Flashes of Panic

I wonder if there’s some coincidence to the fact that my favorite views in Amherst tend to look roughly east. Today, coming back from PT, I looked east from North East Street over the Amythest Brook conservation area to Mount Orient. You can’t actually see the mountain in this wet weather; though the visibility is good, the ceiling this morning was quite low, and the brook itself, normally invisible until it meets Fort River near the Pelham Road, was traced out in tendrils of vapor on the hillside.

It’s a stretch to call it a mountain at all, even from an east-coast perspective; it’s the front row of the Pelham Hills, and much more of a ridge. Like many hillside streams in New England, there used to be a small-scale vacation resort in there somewhere, in the days before trains and automobiles, and if you look in the right places you can find traces of the carriage roads. Along this stretch of North East Street, farms run back towards the hillside with nothing to block the vista. One of them has a llama pasture by the road, with a handmade sign: “Llama llookout.”

We used to run through the conservation area and the neighboring private-but-tolerant land in college; the Robert Frost trail goes up to Mt. Orient and follows the ridge into Shutesbury, but there are other trails which aren’t on any map that I know of. We called the RFT “Upper Ridge,” and there was also “Middle Ridge” and (surprise!) “Lower Ridge” which barely had any hills at all. I ran them looking alternately at the back of the upperclassman in front of me, or the rock I didn’t want to trip over, and found when those seniors graduated that I really didn’t know my way around in there. I could run Upper Ridge by following the RFT blazes, but the lower, easier and less rocky trails were as much of a mystery as a one-way back street in Boston. There must be branches of the trails which go more east into Pelham; I remember once emerging from the woods somewhere on Lower Valley Road in Pelham and running down, down, down the road into Amherst. It was one of my first runs with the team, and one of the longest runs I’d ever done; the twenty-fours I did for my 2002 marathon were a long way in the future.

Since we moved back to Amherst, I haven’t been in shape to run in Amythest Brook yet. No doubt it’s not as thrilling as I remember. But this morning, looking over the farms at the wisps of cloud tracing the contours of the hills, with the dry burning of the iontophoresis contact still prickling on my calf, I really missed being out there.

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