Someone Built It, So It Must Lead Somewhere

Barley, a dog, stands beside a wooden bench, painted green, beside a gravel path that has dense greenery encroaching upon it from all sides.

There’s something very funny to me about parks conceived of after the fact, stitched together from land ill-suited for other uses. Such zones can vary a lot, from vast, featureless expanses of grass atop sealed landfills, to narrow, gerrymandered squiggles that trace the length of some natural ravine. This park is the latter sort, and as such has a single, unforking path that runs its length. The point, of course, is to provide a green space for people to enjoy, but there are really only two appropriate activities here: Wait or Proceed. This gives the path a feeling of purpose - someone must have cleared a path through this wilderness for a reason, so surely we must be going somewhere - but there is no destination of note at either end. It’s a paradoxical space, at once liminal and not, in which the only way to fully engage is to do nothing, because to do the only other thing available is to gradually depart, whether by taking the short way out or the long way.