Stewards Appreciate Aesthetics

Our Baker Woods Preserve hiking experience is enhanced by hand routed wooden signs and maps fashioned by BWP trail creator and stewardship team member Liam Carney. Poetry is a favorite genre and portions of our trails are unobtrusively graced by poems meant to help visitors connect with the natural environment. Poems or excerpts of poems by e.e.cummings, Joyce Kilmer, William Blake, W.S Merwin, Basho and Bob Dylan etc. grace portions of our trails.

Perhaps the most poignant poem, especially on cold and snowy days, is The Snowman on Norm’s Path. The poem written in 1921 by American modernist poet Wallace Stevens beautifully encourages hikers to become one with the winter forest and appreciate the winter landscape for what it is ….

Wallace was a favorite poet of Norm Baker - himself “a man for all seasons” who along with Doris Baker made BWP possible….

Matt, Linda and the BWP Stewardship Team

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.