One can easily be miserable in this kind of weather; I’ve just chosen not to.
The rain and wind are getting nasty. The hood is up on my raincoat and my gloved hands are deep in my pockets. I follow the red trail at Chenes Roches along a nameless brook, down its dark ravine between Village Hill and an esker hump. Beyond that glacial ridge the land–and all this precipitation–plummet steeply into the Willimantic River valley. The path meanders below somber hemlocks. Every nearby erratic boulder is embossed with pastel green lichen decals, and there’s a carpet of low mountain laurel (note to self–visit in June for the flowers). It feels like the way into a secret C. S. Lewis land beyond my Joshua’s Trust map. What if it just keeps going? Content in solitude, I’m having a wet but happy walk.
There is water above me and all around me, water below and water squishing in my hiking shoes, water tumbling 300-400 feet to join the river, then sliding the rest of the way to the Sound. Where does all it come from? You know the great hydrologic cycle H2O makes, moving from atmosphere to land to ocean, shifting from gas to liquid, sometimes even solid. Did you know that outside of ice packs, 98% of the world’s freshwater is groundwater? At Joshua’s Trust, we protect land, and thus protect a hidden resource, the aquifers underlying eastern Connecticut. Imagine: under you, trapped in rock, is the equivalent of Lake Baikal. Groundwater fills in every tiny space between gravel, clay, sand, and silt. Water doesn’t begin anywhere at all, but it sure occupies much of Earth.
This is one of those places that prove cold air sinks. Chenes Roches would feel great on a hot August day. Several springs release icy groundwater as tiny rills that feed the larger brook, and steep slopes east and west shade this spooky hollow from a low winter sun. Air conditioning. A quarter of today’s downpour will end up in the aquifer. It will flow and move endlessly below here, sideways and up and down. The rest is rapidly departing to join the greater wet world. This rain was once the same quiet stream that Thoreau paddled in, the same oasis Marco Polo splashed on his sweaty face somewhere on the Silk Road, the same tide that drained from Mt. Ararat, giving Noah a place to land (well, maybe). Just because it’s eternal doesn’t mean we should take it for granted.
~ George Jacobi