One Hundred Centuries

By George Jacobi

Something had been gnawing at me since the well-attended walk on the Madeleine Regan Preserve, some buried thought that seemed worth unearthing. I kept digging for it unsuccessfully while falling asleep or otherwise unencumbered by day-to-day life. It finally dawned on me that to revisit it, I’d have to revisit it (I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box).

This morning is sunny and still, warming fast from just below freezing. The brook is safely within its banks, barely audible, and the tall straight white pines hint at what a forest here may have looked like before the European invasion. “King’s Pines”, potential ship masts for the British Navy, trees that would have gotten those settlers severely punished for cutting down. As I hike the trail, a hawk keeps calling from somewhere nearby.                                                                                                              

Otherwise alone, I review our previous visit. I had suggested that everyone don their birchbark backpacks and travel back in time with me, northeast on the Old Connecticut Path. Even farther back than old Thomas Hooker 400 years ago. To imagine that two thousand years past, when a guy from Nazareth was discovering his remarkable destiny, Americans, indigenous Paleo-Indians, were busily using this trail for trade and travel. And yes, farther back, 4-5000 years ago, while Egyptians were constructing the Pyramids, those people were walking here. I am again following their footsteps.

A world heritage site, the Pyramids were celebrated as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. They are carefully preserved dramatic monuments to an ancient culture. In this hemisphere we admire Mesa Verde and the other grand Puebloan dwellings in the southwest and enjoy the recent discovery of a similar prehistoric civilization in the Amazon. What remains here in the northeast? Arrowheads, clay and soapstone potsherds, and some flint. Charred firepits in villages and forts. And this long track, much of it gone, bits of it preserved and offering us glimpses of ghosts.

Evidence shows people migrated here as the ice shield was still receding, 12,000 years ago. What they built was from wood and animals, their only available materials. The caribou they dined on fled north along with the tundra, following the glacial retreat. Mastodons died out or were eliminated. Of dire wolves, giant sloths, and their like, we know even less. Wood and animal skins decompose. Though relics are rare, over thousands of years the Paleo-Indians built a civilization here. That’s what people do. They traded, visited, mingled, intermarried along this trail. The Old Connecticut Path is arguably our most significant artifact from that epoch. It’s the last–and oldest–visible connection to humanity’s history in this place we now call home. That’s what was demanding my attention. You bet it’s a landmark deserving of conservation.

I turn at the top of the esker portion of the trail, drawn by the shrieking of hawks, and look back northward. The beginning of this ancient story lies here. Somebody might have stood where I am now, admiring a wall of ice. A mighty stream pouring out of the bottom of the glacier had changed course or dried up, leaving a rugged ridge of gravel for him to climb on. Beside the esker, glacial till covered depressions in the ground that were filled with enormous chunks of ice, destined to slowly melt as sediment washed away and the climate warmed. Mud and stone would fall to the bottom of the kettle hole ponds as the earth imperceptibly rose, the ice sheet’s weight gone from it. This little preserve is a humbling glimpse deep into humanity’s past. One hundred and twenty centuries will pass before today’s hawks redirect my attention.

Far back in the trees there are two shapes, only visible from this spot. Sneaky birds. I see motion and raise the phone camera. The shrieking rises to a cacophony; I’m not supposed to notice them, of course. I guess it’s time to take my overactive imagination down to the trailhead and again leave this place in peace, as it has been for a long, long time.

You can walk the Old CT Path on the Trust’s Fliegel Farm Preserve as well. I hope Joshua’s Trust, the Wyndham Land Trust, the Tolland Conservation Commission, TLGV and others keep in reserve the idea that when opportunities happen, conserve more of the Old Connecticut Path.