It’s the day before Earth Day 2024. From a late-morning meet-up at Brunswick Town Hall, five of us drive 15 minutes to the parking area beneath the high point in town. Cox Pinnacle hovers? looms? naps? above the dirt lot with its signage and a narrowing that leads to a 200-foot wooden bridge that begins the trail up.

But before we five set out, we pick tools from the town truck Parks and Rec staffer Connor Levigne has driven here. Loppers, a couple of small hand saws, a rake, and to supplement those tools, a few of us take home tools out, including a larger bucksaw and a small hoe. We gather at the bridge and agree not to fell any branches or trees on each other.

We five are here as part of an Earth Day trail cleanup, joining town staff from Parks and Rec with a group of six Bowdoin College students and four of us from the town’s Conservation Commission. We are led and organized by Brunswick’s environmental planner, Ashley Charleson, and Town Forester Dennis Wilson.

Charleson and Conservation Commission Vice Chairperson Kurt Stinson are off at Kate Furbish Preserve with Bowdoin’s Charlotte, Naomi, Fiona, Ethan, Anton and Caroline, and Parks and Rec staffer, Luigi Difazio. They will be at sea level, so at some point in the next few hours, we will be working at the high (407 feet) and low points of town.

Cox Pinnacle is set just off Hacker Road in Brunswick’s rural outland; every time I drive there along its rolling roads and by its well-spaced houses and open areas, I smile. It is beautiful country, and the 2003 collaboration between the town and Pinnacle-lovers has given us all a 104-acre gem of a park for those who like a little up in their day.

So, the trails. After the recent spate of branch-cracking storms, we five expect a litter of limbs, punctuated by the occasional felled tree-body. And yes, there are some downed branches, but only a usual, post-winter number, along with some snow- or ice-bent saplings. We lug and lop and trim; the trail clears easily. Here, it seems so different from the pine-strewn streets of town.

Some of that, I think, as I amble and clear, is due to the spacing in this maturing forest. But then I begin to note also that there are many more hardwoods and hemlocks here, which translates to fewer white pines, the splendid but soft-hearted trees of so many town neighborhoods (and power outages).

Melanie and I reach waterbar number one, and I begin scratching out sediment behind the bar with my sharp-bladed hoe. Melanie joins in with her hands, and soon we’ve deepened the groove behind the diagonal of stones crossing the trail. Water flowing down trail will be shunted to the side and into the woods; so, water will be “barred” from gouging out gullies in the trail center. This is, we agree, pleasing work akin to lawn-cutting or row hoeing — you can see the neatened results.

After clearing another waterbar, we five reach a split in the trail. Here, we divide to clear both sides of the half-mile loop ahead; we’ll meet at Pinnacle’s top.

Meanwhile, later report informs me, the nine-person crew at the pine-rich Kate Furbish preserve is finding fuller work. Branches litter the trail and a number of full-sized trees block the way. Out come the hand tools and, for the full trees, Luigi fires up a chain saw. They clear and talk as they go.

On the Pinnacle the early afternoon ambles by pleasantly. We trim more overhanging branches, employ the bucksaw to some tilted or fallen medium trees, comb leaves and muck from a few more waterbars.

The other plus of this work, both crews agree, is the company. We work sometimes in pairs, sometimes solo, but always in proximity, and as we go up, we learn small trail stories that account for our being here today. Melanie, who is visiting a local family from California, has put in one season of trail work in Vermont’s mountains, which she “wanted to see,” and that’s led her to set up a next summer of trail work in New Hampshire and Maine. “How’d you find this summer’s work?”, I want to know, and hear that “a friend on the AMC Trail Crew suggested it” as a way into a possible career in the conservation world.

Helene, who has the largest mental local Rolodex I know, is here in part because “since COVID, four friends and I go for a weekly hike, and we keep picking new trails. So, I appreciate all that goes into them.” And Kevin, whose local Rolodex may rival Helene’s, sees the enduring possibility that trails offer of getting people outdoors. He also has a long-distance trail-hiking son, who has brought back many stories from the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails.

So, we’re all here for various experiential reasons and itches, hoping that our little work helps others to take the hundreds of little steps that get them into local wild places.

Pinnacle top is a small divergence bulked up by a large ledge. Once, in the agrarian past, there were views stretching from Katahdin in the northwest to Mount Washington in the west. Today, the regrown forest has brought woodlands much closer to home, and the mountains must be imagined. But trails are as much acts of imagination as they are routes into the world.

As we turn to go back down over the summer-ready trails, we know we’ll be back.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident, chairperson of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com.

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