With snowshoes and mocs, family leaves its mark

Barclay and Sarah Hudson, 2004

Near the back of the Tyringham cemetery, behind the Union Church, a simple marble headstone bears the name of a woman named Sarah S. Hudson. When Mrs. Hudson died in 1963, she left three special legacies: Her daughter Sarah and her son Barclay, and a distilled love for her beautiful land draped across the mountainous pass between Tyringham and Monterey.

Sarah S. Hudson came to Tyringham in the late 1930s. She spent some 25 years of her life in town. Not enough to make her a native, but long enough to leave her mark on more than a stone.
When she died, her children held onto the mountain land. The forest turned through the seasons, from the ledges high on the slope to the wild leeks knifing up from the forest floor in the spring. Memories aged along with the trees: Their mother snowshoeing home after heavy storms closed the roads; children and mother walking silently through the woods, feeling each twig through the thin soles of moccasins. From Barclay's home in California to Sarah's kitchen in Tyringham, an idea ripened.

Sarah S. Hudson turning on her snowshoes Tyringham, Christmas Day 1938

This summer, with a harmonic wind blowing over the marble stone in the valley and through the complex alleys of the state bureaucracy, Barclay and Sarah Hudson sold a conservation restriction over 360 acres in Monterey and Tyringham to the Commonwealth's Division of Fish and Game. The state could afford the deal only because the Hudsons agreed to sell the CR for less than half its true value.
Two weeks later, having taken the first step, they took another, gifting title in the land to Berkshire Natural Resources Council.

Stories reveal themselves slowly from the old woods. Ancient roads, charcoal pits, stone walls and cellar holes. Tree tops. In the springtime, a man walking a woods road through the forest sensed the air over his head moving before he heard the diving goshawk. For half a mile, the goshawk dove, driving the man away from the nest above. The man hurried. He left the road and sought cover under low hanging branches. He felt fear at first. And then he felt awe, and wonder. Few places in the Berkshires are truly wild anymore, but there are mountains and there are woods that guard the truth from one day, one year, one life to the next.

Sometimes, ordinary people do great things to save these places.
This place will be called, forever, Hudson Woods.