Park Here

This column originally appeared on Sunday, July 19, 2009

Stop what you’re doing.

Put down the remote control, and turn off the Wii. Set aside the hedge clippers and quit cranking the lawn mower. If you’re in the car on your way to the mall, hit the brakes and turn around (making certain you use the turn signal; we don’t want you to get 1) rear-ended or 2) a moving violation citation.)

Why? Because there are about eight parks in East Bradford that deserve your attention, and with the weather doing its best impersonation of mid-May there is no time to waste to get to them for a little outdoor recreation.

Walking the sidewalks of West Chester we have found is a fine thing to do, and we are not about to start complaining about it. Sidewalks make a community livable because they bring people in contact with one another – either in the active sense of using them to get from one place to another all the time running into people you know, or want to know, along the way to whom you do not owe actual money, or in the passive sense of sitting on your front porch and watching as your new, or old, neighbors pass by with either a friendly wave and a kind hello or, if you are truly lucky, with a blueberry pie they baked for their Aunt Hester but decided to bring it over to your house instead.

But walking along paths that meander through the woods or along the peaceful banks of the Brandywine Creek is something that is not to be sniffed at either, and that is why we say that the parks of East Bradford demand your attention. They have both of those options aplenty, and other amenities to boot, like picnic tables and soft meadows, and shady trees and the Valley Creek. Not to mention the odd rope swing.

In fact, it as a rope swing that got us thinking about the parks in East Bradford in the first place. We saw the photos on the front page of our favorite daily newspaper last week that showed a gang of teenagers using a rope swing to douse themselves in swimming hole in the cool waters of the Brandywine, and though to ourselves. They looked as though they were having the time of their lives, if their lives had been lived in a Norman Rockwell universe of about July 1947, we thought. Teenagers, we thought, are not supposed to use rope swings to douse themselves in cool water in the 21^st century. Teenagers in the 21^st century are supposed to use rope swings to tie up their parents so they can spend an hour or two more playing WarCraft on the Dell without interference. Cool water and teenagers only come into contact when the latter needs something to drink after falling off their skateboards, and the former is available in plastic bottles.

And we wondered where in the world there still existed something akin to a “swimming hole,” which we understood once was available in every Chester County backyard until the developers started to use them as stormwater detention basins. So we did what all good newspaper reporters do when confronted with a question we had no ready answer to: we asked the photographer involved. Newspaper photographers may not actually work for a living the way normal people do, but we are certain they have an answer for just about any question you put to them.

So they told us: The swimming hole is down the road at Shaw’s Bridge Park. On South Creek Road off Route 842. You know, in East Bradford.

And we remembered visiting Shaw’s Bridge Park last year when the weather was just hot enough to make you want to take a dip in the Brandywine Creek, west branch, and watch kayakers float by. We remembered that we smiled at a young woman who had taken her babysitting charges to the bench at the park that overlooks the creek and that the children looked like they were having fun circa 1947, splashing in the water and skipping rocks across to the other bank. And we remembered that we liked parks that had real names, like Paradise Valley and Harmony Hill and Timbertop and Sugar’s Bridge and Shaw’s Bridge, names that conjured a place and ambiance instead of a generic designation.

And so we stopped what we were doing and turned off the laptop and made haste for Shaw’s Bridge Park. And we listened to the wind in the trees, felt the cool water on our feet, and heard the ripple of the creek over the rocks. And for our attention to the parks of East Bradford, we were rewarded.