Readers of my blog will know that I have spent the past several months sheltering in my parents’ home in my old hometown of Acton, Massachusetts. When we arrived here from China via California at the beginning of March, we certainly could not have foreseen at the time how fast the outbreak of COVID-19 would spread here in the USA, especially in our neck of the woods. Massachusetts was hit hard early on, along with New York and New Jersey. By mid-March, schools were closing, and eventually businesses followed. April and May were hard lockdown months, with most businesses shuttered. In June, some things began to open up (I’m being very general here), yet everyone was encouraged to practice “social distancing” and mask-wearing. We spent most of our time sheltering in my parents’ house, and if we went out, it was to the local supermarket for food shopping or to Staples to get office supplies.
Without the ability to go to my usual places and haunts (Boston, Cambridge, bookstores, cafes, malls, cinemas, restaurants, museums, etc.) or to see old friends and relatives, I found myself increasingly drawn to nature. I began to explore the nature trails that are maintained in the forest behind our home. Pretty soon, I’d explored nearly all of the trails and pathways in the Spring Hill and Nashoba Brook trail system. After a few encounters with owls, which I’ve blogged in previous posts, I invested in a good pair of binoculars for birdwatching and started to diversify my nature hikes with visits to nearby wetlands, conservation lands, and wildlife refuges. I took walks in the neighboring towns of Carlisle, Concord, Westford, Littleton, and I also explored more of Acton’s own nature trails, sometimes with my family members but mostly on my own. I suppose this was a kind of escapism, but in another way it was a deeper engagement with the place in which I happened to spend most of my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s.
Me posing for a selfie in the Nashoba Brook conservation land, also known as the Trail Through Time
Since graduating from Acton Boxboro Regional High School in 1987, I hadn’t spent much time in Acton, just a couple of summers in grad school and periodic short visits to see my parents. Now I found myself living here for an indefinite and uncertain and unbounded time, while waiting for our opportunity to return to our home in China, which had decided (wisely) to close itself off to the world in late March.
A Barred Owl, which appeared mysteriously during a walk through the woods, and then disappeared into the woods
As I delved deeper into local nature sites, one of my indispensable guides was a locally based writer and naturalist named John Hanson Mitchell. A friend encouraged me to read his book Ceremonial Time. As I blogged in a previous post, I was amazed to find that the patch of land he writes about in this book was one very familiar to me since early childhood.
Another selfie while cycling through Harvard, posing at Harvard Center in front of a monument to the local citizens who fought in the Civil War.
In addition to roaming the streets, train tracks, and forests, and swimming and fishing in the lakes, ponds and streams of Acton and environs, another favorite activity of my teenage years was cycling. I used to cycle, sometimes with friends or relatives, other times on my own, quite avidly. In June, I found myself recovering my appreciation for riding the roads of this largely semi-rural or “ruburban” area located between and around the major highways of Route 495 and Route 128 in the Boston suburbs. I started in late June with some shorter rides, sometimes with my stepfather or with a childhood neighborhood chum named Steve, who still lives in the Boston area.
One of our more challenging rides, over the hilly country of Harvard and Bolton and back to Hudson
Hudson Town Center, where we stopped for a beer after our bike ride, with proper social distancing of course
Over the two hot months of July and August, my bike rides became longer and more ambitious. I became attracted once more to hills of Harvard, one of our neighboring towns. I also did a lot of cycling along old colonial-era roads that wind through our neighboring towns of Concord, Carlisle, Lincoln, Groton, Westford, Littleton, Bolton, Stow, Wayland, Weston, and Lexington. Hiking along forest and wetland trails was one way to gain an appreciation of the natural environment that we are blessed with here in New England, while cycling through farmlands, fields, forests, hills, and along rivers such as the Concord, Sudbury, and Assabet was yet another way to pay homage to our fair New England towns and their scenic vistas, town centers, and other delights.
My daughters Sarah and Hannah climb Indian Rock at Punkatasset conservation land in Concord
At the same time, I found myself curating my daughters’ summer experiences as well. Without the ability to attend summer camp or other organized activities, and with no friends of their own here in Acton, they were at a loose end. I took them on trips to the antipodes of our home state, where we experienced the beauty of the western mountains and the seashore and wetlands of Cape Cod. I also took them on local excursions to nature sites and to sites of historical significance. As I recorded in my previous post, we spent a lot of time in Concord, paying a visit to Walden Pond, and visiting the homes and graves of famous authors and philosophers, including Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott (Louisa May, that is).
More recently, I acquired another book written by John Hanson Mitchell: Walking Towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place. In this book, Mitchell writes a great deal about the history of Concord, and about the extraordinary men and women who congregated there over the centuries. He argues persuasively that ever since its establishment in 1635, Concord has always been a sacred and central place in the history of our country, as well as a place that has gathered an unbelievable concentration of intellectual power brokers and literary influencers onto its hallowed grounds. Even today, Concord seems to attract luminaries such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose home I visited a few years ago with my mother.
Reading Walking Towards Walden
Hanson frames this book around the story of a walk that he and two of his close companions did, bushwacking their way through forests and wetlands and across brooks and streams as they went. Their walk, which he describes as a “pilgrimage” of sorts, begins in his hometown of Westford (or does he actually live in Littleton?) and ends at the Colonial Inn in Concord Center, covering around 15 miles by my reckoning. He also segues into stories, both historical and personal, of other quests, adventures, and travels, while exploring the ideas of place, the sacred, and belonging.
A page from Walking Towards Walden describing Henry David Thoreau and his ambles
He also spends plenty of pages telling tales of displacement. In particular, he illuminates how native Americans or Indians were unsettled and eventually pushed out of New England and other American lands by the colonial and post-colonial settlers of the United States. Slavery is another subject that comes up periodically in this book. One of the most significant war stories in this region is King Phillips’ War, which took place in the late 1600s between coalitions of Indian tribes and the colonial settlers of the towns that I have spent the past six months exploring. Hanson weaves this story together with that of the famous episode on April 18-19, 1775, when the colonial settlers or Minutemen marched to Concord and fought bravely against the British regulars at the Old North Bridge and beyond. By the end of the book, I had learned a great deal about this event that I didn’t know previously, including the unerring politeness of the British officers as they raided and ransacked the settlers’ homes in search of weapons and stocks.
While reading Walking Towards Walden, I was quite delighted to discover that nearly every road, passage, brook, wetland, forest, hill and farmland that Hanson and his companions encounter during their walk from Westford to Concord Center was a place not only familiar to me, but one that I had also walked or ridden upon over the past few months. Like Hanson, I find that something always draws me back to Concord, which exerts a mystical pull to people in this region. In fact, Acton used to be part of Concord, and the old road that connected Acton village and its mills to Concord center is located in the forest behind our home. It is completely overgrown and unusable now, part of the forest really, but you can still see the fieldstones and the wall that was built along both sides of the original road, which comes down to Wheeler farm and Robbin’s Mill along Nashoba Brook, and you can imagine Thoreau coming down the hill on his way to Westford and beyond.
It is comforting and enlightening to realize that all of these lands and pathways that I have followed over the past few months were probably trodden upon by the peripatetic surveyor, naturalist, and scholar Henry David Thoreau, whose keen observations and insights into the natural world and its workings were at least a century ahead of the rest of the world. Hanson also treads in the footsteps of Thoreau, taking us deep into the center of things. You may not have grown up in this place like I did, and you may not have a visceral experience of the places he describes on his journey to Concord, but if you read this book, I believe you too will feel that you are walking alongside Hanson and his companions, historical and contemporary, as you make your way through the forests, farmlands, horse trails, streams, and fields, birdwatching as you go.