Sap and music rise on the edge of spring — #Berkshireweekend

The inner walls were smooth with age. Somehow they’ve worn away here at the center and kept their integrity, so they could holding a hundred feet of the trunk over my head. I was standing inside a tree.

By the scuffed ground around the bowl, I’m not the only small person who has found this magic circle. I was out in the golden hour, walking on the lower loop through Hopkins Forest on a night on the edge of spring, and the light was turning the woods into a new world.

I remember it now, when the sap house is boiling again and Williams College is planning their annual maple celebration. That spring I’d had the chance to walk through the woods with Hank Art and Scott Lewis and Drew Jones, who have cared for the woods for 50 years, and ask them what they see here.

They told me about spring nights when you could have found students from three colleges up by the vernal pools, keeping count of the salamanders. And maybe that’s what I remember now, that energy — finding what lives here that we’ve never seen, making something happen

In my student days the contradance band used to play for the spring festival — Saint Antoine’s Reel, Quebeçois music ripping along at top speed — we’d haul our instruments up the trail to cheer on people checking out the canopy walk, which was one of the first in the world when Meg Lowman made it in the 1990s. And we’d try fresh syrup, still hot from the boiler, poured over vanilla ice cream.

The lower loop trail holds long shadows in the late light on an early spring evening at Hopkins Forest in Williamstown.
Photo by Kate Abbott

The lower loop trail holds long shadows in the late light on an early spring evening at Hopkins Forest in Williamstown.


Events coming up …

Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.

Images Cinema persents the The Quiet Girl, the acclaimed Irish drama nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film.
Mar 23 2023 @ 4:30 pm
Rural Ireland. 1981. Nine-year-old Cait is sent away from her overcrowded, dysfunctional family to live with foster parents for the summer.
Leo and Remi stand surounded by tjckly growing tall flowers in Close, Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film.
Mar 23 2023 @ 4:30 pm
Leo and Remi are two thirteen-year-old best friends whose seemingly unbreakable bond is suddenly, tragically torn apart.
An artist in residence paints in a studio at Mass MoCA.
Mar 23 2023 @ 5:00 pm
Mass MoCA’s artists-in-residence at The Studios — where you may meet a fiber artist, an Affrilachian Poet and a Cave Canem fellow and game designer, a fourth-generation asian American artist exploring collective memory, generational narratives, histories and space, a visual album maker from San Francisco, an Afrofuturist poetry slam champion, […]

By the Way Berkshires is a digital magazine exploring creative life and community — art and performance, food and the outdoors — and I’m writing it for you, with local voices, because I’ve gotten to know this rich part of the world as a writer and journalist, and I want to share it with you.

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