Walking Towards Walden by Mitchell John Hanson;

Author:Mitchell, John Hanson; [Mitchell, John Hanson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 1995-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

MILE NINE

The coffee houses of Lisbon or Madrid, the cafés and bistros of Paris, the tavernas of Greece, the clubs and pubs of London have their own atmosphere and traditions. They are fascinating places, but they are places. You go there with some purpose.

—Georges Mikes, Coffee Houses of Europe

Experiences occur in places conducive to them, or they do not occur at all.

—Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place

Spencer Brook Marsh

FROM THE CASTLE TOWER Kata and Barkley and I descend and press on to the east. At the bottom of the slopes we come to another small, unnamed stream that runs southeast and appears to flow into Spencer Brook, which, because it is deep and has wide marshes, may prove difficult to cross. Below the castle rock the land flattens slightly, and the vegetation changes from oak and maple to another stand of white pine with very little underbrush. Walking over the ground is easy enough in this section, but the limbs are low and we have to keep ducking under snags and at some points actually have to break through tangles of dead limbs. It’s noisy going. Any wild animals we had hoped to surprise will have fled ten minutes before our arrival.

There are many signs of mammals around us. Deer droppings are everywhere, and we find twigs nipped by rabbits, mink droppings by the small stream, and at one point gnawed bark on the upper reaches of one of the hemlock trees, which Kata presumes to be the work of porcupines. We are passing through what must serve as a corridor for the local wildlife, a sort of greenway that the animals use to get from the open space of the Carlisle State Forest to the north and the undeveloped section of land and the Nashoba Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, behind us in the west. This route we are following is a part of a larger corridor of green. If you were a coyote or a wandering moose and were not disrupted by marshes and streams, as we are, and if you picked your route carefully, it would be possible to wander from the greeny hinterlands of southern New Hampshire, south to the square mile of open space of Scratch Flat in Littleton, south-southeast through Acton, down to the Estabrook Woods and on to the Great Meadows National Wildlife Sanctuary, which, give or take a few interruptions, runs all the way down to Sudbury and Framingham. All of this is a distance of twenty-five or thirty miles, and offers one of the last green corridors in the region. Even the major north-south barrier, Route 495, is passable. Several streams run under it, plus a number of small rural roads that are empty of traffic by night. In fact, according to some wildlife biologists, highways are proving less of a barrier than was formerly believed (although I find it hard to accept). Box turtles somehow manage to cross the New Jersey Turnpike, I have read, and recently biologists have found that mountain lions in southern California commonly use culverts beneath superhighways in their wanderings.

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