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| NEW YORK — It was a chilly Saturday night in February and there was more than a foot of snow in Central Park, along with slippery patches of black ice and slushy, calf-high puddles. But some 200 New Yorkers carefully made their way to the Reservoir in hopes of catching a glimpse of the magical snowy owl, who had touched down in the park the week before in what was reported as the first visit there by the species in more than 130 years. |
| 纽约——这是2月一个寒冷的周六夜晚，中央公园的积雪足有一英尺多厚，还有湿滑的黑色冰块和齐小腿的泥泞水坑。但约200名纽约人小心翼翼地前往水库，希望能一睹这只神奇的雪鸮，它一周前降临这个公园，据报道，这是130多年来雪鸮首次来到这里。 |
| Except for a few excited shrieks from children, people were quiet — reverently, passionately awaiting the owl’s arrival at the Reservoir’s North Gatehouse, where she had been spotted the night before on her evening hunting rounds. The snowy owl did not disappoint: to polite gasps of admiration, she swooped in from the darkness, alighting briefly on one of the gatehouse towers. She surveyed the water and the people holding aloft binoculars and phones and cameras, then bobbed her head regally before taking off into the night — to the applause of her many fans. |
| 除了几声孩子们兴奋的尖叫，人们都很安静——虔诚地、热情地等待着雪鸮来到水库的北门房，前一天晚上，人们就是在这里看到了它的夜间狩猎之旅。雪鸮没有让人失望：出于对赞赏的礼貌，她从黑暗中俯冲下来，在一座门楼上短暂停留。她打量着水面和那些举着望远镜、手机和相机的人群，昂首阔步地摇了摇头，伴随着众多粉丝的掌声，在夜色中起飞。 |
| Some in the crowd that night were ardent and deeply knowledgeable birders. But there were also many New Yorkers who had only discovered bird-watching during the COVID shutdown, and others who simply wanted to see this lovely creature whose improbable appearance in this winter of our endless discontents seemed to signify hope or beauty or the possibility of change — or at least an excuse to leave their apartments and take part, however briefly, in one of those communal moments that had become so precious during the pandemic. |
| 当晚有一些人是狂热且博学的鸟类研究者。但也有很多纽约人只是在新冠疫情期封锁期间才开始了解观鸟活动，还有一些人只是想看看这种可爱的动物，在这个冬天我们无尽的牢骚中，它却不可思议地出现，这似乎意味着希望、美丽或改变的可能性——或者至少是离开公寓、参加活动的借口，不管时间有多短，这是在疫情期间变得如此珍贵的公共时刻中的一个。 |
| Central Park has long provided a refuge from the anxieties and stresses of daily life, perhaps never more so than during the coronavirus siege and four long years of increasingly toxic politics. New Yorkers who visited the park every day, as well as those who had long taken it for granted, felt a renewed love for this amazing rectangle of green in the heart of the big city: its startlingly lush woodlands and rolling lawns, its meandering trails and wide-open meadows, and, of course, its astonishing wildlife including owls, hawks, herons and a dizzying array of other birds and waterfowl who for generations have used Central Park as a vital rest stop in their migratory travels, knowing what many humans only came to fully appreciate during the uncertainties of the pandemic — that the park is a beautiful and essential sanctuary. |
| 长期以来，中央公园一直是人们摆脱日常生活焦虑和压力的庇护所，也许在新冠疫情封锁和政治环境毒化日益严重的四年中，这种作用变得更加突出。每天到公园游玩的纽约人，以及那些长期以来认为公园是理所当然的人，都对这座大城市中心的这片令人惊叹的长方形绿地重新产生了爱意：极为茂盛的树林和起伏的草坪，蜿蜒的小径和开阔的草地，当然还有令人惊叹的野生动物，包括猫头鹰、老鹰、苍鹭和令人目眩的其它鸟类与水禽，它们世世代代把中央公园作为迁徙中的重要休息站，它们知道许多人类只有在疫情的不确定时期才充分认识并感激的事情——这座公园是一个美丽而必不可少的庇护所。 |
| In offering an oasis for New Yorkers during COVID, Central Park is living up to its original mandate — to provide, as its chief architect Frederick Law Olmsted put it more than a century and a half ago, “tranquillity and rest to the mind,” an escape from the anxieties of the city. |
| 在疫情期间，中央公园为纽约人提供了一片绿洲，履行了它最初的使命——正如其首席建筑师弗雷德里克·劳·奥姆斯特德(Frederick Law Olmsted)在一个半世纪前所说的那样，提供“宁静和心灵的休息”，让人们摆脱城市的焦虑。 |
| In the 21st century, with some 40 million visitors a year, Central Park had become the third most popular tourist attraction in the world, and at the start of the pandemic, when out-of-towners departed the city, New Yorkers fortunate enough to live within walking distance from it suddenly felt like they had this Edenic retreat to themselves. Even when people started using the subway again to travel between the boroughs, Central Park continued to feel like a neighborhood park. Unable to go to their offices or the gym, people started using the Sheep Meadow and the Great Lawn as their all-purpose backyards. |
| 在21世纪，中央公园每年接待游客约4000万人次，已经成为世界上第三大热门旅游景点。新冠疫情开始后，当外来人口离开城市，有幸住在步行距离内的纽约人突然感受到了这个伊甸园对他们的重新滋养。即使当人们开始重新使用地铁来往于各区之间，中央公园也仍然像是一个邻家公园。因为不能去办公室或健身房，人们开始将绵羊草地(Sheep Meadow)和大草坪(the Great Lawn)作为他们的万能后院。 |
| As spring turned into summer, you saw people sitting on the grass or benches — not just catching some sun and having family picnics but also tapping away on their laptops and iPads, and having socially distanced business meetings and what passed for cocktails during the pandemic — bottles of wine or Jack Daniels, carried in a backpack and poured into paper cups. |
| 春去夏来，你看到人们坐在草地或长凳上——不仅是晒太阳和家庭野餐，还在笔记本电脑和iPad上敲敲打打，举行保持社交距离的商务会议，以及疫情期间充当鸡尾酒的东西——瓶装酒或杰克丹尼(Jack Daniels)威士忌，用背包装着，倒进纸杯里。 |
| A handful of people sported fancy designer face masks, but the majority opted for disposable blue surgical masks. Perhaps because those masks conferred a measure of anonymity (and most beauty salons, barbershops and clothing boutiques were closed), many folks seemed to shed their vanity: baggy sweatpants and T-shirts began to outnumber high-tech, fashion-forward gym outfits, and men and women alike sported longer, shaggier hair and baseball caps. |
| 少数人戴着花哨的设计师口罩，但大多数人选择一次性的蓝色外科口罩。也许是因为这些口罩赋予了人们一定程度上的匿名性（大多数美容院、理发店和服装精品店都关门了），许多人似乎摆脱了虚荣心：宽松运动裤和T恤多过了高科技、时尚前沿的健身套装，男男女女都留起了乱蓬蓬的长发，戴上了棒球帽。 |
| An island of nature in an urban sea |
| 城市海洋中的自然岛 |
| The park was planned and constructed at another difficult time — in the years before and during the Civil War, when both the nation and New York City were grappling with rising political and social tensions over slavery and class and immigration, and the fallout of rapid industrialization and technological change. Unlike many European parks that had originally been built for the rich or aristocratic, Central Park was designed as a democratic public space, in Olmsted’s words, where the poor and rich alike could “easily go after their day’s work is done” and “stroll for an hour, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets.” |
| 中央公园是在另一个困难时期规划和建造的——南北战争之前和期间，当时的整个国家和纽约市都在努力应对围绕着奴隶制、阶级和移民而不断加剧的政治和社会紧张局势，以及快速工业化和技术变革的影响。与许多最初为富人或贵族建造的欧洲公园不同，中央公园被设计成一个民主的公共空间，用奥尔姆斯特德的话说，穷人和富人都可以“在一天的工作完成后轻松前往”，在这里“散步一小时，看不到、听不到、也感受不到街上的喧嚣和冲突”。 |
| Seeing a great blue heron yards from the Plaza Hotel (not in a zoo but competing with a great egret for fish in the pond) makes it easy to understand why Christo — who used the park in 2005 for his dazzling work of art “The Gates” — described Central Park as the most “surrealistic place in New York City.” The looping, curvilinear lines of the park’s roads and footpaths and streams, and the pleasingly irregular shapes of its lakes and lawns stand in willful opposition to the city’s relentlessly regular grid and right-angled symmetries. Even the park’s one straight walkway, the Mall, has been constructed at a slight diagonal — another reminder that when we are in the park, we have entered another world, adjacent to the asphalt streets and steel and glass skyscrapers that frame it, but separate and apart. |
| 在广场酒店的院子里观看一只大蓝鹭（不是在动物园里，而是在池塘里与一只大白鹭争鱼），你就很容易理解，为什么2005年用这座公园创作了令人目眩的艺术作品《门》(The Gates)的克里斯托(Christo)，会把这座公园描述成“纽约市最超现实主义的地方”。公园的道路、人行道和溪流构成的环状曲线，以及湖泊和草坪令人愉悦的不规则形状，与城市无情的规则网格和直角对称形成了刻意的对比。就连公园里的一条笔直的人行道——中央广场——也被建造成了一条轻微的斜线。这再次提醒我们，置身公园，我们等于进入了另一个世界，与柏油马路和钢铁玻璃组成的摩天大楼相邻，但又相互分离。 |
| For that matter, during the early months of the COVID quarantine, it was the parts of the city outside Central Park that felt the most surreal to many New Yorkers: the streets suddenly emptied of cars and people, whole neighborhoods transformed overnight into ghost towns or haunted spaces from a de Chirico or Edward Hopper painting — lonely and desolate and apprehensive. |
| 就这一点而言，在新冠疫情隔离的最初几个月里，对许多纽约人来说，最让人感到怪异的是中央公园以外的城市部分：街道上的汽车和人突然清空了，整个街区一夜之间变成了鬼城，或是德·基里科(de Chirico)或爱德华·霍普(Edward Hopper)画作中的鬼魅空间——孤独、荒凉且令人忧虑。 |
| In Central Park, at least the illusion of normal life could be sustained: people running and biking and walking their dogs, birds going about their birdy lives — hunting for food, building nests, taking flight over the lake or the reservoir. |
| 而在中央公园，至少可以维持正常生活的假象：人们跑步、骑行、遛狗，鸟儿们过着鸟儿的生活——觅食、筑巢、飞越湖泊和水库。 |
| A sense of timelessness |
| 一种永恒的感觉 |
| It’s been a year since the start of the pandemic, and while we’ve all grown weary of the isolation, the changing seasons in Central Park are soothing reminders of the eternal cycles of nature: the tulips and cherry trees giving way to the electric greenery of summer; the brilliant red and gold leaves of autumn replaced by snow and ice, and soon now, crocuses and hyacinths, the first flowers of spring. There is a sense of timelessness in the park. During the summer or over the Christmas holidays, childhood friends hold reunions in Sheep Meadow or by the East 90th street entrance to the reservoir. And children still wonder, as Holden Caulfield did in “The Catcher in the Rye,” where the ducks in the pond near Central Park South go when the water freezes over in the winter. |
| 距离疫情开始已经一年了，在我们对隔离越来越感到厌倦时，中央公园里季节的变化让我们想起了大自然永恒的循环：郁金香和樱桃树让位给令人激动的夏日绿色；秋天美妙的红叶和金叶被冰雪所取代；不久以后，就会有春天的第一朵花：番红花和风信子。在公园里有一种永恒的感觉。在夏季或圣诞节期间，儿时的朋友们会在绵羊草地或东90街水库入口的地方重聚。孩子们仍然和《麦田里的守望者》(The Catcher in the Rye)中的霍尔顿·考尔菲德(Holden Caulfield)一样，会好奇冬天结冰时，中央公园南部池塘里的鸭子都去了哪里。 |
| Last April, 6-foot-long red signs were posted in the park that said “KEEP THIS FAR APART.” Most of those signs have disappeared — it’s unclear whether they were stolen or removed by the city — and the police patrols warning people to social distance have also abated. Carriage horse rides returned to the park in October, and ice skating returned as well. Freezing temperatures and a foot and a half of snow failed to deter the park’s many visitors, who quickly set about making snow angels, having snowball fights and building snowmen, snowwomen, snow horses, snow forts and one gigantic snow octopus. All of which seemed like infinitely healthier activities than sitting in an outdoor restaurant, zipped into a plastic dining bubble. |
| 去年4月，公园里张贴了六英尺长的红色标语，上面写着“保持这个距离”。这些标语大多已经消失了——目前还不清楚是被偷走的还是被市政府移走的——警察们巡逻警告人们保持社交距离的情况也有所减少。10月份，马车巡游和溜冰又回到了公园。零下的气温和一英尺半厚的积雪没能阻止公园里的许多游客，他们很快就开始制作雪天使，打雪仗，堆雪人、雪马、雪城堡、还有一只巨大的雪章鱼。所有这些绝对都比坐在户外餐厅，缩进一个塑料的球形进餐空间里健康得多。 |
| During the pandemic, just being in vague proximity with other people in Central Park gave us a sense of community — the sense that we were all in this together, and that together, we would somehow persevere. Over a century ago, Olmsted wrote about the many arguments advanced for parks, including their value as “breathing places” — where city dwellers might escape the fetid air of crowded streets. But to think of parks merely as “airing grounds,” he added, would be simplistic, ignoring the profound social and spiritual dimensions these green spaces furnish. |
| 在疫情期间，仅仅是在中央公园与他人无意的接近，也能给我们一种社区的感觉——感觉我们在一起干这个，或是在一起干那个，因此可以坚持下去。一个多世纪以前，奥尔姆斯特德写了许多关于推进公园建设的论据，包括公园作为“呼吸场所”的价值——城市居民可以在这里逃离拥挤街道的恶臭空气。但他补充道，如果仅仅把公园当作“通风场所”，那就太简单了，是忽视了这些绿地提供的深刻的社会和精神层面价值。 |
| Watching people in Central Park come together “in pure air and under the light of heaven,” Olmsted argued, it was impossible to ignore the “evident glee” many felt in the experience: “all classes largely represented, with a common purpose,” each individual “adding by his mere presence to the pleasure of all others, all helping to the greater happiness of each”: people taking time off from work and workaday worries to engage in what he called “healthful recreation” — strolling, boating, ice skating, listening to music, contemplating the beauty of the meadows and woods, communing with all that was sublime in Nature. |
| 奥尔姆斯特德认为，看着中央公园里的人们“在纯净的空气和天堂之光的照耀下”走到一起，便不可能忽视许多人在这样的体验中所感受到的“明显的喜悦”，“所有的阶级基本上都被代表，有了一个共同的目的，”每个人“仅仅通过自身的存在，就增加了所有其他人的快乐，所有这些都有助于每个人都有更大的幸福感，”人们得以从工作和日常烦恼中抽出时间来从事他所说的“健康的消遣”——散步、划船、滑冰、听音乐、思考草地和树林的美丽，与大自然中一切壮丽的景象交流。 |
| Or, he might have added, looking for the elusive snowy owl. |
| 或者，他可能会补充说，去寻找难以寻觅的雪鸮。 |
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