I spot the American Chestnut leaf somewhere on the New England Trail between Route 2 and Mountain Road in Erving. I’m returning to my car on an out-and-back hike and the leaf, the toothy edges of which make it look like a green-bladed bread knife hanging from a sapling, stands unique among all the leaves. The Chestnut leaf grows near the falls and pools that the exposed and precipitous rock ledges of the hillside make of the brook rushing to the Miller’s River below.
These falls, these deep pools, this one leaf, I don’t expect them so close to Route 2, one of the fastest, and so heavily trafficked, ways to get to Boston if you’re in western Massachusetts. The falls, more than a 30-foot vertical drop, splash hard by the trail, so close it would be impossible to miss unless you were walking in a cloud and still you’d hear the crashing water, which would be a thrilling sensation — the sound of drumroll water landing feet from your head while at the same time blinded by white.
But that’s not the case today. The sun fills the day, though on this section of trail the hemlocks, short-needled coniferous trees, have taken over. This tree loves a little damp; and when it finds the right amount of water, the tree spreads, weaving a canopy that soaks up the light above, allowing little to the floor. When walking among hemlocks, your feet land softly, for their needles make a pillowy mat; you also might wonder where you put your flashlight. It’s dark in daylight among hemlocks, which partially explains why it’s so open below in a hemlock glade. By open, I mean bare of shrubs vines, grasses that thicken the carpet of a new forest, one wooded with birch or maple.
As the trail moves away from the water, the hemlock gives way to those maple then oak, mostly red but some white oak, and then as I climb higher, I see a blast of light as if I’m bound to arrive at the top of a treeless summit.
We all know that can’t be true. This is New England in Massachusetts, where walking above tree-line is like walking in the desert and finding a watering hole surrounded by fig-heavy trees. You’ve found an oasis when you climb above the trees in Massachusetts, something rare, something to be savored, something not to be trusted.
Yet, the light is real. When I look up the hill, more light spills down on me, and I see a steep talus slope, made of rocks about the size of my fists. The light and the open rock slope make me think I could burst out of the dark forest and climb above leaves and moss and vine then, for once, see all around me, see in any direction I face. Oh, delight.
I stop to gather more information, peeking through the maples and a beech or two, and I spot a section of chainlink fence.
Right, dummy.
This light isn’t coming from the top of a talus slope found on the side of a butte in Colorado. The chainlink runs as far as I see to the left and to the right. The message is clear: Keep the fuck out.
This is one side of the Northfield Mountain Reservoir, a peculiar construction here on the north side of the New England Trail. This rock hillside isn’t a dam, blocking a river with the reservoir collecting behind. This is weirder. This is a side of a huge pit on top of mountain, filled with water pumped up from the Connecticut River to the west. The water is released, when electricity prices are at their highest, to race down a penstock and turn what are called reversing turbines, generating as much as 1,100 megawatts of electricity. Read this story by Karl Meyer https://commonwealthmagazine.org/opinion/this-energy-storage-is-tough-on-connecticut-river/ if you want to know more about the environmental disaster that results from repeatedly vacuuming and flooding a river. Hint: Aquatic life suffers and some people make a lot of money.
The realization that the talus slope ahead is not a route to a treeless butte does not dash any I’m-in-the-Wild expectations. As long as I’ve been walking from Connecticut to New Hampshire, I’ve harbored no illusions about walking in Thoreau’s footsteps, walking where few have gone, walking where the Wild Things Are. I’m on a trail, a human-made trail. The trees and rocks and moss and veery and red-eyed vireo, they all gloss over the fact that often I can throw a rock while walking on this trail and hit the roof of someone’s house. I wrote in an earlier installment about the slightly sneaky, creepy feeling I get walking this trail. I have to look away so as not to peek into people’s back windows, and sometimes I’m hundreds of feet above a house with a view in the kitchen window. No, I’m never far away from people out here.
Last week, I found a fungus measuring more than two feet wide, not far from what seemed like a miles-wide gash in the land, a quarry between the Massachusetts Turnpike and Route 20 in Westfield. This trail winds where people have abandoned the land, where they cannot build because of rock underneath or the steep hillside angle. That doesn’t mean no one uses the land for crushing rocks, for harvesting timber, or for storing 5 billion gallons of water to let loose when the price is right.
The trail, and where it leads, reminds me constantly that beauty, deep satisfying, dripping folds of wonder, occur most anywhere, and there’s little correlation between remoteness and a sublime forest. Just allow a bit of forest some time — decades will do — don’t disturb it, and something full of grace will appear. Not the grace of God, just plain grace of being.
This bit of grace and beauty will most likely erupt from the forest floor in New England; this soil is damp and rich and wondrous. So I walk slowly, sniffing and spying and eavesdropping, trying to sense something new.
I’m going to get a little abstract here, or Nan Shepherd is. She’s a long-dead Scottish author, who wrote a book called The Living Mountain that some consider the best bit of nature writing produced in Great Britain. Think Sand County Almanac for the Cairngorm Mountains in northern Scotland. From the 1920s to the 1970s, Shepherd climbed deep and often into those mountains and wrote impossibly well about how being in a state of curiosity was a Highland version of the Buddhist idea of Satori, a way of play between the poles of rational thought and nihilism. She wrote this in the 1940s:
“So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love to penetrate to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.”
Shepherd romped and played on the Cairngorms, verbs I choose with care. Thhat sense of play, I believe, is important if we want to “widen the domain of being,” and get out of our own heads, lose ourselves in the joy of a fungus big enough to nap in. I have the New England Trail on which to play, and it never veers far from human work and home. But, here’s the point, the forest doesn’t seem to care about my idea of wilderness, about whether I think a nearby blasted quarry ruins the mood, or my opinion that 5 billion gallons of water sitting on a mountain top is obscene. Because a few hundred yards from a carved out hillside, a Berkeley’s Polypore, the fungus I found last week, will bloom from the mycorrhizae underground. And this week, I find rolled out mats of moss, so green they seem to thrive under a leaky faucet. The moss lines both sides of the trail, at once inviting me to step off the path and pad on the soft cushion, then just as suddenly I’m in a state of dread. I should not allow one toe to reach that moss, which grows slowly and only under strict conditions of light and water.
Truth. I stumble, not inconceivable since I’m 59, and weave off the path onto the moss. I stop still, and enjoy, feeling the give, almost an enveloping, that is fully hydrated and thick moss. The moss takes on a double grace; I see it and feel it beneath my feet.
This is not the wilderness. This moss moment occurs within a ten-minute walk from the chainlink fence and the mountain-top pit.
I keep walking and hoping to develop some capacity to penetrate the forest’s essence like Nan Shepherd would do if she were my walking partner. Maybe, what I’m trying to grasp on this hike to the summit of Mt. Monadnock is a capacity to play in places not considered sublime.
Next time, I’ll stretch out on the moss, seeing, touching, and listening to it grow, even if a neighborhood fence stands nearby.
Mr. K's World 