Notes from a recovering know-it-all
On leeches, lockdowns, and letting curiosity win
Today marks five years since the world collectively held its breath.
March 15, 2020: the day lockdown became our shared vocabulary. Almost 60 months later, I’ll admit it—I’m nostalgic. Not for the fear, the grief, or the grocery store panic (I see you, essential workers who kept the wheels turning while the rest of us clapped from balconies). I miss the quiet. The pause. The way responsibilities disappeared behind closed doors. In my tiny crevice of the world, life softened. No wolfing dinner to sprint to basketball practice. No frantic mornings herding small humans onto buses.
With everyone home, we spent more time outdoors. My fledgling passion project, Berkshire Family Hikes, had only existed for two years. I hadn’t yet found my rhythm—the alchemy of trail dust and storytelling. Then, the day before lockdown, we visited Glendale Falls in Middlefield, MA. A short hike, but the air had that buzz of early spring: moss glowing neon against the brown leaf litter, ice thawing in every crevice.
Back home, buzzing with that post-hike high, I fell into my usual ritual: scouring the internet for stories about where we just explored. Who built these trails? What ghosts came before? I dug through digitized newspaper articles, chased dead-end leads, read about the 18th-century farm, Martha Stewart’s fond memories of the area, and—click—there it was. The thrill wasn’t just in the hiking. It was in the hunting. In the need to knowing. The stitching together of stories like a quilt.
Suddenly, I was nine again. Notebook in hand, lurking outside our red cabin at Eric’s Buckhorn Resort UP (THE BUCK) on Michigan’s Upper Penisula, where Big Manistique Lake licks the shoreline. July 1996. (Earlier that month, Harriet the Spy hit theaters!) My parents had driven our battered maroon Dodge Caravan 15 hours from Massachusetts to this rural delight.
Picture it: the Upper Peninsula in mid-July—all mosquito hum and suncreened shoulders. Our annual family trip with Uncle Bill (my Dad’s brother) and his crew: three cousins who approximately mirrored me and my sisters in age, all of us crammed together in a red cabin sneaking listens to Adam Sandler’s “What The Hell Happened to Me?” (remember the Goat?!) on CD. Those were feral summers. Six kids with handfuls of Twizzlers daring each other to wade into the leech-filled lake. You heard someone yell, “GET THE SALT!” and knew an Emergency Shriveling Operation was in order.
Much of that summer is lost to memory (not the french fries and ketchup incident in my aunt and uncle’s NEW minivan—sorry, Aunt Cheri!), but I remember the reclusive itch that gripped me. I’d read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and when the movie starring Michele Trachtenberg (RIP) premiered that July, I hung on to it like a leech. As I still have a propensity to do when consuming something that resonates with me, I absorbed it into my personality like a second skin.
Like Harriet, I wanted to remember everything and know everything.
Suddenly, I was making sure my clothing had adequate pockets and never left the house without a pen and notebook. That summer, I believed if I followed every thread—my teenage sister and cousin mooning over the boy they met at The Buck (was it Tyler?), my parent’s hushed voices, the maintenance man who tightened the screws on the seesaw—the universe would unravel its mysteries. Instead, I was mainly a broody pest.
But here’s the thing: Decades later, hunched over my laptop, Googling “Glendale Falls + Martha Stewart + Highland Cattle,” that same itch returned. I wanted to know everything about where we just were. The lockdown gave it oxygen. For three months, we explored. I researched. I wrote. People trapped in their own homes read my trail reviews, my oddball historical tangents. And it felt like trading gifts, not content—a “look at what I found!” shouted across quarantined balconies.
Author and naturalist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the ethics of reciprocity, the “gift economy,” in her book, The Serviceberry. This was mine. No algorithm strategy. No hustle. Just: Here’s an interesting story about a waterfall. Pass it on.
Five years later, the world’s back to its old tricks and has learned some more: a cacophony of deadlines, doomscrolling, and the downfall of democracy. The “slow” has been steamrolled by the cyber truck of capitalism that threatens to break its axle over your back if you lose leverage. But sometimes, when I’m knee-deep in library archives, or stumble on a faded map, I feel her—that leech-dodging kid in cut-off jeans, scribbling secrets.
We’re all still searching for how to fit into this mess. But I hear Ole Golly’s voice reminding me, “Well, you must realize, Harriet, knowing everything won’t do you a bit of good unless you use it to put beauty in this world. True or false?”
True.
The Buck will forever be the standard for slow summers! I might never be able to get into a doge caravan again though
I completely agree about how nice it was to be able to slow down, think, relax, and enjoy life. It is great to see you posting your funny and thoughtful lore again. I love your writing!