Rail trails are a dime a dozen around these parts, but Easthampton’s Manhan Rail Trail is, for me, the finest of them. In the middle of its run, it dissects a nondescript end of town, crossing busy Union Street beside a stripmall, a melancholy ATM, and a gas station. Granted, not far from that crossing you’ll find some intriguing outposts, including Tandem Bagel, a well-landscaped former depot building full of tasty round diversions and stout coffee. Still, the middle section isn’t home to the trail’s best-realized charms.
When I lived in Easthampton, the Manhan was a lifeline. Most days, after a hundred-yard jaunt from my front door, I embarked on a short bike ride or a longish walk to work at the old mill building Eastworks. When the Advocate offices moved to Northampton, the trail still took me there, if on a different route that wound over Route 10, behind a car graveyard toward Smith College. Before long, I got to know most of the trail’s forested curves, its rural straightaways, the odd industrial crannies behind the Eastworks building, and the spectacular ruins of One Ferry, another mill building, gutted and abandoned.
The Manhan’s many moods wordlessly reflected my own. On good days, it rewarded even the smallest hint of euphoria with speed and wind, an unrolling landscape of farmland and woods. On cloudy ones, it offered quieter spaces, like the waterfall deep within One Ferry’s apocalyptic tumbledown, a trailside tableau that beckoned like a secret kingdom. Every season brings its own charms to the trail, too. The cold pastels of winter hold sway for months, bringing their own beauty but leaving the trail to the Nordic ski crowd. With the warmer months, the trail erupts into blooms, then green overgrowth, then leaf-strewn New England poignancy.
Tour my favorite non-commuting ride — the segment of trail from Eastworks out toward Arcadia Wildlife Refuge and the Connecticut River — and you’ll find a remarkable diversity of view and feel. It was on the Manhan that I paused in mid-pedal, enthralled to see, looking down at me with a fearsome turn of beak, a bald eagle atop a telephone pole. There, too, that I saw a fox dart from industrial wasteland into near-jungle.
Start from downtown toward Route 5, several miles away, and you begin in a green twilight, meandering behind a few businesses before skimming along between several mill buildings and the large mill pond that’s always in the way of a straight-line route to anywhere in town. On the right, the water beckons, skirted in the warm season by blooming trees. On the left, the backside of industry looms, with piles of building debris and old fences, and the grim mouths of old loading docks. This is where the leftovers end up in Easthampton’s transition from mill town to mecca for young entrepreneurship.
You wander past a park where bands fill the lawn in summer, then head into the deeper gloom in a curve heading behind One Ferry. Europe may have cornered the market on grand old ruins, but One Ferry, with its gap-toothed windows and vaulting decay, seems like a perfect spot for an aspiring crow to croak out “Nevermore.” Far in the ruin’s interior, brick and stone erupt into abrupt corners and half-fallen walls of unclear purpose. It’s like a grand depiction of an unkempt mind.
Carry on, and, at least once you pass the miasma of stench that humid days send aloft from the sewage plant, you hit wilderness proper. Rabbits, snakes, foxes — all sorts of critters play here, and twilight brings most of them on or near the trail. The Manhan veers behind houses into fields that, on misty days, bear resemblance to the verdant north-of-the-Alps section of Switzerland I once inhabited. You’re near the river now, and the wildlife seems a touch more uninhibited. Often, on these forays, I’d stop to say hello to the horses who whinny trailside at a pleasant farm.
From there, all is overgrown and wild, and the Manhan’s best point soon looms, a place where the flats beside the Connecticut are in view, often with a lazily floating boat or two in the water. Beyond the river, the mountains fold into the blue distance, set alight by the sinking sun. Listen close, and you’re likely to hear the call of a raptor or two.
I always paused there. It felt like a visit, however brief, to a scene outside of time. When I finally got back on my bike or turned heel for home, I did it feeling grounded, in touch again with the part of the world that has no schedule save that of the sun.•
