Tent City: A Child’s Urban Adventure

TO camp out in a New York City park is to experience a number of thrills. There’s the illicit delight of sleeping, a most intimate and private activity, after all, at a public facility during closed-to-the-public hours, bringing to mind what the children in “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” accomplish by getting themselves locked in at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And there’s the joy of having all that quasi-rural space while inside such an urban city.

This, perhaps, is a sensation akin to discovering that your West Village walk-up comes with an attached two-car garage.
One of the better-kept secrets of the city is the series of one-night family campouts that the Parks & Recreation Department has every summer weekend. They rotate through 13 city parks, spread across the five boroughs. Dinner, breakfast and all supplies except sleeping bags are provided. It’s free.
In the thought bubble of this parent upon learning about the program, there was a note to self: opportunity to make an outdoorsman of 4-year-old son despite own (intermittent but overweening) tendency toward supreme indoorsiness, no organizational work required.
These are things that have suggested to me that our son, Alec, is soft: He’s afraid of spiders. He likes air-conditioning. It was his idea to enroll in afternoon French classes this fall.
So just after 6 on a recent Friday night he and I arrived on the lawn at the far end of the Orchard Beach Nature Center boardwalk, in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The evening was run by four members of the Urban Park Rangers squad, all in their 20s, who helped us set up a two-man tent alongside about a dozen other families. I took it as a good sign that Alec immediately crawled inside and laid out his sleeping bag. Thrown off only by his observation, issued aloud to nobody in particular, that the interior of the tent “smells like horsies” (it was actually the scent of cut grass), I could see that he was very much at home.
There were about 25 of us. (Program sizes vary and tend to fill up quickly through online registration.) We were told to form a circle and each share “one cool thing” about ourselves with the group. One mother of three said she was home schooling her children. One father worked on an airline crew at Kennedy International Airport. Another woman, who had brought her son and his cousin, both 7, said in heavily accented English that she had last been camping as a child in her native Chile, “and to be here now, it makes me feel like I am a kid again.”
Kathy Vasquez — Ranger Kathy to us — said she grew up nearby, in Building 27 of Co-op City. “This is my backyard,” she said. “I wanted to work here because the wildlife in Pelham Bay is so diverse.”
She added: “You’ll see a lot of crabs and ocean life. But, for instance, if you did family camping at a Brooklyn park, it would definitely focus on bats. There are a lot of bats in Brooklyn.”
There was a cookout — burgers, chips and bug juice — and then a crafts project for the children, who made model fireflies out of plastic vials, pipe cleaners and glow sticks. Ranger Traczie Bellinger brought Alec and several others into the nature center’s headquarters and let them play with a horseshoe crab that sat in a tank.
When it got dark, another Urban Ranger, Michael Vincent, led us through a wooded area to Twin Island. “Night hikes are really special,” he told the children. “There are different kinds of animals that come out, and different ways of looking at them.” He instructed everyone to turn off flashlights. In the woods the lights of a hundred fireflies burned on and off. It was magical.
Ranger Michael told us the history of Orchard Beach, how Robert Moses put a landfill between the shore and Twin Island. We walked along a land bridge — the tide was out — to Two Trees Island. He hoisted large rocks from the sand, and we watched the crabs hiding under them scurry in the moonlight.
Before everybody turned in, we toasted marshmallows over the grill. Alec curled up and was snoring in seconds. By 5:30 a.m. the sun was rising, and children began spilling out of the tents and onto the beach of Long Island Sound.
“It looks like Maine,” one mother, a Brooklyn artist named Brenda Zlamany, said. “You have to drive hours from the city normally to be alone on a beach like this.”
Alec had been so free of complaint, such a hardy trooper, that I didn’t even look around sheepishly when he announced that he was heading to the bathroom “to do my morning toilette.” When a breakfast of muffins and bagels was brought out, he asked if they had lox.
The Parks Department required us to vacate the premises by 7:30. As Alec and I headed to our car, we saw the mother from Chile and her son and nephew lingering at the beach playground. On one swing the taller boy was pushing his cousin. On the adjacent swing the woman soared back and forth above them, looking as if she felt very much like her childhood self.