, the stillness and cold serving as antidote to the industry of all the other seasons. .the stillness that is not death but the incubating prelude to exuberant rebirth. (p. 27)In Part 2, Spring, Choukas-Bradley tells us: .I want to be out of the cave and into the day and the night, especially the fertile night (51). Spring brings with it new life, birds repopulating the wooded areas, and first leaves on plants and trees bringing new hope and rebirth from the winter hibernation. …