I recently took my first stroll through Beverly Road in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, and let’s just say I was enchanted. The houses are brightly colored and mostly Victorian in style, and there are trees everywhere. It’s one of those streets you just walk down with a smile on your face.
A house on Beverly Road (Photo 'Flatbush Gardener')
Shortly after I walked to the subway stop (and vowed to find a way to live in Ditmas Park), I began to think about the National song “The Geese from Beverly Road,” and I got this great image in my head of Canadian geese hobbling down the road.
Canadian Goose (Photo John Glass)
Fast forward a few weeks, and I can’t believe what I’m reading in the paper. The New York Times ran an appalling story that detailed the capture and execution of thousands of geese in an attempt to lessen the complications between geese and airplanes.
The captured geese are placed alive in commercial turkey crates. The geese would be brought to a secure location and euthanized with methods approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Euthanized geese would be buried.
On Tuesday night, The National played their song “The Geese of Beverly Road” in Prospect Park where sadly, the geese had been wrangled up and killed, but they refrained from getting into the politics of the situation much, saying only “This song has definitely taken on a different meaning recently, but we don’t want to be distasteful.”
Here’s hoping the zombie-like impulse that drives “Conversation 16” doesn’t come back to haunt us, too.
