Our Summer Mountain Repeat

This morning I dropped off Archie at school and took Augie to City Park’s Coterie Forest. In a few weeks Archie’s school-year will end and I’ll have both boys during the day, Xuladad version 2.0. But for today it was me and Augie, solo in the backwoods of the park, him at a year and nine months, around six months older than Archie was when we began the adventures of Xuladad, in the summer of 2013. And yes I’ll be employing that New Yorker-style comma for dates in these posts because its use makes sense to me on logical grounds. We didn’t also begin our adventures at another time that wasn’t the summer of 2013, which is how it would read to me without the comma.

The air temperature was remarkably cool for a May 9th morning in New Orleans, unbelievably, really, as I couldn’t recall a year with as long a reprieve from the crushing heat as this. Winds swooshed in the trees above us as we walked across the bridge at the entrance to the forest. Augie proceeded with some trepidation, holding to my hand, where in most situations he’d barrel ahead with confidence. This place was new and strange, and its beauty unfolds beginning there on the bridge, which crosses a shallow marsh of a lake covered with vast swaths of water hyacinths. The canopy darkened the path beyond as we watched a brown dove walk ahead of us, the only animal we’d see on the outing. Augie held fast to my hand as we climbed the forty-three-foot-high Mt. Laborde, the highest point in New Orleans, and he remained cautious at the top, where we encountered the owner of one of the two other vehicles we’d seen in the lot. She was out for some exercise, by her outfit, but had taken a moment to place a row of rocks on the end of the tall, semi-circular bench at the top. The top of Mt. Laborde is leveled flat and on it is a strange fabricated space consisting of a concrete slab topped with like a fiberglass-and-gravel meshed surface and the semicircular bench. I placed Augie on the bench and held his hand from the ground as we walked toward the rocks at the end, which he identified correctly and we played with for a minute. I wasn’t sure if the exerciser had put him there for him or not. They were placed in a row and spaced evenly, not something an adult would normally do for herself. It could have been a message to any other person, not necessarily us, but there was no doubting that it spoke most directly to kids, and Augie understood. The exerciser had disappeared but then reappeared quickly. She was running up and down the hill on the different paths on it and had broken a sweat, one that was a mild version of what a May morning’s heat would normally inflict. She said hello and didn’t seemed displeased that we’d scrambled her rock message.

We then walked down another path, made of broken concrete stepping-stones, toward the small lake, where we saw the other vehicle owner, a man with a fishing pole who was in the middle of switching spots. We moved toward the one he had just left, a short pier, and he said hello as he passed. On the pier Augie finally released his grip and started to explore like his usual self, walking up and down the single pier step and to the railed end and back. I sat and watched him play, and he came and sat next to me and fed me some pretend snacks that he pretend pulled from the post. We had a quiet moment there, as the breeze rippled the water, so much like a moment Archie and I had spent there in 2013 that it felt strange and fortunate to be able to repeat it like that. The boys were similar in the way I guess all kids of that age to be, experimenting with their balance, trying the different surfaces, transitioning from one to another, grabbing the rail and peering over into the water, looking through the boards to the bright green algae below. But they were different, too. Archie wanted to be picked up and held. Augie wanted to walk. Archie never pretended to eat. He would pretend prepare food to serve to others, but he would never taste his preparations himself, real or pretend.

When we got back to the top of the hill, he had a completely different mindset. Now comfortable with the stillness of the forest, and that strange, bastardized natural space at the hilltop, he went to work playing in earnest, running around on the fiber-mesh surface, to the center and back to the bench. The very center of the top is covered by a piece of spray-painted wood, heavy and old, worn-down and smooth, with holes and gaps that gave the spray-painted colors a vintage, almost 1970’s NYC subway-style look. The whole top area, with the mesh surface worn away in places, revealing the industrial fibers of which it was comprised, and the slightly-tall bench, and spray-painted wood, had a look like someone’s good idea from thirty years ago. I put Augie up on the bench again and now he wanted to jump off and have me swing him back by his arms. He laughed and got more aggressive with the game and signaled “more” in his index-finger-to-palm way when I paused.  He got into his full regular mode, exploring down the paths until he disappeared from my sight and I called him back, until finally he got around to doing what he really came to do, throw rocks.

As we left we passed a group of four coming in wearing pastel and khaki, plastic-ish hiking clothes. There was no new car in the parking lot, though, which meant they had walked in, which suggested out-of-towners, possibly European, no doubt wondering why more Americans don’t live in New Orleans, with such glorious May weather. I wasn’t sure how often we’d be back once version 2.0 kicked in in a few weeks, but it was good to get this “repeat” day in for me and young August. And the forest was an option, which I need a few of to get through summer. On the way home we drove by the skatepark at Paris Ave. and I-610 . . . .