We Want To Go Where Al’s Trail Leads

 

To find new things, take the path you took yesterday.

–– John Burroughs

Al Goodrich died this week after suffering a stroke earlier in the month. He was a low-profile guy in a sweater and comfortable boots who quite literally mapped the way for a growing band of Newtowners committed to preserving open space and providing the public access to it. The work he began when he retired as an engineer 20 years ago gave our community a fighting chance to establish a 8.5-mile greenway from the Reed School to Upper Paugussett State Forest. Over the years, he meticulously mapped existing trails, blazed some new ones, and rediscovered a network of abandoned railroad paths that knits together our far-flung town. He brought them to the attention of the community with the help of his longtime friend and collaborator Mary Mitchell in a popular series of Newtown Trails guidebooks. Those who carry on the work call the greenway that emerged from his countless walks in the woods Al’s Trail.

With the important addition of access to a private ridge overlooking The Glen in Sandy Hook, and the prospect of $49,000 from what remains of the Iroquois Gas Transmission System’s open space grant to the town, it now looks like Al’s Trail will become everybody’s trail soon enough. This greenway is just a part of the town’s renewed dedication to open space acquisition as a means to preserve Newtown’s declining inventory of rural scenery and to stabilize its soaring tax rate.

It is appropriate that Al’s Trail leads from the town’s newest educational facility and hope for the future, the Reed School, all the way back into a forest named for Native Americans, our link to prehistory. An inveterate walker, Al Goodrich understood the value of traveling the same paths again and again. Even the oldest trails yield something new every day to the attentive mind. The kind of collective wisdom we need to choose a path for the future of this town will not arise in us spontaneously because we are clever and blessed with resources, though these things help. Those who went before pass it on to us. They teach about who we were so that we can better choose who we will become. Newtown was so fortunate to have Al Goodrich as a guide on the most recent leg of this journey. Always the good engineer, he left our vital connection to nature and our past intact and in working order.

A town devoid of open space and long meandering trails quickly becomes cut off from its past and drifts untethered toward the monotony of generic development, which makes one town look like another. We do not want that to be the future of Newtown. To get to tomorrow, we intend to travel the path we took yesterday. We call it Al’s Trail.