I knew I’d be weary after the big city so had arranged to head upstate to volunteer at the Kadampa Buddhist centre, an oasis of calm as hoped for, surrounded by forest close to the Delaware river. The golden domed World Peace Temple gleamed in the late winter light, the shrine room’s 2.5m Buddha apparently the largest cast in the west. I followed a verdant green mossy path leading through the forest of oak and pine, a curious open trail given all the surrounding leaf litter until I learned that it was cleared periodically by leaf blowers to allow the disciples to walk in beauty. There were old stone walls through the forest, something I was going to see often in the north east, relics of the former farmed landscape.
There were five of us volunteering that week, a couple from New Jersey who were on the road in their converted ambulance, an Afro American woman from NYC, a woman from Sweden, and myself. The days were clear and cold, mid-April, snow flurries at times, and preparations were underway for the annual spring festival. Our host, Jeremy, a lanky affable guy introduced the jobs for the week with a constant reference to buddhist practice. We cleaned all the windows of the temple, inside and out, dozens … this was ‘opening to the soul’; emptying the trash was ‘letting go of delusions'; ‘vacuuming rocks’ was a real lesson in ‘emptying the mind’, essentially hoovering the lawn edges of the lengthy driveway to remove any gravel that might damage the mowers. Otherwise we shifted fallen timber in the grounds, thus transmuting anger, and moved furniture around for the forthcoming gathering of some 200 people.
The residents, mainly women, were open and hospitable, and I liked the monk, Gen Samten, formerly from somewhere in the English midlands, with a humble demeanor, a beatific smile and good humoured in his talks. I liked the simplicity of ‘cherishing others is the only way to happiness and world peace’.
For my sins I was also dipping into ‘On Care for our Common Home’, the pope’s 2015 encyclical, which John had given to me. I’m not usually one for papal bulls, but the current incumbent, Francis, appropriately for addressing the climate and ecological crises, is something of a radical. He calls for a cultural change, for instance ‘Inner peace is closely related to care for ecology and the common good because, lived out authentically, it is reflected in a balanced lifestyle together with a capacity for wonder, which takes us to a deeper understanding of life’. Amen!
After ten days at the Buddhist centre, I reckoned I’d made progress on solving my problems of ‘uncontrolled desire, anger and ignorance’, and it was time to hit the road. It turned out that the online bus timetable for the local town of Port Jervis was wrong, I’d missed the only bus, so I hired a car there, rather a bigger motor than I’d wanted, and headed north. Booked airbnb with a single mum and 10 year old son in a downbeat suburb of Albany, where I had a wander around the riverbank area, the Hudson again. Some fine urban art covered the concrete pillars of the flyover overhead, and I watched a groundhog emerge from its burrow above a culvert, rooting around until it got a whiff of me. ‘How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?’ Had some pizza and turned in, sirens in the night, but the motor was still there in the morning and so on to Massachusetts.
I’d arranged to visit the Harvard Forest, the University’s 4000 acre long term ecological research site, and met up there with Bill Labich. Harvard has lead on the development of the Wildlands and Woodlands (W&W) vision for New England (see www.wildlandsandwoodlands.org), proposing community based regional revitalization, with wise harvesting of food and fibre, growth of the conservation economy, and support for the voluntary protection of land. Given current pressures for development and a growing fragmentation of ownership, it calls for 70% of New England to be permanently protected as forest by 2060, and 7% as farmland; 10% of the forest would be set aside as wildland reserves, left to natural processes. Bill is based at Harvard on a collaborative basis, working primarily for the Highstead Foundation, which has established the Regional Conservation Partnership (RCP) Network to enable communities, private landowners, public organisations and agencies to work towards the W&W vision, with Bill acting to coordinate this work (see www.rcpnetwork.org).
We went out to lunch, joined by one of Bill’s colleagues, Brian Hall, to the Country Store in nearby Petersham. It was opened in 1839, built in the ‘Greek revival’ style, and now offers ‘friendliness with a good dose of deliciousness’. In line with the W&W vision they source locally produced fresh food, and indeed it was a tasty place. The buffalo robes and feather mattresses of the 19th century are now supplanted by local crafts.
After lunch I browsed the renowned Fisher Museum, including a series of 1930’s dioramas showcasing the landscape history of New England following European settlement. Few areas of old growth forest remain, most having been cleared by early settlers; then in the mid 1800’s, with cheaper grain coming from the mid-west, many folk moved west to new opportunities, or to the cities, and the forest has returned. New England is now around 80% forested! … and I was reminded of a similar landscape history in SW Norway. One exhibit shows the painstaking processes involved in creating the dioramas, for instance each individual pine tree was made of twisted copper wire, with etched copper plate producing the needle groups.
Diorama of 1740 landscape.
Harvard of course has a whole team devoted to research and education, using the site for some longer term projects. Later that afternoon I had a wander around the forest trails, driving rain now, to look at some of the ongoing research plots. A section of the site has been left unmanaged since the late 1800s, with white pine the early colonist, now self thinning and allowing the hardwoods to get established. I went back to dry off and eat again at the Country Store, then drove on through the rain, thinking about camping, but wisely found a motel. It was run by an Indian (as in Asian) man who, hearing I was from Scotland, gave me a tot of his favourite Indian whisky, nae bad.
Another day, another state, I was off to New Hampshire to meet Dave Patrick, the state’s manager for the Nature Conservancy. Now we don’t hear about them back in Britain, but it claims to be the largest conservation NGO in the world, with some 4000 employees, branching out from a biodiversity focus to work also on climate change issues and energy policy. They were involved in some interesting angles, e.g. buying up offshore fishing rights and re-letting them on a more sustainable basis; buying 2700 acres of forest, after it was felled, and transferring ownership to the state Fish and Game agency, whilst retaining a conservation easement; and saving a small sawmill to keep local forest management going.
Dave, Elizabeth and kids live in a fine house near Wilton, with a great old barn and 8 acres of diverse woodland ... red oak, sugar maples, yellow birch, white pine, hemlock, ash ... the latter now red-listed because of the emerald ash-borer, just a few miles away. They’d just built a sugar shack and had made their first batch of maple syrup. They invited me to stay. Both formerly amphibian specialists, after dark we went out for a torchlight pond search. The forest night was alive with the loud calls of tiny peepers and at the pond we watched spotted salamanders egglaying; these are long-lived creatures, not that rare but rarely seen, just visiting water briefly in the breeding season, lucky timing for us.
Next day I took my first real hike, climbing Mt Kearsarge, at the Winslow State Park. It’s forested all the way, the trail icy and hazardous higher up, before emerging amongst a krummholz (dwarf) of twisted spruce, dwarf birch and willows. The panoramic view gave me my first appreciation of how forested New England is … NH over 80%. Where I’d parked my car at the trailhead there was a small cemetery amongst the trees, headstones dating back to the time when the land around was farmed, the old stone walls again evident through the forest around the lower slopes of the mountain.
More rain as I drove on to trendy Keane NH where I stayed for a long weekend with Valerie and Pablo, (via the volunteering website workaway.com), old hippies who run a wood energy and solar business; they’d just moved into larger premises where I helped out cleaning the basement in preparation for a big delivery of stoves and solar panels. They were good folk and we went to eat one night, Pablo’s birthday, at their daughter’s place, her hubbie a connoisseur of the maple syrup process. He told me how it’s still a major pastime/cottage industry for folk in NH and Vermont, around 40 gallons of sap needed for 1 of syrup, with the red maple more productive than the sugar maple itself. Amongst his equipment he proudly showed me a collection of antique spouts, used to tap the trees, from early wooden and cast iron examples, through rolled tin and galvanised, to the aluminium used today. He gave me a few duplicates; I wonder whether anyone has tried sycamore back home?
I'd browsed the bookshelf at Val and Pablo's place and came across 'The New Art of Travel' by Alain de Botton, dipping into it to find out the meaning of my quest. One quote that struck ... 'Travel should not be allowed to escape the underlying seriousness of the area of life with which it deals. We need always to aim for locations in the outer world that can push us towards where we need to go within'.
Ruminating on this, back in Port Jervis, a week having passed, I dropped off the car and made it to the bus this time, which showed up from a company called Leprachaun. Two monks from the Kadampa gathering also got on so I figured we could end up in some cross-cultural 'everland', perhaps indeed where I needed to go? However, disappointingly no Tir na Nirvana, just a long day back via New York, bus, train, subway, bus, and I managed to get to my next destination at Hartford, Connecticut. Here I was picked up by Jen and whisked off to the annual gathering of the American co-counselling international network, held at an outdoor education centre towards the coast. We spent 6 days together, a group of around 60, a few of whom I’d met before, honing our counselling skills, laughing, crying and playing, setting ourselves and the world to rights. One live issue we addressed was the use of gender neutral pronouns; for the record I’m sticking with ‘he, him, his’, but people who are transgender or gender non- conforming may choose something non-binary, usually ‘they, them, theirs’. Enlightened managers are encouraging staff to adopt this, to encourage a more diverse company culture. Coming to your workplace soon perhaps!
Afterwards a few of us from Britain stayed on with hospitable new friends in Northampton Mass, myself with Cat and her lanky teenage son, aka Gandalph. Another trendy town, with cafes, food co-ops, bookshops, galleries, it has a big LGBTQ community, especially women due to Smith College there, even the zebra crossings painted in rainbow colours. Talking, walking, eating over the next few days. The weather had turned warm, we canoed/kayaked the Connecticut River, a blue sky day, and I watched my first bald eagles, with two young already poking inquisitive white heads above the nest, adults flying around on 7 foot wingspans.
One evening we drove to the edge of the Green Mountains in Vermont to visit Paddy, living in the forest there and working nearby in environmental education. She introduced us to her rescue animals, including Ursula, a porcupine, who was sharing a fenced off area of the living room. Through the forest we came across bear scat and then a pine with a great chunk bitten away to produce resin runs for the bears. We passed one beaver pond currently unoccupied, carved out of the forest. And then after an hour, a much larger pond, with a great lodge built of branchwood. Sitting there quietly for a while in the dusk, sure enough a beaver emerged, a female, and then a kit, tempted by the apples that Paddy had brought. She’s a familiar presence to them and they tolerated the extra visitors that evening.
Early May, again back to NYC, I spent a final night with John and headed across town on the subway, resisting Track 19 to Babylon, via Jamaica, taking instead the airtrain to JFK. We touched down in Denver in a gloomy late light, the surrounding landscape of high desert looking bleak. The taxi driver, from Eritrea, spoke little English and I’d got the address of my airbnb wrong … we drove around for some time until I checked, an expensive ride although he graciously gave me a $10 discount. I let myself into the house, a real bachelor’s pad, greyish tones, like the landscape, stark and sparingly furnished, a pile of men’s health mags the only concession to humanity, and everything tech controlled … from the code to my room to the sensors on the taps and waste bin. No human around, it was a strange impersonal experience.
I’d been reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, which a couple of people had told me in the past was their best novel ever. Like the Joad family, my ultimate destination was California, not out of material desperation thankfully; however, I was reminded of a phrase that stuck in my head from something about travel I’d read years ago ... the ‘desperation of affluence’, that causes people like me to head off on picaresque odysseys to find … something? Not for the first time I wondered what am I doing? But I slept fairly well and next day it was back to the airport to catch a bus to Boulder, an hour or so up the highway.
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