The Concrete Jungle

I used to think nature was something you had to escape the city to find. It was a place where people in fleece jackets would disappear on long weekends. Nature was the Catskills or the Berkshires, or at best Central Park’s Ramble if you squinted past the skyline and tuned out the wail of honking horns. Where I’m from, we had pigeons, sewer rats, and whatever drought-battered trees city officials wedged into sidewalk squares. We had ivy clawing up the crumbling brick of tenements, playgrounds padded with chartreuse AstroTurf, and the Hudson outside my window. Growing up, I accepted that this absence of nature was just a condition of city life, a tragic trade-off that all New Yorkers must make to live in the concrete jungle. But over the years, that explanation no longer put me at ease. Even in the most overbuilt parts of New York, beautiful relics of the natural world find their way to me.

Down in the underworld of squealing trains, in the grit and grime of the rusty rails, I saw a cluster of them peeking through. It was an unusually stormy November morning, and I was already an hour late for school. Hungry, sleep-deprived, and a bit grumpy, I knew my day wasn’t off to the best start. Someone had stepped on the heel of my shoe getting off the train, and when I glanced down at the tracks, ready to capitulate to my moodiness, there they were. Blooming from a crack where nothing was ever meant to grow, these dandelions were brilliantly yellow and inexplicably healthy.

I realized then that New York is nature. The only thing that has changed is our willingness to take care of it. We don’t notice the feral cats that make homes behind the old synagogue and sun themselves in the sliver of light between buildings. We don’t notice the mossy frontage of the deli on 18th and 1st. We don’t notice the mourning doves nesting in the wiring above a busted laundromat security camera. When we stop noticing the wild beauty of our man-made monstrosity, we surrender ourselves to an unfulfilling life.

It took me a while to unlearn that numbness. To understand that nature did not have to be a place you visited to take aesthetic Instagram hiking pictures. Nature was all around if you opened your eyes and heart to it. I found it most vividly on the East River Promenade, where I’d wander after school when I didn’t want to go home right away. Lined by a thin strip of railing and cracked concrete that reeked of seaweed, the water was brownish and littered. But, for all its ugliness, there was something human about that river. Its waves roared with a painful nostalgia, begging to be seen and cared for. In its reflective shores, I felt like pieces of myself were floating adrift with the bloated flip-flops.

I started to wonder what it would look like if we stopped treating forgotten places like lost causes and started loving them back. At first, I picked up a couple of crushed cans and sodden chip bags. I didn’t single-handedly clean up the river, but it felt like the beginning of a long-awaited conversation with the crashing waves. Some afternoons I’d be alone, hunched over the rocks with a pair of gloves and a garbage picker. Other days, a friend would join, or a stranger would stop to help. One woman handed me a granola bar and told me her father used to fish off that pier before the water got too dirty. Another man said thank you and then kept walking, and that was enough to know I was answering the river’s prayers.

These simple acts of service filled me with immeasurable joy. There’s something about growing up surrounded by sirens and scaffolding that makes it hard to hear my thoughts. I wasted years thinking I could only love nature from a screensaver of mountains or a vacation I couldn’t afford.

But then, I saw a bee pollinating a bodega flower. I saw a child tossing breadcrumbs to sparrows on the steps of a brownstone. I saw a tiny patch of grass sprouting from the cracked tiles of my community garden. I’ve since stopped calling the city “unnatural.” Living here hasn’t alienated me from nature but rather grown my hunger for it. It has made me attentive, grateful, and even reverent for the few times a day I can appreciate the greenery.

I am still learning how to belong to this city and the Earth at the same time. Some days it feels like an unwinnable tug-of-war between nature and the city girl in me. But then I go for a walk, and the world makes itself known again.

My connection to nature is sauntering through this fast city. It is remembering that I am made of cells and salt and carbon, no different from the moss or the rats or the roots twisting beneath my feet. It is recognizing that nature is here, blooming in the subway cracks and running on the river’s edge.