Electronic Age Winter Sport
BY DON DOUCETTE
Following this past week’s blizzard, we have been taking our afternoon Seven Stars tea to the car park at the Caratunk Nature Preserve in Seekonk.
We sit in our Subaru, sip our tea and listen to Simply Sinatra on Sirius Radio – we find these moments relaxing during our advanced years.
We are unable to move around Caratunk property as we once did, so we sit in the car park by the white barn and enjoy the beautiful vista of the back fields and woods.
Nature comes to us occasionally for observation and it truly does if one is patient and has the time to invest.
We are fat cats in this regard.
We have been enjoying and observing the snowshoe and cross-country ski activities as enthusiasts enjoy the physical winter sport exercise in one of nature’s finest settings within the Ten Mile River Watershed.
The winter beauty of the Coles Brook tributary babbles and curves through the unique Caratunk property.
It seems spontaneous local winter sports for the majority appear to be a thing of the past when ponds and slopes years ago once filled with the fun and sounds of local winter activities.
As kids, we could not wait to get home after school in the afternoon to grab our ice skates for a few hours of fun on Caroufel’s Pond off Thurber Avenue in Attleboro, a portion of Twin Village Brook.
The pond is gone now, the casualty of a quick drainage project for housing development in Dodgeville – progress you know.
Since the advent of the electronic craze, afternoon school buses empty and students seem to disappear into themselves and scatter into isolated homes and online – late afternoon winter activities on local slopes and ponds seem as a past social ritual.
So, it’s pleasing for these old codgers who remember the fun times of our youth while a few others more limber actually enjoy the snow fields of Caratunk – as eternal Coles Brook faithfully as by magic beautifully flows with its dark sparkling pools and frigid ice crusts.
Winter sport remains alive and well at Caratunk in Seekonk – a Ten Mile River Watershed open space winter gem.
Don Doucette
“Ten Mile River Rambles”
Friends of the Ten Mile and Bucklin Brook
Citizens of the Narragansett Basin