To the Glen

On stewarding and seasons

I go to the Glen in all seasons. The trees here have eyes, knots in the bark that stare out at me as I pass by. They were destined for slaughter once, and now they keep their eyes open, watching. The Glen is an old Christmas tree farm on a winding road in West Stockbridge MA, one of the properties procured and tended by the Berkshire Natural Resources Council. For the past few years, I’ve volunteered here as a Trail Steward, which means that every month, I walk the path down to the gorge and up again, cleaning up trash, refilling trail maps, and making note of any blowdowns. It’s an easy task with the great reward of getting to know this one trail so well, in all of its states of being.

In the spring, when the sweet white shock of hepatica appears in the crevices of the tree roots, I hunt the calls of warblers high in the canopy. In the summer, rounding a corner thick with black-raspberries, I take my loppers to the thorns that grow across the trail and threaten to etch thin lines of blood on bare skin. In the fall, I wear a knit cap in safety orange and find mushrooms in every color emerging like laughter in the quiet woods. And every time, I pause on the bridge where the water runs down from the gorge, sometimes gushing, sometimes trickling, sometimes spurting through a skirt of ice.

The Glen is always beautiful, always the same and yet ever-changing. I’ve tried many times to capture the magnificent light with my phone camera, the way it sifts down through the staggered balsams, but it never quite translates to the screen. I love it for that. The land resists capture, and thus exists only as itself in the moment when I meet it.

I think about what it means to be a steward. The word comes from the Old English stiward, “housekeeper,” or stigweard, “guardian of the hall.” Stripped of its aristocratic origins, to steward something means simply to oversee or manage it. There is no ownership or claiming—it is a role without ego, a role in which you are subsumed in your care for another thing. A steward tends and protects yet remains separate from its ward. In this way, it strikes me as not so different from mothering. To guard the hall that is the womb, to keep a hospitable home, to clip the stray tendrils of weeds the way you’d trim a wayward curl of hair. To oversee something that is ultimately not yours to keep.

Today, the trail is completely filled with snow. The trees create a kind of microclimate, huddling in close and keeping the Glen cool, so that even though the sun is melting the snowbanks around town, here everything is preserved like a cryogenic chamber. Protected yet treacherous, a cradle of ice. I move slowly, using a length of dead branch as a walking stick, careful not to fall on my growing belly.

The trees have been watching me in all my seasons too. From the early April walk when I wept through the switchbacks, awaiting news from an ultrasound that would land me in the hospital days later, to the July morning when I sang a duet with the Blackburnian warbler I couldn’t see, my voice offering up Bob Marley’s mantra to soothe the pain in my body: “everything’s gonna be alright, everything’s gonna be alright.” And then that dazed October amble, the news of a second pregnancy so new, the fear of another loss so deep, when I stepped gingerly among the legions of mushrooms poking through the duff.

In Norway, where foraging mushrooms is a cherished pastime, I learned that citizens can volunteer to be mushroom inspectors by taking and passing a rigorous test. These inspectors, these stewards, station themselves in popular foraging locations and make sure people don’t bring something deadly home in their baskets by accident. If they find one poisonous mushroom, the whole haul must be thrown away due to contamination. Here in the US, though, there is no one to greet us at the edge of the forest and gently take our poisons away. We are left to fend for ourselves, to guess if what we carry might condemn us. 

This is what I was thinking on that October walk, the fear clinging like air heavy with damp earth: that I would have to empty the basket again, that I would have nothing to show for this long walk in the dark woods. 

Five months later, I pass under the bent bough that I’ve come to think of as the Fairy Gate. The baby is kicking and strong. The trees, I see now, have been my stewards all along, cleansing and guarding me as I walk among them, keeping me clean. Mother trees, wise as crones. Their lives were spared as the Christmas tree farm turned back to ragged forest, and I think now that maybe this life will be spared too, this mushroom sprouting from my fruiting body, this magnificent light I hold inside.