Essex: Plum Island

The North Shore in the winter is a special place - bereft of beachgoers and out-of-town traffic, cold, stark, and beautiful. We’re driving up the coast in the pre-dawn dark, through curtains of alternating snow, mist, and empty grey sky. It’s been a busy few weeks in the hospital, and Jane and I are looking for a bit of time - any time, even just a morning - away from the city. Plum Island, in the northeastern corner of Essex County, has been on our wish list for awhile. An prototypical barrier island situated on the Atlantic flyway, Plum Island, with its great marsh and dunes, is a birder’s paradise. Thousands flock to the island’s refuge (Parker River NWR) every year to see shorebirds, seabirds, and migratory visitors from far-flung nesting grounds in the Arctic. For me, the binoculars stay in their pack for most of the morning. I’m mainly here to spend some time with the camera, wander the lonely outer beach, and get lost in the howling wind - and in my own thoughts.

We arrive at the entrace gatehouse shortly after sunrise; after leaving our entrance fee in a little envelope, we walk the short boardwalk over the dune grass to the gently sloping beach. As the sun rises into a bank of purple clouds, the tide is coming up over a narrow bench that separates us from the breaking waves. The water chases Jane up the beach, leaving sinuous curves and gullies in the sand. Light is beginning to show on the beach houses in the nearby village of Newbury. My fingerless gloves prove to be downright masochistic amidst the morning’s severe windchill; I manage to snap some nice compositions up and down the beach, and along the dunes, before we retreat back to the car.

Back on the refuge road, we drive the length of the island, down to the boardwalk near the Emerson Rocks. I climb a nearby observation tower while Jane warms up in the car. We walk the nearby boardwalk to reach a beach covered in snow - a first for me, after a childhood in California and years of mild weather in the Mid-Atlantic. I find that the demarcation between snow and sand, at the high tide’s strand line, makes an interesting element for black-and-white compositions. Jane wanders down the beach, watching a flock of plovers and sandpipers foraging for breakfast in the surf. After short walk to the nearby bluffs, we return to the car and grab breakfast in town, and are back in Boston by late morning.

Hampshire: Hill Country

The year’s last outing, a quick overnighter, sees us going westward to the rolling hill country of the Pioneer Valley. Ever since my day trip out here in October with Lindsey, I’ve wanted to show Jane the Quabbin, and to spend more time exploring its wooded shorelines. The western part of the state is something special, in that it feels quite identifiably Massachusetts (for the sphere of Boston’s hardscrabble, lobster-loving, history-worshipping influence is long), but also represents something entirely different as well. A touch more Appalachia, a pinch less recognizably New England. You have to get off the Pike to really see the place for its many forms of beauty: the shuttered mill towns with their hardware stores, bus depots, and job marts; the village greens surrounded by steepled churches, old colonial houses, and ancient headstones; the rivers and streams climbing ever and onward into the escarpment. The beautiful, forested landscape. It’s a sort of place one can imagine growing up and growing old in - perhaps without accomplishing much, and without seeing wider horizons, but dying happy, none the wiser.

We leave Boston in the early hours of the morning, cruising down the Pike as dawn colors begin to reflect across the ponds in the central part of the state. Pulling off in Ware, we reach the Enfield Lookout, on the southern shore of the Quabbin, just the sun begins to crest the hills to the east. Where a few months earlier the treeline here had been lined by bright-gold birches, tawny oaks, and fiery maples, the view on this winter morning is one of barren branches, punctuated by glowing, silver birch bark. As the sun rises, Jane and I pace around the lookout, looking for compositions. At the western end of the picnic area, I find a much cleaner shot of Mount Lizzie than I got in October, poking up out of the water to the east. Jane and I track our way across the heather and down a steep path through the trees, where we emerge at the water’s edge. We set up for a selfie here (the aluminum tripod legs nearly freeze my fingers off) before climbing back to the car.

Continuing our tour around the Quabbin, I take Jane to the hilltop observation tower and Winsor Dam before we head into Belchertown for coffee and breakfast. In the late morning, we drive up the western shore of the reservoir and stop in New Salem, a tiny New England village with a classic green ringed by a town hall, a little library, a cemetery, a firehouse, and a few churches. We take a little path past the firehouse to a picnic area, where we get a lovely view of the the islands at the Quabbin’s northwestern corner. In the afternoon, we drive down toward Deerfield in the Connecticut River Valley, first stopping just across the river in Sunderland to visit the Buttonball Tree, an unbelievably old and massive American sycamore - the largest east of the Mississippi. At Lindsey’s suggestion, we wind up checking out the liveliest thing happening in South Deerfield - the post-Christmas sale at the Yankee Candle Village, a gargantuan complex of home goods, holiday toys, and flammable material. Tired from a long day of driving and winter hiking, I find myself staring dazedly at a band of flannel-wearing animatronic rednecks singing Christmas carols while Jane careens giddily from store section to store section. She somehow winds up buying nothing before we check in and pass out at the motel next door. We spend the evening watching TV and relaxing; the most notable news of the night comes to my email shortly after 9 PM - I receive an invitation to schedule my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine for New Year’s Day.

The next morning, we drive a short distance east to the river and climb to the top of nearby Mt. Sugarloaf. The switchback footpath to the summit is narrow and icy, but we make it up shortly after dawn, and are greeted by a commanding southward view across the valley - the Connecticut River curving away toward ridged peaks of the Mount Holyoke range. Jane and I take some photos together on the mountaintop before walking down along the access road; after breakfast in Greenfield, it’s a long drive back to the Boston via Route 2, completing a circuit of the state and our last little road trip of 2020.

Saugus: First Snow

Snowfall is a special treat, one which we experienced all too rarely in Maryland. We had our first big snowstorm of the year this past week, and it was quite amusing for this ex-Baltimorean to watch the mighty Boston machinery handle the situation on my brief daily walk into the Longwood Medical Area: walkways and roads carefully salted days in advance, fleets of bulldozers pushing two feet of snow into neat mountains along the sidewalk, trucks collecting the stuff by the ton and whisking it away to who-knows-where. Quite a contrast to my old home, where the combined driving prowess and weather-preparedness of Baltimore meant that any more than an inch of rain would cause a citywide pile-up of disaster-movie proportions.

Two days after the storm, Jane and I head back up to the Breakheart Reservation to test out our new showshoes - a pandemic purchase among many, as it were. The snowy woods, too, are something special. Although much of Breakheart is linked by paved trails, we break away into the woodland paths surrounding Silver Lake, and go for a few hours without seeing another person. I find myself standing quietly, in awe, beside the frozen lake, breathing in the fresh, cold air and listening for sounds in the wind. The tapping of a distant woodpecker. The soft thump of snow falling from treetops. The wingbeats of geese in flight - so late now to be so far north. The landscape feels more personal now that we can see clear across the lake and through the trees, passing through the woods without the foliage to conceal us, or insect hums and birdsong to accompany us. The world has gone to ground. It’s restful. It’s pulled in close. It’s waiting for something - whatever comes next.

We slosh our way through the forest, high-stepping our way back to the car, and back to the rest of a quiet, pre-holiday weekend in the city.