Where There's Smoke: Chapter Six
A Father And Daughter On The Trail To NH's Fire Towers
Welcome to Week Seven, Chapter Six of Where There’s Smoke: On the Trail to New Hampshire’s Fire Towers, a weekly Wednesday publication brought exclusively to subscribers of Day By Day. We hope you enjoy this old is new memoir of a father and daughter’s adventure to all of the Granite State’s active lookouts. And while you all are getting these chapters first and we won’t be sharing across networks, the link is open should you want to share or pass on to someone who you think would be interested in subscribing. Please like and comment and let’s make this run a success!
If you’d like to catch up first, here’s a link to last week’s Introduction and a link to Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Chapter Five. See you in the tower!
Stretching Our Legs
#6 Oak Hill, Concord/Loudon
We are half way to the fire tower atop 920-foot Oak Hill. The tower itself sits in Louden, but the trail is mainly in Concord. We’re taking a break, having a mini-lunch near a trail junction because this is our longest hike yet, a four-mile round trip, and I’m trying to pace us.
Uma hasn’t hit a wall yet, and my strategy to avoid that is to take lots of breaks and feed her sweets. Sure, she’ll crash at some point, but with luck she’ll crash back at the car on our way home.
So, we relax at a wide junction. The day is mellow, the trails are light and we have all the time in the world. I’ve broken out a container of strawberries and half a white chocolate candy bar.
And as I watch my daughter, being content, in this small plot of woods, it feels, once again, like time moves faster as you get older. It feels like being in the moment becomes more of a challenge.
The spiritual teacher and philosopher Eckhart Tolle would suggest that this is because being young is a continual adventure into the unknown. The day is long for Uma because she’s patterning all new information, every bug, leaf, rock; there’s no template for her so she’s able to be easily in the moment. Whereas my experience has already projected years of information onto every bug, leaf and rock. It’s common to me so I unconsciously brush it aside, the day passes in a sort of memory fog.
But as she always does, my daughter annihilates my malaise and pulls me into the now. “Daddy!” She’s bent over an old, rotting tree stump. “Daddy, you have to see this!”
And as I approach her, I’m jolted into the moment as surly as if I were snapped in a sling-shot. She holds up a bare arm toward me which is crawling with daddy-long-legs.
She’s grinning.
I swallow the urge to scream, and dig deep into my memory for any danger waymarks. Do daddy long legs bite, are they poisonous? I have a memory of the show MythBusters testing this legend and deciding no. Do they carry disease, rashes, infections? I run down the list of possible horrible maladies in my head, but can find no logical reason that my little girl can’t enjoy a couple dozen pholcidae, otherwise known as cellar spiders, skittering over her bare skin.
“They tickle,” she’s yelling, and giggling. “Look how many, daddy, look!”
If there is a more common spider, I don’t know of it. These are found everywhere, on every continent except Antarctica. They love loose bark, and as I look more closely at the rotting tree, it’s clear there’s an enormous daddy long legs nest somewhere under the bark. The things just cover the stump.
Uma could not be more pleased.
“Come’er you little guy,” she speaks gently to one that has made it to her shoulder, and plucks him up and moves him back down her to hand. “Where you going?”
I consider this display, which goes on for a while. Here we are, my daughter and I, alone on the woods, a clear destination in mind, but with no thought given to attaining our goal. Perhaps I’m not too old yet. Perhaps there’s still hope for being in the moment. Maybe she can teach me.
Or as E.B. White once wrote about his inspiration for “Charlotte’s Web” to his editor, “Once you begin watching spiders, you haven’t time for much else.”
Though he wasn’t speaking metaphorically, how well that methodology relates to any situation. Let the moment encompass your whole self, push every other distraction aside. Submerge into the now.
And so I do, and our short break extends into twenty minutes, then 30 and then nearly an hour where the girl and I watch the spiders, until there’s nothing left to do and her new found friends finally all disappear beneath the wood and the chocolate is entirely consumed.
She sighs deeply. “Ok,” she says, “I’m done.”
After the spider episode, the rest of our journey feels anti-climactic. Even as we have a casual lunch at the lower platform of the tower and contemplate the surrounding woods, I can’t imagine more of a highlight than befriending a nest of daddy long legs. Legend has it that the Cate Family that donated all this land for the tower back in 1928 were descended from Stephen Cate from Deerfield. In 1784 Stephen and his wife rode on horseback to Loudon, about 20 miles, carrying their two children, two years old and 18 months old, in their arms to settle into a hand-built log cabin. Stephen’s great, great grandson, John planted an elm tree someplace in these woods and the historical records claim that tree is still alive and has a 17-foot diameter base. Perhaps that’s all even true.
For now, our day done, we make our way slowly home. In memory of Stephen, I carry Uma on my shoulders part of the way down when I can find terrain that’s flat and not rocky. She’s worked hard this day, and keeps herself occupied by talking to a small, stuffed finger puppet dragon she had stuffed into her backpack before we left.
And as we finally pop out of the woods at the trailhead, she’s only mildly interested in the Little Free Library the local library has erected at the head of the trial.
“Look Uma,” I say. There’s a fuzzy caterpillar latched onto the side of the box post. But my sleepy daughter only smiles and sighs, and I lift her into her car seat, droopy eyed and happy. She drifts off nearly before I start the car, her head full I’m sure, of the thin, delicate legs of spiders.
Oak Hill, Loudon/Concord (Elevation 920 feet)
Location and Directions: Oak Hill Trails is located in the north/east of Concord, with several trail access points. Exit 16 off the I-93 will point you in direction of either Shaker Road or Oak Hill Road. Both have parking areas and access to Oak Hill Trails.
Our Route: Tower Trail up and back, total mileage 4 miles. Easiest access to Tower Trail is from a small parking area off Shaker Road.
If You Go: This is a popular place for hikers and families, and just outside of the city. Even in the winter, it will be a popular place. There’s plenty of views, benches and things to do and see along the way. The Concord Conservation Commission has maps available to download online so you can pick your route depending on the weather and how much time you have.
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Ah, thank you! I’ve been waiting for Oak Hill! Uma did great for so little! But you did know it’s a 1 mile woods road if you park on Oak Hill Rd. right? The Concord trails are pretty though. I know I shared with you that my late husband was the tower watchman for Forests & Lands - a volunteer many seasons then paid April-October a number of years. He loved it! Specially loved kids visiting - showing them how the Osborne Fire Finder helped him identify “smokes” and his radio and telephone to talk with other towers. I went up many weekends with his lunch and visited and stared out. I couldn’t identify places or smoke like he could, but I made good lunches! Good memories. I see Oak Hill and the communications towers from my sunporch every day.