westerpark west.

I have an unenviably roomy capacity for forgetting how peace-inducing a walk in the park can be. A good park, I mean, somewhere big enough to where mopeds and streetsweepers and randomly screaming general sonic urbanity is all unhearable.






















Well, in the Westerpark you can still hear trains quite often, very close by, but that's a sound I don't mind at all. In fact it may be one of my favorite things about Westerpark.

I also like the diversity of the place, there's a lot of different, whatchacallit, ecosystems? going on in this large (120 acres) but efficiently and appealingly arranged urban wilderness. Not to mention that it's an internationally-recognized example of reclaiming unusable industrial areas of the city center and transforming them into something radically more interesting and useful.













Back to peace-induction. For me to forget about it, the forgotten nature walk also has to be a good walk. Not just bringing a book and a bottle of wine and flopping down in the nearest available spot. That I remember to do all the time.













It doesn't always work out for everyone like this. This person did not find his or her time in the woods to be nearly as relaxing as I found mine:












Nature also does a good job of quietly reminding you that it doesn't care about your daily life stressors, and maybe you shouldn't either. At least not all the time. Any idea what this unfortunate half-body is? It's quite large, and this is only half of it. My initial quesses were: raccoon, possum (which I'm not even sure we have here), were-rabbit, cave cat, and rat-heron.

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