December 15, 2020 - Easton: Wheaton Farm to Route 138

Welcome to Susan's Bay Circuit Diary! This blog follows my adventures with my dog Sulu hiking the Bay Circuit Trail.  To get new posts in your inbox, please subscribe (see the little "subscribe" oval above). The rest of the past posts can be found using the little menu on the left.  If you are curious how this all started, go here.

From a little before G to J

Google Maps routed me via Route 24 again to get to Wheaton Farm, so I guess last time was no fluke.  

The day for my hike was sunny and cold. I did my homework this time, and found the parking lot and the trail easily. I am still trying to conserve phone battery by using paper maps. 

Sulu and I are also still wearing orange even though shotgun season is over now it’s “primitive firearms” season. The other dogs and walkers I saw had orange too. 

I had good news early in the walk - the turnaround point from last time was much closer to the parking lot than I realized. 

After leaving Wheaton Farm, we had nearly 2 miles of road walking. There were two more old cemeteries, weirdly similarly named: The Colonel John Williams Graveyard and the Lieutenant John Williams Bury-Ground.

No, I don't know which one.

This is possibly technically a "raised ranch"

There was one stretch that featured many split level houses. It made me wonder, why the split level? What convinced builders back in the day that that was the right way to go? Was it economy? Was it modern living? I did some research and learned that the split-level is part of the mid-century design movement. It did have the advantage of squeezing more square feet of living space into the same sized lot, and segregated bedrooms from public spaces. Interestingly, aspirational working class families entering home ownership for the first time were intimidated by traditional colonial houses. The split-level was an intermediate step up from the basic ranch house. These days the appeal is that they are “affordable”, which of course derives from their lack of appeal.

After the road walking we finally made it onto nearly two miles of uninterrupted power cut. I turned Sulu loose almost immediately, much to his pleasure.  I did see three men ahead of me near a construction site. I was momentarily concerned they might be hunters, as one was wearing orange, but I was able to call Sulu away from them. A friend advised me that Sulu should be wearing a bell during hunting season, though I can’t imagine anything he’d hate more. I do have a bell left over from a Jingle Bell run I did a while back,  so perhaps I could wear the bell. There are two more weeks of deer season left.

I saw a good sized solar farm up the hill from the power cut on my left. It looks like it might be an old landfill site (update: it is)

The killer cable

The trail instructions say “do not come in contact with exposed tower grounding wires”. Does this mean Sulu or I might be electrocuted? It took me a while to figure out what they were even talking about and I noted that there’s a cable which is buried under the road which is sometimes uncovered. I don’t see how that could be hot all the time. I checked with my resident electrical engineer, and he told me that the risk is very small, and the risk is of being burned rather than electrocuted.  There are some freak circumstances where electrocution is possible, but the risk is pretty much up there with being killed by discharged frozen human waste being dropped by an airplane. This is a relief as some of the exposed wires run through puddles which Sulu ha traversed.

After about an hour on the trail I’m warming up. Gloves are off, the hat is rolled up a bit, the jacket is partly unzipped. I feel very lucky to have such a sunny day.

The directions also mentioned crossing an abandoned railroad bed. I assumed there would be tracks, but I believe they have been pulled up and I have crossed it. I’m excited that it could be another rail trail in the making.

We reached the turnaround point at Route 138 faster than expected, in about an hour and a quarter (3.4 miles). On the way back the wind was in our face so I zipped up the jacket.

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