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new york diary

Many cities are urban jungles, but some are more jungle than others. In recent days, the fine citizens of New York have had cause to wonder if their lovable burg, so well behaved and efficient lately, wasn't perhaps having second thoughts about its reckless embrace of modernity over the past few centuries.

Last month, a curious little panic took hold in the city when a 51-year-old churchgoer dropping off fellow parishioners at a Bronx nursing home was rewarded for her charitable act with a 75-centimetre arrow penetrating her midsection. She was taken to hospital and is recovering nicely, but the authorities were stumped, and people were left to wonder: Was it a sign of the times? Were they heading back to the days of yore, when the land was all tall grass and many hills and survival depended on the fruit of the seasons, the natural bounty of hunting and gathering?

With the contemporary money system seizing up like an unoiled engine, we're just a step or two away from returning to the barter economy, anyway. Were the Lenni Lenape people at last returning their $24 worth of blue glass beads, with a crumpled receipt and awkward apologies, and asking for their island back?

If so, their timing was good. Sept. 12, 2009 will mark the 400th anniversary of the day Henry Hudson and his small crew of Dutch and English sailors pulled into New York Harbor and unwittingly launched the city's modern era.

Over the past few years Eric Sanderson, an associate director with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the non-profit body that runs the city's zoos, has been heading the Mannahatta Project. It's a research effort to uncover what Manhattan might have looked like when Hudson's first mate, Robert Juet, wrote they had found a place, "as pleasant with Grasse and Flowers, and goodly Trees, as ever they had seene, and very sweet smells came from them." Next month, Abrams Books will publish the result of their research, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, filled with illustrations of a verdant wonderland circa 1600.

Sorry to say, though, that the arrow incident in the Bronx had nothing to do with the city's ancient history. As the police described it later, the culprit turned out to be one Eric Collins, a 27-year-old married father of one who had been moving his family's belongings into a nearby house when, thinking target practice might be a nice way to kill a few minutes of down time, he pulled out an old crossbow. Collins had apparently aimed low in the backyard but, after the arrow went through a plastic fence, it had changed course and found its way to the victim's torso.

But in the sprawling game of Whack-a-Mole that is sometimes big-city justice, police were just announcing the arrest of Collins when they had to rush off to Queens, where someone had unloaded another half-dozen arrows upon a residential neighbourhood.

All of which compelled me to pick up the phone and call John Patrick Shanley, the Bronx-raised playwright who won a Tony Award in 2005 for Doubt, and earned an Oscar nomination this year for his screen adaptation of the play. (He already has an Oscar, for his screenplay of Moonstruck.) The very first film Shanley wrote was a quirky and compelling little drama, released in 1987, known as Five Corners, which featured Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, and a menacing turn by John Turturro. In one of the film's early scenes, an algebra teacher is walking along a Bronx street when, out of nowhere, he is struck down dead by an arrow in the back.

Some scenes later, a pair of detectives sitting around the stationhouse, Mazola and Sullivan, have a lazy conversation about the fact that the area used to be populated by Indians.

Sullivan : Why ain't they here now?

Mazola: The neighbourhood changed.

A few lines later, they pick up the thread again.

Sullivan: So we moved in, and the Indians moved out.

Mazola: Pretty much. The Indians moved out, and this Dutch family moved in.

Sullivan: Who were they?

Mazola: They were the Broncs. Something like John and Katrina Bronc. People used to say, 'Let's go over to the Broncs tonight.' That's why it's called the Bronx, see? It was their place.

I asked Shanley if he wasn't perhaps our Nostradamus but, disappointingly, he demurred. "It's my belief that there have been unreported incidents prior to these stories about arrows in the Bronx," he replied, "because I heard about people being shot with arrows in the Bronx when I was a kid, in the Bronx. And yes, it may have been an urban legend, but you know, given recent weeks, it suggests that perhaps it just was never written up."

In fact, Shanley admitted, he himself had made a mistake like the one Collins had made, some years ago, up at his cottage in the Catskills, when he was playing around with a compound bow. "I put a rusty tin can against a barn, and I aimed and shot this arrow, and it went right through the can, and right through the barn - and that's when I realized how powerful those things are."

Which brought Shanley back to the streets of Astoria, Queens, where Five Corners had been, uh, shot. "This was my first film, and I had the illusion that there were all these sophisticated techniques for dealing with special effects, so when it came time to do the arrow stunt, I remember I went to the set and I said: 'So how do you do it, how are you gonna do it?' And they said, 'well actually it turns out that probably the best way to do it is that the guy is wearing a piece of buffered wood underneath the coat in the back, and this guy over here, he's got a crossbow, and he's gonna shoot it into the piece of buffered wood.' "I said, 'you mean, it's a real arrow, and they're gonna shoot it at that person?' And they're like, 'yeah, I know it sounds tricky but the crossbow guy assures me that it's really accurate.' So this actor - and I saw the thing they had on his back, it didn't even cover his back! Forget his head, neck, arms or shoulders! It was just probably 16 inches high and a foot wide, and if the guy had missed that? He would have shot - and this was like a serious arrow, in terms of the speed that it was going - it would have trashed him!"

On the other end of the line, Shanley chuckled at the memory, and the nutty recklessness of the undertaking.

Wait, I asked: Did he say this was an actor who volunteered to be shot?

"Well, you know," he laughed. "People wanna work."

shoupt@globeandmail.com

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