Wandering with saints

Ever fancy a good wander? I’m all in favor of good wanders, although I am not in favor of wandering too much without some preparation. Forest Park provides more than 1300 acres for wandering, and that is precisely what I did today: directed wandering.

The park was established in 1876 and was the site of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition: 1904 World’s Fair. The façade of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Grand Basin and some third thing (didn’t catch quite what, don’t want to misinform) are the only remaining physical features from the fair.

There is a statue of Saint Louis (now identified as Louis IX)(which is good because I was getting a bit confused – have you heard about Louis XIV or Louis XVI?!? I mean, really.) that crowns Art Hill which slopes down from the St. Louis Art Museum to the edge of the Great Basin. That statue is a permanent replica of a temporary statue that was in front of the building where the Missouri History Museum now stands. I love this. With funds from the fair, the statue was cast in bronze, a pavilion was built (named the World’s Fair Pavilion (no temporal relation)) and a pagoda was given as gift to the city of St. Louis.

The park has undergone extensive renovation and maintenance in the last 20 years. A group called Forest Park Forever, privately funded, formed in 1986 with the aim of restoring the park to the people of the city: to clean it up, make it safe, develop recreational opportunities and generally provide for its well-being as an integral part of the urban life of St. Louisans. People have responded. The park was scattered with all sorts of people this morning – 10am on a Wednesday during school season.

Picnic Island is one of the places where such response is visible and will continue to be so for the next several decades (assuming that zombies are not adverse to open green spaces after the apocalypse, of course). It is right now no kind of place to have a picnic between the hours of dawn and dusk. There are no tables in sight and the trees are either so tall that the shade their leaves cast is dissipated halfway down the trunk, or so young that you could sneeze near them and they’d fall over. But there are young trees, and that is the salient point: donors are donating, they are paying for trees to be bought, planted and cared for so that in five to ten years the Island will start resembling a place where picnicking can happen.

I’ve learned that there are bird walks on the first Saturday of each month – I’m thinking of going to the one in December. There’s a volunteer opportunity in the form of ripping up honeysuckle (exotic and invasive) the first Saturday in November which sounds like heaps of fun, so I’m adding that to the plan of events. There is a boat house where paddleboats and rowboats and bicycles are available for rent. The bicycles, presumably, do not afford passage on the water, but they may have fins, I don’t know. There are three restaurants in the Park, and I’ve been going over the list of people who are coming to visit me, or who will come to visit me once I can compile a tempting enough itinerary of sightseeing, events and eats, and those restaurants may have to be included in the pool of things I draw from.

I am, naturally, completely exhausted. It was not enough for me to take the morning wander, no. I had to wander across a hill to spend over an hour wandering around the art museum, too. Got my ticket for Friday. Decided to go with the audio tour for this first visit – it may be very busy, I do not wish to be distracted with rage.