The Garden of Possible Places: More Hikes & Walks in the Berkshires

There is no such thing as too many places to walk in the woods.     

            Mountain Meadow in Williamstown, a Trustees of Reservations property (just like Bartholomew's Cobble), was our first shot at expanding our repertoire of favorite places once we purchased new guidebook called "Hikes & Walks in the Berkshire Hills."

            We followed the directions we found for this "walk" destination and headed north on Route 7, a long ride enlivened on another gorgeous fall day by views not only of those high ridges running parallel to the east (among them Mt. Greylock, the tallest peak in the state) but of the foliage-hungry tourists pulled over to the side of the road on somebody's open hay field to try to capture the panorama on their cameras.

            The hike from the Mountain Meadow parking lot a few miles north of the center of Williamstown starts from the word go with an ascent, a steady though not steep incline. It passes through a beautiful field of wild grasses cut to about knee high, from which you can see Greylock. The trail takes you toward the property's own "summit," but since we learned from other hikers that the view was blocked by the tree canopy we passed on the climb and worked our way instead around to the remains of a woodland "camp" where we admired the sturdy stone fireplace and chimney and caught a partial view of the surrounding peaks. A smaller fireplace held somebody's hand-crafted nativity scene made of sheet metal. Birds called and flashed away, avoiding us. Too many visitors; sick of us by October.

            On the road back south we used our new guidebook to locate another trail site off Route 7, called Sheep Hill. You find it at a place that looks like an old farm and is now the office for the Williamstown Rural Lands Foundation. It looks like you're pulling up the drive to somebody's well-maintained and far too neat-and-clean farm (real farms are dirty and generally smell), but there's a parking area between one building and another and signs of cute welcome you, including cutouts of sheep with holes where you can stick your face for the photos. Also a picnic table and some shaved grass for a path around an amazingly contoured hillside field grown for a grassy feed crop. It looks like it's been ploughed, harrowed and mowed to be somebody's real-life installation art project: Perfect Terraced Hillside. The green was sublime in the late afternoon sunlight. The pictures I took flatten the perspective and fail to capture the steepness of the ploughed hillside. In the late afternoon the color, textures, and light were amazing. If there are still really sheep on this farm, they must think they are living in Shangri-la.

            The book tells us this place was once the "old Rosenburg Farm." Mostly we admired the view and didn't walk very far because the day was growing late and we had already logged a few miles. But we collected some maps and kept it in mind for another day.

            Two good sites. Pretty fair harvest for our first day's application of our new toy. The previous trail guide we have been using for way too long before our new acquisition was published 40 years ago. Some of the views described in its pages were no longer there. Some trees grow pretty high in 40 years. Forty years from now will there still be books? Paper? (Trees?)

Cobbling Together

Beautiful soft light last weekend in Bartholomew Cobble, a marvelous Trustees of Reservations property in Sheffield in the Berkshires "South County." The reservation is named for the big mound-shaped pile of stone and accompanying geology and topography notable for the holes in its exposed limestone, called a "cobble" by those who name this sort of thing.
            We have visited here numerous times, it's a standard destination on our Columbus Day Weekend itinerary. But for some reason this year when we walked the Ledges Trail, looping along the exposed rock beneath the trees and looking down on the river, we were absolutely alone. As if everyone else who parked in the lot by the headquarters building had wandered off and taken their walks on some alternative cobble. The air was soft as well, the day fairer and warmer than predicted. Even the curious holes in the steel-gray walls of rock exposed by the eons were filled with the day's benevolence.
            The river below our trail, that even, fat, slow-winding ribbon, a typical coil of the Housatonic, the stream that runs everywhere in this part of the state, a gentle mirror of time, was doing tricks to amuse us (or itself). A steady breeze along its surface sent the mirrored skim of its reflections flowing in the opposite direction from the current, so that its freight of fallen yellow leaves, heavier apparently than some top-side impression of sunlight -- a skin of light slimmed down to mere perception: how much could that possibly weigh? -- traveled one direction along the river's surface while the wind carried the idea of water, that weightless layer of pure perception rippling along its surface, briskly along in the opposite direction. The wind, the breeze, blew less strongly than the current, a thing in itself of no matter, no weight at all, no substance -- a kind of idea in the mind of water physics -- but a wave of invisibility moving through the water, the way time moves through out lives.

            So that the fallen leaves, freshly fallen on the stream's surface, heavier (though lighter than almost everything but air) than some mere topside impression rippled by the wind: the yellow leaves of the surrounding forest unleaving in shades of yellow and brown in a great near-unanimous hurrying of time and weather -- proved more substantial than mere reflections.

             Along the river we found new plantings of scores of trees, mixed deciduous trees planted this spring with wire guards around their vulnerable lower trunks (see the fourth photo down). They're part of a project to restore a natural flood-bank woodland. They survive the occasional flooding from the river and, according to the Trustees, provide an unusual habitat for some plants and animals suited to survive better there than in riverbed, forest or grassy field.

             Later I got us off the trail that takes visitors uphill to the site's famous view, Hurlbert's Hill. We had to retrace our steps back to the trail I lost, where I eventually remembered, oh, yeah, I get confused here every year. We found the wide path that leads upward through an ascending close-cut hay field to the observation spot, where an explainer board points out (with illustrations) the migrating raptors and broadwings we can see gliding over the mountains from here, only today we couldn't. 

           The sky clouded over and did not recover. No matter, we have had the best of this day by the soft breezes and gently flowing waters of the autumn stream.

Diving Into the Silence

          Every year for one long weekend just this time of year we dive into a pool of silence. We disappear ourselves into the tree house in the after-the-season town of Stockbridge in the Massachusetts Berkshires. It's different there now: The summer tourists gone, the Tanglewood season long over, the last strains from the last James Taylor or some other nostalgic pop concert drawing a long exhalation whoosh of traffic down a narrow country road past the summer cottage where we stay have long dwindled to a dying fall. (Sometimes in the summer months we are part of that country-road post-concert whoosh.) And after the stilling of the child-splash chatter from the strip of imported sand on the edge of a great blue wet circle locally called Stockbridge Bowl we drop down into the deep well of silence that settles over a landscape when a long-playing record that grooved itself into a season has come to an end, and the crowds have gone away.

We are summer people as well since the family cottage where we stay has long provided a summer retreat for Anne's parents and frequent guests like us. But when the long Columbus Day weekend arrives, we immerse ourselves in a depopulated landscape, dropping down into a well of silence, shuffling out feet into four-inch thick carpets of fallen leaves and winding our psyches into the star-lit quilts of chill autumn nights. We can count on the chill; it's cool in the mountains after dark in October. The cottage, thin-walled, uninsulated, has the dank feel of abandoned shelters because no one has been inside it in weeks, turning on radiators, using the stove, flicking on the light switches. If the temperature has just dropped sharply, it can be a mind-chilling experience just to open the door. You want to step back outdoors where the cold is in the right place. 
        But that's not even the biggest difference between here and there. We an turn on the wall-unit radiators, flicks the switches on the lights, put the tea kettle on the stove, raid the cookie box... But after that there is absolutely nothing to do.
        That’s the scary part.
        No TV, no internet, the phone has been turned off. We could bring a movie and play it on our laptop if we were the kind of people who knew how to do that (we aren’t) and owned movies (we don’t).
            We do have use of a radio that brings in a couple of woodsy public channels through the mountain ridges, one of them a reliable source for classical music. One evening last month we got an earful of the modernist side of early 20^th century composer Shostakovich. A musical approach that seemed to say 'if you wanted to stick to the same old familiar stuff, you should have stayed home.'
            We bring books. Most evenings we succeed in finding acceptable background music. We sip wine if we remember to bring it. We bring our own food. Our other source of entertainment is making fires. This is the one place we can do that because we don’t have a fireplace at home.
            On the first evening we walked down to the pond to glimpse the underside of the clouds, few or no stars visible in an overcast sky. A cloud-masked moon glowed occasionally behind the thinner clouds.
            The second night the sky was clear but now the moon was well past first quarter and we saw only the brightest stars: the handle of the big dipper, the rest of its shape a fainter approximation. We checked out the heavens from the pond beach earlier that day as well, arriving just after sundown for twilight color: sky very clear, no clouds to catch the last light, some pinkish line. And a first star appearing in an absurdly bright sky, must be the evening star.
          And during the days we find places to walk in the country of autumn. This makes Anne very happy: see photos.

October Romance

     It's rendezvous season with basil. Basil wants to be pesto. Why else would it grow in such profusion? As the summer ends the basil plants grow flowers at the stem tops. You're supposed to pick these off to encourage more production of basil leaves, but inevitably I get behind and the seed stalks grow long and grow seeds. There they are in the photo (top left), happy as kings with their very own crowns of seed stalks jeweled with tiny white flowers.

            Even after I turn the leaves into pesto, I keep the flowers around. They retain a touch of the plant's balmy late-summer scent as the kitchen puts on a puffy hat and celebrates a brief happy basil season.

            October is white Montauk daisies, violet asters, late roses, a few new arrivals -- the white anemones finally blossoming from a couple of plants I introduced into the late summer program last year -- and of course mums, plenty of garden mums.

            Morning glories, especially the big blue throaty ones, they look like trumpets warming up to sing, still climb up the back of the house. I have a new generation of them under the study window this week. A small chorus of annuals -- zinnias, viola cultivars, snapdragons -- pitch into the ensemble to light up the corners.

            Then the spotted toad lilies arrive to put in their annual appearance.

            We go back a long way, these toadies and I, relatively speaking. One year, maybe the first summer in this house, I found a little nursery and florist shop in the nearby commercial center. I was innocent in the ways of Wollaston then. I would go buy coffee in the least-trafficked shop in the square just to try to keep the little guy going. It didn't happen. The shop was so empty that sometimes I heard the proprietress speak low in a sad but consoling tone of voice, taking heavy phone calls in the next room while her husband poured me my coffee. Illness in the family? I felt like an intruder.

            Even I couldn't drink enough coffee to keep this place in business.

            But in the little garden center I found a winner. The proprietor actually knew plants. In the florist side of the business, you sell cold cut flowers grown anywhere -- in the southern hemisphere, for example, around Valentine's Day. The flowers of winter in New England that time of year tend to be snow flakes, accidental creations piled up the snow, icicles, other drippings of serendipity, or ice sculptures in Boston Commons carved for First Night.

            But on the garden side he had a greenhouse packed with favorites.

            Whenever my infant garden flagged in providing new thrills that first year, which was often enough, I would wander over to the Wollaston Square garden center and ask, "What do you have that blooms this time of year?"

            By the time it got to be October, not so much.  

            But I was greedy for color, endlessly desirous of new plants. (Anne used another word: addicted.) Well, he said, there is this one unusual plant. Not too many people have heard of it.

            I certainly hadn't. But I could have made a very long list of plants I had never heard of. Then I asked, as I always did (and still do now), "How much sun does it need?"

            When the answer was "part-sun," as it often is, especially when someone wants to sell you a plant, I said 'OK we're good to go.'

            The plant is the spotted toad lily, its botanical  name Tricyrtis. The common name refers to to the spots on the flowers. On its leaves too, as I learn, but on my plant the leaves are a green monotone. I picked up the "three" in what I took to be Latin, but according to the resource I checked the genus name is actually from the Greek for "three" and "convex" because the 3 outer petals have tiny bags or swellings at the base.  I must say that "convex" is not the obvious word that leaps to mind when examining the intricacies of this flower.

            It's sometimes hard to keep track of a plant that doesn't bloom until autumn. I've planted other perennials, groundcovers mostly, in the same area, and sometimes the toad lily gets overrun and I have to remember it's there and clear out some of the invaders. I even backed it up by buying another Tricyrtis plant in another shop and planting it in another location. This patch grows taller and I'm less likely to lose track of them.

            But seeing old friends in their season is part of the romance of the garden. I've learned (at least I flatter myself that I'm on the right track) to appreciate whatever you have and offer no complaint for whatever you don't -- in gardening, as perhaps in other areas of life as well.

            Whatever is there, is good. Sometimes it's also beautiful.

Blended Heron Family

             Wading birds, I've seen my share.

            I carry the glasses, the new small lightweight ones, in my hand and am ready to see a heron pop out of the marsh grass just around the bend in the path where he's sprung and surprised me, winging gracefully and disappearing remarkably swiftly, the last few times I've gone looking for him. Of course, now that I'm ready none does.

            I stand on the trail and work on focusing the glasses. I put them down and there he is, only much farther away this time, over toward the little wooded rise called Callahan Park. Looking all the world like the classic Great Blue Heron, he flies only a little ways, then drops into some grass tall enough to hide him. I try to focus the glasses on the place where I saw him drop and immediately the bird lifts up again and flies directly into the eye of my glasses. He flies another hundred feet before dropping again into greater concealment. No reason for him to come out again until I'm gone.

            So this is my amusement for today, I think. A brief, tantalizing turn on the stage of salt marsh.

            I walk on to the new works-of-man osprey nesting platform. It's big -- and rather absurdly close to my path. So far no bird has gone near it. I spy, however, a vertical lumpish sort of shape behind it, possibly a creature sitting on a rock. I'm getting good at identifying heron postures with the naked eye. When I look with the glasses though I can't find it. However while I'm looking that way, I'm distracted by the arrival of the first heron (at least some heron) flying directly across my naked-eye field of vision. I lift the glasses to follow his flight and am surprised once more when he drops into the shallow end of the nearby body of marsh grass-bounded low water (locally called a "creek") and takes up a classical wading bird position -- not far, as I am surprised yet again to see, from a Great White Egret, a heron of another color.

            OK, are these two hanging out together now?

            Is this a mixed marriage? The dashing dark-feathered great blue and the elegant all-white egret?

            After watching them do their thing, the heron thing of standing in the water being very still so a fish will mistake their legs for grass, I turn the glasses back to that lump on a stone behind the osprey platform, find it this time, and discover there a highly condensed heron, squatting down in its crouched, sitting-tight position: Nothing much to do; I'll just wait here until I am mysteriously moved to do something else. It's hard to see the markings on this bird. I wonder if its squatness signifies some other species, a Night Heron maybe. Not a blue, then? Grayish, its neck doubled down to the shoulders. My world is thrown into doubt.

            And then I notice, right behind this figure, another white egret.

            So are these guys species swapping?

            I put the glasses back on the heron in the water and as I observe him a very small white egret -- yet another egret, probably one of this year's newbies -- walks up to the tall dark heron and pauses. Then the tall one thrusts his beak down to the small one: the class bird-parent feeding gesture. I'm not sure if it was real feeding or just a gesture. Possibly he is just standing there holding a tiny fish, or something, in his long beak waiting for a babe to walk by.

            I'm seeing more white smalls over by the squat heron side of things now too. And then a line of small water fowl -- ducks! What are ducks doing here? Is this a parliament of fowls?

            I am wholly uncertain. Doubt weakens all my judgments

            That so-called "first heron" has no visible crest feather slanting rakishly off his head. Could he actually be some kind of ibis (the which I have never seen here)?

            Only one thing seems certain. The only kind of big bird I am (almost) sure I have not seen hanging around the osprey nest platform is an osprey.

Light in the Forest

 

Flowers in the Garden of Memory:   

            The light in a grove of trees, while walking the road past Stockbridge Lake. All the trees lined straight and slender with just enough space between them to see their leaves, and all their leaves turned pale yellow or a little brownish orange, or the green thinned out on the way to turning, a pale subtle color adding to the delicate palette. And the light angled, almost flat from the setting or even now fully set sun, shining horizontally through the leaves, so we saw them, trunks and leaves lit from the top and the side and from the bottom up also, the light reflecting and reflections joining from all angles to make a vision for the eyes.

            It was like wallpaper for the world.

            The sunset, a few minutes earlier, watching it across the lake and over the line of mountain (a ridge line, really). A big cumulus cloud hovering over the ridge line like a giant zeppelin, the sort of space ship they use in sci-fi movies to show some other world, some alien super-civilization impinging on our own -- a looming cloud on the horizon that becomes in the end the whole horizon. This one though not so enormous as all that, but dominating the eye for its color, the solidity of its color. A steel gray mass in the center (just tiny cloud particles, we know, densed into darkness), lit up solid from the setting sun behind it.

            The sun has gone over the line of the mountains, but not yet over the edge of the greater convex world. So now the hovering mass is filled with a great ruddy round mouthful of color. Not exactly blood-red, but red-blooded, a sky-incarnadine statement of muscular cloud presence in a still otherwise clear-blue sky. Deep blue now. The cloud can no longer block the sun; the sun is behind and below it. It is only a kind of love game, after all. The light reaches its arms out and surrounds everything. Putting its arms around all that is. It glows, it swallows its own fire... Then, moments later, the accumulated cumulus mass turns a wine purple as the light sinks deeper, and twilight takes its own brilliantly restricted turn.

            The second day is Sunday, a sun day for the best of all suns. A great benevolent light shines on every moment of every passing image as we drive on the country ways where people live among the foliage, and the grasses they have planted, just being there. That's all they have to do, they make no more noise or commotion than the grass, less than the wind in the leaves. We see nobody.We drive along wonderful roadside stretches, miracles of revelation. When we get to the top of our lonely road, to the place where we turn into the forest, a field that is also the happiest of lawns has rolled up its grass for the season. The shorn grass lies wrapped in a spiral around itself, rounded tight in a platterful of grass-on-grass sandwich wraps, its shorn leaves now brown and stored for the winter inside its own labyrinth.

            We see clouds on the wide, silent water of Beartown Lake, the high woodland lake around which we pass in our own good time. The images of clouds are "reflections on a late September day." Grand illusions. Floating continents of appearance. We perceive them, though of course they are not there in body. If we dive into the water we will not find them, though illusions may find us. But they appear there on the surface, they look like themselves, perception is tricked. Lakes are the universe's trick mirrors, doubling the world for us.

            On a hilltop, after a short, sharp-enough and winded-climb, we find a yet higher lake that fills a mountain valley. Somebody says "the beavers." The beavers must be god's water builders then, building land out of water, moving trees to dam rivers and fill huge bowls of earth with water where nobody would expect it. On high we see them: water views, woodland banks, reflections.

            The beaver lake empties downward, falling on rock, and so a strange highland waterfall flowing fast in September drains downward into another beaver-land, a lake made swamp. We trundle down and then rise again around the marsh we thought left behind, and then open a backdoor to the mountains, a view we have no idea was there.

            It's those other mountains.

            Who and where are they? Always receding, a dwindling notion in the sky, but yet offering some silken resistance against the forces that smokily weigh against visibility. They shimmer, mirage-like, at the end of all things knowable by sight, by the senses, like the mind's last ideas.