Byron Brumbaugh

Pre-dawn on the rail-trail.

You don’t always need a plan.  Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go and see what happens.

-Mandy Hale

It’s 4:45 AM and still dark.  I have to use a flashlight to make sure I pick up all of what Waldo deposits.  It’s overcast and sunrise isn’t due until about 5:30.  Still, the city lights, although none shine directly onto the trail, provide enough ambient glow that I can easily make out the tarmac as it winds its way through the trees of Marlborough and Hudson.  The temperature hoovers around 70, even at this early hour, and the forecast is for heat in the low nineties at around 4 PM.  Yesterday it was 77 degrees at dawn!  There’s also a 45% chance of rain from 6 to 8 AM.

I haven’t been awake for very long and my hazy mind slips its grip on the world twenty-first century man has created and wanders down the byways of the here and now, surrounded by fecund Mother Nature.  Like Waldo, as he sniffs his way along the trail, my attention goes with the flow as we walk along.  There’s a slight breeze as twilight slowly brightens the leaden sky.  It wanders its way through the trees, enticing the leaves to sing in sibilant whispering song.  Birds rise early and, progressively, more and more of them sing out their own morning greetings as we start out on the rail-trail.  I’ve given it some thought and I think a good guess as to why people feel that bird song is cheerful is due to genetic memory.  When the birds sang, it was, to our ancestors, like a town crier calling out, “All’s well!”  When the birds became silent, that was a time to start looking around for some danger that our avian neighbors perceived, like an approaching predator.  The birds, today, seem to be raising a rally cry for a good day.

I notice Waldo saunters along, investigating things beyond my perception and I leave him to pursue his curiosity as I pursue mine.  I smell leftover skunk scent and I make sure Waldo stays on the trail and away from any bushes or holes where Pepe Le Pew might be hiding.  I also try to keep him away from the mud puddles left over from the last rainstorm.  He still has plenty of interesting places to explore and he wanders jauntily down the path with tail wagging.

After about a mile and a half of my loosely watching the greenery as we trod by, it starts to sprinkle.  This is a little earlier than forecast, but this is New England and anything can happen at any time.  A 45% chance of rain means a 45% percent chance of getting 100% wet, so I did bring a rain jacket and pants, if needed.  The sprinkle slowly becomes a solid drizzle and I put on the jacket.  It increases and I put on the pants, which is a pain in the butt because I have to drag the legs over my hiking shoes.  I do this standing up as there is no good place to sit where we are.  After hopping along on one foot and then the other, I finally get them on and we continue on our way.  Waldo has been patiently waiting for me while I was putting on the pants and I wonder what he’s thinking.  Sure, Waldo, you can laugh, you who always wear your all-weather birthday suit.

We don’t go very far and the rain lessens and then stops.  In 70-degree humid weather, the rain suit can be uncomfortable because it doesn’t breathe.  Exercise creates body heat that accumulates under the impermeable plastic that doesn’t allow my proliferating sweat to evaporate.  So, I take it off, roll it up and stow it away under a belt.  The pants, they stay on.   I don’t like it when Waldo laughs at me.  Of course, it’s not long after I take the jacket off and it starts raining again.  And so it goes.  For six miles.  For a little over two hours.  The whole time I’m swimming in the environmental ambience.

The sun is fully up before too much time passes, although you wouldn’t know it because it’s overcast.  There are no shadows, just an ever-brightening greyness, sometimes wet, sometimes not.  On a clear day, you can measure how long the sun is up or how long until it sets with your hands.  One of your fingers, held at arms-length, covers about 5 degrees of heaven.  The sun and moon also take up about 5 degrees of space.  If the distance from the rim of the sun to the horizon is four fingers, it’s about one hour above the horizon.  But on a grey day like today, it’s like navigating in a fog on the high seas.  You’re better off looking at your watch.

After a little more than two hours, we get back to the car.  I put Waldo in the passenger seat and start the car.  Like a rubber band being stretched out from its natural relaxed condition, my mind is pulled back and shackled to the twenty-first century with thoughts of traffic, to-do lists, and other mundane matters.  But the rail-trail is still there, waiting for us to return tomorrow.

And once again leave the human-created world behind to drift down Mother Nature’s meandering existential rivulets.

Dawn over Fort Meadow Reservoir.

This here be farm country.

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

-Masanobu Fukuoka

From West Warren, we head west down Main Street, Route 67, to Warren.  There’s a little traffic, but there are also wide shoulders and, occasionally, poorly maintained sidewalks.  In Warren, we turn right and go down East Road.  From there, it’s a straight shot to our destination, Brookfield, 7.5 miles away.  East Road is a sometimes hilly, small, treelined road that meanders through some beautiful farmland and pastures.   We see a few small fields of corn, whose stalks are not more than a foot or so high, lots of grassland and a few cows.  Many of the fields have picturesque large red barns and farmhouses — the kind of scene you might expect to see as a pictorial example of the word “pastoral” in a dictionary.  Waldo seems very comfortable in this environment – he was born on a farm in Pennsylvania.

We pass a meadow where a farmer is putting hay into large round bales.  Each round bale has the same amount of hay as about twenty square bales.  When I was eighteen, I spent one summer helping my uncle put up a lot of hay in the San Luis Valley of Colorado.  We stacked it with a device called a stacker (go figure) that threw the stuff up on top of an ever-growing mountain of grass.  As this was going on, two of us kids got on top and pushed the hay around with pitchforks and stomped it down until we had huge square piles.  This was called “stacked hay.”  I also helped collect one-hundred-pound square bales of the stuff by throwing them onto a wagon which we then had to unload onto huge piles many bales high.  It was all hard work.  This guy we passed was working alone, using a machine that rolled the grass up into round bales as tall as a man and about as thick.  The machine then wrapped it in plastic, stretched taut, and put it on the back of a truck.  I’m sorry, but that’s just cheating.  There’s no other way to describe it.

It’s hot, in the mid to high seventies, and humid.  I’m awfully glad I’m not baling hay today.  Not the way I used to do it.  Waldo is panting, but doesn’t want to drink a lot of water – he’s probably sloshing with all the water I already gave him.  He seems to be just fine.  Sweat is soaking my shirt and running down my brow.  Sometimes, the road goes between grassy fields where there is little shade.  Along one such stretch, we come across a large orange trumpeting bush and we both make for what shade it provides.  Waldo snuggles in at its base and lays down.  He’s panting pretty hard, but refuses more water.  The bush is next to a fence on the other side of which is a house and a huge, well-maintained classical old red barn sitting on the edge of an expansive mowed field of grass.  We stop and wait for Waldo to cool off a bit and appreciate the property.  It’s not long and a man comes out of the barn.

We say hello and wave.  The man yells back, asking us to wait, he wants to talk to us – his tone is not confrontational, he just seems eager for some human interaction.  We’re always up for that, so we wait.  Within a couple of minutes, he comes over, wearing a mask and keeping his distance, and we exchange pleasantries.  Introductions are made, we explain we’re walking to P’town and tell the man where we’re from.  The man tells us of the history of the farm and how he was in construction and excavation, but is now retired.  He seems reluctant to let us go on our way.  Maybe he doesn’t get many visitors out this way.  But it’s getting hotter and we still have a ways to go, so we wish him well and continue on our way.

We don’t go a hundred feet and a passing car stops and the driver calls out to us from an open window that he just saw a large bear come out of the woods up ahead and disappear down a driveway.  We thank him, I shorten Waldo’s leash and the three of us humans become vigilant, cautiously looking for a big old Ursidae.  I’m thinking about what I’m going to do if we come across one.  I’ve heard that they will avoid you if you make a lot of noise — they want to have less to do with you than you do with them.  But we walk on to our destination without confrontation.

You know, if you step out your door, interesting adventure abounds.

All you need is an open heart.

Keep on truckin’.

Waldo looking for shade.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by…

-Robert Frost

West Warren, another 7.5 miles down the road, is our next destination.  Warren was first settled in 1664 and officially incorporated in 1741.  It was named after General Joseph Warren, who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill.  West Warren’s population is 1,133.

We start out from where we left off at the Swift River Boat Launch parking lot in Belchertown.  The boat launch is next to the Swift River and is, apparently, a very popular place in the summer, even during COVID.  There are many cars and people about — some with fishing gear and some with boats.  And it’s only 7 AM.

Christine and I, with Karen’s assent, have designated Karen our pathfinder.  She is incredibly good at it – she and Google.  We like to avoid busy highways and major streets because they not only have heavy traffic, they are broad, open, shadeless, hot and relatively ugly.  Somehow, Karen is able to find backroads, sometimes little more than seldom used paths, that don’t take us out of our way.  I can help some, with rail and other trails, when they’re available and going our way, by means of apps and websites, but if there is a backroad or path that we can follow to get to where we’re going, Karen can find it.  Waldo is very grateful.  He tolerates the highways when he has to, but I can tell he doesn’t like it much.  Neither do I.

Today, our path from the boat ramp leads down a backcountry road with little traffic.  It’s shady and cloudy with a soft breeze and really quite pleasant.  Trees abound and are close at hand.  The temperature is cool, in the sixties — I don’t have to worry about Waldo getting heatstroke today.  We aren’t gone long and we make a right turn onto a grassy path that wanders away into some woods.  This is Waldo country, for sure, but it probably has a lot of ticks.  Waldo is protected – I give him tick medicine that kills the damn bugs when they bite him.  Me?  I tuck my pants into my socks to keep them away from my skin and then follow along after a wagging tail and bounding ball of fur.  Our way is paved with short grass and swathed in green undergrowth.  There are squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks about, I’m sure, but they stay well hidden.  The birds sing happily and flit about in the sky.  Waldo is so happy out here in the wild.  In less than a half-mile, we come across a tree that has recently fallen across our path – its leaves are still a fresh green.  We climb through the foliage and under the trunk and continue on our way.  Waldo’s not bothered by the fallen tree at all and readily plows his way through the branches.  I think the trouble he had in the past was because a limb was moving in what he perceived to be a threatening way.  Nothing like that today.

Not much further along, we come across a sign that says, “Bridge Out.”  The bridge is intact, but there are barricades placed across the path so no car can pass.  It doesn’t appear to me that any motorized vehicle has been down that way in a long time.  The path eventually joins a paved backroad and then joins with Ware Road, followed by Route 67.  We’re back on busy roads and I have to pull in Waldo’s leash from its 8-foot maximum.  Our car is parked just off of Route 67 in the West Warren Senior Center parking lot in central West Warren.  My dog-walking app says we’ve come 7.5 miles, but it doesn’t seem like it has been that far.

I used to have a motorcycle, a Harley Davidson Superglide Custom, and I’ve wandered through this area in the past.  When you have a bike, the weather gets warm and you have the time off, you get an itch that must be scratched.  You roam.  It’s more interesting when you take the backroads, so you do.  You don’t have any particular destiny, you’re just out to ride.  But this wandering was never so intimate as what I experience out here on foot.  In the woods.  With friends.  With Waldo.

However you go, sometimes you take the road less traveled because of an inner need.

And sometimes you take it because of the shade.

Definitely, a road less taken!

Meanwhile, back in Marlborough…

You get older, and you realize there are no answers, just stories.  And how we love them.

-Garrison Keillor

We’re taking about a 12-day hiatus from our trek – life maintenance has intervened.  Nothing serious, just stuff that needs doing.  Waldo and I continue our daily walk on the Marlborough rail-trail, however.  Rain has come to visit us and brought cooler temperatures with it.  When possible, I wait until 6 AM to get up, instead of 4 AM.

I still need to talk myself into getting out of bed at that hour. The alarm goes off.  I turn it off.  My body says, “Leave me alone!”  I reach over and grab my phone and check the weather.  Can I wait a bit longer and snooze, or do I have to get up so we can be done with the walk before the hot comes?  Is it going to rain and, if so, when?  I make a decision and my starter motor grinds to get the pump going that starts the activity-sustaining juices flowing.  This takes awhile and I usually solve a crossword or play some Mahjong to get the brain circuitry warmed up.  Waldo sees me stirring, gets out of bed and lies near the bedroom door, which I keep closed, eyes on me, waiting patiently.

Later, rather than sooner, we’re on the trail.  Waldo is up ahead, sniffing, looking up at something I can’t see in the trees and grabbing sticks.  I look around, appreciative of the cool morning air, the bird song, the rustling leaves and the squirrel running along the fence rail.  And then I’m off, somewhere else, thinking about this or that.  It is so hard to stay in the moment — temptations abound that drag my attention elsewhere.  Part of this is habit and part is the delusion that if I think about something, I can exercise some control over it.  But when I’m thinking about stuff, what I’m really doing is telling myself a story.

People have argued forever about what makes humans distinct from other animals.  Our ancestors were tool makers – yes, but that’s not unique to mankind.  People are self-aware – yes, but is it not true of dogs as well?  Prove it.  Good luck with that.  In the end, it seems to me, humans are just at an extreme of a continuum, not entirely distinct from other animals, we just have traits that are more exaggerated.  I’ve been thinking, recently, that one of those more exaggerated traits is story-telling.  We are a story-telling species.  Homo Narrativus.  Our minds are constantly full of stories that we tell ourselves.  We make ‘em up, draw them out and then we believe them!  We objectify our stories and posit the existence of things outside of ourselves that support the validity of the stories.  Those envisioned things then bring about what happens to us and we tell a story about it.  It’s all very circular.

But there are rules.  Logic dictates a most important rule: any story we make up must be consistent with the other stories we already tell ourselves.  Logic does not tolerate contradictions.  So, a new story must be relevant in some way and, at the same time, not contradict our other stories.  If it does, logic forces us to amend or discard it, or our previous stories must be changed to remove the contradiction.  This is very interesting because it is not at all a certain thing that this can always be done.  A man named Kurt Godel proved that, within the bounds of number theory, no theory can be both complete and self-consistent.   If you demand completeness, there will always be some contradictions somewhere.  If you demand self-consistency, there will always be truths that you cannot find from your theory.  Some thinkers have suggested that any formal system of thought suffers from this same problem.  No world view can be both self-consistent and complete.

So, our efforts at telling ourselves a comprehensive story that follows the rules of logic, that we can take as a consistent world view, may be doomed.  Yet many of us do it anyway.  At the very least it is alluringly distracting.  I’m not so sure that Waldo does this at all.  If he does, I’m pretty sure that it’s at the other end of the story-telling spectrum from where I sit.  Sigh.  It does get me out of bed in the morning so I can enjoy our walks.  But then it distracts me from being in the moment so I can really enjoy the experience.

Being human is just so complicated.

Waldo knows this is a place of natural beauty and wonder.

Are you sure this is the right way?

Summer has set in with its usual severity.

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Sun, Sol (Latin), Helios (Greek), Ra (Egyptian), Khorsheed (Farsi), Shams (Arabic), Taiyang (Chinese), Taiyo (Japanese), Tsehaiyi (Amheric), whatever you want to call it, can be hot.  A huge ball of ionized hydrogen, squeezed by gravity to create temperatures at its center on the order of twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit, is hot enough for the core to become a huge thermonuclear bomb.  All the energy this continuous explosion creates is shot into the surrounding space as electromagnetic radiation and high-energy particles.  The Earth’s magnetic field protects Terran life from most of the high energy particles, but the electromagnetic energy shines through. The atmosphere is transparent to much of this radiation and the air is not directly heated by it.  It warms the ground, though, and the ground warms the air.  This means the coolest time of day is just before dawn and the hottest around 4 PM.

The forecast for the next leg of our journey, the Southeast side of Belchertown, 6.6 miles away from our last stop on the northwestern side of Belchertown, is for a high of 89 degrees (at 4 PM) and a low of 64 degrees at 6 AM (dawn is at 5:15 AM).  No doubt about it, we gotta leave early.  We agree on starting our sweaty slog at 7 AM.  The temperature is forecast to be 68 degrees, not bad at all, but by the time we finish, at around 10 AM, it’s gonna be 77 degrees.  Burn!  Our meeting place is about an hour and ten minutes away from where I live, so this means Waldo and I have to leave before 5:50 AM.  I have to get up, dress, walk Waldo for his morning poop and pee, and feed us before we go, so I’m waking up at about 4 AM.

Waldo, heck, he don’t care about getting up early.  We’ve been getting up at 4 AM for the past few days to avoid the worst of the heat and he’s ready and eager to go, even though it’s still dark out.  I have to admit, the predawn effort is worth it, once I’ve actually gotten my butt outta bed.  It’s a great time to be out and about in nature — animal life of all kinds is stirring, birds are singing, the shadows are long, cool breezes blow, and there is an inherent pastel beauty shown off by the nascent day.

We use Google to find our route to P’town and the stopping point for the day.   Highways and major streets are avoided, rail-trails are used when possible and minor streets and roads are otherwise preferred.  We look for a stopping place, along the route we choose, that is somewhere around 7 miles from the starting point and looks like it should have a place to park a car.  Google is not perfect.  Today, when we get to our chosen end point, there is no place to park.  We find an alternate that does, but it’s 9.9 miles away from the start.  Ah well.  This last-minute change in plan means we start late, about 7:20.  It’s 63 degrees out.  Not too bad.

We start out and about 2 miles down the road, Google sends us onto a two-rutted track that runs south alongside the Quabbin Reservoir.  It’s well-shaded and quite pleasant.  A couple more miles and this turns into a grassy path, still delightful and relatively cool.  Then we return to suburban streets and eventually a highway (Route 9).  By this time, it’s 10:10 and the temperature is 82 degrees – and we are still quite far from our stopping point.  It was forecast to be 77 at 10 AM.  Damn.  We started late, we chose a longer path to take, made even longer when Google sent us off into the woods, and the weather is a good 5 degrees hotter than forecast.  We humans can take it – we sweat profusely.   Waldo could be in trouble, though.  The only way he can cool off is to pant and rest in the shade.

As the day wears on, I can tell Waldo’s getting well heated.  He’ll find some shade, plop down and pant like a racing steam locomotive.  I give him as much water as he wants and I let him tell me when he’s ready to continue.  Needless to say, we stop frequently and it takes us even longer to complete our hike.  Finally, at 11:35, we reach the waiting oven that’s our car.  The outside temperature is 87 degrees.  The sun is the source of energy that sustains almost all life, but there are times when it is just too much.  Waldo is a real trooper and, although ready to collapse from the heat and exhaustion, he’s fine.  I don’t want to do that to him again, though.  We’re going to have to leave even earlier, before dawn if necessary.  Sigh.

Our next end-point is still to be Googled — that ain’t perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got.  It will be someplace south of Ware, I think.

For now, once again in the AC at home, it’s chill, rehydrate and rest.

Oh man, bright lights! Bright lights!

Trees, so many trees!

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

-Confucius

The Norwottuck Rail-Trail takes a turn to the southeast at Amherst on its run toward Belchertown, population 15,134.  The area was first settled in 1731 and was eventually incorporated as Belchertown, named after a Royal Governor of Massachusetts.  It seems that a lot of towns out here were named for governors.  To Belchertown’s east lies the southwestern tip of the Quabbin Reservoir, built between 1930 and 1939, which serves, along with the Wachusett Reservoir, completed in 1905, as the water supply for Boston.  I found out The Belchertown State School used to be located in the town from 1922 until 1994 when it was closed due to poor conditions and the inhumane treatment of its residents.  What’s left of it lies some distance from where we’re walking, but it might be worth visiting someday.  I’d wager there are some interesting stories lurking there – and spooky.  Our goal is to walk to the end of the rail-trail then turn east to Route 9, a total distance of 8.7 miles.

We’re not afoot for long and we’re engulfed in thick woods.  The trees look old, but they can’t be that old.  New England settlers cut down some 80% of the forests that predated their arrival.  The land was cleared for agriculture for over 200 years some 350 years ago.  In the past 100 years, after farming moved west because richer land was found there, forests returned and now cover 75% of New England.  The trees that grow here now include white pine, red maple, northern red oak, red spruce, red pine, sugar maple, yellow birch, American beech, eastern hemlock, balsam fir, and white spruce, to name just a few.  Christine points out a hemlock tree and tells us that we must be passing a wet area because that’s where you find hemlock.  Sure enough, just a few yards off the trail are lowlands that, though dry right now, look like they are often boggy.

The Daniel Shays Highway runs down the western shore of Quabbin Reservoir into Belchertown.   Daniel Shays was an American Revolutionary soldier who led the Shay’s rebellion in 1786-87.  The rebellion was in response to post-war high taxes and ended at the time of the Constitutional Convention.  The havoc the rebellion wreaked influenced the framing of the Constitution and was a factor in the evolution of the US government under the Articles of Confederation into what followed under the Constitution of the United States.  Daniel Shays was a resident of Pelham, just to the north of Belchertown.

Christine and Karen are remarkable walking companions.  Karen is a musician and plays the organ.  She loves to read and has adventured around the world.  Like me, she is a bleeding-heart liberal.  We have a lot in common and never run out of things to talk about.  Christine is very intelligent, extremely well read and stimulating to talk to.  She is always curious and explores our surroundings and interesting vehicles we pass.  I am blessed with companions that make the miles go quickly and ease our plodding progress.  We talk about politics, often with playful banter, the flora we pass, the antique vehicles we encounter, the history of the areas we go through and just about everything else that comes up on our trek.

Waldo, while still my puppy, is no longer the frenetic ball of fur he once was.  He herds Christine back into line when she wanders (or at least tries to).  I can, when the traffic isn’t too bad, comfortably let him guide us at the front end of the leash at its full extension, about 26 feet.  If he strays, I say, “This way!” and he turns back to look at me to see how I want him to change course.  When I shorten leash, he walks next to me without too much fuss.  “Wait!” brings him to a halt until I say, “Okay.”  When we stop for a breather, he plops on the ground next to us.  It is no longer a big job to take him for a walk.  I don’t think this is due as much to training as it is to his maturing into a young dog.  That and repetition, lots and lots of repetition.  And maybe the CBD oil.  Most importantly, he enjoys our walks as I enjoy walking with him.

We’re making slow, but steady progress.

P’town, we’re coming!

Lots of welcome shade!

Old railroad bridge over the Connecticut River.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

-James Baldwin

The day is warm, but not excessively so.  It is within Waldo limits, although not by much.  As we leave Northampton for Amherst, we’re on the Norwottuck Rail-Trail (named after the Norwottuck Indian Tribe), and we’re mostly blessed with cool green shade.  A slight breeze adds to our well-being and we are quite comfortable.  Waldo is his usual happy self and he trots along in the lead, tail wagging as he goes.

We left the bikeway about 0.3 miles from where we started today and, shortly after, we came across what was once a railroad bridge, built by the Central Massachusetts Railroad and leased by the Boston and Maine Railroad.  It is now part of the rail-trail and crosses the Connecticut River a short distance north of Route 9’s bridge.  The rail-trail bridge is quite long and narrow, I don’t think there was ever more than a single set of tracks there, and it passes high above the water as it also has to cross over an island.  I can see the Route 9 bridge and there is a string of cars stuck there, waiting for a light to change.  I’d rather be where I am, doing what I’m doing.  Green shade beckons from the far side of the bridge.

The country on the East side of the Connecticut River is flatter; we’ve left the Berkshire Mountains behind.  There are large tracts of farmland growing corn and other plants near where we walk.  It’s hard to identify what’s there because it is still early in the season, but the corn you can see.  The trail runs straight as laser light, to the northeast, for miles, tunneling through the foliage as if boring through jade.  There are benches strategically placed every so often, for the weary, and next to them are boulders engraved with pictures of the American bullfrog, or the spotted salamander among other things.

We’re headed into academia country; the Amherst area is home to five colleges, including The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Smith College, Amherst college, Hampshire College and Mount Holyoke College.  In non-pandemic times, I’m sure the rail-trail is a welcome retreat for the students and faculties.  We do pass young people out walking and biking, but no more than Waldo and I pass on a typical day on the Marlborough rail-trail.

In Hadley, population 5,346, a few miles to the west of Amherst, we cross what looks like a grassy boulevard, with streets on both sides.  It is the Hadley town common and was once surrounded by a palisade that protected the town from the Norwottuck Indian attacks of 1675 or 1676.  There is a legend that “The Angel of Hadley” saved the settlers during that conflict.  It is believed that this godsend was William Goffe, one of the English judges who condemned King Charles I to death during the English Civil War, who was hiding out in Hadley.

Amherst (population 40,046) was home to such notable people as Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and Noah Webster.  It was first settled in 1727 and became a township in 1759.  Its name came from Jeffrey Amherst, the first Baron Amherst, who was Commander-in-Chief of the forces of North America During the French and Indian War.

Waldo is more interested in natural history.  He sees the world through his nose, exploring it not through historical glasses, but through minutely sensing the plethora of odors that bathe the air he breathes.  He doesn’t care how the smells got to be how they are, or what preceded them, he just tries to figure out what they say.  I wonder what they do tell him – God knows, though I can’t smell much of it, there is a lot of nature out here.  There are plenty of sticks around, too, and Waldo happily bounds down the trail, with one or more in his mouth.  I’m convinced they serve as a security blanket for him.

Once back to the car we left in Amherst, we complete another seven miles on our journey to the cape.  History abounds all around us, both social and natural, and, as we walk along, we soak ourselves in them as only you can by being there.

Next stop, Belchertown, another seven miles away.

Nice, shady, green and cool. Walking on rail-trails beat slogging it out on roads!

On the Northampton Bikeway.

Most young people find botany a dull study.  So it is, as taught from the textbooks from schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

-John Burrows

From Chesterfield, we walked to Williamsburg, population 2,489, 7.1 miles.  Along the way, we left State Route 143 behind and followed Mass Route 9 for about a mile.  The current population of Williamsburg descends from loggers who moved into the area to harvest the hardwood forest that was there in the latter eighteenth century.  The town lies next to the Mill River and is quiet, a nice place to chill.  The walk from Chesterfield was mostly downhill and pleasant as we paralleled Meekin Brook.  The traffic was light and Waldo seemed quite comfortable.

Leaving Williamsburg, we followed Route 9 for about a mile and a half and then took a sharp left turn up a slight incline to the Northampton Bikeway.  It, too, is a rail-trail that once carried trolley-cars from Leeds to Northampton alongside the Mill River.  Once on the bikeway, we are wrapped in arboreal shade and surrounded by New England greenery.  Having spent most of my life in the West, where the countryside is covered in yellows and browns, the place feels idyllic, bathed in so much verdure.  If I let my imagination go and look hard enough, I feel I just might be able to see an elf or a fairy hiding in the underbrush amongst the flowering weeds.  The bikeway is paved and relatively flat.  Some botanist, perhaps with time on his hands due to the Coronavirus, left messages in chalk on the side of the tarmac, informing the passerby of different species of plants.  He points out the presence of Silver Maple, European Elm, Purple Trillium, Swallow Wort, Rosa Rugosa and others.  It revives my faith in humanity to find that there are people out there who indulge in their better nature and leave behind such simple footprints that are so friendly and heartwarming.  On the right, down a steep hill, runs the Mill River, white in places where it flows over stone and boulder.

Waldo is very happy on this leg of our journey.  Far from the stress of sharing the way with large, noisy, stinking, scary mechanical beasts, he trots along, doing his Waldo thing, with sticks in his mouth, taking in all the new olfactory stimulus.  We don’t see very many animals, squirrels and chipmunks, for example, that we’re used to seeing in Marlborough.  Birds are out in force, though, and serenade us as we plod along.

We pass others, but not so many that our social distancing is challenged.  There are a few bikers, and hikers, many wearing masks, others not (we do not as long as we are outside and can maintain our distance).  There are no groups of three or more people and the four of us are not grouped together.  Waldo is out front at the end of his leash and the other three of us are often strung out in a line behind.  Sometimes, two of us are together as we discuss this or that (today, botany), but, mostly, we leave each other to their own experience and assimilation of this gest.

We pass through Leeds, a suburb of Northampton, population 28,726.  There were textile mills along the Mill River in Leeds, including some producing silk.  A dam burst upriver in 1874 which took out many of these mills, though some were rebuilt.  Today, the place is quiet and, I suspect, is mostly a bedroom community for Northampton proper.  The larger part of the city lies next to the Connecticut River to the east.  It is an academic, artistic, music and counterculture hub.  It is the most liberal medium-sized city in the United States.  Sounds like my kind of place.  We are tired, stiff, hot and sweaty when we reach our end point, a Stop and Shop parking lot just a few yards off the Bikeway.  Waldo has his tongue out, panting like a choo-choo train, and seems eager to call it a day.  Another 7.3 miles has passed beneath our boots.

Next time, we cross the Connecticut River and plod on to Amherst.

Leeds, 1865 to 1950s.

Beautiful meadow!

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

-T. S. Elliot

Our P’town-or-bust path winds its way through the Berkshire Mountains, which are more hills than mountains and, at times, alongside the Housatonic River gorge.  As we walk up hill and down, we go through forested country and next to wide swaths of beautiful pastureland.  Christine cares for several rescue horses, cows, chickens, and even a pig.  She doesn’t have much pastureland and she drools whenever we pass a broad, flat, grassy meadow.  “Oh, the moos would love it out here,” she coos with a besmitten leer.  Karen and I roll our eyes and continue on down the road.  Traffic is light and there aren’t many people out and about.  We are mostly left alone, except for the occasional “Hello” as we pass.

When we passed through Dalton, MA, we came across a sign in front of an old brick building that read “Crane Paper Company.”

“Isn’t Crane the sole source of paper for US currency?” said Christine.  It’s a pleasure to walk with such good and interesting people as Christine and Karen – conversations with Waldo tend to be a bit one-sided and mostly in my head.  Christine is very well-read and she was right.  The company bought its first paper mill in 1770 and sold paper to Paul Revere who used it to print the American Colonies’ first paper money.  Today, it makes bank note paper for several other countries as well.  Who’da thunk that the source of all that green is a small town in western Massachusetts?  I find it surprising, and pleasantly so.

The road meanders alongside the Housatonic River.  In hilly places, it rushes over large boulders and down narrow defiles, making that soothing gushing, slapping, gurgling sound that is the basis for many a bedside sound-maker.  The temperature is a good ten degrees cooler and the river is bathed in shadow cast by an enswathing deciduous forest and its undergrowth.  Idyllic in tone, it soothes our tortured step as we plod along.  Waldo, distracted by the many new and interesting smells, noses about here and there, taking it all in.

Now that we are in the more rural parts of western Massachusetts, Waldo is enjoying himself more.  There are fewer cars rushing by, lots of new smells and an abundance of sticks.  Outside of the forested areas, there is less shade than on the Marlborough rail-trail (that runs between Marlborough and Hudson), because the highway is wider, and Waldo drinks a lot more water.  I have to watch him closely and make sure he gets all he needs to drink.  Avoiding the hotter times of the day is going to be essential too.  I can see it coming.

It’s nice to be walking somewhere different.  As much as I like the rail-trail in Marlborough, and I never tire of it, walking somewhere totally new is a welcomed change.  I have to be out walking Waldo anyway, so we might as well change things up a bit.  I never suffer from are-we-there-yet-itis because my walks with Waldo never end.  All Waldo-walks are of the to-be-continued-tomorrow sort.  We soon will be coming to a bike trail (Northampton Bikeway that runs from Haydenville to Northampton) that connects to the Norwottuck Rail-Trail (that runs from Northampton to Belchertown) — it will be nice to be able to follow a path that isn’t next to traffic.  The trail passes through Northampton, crosses the Connecticut River and then continues on to Belchertown.  The Connecticut River has become a waypoint for me because it’s close to where it will take us an hour to drive to where we start instead of two.  Belchertown is near the bottom of the Quabbin Reservoir, which serves as one of the sources of water for Boston, and is close to being in the middle of the state.  We are making slow progress, indeed.

The four of us are on a trek of discovery, doing it the way it used to be done.  On foot.  One step at a time.  Out in the open.  Among the forces of nature.  We walk along, taking in what we’re passing through and soaking up what we can.  We’re spent at the end and, as we drive back to the car we left at the start, I’m always amazed at how far we came.  It didn’t seem that far when we walked it.

And we still have some two hundred and sixty miles to go.

Rail-trail in our near future!

At least Williamsburg is downhill.

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.

-Marquis de Lafayette

So far, our trek from the New York border to Provincetown (P’town in the vernacular) has taken us 8 miles to Pittsfield (population 42,533), then 6.5 miles to Dalton (population 6,569), 6.8 miles to Peru (population 847), 8 miles to Worthington (population 1,156) and lastly, 5.9 miles to Chesterfield (population 1,222), for a total of 35.2 miles.  Chesterfield’s about fifteen miles or so from Northampton and the Connecticut River.  We are making slow progress.

We’ve been able to do this in cool weather and we’ve picked only dry days to go.  Typically, we would meet up at about 10:30 AM and drive to our starting point, roughly 2 hours away.  We then start our walk around 12:30 to 1 PM.  The days are warming up, though, and we will only be able to do this as long as the days stay cool.  Soon, we will have to get up before dawn so we can finish our walk before it gets much above 75 degrees.  Our next leg is from Chesterfield, MA to Williamsburg, MA, another 6.8 miles down the road and the day we’ve picked for it is forecast to have a high of 70 degrees — a nice temperature to walk up hills.

Waldo is a great walking companion and causes little trouble as we walk along.  I suppose the 75-degree requirement, forcing us to leave in the early hours on hot days, is a nuisance in some ways, but it also makes it more comfortable for everyone and the women go along with it with only a teasing objection.  Christine is an animal person and enjoys having Waldo with us.  Karen is tolerant of Waldo and he stays pretty much to himself, doing his Waldo thing, and gives Karen no reason to object to his presence.

The worst part of each walk is the two-hour drive to our starting point.  Waldo and I take one car and Christine and Karen, the other.  Waldo doesn’t like car rides much and he sits in the passenger seat next to me, squirming and nudging my right arm with his nose, trying to get me to pet him.  He paws me in the chest, to press his point, and nervously licks me, the console and the touch-screen radio, changing the stations often.  I drive along, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on Waldo’s back, giving him reassuring rubs and pets (and changing the radio station back to where I want it).  This only stops when we reach our destination.

The two-hour trip back home is exhausting.  Waldo is more chillaxed, spent and lethargic.  But I have to stay awake and alert, even though I, too, am all played out and ready to rest.  At least the radio stays on a single station.  Once we get home, Waldo and I eat, drink and take a well-earned nap.

We’ve been able to arrange each leg of our walk to be 6 to 9 miles long.  It’s interesting that towns in western Massachusetts are right around 6 miles apart, which is close to our comfortable endurance.  But maybe that’s not coincidental.  When these towns were established, walking and horse-powered transportation was the rule and maybe that was a factor in deciding why they are where they are.

We keep our eyes open and, every so often, interesting things reveal themselves.  I remember when we were walking along between Pittsfield and Dalton, Christine stopped and looked at the side of the road.  “I wonder what that means,” she said, staring at a sign which said, “The Lafayette Trail.”

“Maybe Lafayette was involved in some Revolutionary Way battles out this way,” said Karen.

“I’m no expert,” I said, “but I don’t remember any battles out this way.”

“Hmmm,” said Karen.  “Grist for the Google mill.”

Once home, we did look it up.  It turns out that from August 1824 to September 1825, Lafayette, the last surviving Major General of the Revolutionary War, went on a 24 state (the total number of states at the time) farewell tour.  The route we are taking is along the path he took on his way through western Massachusetts.  Known today as state highway Route 143, it is two-laned, paved and very rural.

We are discovering our heritage and the lay of the land as we make our way to P’town.

All it takes is boots on the ground.

Karen and Christine on their way, one step at a time.