Category Archives: Road trips

Day hike: Blue Hills Reservation

Rain in the morning, so I drove down to New Bedford to water the plants and pick up the mail. On the way back, by two o’clock the looked to be ending; right after Route 24 ended at Interstate 93 I got off the highway at the Houghton’s Pond exit, parked by the pond, and went for a walk in the Blue Hills. I started walking at two-thirty, having smeared sunscreen on, but also carrying an umbrella just in case.

From Houghton’s Pond, I headed up the Massechuseuk Trail, cut over on one of the innumerable smaller trails to the Skyline Trail, and climbed up Tucker Hill. By the time I got up to the open ledges on top of Tucker Hill, the sky was blue and clear except for a few small puffy white clouds overhead, and a line of grey clouds to the south. The observatory tower on top of Great Blue Hill to the west stood out over the intervening tree-covered hills. The intersection of Route 24 and Interstate 93 sprawled through the woods south of me, busy with hundreds of tiny cars bustling back and forth.

The north branch of the Skyline Trail from Tucker Hill to Great Blue Hill turned out to be fairly challenging. It was steep enough in places that I had to use my hands, particularly in Wildcat Notch. In other places, missing or badly placed blazes meant I should have been paying full attention to picking out the route; but I wasn’t paying full attention, and went down the wrong trail in one or two places. While none of the hills is particularly high, the Skyline Trail goes over as many hills as it can and the cumulative effect was that I got a pretty good workout.

I climbed Eliot Tower on top of Great Blue Hill, and spent a few minutes up there cooling down — the woods were still humid from the morning’s rain and I was drenched in sweat. The view to the east was worth more than a few minutes: the skyscrapers of Boston, Boston harbor and its islands, the rolling hills between. But I hurried on.

At the base of Great Blue Hill, there was no crosswalk to get across busy Washington Street. I walked along the edge of the road to the traffic lights at Royal St. and managed to make my way across to Dunkin Donuts, where I got a large iced decaf coffee. Hundreds of breast cancer walkers, mostly dressed in pink and white and black, were coming down the sidewalk along Washington Street, and I had to walk against them for half a mile in order to get to the start of the Red Loop Trail up Great Blue Hill. Mostly they ignored me, or almost ran into me (there were no other pedestrians or hikers out); except for one woman who, conscious that she was engaged in a virtuous and purposeful activity and I was a mere idler, said, “Hey, you’re headed the wrong way” — half humorously, half challenging me.

The Red Loop Trail, wide and well-worn, is supposed to be the most popular trail up Great Blue Hill. A man and a woman and three children came down the trail towards me. “Excuse me,” said the woman, smiling, “but there is a pond?” I told them they were far from the pond. I don’t know what their native language was, but they clearly didn’t follow what I was saying, even though we kept trying for a while.

At the top of Great Blue Hill, I went up Eliot Tower again, and this time managed to see Mount Wachusett off in the west. I wanted to spend more time looking at the view, but the sun was getting low, and I was getting tired. I set off back down the North Skyline Trail, veered south on the Houghton Trail towards Houghton’s Pond — but when I got to Royal Street, there was no crosswalk and I didn’t dare cross the heavy rush hour traffic. Up over Houghton’s Hill towards the crosswalk at the Reservation Headquarters. But the hill was pretty steep, and on the way down my left knee started to hurt and warn me that I was in too much of a hurry.

By now it was quarter to seven. The picnickers and swimmers had mostly left Houghton’s Pond. The sun, setting in what was now a clear blue sky, sent a golden summer light through the trees. By the time I got back on the Interstate, rush hour traffic was mostly gone.

Eight miles.

Day hike: Cambridge and Boston

The heat wave was getting to me. I went out at 12:30, thinking I’d climb on the subway and head off to find someplace air-conditioned to spend the afternoon. But the air felt drier, and even though it was hot it felt good. I went back home, ate a leisurely lunch, and started walking at about 2 p.m.

By the time I reached Harvard Square, you could feel the change in the air. I left Mass. Ave. and made my way to the Charles River. The air felt glorious. The wind backed around into the east, coming right off the ocean and up the river: a back door cold front. With the change in the air, my head cleared and I felt lighthearted for the first time in days.

I walked down along the Charles, past all the boathouses. The sailboats were having a good time beating up the lower basin of the Charles against the wind; right next to me, one sailor did two quick messy tacks and brought his boat up to the dock of the MIT boathouse. Crossing the Longfellow Bridge, the easterly breeze felt cool:– I was walking at a good clip, but not even breaking a sweat.

Down Charles Street to the Charles St. Meeting House, where there’s nothing left to remind you of the time when the white Universalist minister hid Huey Newton from the FBI in a Sunday school room. I went over the lower part of Beacon Hill — cool and quiet and very, very wealthy — to Boston Common.

The Common was crowded, not just with the usual crowd of summer tourists, but with all kinds of people enjoying the first good weather in days: office workers headed home, homeless people, construction workers carrying plastic lunch coolers, a gaggle of young mothers pushing strollers, older children splashing in the frog pond, a group of people sitting and talking and listening to a man playing a tenor sax.

Near the Public Garden, a crew was working on the lights at the stage for Shakespeare in the Park. Crowds of people on the path across the Public Garden: A group of Japanese tourists got their picture taken by a woman with a Boston accent. A child holding on to his mother’s hand looked down at the Swan Boats and said something I didn’t quite catch. “No, dear,” she replied. “We can’t go on them, they’re closed for the day.”

The lower end of Newbury Street was more chic and further upscale than I had remembered. Young women wearing chic dresses and chic flipflops walked the sidewalks, peering into the windows of the boutiques. Tourists held their cameras at the ready, and stopped in the middle of the crowded sidewalk to gawk at the stores. People got a little scruffier at the far end of Newbury Street near Mass. Ave. I stopped briefly at Trident Bookstore and inside no one was wearing a chic dress.

On Mass. Ave., people crowded the sidewalks getting on and off the buses. Around Berklee School of Music, young people with scruffy hair toted instruments cases for a variety of instruments — alto sax, guitar, woodwinds. But the quiet shaded back streets through Northeastern University were deserted all the way to the Museum of Fine Arts.

In the Fens, I paused briefly to look at the community gardens. A few gardeners managed to grow vegetables in spite of the shady trees, but mostly I saw flowers and ornamentals, gravel and even brick paths, trellises and chairs set out under leafy bowers. One woman industriously swept the path in her garden plot; in another, a family sat enjoying the green shade.

As I neared Fenway Park, I could hear them announcing the lineup for today’s game. People streamed towards the park wearing Red Sox hats and sometimes Red Sox shirts with numbers and names of famous players emblazoned on them. One little boy still had a shirt saying “Garciaparra,” even though Nomar hasn’t played with the Sox for a couple of years.

The M.I.T. Bridge across the Charles is still measured in Smoots, and on the far side I walked right up Mass. Ave. towards our summer home base above Porter Square. I stopped only twice: once to buy a quart of water (which was gone in minutes), and once to stop at Pandemonium Books (which has finally reopened in Central Square).

Ten or twelve miles.

Broccoli

On Friday, I pulled the broccoli out of the refrigerator. Abbie had given it to us when we were up visiting in Maine. “Take this home with you,” she said. “I have plenty and I can always go get more.”

We had stopped in to visit the Four Season Farm on Cape Rosier, in Maine, just a few miles from Jack and Abbie’s house. Eliot Coleman had purchased the land from Helen and Scott Nearing for thirty-three dollars an acre in the 1970’s; that’s what the Nearings had paid for it in twenty years earlier. The farmstand wasn’t open yet, but we asked if we could look around anyway. “Sure,” said the pleasant young man with the disheveled hair and beard.

The market gardens were stunningly beautiful. The plants were larger than seem possible, they all looked incredibly healthy. We went inside a greenhouse. It was immaculate. Even the weeds looked like they were supposed to be there. Squash and eggplants and tomatoes were tied to string and grew up to the top of the greenhouse ten feet up. The pepper plants weren’t as tall, but were just as spectacular.

Eliot Coleman walked up as we walked back to Abbie’s car. Abbie and Carol knew who he was because of his pictures in his cookbooks. I knew who he was because he walked around like he owned the place. We said hello, and he responded politely.

A small apple orchard grew outside the greenhouse, perfectly cared-for trees growing in a mix of clover and grass. The farm spread out around us, green, fecund, orderly. They grow perfect vegetables all year round in coastal Maine’s unforgiving climate.

Our mother used to say that the essence of good cooking was “good goods.” If you start with good ingredients, it’s easy to wind up with good food.

I rinsed the broccoli, cut the florets off the main stalk, dropped it in the boiling water. After five minutes, I drained the water off, a light but brilliant emerald green. The broccoli tasted like green, it had a buttery after-taste, it was sweet, it tasted like broccoli but it tasted like more than broccoli. I like to read while I’m eating, but this broccoli was so good I couldn’t. Instead, I said to Carol: “It’s so good!” I looked out the window at the brilliant green trees along Rindge Avenue and thought: That’s what the broccoli tastes like, the green of things growing in the heat of summer. It really was that good.

The Good Life

Carol and I went up to visit Jack and Abbie — Jack is my dad’s cousin. Abbie gave us a little tour of that stretch of coastal Maine. Carol said she had seen a sign pointing to the “Good Life Center,” and asked if we could go there. Abbie said that was only a few miles from their house, and we drove over there.

We drove down the well-maintained but narrow gravel road until we saw a big mailbox that said “Nearing” on it. Back in 1954, Helen and Scott Nearing published a book called Living the Good Life: How To Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, a book which some credit with being a major impetus for the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Nearings had first homesteaded in Vermont, but later in life they had moved to Maine. The “Good Life Center” now occupies what was once their house.

We pulled into the driveway. Carol asked a hirsute young man if we could look around, and he said of course. He even gave us a plastic-laminated sheet of paper with a short walking tour, and then peddled off on his bicycle.

We admired the house the Nearings had built from stone, in a sort of Swiss-chalet style. We looked at the garden, enclosed by a wall built of stone and mortar. The vegetables looked healthy but not spectacular. The small greenhouse, also made of stone, was pleasant to walk through. We looked at the stone outhouse (according to the laminated plastic card, it was the very first structure built on the land).

At the back of the clearing in the woods, we found a round yurt-like structure built entirely of wood, with round porthole-windows, and a strange round cupola. It sort of looked like a flying saucer from a 1950’s science fiction film. The laminated plastic card noted that this structure, called “The Gathering Place,” had been built by someone else after Scott Nearing had died. Inside, it was pleasantly cool, and all the unfinished wood was soothing. We sat and talked about this and that for quite a while.

At last we left. We had spent a pleasant half hour there, but the place didn’t carry the magic of the Nearings’s books. The house was just another house, the garden just another garden. Only “The Gathering Place” had held our attention for very long, and that hadn’t even been a project of the Nearings.

Traffic

I left Ferry Beach Conference Center at quarter past one. By quarter to three, I hit rush hour traffic, just before the junction of Interstate 95 and Interstate 93. Traffic was heavy and slow from there all the way around Boston. By five o’clock, when I was well south of Boston on Route 24, the traffic finally thinned out a little. I made it home just before six; it should have been a three hour drive.

When I started driving today, I was determined to pay attention and remember whatwhat goes through my mind when I’m driving. Within minutes, I had forgotten that determination. When I drive, it almost seems as if there’s nothing to remember but the bare facts: I started at such-and-such a time, traffic was heavy, I arrived at such-and-such a time. It’s almost as if memory and higher awareness shut down for those five hours I was driving today. Not such a pleasant thought, given how many hours I spend driving.

Eagle Island

The weather hadn’t cooperated all week: fog, wind, rain storm. Some of us had hoped to paddle out to Eagle Island, but the weather had made it impossible.

Tonight at dinner, I realized that finally the weather was perfect: calm, no big swells coming into Saco Bay from the Atlantic, no chance of fog. I asked around, and Rebecca, who is from Arizona, said she’d be willing to paddle out with me. Just as we were about to carry the canoe down to the beach, Jon came walking along. He’s been waiting for the weather to break all week.

“We’re going out on the bay,” I said to him. He looked at his wife. “Go,” she said, “if you don’t, you’ll be miserable.” He ran and grabbed his kayak, and walked down with us.

We walked way down the beach to meet the low tide. We waded out, floating the canoe until the water was up over our ankles, then jumped in and started paddling.

About halfway out, a big fish jumped completely out of the water, and fell back in with a splash. It must have been four to six feet long. As we paddled along, Jon laughed and said, “I needed this.”

The water started getting darker. The sand ended, and the bottom dropped away to deep rocks. We passed a few lobster buoys. The island was getting closer: dark jagged rocks, long points or spurs exposed by the low tide, little specks of birds perched here and there, the highest part of the island covered with green (nettles and grasses) above the reach of the highest tides.

We got close enough to see rafts of eider swimming and diving around the island. They flew away when we got too close. Jon saw a seal slip into the water from off one of the rocky points.

Great Black-backed Gulls seemed to control most of the island, with a few Herring Gulls and Double-crested Cormorants. We could hear the keening cries of the baby gulls, saying, Feed us.

We slipped around one of the points of the island, out from the lee side. Low swells from the Atlantic slowly raised and lowered our boats. It’s a lonely, rugged little island.

The sun was getting low. We didn’t have time to go all the way around the island, so we turned around. “What a magical place,” I said.

On the way back, a Common Tern dove down close to our boats, pulled back four feet above the water, hovered for thirty seconds, and flew low over our heads. “Wow,” said Jon. “Amazing. Imagine being able to see that.”

The setting sun was off our starboard bow. Further to the right, thunderheads were building up over Casco Bay, the next bay to the north. We talked about other outdoor trips we had gone on, until at last we rode some waves in to the beach.

Rebecca and I put the canoe on my car, and Jon dumped the water out of his kayak. We looked at each other. “That was great.”

A hazy blue sky

Sitting on a porch gazing out over dune grass at the Atlantic Ocean with a brisk southerly breeze to blow the mosquitos away. I’m at Ferry Beach Conference Center for a religious education conference, and yes I’m doing lots of professional development (workshop on theologies of religious education in half an hour). But I’m also managing to sit here on the porch gazing off into a hazy blue sky. Something about hazy blue skies in New England — I can never make up your mind whether they look farther away or closer than a regular blue sky. So I keep gazing at that haze until I fall asleep.

On the train, 6/26-27

From notebook and memory:

Still dark when I get on the train at 4:30 a.m. As we roll across the Mississippi River, the sky has lightened, and the Gateway Arch catches glints from the east.

North of Springfield. Young man behind me answers his cell phone. Drowsily, I hear the end of the conversation, which to my New England ears sounds like this: “Yahp. Bea raw nair. Bah.” He’s saying: “Yeah. Be right there. ‘Bye.”

Downtown Chicago, 65 degrees, cool and cloudy, the locals wear windbreakers or light jackets. In the Art Institute, two young men look at a painting: “I like that. I don’t know why I like that, but I like that.” They walk away from me, still talking about the painting. They burst into laughter for some reason.

The train is late coming out of the yard. While we wait, Robert and I joke about waiting. He’s on the same sleeper as I, except when we get to the train our sleeper is gone (toilets don’t work), they give us a coach instead. We talk and figure out how to make the best of it. The sleeping car attendant gives us blankets: “Brand new,” he says; they’re still in plastic wrappers. “Keep them, you deserve something for this.”

Robert’s a rail fan and a model railroader. In the dining car, we talk about trains and model railroads.

The sun awakens me somewhere in Pennsylvania. Six hours of sleep.

At lunch, Robert and I eat together for the third time. The two other people at our table talk about being in St. Louis, and I figure out we’re coming from the same event, but I’m tired of talking about religion and move the conversation in other directions. Later: “Look at that,” I say, pointing to a beautifully restored locomotive. Robert looks and says, “An F-7. Nice job on the New York Central colors.” The couple is only politely interested.

I doze some more.

At Rochester, the train is stopped by federal agents from the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service. We sit and wait. Robert and I and some others get out to stretch our legs. At the end of the platform, everyone from the last car is off the train, with their bags. They start herding people back on the train. As we pull out, I see a police car driving down the platform. Later I overhear: “They arrested two guys.”

The whole way through the Berkshires, I sit in the cafe car and talk with Bob from Chicago. We look at the scenery. We talk about snowmobiles, we talk a lot about how much we like Chicago, I point out a beaver lodge next to the track, we talk about Geneva, Illinois, where I lived last year, he mentions his wife who died a decade ago and his Navy buddy who has cancer, we talk about our favorite fishing expeditions. After an hour: “Nice talking.” “See you.”

It gets dark after Worcester. I doze. At last we make it to Boston.

Radisson Hotel, St. Louis

Another crummy hotel. I say this to Carol when I call her, and she replies, “Good, then you know you’ve got the cheapest room in town.”

This place is much the worse for wear: chipped paint here and there, the shelf in the closet coming down, permanent stains on the bathroom floor. Hotel chains tend to treat their customers like cattle in a CAFO. My room stinks of cigarette smoke, even though it’s allegedly a non-smoking room. But obviously space must be tight, because they’ve given me a huge room with two beds (I’m paying for one), and a balcony. I can put up with the smell of cigarette smoke for the sake of the balcony. I had the sliding glass door open all night, and right now I’m sitting out on the balcony watching the traffic on I-70 at the base of the hotel, looking out over the green trees in the park on the other side of the interstate, and the bridges across the Mississippi River. I could complain about the cigarette smell, but if they moved me I’d lose the balcony.

In a short while I’ll head over to the conference center; for the moment I’m enjoying a moment of peace, sitting outside on this day of the solstice, before the craziness begins.