Those who read this column regularly know that my partner and I have spent every day since September of this year packing and preparing for a major move. I am pleased to report that we are about 98 percent done now, with just some furniture left to wrap and some last-minute bits and pieces to toss into boxes before we head off to our new home.
I have moved many times in my life. My family moved twice during my childhood as my father worked his way up the economic ladder from impoverished refugee to middle-class wage earner. We moved again after my father died, when my mother bought a smaller home because the sole provider for our family was gone.
At age 18, I moved out of my mother’s house and into an apartment shared by a revolving cast of penniless women, some sleeping on the floor, a few sleeping in the two bedrooms the apartment contained, and me, sleeping in a former pantry off the kitchen, on a narrow cot in a space the size of a coat closet. It was only after I moved in that I realized the leaseholder’s four feral cats also used that room as their collective litter box.
Being mistaken for a litter box in the middle of the night is an experience that has little to recommend it. A few months after moving in, I moved out. I rented an apartment on the Lower East Side of Milwaukee with the woman I was in love with at the time. Although the relationship ended badly, I stayed for a while on my own until I followed a group of my friends to San Francisco. In those days (1976), San Francisco was such an LGBTQ mecca that most people subscribed to the maxim, “There are two kinds of people in San Francisco: Gays and tourists.”
I paid someone to drive my few paltry possessions across the country.
I moved frequently within San Francisco, approximately 10 times in five years. Because I had no money, I took to building my own furniture from panels constructed of crate wood stolen from Chinatown. I recall one memorable episode when I was chased down the street by a cleaver-wielding business owner, cursing me in his native language.
The crate wood panels bolted together, and having no car, I unbolted my furniture every time I moved, schlepping it panel-by-panel on a city bus. My other belongings, thrown into paper bags, were also schlepped to the new location aboard a city bus, bag by bag by bag.
By the time I was 30 years old, I had moved a total of 30 times. I would move 12 times more. I never traveled, but moved incessantly. Along the way, my economic picture gradually improved, and I achieved some measure of solvency as I rose incrementally through the ranks of public education. As my finances improved, I entered a period of unbridled acquisition. My furniture could no longer be disassembled into flat panels. My possessions could no longer be tossed into bags and lugged to new digs on the bus. I now had to contend with the rigors of real packing, like an actual grown-up, to move my things from one location to another.
It was exhausting.
I am now packing for what I hope will be the final time in my life. My partner, slightly more particular than I am about how things get packed (no scrawling the contents of a box on the outside of the box; instead, a process of using color-coding and serial numbers corresponding to a detailed list of items on a spreadsheet, so that they can be inventoried when loading and unloading the moving van). It is both mind numbing and fatiguing, but it is not without value.
I no longer move my possessions aboard mass transit—not that our region offers anything even remotely resembling that. While it would be in poor taste to reveal exactly how much we are spending on this final move, suffice to say that it eclipses the bus fare I used to pay in order to move from one place to another.
I will miss the Berkshires, particularly the home where we have lived for the past 13 years, the longest stretch that I have ever lived in one location. The house itself is warm and welcoming, but the house itself has been immaterial because it is located on a mustache of land that borders East Mountain State Forest.
At the height of the COVID pandemic, having developed cabin fever during the lockdown, my partner and I started exploring the many hiking trails this region offered: Bash-Bish Falls, the trails adjacent to the Arcadian Shop near Pittsfield, the pond at the summit of Route 7 on the way to Monument Mountain High School, Monument Mountain itself, Bartholomew’s Cobble, and several other well-established trails. But after finally determining that wearing a mask while hiking vigorously deprived us of oxygen, I gazed one day toward my own East Mountain State Forest, easily accessed from our backyard.
I had previously hiked a bit up the forested hill behind our house and found an old logging trail, but before I went too far, I began to fear getting lost and being mauled by any number of carnivores who live in the woods. I chickened out and went home.
But hiking public trails during the pandemic did not allow us to fully enjoy the mystery, magic, and beauty of the woods. We were still too worried about contracting a highly transmissible virus that might very well kill us.
At that point, in May 2020, I launched once again into the forest behind our house. This began my “bushwhacking” phase. Every day for months, I would pull on my boots, soak myself in permethrin to repel the ravenous ticks, grab a garden lopper, and hike into the forest, marking trails with green tape tied to the ends of tree branches. I stuck to trails that I could visually identify—old logging trails, deer trails, etc. I did not establish any new trails; I simply cleared the undergrowth from the ones that already existed.
To any state ranger who might happen to read this column, please know that I have left those trails better than I found them but did nothing to disturb the forest. I would prefer not to be arrested for manicuring public lands, and besides, I have never seen another living soul on the three hiking loops that I have maintained and enjoyed for the past four years. I have also seen no evidence of park rangers mopping up deadfall, or hiking tree to tree, as I have, systematically removing dreaded gypsy moth larvae from each of them. There are few activities quite so disgusting.
Given how much labor has been involved each year in keeping the trails visible and clear of excessive debris and vegetation, and that I labor under the delusion that I single-handedly saved Berkshire County from being denuded by gypsy moths, and in recognition that I have not ventured into the woods in quite some time, perhaps I can escape serious consequences.
I have only seen evidence of human presence, other than my own, once in four years. A fresh snow had fallen, so my partner and I donned our ski suits, strapped on our snowshoes, and trudged inelegantly through the woods, falling every 15 minutes or so when our snowshoes caught either on themselves or on objects hidden in the snow. This, tangentially, is why I have come to regard Mountain Laurel, the roots of which are pervasive and treacherous, as the bane of my existence. They are lovely when they bloom, but mostly, they are a menace.
As we snowshoed the uppermost loop, I saw human tracks—big man boots—following behind a set of deer tracks. It was hunting season. It was then that I became excessively concerned that someone was killing my treasured deer, on my treasured trail. Clearly, I had developed a proprietary interest in East Mountain State Forest, an interest that persists to this day.
When East Mountain went up in flames a few weeks back, I freaked out. The forest is verdant but fragile, and I worried excessively about how my favorite forest creatures would survive. Although the exact cause of the fire has yet to be determined, it seems reasonable that some hunter or group of hunters built a fire to ward off the cold and failed to extinguish it properly.
The rain that fell a few days after the fire began raging out of control could not have been more timely nor more welcome. Who knows how many of our woodland friends have perished, but at least none of our human friends, or their residences, were harmed. After the hundreds of hours I have spent hiking East Mountain, I can say with utter confidence that Mother Nature, ever the healer, will take it back and restore it.
And so it is that my partner and I say a fond farewell to our forested paradise, knowing that we will miss it terribly when we at last settle in our new home in a place that has its own special allure but is far more urban. The forest will be replaced by well-maintained city trails, but it will never be quite the same.
So East Mountain is the gift I take with me as I depart, a gift that requires no wrapping or packing, thank God, because that is how memories are: They travel with us wherever we go; sweet as fresh air, clean as new snow, and deep as the forest.
Postscript: Several readers have expressed concern that I will no longer write a regular weekend column for The Berkshire Edge. Undoubtedly, other readers, not quite so fond of my opinions, would cheer from their respective silos, but whether the thought promotes joy or sorrow, my weekend column will continue to post. That is the great thing about writing—you can do it anywhere.
