Towpath Travels

Hike-Ku
Blackstone Valley Heritage Trail

Heron, fish, turtles.
Russet trails, red maple marsh.
Fall on the canal.


When a day starts with a hawk, you just know it's going to get better. When I took the four legged out this morning, I encountered my neighbors who were coming back up Abbot with a camera. One of them spotted a hawk trying to get airborne with a squirrel it either ha a)killed or b) found freshly sacrificed by a car. At any rate the hawk found it's breakfast too hefty to fly off with, so in that mass displacement thing that makes flight possible, the bird began transferring outside squirrel to inside squirrel. Our neighbor collected her camera and spouse and joined forces with Rascal and I as we all headed up Abbot for the early morning bird viewing. The squirrel was abandoned when we got there, but the hawk was nearby and about the time we looked up, swept across the street and perched in a branch just in front and above us. A real National Geographic moment. (I think it was a redtail, but I didn't bring my camera, so you'll have to imagine) We watched the hawk. The hawk watched us. And probably thought to itself, "my breakfast is getting COLD. . ."

All this before 8. And then in spite of my raging headache, Steve and I headed off to the Blackstone Valley for a 60/60 hike. It was stunning in a completely unexpected way. It was hard to construct a hike-ku, we saw so much on this hike. The terrain was mostly unvaried, but we walked along the canal and riverways from rustic paths to a townway. The trail ran along an old towpath that had been used by the canal as men hauled cargo through the water down to Rhode Island and the seaports. Early nineteenth century industry was. . .industrious. There were turtles piled on rocks and swimming in sunny waters, fluorescent green algae blanketing the canal water, steelhead trout swimming in lazy circles and stilt legged herons in the marsh or soaring overhead. We hiked 11 miles. 11. Add my mile with the dog in the morning and it was a 12 mile day. I EARNED my dinner. Which was excellent by the way. It's autumn and cool enough to cook, so we went all out. No food pictures, by the time it got on the table I was too hungry to think about anything but fork to mouth.