Well, I knew that Somerville wouldn't provide me with the deepest natural experience of the year (on September 12), but it didn't mean I was uninterested in what it had to offer. I found Foss Park.
The park is another urban catch-all, a playground, athletic fields, including a soccer field in serious need of landscaping attention, and a baseball field doing just a little better. There were trees that provided shade and even some wildlife. And I mean this next sentence with all seriousness. The pigeons have to live somewhere.
One marker threw me for a loop. "Route of Middlesex Canal." Here? Through this park? Well, I'll be hornswoggled. It turned out to be true (historical markers are rarely wrong, although they are not 100% foolproof). The canal, which operated for about 50 years from the start of the nineteenth century to 1853, ran 27 miles in length and provided a highway for goods and materials during the height of the Industrial Revolution. This particular section had been filled - Boston's history is of filling wetlands to create buildable land - but much of it remains open today. There's even a historical museum dedicated just to its story, in North Billerica.
So, even in the heart of the city, on a small, well-trodden and urbanized block, surrounded by a steady flow of traffic and its clinging noise, even in a place where the residents looked askance at my approach, Massachusetts surprised me.
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