On the railroad bed.
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.
-John Muir
Today, Christine, Waldo and I are doing another leg of the Mass Central Rail Trail. This piece starts at the intersection of Wachusett and Mill Streets in Holden and runs around 8 miles to near the intersection of Wachusett Street (not the same Wachusett Street) and East County Road in Rutland. There are three places where the trail is paved with crushed stone on top of the old railroad bed and the rest is on backcountry two-lane roads. At the moment, this is the official route and it doesn’t exactly follow along where the railroad was. The road follows a saw-tooth pattern, see-sawing back and forth as if we were in a sailboat beating into the wind. This is real country and there aren’t a lot of roads, so you have to take what you can get. I don’t know, but I suspect that the trail follows the roads the way it does because the old railroad bed lies on private property, but I don’t know that for sure.
The day is overcast and cool, a great day for Waldo, with temps in the high 50s. The ground is dry and there is only a slight breeze. We pass a few people on the crushed stone parts of the trail, but not many. There is not much traffic out here and we meet only an occasional car. Most importantly, for Waldo, there are no bikes. The one thing that stands out is that everything is so green. We’ve had a wet spring and the leafy plants have relished it, turning lanes and byways into Emerald City streets. Coming from a semi-arid part of the world, I’m always awed by just how green everything can get here in the spring and summer.
In some places, where our path leaves the old railroad bed, the bed just disappears and I can’t tell where it used to run. There are other times when it continues on into the weeds and I’m tempted to bushwhack along it to see where it goes. But that might add a number of miles to our trek because we’d have to turn back because of dense overgrowth, fences or no trespassing signs. So I make a mental note of it and file it away for possibly another day. The main point is to walk the entire Mass Central Rail Trail as it is, not the railroad bed as it was (although that does hold some temptation as well).
Waldo is having a good time, out front running point. We walked so much over the years that he knows how to walk safely on the side of the road without my giving him any guidance. It’s probably also true that he finds the better things to sniff over there. The point is, I don’t have to continually watch him and redirect him to keep him safe. If there was heavy traffic, I would get nervous and shorten his leash, but there’s not and he’s doing just fine at far end of his 26-foot leash.
As we walk along, talking about politics or the state of the world, Christine stops, bends over, picks up a leaf and stares at it. “Whatcha got?” I ask.
“Dunno,” she says. Christine is pretty good at botany and usually knows the plants she notices, but not always.
I look it up on the app on my phone. Because we’ve had such a wet spring, plant life has proliferated. We find weigela, dames rocket, corn speedwell, purple loosestrife and field horsetail — none of which I’ve seen on the Assebet River Rail Trail. Some of it, like the weigela, is not native to this part of the world and was transplanted here by somebody at sometime. It occurs to me that many of the plants we see probably have an interesting history of how they ended up when and where we happen to be walking.
The last part of our walk is on old railroad bed and runs straight up to where it Ts onto Wachusett Street, where we parked our car. It is as wide as a two-lane street, surfaced with crushed stone and is bordered by maple trees on both sides. This part has to be on private land, because there are small blue and white tubes that run between the tree trunks, connecting them all together and running off to a collection tank somewhere out of sight. After collection, the sap is boiled down to make maple syrup. We’ve seen this kind of collection system before, on some of our many treks, but it always interests me because I know nothing about harvesting for syrup. There are a lot of maple trees here in New England; they’re everywhere. But there aren’t that many stands of sugar maples.
We get back to our cars and head home, yet one more piece of the mass Central Rail Trail has passed under our feet. The next piece is short, only about 2 miles or so, and ends on a 10 mile or so stretch that we’ve already walked. But that’s for another day. I will never live long enough to wander down all the interesting highways and byways that exist in the world.
And that’s a good thing.
The sugar maple sap collection system.