Finding the Way

Saturday, January 5, 2008

I left home at 9:30 in the morning. It’s a bit harder to get an early start on these winter days. It was 29 degrees, calm and clear. A few wisps and puffs of cloud were in the blue sky, offering just the kind of light I love when I’m in the woods. I cut through the train station and took the new bridge over Beaver Brook and hiked on the road just long enough to get to the Hobbs Hill trail. I climbed through the pine plantation before breaking out into the more open natural oak-pine forest. The crunching of my footsteps in the thawed and re-frozen snow precluded sneaking up on anything.

I stopped on Hobbs Hill for breakfast. I just sat in the sun and listened to the quiet. There were human sounds off in the distance, but the woods around me were silent. It was so quiet, the only nearby sound was the ringing in my ears. Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s too many hours listening to power tools, but I prefer to thinks it’s just caused by everyday stress and if I could only sit here long enough it would go away.

As I sat daydreaming, the sun rose enough to shine through the space between the trunks of a double-stemmed hickory and warm my face. It shined through the naked oaks and hickories to illuminate the patient pines below, their soft deep green needles glistening in the clean light, shining all the brighter on the background of white snow.

I wanted to linger and allow friendly thoughts from the forest to creep into my mind, but I had a plan. As part of my (no doubt temporary) New Years ambition to clean up and de-clutter, I was organizing a box of bike-related maps and such when I found a misplaced topographic map a friend gave me some time ago (Thanks, George!).

Moose Hill is in the northwest corner of the Brockton, Massachusetts 7.5 x 15 minute metric quadrangle. (I’ve always wondered how mapmakers always manage to put every item of interest in the corner of a map so you have to buy four maps to cover the area you want to explore.) One thing that caught my eye on this map was the indication of a trail running from Moose Hill Parkway, over Hobbs Hill, across one of the headwater streams of Beaver Brook, over another hill, and then on to Moose Hill Street. The first part of this trail was well known to me as part of the Hobbs Hill Loop, but as far as I know, the rest of the trail may be abandoned. It was my plan to use map and compass to find this new hilltop and look for remnants of this trail.

In my youth, I spent a fair amount of time hiking and bushwhacking in the Catskill Mountains of New York with map and compass, but with the exception of one fun attempt at orienteering with my son a few years ago, it had been quite a while since I’d navigated in the woods this way. Of course, map and compass is so old school. Everybody has GPS these days, but I’m nothing if not behind the times.

Using my old Silva Ranger forester’s compass, I oriented the map and took a bearing from Hobbs Hill to this new hill and set off through the woods. Sighting through the notch in the compass cover while peeking in the mirror at the needle, I would look ahead and pick a rock or tree as my destination. All I had to do was pay attention long enough as I meandered through the landscape to allow me to get to my landmark where I would take a new sighting. My path kept intersecting deer trails and I was tempted to follow them, but I wasn’t convinced the deer were following the old hiking trail so I resisted the urge.

As I knew it would, my course took me to a brook, but what I failed to notice was that this part of the brook formed a small swamp. I thought it had been cold enough that I could cross on ice, but I was mistaken and promptly broke through, soaking my feet with black muck. This got me thinking about a Jack London story where a trapper gets wet in the arctic and has to kill his dog to cut it open so he can warm his hands inside long enough to start a life-saving fire with his only match only to have the incipient fire warm the snow on an over-hanging pine bough causing the snow to fall, snuffing out the fire. In my case, it was a dry sunny day and the temperature was on the way up and I was no more than a half mile from a road, but my imagination is like that.

My mishap did cause me to abandon my course and head upstream, looking for a place to cross where the stream was narrower. Misfortune turned to luck when I found a place to cross that was well used by deer and looked like the old trail I had been seeking. This was soon confirmed when I saw some old painted tin can lids nailed to trees. I’d seen this method of marking another old trail in town – the Massapoag Trail – and I wondered if these markers had been placed by the same person decades ago.

I saw the hill I was seeking rising through the trees, but cold feet and a late hour prompted me to save conquering it for another day. I decided to follow the creek up to the road and head for home.

Exploring with map and compass brought back many fond memories. I thought back on those days when I was young and optimistic and I had my whole life in front of me. A good chunk of that life is behind me now, but on that bright sunny January day, it felt good to have a whole new year in front of me. A tough 2007 was behind me, and I had a chance to make a fresh start in 2008. I could see good things on the trail ahead, and I had a feeling a few hours of quiet reflection on Moose Hill might just help me find the way.