The snow is granular this April morning. With each step, I feel its crunchiness underfoot. Warmer temperatures and that smell-of-spring feeling in the air are sure signs that it won’t be long before the buds on the trees pop open. Soon, robins and the other songbirds of spring will start singing again.
Walking down the steep parts of Odell Park’s Main Hill Trail, I choose to wade in the snow beside the trail, rather than on it where frozen footprints make walking tricky. To maintain balance, I reach out doing a touch and grab on trees and bushes as I go. Fortunately, the snow’s not deep.
Odell Park, a 175-hectare (432-acre), year-round park in the heart of Fredericton, is an excellent example of the northern hardwood forest that once stretched unbroken from the St. John River Valley southwest along the Appalachians. Logging and natural events such as forest fires have changed much of eastern North America’s forests, but not the Odell Woods, as the park used to be called.
Aside from 16-kilometres of trails, an arboretum, the Fredericton Botanic Garden and the Odell Park Lodge, I bet William Franklin Odell, who once lived here on the sprawling estate known as Rookwood, with his wife, Elizabeth, and their eight children would still recognize the landscape. He would even recognize some of the trees.
So would his father, Loyalist Jonathan Odell, who after arriving in New Brunswick in November 1784 and making a 90-kilometre journey up the frozen St. John River to St. Anne’s Point, helped choose the site of the future capital of the province. On the day they made that choice, several of the park’s big pine and hemlock were already a hundred years old or older.
Until his death in 1818, Jonathan Odell played a significant role in the development of the newly created province including as secretary, registrar, and clerk of council. So did William, who like his father, assumed many roles in the government, including that of provincial secretary. The Odell name figures prominently in Fredericton’s history.
Reaching the bottom of the Main Hill Trail, I see kids playing in a small row of wonky looking cedar trees near the lodge, known affectionately as “the monkey trees.” Hearing their laughter, I start thinking about William and Elizabeth’s four boys and four girls and the fun they must have had playing in these woods. They may have even climbed some of the larger pine and hemlock I passed coming down the hill. Like me, they would have had their own secret places in these woods — cool, green and shady places where they could hide, and no one could find them.
Although the trees in the cedar row are of climbable size now, they may not have been when the Odell children and grandchildren lived here in the 1800s. Back then, there was a farm here with gardens and livestock and wire fences around which young cedars wound themselves as they grew. That’s why these trees have such odd shapes. Since an eastern white cedar can live 200 years or longer, it’s possible some of them bore witness to the comings and goings of the Odell Family.
When the kids see me heading their way, they clear out. Approaching the cedars, I realize it’s been a while since I looked in on them. Stepping under their whimsical looking branches is both fun and mysterious at the same time. It’s a feeling I remember from when I played in these trees as a child. Or when I brought my own kids here when they were little, so they could swing like monkeys on the branches.
Walking under these weird and wonky cedars is surreal. It’s as if they are secretly reaching out to me with their branches, welcoming me back but at the same time giving me direction, guiding me forward. Pausing for a second or two, I imagine all that’s happened here in the Odell Woods since these funny looking trees first took root.
Stepping out from under the oddly shaped cedars, where once a wire fence — long since rusted away — contained barnyard animals, I continue my walk.
Returning home, up the Main Hill Trail I feel the crunchiness of the snow underfoot. Surely it won’t be long before the buds on the trees pop open. Soon the songbirds of spring will start singing again.
