Beaver Brook runs through the middle of the conservation land near my childhood home. It's a hundred some odd acres of wet meadow and red maple swamp full of shrubs and brambles. A dirt and boardwalk path cuts through it, passing through thick woods and open meadows, crossing the brook twice. In the summer, jewelweed and garlic mustard grow along the sides of the path and vines of wild grape and poison ivy stretch between the trees. A popular birding destination, it is home to coyotes, deer, turkeys, raccoons, and all the other creatures you'd expect to find in a patch of New England woods.
When I was a kid, I used to retreat there after school. It was a great place to bike or sit and watch the bugs and birds - the closest little patch of nature to where I grew up. For college, I moved toward the city, but when COVID started and the world seemed to slow to a halt I found myself home once again and drawn back to the woods. When everything was still, and yet restless and off kilter, that little patch of woods felt stable, safe.
And where the hell else could I go? Stores closed, friends scattered across the country. There wasn't much else to do. So I went walking - or rather rambling and bushwhacking, since so much of the time I would go off trail in search of a bit of quiet and solitude. As winter turned to spring, green buds and flowers emerged, and green shoots pushed their way through the mud - fiddleheads and cattails and rushes.
Spring is the best time to go on a good ramble through the meadow. The brambles haven't quite grown in yet, so patches of woods that are impassable during the lush summer are accessible. Tramping through the underbrush, I tracked deer to their beds in the tall grasses - tamped down by the winter snow. I climbed a maple tree and watched a coyote lumber its way along below me, none the wiser. One day I came across a full deer skeleton with an antlered skull, half-buried in the mud. I cut my way through briars to get to it and triumphantly brought it home with me. It felt like a sign that all my wandering was what I was meant to be doing.
And yet all the while time kept passing. The flowers bloomed, the ferns unfurled. The trees sprouted leaves and the vines grew in around them. I turned 22 and I graduated from college, still at home. I had imagined that by the summer, when the big snow piles in the parking lots were long gone and the spring rains set the brook running quick beneath the bridges, I would find a job and move out. But summer came and the poison ivy and briars choked the game trails I had explored in the spring.
In late summer, the greenery showed its first signs of retreating. The brambles sprouted raspberries and blackberries and the grape vines bore fruit, sweet and pungent in the dry September air. The jewelweed (or "touch-me-not") bore pods that explode when brushed against, scattering their seeds. By this time, I had picked up part-time work in town splitting downed wood and doing yard work for a neighbor, and I was still spending lots of time out in the woods. In some ways, it felt right to be taking time off before launching into a more “grown-up” job search. The pandemic was still in full swing, and I didn’t want to work in-person, but I also knew that with every passing month, I felt further off of the path that I had planned out for myself. I started chipping away at preparing for a job search - updating my resume, reaching out to folks in my network - but job searching, especially during the pandemic, was soul-sucking, miserable work.
To cope, I kept doing things outside. I chopped wood through the fall until the ground froze and the snows came in. I collected and processed acorns that I harvested in the neighborhood. I reached out to a hunter friend of my parents who had shot two does and taught myself to tan the hides into buckskin. It felt simultaneously like time was slipping by and moving painfully slowly. In some ways I experienced stability and rest - I was at home, safe, and healthy, I was with my family, I was taking time off after college. And yet in more profound ways I was constantly off-kilter and restless, and all of that excess energy I burned off in the woods around Beaver Brook or in my backyard scraping away at the hides or peeling the shells off acorns or by taking one of the family cars and driving as far as I could and then back again just to feel like I was moving.
Before I knew it, a whole year had passed from under me. It was spring again and the snow was melting and I was doing my best to find a job so that I could finally move away from home, and that’s when I wrote Beaver Brook Waltz.
So many people poured so much talent and passion into this song. This whole project started as another Downy Woodpecker collaboration with Edward Glen, but eventually diverged into our own solo records. Still, we went through nearly every step of the process together. I am indebted to Ian (Edward) for his feedback, writing advice, and hard work making this music happen. I am also grateful to fellow Edward Glen member, Sam Eastman, who enriched the song with lead guitar, both the electric and the pedal steel. He brought finesse and style to more than half of the songs on the record, and helped immeasurably during the mostly at-home recording process. Thank you as well to Nic Adam for the masterful drumming, and to Ian van Opijnen for refining our DIY recordings into a professional final product.
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