The Urban Pantheist

Needham is a small mostly residential town next to the one I live in, in eastern Massachusetts. I don't go there much, except to Cutler Park, a big boardwalked swamp that's fun to visit. To be fair, I haven't been to a big boardwalked swamp that WASN'T insanely fun in my opinion, and I've been to a few. I noticed that in addition to Cutler, there was another parcel of public land in the town, designated Needham Town Forest. When my dad drove up for the day, we went there. It was a very unusual Town Forest in many ways.

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When one learns of container breeding mosquitoes, one wonders what the mosquitoes did before kiddie pools, bird baths, waterproof tarps, plastic barrels, and other human-made habitat was available. Here's the answer.

I took a walk with Charlie yesterday in the Stony Brook Reservation. With my camera out of commission I've been using my phone to take pictures. I got a self-timer app to take photos like this. Since it was overcast and raining with very low light conditions, most of my pictures are terrible.

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Wilson Mountain Reservation is a protected patch of woods on a stony hill in Dedham. The main entrance has a parking area which is almost always packed with cars full of dog owners taking their pets for a quick ramble up the path, often off-leash. My good friend dedhamoutdoors knows her town well, and took me to the back side of the Reservation, where we didn't see another human or canine soul. Perhaps the persistent light rain helped.

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Here's my brother and I after an impulsive walk in the woods turned into an extended adventure.

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I went for a perfectly pleasant walk in the Dedham Town Forest today, but I got home and looked at my pictures and some of them are pretty off-putting. This first one is just an old sign indicating part of the "fitness trail," but it feels very foreboding to me. Be warned, this series includes at least one very unpleasant photograph.

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Settin' on the stoop with my dawg. I found some old pictures this weekend, from my first couple years in Boston, and I realized (again) that the pictures with lots of mundane details in the background are the most interesting to look at, years later.

Anyway, on Sunday we took the dogs to Stony Brook.
( Come see the icy swamp )

A short walk in Stony Brook led to the discovery of some relatively fresh Reishi mushrooms.


Charlie used to happily go out onto ice, but now he's much more cautious about it.


As much as I dislike the cold, I do love a frozen swamp.

As seen in my sneak preview post, this is my Dad on the balcony of Casa Cubuy, the lodge we stayed for two nights. This place is way way at the end of a tiny road way up in El Yunque National Rain Forest.

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A brown jelly mushroom--some version of Exidia recisa?

This photo set is from October 15, 2011. I took a short walk through a part of the Stony Brook Reservation and found some mushrooms.
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