Sept 22 -- In the park this morning, along the bend at the bottom of the hill by the fading sunflowers, the police are out with gaudy orange and yellow tape. I stop and ask, and a somewhat friendly policeman breathes in the bright morning air, and says that they are gathering information for a coroner's inquest on a man who was found here last week. Foul play? Probably not, probably had a heart attack. Thirty years old, so they are doing some more checking. They crunch through the grass. He says, well, you know parks, dumping grounds for everything. I size him up, and say, that is why official people always hate parks. Oh yes, he says, park detail is the worst: always running into people having sex, orgies under the railway bridges, people dumping bodies, drug stuff. And it is all so badly lit.
I walk on and soon reach the paved part of the road. And I recall, not for the first time, why there is this desperate urge on the part of all parks people to put pavement down and high lamps everywhere they can, thus destroying the whole idea of a wild space in the city. To make it easier for the police cars to drive in at night and look around at the dark and the untamed for a few minutes, before heading back out a few hundred yards to civilization.(p.t.)