Field Notes — July 2026

I went for a walk at Hollyhock Hollow recently.

That sentence sounds simple enough. I have walked those trails hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. For 26 years, Hollyhock Hollow was where I worked. It was an office, a classroom, a meeting place, a laboratory and, in many ways, a second home.

I have now been retired from working there for 13 years.

That means I have been away from Hollyhock Hollow for half as long as I worked there.

That is hard for me to comprehend.

But this time I wasn’t there for work. I wasn’t leading a field trip, inspecting the property, meeting with someone or thinking about a management project.

I was simply taking a walk with Theresa.

And noticing things.

I Wonder What Robert Rienow Would Think

One of the thoughts that kept coming back to me was Robert Rienow.

Rienow donated Hollyhock Hollow to the Audubon Society of New York State. That simple act entrusted a piece of land to people he would never know and to generations he would never meet.

As I walked around the sanctuary, I found myself wondering:

What would Robert Rienow think if he could walk these trails today?

Would he be pleased with what the sanctuary has become? Would he recognize the values he hoped to protect? Would he be surprised by some of the changes?

There is something powerful about donating land for conservation. The donor eventually disappears. The people originally entrusted with the property disappear. Organizations and their leaders change.

But the land remains.

And the responsibility remains with it.

A Message From a Glacier

At the stream, I noticed the large boulders.

I’ve seen rocks like these countless times, of course, but this time I found myself thinking about the force required to put them there.

A glacier.

It is difficult to stand in a peaceful little stream at Hollyhock Hollow and imagine an enormous mass of ice moving across this landscape, reshaping the land and carrying rocks along with it.

Yet there they are.

We tend to measure change in years because that is the scale on which we live our lives. A forest changes. A building gets older. An organization changes. A person ages.

The boulders operate on another clock entirely.

They are reminders that this landscape had a very long history before any of us arrived.

My Favorite Tree

Then there is the sycamore.

It has long been my favorite tree at Hollyhock Hollow.

I looked up at it again and admired it, just as I have many times before.

And then I noticed the power lines.

I wished they weren’t there.

There isn’t necessarily a profound lesson in every observation. Sometimes you simply notice beauty and then notice something that detracts from it.

But perhaps that’s part of stewardship too.

We don’t experience nature in some imaginary world untouched by people. We experience it in the world we have actually created—trees and roads, streams and culverts, forests and power lines.

The question becomes how well we can make those things coexist.

A Dead Tree Full of Life

Farther along the trail I photographed a standing dead tree riddled with cavities.

Some people might see a dead tree.

I saw real estate.

Woodpeckers excavate cavities. Other birds use them. Mammals use them. Insects use the decaying wood. Fungi and microorganisms continue breaking the tree down and returning its nutrients to the soil.

The tree has stopped doing what it once did, but that doesn’t mean it has stopped having value.

There is beauty in that.

A Redbud and My Dad

Then Theresa took a photograph of me standing beside a redbud.

That particular tree isn’t just another tree at Hollyhock Hollow. The Conservancy planted it in honor of my dad.

So naturally I thought about him.

Dad has been gone for many years, but there I was standing beside a living reminder of him in a place that was such an important part of my own life.

I suppose that is another kind of time.

We plant trees knowing—or perhaps without thinking about the fact—that many of them can outlive us.

Someone plants a tree.

Someone else cares for it.

Years pass.

And someday another person stands beneath it and remembers.

And Then There Were My Feet

There was another thing I noticed on this walk that wasn’t nearly as poetic.

My feet hurt.

My neuropathy makes walking trails more difficult than it once was. I don’t particularly like that fact, but pretending otherwise won’t change it.

There was a time when I could spend much of a day walking around Hollyhock Hollow without giving much thought to the physical act of walking.

Now I notice every hill a little more.

I notice rocks and roots differently.

I notice how far I’ve walked and how far I still have to go.

And, yes, there is some sadness in realizing that something I once did so easily is becoming more difficult.

But I am still doing it.

That matters too.

Turning Wander Into Wonder

By the time we finished our walk, I realized that I had traveled much farther than the distance recorded by my footsteps.

A boulder had taken me back to the glaciers.

A sanctuary had taken me back to Robert Rienow.

A sycamore took me through decades of my own experience at Hollyhock Hollow.

A snag made me think about life continuing after death.

A redbud took me to my father.

And my aching feet brought me squarely back to the present.

None of this was planned.

I simply went for a walk.

But I noticed things.

And when I noticed them, I became curious. When I became curious, I began asking questions and making connections.

Perhaps that is one of the great gifts of noticing.

The same trail can never really be walked twice because the woods have changed—and so has the person walking through them.

I worked out of Hollyhock Hollow for 26 years.

I’ve been retired for 13.

I can’t walk its trails quite as easily as I once did.

But I’m still walking them.

And perhaps after all these years, I’m noticing more along the way.

Turning Wander into Wonder.

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