Tuesday night, around 7 p.m., a group of two dozen or so gathered outside the Benjamin Olewine III Nature Center in Wildwood Park, at the north end of town.
They were carrying flashlights, binoculars, and bags. It was National Night Out, and across the city—Midtown, Olde Uptown, Engleton, Allison Hill—neighbors had taken to the streets to mingle, eat free food, and hobnob with McGruff, the crime-noshing bloodhound. The night, begun in 1984, urges citizens to congregate outdoors, preferably equipped with a light-producing instrument, to signal to criminals that “neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.”
At the intersection of Green and Muench, this entailed petting rabbits and brandishing balloon swords. But in the hinterland beyond the Farm Show Complex, a more venturesome outing was commencing: the group would walk Wildwood’s trails til it got dark.
“Does anybody know what this tree is? Big, big leaves?” asked Sandy Lockerman, one of the park’s full-time environmental educators. She was wearing a blue polo, light khakis, and a chock-full gray Jansport.
“Pawpaw,” Lockerman explained. “They haven’t produced fruit in 15 years. It turns out they’re all clones of each other.” She indicated an installment on a nearby trunk, which looked like a Jackson Pollock made of sticks and leaves. “This is for children to hang things on and make art.”
Lockerman started the National Night Out walk three years ago. “Nobody’s supposed to be here in the park after dark,” she said. “That’s part of why it’s popular. It’s our little way of offering something to the public.”
Further along, tucked amid trees, stood a natural-materials sculpture of Gandalf the Grey, complete with a fired-clay face and a wizard staff. “This summer I came through and there was a garter snake wrapped around the hat,” Lockerman said.
She noted a roadside growth of touch-me-not, so called because the plant’s pods, when ripe, become seed grenades.
As the group walked on, the sound of barreling semis filled the air. Wildwood is adjacent to several major roads—“our little piece of paradise between the highways,” Lockerman called it.
The group paused on a bridge over Paxton Creek. Last May, a tanker truck full of diesel oil toppled on the on-ramp to Route 22-322, bursting into flame and shutting down a section of the interstate. Shortly after the accident, a maintenance worker at Wildwood spotted oil entering the park by way of the creek.
“It came down this way,” Lockerman explained. She recounted how the DEP had arrived on the scene in minutes. (“I was looking at the oil, just wishing I had a mattress to stop it,” she said later, miming propping up a mattress as a dam.) They placed booms in the creek, shut down the park, and brought in “a big truck with a super-sucker.” The spill was prevented from reaching the lake, but 11 ducklings and goslings had ingested oil and eventually died.
“If it had happened at night, it would have covered the lake and gotten to the river,” Lockerman said. “A lot of caring people put in a lot of time to help us.” Nonetheless, “it was very difficult to breathe here. It was very difficult to have ducklings in your arms that weren’t going to make it.”
It was an overcast evening, humid but cool, and not dark enough yet for flashlights. A man remarked on how pleasant it was to be out “in nature.” At that moment, a truck roared past, as loud as if it were just beyond a thin screen of trees. “Asterisk on that,” he added.
“Hear that chip, chip, chip?” Lockerman asked. “There are wood thrushes doing alarm calls over there. There’s something upsetting them.”
“Is it us?” someone asked.
“No,” Lockerman said. “It could be a snake, even a squirrel near a nest, close to their babies. They’re making a fuss!” The path wound around, affording a better view. Lockerman turned back to the group. “I just discovered the reason for the squawking. There’s a Cooper’s hawk up there. They eat other birds.”
The group stopped on another bridge, where the water below was sluggish. In summer, Lockerman said, the level is low, but “there are times when the water is up to our necks here.” Wildwood, being a wetland, is a flood-control mechanism for the city, able to hold and disperse runoff in ways pavement can’t. “It’s like a big sponge,” she explained. “The road you drove in on is a dam.”
“My son this year is doing a Lego challenge, called Nature’s Fury, to come up with a solution to Pennsylvania’s flooding problem,” a woman offered.
Lockerman nodded knowingly. “Do you know what comes in with the water? Basketballs, refrigerators, tires, kids’ sneakers.”
Someone asked what sort of devices Wildwood had for detecting floods. “Just eyesight,” Lockerman said.
As the path continued, the canopy opened. “Does anybody hear the cricket?” Lockerman asked. She unfolded a square of paper, where she’d scribbled a cheat-sheet of cricket sounds, using a CD by a Hershey-based enthusiast for reference. “It’s the Carolina ground cricket. Trill. It’s like a trill.”
A boy asked about the gender of the singing crickets.
“It’s mostly the males,” Lockerman said. “So the females can find them. That reminds me, I have an activity.” She took two Ziploc bags of film canisters from her backpack and distributed them among the group. “You have become insects, and you have no vocal chords. So what you need to do is find the two insects who make the same sound as you.”
The canisters started rattling. The group members mixed. “We’re together,” said a woman with binoculars. Lockerman went over, popped off the tops of their canisters, and peered inside. “Yup, you’re a match,” she said.
She inspected another group, all adults. “Kids cannot do this without talking,” she divulged.
“We talked,” one of the adults confessed.
“You’re not supposed to talk!” Lockerman looked around. “We still have some insects that haven’t matched. They’re wandering around the woods, trying to find each other!” At the end, she collected the canisters and held one up. “These are gold. If anyone has any film canisters you don’t want anymore, please donate them to Wildwood. You can’t find them anywhere!”
Ray Osif, in a faded ball cap and green rain jacket, with a pair of Nikon binoculars around his neck, hung towards the back of the pack. He had started volunteering at Wildwood in April, a couple of weeks before the spill. Currently, he worked at the nature center help desk, but he hoped eventually to guide walks like Lockerman.
“Right now, I’m a rookie. Little bit older of a rookie, but a rookie nonetheless,” Osif said. “Rookie’s one of the things you get to do more than once in life.”
Lockerman paused again by a field of swamp mallow, a native plant with pink flowers. “I got some stuff to show you,” she said. She began removing pelts from her backpack. The first, from a possum, had dried-out, pointy ears. In sober tones, she discussed the lottery dynamics of possum reproduction. “The mother has only 13 attachments, and she delivers 15 to 20 babies. It’s whoever gets there first.”
A woman clicked her teeth reproachfully.
“Also, possums do not hang from their tails. So let’s dispel that,” Lockerman added.
She pulled out a sizable raccoon pelt. Someone started singing: “Davey, Davey Crockett, born on the wild frontier… come on!”
Lockerman held up a snapping turtle shell. “This is a teenager,” she said. She showed with her arms that the turtles could get much bigger. A boy in the group, wearing a Star Wars T-shirt, asked if anyone had seen a YouTube video of a snapping turtle eating a watermelon. “They set it down, and the snapping turtle bit it so hard the watermelon exploded.”
The path terminated at a wooden bird-watching stand, facing out over a field of American lotus. The plants, which hold hemispheric seedpods in the middle of large cream-colored petals, cover the entire surface of Wildwood Lake. For years, Lockerman explained, the American lotus was endangered, but the population has more than recovered. “Now it’s a noxious weed in several states,” she said.
The tubers of the lotus are edible, their texture a cross between Twizzlers and celery. So are the seeds and flowers. In myth, the plants were attributed narcotic properties. Homer, in the “Odyssey,” describes an island where lotuses are the only food. Its residents lie around all day, doped up on lotus fruit.
It was getting late. The lotus petals, pale like moons, dotted a carpet of gently turning leaves. Lovely, dark, and deep: was it possible that the lotuses could drug without being ingested? Lockerman discussed another endangered species—the great egret, a slender white bird that can be spotted at Wildwood and up and down the Susquehanna. Once, she explained, great egrets were prized as sources of white feathers for ladies’ hats. Like the lotus, their population has since rebounded, though the bird remains on the state’s endangered list.
“They’re beautiful birds. Beautiful,” Lockerman said. They breed on Wade Island, south of the George N. Wade Bridge, where specialists sometimes visit to band young birds. “You have to don a hazmat suit, because as you climb up the ladder, they defecate on you and throw up on you as a mechanism to keep you away.”
By the time the group neared the center, it was completely dark. The woods were raucous with chirping, beeping, and croaking.
“I assume what we’re hearing is frogs?” one woman ventured.
“No, that’s all crickets,” Lockerman said.
“That’s all crickets?” the woman responded. She glanced around. “Scary.”
