Mass Audubon's Blue Hills Trailside Museum

N42° 13.128' W071 07.110'

Ken idly poked a box turtle up out of the water with the end of his net. "I think," he said, "it's easier to make laws than to enforce them." He is a slight old man with white hair and a wry smile. He's dressed as a ranger, and he has a fat red knife in a leather pouch on his belt.
He takes the turtles in for the night, every night. It's a giant bowl they live in, with a raised center section bedded with Astroturf, and through a slit in this, a solitary, very real bush. One wonders how the bush was passed so cleanly through the plastic. The whole arrangement looks like a mold for jello or pineapple upside-down cake. I asked whether this was preventative, to keep his turtles from being stolen in the night.
"Oh, yeah. People will take 'em."
Like a twelve-year old, I compulsively blurt what I know about turtle legislation in Missouri. It is, of course, entirely illegal to own, hold, or capture a turtle native to Missouri. Ken lays his wisdom on me and it occurs to me that I hadn't yet thought of a ranger going into a person's house, leading a raid, busting down a door to scoop up a painted box turtle and fire off a few rounds before rolling back out the remnants of the now-shattered door.
Honestly, this story starts much earlier. When I passed it, the Trailside Museum want yet open. Nobody was really in the parking lot, though the wildlife preserve is apparently dawn–dusk. I was passing by on the main road and had to pull through two lanes of folks going to work just to get there. My only question was: what does this Trailside Museum curate, anyway? Colonial history? Almost everything is colonial history in Massachusetts. I quietly pedalled into the open gates and up to a large enclosure, essentially a pit with hip-high walls and a chain-link fence up to my armpits. It said River Otter, but I was prepared to be disappointed. The otters were invisible at Chattanooga last time I visited, and invisible at the St. Louis Zoo.
But there, curled on a burl and floating around in lazy circles, was a solitary otter. It was definitely asleep, but it shifted and woke when I unclipped my pedal. I watched as it chewed its tail for a few minutes. That's when Ken came out to replace the turtles.
But that's not the beginning I was talking about.
When my Grandmother died in 2012—I think—I was in Chattanooga at school. I had to drive 13 hours from Friday night to Saturday morning so I could sleep and be part of the funeral. I was driving through Tennessee or Arkansas, somewhere I couldn't tell you, and I saw a sign on the side of the road: Freshwater Clam Museum, Next Right. the entire concept it so patently ridiculous. I pictures the state senator from Podunkville proposing this legislation on the floor and the brass laughing him back down to his chair. I picture Jimmy Stewart: Mister Smith goes to Little Rock. I almost pulled over, but a cooler head prevailed upon me to perhaps not. I would get in at four in the morning, as is. So I drove straight past the only chance I may ever get of going to that museum. I don't have a passion for freshwater clams. I haven't got the foggiest what qualifies a clam from a crab, mollusk from mussel. And if those categories are like apples and orange sherbet, you begin to understand how little I know about shellfish in general.
It turns out that when a person misses their only chance to see freshwater clams presented by a curator and treated as important academic items, it sticks with him. I've had a personal maxim from that day on: travel with enough time to see the freshwater clams. You are never in such a hurry that you can't just . . . pull off the road. I've already backtracked from Plymouth to Boston this trip, because there was a clam worth seeing. I'll guess I'll do it again. This was no different. Trailside Museum? What? I'm in. Let me see what you got.

But what Ken said, about the law. I guess I have to agree with him, because the same idea has been eating at me since Sunday night.
I rode seventy five miles on Sunday. That's double anything I've ever done before in one day. At the end of the day, I really started feeling increasingly drop-dead-tired. I was drinking enough water, for sure, and most of it ice water from McDonalds. God bless America. I wasn't done by a long shot: still pedalling up hills like a champ. But I was fading quickly. I poked around the corners of the Miles Standish State Forest for thirty minutes before I gave up on the advanced marvel of Google maps (it tried to send me through two cranberry bogs and one private campground) and navigated by guts and luck. I got to the State Forest headquarters and collapsed into their ranger station.
"I'm here on a bike, and I want to know what the policy is on bushwhacking out and camping. You know, follow a trail out into the woods."
The woman behind the desk looked at me aghast. "That's not allowed. Maybe some places, but not in a State Forest!" She said state forest like it held all the weight and meaning of "Shopping Mall." The ranger came out of the back room. She turned to him. "Sam, is there anyplace like that?"
"Definitely not here. There are some places, but you have to get a permit, and you have to prove that you can hold to 'leave no trace,' you know." He proceeded to explain a concept I learned when I was ten. "But you can't do that here. There's just no space in Massachusetts, not for that."
"Ok," I said, exasperated.
"I mean, you could do it? If you don't get caught." It seemed like Sam was tempting me with this. I think being a ranger Massachusetts must be very boring. He wanted to see if he could find me.
"I'll just take a campsite."
She smiled like she finally understood that I was a human, too. "Okay, that's twenty dollars." I gagged. I considered running then, but Sam had a hungry, hawk-like look to him. So I paid what amounted to $20 of stupid tax. No way Sam would find me if I didn't want him to. Seventy miles or no, I can ride another four to the far end of this labyrinthine and frankly enormous reclaimed forest, dig an unnoticeable trail back into the woods, and be gone in the morning before you even consider the direction I went in. Sam. Bring it.
But I didn't. I paid up and took a shower in their bathhouse and threw other people's garbage away in the open raccoon-magnet dumpster. Because, like Ken said, it's easier to write laws than enforce them. And if we all got away with whatever we wanted, if we all destroyed piecemeal the social construct that holds us together, society would dissolve and chassis would reign. But it hasn't happened and won't happen yet. Because I paid my $20 idiot tax.

In a way, that's not what this trip is about. It's about the clams, not the taxes. At least, I want it to be. I want to remember and cherish the things I discovered about myself, about Delight, about life. I don't want to hold on to the costs and burdens of our relationship. Regret is cancer. It's part of you that grows and eats what it finds until you're a thin skin of human wrapped around a whole lot of regret.
So I'm finding clams and paying my taxes.