A twisting tunnel chewed through dead grass, a line of bounding paw prints in mud, a translucent snakeskin on a sunny rock. Those creatures that have passed this way before me stitch their stories on the landscape, helping me understand this place where I live. Lately, I’ve been following a larger track, one that beckons invitingly behind my house and leads through forests and along rivers, disappearing mysteriously at the edges of ravines or crumbling away into marshes. In some places it’s subtle and hard to follow, in others it’s visible for hundreds of feet at once.
The Burlington & Lamoille Railroad connected the Vermont communities of Burlington, Essex, Jericho, Underhill, Cambridge, and Jeffersonville between 1877 and 1938. In the forest behind my home near the Jericho-Essex line, the linear form of the abandoned bed emerges, flat-topped and about 16 feet wide, defined by a group of still-youthful hemlock trees whose trunks all curve outward in the same direction. In their shadow a long, narrow wetland fills with water each spring and glows with hundreds of wood frog and spotted salamander eggs. Fallen trees add their structure to this hand-dug depression. One spring afternoon, I saw the dark brown head of a mink pop up from the tangle of branches, then promptly disappear again.
Further on, the railbed is broken by woods roads and ends abruptly at bridge abutments. High above a cattail marsh, I’ve found an iron spike, circa 1875, half buried in gritty soil at the base of a black cherry tree; the soil here contains dull metallic chunks of clinker, a byproduct of the locomotives’ coal combustion. Clay pipes still drain the elevated bed, whose bulk created ponds and wetlands on the upslope side. I’ve found old culverts carrying water beneath the railbed and felt the subterranean chill in a narrow cattle pass constructed of stone blocks, where tiny stalactites emerge slowly from the ceiling and phoebes build their sheltered nests.
Old photos of the B&L trains show them traversing a nearly unrecognizable open landscape. The once-daily passenger train between Jeffersonville and Burlington took two hours; travelers riding just a few hundred feet from where I write this would have looked out over farmland. In the early 1980s, 45 years after the railroad was dismantled, the former John Davis farm was developed into house lots, including mine. The railroad gave up its rights of way, so different neighbors now own each section. Some keep their land open and welcome public access, others actively post it, and many just let nature take its course.
Last spring, many of us took to walking the B&L bed. Faced with a pandemic shutdown whose repercussions will extend for years, altering elements of our culture beyond recognition, my neighbors and I sought solace along the old tracks. The first people we saw outside our own homes after the lockdown order, we approached
each other warily, and a little dazed, to stand six feet apart on the old bed and trade stories and well wishes. One neighbor had birthed a son, while another lost her elderly mother. Generations removed from when the train threaded its way through our present backyards, we built community on the old railbed. Would the laborers, most of them immigrants, who dug gravel, transported ties and rails, and pounded spikes have thought that in a distant time, a devastating sickness would pull future Vermonters back to the railbed they had painstakingly built?
It’s a landscape of change, echoing with the rhythmic hissing of locomotives and the ghostly footfalls of saber-toothed tigers and catamounts, now roamed by minks, salamanders, domestic dogs, and human neighbors. The fine, fertile soils here were deposited by ancient rivers, where they grew forests, then crops, then the railroad, and now, for better or worse, homes, yards, and gardens.
The B&L railroad’s sturdy bed anchors our neighborhood, quietly reminding me how nothing is permanent, but very little disappears without a trace. Following this arrow-straight, sun-dappled line through the woods, seeing it charge confidently forward with the industrious optimism of another time, I wonder what will change in us as we emerge again this spring after an unprecedented year. Did the steps we took in those days last spring lay the tracks for us to adapt to a post-pandemic era? I hope we’ll continue to accept the small grounding gifts of a daily walk out the back door: a breath of fresh air, the scent of soil, the flash of another human’s jacket as we raise hands in greeting, getting to know the land as well as each other.