Now that my weekly Locke’s Mills column (along with those of several other former Bethel Citizen town correspondents), is part of Western Maine Neighborhood News, found on Substack and at the website wmnn.org, I’ll be posting only every other week’s “free to all” Locke’s Mills columns here on my own site.
On some of the weeks when my current column doesn’t appear here, I’ll be posting a look back at Locke’s Mills columns from 5 and 10 years ago.
From January 7, 2021
While the ground was still bare, Tony, Will, Eli, and I spent both days of the weekend after Christmas tramping around in the woods on four different remote hills in Hartford with a map, successfully locating four giant stone cairns of mysterious origin that we had recently learned about. Two of them, on Thompson Hill and Hutchinson Hill, are around 10 to 12 feet tall, while the two on Doten Hill and Irish Hill are smaller.
Since then, we’ve been told about two or three more similar stone structures in other nearby towns, but no one seems to know anything about when or why any of them were constructed, or by whom. If you have any information, please share it!
I spent several hours this weekend sorting through the records I’ve been keeping on my FitBit, posts to my hiking album on Facebook, and entries in a document on my phone where I’ve kept track of the mileage of all my hikes, walks, and runs in 2020.
Now I have lots of detailed statistics about what I’ve been doing for the past year, most of which are interesting only to me. I will share that I hiked, snowshoed, walked, or ran a total of 1,272.8 miles, which was well over my goal of 1,000, and I went on 127 hikes, comfortably surpassing my goal of 100. At least 2020 was good for something.
From January 14, 2021
The extra daylight in the afternoon means time for an occasional after-work hike for Eli and me, if we can duck out early. We did that last Thursday, and had time for a quick hike up Peabody Mountain in Albany, about a 3.5-mile round-trip. Even with the slightly longer afternoons, the sun was setting when we came off the trail, and it was almost dark by the time we drove home.
Although I didn’t need them on that hike, I was glad I had been carrying both a headlamp and a portable phone charger in my pack. One of my many resolutions for 2021 is to remember to be well-prepared when I head out on the trails, especially when I’m hiking alone (or with Eli, who is great company, but no Lassie when it comes to knowing what to do in an emergency).
Since the start of the new year, Will, Eli, and I have already made two hikes to the summit of Moody Mountain on the Woodstock Conservation Commission’s new trail extension that continues from the top of the Buck’s Ledge trail. We chose that trail for our New Year’s Day hike, and did it again this past Saturday. It’s definitely going to become a new favorite.
I mentioned this new section of trail after we hiked it the first time, in early November, when a potential route had just been flagged. Since then, the trail-clearing work of volunteer extraordinaire Jurgen Marks has resulted in over a mile of new trail that is easy to follow and leads to rewarding views.
In the future, there will be the option of making a loop via a short, steep trail connecting the summit to a point about a mile further up the logging road from the place where the Buck’s Ledge trail departs from it. This section is very steep, and the loop, when completed, will be best done counter-clockwise.
If someone would send me some real news, I wouldn’t have to write about hiking all the time!
From January 7, 2016
As predicted, the temperatures have taken a dive to more seasonal levels, and with the several inches of snow we got on Dec. 29, it finally looks and feels like winter. As I write this at noon on Monday, our temperature has only crept up to 16 degrees, from a low of 10 this morning.
I’ve already broken one of my New Year’s resolutions, which was to write a “real” letter—the kind you fold up, put in an envelope, add a stamp, and send through the mail—every Sunday. I do plenty of communicating via email, Facebook, Messenger, and texting, but there are a few people in my life who still write old-fashioned letters, and I’m afraid I’m not very prompt about answering them.
My current backlog of correspondence includes an Oct. 1 letter from a former Greenwood summer resident who reads my column from his home in Pennsylvania, and one from Nov. 5 from East Bethel native Deborah Farwell Eldredge, who lives in Unity.
Debbie is my father’s cousin, and always came to visit us at camp in the summer with her three boys. She told me in her letter that she works at the polls each year with a friend from Andover, who brings back issues of the Citizen for her to read.
She also told me a story about her grandfather, Porter Farwell, a farmer in East Bethel. He was disabled after a broken leg later in life, and unable to do much farming, so Debbie’s mother taught him to knit and “he kept the men in socks to wear working in the woods.” Debbie learned to knit by watching her grandfather.
Debbie’s letter was going to be the first one I wrote on the first Sunday of 2016...but I forgot all about my resolution until after I’d gone to bed. Of course, there’s no reason why I can’t write a letter on a Monday, or a Tuesday, and I hope to have her letter answered before next Sunday!
Betsey Foster says she doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions, but she follows a “100-day practice” started within the past 50 years or so by a T’ai Chi master named Jou Tsung Hwa. It entails simply picking a specific thing and doing it each day for 100 days, from writing a haiku to setting aside time for reflection each day.
“It doesn’t have to have any relationship to anything—it could be to brush the cat daily,” Betsey said, adding that it traditionally begins on the Chinese New Year, which falls on Feb. 8 this year. She finds it “a good way to appreciate the dark days of this season and note the progression toward light.”
From January 14, 2016
Time for some trash talk. At last week’s meeting of the Greenwood-Woodstock Transfer Station board, it was decided that the “swap shop,” which is currently closed for the winter, will reopen in the spring, but only if volunteers can be found who are willing to be responsible for its operation.
Transfer station employees have said that keeping the swap shop running and orderly takes a lot of their time and they would prefer to see it closed. Despite signage, they have had problems with people leaving unusable or inappropriate items, or leaving vehicles blocking the bulk trash and metal recycling bins while they visit the swap shop.
Some residents, as well as some members of the board, however, have expressed that the swap shop provides a valuable service as a way to pass items that are no longer needed by one person on to someone else who can use them. Besides the neighbors-helping-neighbors value, this reduces the amount of bulk trash the towns must pay to have hauled away.
After hearing from a friend in New Hampshire that the towns in her area have volunteer-operated swap shops, I searched for information on line. It appears that having volunteers run the swap shop, or having it open only a few hours per week, or a combination of both, are all common solutions.
Most town websites I looked at stress that items left at the swap shop should be clean, working, and usable, and many place restrictions on the types of items that can be donated.
Incidentally, while most towns simply call it the swap shop, my favorite name comes from the Midcoast Solid Waste facility, which serves Camden, Rockport, Lincolnville, and Hope. Their volunteer-run swap shop is called “The Pick of the Litter.”
I especially enjoyed the item from January 2016, Amy! I now remember Betsey's 100-day practice as she shared it with her Tai Chi classes. I had forgotten about it until I read your column, and I am now inspired to do it again. Betsey got me started on my Tai Chi journey, and though I practice a different form now, I will be forever grateful for her patience and skill.
I love looking at that wearable data too Amy! Congratulations on surpassing your goals - even with recovering from surgery! Impressive. As always, I enjoy hearing about your hikes as it gives me new ones to add to my list.