STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS – The Musings of an 80-year-old Metro Parks

VIRGINIA GORDON
Communications Coordinator

It’s August 14, 2025 and that means I’m 80 years old today. Congrats to me, ha ha! That’s me speaking here, as in me, Metro Parks, not the scribbler who has her name at the head of this missive. No, it isn’t the scribbler’s birthday today and she isn’t 80 neither, although –ahem!– she is getting a bit long in the tooth, if you know what I mean? I’m just channeling my consciousness through the scribbler to let all you great folks know about my birthday. This is about me! Me, me, me! Columbus and Franklin County Metro Parks.

Well, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Just like William becomes Bill, and Katherine becomes Kate, I got myself a nickname too, or a diminutive if you want to be proper. Just call me Metro Parks, and everyone will know who you mean. Unless you live in Cleveland, or Dayton, or Hamilton County, but that’s beside the point, because we are central Ohio through and through, are we not! So Metro Parks is my nickname, although my really close friends call me Parky!

I came into being –born, as it were– on August 14, 1945, and that was at the hands of a scribbler too. Well, maybe it’s more proper to say at the hands of a signatory. Go tell it to the judge! Judge Cloys P McClelland was the judge who put his signature to the document that gave me life that day! But I’d been a special glint in the eye of Walter Tucker and a grand bunch of central Ohio environmentalists and citizens long before that. They wanted me so much for central Ohio, and wrote up a big report about me and the need for me. I felt loved! The report went to the judge, and the judge did his stuff!

And so I came to be. I had life, but not form. You, dear readers, you have form. You have form in the shape of legs, and arms, and feet, and heads, and… and other bits! But me, I had nothing! Not until October 14, 1948, that is, the momentous day when at last I acquired form. My form is in the shape of parks, and my form took shape on that day with the opening of my first park, Blacklick Woods. Ah, it was good! But I were just a baby then, a mere 113 acres size wise on that fine day.

Those early years were tough! Back then, I’m just a teensy-weensy 113-acre hunky-dory gorgeous piece of land and I’m inundated,  overrun by thousands upon thousands of good-meaning folks who couldn’t get enough of me. They kept on coming, picnicking madly, and I didn’t have the space. Nope! Did not have the space! I felt a bit like V-Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, complaining about the infestation of carbon units on the Enterprise! Well, not that I complained, exactly, and you dear, wonderful carbon units are ever welcome to my humble abodes, but in those first years I couldn’t cope with the demand. So my extended family, my board and staff members, they set about acquiring more land and expanding my form by opening more parks. And building all kinds of structures on top of me, like picnic shelters and nature centers and restrooms and what have you! And all was good! Because it made it easier and better for you to come visiting me!

Oh, but I’ve seen so many changes in my 80 years. Highlights include the restoration of prairies and wetlands at so many parks, and the feeling of joy in my chimerical bones as the wildness and wilderness began to reestablish itself over thousands of acres of land that had been converted to agriculture many a moon ago. And I have a great big smile on my invisible face whenever I think of the nature centers established at Battelle Darby Creek, Blacklick Woods, Blendon Woods and Highbanks, and of the five state nature preserves that I embed within my boundaries at Blacklick Woods, Clear Creek, Highbanks, Pickerington Ponds and Sharon Woods. But one of my greatest pleasures, and greatest successes, is the almost magical conversion of a brownfield site full of industrial pollution into a beautiful inner city park on the Whittier Peninsula, bounded by the Scioto River. Yes, Scioto Audubon Metro Park, it was like a dream come true!

I glory, too, at seeing so many people enjoying their time in my parks, and in the scenic beauty I’m able to spread before you. I take great pleasure, also, in the habitat changes wrought within my parks, changes that have benefited the growth of native plants and the burgeoning spread of native wildlife. My splendid environs are wonderfully welcoming of wildlife, and so attractive to them, which is why bald eagles began nesting at Highbanks in 2010 as this spirit of America species reestablished itself in central Ohio, and why sandhill cranes found one of their first footholds at Slate Run Metro Park on their return to the area. So yes, the changes I’ve seen have been marvelous.

Now, I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet, but the fact is, at more than 28,900 acres, I AM the biggest Metro Parks system in the entire state of Ohio. So that’s worth blowing a trumpet about, I guess. And it’s all down to you lubbly-jubbly visitors that I went and got so precious big. Because you kept coming to the parks, and those of you who live in Franklin County, thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my deepest tubular roots to the rushing blood-like flow of my longest streams, for supporting me with our Metro Parks levies that come along every decade or so. I couldn’t keep going without you!

These days, I am visited by more than 12 million of you delightful carbon units every year and I love it! Keep on coming! And enjoy a slice of cake and maybe a favorite tipple of your choice to celebrate my birthday!