Dispatches from the Dark Side

WARNING TO READERS: This post is not about a happy nature walk in the woods. Persistent reading may cause eyes to glaze over and promote cravings for the latest Nancy Grace show on “Where the White Woman At?”.

Scottsdale, Arizona

April 24, 2008

We live in a time and place full of contrasts, variety, freedom, mobility, opportunity and distractions. There are times when my life is going in so many directions at once, it’s a chore just trying to grasp how – and even if - it all fits together and makes sense. One week I can be riding my bicycle to Moose Hill to wait for woodcocks on a chilly evening, and the next I can be sitting by the spa pool at a five-star resort. But I can’t relax because all the rich people around me can’t just turn off their cell phones and enjoy the moment. Last night, back at home, I was at a live concert and a young boy sitting in front of me was listening to his iPod. In Iraq, people are killing and dying in our name, but our news sources tell us of the outrage over a 15-year-old pop singer posing for a photograph with bare shoulders, and a prominent news figure spills her guts about an illicit relationship with a U.S. senator just to pump up book sales. We are so busy rushing ahead, we never pause to think about where we are headed. As they say, we don’t know where we’re going, but we’re making great time. I find myself wishing a magical sprite would whisper the Truth in our ears.

Scottsdale, Arizona is a place where they’ve been making very good time, indeed, but every time I go there, I see lemmings rushing forward, not seeing the cliff just over the next hill. It is a world of highways and big box stores. It is populated with Escalades, Expeditions and Yukon XLs. Even in the warm, sunny, dry weather of April, there were very few people on foot or bicycle. There are fancy new sidewalks and bike lanes, but they go mostly unused. The bright sun shines every day, but there are no solar panels in sight. The bewilderment I felt when there last year (See “Wandering in the Desert,” April 13, 2007.) was only reinforced this time.

In the past, when going on vacation, I would take a stack of books and magazines, fantasizing about endless hours of quiet reading. With age comes at least a little wisdom and I now know that our trips are much too busy for that. Now, I try to bring one good book and immerse myself in it for the whole trip. Last year, it was Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy about how we need to start decentralizing everything and start building lives close to home based on the inter-connected web of community.

This year, I learned more about exactly why that is by reading James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. (Yes, that guy again.) His basic argument is that the oil is already running out and, at the rate we’re going, it will soon be gone. In the past century, everything we have built was - and everything we do is- based on the assumption that fossil fuel will be cheap and plentiful forever. There is no magical technology on the horizon that will save our sorry butts when the taps go dry. I have the bad misfortune of believing everything he says. Life would be so much more fun if I didn’t find myself constantly looking around me and imagining what life will be like with no electricity, no natural gas, no gasoline, no diesel fuel, no heating oil. Where will plastic come from without petroleum? Food prices are on the rise now, but what will a loaf of bread be worth when we’re trying to grow wheat on the golf courses, by hand, without farm machinery, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and fossil water pumped from deep underground? God, I’m depressed. I wonder what’s happening on Wisteria Lane?

I saw signs of the impending Long Emergency everywhere I looked that week in Arizona. One day on the front page of the New York Times there was one article about how one of Saudi Arabia’s last big oil fields is turning out to be more difficult to pump than expected. There was another story about a guy in Boulder, Colorado who is making a business of tearing up lawns to put in mini-farms (The neighbors are not happy.) because of the increasing cost of maintaining those lawns and remorselessly rising food prices. Another article describes how some warehouse club stores like BJ’s, Costco and Sam’s Club are rationing rice because people are hoarding it. Imagine that! Hoarding and rationing food in the USA. John McCain, and then the desperate Hillary Clinton, were crowing about a summer driving season (read voting season) gas tax holiday, further proving to me how gutless our leaders are on this issue.

It’s called cognitive dissonance, and I was exhibiting all the symptoms.There I was, jetting back and forth across the continent at something like 500 miles per hour, eating gluttonous quantities of imported gourmet food, swimming in heated pools, and enjoying a green manicured and watered landscape in the middle of a desert. We flipped on the air conditioning with barely a second thought and enjoyed the fountains and man-made waterfalls spraying water into the arid air. In the 10 days of our visit, our group went through literally thousands of bottles of spring water, all of it trucked in from elsewhere and none of the plastic bottles recycled. On one side of my brain I could clearly see how we are all headed to Hell in a hand basket, while on the other side I was having a wonderful time. It was great to be together with family and to have every creature comfort instantly available.

I was a guest on this fabulous vacation, so I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but I felt as though I was on an anthropological expedition to a world where money and privilege isolate some people from the realities of diminishing resources while poor souls elsewhere struggle to survive. I looked around at the hundreds of other vacationers and wondered if any of them even considered the eventual consequences of such decadence and waste. I also reminded myself that my own lifestyle back home – which I like to consider modest - is unbelievably extravagant in the big picture of things. I thanked my lucky stars to be an American and to have lived most of my life in the golden age of oil.

I clearly recall driving around in the mid-1970's, not long after the 1973 Oil Crisis, and thinking I'd better enjoy my driving now because we won't be doing it much longer. I remember my organic chemistry professor explaining, in 1973, that losing gasoline was only a part of the problem and that many vital organic compounds are derived from petroleum. It has always been evident to me that fossil fuel supplies were finite and that we should use what we have wisely and conservatively. I never understood why we wouldn't want to save some for our grandchildren.

Now, I know where we live in New England, we also drive everywhere and we have to heat our homes in the wintertime, but there’s something about the Phoenix area that makes the modern American lifestyle seem so much more foolish. Maybe it’s because New England was settled by Europeans long before fossil fuel powered everything and it’s possible - on some level – to imagine life without it. At least we have our own water and it’s easier to warm a home without petroleum than it is to cool one. We have lakes, rivers, oceans and the remnants of rail lines to travel on as the oil disappears. We can actually grow food here. The desert has lots of solar power, but there will never be enough of that to power all those cars and air conditioners. Without fossil fuel to power the pumps, the canals that carry their water will dry up. Scottsdale, as it is today, didn’t exist 40 years ago. In 40 years from now, it will be gone.

Any drive or jog around Scottsdale will take the traveler past many gated communities. Along with granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, and three-car garages a gate and – better yet – a guard house at the entrance to the development is evidence of fine upscale living in 21st Century America. I would love to get some candid opinions about what these people think they’re fencing out. I suspect it’s Mexicans or, perhaps, judgmental tourists. But no matter how fancy the gates, or how high the walls, these people will not be protected from the disruption and upheaval that awaits us all during the Long Emergency.

Doodling in the Gloam

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

From pearls before breakfast to peents before dinner.

It felt like the scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the local yokels are waiting along a mountaintop roadside for the flying saucers to arrive. I had stationed myself below a clump of young white ash trees in the old field near the Billings barn. I had arrived by bicycle after taking the long, hilly way around on an after-work ride. I was relaxing with some cheese and crackers and a vacuum bottle of Earl Grey tea, waiting for the show to begin.

I had just heard the story of how Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post had arranged for Joshua Bell – perhaps America’s finest concert violinist – to play incognito in a busy Washington, D.C. subway station during morning rush hour to see how many people would stop to listen. Wearing a baseball cap and casual clothes with the case for his multi-million dollar Stradivarius open at his feet for tips, Bell played a series of difficult and dramatic classical pieces for nearly 45 minutes. In that time, hundreds of people passed by, most not even glancing in his direction. Here was a musician who regularly plays at packed concert halls for adoring fans who pay hundreds for tickets and no more than a handful of harried commuters paused for even a minute to listen. Only one person recognized him and he collected a mere $32.17 in tips.

Now, I’m no classical music fan - about the closest I get is when I enjoy Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring - but when I read the Post article online and watched the hidden-camera videos, I felt my eyes welling up. What has America become? What are we doing to ourselves? Do we appreciate greatness only when we have to pay for it or when some anointed expert points it out for us? Has our popular culture dumbed us down so much that we are unfamiliar with true genius? Is our work so important that we can’t take a minute from our hectic schedule to bask in beauty? Are we so burdened by debt and taxes that we can’t afford to pause for a moment? Do our profit-hungry employers push us so hard that we dare not take a breath?

On this cool, early-April Moose Hill evening, I was pausing. There was no wind, but I could feel the cool air draining off the hill so I pulled on my fleece hat and draped my blanket over my shoulders. The peepers were singing loudly in the maple swamp and I strained to hear the calls of other frog species amid the din. I thought I heard a few different calls, but didn’t know any of them well enough to give them names. A robin chuckled in the swamp and a dove cooed gently down at the other end of the field. A cardinal stopped by to give a few chips before heading off to his roost. I was waiting for my vernal virtuoso.

Sunset was at about 7:20 and by 7:30 I could see my own tea-warmed breath in the air. It was getting late and I was starting to worry about biking home in the dark. I wondered if it might be too cold, but the peepers reassured me. At 7:35 I heard the first call from the shelter of a big mass of forsythia up the hill behind me. My maestro was warming up. The calling was followed in a few minutes by a twittering sound as the bird flew behind me and circled the perimeter of the field, spiraling upward. I watched his dark silhouette against the lighter sky until he rose out of sight as if in slow motion. A period of silence was followed by what I can only describe as a random chirping similar to the sound that comes from one of those little wooden Audubon bird calls that is held between the thumb and forefinger while twisting the metal thumbscrew with the other hand. A couple of minutes later, the ground calls – known as peents – began again and the entire performance was repeated.

The woodcock is a funny little bird. With his long beak that is used to probe the mud for earthworms, he looks like a shore bird that took an evolutionary wrong turn to wind up in the uplands. The timberdoodle has a long history as a game bird and as a target for pot hunters. This heritage may contribute to the fascination many have for this rich brown bird with big eyes and bigger feet that make me think of E.T. His ground call is a funny little squeak that Julie Zickefoose might say sounds like an accident, but his song as he falls from the sky is almost other-worldly.

The show was just starting but I had to go and I heard more peents behind me as I pushed my bike down the old gravel road. The upturned crescent of the moon did little to light the way. When I got to the pavement I turned on my blinking red taillight and plunged down the hill into the deepening darkness. A lone car passed and I chased it down the steepest part of the hill at about 30 miles an hour letting his headlights light the way. As the road flattened out, I could no longer keep up, so I pedaled happily from one pool of streetlamp light to the next.

Who Knew?

Moose Hill Journal is two years old!

I just read the first post on the Moose Hill Journal written two years ago and I am quite surprised that this effort has turned out much the way I had imagined it on that early spring day in 2006. I still can’t explain exactly why I felt a need to walk and sit in the open to explore nature and explore my thoughts. Most likely, it was just my version of a mid-life crisis; another case of Boomer navel-gazing. I had recently passed 50 and my wife and I were rather new empty-nesters. I felt an urge to reflect on my life – what it was supposed to be, what it had become, and where it might be headed. I wanted to reconnect with the outdoors. Life in the woods had been such a vital part of my identity as a youth and I had let that part of my life slip away. I wanted that part of me back.

I can thank Julie Zickefoose (See sidebar.) for a big part of the inspiration. I heard her NPR commentary on blogging just a few days before I had that first breakfast on the hill. I found her blog and a whole new world was opened to me. Not only was I moved by her stories, photos and art, but by following her links I discovered a web of connections among dozens of thoughtful and talented souls. When I was thinking about how I should record my Moose Hill observations, a blog seemed like the perfect medium.

I am surprised that I’ve kept at it this long. I suspect that one day I’ll just stop. Perhaps I’ll simply exhaust the supply of things I feel like talking about. Maybe all the walks will start feeling the same and offer no new surprises. Or, maybe I’ll wake up one day and ask: What’s the point? For now, a new season is arriving and I want to be there to watch.

I’m also surprised at how quickly and thoroughly this blogging experience has become an important part of my life. I spend a lot of time thinking about my time in the woods and about things I might want to write about. I’m constantly scanning my thoughts and experiences for post topics. I think of it as exercise for an ageing brain. My wife likes to do sudoku puzzles. I ponder essay topics. I’m always thinking about my next trip to the Hill; where I might go and what I might see. In a way, for me, Moose Hill has become more than a geographic location. It has become something of a state of mind. Maybe if I keep this up for a few more years, I’ll be able to explain what that means.

Finally, I want to thank my readers. These days, I get about ten hits a day and most of those are click-throughs of people searching for something like information on “cheap tequila.” A typical post might attract five comments. About ten is the most I can hope for. I benefit from low expectations so I have learned not to dwell on or obsess about these things, but I value readers and their input. To the handful of readers who read and comment regularly: Thank you. Knowing that you read my posts helps keep me going. I try to return the favor and I truly enjoy the windows into your world that you open with blogs of your own. To those who may read but don’t comment: Don’t be shy! I want to know who you are, where you are, and what’s on your mind.

Well, the sap has been rising, the peepers are peeping and the timberdoodles are peenting. It’s time to go for a walk. Won’t you come along?

Just Over the Horizon

Sunday, March 9, 2008

The bluebirds must have been feeling pretty cocky. The pair sat atop nesting boxes in the middle of the big hayfield near the top of Moose Hill Street. They had their pick of over a dozen boxes and were hawking down into the stubble to pick up morsels I could not see. As I pushed my bicycle along the edge of the field heading for home, I imagined that they were dreaming of a happy and productive season as they perched in the bright spring sunshine. They selected just the right home, and thought of the limitless supply of insects that would soon be hopping around in the fresh grass. The small flock of robins that probed for earthworms in the soft soil along the edges of rainwater puddles presented no threat. They paid no attention to the loving pair of doves flying overhead. Could it be that they didn’t know what was approaching just over the horizon? At that very moment, millions of tree swallows were winging their way north like squadrons of dive-bombers, and soon dozens would descend on this field to swoop and squabble over nesting sites. Bluebird heaven would be transformed into a world of constant vigilance and stress.

I ride my bicycle because I can, not because I have to. Of course there were times when simply jumping in the car to run an errand was not an option. Simply traveling to work or to secure the things needed to survive was a chore, if not an ordeal. But in this age of wealth and luxury, biking and walking are things some of us do because we think them fun or good for us. Most adults who ride bicycles today, do so solely for recreation, exercise or sport. I suspect most of us, upon seeing a grownup riding a bike simply to get from point A to point B, wonder what’s wrong with them. Homeless? DUI? Broke? Unstable? I sometimes wonder if people seeing me returning from Moose Hill with my tattered clothing and backpack hanging from my shoulders as I struggle up Depot Street to the center of town might think perhaps I have a few loose screws, too. Surely, no middle-class, middle-aged American would ride a bicycle because they have no other choice. Well, the day may be coming when bicycling looks like the best choice of all.

One of my regular business chores involves a five-mile round-trip commute. Most days, I’m carrying tools, bundles or supplies, so I drive. I’m trying to arrange things so once or twice a week I can make the trip on foot or by bicycle. Sunday was one of those days.

I rode the touring bike to do my work and then took the long, scenic route home. This involved mostly climbing through the cool, very windy air to get to, and then over, Moose Hill. This was no race; I was just enjoying the feeling of the wind and sun on my face and the pulsing of blood through my body. I passed the Audubon visitor’s center where groups of young families were gathering to go see the maple sugaring demonstration. I coasted down the south side of Moose Hill and pedaled over to our local farm stand where I bought a muffin and had my vacuum bottle filled with fresh coffee. I packed these in my bag and headed back to the woods. I had a few things on my mind and wanted to sit and think for a few minutes.

I found the abandoned and barely noticeable old trail that leads to The Mikveh. This is the old stone-lined springhole I stumbled on early last winter when I was thinking about my recently-deceased high school buddy, Martin. (See “Living Waters,” December 17, 2006.) I guess returning to this spot was my way of acknowledging the 20-year anniversary of the tragic passing of another high school friend, Marcie. No new insights rose out of the crystal depths of that pool; only that even the most gifted, kind, talented and beautiful of us can stumble upon unimaginable misfortune. For the rest of us, life goes on and we should try to be better people in the time we have left.

Just beyond The Mikveh a bedrock outcrop rises above the surrounding forest and this is enhanced by a couple of granite boulders stacked on top in a way that makes me think of an alter. In the event I need to offer up any sacrifices, I’ll know just where to go. On this day, the only thing I was offering up was coffee and a muffin. I put on my fleece hat and jacket and put my little foam pad on the outcrop so I could sit in the warming sun and lean against the alter to get a little protection from the wind.

I shuffled through my thoughts and tried to pick one to focus on. My thinking sometimes gets stuck on a theme and recently that theme has been the grim prospects for our future as prophesized by James Howard Kunstler (See sidebar), with thanks to Eleutheros at “How Many Miles from Babylon” (Sidebar) for pointing me in that direction. I was even lucky enough to score Kunstler’s new novel, World Made By Hand, at the library and read it in a few short days. Kunstler has been preaching for years that, in a nutshell, the age of cheap oil and cheap credit that has made the unsustainable expansion of the suburban way of life possible is just about over. Recent events on the nightly news make it hard to dismiss his claims. He marvels at our collective ability to suspend belief about the impending collapse of business as usual and at our willingness to think that technology and casinos will save us.

The prospect of life without fossil fuels can lead to endless daydreams. Will we plan a wise and orderly transition to conservation and renewable sources of energy, or will we descend into chaos as we squabble over the last few drops of petroleum. In the future, after the oil fields have gone dry, perhaps every one of us will have fantasies about what we could have done with the gasoline burned at just one NASCAR race. Just the night before, I was listening to a friend describe his one- to two-hour (each way!) daily automobile commute to a new job. Maybe he is among those who think we will soon discover more oil and more hours in a lifetime buried under distant blood-soaked desert sands.

It was time to go, so I packed up and headed for the trail. I paused one more time at the springhole just in case there was new wisdom to be found there, but I saw only the same old bewildered face staring back at me from the smooth surface. I was worried about the troubles that may lie just over the horizon but I was also optimistic about the approach of Spring so I pedaled back up Moose Hill to see what was new in the big meadow.

Un-American Activities

Sunday March 2, 2008

I had to stop by a house I’m watching for an out-of-town neighbor this morning and it was on the way to some town-owned conservation land, so I abandoned my plans to go to Moose Hill and opted for a different route today. I packed my bag and when I left home it was cold and windy, but crystal clear and sunny. Friday night’s snow became Saturday’s rain and slush that set the stage for Sunday’s crunchy snow and ice. Walking through the neighborhood, I heard the cardinals staking out their territories and the singing of one of the song sparrows that have been back for a week or so. Woodpeckers were tapping out their staccato love messages. The 27-degree temperature could not completely hide the fact that we had entered March and spring was rapping gently on the door.

I walked down Brook Road and found the Town right-of-way that passes between two typical suburban houses. A public pathway passing through private back yards is unusual around here, to say the least. I always get a happy feeling when I take this path, similar to the way I feel when walking up and down the Berkeley Hills Paths. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but it has something to do with the legal recognition that people traveling on foot have rights, too; something we tend to forget in this age of the automobile.

I took the trail – blazed with the blue marks of a side trail – into the woods and down to Massapoag Brook where I crossed the rain-swollen stream on a make-shift bridge of boards nailed to a couple of downed trees. A few more minutes of crunching through the snow brought me to Devil’s Rock. This is a huge granite glacial erratic that is 20 or so feet tall at its triangular peak. Its shape reminds me of a tiny Yosemite Half Dome. Nearby is another big stone, possibly the sheared-off half of Devil’s Rock, that has split yet again to form a cozy – if narrow - shelter. Like just about any big rock around here, this one has a stone-ringed fire pit. These fireplaces are used mostly by beer-drinking teenagers these days, but I have little trouble imagining that these big boulders were something of a Stonehenge to natives long ago.

I found a sunny snow-free spot against a white pine where I could gaze at the Rock while I had breakfast. The woods were quiet. The singing birds up among the houses were absent here. I looked down at my shirt cuffs and my mind drifted back to the day before when I sat quietly in the house with needle and thread sewing buttons on some old shirts. I hate to throw things away if I think I might be able to fix them and use them some day. Besides, one of the shirts was from L.L. Bean in the days when they actually sold things made in the U.S.A. But, of course, I never get around to fixing anything and stuff just piles up and clutters the house. I’m still on my New Year’s de-cluttering kick, however, and I’ve been wanting to fix these so I could clean up another corner of the house. I’m also growing increasingly disgusted with our inclination to just toss stuff and buy more cheap imports.

Now, any good American would toss a shirt with a missing button in the trash and drive down to Mega Mart to buy a new one from China. Obviously, in today’s economy, the time I spent fixing four shirts was easily worth more than the cost of a couple of new cheap ones, so my efforts were clearly silly. That was time I could have spent watching commercials on TV or driving to the mall rather than sitting in quietude stitching together clothing and memories.

I remember my mother had an old tin candy box full of hundreds of buttons of all kinds. As a little kid, I loved to dig through the wild assortment and pick out the most unusual ones. Later, in high school, I would repair the worn-out stitching on the fly of my blue jeans with big loops of white thread. As an idealistic and enthusiastic college freshman I proudly sewed my forestry school patch on my green and black checkered wool jac-shirt. I thought it was good for an independent man to have skills – even if rudimentary – like that.

I was getting cold just sitting there, so I packed up my stuff and headed for home. I retraced my steps on the blue side trail to join the main orange-blazed Massapoag Trail. As I understand it, this trail was created by the Sharon Friends of Conservation in about 1966 to traverse a green belt that runs through the center of town, but it was soon neglected. About a dozen years ago I tried to carefully locate the entire length of the original trail and refresh the orange blazes. Here I was, over a decade later, following my own paint. The paint was visible enough, but the trail was in tough shape. We had a tornado-like microburst a few summers ago and a nasty ice storm a few weeks ago so many large trees and branches are blocking the trail and making a general mess of the woods.

Maybe it was the torn-up nature of the forest, or maybe the Devil still lurks among the rocks and was following me out of the woods. He began to insinuate himself into my thoughts and my mood changed. They say the Devil is in the details, and that may be true, but at that moment I was thinking that the Devil is really in the big choices we make. I looked at the devastation around me and knew there were no Town resources to clean up this public land. The scale of the damage is much greater than any Cub Scout troop could ever make a dent in. I understand that the woods and wildlife don’t care and may even benefit from the disturbance, but to this human eye, the place is a mess and not much fun to visit. The forester in me hates to see all that timber going to waste.

My mood continued to darken. How many shirts could I buy with my share of the Iraq War? How many buttons could I sew in the time it takes me to earn enough to pay my share of the obscenely wasteful Massachusetts highway projects? How many compact fluorescent bulbs would I have to put in my house to save as much energy as it takes to light Gillette Stadium for one second? Why should I bother to save my cans and bottles and carefully bag my newspapers when my neighbor just chucks it all in plastic a trash bag? I was beginning to understand what our Vice President meant when he said conservation is nothing more than a personal virtue. It seemed that any effort I might make to lighten my impact on the world was pointless tokenism.

As I neared Billings Street, I left the woods to head home on the pavement and sidewalk to avoid the downed trees and mud. Near Mann’s Pond a flock of two dozen robins flew in waves into a tree bearing a bittersweet vine where they snacked on the red-orange fruits. I wondered if they were hungry after a long north-bound flight. I was happy to see these harbingers of spring and had the audacity to hope that a fresh new season would soon be upon us.

I can’t help it if I worry about things like squandered resources and pointless consumerism. That’s just the way I am and I’ve always been that way. Maybe it was the influence of my mother who suffered through poverty as a child. Maybe evening walks along county lanes with my father when I was very young taught me a love of nature. Perhaps I just understand that if we use things up now, they won’t be there for our grandchildren. Maybe I’m just easily amused and don’t need a constant stream of new stuff to make me feel good.

On the other hand, I know I’m no monk. I live in a single family home that uses natural gas and electricity from the grid. And, as I am growing all too aware, that house is full of stuff. I drive fossil fuel vehicles. My footprint is much larger than that of the average global citizen. I try not to be ignorant of my impact on the world and I try to be realistic about the positive effect my modest conservation efforts can have. It may be simplistic, but I think there is a deep wisdom in the belief that less is more and I want to live a life that seeks that wisdom.

My mood was lifting already. Who can stay depressed when cardinals are calling, woodpeckers are drumming and robins will soon be hopping across the lawn, pausing to cock their heads sideways and peer from one eye at fat worms below?

Blanket Statement

Sunday, February 10, 2008

We have a saying in New England: “If you don’t like the weather here, wait a minute, it will change.” Nasty weather was forecast for Sunday, but after doing a few chores and running a few errands in the morning, it was unexpectedly warm, sunny and calm. I knew a change was on the way but I thought I had time to sneak up to Moose Hill for lunch.

By the time I got home, brewed a pot of coffee and cooked some oatmeal, the clouds had already moved in. I wanted to make this a quick trip, so I took the touring bike and pedaled the mile and a half to the beginning of the Vernal Pool Trail. This bike has fenders that were appreciated as I rode through the slush that was left over from overnight snow showers. By the time I pushed the bike up the trail a ways and traded my bike helmet for a fleece hat, it was drizzling.

I walked up the trail and in no more than a half hour after leaving home I was at The Boulders. This is a high bedrock outcrop just off the trail that I’d visited several times before. I usually sit on one of the high points on the rocks, but on this day they were slush-covered, so I went downhill a bit to find a place under the pines that was sheltered from the slush and drizzle. I sat down on an insulating piece of packing-material foam I carry to keep my rear warm and dry (Note to Self: Get a bigger piece of foam!) and draped my new fleece blanket over my shoulders.

I’d been thinking about carrying a blanket for a while. Sitting quietly in the woods in winter can get uncomfortable and I liked the idea of carrying a portable instant shelter. I might have preferred a natural wool made-in-America blanket, but I have a feeling such things are rare and expensive these days. The fleece blanket had the advantage of being warm, light and free. (It was a new-member premium from the Trustees of Reservations who manage Moose Hill Farm. Thanks TTOR!) I felt like I was rediscovering a bit of old-fashioned woods wisdom. A simple blanket could be used as a wrap, or - draped over sticks or tree branches - it could make a quick shelter. On a nice day, I could imagine wrapping myself up in it and taking a sylvan snooze. I’m sure wilderness travelers of yore never ventured forth without a blanket, but who carries one today?

After I settled in, I poured a cup of coffee and opened up the oatmeal. It was still warm from the kitchen and the raisins were perfectly plump, soft and sweet. In the past couple of years, I’ve had breakfast in the woods quite a few times, but this may have been my first lunch. I sat thinking about other meals I might bring to the woods and watched the clouds change form as the promised cold front advanced and the wind began to intensify.

I figured I should get moving so I packed my bag, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders to protect both my backpack and me from the cool air and light rain, and headed back down the trail. Along the way I stopped to examine a clump of American chestnut (Castanea dentata) sprouts. Most of the sprouts were dead and from the lone live branch hung limp, bleached, toothy leaves. I’d been reading American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree by Susan Freinkel. I thought how a century ago this tree was one of the most magnificent gifts offered by our eastern forests. It grew as much as a hundred feet tall and provided versatile rot-resistant lumber. In the fall, natural orchards dropped a bounty of delicious nuts, like manna from heaven, that fed all manner of wildlife, people and livestock. For many early Appalachian settlers, nuts harvested from the forest floor were their most reliable cash crop. The chestnut blight swept down the East Coast in the early part of the 20^th century, killing virtually every tree. The tree longs to live and keeps sending up sprouts from stumps and roots, but the blight keeps slapping them back down. Even this sad little clump of sprouts bore orange fungal fruiting bodies.

I took the sprouts as a reminder to appreciate the good things we have before they are gone. I hugged my little green blanket a little tighter, as if it were a prayer shawl, and promised myself I would count my blessings. I reminded myself to recognize and nurture the good things in life. As I rolled down the hill on my bicycle, the wind was picking up and the temperature began to drop. When I got home, I brought an armload of firewood in from the shed and got a big pot of soup going on the stove. Good food and a warm house are things we might not think about much these days, but on that winter afternoon, I felt lucky to have both.

The Perfect Spot

Sunday, February 3, 2008

It’s not as easy to find a good spot to sit in the woods as one might think. A good place would be sunny in cool weather and shady when it’s hot. Sometimes I like wide open spaces with sweeping views of sky and fields. At other times, I prefer to keep my view – and thoughts – close, so I look for a spot where the forest is thick. I usually look for a large rock to sit on. It should be large enough to have a place to set down my binoculars and coffee cup and I usually look for one that is elevated above the surrounding forest so I can hope to see passing wildlife. Oh, and no ATVs.

Sunday morning it was sunny and warm for early February, so I took the touring bike and rode up Moose Hill Parkway and down Moose Hill Street toward Walpole Street. My plan was to walk into the woods and find the back side of the hill I was looking for a few weeks ago. (See “Finding the Way”, January 16, 2008) Just before the big hayfield near Walpole Street, I walked the bike into the woods far enough that it couldn’t be seen from the street. I took a quick look at the topographic map and saw that if I walked around a large kettle hole I had seen once before I might be able to find an old trail the map said should be there. Looking for an old trail was tricky because the oak leaves were all matted down by the recently-melted snow and the over-abundant deer have made trails everywhere. I’ve been told the sanctuary people intentionally abandoned some trails to discourage unauthorized uses that they couldn’t control, and I was thinking this might be one of those trails. This part of the sanctuary is far from the visitor center and close to a neighborhood, so youngsters might be inclined to party here.

I didn’t take any compass bearings, so my casual wanderings took me near that neighborhood and I saw plenty of beer cans and old mattresses that seemed to indicate the sanctuary people were right. The map confirmed that I had missed both trail and hill, so I adjusted course and headed deeper into the woods.

As I came over a rise I heard a motorized vehicle. It’s seemed out of place because I thought I had moved away from the neighborhood. I soon recognized the sound as the putt-putting of an all-terrain vehicle. There’s an old woods road in the area and that might be an appropriate place to drive a four-wheeler, but this guy had left the road and was driving off-road through the woods. I guess if you’ve invested thousands in a toy like this you go to the woods you have and not the woods you wish you had even if those woods happen to be an Audubon sanctuary. I’m inclined to mind my own business so I said hello and went on my way. This seemed to be a one-off Super Sunday internal combustion joy ride, but if I thought this was a regular event that threatened to tear up the woods, I would have notified the Audubon people.

At this point, I was getting my bearings and spotted the hill I was looking for and headed north. Overhead, a red-tailed hawk was circling and shrieking in the clear blue sky above the tall pines as if sharing my annoyance at the motorized invader. I found a place to hop over one of the headwater branches of Beaver Brook and started to climb. I found a faint trail running along the north-south axis of the hill, but Hobbs Hill is to the northeast of this unnamed hill so I didn’t think it was the trail I was looking for.

I walked back and forth along the hilltop a couple of times looking for trails and a place to sit with my coffee. Unlike Hobbs Hill, I couldn’t find any large rocks to sit on here, leading me to think this was a glacial deposit whereas the larger Hobbs has a heart of bedrock. Every time I tried to explore the south side of the hill I heard and saw the ATV driver and I certainly didn’t want that sort of company when I was hoping to sit quietly and just think. I finally settled on the northeast side of the hill where I leaned against a tree. The warming sun was just over my shoulder and I had a nice view of another Beaver Brook tributary. The gentle babbling helped me to forget the drone of the four-wheeler. The brook tumbled over rocks and formed small pools under the roots of trees growing along the bank. I remembered the thrill of finding small trout in places like this but I’m quite sure this creek is too dry in summer to sustain fish.

Movement caught my eye, and I saw robins flying like silent ghosts low through the forest. I’d seen them along this brook before, but robins deep in the woods always seem out of place to me. I wonder if it’s the running water or the rich soil of the small alluvial flats that attracts them. The robins were quiet, but I heard the deeee-dee of a chickadee and the tooting of a titmouse, making me hope that winter was loosening its grip on Moose Hill.

Time was growing short and my seat was not as comfortable as I like, so I dropped down to the brook and followed it up to the road where I walked back to my bike. I was a little surprised at how far my wanderings had taken me.

Exploring new places is fun, but it’s also good to have a few favorite spots to go to. If I feel the need to disappear into the woods but only have an hour or so, I like to retreat to a familiar perch. I can get there quickly and spend more time quietly observing and thinking and less time wandering. I liken it to a musician having a repertoire of old standards, the angler having favorite fishing holes, or the hunter having traditional coverts. I can pick my destination depending on my mood. I like to go to a place I’ve been before and see how things have changed over the seasons. I sometimes find that being in a particular place reminds me of daydreams I had there before as if the thoughts wait for me there, waiting for me to return. I didn't find a perfect spot on this trip to Moose Hill, but I hope to go back soon to check up on some old dreams.