Skylark

It's a new kind of flight zone

I took my son for a bike ride at Tempelhoferfeld this evening. Actually, I dragged him from the apartment with equal parts chocolate bribery and short tempered threats. I had been sitting inside doing my German class online and watching the sunlight stream through the library windows for three and a half hours and I was not in the mood to miss one more second of outside opportunities. Plus, with no school this week he’s been sleeping in until noon, and all hopes for a calm, albeit late, bedtime hung on a bit of fresh air and exercise. They say to pick your battles, and this I won.

We got there easily by SBahn and started pedaling furiously alongside the old terminal. It’s almost hard to imagine the roar of the airplanes when today we heard laughter and skylarks. My son has a good eye and a keen ear, and he’s the kind of kid who’s in tune enough to realize that a skylark in the city is something tremendously special. We watched her hovering high above the field, perhaps scouting a nesting space amidst the scrappy open meadow. We shared some off-brand Pringles and an apple, his earlier fight burned away by some potent cocktail of resignation, endorphins, and junk food. We kept on our way, watching the kiteboarders from afar and then getting up closer to see their sweeping sails billowing in the breeze and dragging them along for the ride.

Tempelhoferfeld is one of my very favorite places in Berlin. The site of the historic airport that received the Berlin Air Drops in response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin-- one of the first major aggressions of the Cold War--the runways are now filled with cyclists, rollerbladers, runners, and kiteboarders. There’s a headquarters of a ragtag chess club that meets every Saturday morning. At about 800 acres, it’s one of the largest urban green spaces in the world. Still, it never feels oppressively crowded, even when it’s busy.

I’ve never had a bad time there. There’s something special about wide open spaces in the middle of the city, a sightline where you can see the skyline as the backdrop against a field of green, with all sorts of people out enjoying it. It’s possible to really open up, to bike as fast as you can, to use your outside voice, to fly the kite or toss the frisbee without much concern about running into others. With a scale like wilderness and a vibe like downtown, it’s like nowhere else I’ve ever been.

Land has value. Land use speaks to the priorities of an area, a government, and a people. This decommissioned airport could have easily housed tens of thousands of people. And yet, if they’d done it that way, there would be no skylarks.