11-May-99 Riverwalk
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On Hyde Street a woman in a car was asking a woman pushing a stroller for directions. They hailed me and asked if I knew where Matthew Eappen park was. The driver said that she had been told that a playground nearby had recently been renamed in his memory, and told me enough about where she thought it was (by the old Hyde school, which isn't on Hyde Street) that I was able to direct her. Did that name ring a bell? Maybe you've heard of Louise Woodward, the British au pair who most people in this area, his home town, believe shook Matthew to death.
The ladies slippers were out in Edmands park this morning. I went up that steep trail and first saw one bud, larger than it had been on Friday, and then saw two open flowers nearby. Farther up the trail is another clump of the plants. I photographed one flower, and then turned around and saw two more next to where I had been standing.
The flowers I'm talking about are the pink moccasin flower. It's more common than it seems in the woods around here, but it takes a little practice to get tuned in to seeing it. The pink color is surprisingly easy to miss; somehow it blends in with last fall's dry leaves. I learned to spot them eight or ten years ago, and started seeing them all over in season. There was even a plant I could see from a window at work.
I went bicycling on the river walk over lunch hour and took several pictures. There were more birds singing than I saw -- I'm not really that good a solo birder -- but I did spot several yellow warblers. As I got nearer the dam I heard and saw a multitude of seagulls on the rocks below it. The alewives (herring) are beginning to run in the river, and the gulls know that means an easy dinner. A guy who was watching from the lookout platform told me that the fish had been there since yesterday, but weren't able to get up the main part of the dam. There's a fish ladder on the other side of the river, but not many of the fish find it. Do you know that herring swim upstream to breed, like salmon? OK, well, that's the way they are. The guy who was watching pointed to the gulls and the white water below the dam and the water rushing down the face of the dam, and said, “Can you imagine having to run that gauntlet every time you wanted to have sex?” It's a different lifestyle, being a herring.
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