A Winter Walk: Canal Park Allentown

As simple as yesterday’s post about the seasons, today I offer views of winter from Canal Park. The first picture is of the canal itself, frozen over.

Down a bit, past the bridge, the canal has been refilling itself since the towpath breach was mended. Sadly, the water is rising before anyone had the chance to clean the garbage out, as the rusted out garbage can poking out of the water makes painfully evident.


On this beautiful winter afternoon, I was joined in my journey by two young ladies named Abby and Jamie who were making their first trip to Canal Park.

I have mentioned numerous times the things I believe should be done down in Canal Park to revitalize and reinvigorate the place but the thing that irks me the most is the log on the dam which has been there now for as long as I can remember. I hope someone with the professional ability to remove such a thing does so next summer.

In closing, I leave this view of winter with a quite literal view of death. The still fleshy and bloody bones of what appears to be a decomposing goose seems a fitting image for both winter and Canal Park as it is.

2009: Four Seasons in The Parkway

Looking over the ridiculous (14+ gigs) amount of pictures I have accumulated on my hard drive since beginning the journey of writing Remember and trying to decipher "best of" sets for the end of the year is impossible. I saw too much beauty to condense it into such a series of posts. I still however want to document the year that has been and this post will be what I imagine is the best way to do that.

The Parkway is perhaps the wildest park in the city of Allentown. There are huge swatches of fragmented forest, no-mow meadows and riparian buffers. It is also one of the largest parks in Allentown so it is to be expected that a significant amount of habitat diversity should exist there.

Today, I am going to post a year in the Parkway through the four seasons. I will begin with photographs from late-spring, move into summer, fall and ultimately to the present, in young winter. This is simply the narrative of time passing, the unavoidable change that is the constant in all that surrounds us and the promise of a journey.

Late Spring:





Summer:





Fall:






Winter:

The Canal Parks: Northampton

Taking the advantage of an unseasonably warm (mid-forties) December afternoon with no precipitation, I hurriedly made my way to the Northampton Canal park yesterday upon waking. The Lehigh Canal had as much historical impact in this area as did the Bethlehem Steel (You can read about it here), and now, years after the industries that used the canal to rise to importance have faded; the history is preserved in a series of parks connected by the D+L towpath.

This Canal Park is located about 4 towpath trodden miles from the Canal Park in Hanover Township. The D+L trail saunters in under a high bridge and meets the Northampton Canal Park over the mingling of the Hokendaqua Creek and the Lehigh River. As it enters the park, the towpath looks as it does in Hanover Township. It is surrounded by young trees and a mostly empty Lehigh Canal.


The Canal itself disappears in Northampton and where it was, this park now exists. There is still a reminder here and there of what once was a bustling waterway of industry.


The Northampton Canal Park is about 2 miles long. It runs alongside the Lehigh River with a paved trail, buffeted from Northampton itself by ball fields, occasional playgrounds, and exercise equipment.

This ribbon of park is unique even in the briefest observation. With the wild river on one side and the typical recreational aspect of a city park on the other, depending on the angle of eyesight, it would be hard to determine whether one was standing on a trail of wilderness or on a trail of recreational managed wildlife.


Of the four Canal Parks I have visited on Remember, the experience at each one has been completely different. Here in Northampton, I felt the greatest connection to the Lehigh River especially without the Lehigh Canal present inside the park.

The park ends at a small dam in the River near another bridge.

A D+L towpath trail head signals the journey ahead that will take the trail out of the cement belt and into coal country.

While visiting the park, I must tell you of a rather unique experience, the likes of which I have yet to be witness to anywhere else. As I walked down the park’s path, I saw a group of Canadian Geese meandering about in one of the baseball fields.

They paid little attention to me as I passed and I climbed down the bank of the river to meet the water. There was another group of geese there, and these fellows seemed rather bothered by my presence and immediately fled into the swollen waters of the river. As they began moving swiftly with the river’s current, one of the geese began honking wildly. I turned to listen and heard a response from one of the geese in the ball field. I climbed back up to the park path listening to an increasingly frantic call and response from the two geese that were now separated by the angry river. Getting back on to the path, I saw the geese from the ball field rapidly waddling ahead of me towards the river.

The call and response continued loudly and seemingly worriedly. The geese from the ball field made their way in the Lehigh, stopping to take a drink first.

A few minutes later and the call and response ceased. I walked back towards the parking lot and turned to see the geese reunited, bobbing in the swift water, silently. I suppose, that briefly, I was lucky to hear the Goose Music of Aldo Leopold in the Northampton Canal Park.

“If, then, we can live without goose music, we may as well do away with stars, or sunsets, or Iliads. But the point is that we would be fools to do away with any of them.” –Aldo Leopold

See Also:
Canal Park (Allentown): Complete Park Log
Sand Island Park
Canal Park: Hanover Township

Video Blog 2: Canal Park

Below is a video of me discussing the many issues that face Canal Park that I have written about over the course of the last year. Have a look:

Take a look at this

An ambitious new blog has begun. It is written by Bryan Kleiner. The blog is going to focus on essays written about the history of Allentown.

Click here and check it out.

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Looks like the Canal Towpath has been repaired and the Canal itself is refilling. I'll have some pictures and a full story tomorrow.

Forgive me for the short post, I am having some technical difficulties with youtube and a video that I want to load.

Solstice: Second Snowfall (A new look)

Winter is arriving on a self made white carpet today, the solstice is upon us. Today is the darkest day of the calendar year; with the sun keeping nearest to the horizon throughout the day. Naturally, it is also the day that signals the end of the growing darkness of winter and the beginning of the slow expansion of daylight that culminates in mid June with the longest day of the year.

Yesterday morning there was no want of light anywhere I stepped across the city of Allentown. Although we were spared the horrendous two feet our southern neighbors were buried under, a six inch snowfall is no slouch. Happily, the sun had managed to poke its energetic self from the clouds early Sunday morning to help clear the roads otherwise I surely would not have found myself stomping around the snowfields of parks that had been left by the nor’easter.

The psychology of snow is well documented whenever a flake is seen or a weatherman announces the possibility of an impending storm. People react to a coming snowfall, regardless of predictions, as if a hurricane was making landfall on the Lehigh. In the wake of the storm, we are left buried to whatever measured degree, we are left "in", and we fall under a white sameness with silence as its greatest manifestation.

At Muhlenberg Lake, the snow appeared for the most part untouched, save the tracks of skiers and occasional footprints. The cold blue of the sky mingled across the face of the water until the two were all but indistinguishable from one another save the snow to tell them apart.

The brown stalks jutting from the accumulation and the yellow willow limbs seemed the greatest contrast of all; forming an earthen frame around the ethereal white and blue new portrait of winter. A cold wind that felt as if it curled from the edges of cirrus clouds and unfurled itself shockingly across the park was the herald of winter’s fledgling dominance. Above all, the scene at the Lake was quiet, serene, soothing… as if a great breath was drawn deeply into the chest and time allowed itself to slow for a moment.

Down in Fountain Park, I stopped on a bridge to view the creek. Here, Center City looked starkly clean, as if the snow scoured the dirt of 2009 from the surfaces of the buildings and allowed them to shine again, for the first time. In the distance, the Eighth Street Bridge loomed large over the park as it always does but asserting a greater aesthetic severity with nothing but bared branches and white fields to contrast with it.

I drove up, parked and walked across the bridge for the first time to take a new look at Fountain Park as it showed off its winter coat. The view from the bridge was incredible.

The Little Lehigh almost appears with the same blackness as Martin Luther King Boulevard, as if even a natural aspect of the environment was a foreigner in this new land of snow.

In Trout Creek Parkway, I experienced the greatest absence of the day. The Knotweed was almost invisible in the winter wonderland. Without the thick Knotweed dominating the landscape, Trout Creek Parkway was an entirely new place to stumble around in.



Here though, the persistence of life was present in the nearby feeder stream. Echoing the brown contrast at Muhlenberg Lake, here the contrast turned to green. Green enough that it would seem these plants were blissfully ignoring the fact that winter had arrived six inches deep all around them.


I had spent so much time in these places this past summer that to walk around them this morning, in these conditions, was like walking in them for the first time. It was not just an observable change in appearance but an entirely new distinction of personality. These places are new again and will in all likelihood look this way for awhile. That is until the equinox and the arrival of Spring. Then, just like this snowy Sunday morning, I imagine I will find myself in these places for the first time.

See Also:
First Snow: Lehigh Parkway