Rhode Island: Providence by Train

Jane and I cap off Thanksgiving weekend with a two-night getaway to Providence, RI. We intentionally take the commuter rail to get a little public transit practice in before Jordan’s big December trip to California - as well as because the little man is on a trucks-and-trains tear right now, and it’ll be his first riding a train bigger than the T. We book a hotel room on the edge of Providence’s Financial District, just a few blocks from the train station, and spend two days walking around the downtown area, eating the hotel breakfast multiple times each morning, getting some precious time in at the hotel fitness center (me) and savoring the availability of television and relaxed screentime rules (Jordan and Jane). On Sunday (our full day in town), we take a morning stroll up College Hill to walk around the Brown and RISD campuses, taking some pretty photos with the last of the fall’s foliage; after Jordan’s nap, we walk to the nearby Providence Place shopping mall, where we dine at the food court, and Jordan has fun riding an escalator for the first time, running up and down wheelchair ramps, and pretending to be a Paw Patrol helicopter while sitting in a push car. After each night’s early sunset (just after 4 PM), I take a stroll around downtown, trying my hand at nighttime cityscapes, and bringing home dinner from the nearby Maruichi Japanese Food & Deli. Then, it’s back to Boston on Monday morning - our little budding traveler enjoy every second of our frigid walk home from the comfort of his bundled-up stroller muff, with only his eyes and a little patch of his upper face showing (“It’s his expression square,” I tell Jane while imitating the latest tiny wrinkled eye or furrowed brow visible on Jordan).

Massachusetts: Heading Out, Heading In

As the autumn marches on and the calendar year draws to a close, as the nights grow longer and the days grow colder, I find myself (as usual) in a space of reflection and looking inward, even as my life outwardly expands and several of its threads weave toward something resembling climax and resolution. After a busy October filled with family time, a lot of traveling, and photography, things have settled out. The grandparents have gone home; the systole of the academic year has begun to relax into diastole; and several resolutions I made for the year seem to be culminating in the space of these few weeks. After a lot of introspection last year, I set into motion a series of life goals that had laid dormant for awhile. I took better care of my body, putting together a consistent fitness plan that saw me gearing up for my first half-marathon in over five years (since the 2019 BRF that I ran with co-fellows). I pursued my passions more fiercely, with support from Jane - traveling solo, exploring through photography, pursuing weeknight and weekend coursework in field naturalism, and devoting more energy to spiritual practice and creative writing. It’s been a year of blossoming, and regaining confidence that I’m carving out the lifeway that I want to live, and model for Jordan and others. I won’t say that it’s a finished piece; it never is. The questions still come regularly, even relentlessly — am I doing what I should? Is it enough? In my professional life? In my family life? I may never know the answers, but I will keep trusting myself to look and ask and adjust. After all, there’s never enough time. And yet, there’s still time. And how much less beautiful and precious it would all be, if we always had enough.

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October 31, 2024: Jordan’s second Halloween. We dress up as the mom and dad from My Neighbour Totoro (Jordan is, obviously, Totoro) and pick the man up early from daycare to go trick-or-treating on nearby Toxteth Street. Jordan enjoys socializing with a giant animatronic skeleton, and running up porches to take candy (once in awhile managing to say “peese” and “tank you”).

November 2, 2024: A day out with Mass Audubon’s Field Naturalist Certificate Program, at the Blue Hills Reservation in Milton, MA. Our class spends the morning looking for animal sign on the shore and in the woods surrounding Houghton's Pond, and in the afternoon visit the top of the Great Blue Hill to hear learn about the weather observatory at the summit and view the surrounding watersheds from the highest point within ten miles of the Atlantic coast south of Maine. Helicopters go buzzing by, fighting nearby brushfires throughout Norfolk County. The afternoon ends with a freshwater habitat survey exercise (catching tadpoles and invertebrates!) beside the pond near the Blue Hills Trailside Museum.

November 10, 2024: The 2024 Boston Half-Marathon, my first distance race in over five years. Despite the intervening years of pandemic, parenthood, and generalized aging, I have had a lot of fun getting back into running this year, and hope to continue the fitness kick into next year. It’s not my fastest half-marathon (that was the 2013 BRF, by about seven minutes), but it’s, by far, the most confident and prepared I have felt for the half-marathon distance. In large part, I had an enormous mental edge because over two-thirds of the course replicated my training routes along the Emerald Neckalce since this past spring - not dissimilar to the experience I had running through the BRF course through East Baltimore, Homewood, Mt. Vernon, and the Inner Harbor. I run a steady 10-11 min/mile pace, without any dehydration or muscle cramping. Notwithstanding some knee soreness and runner’s toe, and despite a ridiculously tough and hilly final four miles in Franklin Park, it’s the best I’ve ever felt closing out a race.

November 16, 2024: My penultimate Saturday out with the Field Naturalist Certificate Program. I spend the day exploring along Boston’s waterfront, examining the effects of the king tide (spring tide coinciding with perihelion and perigee) on the coastline, and documenting the effects of anthropogenic climate change - as well as the ways that local communities are developing strategies to mitigate and resist its effects. After a fantastic day thinking about the coastal landscape from the lens of environmental justice, our class ends the afternoon at beautiful Belle Isle Marsh between East Boston and Revere.

November 23, 2024: A final Saturday spent with the Fall 2024 FNCP crew, reflecting on our time together at the Boston Nature Center and learning about dendrology at the Arnold Arboretum.

Hampshire: Pioneer Valley Autumn

For October’s second family weekend vacation, I bring Jane, Jordan, and my parents out to Hampshire County - a trip which we deferred last year (instead going to Grandma’s house in Plymouth) due to the threat of rainy weather. This time, it’s a gorgeous, sun-soaked weekend in mid-late October, and the foliage is peaking throughout the Pioneer Valley. It’s both Jordan’s and my dad’s first time visiting this part of Western Massachusetts, so we take the opportunity to tour them around the Quabbin Reservoir, through the college town of Amherst, and to the top of Mt. Sugarloaf for sweeping views of the Connecticut River below.

On our first day out (Saturday), we make the long drive westward on the Pike from Brookline to Ware, retracing a route that I’ve grown familiar with after visiting the Quabbin several times since my first trip out here in the fall of 2020. Jordan sleeps most of the ride, only waking at the end to eat some snacks and admire the country scenery. After a few more miles of driving, we reach the reservoir, and I take the family up to the Quabbin Observation Tower for their first overlook of the valley below. Jane and Jordan promptly sit on the grass to relax, while my parents circle the tower and admire the scenery. Back down the hill (Jordan having a difficult time deciding if he wants to walk by himself, or be carried), we continue onward to the Enfield Lookout, where we find beautiful views of the curved reservoir below. It’s a bluebird day with zero cloud cover, and the afternoon sunlight really does the foliage and the landscape no favors - but nevertheless, pretty. We stop Jordan from trying to pick and eat a bunch of oriental bittersweet berries, then return to the hill to the area around Winsor Dam. Unfortunately, we find that that the hillside adjoining the spillway to the west (where Lindsey and I marvelled at the light almost exactly four years earlier) has been completely clearcut; I can only guess that it was done with some conservation purpose in mind, but the result is devastating, and I am saddened to see that that scene, which I felt such personal connection to after multiple visits in varying light and seasons over the years, is now permanently lost. The shaded drive between the entrance gate and the dam (which I walk after dropping everyone else off at the dam and parking the car) winds up producing some of my favorite images from the afternoon: I take some medium compositions of the backlit forest canopies, with the brilliant colored oaks, beeches, and maples lending their color to an otherwise high-contrast scene.

Back in the car (it’s now mid-afternoon), we continue westward into Belchertown, planning to stop for groceries at the nearby Stop ‘n Shop (“Stoppah shop! Stoppah shop!” Jordan proclaims, loudly announcing the name of his favorite grocery store). Since we’re only vacationing for two nights and have the town of Amherst just a few minutes away for takeout meals, we make only light grocery purchases - milk, bread, butter, eggs for breakfast, some snacks and apple cider, and some fruit for Jordan, including our first time trying goldenberries (verdict: disgusting!). Then, it’s a short drive northward to the “town” (if you can call it that) of Pelham, which borders Amherst, where we’ll be staying in a converted barnhouse overlooking the Harkness Conservation Area. We settle into our new digs, with Jane setting up Jordan’s travel crib in a little basement room downstairs, while the rest of us admire the westward view from the living room’s big picture window. In the evening, my mom and I head out to Amherst to fetch dinner for everyone, and we go to bed satiated and happy.

After a good night’s sleep, we awaken the next morning to a cloud inversion happening in the Pioneer Valley; the church steepletops and dorm room towers in Amherst rise above the clouds like beacons on an island amidst a sea of white. After breakfast, we head out northward to Sunderland and Deerfield, our first stop being the top of Mt. Sugarloaf - to see the valley view and photograph the last remnants of the morning clouds upon the Connecticut River. The rest of the family climbs the lookout tower on the mountain with Jordan, and after I get my shots, I join them and take a tripod portrait with the entire family.

Next, we head a few minutes west to South Deerfield on a whim, bringing Jordan to the massive Yankee Candle flagship village so that he can peruse the store. While Jane and I visited this monstrosity of a holiday-and-home-goods store during our New Year’s Eve trip in 2020, it’s a different experience altogether with little Jordan, who is endlessly fascinated by the model train tracks suspended above our heads, the rooms and rooms full of toy models and decorations, figurines and action figures, plushies, and so forth. His favorite attractions in the entire store are an animatronic reindeer that grunts and nods its head, with a smile (“Hi moose!” Jordan says excitedly) and a rotating Christmas tree over ten feet tall and bedecked with ornaments (“Tree! Haka-baka (helicopter)!” he exclaims). After touring the entire store, we head back out; my mom is the only one who successfully makes a purchase.

Our final stop of the morning is a few minutes back to the east, across the river in Sunderland. We bring Jordan and my parents to see the famous Buttonball Tree that Jane and I first visited in 2020 - perhaps the tallest American sycamore tree on this side of the Mississippi. This time, I set up a tripod shot including the entire family, capturing the tree’s incredible trunk and canopy much more vividly than I did when Jane posed against it all those years ago. Then, we pop by Amherst to pick up Vietnamese takeout (and a bag of boba drinks for everyone to share) before heading back up the hill to home.

In the afternoon, following Jordan’s obligatory nap, I peruse a bunch of different options for local exploration (New Salem? Buffam Falls?) and ultimately settle on the most straightforward one: a walk right out from our front door, down the road a bit to the Pemberton Memorial Forest; a quick car-less stroll in our adoptive neighborhood and local woodland. This proves to be a wonderful golden-hour walk, filled with beautiful foliage (mostly birch, beech, and sycamore leaves coating the ground in yellow) as well as some individual beautiful maples that I stop to photograph in detail. Our loop walk through the forest takes us past lines of native azalea shrubs growing by the path, beautiful golden forest scenes, and an empty vernal pool bounded by an old dam. I poke around the vernal pool and climb the dam, photographing off into the forest and down the dried-up streambed, which forms a lovely leading line through the trees. As the sun sets, we finish our loop and return to the road, each walking at our own pace (except for Jordan, who is resolutely carried by Mama for the majority of the hike and refuses the rest of us who offer to help her - poor Mama!).

All in all, it’s a fantastic way to end our trip, truly soaking in the intimate, beautiful autumn scenery that the Pioneer Valley has to offer. After another takeout Chinese dinner from Amherst (beef noodle soup and Sichuan specialty dishes - yum!), we head back to Boston the following morning, stopping by in Allston to eat lunch and pick up a cake for my mom’s birthday celebration - the last day that Jordan will spend with his grandparents until we head back to California at the end of the year.