THINGS TO DO
Unplugged but reconnecting by Peter O’Neill
Last autumn, to help overcome our Covid ennui and empty-nesting grief (our only child having just fled to Colby College) my wife and I eagerly searched for diverse walking trails in the picturesque coastal region around our home in Barrington. Whose footsteps were better to follow in a pandemic, we thought, than those of our regional ambler Henry David Thoreau, America’s first famous social distancer? While our mentor fled to the woods to escape the metaphorical pandemic of industrialized busyness, we sought the sylvan solace from a real and mounting pandemic. Early on in Walden, Thoreau explains why he went into the woods: “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear.” “Not life,” for Thoreau, meant an inauthentic, soulless existence. Thoreau was not enthusiastic about the telegraph, railroads, or the proliferation of newspapers. All of this “progress” and haste blunted our powers of discrimination and ultimately our sense of self, he believed. Ideally, my wife and I, in our extended sojourns into the woods, discovered similar insights. Our first stop was Fort Barton Woods in Tiverton. After one of our marathon matches, a tennis friend who lives nearby
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July 2021 | The South Coast Insider
The Dundery Brook Trail in Little Compton
had introduced me to this hiking trail in the autumn, when most of the paths were covered in crisp leaves. Though the layered leaves look pleasantly aesthetic at first, a newcomer must tread carefully, for beneath these leafy lanes lie many sharp, jutting rocks and pesky protruding roots. In fact, it was on one of these obstinate roots where the middle of my worn tennis sole landed, when I chased my friend that day after he jauntily burst into a run. I sense this misstep caused a nagging ankle injury for a few months. Thus, if you trek across Fort Barton’s sinuous paths during the fall, be sure to wear stable, well-cushioned trail shoes to avoid any
foot or knee injuries. In short, saunter, don’t sprint. When I took my wife for her debut at Fort Barton a few weeks later, it was even deeper into autumn. The trails had taken on a distinctly sublime character. At the beginning of the trail, you descend steep steps into what seems like the womb of the earth, re-emerging later as if you had undergone a native Pocasset adolescent’s rite of passage. While I was still wary of furtive rocks and stubborn roots afoot, my wife more buoyantly gazed at the tall, sentinel oaks, birches, and hickory trees that lord over the park. The abundant, commanding trees create
