earth on foot 20
2 October 2025
Mary T Watts, an American naturalist, poet, illustrator and daughter of Danish immigrants, wrote a letter to the Chicago Tribune on September 25, 1963. In it, she implored the city to repurpose an abandoned rail line into a multi-use path (“bulldozers are drooling”, she wrote). This letter eventually led to the creation of the Illinois Prairie Path, and to the “rails to trails“ movement in the United States.
The oldest of these paths, the Elroy Sparta State Trail in Wisconsin, transformed from a disused railway line into a hiking path in 1965. It features three hand dug tunnels along its 33 miles.
And on this day, October 2, 1968, the National Trail System Act authorized a national trail system in four categories: scenic, historic recreational and connecting/side. By 1986 a Rails-to-Trails Conservancy was founded, by Peter Harnik and David Burwell, and currently boasts 41,400+ miles across the US. (The free app, TrailLink can be updated to unlimited for $30 a year.)
My family and I walked a favorite portion of one such trail this past Monday: the Torrey C. Brown Trail, a popular, 20 mile route just north of Baltimore City. We started near the 1898 Monkton train station. Along the northern direction there’s an inner tube access into the Big Gunpowder Falls, a rivershed featuring wildlands, wetlands, fishing and kayaking.
We marched the North Central Trail for 6 miles. If we had continued, we may have made it to New York—the original rail line, which operated from 1832 until its demise in 1972 when hurricane Agnes wiped it out. The NCR passes through rural towns with romantic names: Glencoe, White Hall, Parkton, Bentley Springs.
My mom, who’s been walking this trail for over 10 years, has noticed that trees now come down in large patches—a new phenomenon. She says, too (and I agree), that it is a singular joy to walk amidst the cascading leaves of autumn.
While walking, I feel I belong, am a stitch in a fabric most grand, mysterious and beautiful
I’ll leave you with the words of Mary Oliver, my favorite poet of autumn…
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.