Somewhere
on one of the handful of woodlands trails Anne and I hiked in our three-day
Columbus weekend in the Berkshires, I caught a leaf.
A breeze
blows, and those autumn leaves at the very end of their seasonal tether come
floating, swaying, riffling, picking up speed and pulling back, sometimes
lurching off in new directions as currents of agitated molecules shove them
this way and that -- just as they do in the cartoons -- and eventually landing.
This
happened on a path in Williamstown; and I turned a palm up and extended
my forearm a little ways in front of me, and kept walking without moving my hand,
and one of the smaller, maple leaves detached itself from the consensus
of a somewhat numerous squadron and landed squarely on my palm.
That's how
you catch a leaf. It catches you. You can't really try to catch one. The mere
motion of throwing yourself around, leaping after the flock, lurching one way
or another in those last minute course-corrections in a futile attempt to respond to the many
little twists and turns leaves experience from invisible, but commanding
airflows -- your own motion, that is, creates another distortion in the airflow sending the leaves off
course.
You push
them away by seeking.
Just be there. If a leaf has your name on it, it will
find you.
It may not
happen at all. Wind currents are pretty erratic. The answer is not always blowing in
the wind (regardless of the Nobel prizewinner's famous lyric). Still, when it
does happen you can't help feeling a little bit, well, good about things. In
the context of the religion of pagan nature worship it may perhaps feel a
little bit like being -- to appropriate an idea from an entirely different
religion -- "sealed in the Book of Life."
In Williamstown,
in the Northern Berkshires, where this cheerful moment possibly took place, a
series of walking paths in the woods and pasture land can be found directly
behind the justly celebrated Clark Art Museum. The photo at the left is the
Stone Seat, marking the favorite destination for a woodland walk by German-born,
retired professor George Moritz Wahl, who died in 1923. His name is carved
into the stone. I don't know anything more about the back story, but our
trail guide calls the series of trails that lead to this site
"Williamstown's favorite walk."
According
to Williams College, numerous trails on Stone Hill can be combined for hikes
ranging from 0.7 to 4.0 miles in length and offering the hiker "dense
forests, massive rock outcroppings and, at the trail's end, "a great view"
of the town of Williamstown and the Green Mountains of Vermont. Which I don't
think we knew about because we certainly didn't find it.
We followed
one of those busy trail maps complicated by numerous intersections of
helpfully marked trails, arriving at the Stone Seat. Then started off in one
direction, encountered
a posted map, and reversed course back the other way. We followed a lovely quiet woodland
course along leaf-filled paths, encountering not a soul while sending a
score of tiny chipmunks racing to escape our ogre-ish presence.
We did bump into crowded parking lots and human multitudes in the retail streets around Williams
College, one of the few such encounters on an otherwise subdued three-day
October weekend in the Berkshires. Little traffic to speak of on Route 7, a
road we've been locked up on during other Columbus Day weekends. Maybe everybody else
knew the weather was going to be clouds the first day, followed by rain the
second. The third day, the day we had to leave, was in true Berkshire
fashion crystal clear and absolutely stunning.
Our next
site, after leaving the college (and parents weekend?) crowd, proved to be one
of the best rural picnic spots we've ever found. It was right on the farmyard
of the Sheep Hill farm (farm photo below), now a preserve owned by a local conservation
foundation. A picnic table is surrounded by the steeply graded pasture on one side,
and a view of thickly wooded ridges (across Route 7) rising up to Mount
Greylock, the highest point in the state.
We had the
place completely to ourselves. No one else in sight. The 50-acre former dairy
farm was purchased by the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation in 2000. Art and
Ella Rosenburg and their son moved here in 1933 and owned a milking herd for
more than 50 years, according to the group (see http://wrlf.org/sheep-hill/).
The
property was originally called Sunny Brook Farm, and the landscape named Sheep
Hill because sheep were raised here in the late 19th century.
I took some
photos of the strikingly furrowed tractor-cut patterns of the hayed meadow (above, left)The
contours are more prominent and the gradient steeper than the camera
is able to show. From a path along the top of the pasture I took photos of the
foliage on the ridges, and one of the observation tower on top of Greylock.
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