Category Archives: Road trips

At the Massachusetts State House

“Join Us at the State House January 2,” said the announcement from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom To Marry, or RCFM.

Join us for an ALL DAY RALLY at the State House in Boston as we ask legislators to stop the discriminatory ballot initiative. Tuesday, January 2, 2007. All day, beginning at 7:30 AM. We welcome supporters to come whenever you can — before work, lunchtime, after work or school. Bring signs and banners, especially ones that show your faith. Show legislators, the media, and our opponents that People of Faith Support Marriage Equality.

I had a staff meeting and one phone appointment this morning, and then I drove right up to the Riverside T station, and took the trolley into Boston. By quarter of one, I was standing on Beacon Street across from the State House, looking at the people on the other side of the street who had rallied to oppose same sex marriage in Massachusetts.

Standing on Beacon Street

The woman standing next to me was taking a long lunch hour to stand in public witness of her support for same sex marriage. Someone had left a hand-lettered sign leaning on the fence behind me. “Do you mind if I get that sign?” she said. I got out of the way. She picked it up and looked at it critically. She read the sign out loud: ” ‘Another Ally for Same Sex Marriage!’ Had to make sure I agree with it before I hold it up,” she added. “And that’s me, another straight woman for same sex marriage.”

Bob S. and Jean K. from my church arrived at about one. “You didn’t wait for us,” said Jean. I had misunderstood the telephone message she had left at the church, thinking I was supposed to drive up as soon as I could and not wait for them. Bob found another hand-made sign to carry: “Jesus Loves Equality.” Across the street from us, two people held up a twenty-foot long bright orange banner that read, “JESUS IS LORD” — representing a slight difference in theology. A woman standing on the other side of Bob looked at the big bright professionally-done orange banner, and said, “Yeah, but if you ask W-W-J-D, what would Jesus do….”

“He’d’ve performed same sex marriages,” I said, finishing her sentence when she trailed off. “I didn’t want to say that, because I’m Jewish,” she said. “Well, I’m a minister,” I said, “so I can say it. Although Jesus didn’t actually perform marriages, as far as we know,” I continued thoughtfully to myself, but no one was listening to me.

More than half the signs on the other side of the street were identical white-on-green signs saying “Let The People Vote.” On our side of the street, we all noticed that most of their signs were professionally printed, while most of ours were hand-made. Compared to us, they looked like well-organized shock troops against same sex marriage. I decided we looked more like a grassroots movement — but I was biased in our favor.

The Constitutional Convention was supposed to convene at 2:00 p.m. Jean, and then Bob, went in to the State House to watch the proceedings. I have little tolerance for political maneuvering, and said I would stay outside. But the wind began to feel colder and colder. Then a voice said, “Is that Dan Harper?” Standing right in front of me were the father and stepmother of Jim, my brother-in-law. “We’re going in to the State House,” they said, and I decided I was cold enough to tolerate the political maneuvering.

In the bowels of the State House

Of course, we didn’t get in to the actual room where the legislators were deliberating. We got to watch it on a projection screen, supporters of same-sex marriage on one side of the room, the other folks on the other side of the room, the middle occasionally patrolled by a state cop or a park ranger. I felt as if I were back in high school — the bland institutional space, the somewhat rickety old projection screen, the authority figures. But there was Dwight from Fairhaven, and Andy and Bev from the New Bedford area, and one of the ministers from the Tri-Con UCC church in my old hometown, and a few other people I recognized.

At two o’clock, the Constitutional Convention convened, and they voted on the measure to place an anti-gay constitutional amendment on a state-wide ballot. If 25% of the legislators voted in favor, then the ballot proposal would move forward to next year’s Constitutional Convention for another vote; if 25% of the legislators voted in favor the second time around, then the measure would go on the ballot. Which would mean (I’ll bet my boots) that huge amounts of money would pour into the state to support that anti-gay amendment, and even though polls show that the majority of Massachusetts voters support same sex marriage all that money could sway people. That’s why we don’t want a vote on civil rights.

The vote was taken. More than 25% of the legislators voted to place the measure on the ballot — 61 out of 200.

Recess

The legislators voted for a one-hour recess. I went out and got some lunch, and then went back to stand with the same sex marriage supporters across from the State House. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to reconsider the first vote. By now, the sun was getting low and there weren’t many people on either side of Beacon Street.

A young woman wearing a RCFM sticker showed up on a bike. She was a high school Latin teacher, and she biked down to the State House as soon as classes had ended. Two other woman showed up, all of us churchgoers, and we talked about our respective churches. One woman belonged to Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston (“Yes, our building does take up a lot of our time,” she told me); one woman belonged to Old South Church across from the Boston Public Library, and the Latin teacher belonged to Hope Church. “The UCC church in J.P.?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “That’s supposed to be a really cool church,” I said. “It is,” she said. We agreed that a cool church has to be multi-generational, multi-racial, and totally hip.

We all noticed that the people on the other side of the street were, on average, much older than the people on our side of the street. You saw more hip clothes on our side of the street, too. But then, I’m biased.

The ending

The people on the other side of the street erupted in cheers. Someone from the Mass Equality office came over and told us that the legislators had voted to allow the anti-gay amendment to move forward to next year. We all filed over to the lawn on the east side of the State House for a closing rally. As we walked past those other folks, I swore I heard them singing “Cumbayah” (so un-hip).

We gathered in the darkness. Someone from Mass Equality told us that we have made progress — the vote to move the amendment forward was lots closer than anyone had thought it would be — Deval Patrick, our governor-elect, had been calling legislators all day, and yesterday too, trying to shut this amendment down — and seven of the most virulently anti-gay state legislators had gotten voted out of office back in November. “The new legislature will be a whole new ball game,” said the man from Mass Equality. Then the executive director of Mass Equality told us that now we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work — we don’t have much time to work to defeat this next vote — “As soon as you get home, start calling your friends and neighbors and getting people mobilized,” he told us.

The beginning

Consider yourself mobilized. If you’re a Massachusetts resident, contact your state legislator tonight (find your legislator here, and then click on their name to get contact info for them). If you’re a U.S. resident but not a Massachusetts state resident, consider making a donation to Mass Equality [link] — because if same sex marriage gets outlawed in Massachusetts, you know it will be a very long time before you get same sex marriage in your state.

More coverage on this issue:

Bay Windows posted a minute-by-minute account of the Constitutional Convention, and has posted which legislators voted for and against the anti-gay amendment (“N” or no votes are on our side) — Link.

The Boston Globe Web site, Boston.com, has posted a very short article — Link. (In the photo showing supporters of same-sex marriage supporters, I must be just out of the picture — I was standing a couple of people away from the guy with the flag and the guy on the right.)

Three unrelated conversations

The drive up from New Bedford north towards Boston took me through the flat south coastal plain of Massachusetts. Along the highway through the plain, red maples seem to be the dominant trees where the ground is a little lower than the surrounding terrain; white and red oaks, and white and red pines, where the ground is a little higher. The red maples were bright with reds and yellows and oranges; in the lowest ground where I could see there was a swamp many of the trees were already bare. The oaks were still mostly green, although here and there a branch with brilliant red leaves stuck out of the dark green of the oak and pine woods; and here and there I saw a white oak fringed with brownish gold leaves.

I had lunch with dad, and we talked mostly about photography. Dad, who is an avid photographer, has been using digital cameras for the past three or four years. But recently, he said, he’s turned back to using his old single lens reflex film camera, a classic Pentax K-1000. He stood in the window of his condo in West Concord and used four different cameras to shoot the same picture of a sugar maple in full autumn color: three different digital cameras, and the K-1000. He got the film processed commerically, and he printed the shots from the digital camera using the same paper and printer. Then he compared the images all four sources. His conclusion: the images from the film camera had better color saturation and richer reds than any of the digital images.

Photo buffs would probably say that images from a professional-quality digital camera printed on a top-notch printer could surpass the images from commercially-processed film. But that’s not the point; dad was comparing images from cameras he had access to and that he could afford. Forget the photography buffs; dad and I agreed that film cameras are superior. We got into a satisfying discussion of which color film is best, and how both of us would kind of like to get back into a darkroom to print black-and-white film.

Dad had to go off to teach a computer class, so I went birding at Great Meadows. I worked my way down the central dike, stopping now and then to scan the water for ducks. Another birder, a man carrying a high-end telescope, was making his way down the dike at roughly the same pace as I. Somewhere in the middle of the dike, I said to him that I had got some sparrows, and he came down to see. We wound up talking while we waited for sparrows to break cover and come out where we could see them.

He asked where I lived, and I said New Bedford, and he told me about a house that his grandparents had had on Hawthorne Street in New Bedford. I said I hadn’t seen any ducks yet this year on New Bedford harbor, and he said that the wintering ducks had already started moving in to the Barnstable area. He lived down on the Cape during the warm months, and had just moved back up to his house in Weston on Tuesday. He asked how it happened that I was in Concord that day, and I said I grew up in town, and it turned out that his daughter had married a man who was best friends with Steve S—- who had lived down the street from us when I was young.

We finally saw Swamp Sparrows and Savannah Sparrows (and I was pretty sure I had also seen an immature White Throated Sparrow). But most of the ducks we saw were Mallards. “It’s so quiet out here,” he said. “Listen to those geese. I can even hear that tika-tika-tika sound they make when they’re feeding.” He scanned the ducks with his binoculars. “Twenty years ago, you’d see ninety percent Black Ducks and only a few Mallards. Now it’s the other way around. I used to shoot ducks,” he continued. “What I liked was using the calls to bring the ducks, and working with dogs, and being outdoors. I ate everything I shot. But I stopped in 1982, and haven’t been duck-hunting since.” He put his binoculars up to his eyes for one last scan of the lower pool, hoping to see the Pintails he had thought he had seen earlier; and then he headed back to Weston.

I spent another two hours at Great Meadows. I walked way around to the other end of the lower pool, where I did see eight or a dozen Pintails half obscured in the middle of some wild rice. An hour later, up at the sewage treatment plant, I did see a flock of White-Throated Sparrows, along with a Palm Warbler bobbing its tail, and some other sparrows that I couldn’t be sure of because it was getting dark by then.

It was still too early to brave the traffic on the drive into Cambridge. I decided to stop at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. They had moved Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s body back to Concord, to rest beside her husband Nathaniel Hawthorne, from where she had been buried in England, and I wanted to visit the new grave. Across the path, a man was crouched down, taking a picture of Henry David Thoreau’s grave in the dim light; a woman stood next to him watching. I asked if he was a fan of Thoreau, and he allowed that he was. I told them why I was there. The man asked where Louisa May Alcott’s grave was, and I pointed it out.

They said they had driven ten hours to get here today, and I asked where they were from. “London, Ontario,” said the man. And now as I listened for it I could hear the faint accent of central and prairie Canada: the slight differences in the vowels, especially “o” sounds, and the more precise consonants. “We already have snow on the ground up there,” said the woman. “What’s the climate like here?” I said that we used to have snow on the ground for most of three months, but it was definitely getting warmer. “What with global climate change, you’re probably living in the right place,” I said. “Soon your climate will be temperate.”

As we walked back towards town, we wound up talking about North American politics, particularly the way that both Steven Harper and George Bush have strong ties to the religious right. “But it’s a minority government,” said the man. “Canada is still pretty much liberal,” he continued in his soft Canadian accent. “Harper’s going to have to moderate his views or he could wind up facing an election.” The woman added, in what was not quite a non sequitur: “After all, Elton John came to Canada to get married.” I told them I was counting on the Canadians to hold out against the influence from the south. What I didn’t say was that as a religious liberal, I actually do worry about the United States turning into a theocracy of the religious right, and it would be nice to have a place to flee to.

Day trip: Concord River from Carlisle to Old North Bridge

It was one thirty when I parked the car where the old bridge stretched across the Concord River from Bedford to Carlisle. The Bedford has been turned into a broad boat ramp suitable for larger boats on trailers, but I parked on the Carlisle side, which consists of a rutted road surrounded by poison ivy, a bit of a scramble down to the water, and quite a few of the old stone from the old bridge abutment. I put the fishing tackle in the canoe, the binoculars around my neck, and I started paddling upstream.

You could see little or no current along the Carlisle Reach, a broad straight stretch of the river just up from the bridge. But when the southwest breeze caught me, I had to paddle pretty hard to keep heading upstream. I concentrated on hugging the lee shore to keep out of the wind. Not that there was much to look at or any particular reason to linger:– the trees are low and scrubby, the surrounding land mostly flat and boring. It was hot in the sun, and I didn’t do much more than just paddle.

Half a mile upstream, the river begins to narrow, and wind around eskers and other harder, glacially-deposited soils. The land on the left bank of the river is mostly protected as a national wildlife refuge; on the right bank, you see a few huge houses but mostly just trees. In a few of the narrower stretches, I could really feel the effects of the current; but the river was narrow enough that I rarely felt the wind. I paddled on, moving through sun and shade.

Through a line of trees on my left, I could see I was passing a large open area, the lower impoundment of the Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. The Dike Trail between the two impoundments comes right down to the river, and just as I was passing that point, four people with binoculars and telescopes strolled down to the river. I called over to them: “Still a lot of shorebirds out?” “Yes,” said one woman, “but the Glossy Ibis isn’t around today.” I beached the canoe and spent twenty minutes walking the dike between the two impoundments looking at herons, egrets, sandpipers, and plovers.

Still paddling upstream, I passed a small sandy beach, perhaps thirty feet wide, where a tiny brook trickled down over rocks and sand into the river. I stopped there to eat some carrots, drink from my canteen, and listen to the sound of the brook. Further upstream, I saw a man fishing from the bank, but he was gone by the time I got that far, so I couldn’t ask him what luck he’d been having. I decided to go upstream as far as the Old North Bridge, where was fired “the shot heard ’round the world,” some four miles from where I started. Tourists walked back and forth over the bridge, taking pictures, some of them wearing little tri-con hats, looking at the markers and monuments. Just beyond the Old North Bridge, you used to be able to paddle up into Saw Mill Brook. Now beavers have have put a dam there, and they have built two new outlets for the brook, spaced far apart. You can hear the water rolling and babbling from the beaver pond, through the brush, and into the river.

The sun was getting lower than I liked; it sets so much earlier now that it’s mid-August. I turned around, letting the wind and current push me when I could. I saw a man fishing from a john-boat. “Any luck” I asked. “Just a couple of small ones,” he said. “But they’ll be coming out soon. Get their snack just before bedtime.” I paddled around a bend in the river, then let the canoe drift and tried a few casts under the trees at the side of the river. Nothing. I drifted some more, switched to fishing off the bottom. Nothing. I looked at my watch, decide that if I wanted to be off the river before dark I had better keep paddling.

The last stretch, the Carlisle Reach, was monotonous. But by now the sun was low enough to send long slanting shadows across the river. It lit up the trees on the far side with its golden light. The sun made everything look beautiful, warm, welcoming, and even the leaves on the silver maples that are already turning yellow and pale pink with the coming of autumn lost their sad poignancy. I was growing tired from paddling. My arms and shoulders weren’t tired, it was my thighs that were starting to tremble.

The sun was below the trees by the time I beached the canoe, picked it up, and tied it on the car.

Eight miles of paddling.

Day hike: Across the Middlesex Fells

Yesterday was another perfect summer day in New England: low temperatures in the 50’s, dry air, perfectly clear, and a forecast for a high temperature below 80. What better way to spend a perfect day than to go canoeing with Abby and Jim. Except that my car wouldn’t start. The rest of the morning was spent getting the car towed to the garage. After lunch, I finally cleared my head enough to decide that I was going to up to the Middlesex Fells to go hiking.

You can take the subway to the Middlesex Fells reservation — the Orange Line all the way to the last stop, Oak Grove. The subway comes out of the ground at the Charles River, and you ride through a stark landscape of heavy industry, a major railroad corridor, and highway ramps leading to the Central Artery. When you get past that, light industry and unrelieved inner suburbia stretches along the Orange Line the rest of the way to Oak Grove. The train emptied out, and I could hear the African American man several seats away as he answered his cell phone: “Yo, what up.” Except that there was a soft New England flair to his words, so they came out: “Yo, wha ‘tup” — the “t” sound moving to the next syllable in just the same way that older New Englanders still say, “Ih ’tis” instead of “It is.”

There’s a half mile walk past suburban houses and renovated brick mill buildings, and then suddenly you’re on the Cross Fells Trail in the green trees of the Middlesex Fells. The occasional broken liquor bottle testifies to the fact that you’re not in the wilderness. But as I climbed up a rocky ridge, what I really noticed was how loud the cicadas were.

From one rocky prominence, I could see the skyline of Boston, the Hancock Tower with Great Blue Hill beyond it, and elsewhere the trees of suburbia with an occasional building showing through the leaves. The low-bush blueberries were bare of fruit, except for one last shriveled blueberry. A few leaves on some of the bushes had turned bright red. Across the paved Fellsway East road, I did see quite a few huckleberries still on the bushes, but they, too, were shriveled and past being edible. In one little open spot, Goldenrod and Purple Loosestrife bloomed right next to each other, with nodding Queen Anne’s Lace in front of them, all flowers of mid-August.

It was a shock to reach Highland Avenue, a four-lane highway. I lost the Cross Fells Trail here. The trail is poorly marked:– the old blue paint blazes are badly faded, and several of the new blue plastic blazes have been torn off trees. So I wound up taking an unintended detour to the shores of Winchester Reservoir, shining in the afternoon sun. I saw a few sailboats, some kayaks, and even one skinny-dipper slipping illegally into the water.

I managed to rejoin the Cross Fells Trail, following it along the paved Fellsway West under Interstate 93, but then I lost the trail again — the blazes were completely missing. I realized I should have brought a map. AFter another unintended detour, I managed to rejoin the Cross Fells Trail, but the sun was getting lower and lower and I knew I would probably not be able to get to the far end of the trail. I made it across South Border Road and up to the top of Ramshead Hill when I decided to turn around — I didn’t want to be looking for faded blue paint blazes after the sun had gone down.

The trip back was much faster — I didn’t stray off the trail for any unintended detours. It was after seven o’clock by the time I got back to the start of the trail, and since it is mid-August the sun had already slipped close to the horizon. During the whole of my walk in the Fells, I saw only half a dozen people who were more than a couple hundred feet from a paved road.

Nine or ten miles, depending on how far off the trail I actually got.

Walking in the big city

Today’s New York Times carries a story about one reporter’s six-day walking trip around Staten Island. In the story, “A Journey around Staten Island Gives a Glimpse of the City’s Wild Side,” Andy Newman reports on walking through landscapes and meeting people you wouldn’t quite expect to find in New York City:

Heading west, Richmond Terrace becomes the main street of several working class neighborhoods before petering out as a winding, rural-industrial lane. At its very end stands a lone country house with a barn and a chicken coop and a yard that merged into the marshy shore of the Kill Van Kull.

The door was answered by Tara Alleyne, a city employee and inhabitant of what was once a soap-factory town called Port Ivory. “I’m the only resident of Port Ivory,” she said proudly. “I’m on Mapquest.”

Newman even brings a tent and manages to find a few places to camp out a couple of nights. Those of us who love walking in the city and the suburbs can only hope for more such hikers, and more good writing about their adventures.

Day hike: Louisa May Alcott and walking to Boston

When we were children, someone told us about the time Louisa May Alcott walked from her family’s house in Concord all the way to Boston. I no longer remember the details of the story, but it always seemed to me that walking from Concord all the way to Boston was something I would like to do. So today I did. I walked over to Porter Square to catch the 8:45 train out to Concord. When the pleasant young conductor got to me, I said I was going to Concord. “Round trip?” he asked. “No, one way,” I said.

I walked from the train station though Concord center to get to Louisa May Alcott’s house out on Lexington Road. I stopped to talk with Pam, the owner of the Barrow Bookstore. She was just opening her store. “How’s business?” I asked. “Not as good as last year,” she said, “not as many foreign travelers this year.” We laughed together at some of the more ridiculous airline security precautions we had heard about.

Lexington Road was originally called the Bay Road, because it led to Massachusetts Bay. The first English settlers followed the course of the Bay Road when they first went out to Concord in 1635; no doubt parts of that road are older still, and were once paths trod by the Massasoit Indians. Not that you need to know this history; my walk wasn’t a historical re-enactment, it was more of a literary pilgrimage.

It was another perfect summer day, maybe seventy degrees, sunny, a nice breeze. Lots of cars passed me on the roads, but I saw very few people. Many of the houses I passed were perfectly painted, their yards perfectly landscaped — Concord is a very wealthy town now — but many of the houses and yards hardly looked lived in. I wondered how many people you would have seen out and about in Louisa Alcott’s time.

The Alcott family moved frequently, and lived in several houses in Concord. Two of them are right next to each other: Orchard House, the current site of a house museum devoted to Louisa Alcott and her family, and the Wayside which is now more famous as the house where Nathaniel Hawthorne lived. I don’t remember where Louisa Alcott was living when she walked to Boston, but I figured those two houses would be my official starting point.

Soon I got to the Battleroad Unit of Minuteman National Historical Park. The Battleroad Trail winds for five miles through the woods and fields of the park, connecting the towns of Concord and Lexington. At times I was walking along an unpaved road between two old stone walls, with grass growing between the road and the stone walls with open fields beyond. This, I thought to myself, must have been a little bit like what Louisa Alcott saw on her walk to Boston. But not really, for the fields were just rough grass and weeds and not planted with crops, there were no cows or horses or sheep grazing anywhere, no kitchen gardens thriving near the few houses I passed. Nor did Louisa Alcott see any bicyclists in spandex shorts, tourists with cameras around their necks, and park rangers dressed up in tricorn hats, breeches, and waiscoats.

At the end of the Battleroad Trail, I walked on the sidewalk along Massachusetts Avenue, up over Concord Hill in Lexington, through a neighborhood where the old 1950’s ranch houses are gradually being torn down so that McMansions can sprout up.

In Lexington Center, I crossed the Battle Green and passed Buckman Tavern, a historic museum where a man dressed up in 18th C. garb played a tune on a fife. Maybe, I thought to myself, I should have planned to follow in the footsteps of the Minutemen as they chased the Redcoats to Charlestown on April 19, 1775. But I was committed to my Louisa Alcott walk. I bought a sandwich to carry with me, and stopped to talk with Marianne, whom I knew when I worked at the Lexington church.

From Lexington Center, I followed the Minuteman Bike Path all the way to Somerville. The bike path follows an abandoned railroad right of way that roughly parallels Massachusetts Avenue, which is the modern name for that same old Bay Road that goes all the way to Concord. About two miles from Lexington Center, the bike path passes next to Arlington’s Great Meadows. I followed a little path in and found a knoll with a picnic table. I sat down to eat my lunch, gazing out at an expanse of marshland covered with Cattails, and Purple Loosestrife in full bloom. Away on the far side of the marsh, I thought I saw a few red leaves just starting to show on some Red Maples.

As I approached Arlington Center, two men passed me, one riding a bicycle and one on rollerblades. “Downsizing you car saves a lot of money,” said one. “Yeah,” said the other. “…Gas, insurance,” said the first. “Yeah,” said the other. Two women followed them, one woman on a bicycle and one on rollerblades, and they too were deep in conversation.

I stopped to rest in Arlington center. I wasn’t in a hurry, I wasn’t trying to set any speed records, and I had a cramp behind one knee. I sipped some iced coffee and read a newspaper.

On the other side of Arlington center, I came around a corner and there was Spy Pond. The pond was so beautiful — trees and house lining its shores, a small sailboat lazily moving along near the far shore, glints of sunlight on its surface — that I caught my breath. I left the bike path to walk along the pond’s shore. Children and dogs splashed in the water, a large extended family gathered around a picnic table, a woman typed on her laptop, a man sat reading. Regretfully, I rejoined the bike path.

After a while, when you’re walking for a long time, you tend to reach a state of mind where you don’t think about much. When I got to the Alewife subway station in Cambridge, where the bike path officially ends, I had to think because it wasn’t obvious how to get to the extension of the bike path that gets you to Davis Square. That’s all the thinking I did from Spy Pond to Davis Square.

I walked a couple of blocks over from Davis Square to Mass. Ave. and then followed Mass. Ave. to Harvard Square, and then I walked over a couple of blocks to the path that leads along the Charles River. I still wasn’t thinking about much, except that one knee hurt. I crossed over to the path along the Boston side of the Charles. Lots of people out sailing on the Charles. I watched one person sailing a Laser, a small fast sailboat, pushing the boat to its limit, coming about at the end of each tack with losing headway, heeling over until the lee gunwale was covered in foam.

Then I headed up Beacon Hill to Louisburg Square, and stopped for a moment in front of number 10, the house that Alcott bought with the money she got from her writing, and the house where she died when she was just 55 years old. Maybe I didn’t follow the exact route that she did when she walked from Concord to Boston, but that felt like a good ending to a good walk.

About 25 miles in nine hours of leisurely walking.

Day hike: Mt. Wachusett

The huckleberries were no more than 100 feet from the broad, trampled parking lot on the summit of Mt. Wachusett. Not just a few huckleberries, either, for the low bushes were loaded with them. I bent down and tried one. It was a little dry, maybe a few days past its prime, but it had an excellent flavor. I started eating greedily. I must have gotten lost in the pleasure of eating, for I didn’t hear the man until he had come around the bend of the trail. You never want to give away the location of a good berry patch to anyone, so I quickly stood, but he had already seen me.

“Ha!” he said. He was an older man with a white beard, sensibly dressed with a bucket hat and daypack. “Don’t eat all the berries!”

“Look at them all,” I said. “These bushes haven’t been picked over at all. Tells you how far most people get away from their cars. And look how many there are!”

“Yes,” he said as he bent over to pick and eat berries. He looked up at me. “It must the all the rain we’ve had.”

“They’re a maybe little gone by, and they’re kind of dry,” I said, “but then huckleberries always are.”

“That’s because huckleberries are all seeds,” he said. He left soon after that. I don’t think he liked them as much as I did. They were a little dry, but they tasted so good; –not good enough to stop and pick a bucketful to take home, but good enough to stop for ten or fifteen minutes to pick and eat them on the spot.

***

I came up the steady incline of the trail to the top of High Meadow, breathing pretty hard because I was pushing myself pretty hard. But I wasn’t walking too fast to notice the black raspberries. I picked one and ate it, and it was so good, but then I had to stop to catch my breath before I could eat more.

I was most of the way back to the parking lot, and thirsty because the Audubon sanctuary didn’t have any drinking water available. The black raspberries had been well-picked over a few days before, probably over the weekend — you could see the empty stems where people had pulled berries off — but quite a few more had ripened since then. The ones I picked were perfectly ripe, and because I was thirsty, they tasted especially good. In among the black raspberries I came across some blackberry canes, and they too had ripe fruit on them. Blackberries used to be one of my favorite fruits, but now I don’t like them nearly as well as black raspberries; now I think they have a funny almost-dusty taste. I ate some more black raspberries to have a good taste in my mouth before I walked on.

Nine miles, four hours, total elevation gain about a thousand feet, lots of sore muscles.

Day hike: Lughnasa at Great Meadows

Dad and I decided to take a walk in Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge this afternoon. We didn’t walk very far or very fast, though. The recent cold front brought a big wave of fall migrants to Massachusetts, and we spent less time walking than we did looking at sandpipers, plovers, egrets, and heron.

We strolled slowly down to the Concord River along the dike between the upper impoundment and the lower impoundment. I’m sure the slanting light of a perfect, golden summer day made the marshlands look especially beautiful, but I was too busy looking at the birds. While Dad was busy taking a photo of a Solitary Sandpiper feeding in the mud close to the trail, I watched a Spotted Sandpiper bobbing and pulling loose molting feathers out of its breast.

On the way back up the dike, a pleasant woman asked us if we would stand behind that camera over there because they were filming a segment for the Nova public television program (I had thought the two men were just another pair of wildlife photographers), or if we wanted to be in the shot when the joggers came along she’d ask us to sign releases. We stood where she told us. Dad found another bird to try to photograph. I got into an animated conversation with a woman about shorebird identification and migration. After ten minutes, all three of us forgot about the cameramen, and the nice woman from public television had to ask us again to step back, which we did. Apparently one of the joggers they were filming was some famous woman marathoner, but I never did get a firm identification on her.

Someone had a Wilson’s Snipe in his telescope, and Dad and I got a good look at it. The light was absolutely perfect, but Dad and I were getting hungry so we strolled on back to the car and went to dinner. I dropped Dad off at his condo, and as I was driving home I realized today is Lughnasa, halfway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, the time of year when you really start to notice that the sun is setting earlier in the evening. The excitement of watching the first big surge of the fall migration makes the loss of daylight a little easier for me to accept.

Less than a mile in two and a half hours.

Day hike: The Freedom Trail and the Charles River

Carol and I decided to be tourists for a day and walk the Freedom Trail in Boston. We set off from North Cambridge at 11 a.m. Since we weren’t in a hurry, we took the long way to Boston and walked there via Union Square in Somerville. As we walked up to Union Square, Carol that this would be a good place to consider living:– not too expensive yet, no subway but good bus service, pleasant houses, a real racial and ethnic mix.

We turned from Union Square towards Kendall Square in Cambridge, and crossed the Charles River via Longfellow Bridge. Lunch at the Sevens pub on Charles St., with mediocre food but good atmosphere — and an old sign saying “The Real Paper Best of Boston 1979, Best Neighborhood Pub, Beacon Hill.” I asked Carol if she remembered the Real Paper, the best of the underground newspapers in Boston in the 1970’s, but she didn’t.

We started on the Freedom Trail at the Massachusetts State House, at the top of Beacon Hill. This first stretch of the trail gives you lots of interesting buildings and sites for not too much effort: the Granary Burying Ground, King’s Chapel and its burying ground, Old South Meeting House, the old State House. We didn’t go into any of the buildings because we were really out for the walk.

Next along the Freedom Trail was Fanueil Hall, which was dreary and overrun with tourists and touristy things. Then through Haymarket, which was still open. All the vendors were down to the cheapest, most bedraggledy fruits and vegetables but that point in the afternoon, but it was fun to walk through the scene. Carol saw a bag of Bing cherries for a dollar and a half. “Are they any good?” she asked. “They’re as good as any you’ll see here right now, hon,” said the woman selling them. Carol decided to pass on the cherries.

Walking through Boston’s North End might be the best part of the Freedom Trail — lots of great old buildings, windy streets, and really good people watching. I noticed an older man walking towards us because he was neatly dressed in a fitted blue short-sleeved shirt and neatly pressed chinos; no un-tucked shirt or flipflops for him. When he passed us, I could hear he was speaking Italian, one of the older generation who holds on to the old ways. I stopped briefly to admire the facade of St. Stephen’s church, “the last surviving Bullfinch church in Boston” according to the plaque on it. Old North Church is more impressive because it’s older and larger, but it is not as beautiful.

Across the Charles River, Charlestown felt deserted, with none of the lively street life of the North End of Boston. Except for the tourists, we saw very few people on the streets. One boy, about ten years old, sat at the corner of Adams and Winthrop Streets. When someone following the Freedom Trail approached him, he would intone, in a surprisingly loud clear voice: “Ice cold lemonade, seventy-five cents, best deal on the Freedom Trail.” His voice followed us Adams Street as we climbed the hill to the Bunker Hill Monument.

The National Park Service is renovating the monument, so it was closed to visitors. We left the Freedom Trail there, and crossed back over the Charles River via the locks. We saw three pleasure boats in the locks, heading to and from Boston Harbor. Then through what used to be the old West End to Charlesbank Park, where we sat watching toddlers play in the wading pool (and where Carol got her feet wet, too).

As we walked down the Boston side of the Charles River, at first there was lots to look at. We saw people lying on the grass and bicycling and rollerblading and walking. We saw sailboats and windsurfers and kayakers and even a Venetian gondola in Storrow Lagoon. But for a long stretch there’s just the bike path, which is too narrow, between the highway on one side and the river on the other. We would have been better off on the Cambridge side of the river.

We crossed the footbridge over to Cambridge, and walked up to Harvard Square to get Carol some bubble tea, and me some iced tea. By this time, we were a little footsore, so we sat on a park bench outside Harvard Square and watched the people go by. From there, we walked straight back home for dinner; for it was after seven o’clock by the time we got home.

Approximately sixteen miles.