Late Autumn at Orchard Beach: An Essay
Ben Ashby
The light was perfect that day, a perfectly overcast day in early November, the first week of November, the very best week to visit New York City if you ask me. He asked if he could show me Orchard Beach, his favorite beach in the City. I’d never been there before and agreed that we must go. The map said it was out in the Bronx, a stretch from where we were at some corner flea market in Bushwick. I’d bought a box of of transferware, the pattern just felt right. A memento of a very good week, perhaps the best week of the year to visit this city. The pattern was made of brown leaves and ivy, a reminder of the changing and falling autumn leaves. The beach would carry those very same shades.
The beach, a place that was man made, back during the Robert Moses years, was a wide curved swath of land, part sand from New Jersey, part landfill from the old days of old New York. The island and the forests and the bay around the beach and its extensive parking lot, this week home to a circus, promising to be the best you’ve ever seen, is where the true magic was. He took my hand and led me into the woods, old worn foot paths guided our way. The colors of the late autumn leaves made everything feel so alive. The City has a way of holding on to the autumn color long after the Hudson and the Catskills have marched towards the winter months. Geese and ducks filled the waters just beyond the cattails and the weathered reeds. The landscape had a way of creating a soundtrack to mix with the crunching of leaves underfoot. The crashing waves echoed over each foot step and the hushed mumbles of our voices. We walked together as one, arms covered in jackets, intertwined with each other in a way The Judd’s sang about in Young Love. We’d pause for me to take these photographs. I wanted to remember every view of this day. In my mind these images would tell the story of perhaps the beginnings of my next great love.
