Lighthouse, Harmon Park

In the Sanctuary of a Park, you can have Disney Land in your backyard. Or nearly your backyard. Two blocks from my childhood home is Harmon Park, 6 1/2 city blocks of bliss. In 1924, having received a Harmon Foundation grant, the city of Kearney, Nebraska purchased land, designated as Harmon Field, for a playground. A plaque in the park reads:

This playground was made ours through the assistance of the Harmon Foundation, 1924, dedicated forever to the plays of children, the development of youth and the recreation of all. “The gift of land is the gift eternal.”                       Wm. E. Harmon

Lighthouse, Harmon Park, circa 1936

And what a gift eternal it is. From the window of Park Elementary School, the magic kingdom spread out before me as far as I could see. Once these acres held chautauquas, pony rides, and a petting zoo complete with monkeys. But for me, my sisters and friends, they held something better: the promise of what could be. In the Sanctuary of a Park, if you can imagine it, it will be.

Just outside the Youth Center, a WWII tank found a permanent home on a concrete slab. Wars were fought on and around this tank. Dares were made. Can you shimmy out to the end of the gun and drop to the ground? Can you stand on one foot on the top of the tank? And lunches were eaten on its fenders, while the stories of wars and war strategies continued through pb & j and baggies of crushed potato chips.

The Sonotorium, an open-air Art Deco theater, was constructed in 1938. Home to concerts, dramas, graduations, and community gatherings, the Sonotorium hosted our childhood pageants and plays, performed for park squirrels and neighborhood dogs.

But the real magic was found in the Rock Garden at the northern edge of the park. Initiated in 1936, the Kearney Daily Hub reported that if all Kearney residents who travel to mountain country, the Rockies or elsewhere, …will pick out just one or two odd-shaped rocks or stones and bring them back to Kearney, the park would soon have a very good start toward its proposed rock garden. A rock pyramid near the entrance of the Rock Garden testifies to the fact that residents did, indeed, contribute rocks–from every state–to the project. Still, the Works Progress Administration did the majority of the construction during the Depression years, creating a paradise from rock.

And the rock came in. Union Pacific flatcars brought stones from Wyoming, Utah, North and South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. WPA workers unloaded them and moved them to their final destinations. According to personal interviews with Kearney residents and records from the Kearney Daily Hub, this was no small task:

The story is told of one huge rock weighing 8,400 pounds being moved on a sled through the park and while crossing the stream the rock rolled off blocking the water. It was too heavy to move so workmen dug under it to let the water flow. The rock stayed where it fell and can be seen today. 

In the Sanctuary of a Park, something as common as rock becomes the stuff that dreams are made of. The Rock Garden was not professionally designed–no blueprints for its design exist–but rock by rock, the garden took its shape organically, perfectly, until the whole became so much greater than its mineral parts. At the northern end of the park on its highest point, the headwaters of the Rock Garden flows from its largest waterfall down through a series of streams and small pools, around islands, through more waterfalls, and finally to the larger pools at the foot of a magnificent stone lighthouse with a curved exterior staircase. From the balcony of the lighthouse, you can look out upon a grotto, carved in the eastern hillside, and over lily pads that color the summer pools below. There are eleven stone bridges; some are wide slabs of rough rock, others are narrow cuts of smooth stone, but all lead to adventure for those of us who grew up in the park.

For who can boast that they owned an island before they were 12 years old? My sisters and I laid claim to an island near the lighthouse, having chosen it carefully from a host of other islands and christened it TES Island (Timaree-Erin-Shannon Island). We spent hours on and around this island, spinning stories of love and loss, venturing into less familiar Rock Garden territory, and grounding ourselves in the other-worldliness of this place that was, remarkably, so close to home and so accessible.

TES Island, Harmon Park

In the Sanctuary of a Park, there is a willing suspension of disbelief. Legend had it that a disgruntled fiancee threw her diamond engagement ring into the pool, an angry flash of brilliance cast into the mossy water below the falls. I can see us still: a cozy clutch of children, huddled beneath the big cottonwood tree at the base of Diamond Ring Falls, whispering the legendary words that held us all, spell-bound, in the magic of the moment. We would find the diamond ring. Who else but us, those who loved and haunted the Rock Garden most, should be the beneficiaries of this treasure? We would willingly suspend our disbelief, refuting the obvious: that the pool’s 18 inches of water was drained in late October, that if–and this is a BIG if–there really had been a diamond ring thrust into the shallows, it is more than likely that some park worker would have found it as they prepped the park for winter. Summer after summer, we spoke the legend into life, searching the water for some hint of the gem we carried in our hearts and dreams.

Diamond Ring Falls, Harmon Park

And we were willing to suspend our disbelief as we climbed the winding stairs to the top of the lighthouse, where we stood in front of the grafittied and padlocked black door. In truth, behind this door lay park workers’ tools. For us? Behind this door lay glorious possibilities. Kidnapped children (the ones who stole lunch money and cut in lunch lines, the ones we hoped would someday vanish)? Treasure (bags of gold, neatly stacked in circular rows inside the belly of the lighthouse)? Skeletons (of old people–the scary kind who invite you into their homes BEFORE they will give you candy on Halloween)? And what were these words scratched into our line of sight? Clues to mysteries long unsolved? Cautionary words to STAY OUT, to BEWARE, to WATCH YOUR BACK? Never mind that closer, more critical looks would reveal the work of vandals, drunks, and lovers. Never mind that the door was repainted yearly to remove the remnants of adolescent mischief. Just never mind. We could willing suspend our disbelief, fueling our adventures another summer.

In the Sanctuary of a Park, you can find magic when you need it. Even as I grew and understood, all too well, the workings of the real world–the world in which you do not make cheerleader even though you desperately want to, the world in which you remain ordinary even though you yearn to be extraordinary–the Rock Garden in Harmon Park remained a temporary stay against confusion, a Neverland, a refuge. In the small pool at the top of the waterfall we called Wishing Well Falls, I lovingly placed coins that I hoped would bring me luck and love. It was there that unspoken words of hope found their voice. It was there that prayer found me, sustained and chastened me. And it was there that, 1/4 mile from my high school, I could be utterly alone, cocooned in rocks and leaves, the songs of water over rock as familiar choruses, and the vista of the Rock Garden ever before me.

Wishing Well Falls, headwaters, Harmon Park

While many dream of people and plots, I dream in places. Though I rarely recognize or remember the people or stories of my dreams, I am fixed in the places of my dreams. I return to them, each time more familiar than the last. I know their nooks and crannies, I feel their colors and shapes.

Harmon Park is a place I return to–in dream and in person–time after time. This is a place for time-travel. This is a place for unraveling the best stories, those tightly wound balls of narrative twine, unconsciously or subconsciously hidden from the world. This is a place for gathering, a cloud of witnesses from days of swinging, climbing, frog-hunting, and adventuring who hold your hands and your dreams. And this is a place for children and grandchildren whose stories might also find the magic of water and rock and sky.