CUTTING A BOND WITH THE LONG TRAIL
Ned Green's Long Trail Journals as compiled by his ole ma, Clare Green, will be available mid-May for purchase for $14.95 plus tax at Bruce's Browser in uptown Athol, from Clare Green and from GreenMountainClub.org or Outdoors.org. The proceeds from the sale of the book will contribute to the Ned Green Scholarship Fund and The Green Mountain Club of Vermont. The Executive Director of GMC, Ben Rose, says "It's a good read and it's good to spend some time journeying along with Ned."
This book can also be found at:
Trail Head, Aubuchon Plaza, Orange, Ma
Barnes and Noble Book Store in Hadley, MA.
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A Review
By Andrea Woods
Cutting a Bond With the Long Trail by Clare Green
Few of us could live through the tragedy of our only child’s death and spend most of five years revisiting the details of their life, compile their journals and come out the other side with the same grace and generosity of spirit that you started with. That’s just what Clare Green of Warwick has done. An indomitable spirit, she has taken the journals of her son Ned’s traverses on Vermont’s Long Trail and spun a book that made me laugh out loud, weep until the pages were wet, and emerge on the other side feeling like a different person –or at least one with a slightly different perspective on life.
Ned Green was 26 when an ice climbing fall took his life at Huntington Ravine in the White Mountains. Ned grew up in Warwick, the only son of a divorced single parent, and an intense lover of language and the outdoors. He graduated from the College of the Atlantic of Maine with one phrase under his name in the yearbook – “I Worship Mountains.”
Worship them he did. He worked as a trail builder and maintainer with several New England mountain clubs and in his spare time, did it some more. He hiked 1/3 of the Appalachian Trail as a college project and the 273 mile Long Trail as a solo journey. Along the way, he made wonderful friendships, developed a deep bond with the land, and recorded his observations in several journals.
Upon his death, many of those friends encouraged Clare Green to share Ned’s beautiful poetry and his journals with the world. With the goal of donating the funds from sale of the book to a scholarship fund at his alma mater, Pioneer Valley Regional School in Northfield and the Vermont’s Green Mountain Club, and with the help of Ned’s friends, his old English teacher Roger Genest and many others, Green started out on a journey that culminates this month with the release of Cutting a Bond With the Long Trail.
A sampling of Ned Green’s poetry gives the reader a “faint whiff” of the book:
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“The hills glow an old autumn yellow
The wind craves the night
A generator’s hum
The suncitymountains
The treerivervalleys
The trailfeetmud
Everything is coagulating
Merging to the center
Oneness
Hills spread wide
Sharp spikes and domes
We call the mountains, “HOME”.
Along with the journals and poetry, the book has itineraries and maps useful for anyone interesting in hiking or backpacking in New England. The 135-page soft-cover book will be available at The Trailhead in Aubuchon Plaza, Bruce’s Browser, www.greenmountainclub.org (The Green Mountain Club), from Clare Green, and at the Warwick Library. A book sale and signing will be held Sunday, June 4th from 3-5pm at the Warwick Library and at 7pm on June 26th at Bruce’s Browser. The book’s price is $14.95. In his Foreward to the book, Ben Rose, Executive Director of the Green Mountain Club says, “Through these pages, his spirit remains with us, reminding us to laugh, be honest, grapple with ideas, and seek out high windy places.”