Trail Tales: Board Member Bryn Clark
One of my favorite things about living in the Boston area is how readily accessible greenspace is. As a trail runner, I don’t take it for granted that I can lace up my shoes, step out my door, and be in the wilderness within a couple of miles!
Such is the case with my favorite local trail, just two miles from my doorstep. The J.C. Philips Nature Preserve in Beverly runs along the Wenham Lake and it’s a trail I frequent on the daily. There’s a side entrance off a street, conspicuously placed across from a local Dollar Mart. That’s the last glimpse of development for several miles.
About a quarter mile from the road, the trail leads to an old maintenance road through an open meadow.
The trail has a little bit of everything. It begins with a rolling meadow where I regularly disturb deer and, once, even a fischer cat. Then you duck under some rhododendrons which, come first snowfall, still are bright green and will deposit little dots of snow down your back if you happen to brush by them too closely. Eventually you enter the preserve itself, which takes you alongside the lake at various intervals, over some nice inclines, and along a wide, well-marked trail with plenty of roots to catch your toes and remind you to pay attention.
What I love about this trail is that it has a little of everything: elevation, different vegetation, water views, meadows—all of the above. I’ve seen bald eagles, coyotes, deer, plenty of snakes, and the occasional turtle, all within a stone’s throw of the busy interstate that I run under to get here.
The trail follows a water preserve, and in summer months the depleting levels reveal unique landscapes, like this peninsula that appears out of the lake each July.
I’ve been on the trail in eight inches of snow on Christmas Day and in a 100+ degree heat index in late July. I’ve watched the water level drop so low that little peninsulas emerge along the lake, good for squeezing in an extra quarter mile or so. And I’ve run these trails shortly after someone fell through the thin ice and tragically drowned.
It’s a reminder that nature, even this close to civilization and home, is still wild. And the wildness of things calls to us. It expects respect and bewilderment, not just transaction. I’m often tempted to “use” this land as “my training grounds.” I run on it every day and so the familiarity tempts a sense of complacency. Some mornings I notice all of it. Other mornings I’m thinking about work, watching my pace, or simply trying to get the miles done.
Wide open forest trails are interspersed with wooden structures assembled by local kindergartners who frequent the forest as an outdoor classroom.
I don’t want to miss the variety of the landscape, the subtle transformations that can happen between one morning and the next. Perhaps that’s one of the gifts of returning to the same place again and again. Familiarity doesn’t have to breed boredom. The trail doesn’t change because I’m paying attention. I change because I am.
It can teach us to notice. To become curious about small changes. To recognize that a place we think we know still has the capacity to stun.
