nothin Quinnipiac Trail Bears A Visit | New Haven Independent

Quinnipiac Trail Bears A Visit

Brian Slattery Photos

The bear’s mouth was agape, wide enough to snap up two people. Its head, neck, and shoulders were made of scrap. But its eye was tenderly rendered, imbuing the bear with surprising emotion. It didn’t seem like it was hunting; maybe it was even crying. The emotion was all the more powerful for the bear’s location, in a building amid the former Cedar Hill Rail Yard straddling the New Haven and North Haven lines, and just off the Tidal Marsh Trail, which began in North Haven.

The bear was the work of New Haven-based artist M.J. DeAngelo. Finding it took three tries, in a journey that felt like a trip into both the past and the future.

DeAngelo’s work has been a part of New Haven for years. In 2016 he was a part of the Under 91 Project that created a mural for the concrete walls connecting Jocelyn Square and East Rock under the interstate. This summer alone he painted the mural of Sun Ra on the side of the building housing Cafe Nine and another mural at the intersection of Orange and Crown, just down the street. A visit to the artist’s Instagram page showed that he’s kept busy — including by building a polar bear … somewhere.

This guy is made from reclaimed wood and metal falling off of the decaying building he sits in, 14 feet tall, smashed, nailed together, sprayed with a fire extinguisher, and spray painted deep in the woods,” DeAngelo wrote on Instagram.

The woods,” as it turned out, were part of the landscape of the Tidal Marsh Trail, as a few astonished hikers who found the bear noted on Reddit and AllTrails, a hikers’ app. The Tidal Marsh Trail might be one of the most-reported-on hidden places in the greater New Haven area, attracting reporters from WFSB and The Hartford Courant in 2016 and The Daily Nutmeg in 2017. Its history alone is reason enough to attract attention. The land was once part of the Cedar Hill Rail Yard, over a mile across and several miles long, starting in New Haven and stretching into North Haven along the Quinnipiac River. Reporting that there were once 14 yards at Cedar Hill with a capacity of 15,000 rail cars,” the Courant dug deeper to produce this information from a 1928 issue of Railway Magazine: Cedar Hill was designed to meet complex requirements … trains are indiscriminately made up and come in from all directions are classified and made up into solid trains for each point. There are 18 destinations to which solid trains are operated daily east and north from Cedar Hill. The efficient operation of Cedar Hill has resulted in relieving the congestion at New York gateway.”

The rail yard hasn’t been used for decades (though there is an adjoining property owned by Amtrak that is still in use). As nature reclaimed the area, it was managed for a time by the Connecticut Forest and Park Association. It’s now under the auspices of the North Haven Trail Association, which has ambitions to create a linear park along the river connecting to trails in Wallingford and Meriden.

This August, the area was hit by the tornado that barreled through Hamden, North Haven, and Bethany. Was the bear still there?

My son and I first tried to find the bear a few days after the tornado passed through. We found a landscape transformed — and a trail blocked by fallen trees every 15 yards or so. Some were small enough to step over or duck under. Others were complex obstacles; it was unclear whether to climb through them or find a way around them and rejoin the trail. The going was slow, and we were short on time. After following the trail maybe a mile, we turned around and headed back, going through the same obstacle course in reverse. We hadn’t found the bear, but we had seen a lot of destruction. Maybe the bear had been demolished like some of the trees we had found.

I saw DeAngelo shortly after that hike. He had gone out to check on his sculpture. It was still there, he told me, just off the trail.

So we tried again last week. The trail had been mostly cleared, and it was easier going, but there was still plenty of evidence of the tornado’s visit. Much like visiting Sleeping Giant State Park after it reopened, walking the Tidal Marsh Trail was a reminder of the power of nature around us — a power that was hard to remember at the mall at the Tidal Marsh Trail’s beginning, but impossible to forget, confronted with the aftermath of the tornado’s wrenching velocity.

Shortly after the trail passed through a dense stand of trees, the canopy suddenly broke to open sky. Across the forest floor were the twisted remains of toppled trees, trunks snapped in half, the gangly survivors suddenly naked, not the right shape for the space.

And at the same time, if you turned from the trees to look out over the water, the marsh was the same as it ever was, teeming with birds, the waves rolling through the grass.

The tracks from the railway are still there and clearly visible, though the strip of land encompassing the park is also a natural experiment in what it looks like when humans leave a place, and the plants proceed to occupy it. In many places, the tracks were slowly being buried, or grown over.

But the tornado had disrupted the plants’ slow process. Where the wind had uprooted trees, the trees in turn uprooted the tracks around them, suspending the metal rails in the air in a way that seemed almost impossible.

On our first attempt to find the bear, my son and I had relied simply on the trail itself, marked well by white blazes, to get us there and back again. This time we came with a downloaded map from AllTrails. We knew now where we were in area. We still didn’t know where the bear was; only, from the pictures people had taken of it, that it was in a building. Thing was, there were a lot of buildings, and we knew that the sense of scale from the picture could be deceiving. We followed the trail out of the tornado zone and back into the woods, making small detours when we saw structures in the trees. We found a series of watchtowers that had once overlooked the yards, smaller buildings the function of which was beyond us to decipher. My son remarked that if one wanted to film a postapocalyptic movie in the New Haven area, this trail could provide location after location.

The trail roughly followed the tracks south, back into New Haven, and every once in a while produced scenes that felt a little surreal: a tree growing squarely out of a gnarled railway bed, a lighting tower in the distance recolonized by birds for nests.

But we still didn’t find the bear.

I really want to find that thing,” I said.

This bear is becoming your Moby-Dick,” my son said. I’d had the same thought. But on Tuesday, I figured I’d give it one more shot.

This time I got serious. I watched the video DeAngelo had made again, this time mostly paying attention to the building the bear was in, not the bear itself. It was a good clue. I realized I hadn’t seen anything quite like it wherever my son and I had gone — so far — on the Tidal Marsh Trail. I visited Google Maps and looked at its satellite image of the area. Zooming in and hunting around, I found the shape of a structure that resembled the building in the video. It was a little farther south than we had been. I dropped a pin on it to get its latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, and sent them to my fully charged phone. The plan was to use the phone like a map and compass.

Passing on the trail through the spot the tornado had transformed, I was soon in the woods again. As his Instagram account shows, DeAngelo has a long history as a graffiti artist, and coming upon the way other graffiti artists had taken to the disused infrastructure from the railway, it hit me that DeAngelo’s bear was in many ways among its peers.

And in a larger sense, it was possible to think of the forest’s reclamation of the railway yard overall and the graffiti artists’ claiming of the manmade structures there as part of the same process. We tend to describe buildings like the ones in the rail yard as decaying, and in a practical sense, they are. As in, if you go on this trail, please don’t climb the railway towers or other buildings, which are inherently unstable. The area is also full of rusting metal objects, scrap wood, and other potentially harmful objects that make the Tidal Marsh Trail a place to be careful.

But before the Cedar Hill Rail Yard was built, before there were humans at all on the banks of the Quinnipiac, there had surely been trees and grasses here. Now the land was returning to that former life. Likewise, if the railroad companies weren’t using the infrastructure, was it so bad that they were finding another use as a canvas for artists?

The railway yard wasn’t decaying. It was changing, thanks to wind, water, and weather, plant and animal life. When I had visited with my son, we spent time exploring and chatting. By myself, I moved more quickly and quietly, and in the woods, managed to startle both a white-tailed deer and a large bird I didn’t get enough of a glimpse of to identify. This was their place now; I was the intruder.

In the most heavily forested part of the trail, three downed trees from the tornado meant I had to find a way around them through the underbrush. With the aid of my phone as a compass, I could stray from and rejoin the trail all three times. Without the phone, it would have been pretty easy to get turned around. The rails in the woods run north-south generally speaking, which helps — but they’re not entirely to be trusted.

The woods gave way to more open terrain, and the trail, still marked by white blazes, was clearly visible.

It became easier to see how the birds, like the graffiti artists, were making the former floodlight towers their own.

The trail began to go into woods again. I could see from my phone that I was close to the spot I thought the bear was. The first half of the structure appeared on my right. The trail then took a turn toward it, and through the underbrush I caught the shape of the building I’d been looking for, and a flash of white.

I’d found the bear. I took a minute to take it in. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the woods in my life, following maps in unfamiliar places and learning how to stay out of harm’s way, knowing that wild places, or places that are becoming wild again, don’t owe it to you to keep you safe. For whatever reason, finding DeAngelo’s sculpture had been one of the trickier things I’d done outdoors in a couple decades. But tricky” also meant interesting.” Looking for the bear had meant being humbled by the effects of yet another major weather event in the area. It had meant learning more of New Haven’s history. It had allowed me to explore a part of the greater New Haven area I’d never been, which scratched an itch for me, as someone who misses travel in these pandemic times (a lot). And just like travel can do, it helped me think about the bigger picture of the current moment we’re in.

It was fitting that DeAngelo’s signature on the bear could at first glance be mistaken for a tag from someone else. Painting the bear white, amid a series of structures that were already covered with graffiti, felt almost like an invitation for other graffiti artists to tag the bear — it was a blank slate — though it hasn’t happened yet.

On the way back to the trailhead — behind Target on Universal Drive in North Haven — I stopped to notice what other hikers have noticed, about the Quinnipiac’s often overlooked natural beauty.

But the manmade features are an undeniable part of the landscape. While I was stopped, I watched a small flock of birds take a ride on the tidal current, on a mat of sticks and logs. Their journey took them through the landscape of both Sleeping Giant and the malls on Universal Drive. Do the birds notice the difference? And what should that mean to us?

The forest around me was still a little precarious from the tornado. The wind picked up, and the trees overhead started to squeal and groan. It was time to go.

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