A Walk in Hamilton Sanctuary

I’m zipping along in the car on the expressway stretch of Route One between Brunswick and Bath as I glance down at the brochure for Hamilton Sanctuary. It’s late afternoon on a Sunday, and I’ve got to get there before the sun sets. I need to walk around for a few minutes, take some notes, and write a profile of the place. I should have done it weeks ago but I’m so busy these days

Finally I’m there. I park in the dirt lot near a white clapboard farmhouse rimmed with late-summer flowers, and go to check out the map on the notice board. Studying the hand-drawn diagram of the land, I decide there’s enough time to walk the one and a half miles of trail that skirt the meadow and trace the edge of the forested peninsula, veering off at one point to an old ice pond in the middle of the sanctuary. I start in the meadow.

Hamilton Sanctuary, I can see, is a place that people have shaped. The eight acre meadow is kept mown – a boon for the bobolinks in the spring – and moss-covered stone walls extend into the forest, hinting that all of the property’s 74 acres was once cleared for farming. An apple tree grows up ahead, sumac to the side.

Where I walk is where Millicent Hamilton, the sanctuary’s donor and namesake, loved to watch the birds in the spring. Hers were the words I read in the car. Past pale purple asters and Queen Anne’s lace at the bottom of the gentle sloping spur to Back Cove, a small wooden landing marks the edge of the marsh. Up wafts the deep smell of mudflats at low tide, where a man in a tank top bends over in the sun, plunging his clam rake into the grayish brown matter that means life for millions of things. A ring-billed gull circles noiselessly overhead.

Back on the east side of the meadow trail where sulphur butterflies float and oak branches arch overhead, I wonder if the whole world is awash with that greenish-gold light of late summer. All I can hear is a cricket, an acorn tumbling from above. In the forest, the needle- and moss-covered trail rolls up and down, first through a fairy-like stand of tiny balsam firs that range from shoulder to shoe, and then into white pine and spruce. A few poplar leaves curl underfoot, a hint of the autumn ahead. It is quiet, astonishingly quiet.

In other seasons there are pine warblers and vireos, migrating shorebirds on the mudflats, but on this Sunday in September the sanctuary is taking its own rest. Ahead on another spur past the low spot and the lacy branching boughs of a hemlock, a solitary wooden bench looks out at, from a different angle, the mudflats and man digging clams. I hear the peal of a flicker, then the low chrup chrup of a hermit thrush who has perched in the bottom branch of a pine. The birds are getting accustomed to my presence. When I stop to think about plucking a small red raspberry hanging ankle-high over the trail, a song sparrow scolds from above.

Every so often, the base of a pine is circled by pieces of cone, the remains of a red squirrel’s meal. In some low spots on the trail, smooth, pinky-sized twigs of spruce collect up against one another like a unpatterned parquet floor. A nuthatch comes in to watch, cocking his head first one way then the other.

The east side of the peninsula is rougher and older feeling, with blowdown and big, dead, mature trees that are dreams come true for a woodpecker. Every other trunk, it seems, is marked by a deep gash where a pileated repeatedly struck its bill and then unrolled a long tongue to collect the bounty. I think of the clammer. All of the sudden there is one of the shells, dropped by a gull, looking anachronistic and white on a soft bed of moss that’s green-gold like the light back in the meadow. Ahead a kinglet cries like a high-pitched cricket in the crown of a tree; a belted kingfisher sounds out from across the gut to the east.

The trail turns again and heads west, then splits to lead north to the ice pond, which is now more a marsh, its brown water filling in with reeds and ferns. An impossibly blue dragonfly crosses the path, the depth of its color matched only by a half circle of fungus – growing on a fallen trunk – that’s exactly the shade of ripe pomegranates. Back on the main trail on the edge of a footbridge is a neat pile of raccoon scat. Not long after where the old boundary wall comes into view again, its stones nearly reclaimed by the moss and dirt from which they came, grows a big white pine that might be the mammal’s home. My irregular loop is almost complete.

Drawing out of the woods into the meadow and low sun again, I’m surprised to see it’s been an hour and a half. It was longer, so much longer. But then shorter, at the same time, too. Time becomes distorted in the woods. The sun is slanting lower, growing golder. It’s time to go home, to pick the tomatoes, to prepare for the coming week.

As I angle up towards the car, back towards the world, away from the balsam firs and mudflats and meadows, a dog barks somewhere far off. It wants food, perhaps, or maybe something more inexpressible, like to be free again, and wild.