Flashes of Panic

This weekend has been a spectacular time to be in the Pioneer Valley. We’ve had neither the stifling humidity of two weeks ago nor the curiously prolonged cold bleakness of May, but a nice, breezy, sunny, weekend.

Ten years ago, I spent my last pre-graduation summer here, and discovered more of the area than I ever had before, running between Mt. Toby and the Notch and swimming for the first time in Puffer’s Pond. I knew then that summer is the best time to be here. Now, I’m rediscovering my larger back yard on the way to leaving it once again.

A. and I went up to North Leverett yesterday to run on a section of the M-M Trail (more popularly known as “The M&M Trail”) which I had discovered while caching on Brushy Mountain last summer. The trail section has a Quabbin-like feeling, because for a while it runs in the tracks of a centuries-old road between field-cleared stone walls. We ran out to where Jonathan Glazier’s pre-Revolutionary homestead is marked by a faded sign and a cellar hole in woods miles from modern civilization. Most of North Leverett was cleared for farming in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but as the Midwest opened, many of the farmers headed west, and Brushy Mountain, like almost all of the less-traveled sections of New England, reforested. The result is achingly old in a way the carefully preserved ruins of Europe will never be.

At the end of the run, we toured the Rattlesnake Gutter, a small but dramatic gorge which holds one of Massachusetts’ last stands of old-growth forest; it’s simply too rugged to log.

This morning, I rode to work by a slightly different route, and took pictures of the waterfall over the dam that makes Puffer’s Pond, and a fog bank over the river. The river is full, now, with chilly rain water spilling out of the ponds in Vermont and New Hampshire, and it cools the air above it until the humidity condenses into fog.

As my loose shirt rippled in the breeze of my own passing, I watched the outlines of my shadow shifting and blurring.

It’s not perfect here. I miss the ocean, and I am not close to my own roots. But when we visited the Eric Carle museum yesterday with my nieces, at the base of the Holyoke range, I wanted to point to the sun on the mountains and say to my brother, “See why I like it here?”

Now Playing: The Hideout from You Were Here by Sarah Harmer