Victory Park

It's an island that's a park that commands exceptional views of Dorchester Bay on one side and Interstate 93 on the other. It's accessible from the butt end of Victory Road off Morrisey Boulevard, a forlorn neighborhood that consists of an overpass, an exit ramp, a yacht club, a natural gas storage tank, and all the flotsam and jetsam one would expect to be washed up onto breakwater rocks. It is a park popular with people who keep dogs, much to the consternation of picnickers.

Victory Park is an island spotted with benches and overgrown with flora. The grass is high except where it is worn short by dog runs and gathering places. It's idyllic. The surf laps the shore and you feel like you are far removed from the thick of the Dot's hurly-burly when you relax in Victory Park. Cross the short bridge and you enter an atmosphere of unfettered, benign, green nature, toothless and clawless. The only canines are domesticated. There are no vampires or thugs, just smiling folk apologizing that Fido is intruding on your idyll.

We ate cheese and bagels and slices of apple, a cucumber, some radishes and a tin of kippers in Victory Park. We were in Boston, we were in Dorchester, but we seemed far removed from all the big city's swirl. Jellyfish expanded and contracted placidly under the tideline. Our bicycles were parked next to a shrub and nothing was disturbed. We lay on a carved block of granite, absorbing the sunshine into our skins. Pit bulls and setters intruded on our space but they didn't stay long. Just long enough to disrupt the temporary reverie.

I'll take Victory Park for a picnic over the Fenway. The Fenway has a channeled drainage ditch. Victory Park has a vista of Port Norfolk, Tenean Beach, Quincy, Shawmut, and the stretch of Massachusetts Bay beyond before it merges with the expansive Atlantic that ties Boston to the rest of the globe. Why are jellyfish, that most placid animal, drawn to the shores of Dorchester? Probably for the same reason I am in the reverse direction. It is nice here.