FKT: Strix Varia - Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail (VT) - 2024-03-16

It's been a busy week of sugaring, crouching over the smoky evaporator and bathed in sticky sap steam. We're emerging from the "lean times" at the end of winter when stores run low just in time for wild foods to be accessible again. When I dive into the freezer or pantry, I'm happy to see supplies remaining - if necessary, I could have made it through this short winter on what I had squirreled away. Barely.

Late winter is a liminal time, an in-between time. As I trot beside the banks of Wazowategok ("the river that turns back" / "crooked river"), many miles upstream of the historic Abenaki village of Masipskoik ("where flint is") from which the modern mispronunciation "Missisquoi" is derived, I'm looking for signs of winter dormancy ending. The liminal features are there - willow buds breaking; red-winged blackbirds trilling in the cornfields and cattail marshes; migratory geese returning. And of course, the ubiquitous maple sap buckets and lines adorning woodlots along the trail.

Humans on this river have seen many in-between times, from the annual to the millennial in scale. Much canoe travel and trade and settlement (over 13,000 years that we know of). Cycles of abundance and scarcity, "lean-times" and feasts provided by rich riparian forests and fields. And that was all before colonialism, war, railroads, industrial agriculture, obsolescence of the railroad, and a quaint bike path - just on this one river. It would be foolish to think the trail beneath my feet is not in a liminal space at this very moment, the outcome of which I can't predict.

The one constant throughout these changes has been the animated, self-sustaining ecosystem that is so particularly abundant along large rivers. If I come back in a month and run this trail again, I could practically fuel the entire effort from wild foods growing along the path. To realize this continuity of life, despite all efforts made by modern humans to alter and destroy it in the pursuit of power, territory, and industry, is truly astonishing. Something to cherish and protect.

If you've made it this far I think you deserve a parting thought, a morsel to pack away for fuel on your next run. Here it is: the environment in which we practice or perform a physical effort is not a stage, and we are not isolated actors. We are part of the story of a living landscape that takes from us, provides for us, changes us and is changed by our presence. Liminal beings in liminal spaces. Remember this and tread well.

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Missisquoi Valley Rail Trail ☼ out and back ☼ 53 miles ☼ 9h24m37s ☼ self-supported