It’s not easy to miss the stand of tall white pines mixed with a few oaks on the corner of McKeen and Spring streets. Taller than any house and rich with shade in the hot months, these trees are no yard-ornamentals; they are a micro forest in mid-town Brunswick.

Evidence of this is easy to spot — a walker, for example, passing along the Spring Street edge need only look up to one of the bordering pines. There, ten or so feet off the ground are four distinctive holes in the tree’s trunk. Each has bled pitch in white streaks, and the lowest one is large enough to admit my fist. They are impressive excavations in a living tree. Which, of course, occasions question: Who or what did that?

Some fringe character is the answer, though that doesn’t mean a shady skulker with a chisel. What it does mean is a visitor from the deep forest, a bird that likes its woods big. Sibley’s bird guide points out that the pileated woodpecker is “uncommon but widespread; sparsely distributed in mature hardwood forests.” In short, the pileated likes his favorite food, carpenter ants, wild. If such a deep woods bird visits this grove, who else does?

“I’m pretty sure no kid in Brunswick has ever not taken that shortcut when going around that corner,” says nearby resident Kurt Stinson, and in this assessment, Stinson points to another species that likes its land a little wild. The other day, a clear, cold one, I followed Brunswick’s generations of cut-through kids along the diagonal path that bisects these woods. At the grove’s midpoint, I stopped. Yes, if I looked around, I was still in midtown. The pines are lofty and the little woodland is free of undergrowth; so the nearby school and houses and sign posts and roads are easily seen.

But when I looked up into the high branches that seemed close to the sky, being in town shifted to being out. The pines, patterned against the sky, waved a little in the wind, and their 5-part needles caught and tossed the light. Some grew so bright that, even as it was midday, they mimicked holiday trees winking on at dusk.

The first time I drove by this lot, I recall searching for the house that I was sure must be in there somewhere. I was, after all, right in the middle of a predictably house-lined grid of town streets. Who lives there? I wondered. And when I didn’t find a house in those woods, I next wondered, Who owns it?

Recently, those questions sent me sleuthing, and I had to work a little to find initial answer. The current ownership answer, one that’s held since April 21st, 1932, is the town of Brunswick. Gradually, bit by bit, like taking a walk, I learned more: Parks and Recreation’s Tom Farrell told me that the property came to the town from the estate of Frances A. McKeen, with the stipulation that “it be used forever as a park, playground or for recreation purposes for the public.”

Such a gift connects nicely with the words of another McKeen, Bowdoin College’s 1st president, Joseph, who, in 1802, said that colleges should be founded for and serve the “common good.” That phrase endures, both in a community service program and center named for McKeen and in the college’s annual Common Good Day, which sees students and staff pitching in on any number of civic projects.

These 85 years later, the town’s Parks and Recreation department oversees the common good of this in-town acre. The woods have matured now to the point where there’s no understory of rising brush, and the shade tends to keep it that way. But it does make a walker wonder about 85 years ago. I’ll keep looking, and, when I find a photo, I suspect I’ll see a lot with small trees…or none at all. White pines do have a teenage growth spurt almost every year, and so today’s tall, adult pines could have been mere stipplings then.

Still, it is the wild now of these trees that draws the eye and other wild spirits. A few years ago, local resident Tom Rumpf was walking through these woods near dusk, when he “heard an odd noise.” Looking up he “spied a flock of turkey vultures roosting in the trees. They kept coming back to roost for a couple of weeks.”

None of this would surprise Henry David Thoreau, whose affection for the white pine led him to call it “the emblem of my life.” Or the poet, Mary Oliver, who, in her book, White Pine, has written, “From its crown, springs a fragrance, the air is sharp with it…And now I have finished my walk. And I am just standing, quietly, in the darkness, under the tree.”

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 in the spring of 2018. He may be reached at [email protected]