My Maya Lin's Wave Field

upon arrival, the giant's view from above.


getting with the clovers and the bees and queen anne's lace.




taking chances… getting closer… look out for the rangers…




the napkin drawing, illustrating to the biologist.

My Maya Lin's Wave Field

The sound bite:

Gorgeous, majestic, lush, luscious. Thank you, Maya Lin. Makes me feel warm and fuzzy for being a designer.

With Saturday's promise of no-rain, we finally set off to Storm King to witness Maya Lin's Wave Field. Ever since I saw the article in The Times in the late winter, I had been looking forward to seeing it.

Maya Lin has been my hero for so long, and here was a new major work right here in my own backyard. And the getting there was also going to be one of my favorites—riding in a convertable over the GW and up the Palisades thru the Bear Mountains.

We purposely arrived in the late afternoon to avoid the scorching August heat that is finally here, and more importantly, for the light. The 6 pm greens are simply gorgeous.

At the gate, my heart sank when we were told we couldn't go inside the field, that we'd have to stay on the periphery. The ground was boggy due to all the rain we've had lately. I was sour for a second, but quickly resolved to get on with it. We parked and walked through the fields to get to the Waves. I wanted to work for this sighting. Maybe I was channeling Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust" a bit.

Like giants we stood at the hill top looking down at this physical evidence of imagination and craft. And the layers and shades of greens, grays, browns in the distance. Once again, I wished I had chips behind my eyes so that everything I saw, in the way that I saw it and felt it, can be transcribed on to stills or a video unmediated.

Soon I began counting. Seven rows of waves made of 4 crests, staggerd in precise increments in both X and Y axes, taking up 4 acres of land. I wanted to get down there and start measuring the distance between things using the length of my foot. And I wanted to be engulfed by the 18 foot mounds. But alas. For this go round, I wouldn't get to buzz around inside the valleys, like the bees that were buzzing about the clover flowers in front of us. I would have just the giant's view and experience, and not that of a miniature, too. Here, I couldn't help but feel like I was a character in Susan Stewart's “On Longing. 

We stayed a while and I thought about how natural it is to want to articulate this idea of wave patterns, and to use the property of the earth and the vegetation to express it. And size can be everything. And how this is sooo Maya Lin. I love the feeling you have when you see a great piece of art or an idea, and you say to yourself, "I might have done it this way, too." I was happily reminded that I am of the designer tribe. I love the sweeping view and grand perspectives--the big idea. But I also love to know how the thing is made--its logic, measurements, mechanics and details.

In the end, this fetish of mine was validated at a dinner party a couple of hours later. In trying to describe the design and the feelings that the site elicited for me, I drew the giant's view we had on a piece of napkin--architect style with line weights and precise increments. My newly met biologist dinner party mate got the picture. He said he, too, could see perfectly what we saw. And I was happy to be able to share the joy and spread the word like that.