David K. Leff, Essayist, Poet, Lecturer

Hermit's Castle (New England Trail Haibun)

Almost two miles from Farley, I descend a side trail to where the land levels alongside elephantine cliffs rising several stories. It’s a grand jumble of uneven rocky fractures, openings and passages. Under a canopy of red oak, maple and black birch I climb a few rough stone steps and stand in the mouth of a large cave where hermit John Smith spent the last decades of the nineteenth century. Below are a series of low stone walls, half covered in leaves and sticks where the hermit grew wildflowers, ferns, onions, corn and potatoes in a garden that drew visitors in droves. A few daylilies trumpet orange in the dense greenery.

A light breeze speaks in the tree canopy, and I almost hear the lilting Scottish brogue of the long bearded recluse. Humbly born, unlucky in love, an actor for a time, he entertained nobility for years as a paid hermit on great British estates. Coming to America, he lived by gathering nuts and berries, making wreathes and knitting socks before finding “the cave like heaven below.” Without the shade of so many trees, the hilly river valley view was “majestic” and his flowers and crops thrived. He welcomed hundreds of tourists to his slice of solitude, regaling them with stories of his native Highlands and the London stage. He promoted to newspapers and sold accounts of his life.

Just a craggy, anonymous wall of rock for millennia, but the hermit found his home and transformed it by tectonic force of personality, building it tale by tale into a castle. In the creased and jagged rock face I imagine crenellations, spires and battlements.

a man spun stories
castle cliffs, castle in air
we need to believe

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

Lost Airmen (New England Trail Haibun)

Descending the Summit House steps, I’m drawn to a flagpole standing beside an irregular triangular chunk of granite a little to the trail’s right. At the cliff’s edge with a spacious forested view, is a monument with a B-24 Liberator carved above the names of ten men who met a fiery death in a 1944 training mission crash on the ledges below.

Approaching the mountain’s rocky face near midnight, the pilot fought for altitude. But the heavy craft with a 110-foot wingspan and a belly full of sandbags responded slowly. Shearing tall pines, the tail snapped, then a wing. The bomber plowed through trees leaving a trail of burning fuel almost 200 yards long before smashing into the escarpment and exploding in a storm of flame. Machine gun cartridges fired all night from the burning wreck, a seemingly endless 21-gun salute.

The twenty-one year old pilot had finished his first year at Harvard. His wife was pregnant. The flight engineer was his family’s sole support and nearing a hardship discharge. The radioman was to be married the next month. Mere names on stone tell little of the story. Just downslope, they say, you still find scraps of weathered, burnt metal melted on rocks and burrowed into the earth.

cold stone memory
marks death far from battlefields
too much forgotten

(Haibun is a marriage of prose and haiku.  It was first practiced by seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho who perfected the form in a journal he kept on a trip to the remote regions of northern Japan. Gary Snyder, James Merrill, and Jack Kerouac are among American interpreters of the genre.  Haibun best expresses the spirit of the New England Trail because it combines clear-eyed prose descriptions of people, objects and places along with poetry that awakens the imagination.)

The New England National Scenic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, runs 215 miles from Guilford, Connecticut to the Massachusetts/ New Hampshire border.  The trail is maintained by volunteers of the Connecticut Forest & Park Association in Connecticut and the Appalachian Mountain Club in Massachusetts.  For more go to https://newenglandtrail.org/

Paddling with Presidents

Surrounded by water, I sat where President Herbert Hoover once sat. Sounds like a surrealistic dream, but I was wide awake, perched in the bow of a canoe. The boat once belonged to U.S. Senator Frederic Walcott, a fishing buddy of Hoover. A “Whistle Wing” wood-and-canvas model made by the St. Lawrence Boat Works in upstate New York during the 1920s, it was a work of art with white cedar ribs and planking, and mahogany decking and gunwales.

On Norfolk, Connecticut’s Tobey Pond with my friend and consummate woodsman Jody Bronson guiding from the stern, I was intoxicated by the reflective water and wooded shore dotted with a few distinctive cottages. Once a wilderness paddler testing his mettle in the Canadian subarctic, a bad back had kept me out of canoes for many years. This fifteen minute flat water cruise was about my limit, but plenty long enough for memories to come flooding back. It was like falling in love for the first time all over again.