Winter Solstice in the Heartland

Viewed from the air, Brunswick’s town outline appears winged. Our town looks like a bird’s shadow, wings flared, a hawk, perhaps, who has spotted something down on the ground and is readying for a closer look. There is the wing traced by River Road and the other by the Old Bath Road; there are the tailing feathers of Mere Point and Middle Bay.

This imagined bird has twin hearts of open space and conserved land — the greater Town Commons and Crystal Spring Farm. Here, I realize, my extended metaphor has begun to wobble some, its flight strained. Let’s go then back to ground. The left one of these heartlands is the 321-acre Crystal Spring Farm, and it features two primary gifts to our town: The first is a 5-mile trail system available to all; the second is a farm, home of an active CSA, host to a weekly farmers’ market and other outdoor events, all available to those who would join or visit.

This is the first of two planned pieces about the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Crystal Spring Farm. That Crystal Spring is an all-year heartland seems clear, and so it also seems right to look at it during each of the year’s two solar poles — winter, then summer solstice. Winter, paradoxically, seems a good time to wander, summer a time to dig in.

I arrive at the South Parking area on Pleasant Hill Road just about on the solstice nose, (which, in our hemisphere, got here on Dec. 21 at 11:28 a.m). The day is blue sky, transparent air, and the sun’s trying as hard as it can at its southern extreme. No one else is here.

I go south first along the East trail into that sun. Even at this low angle and in 20- degree temperatures, I feel its warmth. Winding then down, by the sliding hill beneath the Marilyn Settlemire bench shaped from granite, then into woods that flank a ravine, and along its fringe.

Unlike the trail, the steep, little hill is packed out by now vanished sliders. It’s clear that more people have been here than anywhere else I wander during this day. Brunswick resident Kurt Stinson recalls, “One year the Portland Press Herald named it one of the best sledding spots in the area. A day or two later, my wife came back from taking the kids there to sled and was mad at the newspaper. She went on about how Brunswick’s secret was out, the parking lot was full, the hill was packed, and she wished the newspaper had left it off the list.”

So, where exactly is this spot? Clearly, lots of local residents know, and I’m not saying.

Where the trail turns back along a field-margin toward Pleasant Hill Road, there’s a remarkable blow-down from the October wind-storm — a body-trunk stalk of pine broke across the trail from some 20 feet up. Its huge force must have landed explosively, though a cleanup force of trail workers with chainsaws has cut through the blockage. After dipping to a bridge crossing of the ravine, the trail takes me along to the Blueberry Loop’s departure (which I leave for another day and season) and then to a crossing of Pleasant Hill Road. In the cold, I’m moving at some mix of jog and walk through the partially broken snow.

Along the sun-side of a field — sun-shrunk snow — and into the north-side woods. On the Main Loop trail, which winds toward the Maurice Drive entrance (off Baribeau Drive), the Settlemire Gardens and the Labyrinth, it becomes clear that I’m following more and more walkers and skiers. I reach another wind-felled pine, this the third stem of a colossal tree, that, if I get such growths right, grew from what must have been a truly huge original white pine. I count 78 rings on the stem where trail workers have cut it through close to its base. I pause here to imagine the landscape in 1950, when this stem began swelling toward the present.

Forest ecologist Tom Wessels has written an illuminating book (“Reading the Forested Landscape,” The Countryman Press) that helps the average-me know a bit of what’s happened in this scene. Coppiced, or multiple trunk, trees, originate from a parent tree, which, given the size of what’s before me, was likely cut for timber. That tree’s intact root system then sent up shoots, three of which became the new tripartite tree, now minus one, before me. Here’s where the window to the past opens a bit: you can estimate the size of that parent-tree: Wessels writes: “Because the sprouts all grew on the outside of the former stump, we can approximate the diameter of the original tree, by connecting the centers of each stump sprout and creating an imaginary circle near ground level.”

I approximate this calculation and get an imagined giant tree more than 4 feet in diameter that I’d like to see.

And on along a firm-packed trail — by now I am snow-running, a short-stepping slowness that is, nevertheless, a form of running that works on foot-pounded tracks.

At the Labyrinth, I pause to read the sign, which distinguishes a labyrinth from maze — meditative walking as opposed to confused seeking — and then I set out along the packed path. No one of the perhaps 10 prior walkers has stepped on or sullied the snow that lies between the pathways, even as stepping over would be an easy shortcut.

It takes 5 contemplative minutes to reach the center, where — how to decide? — I must circle left or circle right, clockwise or counterclockwise. I pick the counter-spin direction of storm; may it give us a snowy winter.

That’s this walking/snow-running day’s far point. I jog back to the Main Loop, join its other direction, return to the sun-field, cross the road, retrace the East Trail, rising to its crest, where I’m brought again to the sun — it warms my face, begins its trundle to June 21 — the next solstice gift from Crystal Spring.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident and chair of the town’s Conservation Commission. He writes for a variety of publications and has a book, “Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains,” due out from University Press of New England on April 3, 2018. He may be reached at [email protected]

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