Oatmeal and the Sea

Several winter correctives for what ails you.

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My husband made oatmeal this morning. He always makes enough for me, too, a practice he started maybe twenty years ago when, for no reason at all, I had a heart attack. The only problem is I hate oatmeal.

When someone you love nearly dies but miraculous recovers you search for ways to keep them with you. My husband turned to oatmeal. He grew up with his mom sending her sons out into Denver’s cold mornings with warming bowls of oatmeal stoking in their bellies. I, on the other hand, was often given a hefty serving of Pennsylvania scrapple. Balance his childhood memory with the worldwide agreement that oatmeal is very heart healthy and I understood his sudden proclivity to feed me it. Balance my memory of my family’s scrapple-scented mornings and it’s obvious why, even with something so laden with artery-clogging fat, I was less than thrilled with seeing a bowl of oatmeal.

I appreciate, though, what an enormously loving gesture the oatmeal is. I cover it with brown sugar and maple syrup and stir berries or orange sections into it. Then I zap the bowl in the microwave. The sugars melts, the fruit explodes. Most probably this greatly reduces oatmeal’s health benefits but at least I kind of like it.

A few months after my heart attack, I decided the best way to recuperate was to take long walks. At first, fearing that my heart would abandon me again, I stuck to the streets around the neighborhood. Then, with more confidence and increasing restlessness, I took to driving about to hidden trails and strange historical sites around Brooklyn that a friend told me about. On the one hand, it was a very stupid thing to do given that I recently had a stent pushed into me. On the better hand, it felt invigoratingly normal to resume wandering around.

This is the path that cuts through a dense bramble field. To find it, you run across Flatbush Avenue’s four busy lanes and climb over a guardrail. Slip through some scraggly firs, thorny bayberries, and reeds until you come to the clearing. At its end, you will find Dead Horse Bay. A large glue factory was built near it in the 19th century where New York City’s old or lame horses were sent. After the factory closed in the 1920s, the area served as a trash dump. The factory was demolished. The seal on the dump spectacularly exploded sometime in the 1950s.

At low tide, you can find weathered polished horse bones. More prominent are broken bottles from the dump, many 100 years old from defunct beer breweries. A lot of people scavenge the beach for broken glass rubbed by the currents into glass diamonds. For some reason shoe soles are always scattered about like ghostly steps. Decades of construction debris—tiles and fixtures mostly—wash up, too. One time my friend found a perfectly good copper basin.

Dead Horse Bay was a fine place to recover and remains one of my most favorite walks. Usually it’s deserted, especially when it’s as cold as it is today. The scent of the sea drifts over from the Rockaways. The Brooklyn skyline crowns the horizon. The tides always wash amazing signs of life across the sand.

I’ve been bed-bound with a cold these last few weeks. But I’m recovering and restless again. With my belly full of a loving bowl of oatmeal, I thought about going to Dead Horse this afternoon for a walk along the beach.