A goodbye walk on Buck Hill
Reflecting on living beside the Blue Hills, calls for a national park in Georgia, and plant of the week
Hello again! Back from a much-needed week off. A couple updates:
First, I recently joined BirdNote as a digital producer. If you haven’t heard the show on public radio before, as a reader of this newsletter you’d probably enjoy it! I joined the team at an exciting time: later this month, they’re launching a new podcast called Bring Birds Back. Hosted by Tenijah Hamilton, who discovered her love of birds during the pandemic, the show features experts talking about solutions for the serious challenges faced by wild bird populations. This kind of solutions-focused media is what I’m all about, as you all know. Check out a sneak peak of the podcast here.
Second, Priya, myself and the cat are moving to Providence this weekend. We’re very excited for the move, because Providence seems like a lovely place to live and also we can still be in touch with our Boston area family and friends. Even though it’s only 45 minutes south, moves send me into a chaotic mix of nostalgia, confusion, and elation. One part of the moving process, for me, was hiking up my favorite local hill.
A goodbye walk on Buck Hill
I haven’t properly left a place unless I’ve taken one last good walk or bike ride. In Kirksville, Mo., where I lived during college, it was a trip on my mountain bike one evening in April or May down seemingly endless gravel roads past the university farm’s pastures. (Yes, the school had a farm, but unlike some have claimed, it’s not part of the main campus or quad.) I feel like I have to shake hands with the place and say, “Well, see you next time” if I’ve lived there for more than a month or so. Not to do so would smack of ingratitude, lack of ceremony befitting the occasion.
As we prepare to leave Quincy, I hiked up Buck Hill in Blue Hills Reservation. Buck Hill isn’t the biggest of the Blue Hills overlooking Boston—that honor goes to the aptly named Great Blue Hill to the west. But for reasons I hope will become clear here, it’s one of the most rewarding places to visit in the park.
The trail begins in dense spruce and white pine, where the air is perpetually moist and the light is dim. I imagine the spot is a little like the Pacific northwest, but I’ve never been. The path soon tilts upward over granite boulders blazed with the blue paint-marks of the Skyline Trail. The pines thin out. Slowly, weather-hardy pitch pines replace the lowland white pines.
The Blue Hills formed from the ruins of an ancient volcano. Quickly-solidified lava floes became slabs of smooth granite. The bluest and glassiest granite type, rhyolite, gives the group of slopes its name. With the marshy river valleys below, rich in shellfish and fertile ground for crops, and with rhyolite in the hills for tool-making, the place has supported human communities for thousands of years. People have lived here since soon after the glaciers retreated. The Massachusett, the Indigenous people of this area, derive their name from Mass-adchu-es-et, which means “at the great hill.”
The Plymouth colonists and later settlers forcibly removed the Massachusett from their ancestral lands. The smallpox epidemic of 1616-1619 and massacres by Miles Standish’s soldiers decimated the Neponset band of the Massachusett that first encountered the pilgrims. Yet their descendants continue to live south of the Blue Hills, at Ponkapoag reservation.
The Plymouth settlers used the name of the Massachusett for the new commonwealth. The colonial and state governments that followed co-opted many Native American words for place names. They did so not out of respect but instead to suggest that the Massachuett had willingly handed over their lands, papering over the violent truth. As Mark Jarzombek writes, naming the hill to the east of Buck Hill after the leader of the Neponset, Chickataubut, helped “highlight the presumed legality of the land transfers” from Native peoples to settlers, obscuring the forcible removal of the original inhabitants of the Blue Hills.
In the 1890s, the state’s Metropolitan Parks Commission purchased much of the Blue Hills and their nearby kettle ponds and wetlands to create a large park as Boston and its close suburbs grew. Setting aside so much land for conservation in a metro area was rare and unusual at the time. The commission’s foresight is why the Blue Hills are in the remarkable condition they’re in today. The state reservation runs right up against some of the most populous areas of greater Boston—just down Blue Hills Parkway from majority-Black Mattapan, pressing up against the apartment buildings of west Quincy, towering over Braintree’s mall. It’s not an exclusive mountain retreat but instead a place that many people can access for hikes both easy and hard, environmental education, swimming, fishing, and summer cookouts. It’s also one of the last refuges for wildlife such as timber rattlesnakes—a population that’s well studied and well-hidden from almost all visitors, thanks to the scope of the park.
When in the Blue Hills, I can’t avoid thinking about their historical legacies and their implications for me. It’s important to me that the park is reachable and beloved to a broad swath of people, not just a narrow set of outdoor sports enthusiasts. But I think, too, of what the place has been, and what it could become. In The Atlantic, David Treuer recently called for the national parks to be returned to Native Americans, who are the best equipped to ensure the long-term well-being of those lands and to tell their histories. Treuer had some of the largest natural areas on the continent in mind. I wonder if states like Massachusetts can operate on a smaller but potentially very meaningful level in returning lands such as the Blue Hills back to the care of Indigenous people.
A solo hike prompts wide-ranging reflections, but immediate physical realities punctuate them. The trail steepens to cross the shoulder of a smaller peak to the west of Buck Hill. I clamber on hands and knees up a narrow granite chute and back down the other side, avoiding slick spots. I climb down into a dark, quiet valley with a small stream. The day’s drizzles and chill have kept most other hikers away.
Splashing through the stream and through the valley, I reach the steep base of Buck Hill. Most trails in the northeast, I’ve realized, don’t feature switchbacks to make the ascent more gradual. They just propel you straight up. Rock scrambles and improvised stone stairways by trail-builders lead me to unzip my jacket.
Scrub-pines appear again on the thin soils of the higher slope. Near the summit, they give way to bear oak shrubs as the hilltop finally opens.
I reach the summit. Unlike the steep-pitched Great Blue Hill to the west, the top of Buck Hill is round and smooth. Towhees sing from the large stands of bear oak, which are just starting to leaf out. Some of last year’s tiny, bitter acorns cling to the branches. Bear oak shrubs hit you at waist height. The landscape feels manageable even though you’re up high.
Creeping stems of bearberries, a relative of blueberries, grow beneath the shrubs. Their bell-shaped pink flowers have just bloomed.
From the eastern side of the summit, I can see all the way to Quincy, spotting my apartment building in the distance as well as the harbor islands, downtown Boston to the north, and Quincy Bay to the south. Buck Hill reminds me of the mountaintops in Acadia National Park in Maine. They too have a shrubby, weather-beaten appearance, and offer sweeping views of the nearby coast.
Like so many in eastern Massachusetts, I’m grateful to have this kind of stunning beauty so close to where I live. While Providence will have its own set of treasures, I felt I had to memorialize my time living beside the Blue Hills with this visit.
Eventually I decide it’s time to return. Internally I say something along the lines of “see you next time” to the summit. I’ve planned a route down that’s more gradual than the way up, which I think is the only sensible way to climb a hill. An ad-hoc stone stairway down the eastern slope of the hill connects with a medium-difficulty trail that traces Buck Hill’s smoother southern base and winds back to the parking lot. Generations of trail-blazes, some faint and some bright new, lie on the rock faces along the path.
The trail narrows in the dense forests of the valley floor. Spots where past gales have knocked down dozens of \pines like dominoes are also places of intense growth—new pines, young birches. In the shadow of cliff-faces, ferns are just starting to unroll their fiddleheads.
American beech trees, which I had never seen in abundance before living in this region, preserve the past locations of their fallen branches with eye-shaped scars, record generations of graffiti, and hold recent trail-blazes. They indicate both the frequent use of the park and its persistence through time—its enduring communal value as a conservation area.
At the edge of the woods, I start seeing more walkers. I’m near Houghton’s Pond, a smaller version of the more famous Walden Pond to the northwest, no less lovely and much easier for us to visit.
Reaching my car, I think about how our countless visits to this place over the past three years have each revealed different aspects to the Blue Hills. When we first moved here, I thought that achieving a map-like totality of knowledge about the park would be an achievable goal. Instead, each new trip has helped convinced me that’s impossible for any one person, and instead suggested all the different valid ways of knowing the place: as a hiker, an urban cross-country skier, a family barbecuing in July, a toddler learning to swim. The size of the place makes it more welcoming to wild animals, but it also diversifies the number of ways that people can relate to it, too.
I can’t arrive at a solution for the ultimate meaning of the Blue Hills as if solving a long math problem. Instead, it’s a matter of understanding other people’s relationships to the place, and understanding mine as a tiny addition to a huge tapestry.
The Blue Hills have their limits. This isn’t a vast wilderness where moose and bears ramble at will. It’s divided and bordered by interstates and busy roads. But it’s hard to imagine living here without the Blue Hills at least as healthy as they are now. Its value is a balance between its size and its interconnectedness to human communities. The park offers a view into the region’s legacies that has guided me, and I hope will continue to guide people far into the future.
*I had originally identified the small pink flowers above as lingonberry. After sharing the photo with a botanist, I learned that lingonberry is pretty rare in southern New England, and it’s probably bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi). Cool name.
A national park along the Ocmulgee River
In Bitter Southerner, Janisse Ray writes:
“Is the South any less beautiful, less ecologically complicated, less rare, less awe-inspiring than the West? Do we need the loudness of geology to understand power? Can we have a quiet geography? Can we understand the quiet muscle of botanics? …
I’d like to plant a seed in the middle of your heart that will become a public land growing in the heart of Georgia — a state that has committed more than its share of atrocities and also a state beginning to make atonement.”
As someone who grew up in Missouri, the way that Ray writes about the value of conserving “quiet geography” resonates with me.
A growing coalition of people, including the Muscogee nation whose ancestors built mounds and large ancient cities along the Ocmulgee River, are calling for a new national park in Georgia. It would build on the Ocmulgee Mounds National Monument to conserve a much broader area. In an encouraging step, the National Park Service has begun a Special Resource Study to consider creating a national park. Learn more here and in Ray’s story.
Plant of the week: Garlic mustard
Sometimes my plants of the week are offered in pure celebration; sometimes they’re also sort of a word to the wise. This week’s is one of those: garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is an invasive species that opens its four-petaled flowers and toothed, heart-shaped leaves before most other native herbs can, outcompeting them for resources in the spring.
The Nature Conservancy has a pretty good suggestion for what to do if you notice a patch of garlic mustard in your backyard. First, cut the plants down before they can go to fruit, collecting them in a bag to avoid spreading seeds. Then, having harvested the plants, you might as well eat them. “Adds spice to dips, sauces, salads, and stir fries,” TNC advises. Best to harvest young plants both to stop the spread and because they taste better. Kind of like eating lionfish that chew up coral reefs, I guess.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.