I don’t know how the snowmobiles make it up or down the short, steep hill at the edge of the cornfield that borders my driveway. But their tracks drop from the top of the hill into floodplain forest below, river-bound. Where the tracks lead, I follow, donning skis to slide through whitened field and forest.
Fields unspool along the river, which winds in little curlicues here, its own messy kingdom, a no-man’s-land of wood ducks and beavers and geese. So many geese. In winter, they hog the open water and blanket the fields, carry on half the night with their honking.
Once I came upon a snowmobile that had plunged through ice, abandoned for the time being in shallow water. Now I find a coyote den in the riverbank, surrounded by tracks. The mud of the far banks is pocked with holes where the swallows that swirl by the hundreds in summer must nest. The river water appears only as dark shapes, where the ice hasn’t fully frozen over: a teardrop, a half moon, a fingernail.
I’ve lived here three years without following the snowmobiles’ tracks this far. I’ve lived almost in sight of this river much longer, in three different places. This year we are having a real winter, snow you can count on. I keep my skis by the door. I don’t know who owns these fields, but the tracks of machines seem to declare it open country.
To one side of these tracks, at a distance, I hear muffled traffic, see the unfamiliar backs of houses I’ve driven past hundreds of times. On the other is the icy river: the lazy, pastoral, PCB-laden Housatonic. Beyond that, more fields stretch for miles across the valley.
As I ski, I catch a moving line of lights: the snowmobiles like distant cavalry, the enablers of this fine skiing. They smooth the snow, pack it down so my skis can glide smoothly along. When the snowmobilers approach, I step aside. We wave. I wonder at the beauty of this unlikely arrangement – they with their machines, me gliding in their wake through the valley.
This southern Berkshires valley is wider and flatter, more agricultural, than the landscape farther north, where the mountains dominate. To the west, I see the profile of the Taconics, where the Appalachian Trail travels the ridgeline and crests Mount Everett, second highest peak in Massachusetts. In winter, when the trees are bare of leaves, I can see the ridgeline perfectly from my kitchen window. When the mountain is whited out, I know the snow will be here soon.
Since the first winter of the pandemic, when there was nowhere much to go – when I got good at staying home, at being alone – skiing out my door has taken on a special allure.
This first time, though, I don’t yet know I can ski along the river all the way into town. It is snowing now. As I follow the tracks, the swish of my skis muffled by snow, fields open like rooms in a dream, both familiar and strange. Soon, a building rises and looms through a line of trees. Then the headlights of cars, perpendicular to the track I follow. And suddenly I recognize, surreal from this angle, the church across town, and there, the house where I used to live. I feel like I’m in on a great secret, having stitched the land together. I ski victoriously into my former housemate’s yard, knock on the door, and she offers me tea.
On the way home the snow stops, and the sky turns an almost unbearable, smoldering, deep cobalt – thunderstorm blue in the middle of winter. How is it we’ve forgotten to follow our rivers? I’ve never even seen my neighbors walk down the half-mile-long driveway, never passed another skier on the snowy track. I want to disappear into this New England dream, the wide sweep of fields, where boundaries dissolve with the first blanket of snow. Where it snows all winter long.
I am swift on my skis. A big flock of winter finches – redpolls, I determine later – swirl through trees, almost vibrating with the hum of their collective chatter. The train rumbles through, out of sight across the highway. In the deepening dusk, the mountains emerge, pink-haloed. Far away, lights from the windows of houses and barns begin to glow in the blue of twilight.
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