The Quillinan Reservoir block of the Naugatuck State Forest stretches east and north of the reservoir itself. The northern entrance, where I began my walk, is in Seymour. The trail, called the Woods Road, which offers the most direct route from there to the reservoir, eventually crosses into Ansonia. But the impression, after I had walked just a couple hundred yards, was of being nowhere in particular. A boulder-strewn ridge rose to my left, blotting out the state road I had come in on. To my right, ferns wove a rolling green carpet, glowing in the backlight of a 6 o’clock sun.
The illusion of an endless forest of oak and elm was abetted by a neighboring property of still more forest. Much of it—beyond the ridge and across the road—is Regional Water Authority property, closed to the general public but nevertheless expanding the Quillinan’s woodsy backdrop all the way into Woodbridge. The undeveloped acreage is enough to enclose two more reservoirs—Peat Swamp Reservoir and Middle Reservoir—and it carried the keening of a hawk from a considerable distance. Nothing tells you you’re alone in the woods like a distant hawk does.
The Woods Road is a straightforward path, rising and falling gently, wide enough to accommodate a walker and a dog. It was surely plotted for ambience, but with no waypoints in particular. So it pleasantly surprised me, after I’d been at it for a good 20 minutes, by drawing up alongside an old stone wall.
Aged into sagging communion with the ground, such walls are practically a natural feature of woods in New England, and I shouldn’t have been surprised exactly. But in their rough but premeditated durability—smaller rocks wedged just so between bigger rocks—they bring time into any consideration of the woods around them. For, towering as the trees were, they had come after a colonial and post-colonial period of clearing and farming. Development had been here first, as the slenderness of the trunks also made clear. The path later crossed a wall head-on, passing from one long-voided property to another through a worn, convenient gap.
Meanwhile, other rocks too big to have been relocated kept announcing themselves, looking paradoxically like they had been placed, either just beside the Woods Road or 20 paces back. These were true mastodons, glacial erratics, perched on rather than coming out of the ground. I knew just enough geology to know that they were from somewhere else, having traveled inside an ice sheet called the Laurentide some 20,000 years ago before tumbling out when the ice sheet retreated some 10,000 later. And yet they most definitely predate the woods around them. A few of them had split, like loaves of bread, but they were otherwise going nowhere. A colonial farmer would have had to plant his crops around them. One medium-sized erratic had been enlisted to form part of a section of wall, with smaller rocks leveled against it on both sides.
The Woods Road offered little indication that it was bringing me closer to the water, until it eventually crossed a stony, trickling brook that was itself en route to the reservoir. A look at the map identified it as Beaver Brook, the line of it tracing up into the realm of the RWA. At first westbound, the Beaver passes the spillway of the Middle Reservoir, then turns south to enter the state forest. Along this stretch is where it would have one day been recruited to fill and then become the Quillinan, assuming its comparatively voluminous teardrop shape. From the southern end of the reservoir, it then reemerges as a brook, winding through and under a lightly commercial, heavily residential mile before being subsumed for good by the Naugatuck River.
As close to the reservoir as it is, the Naugatuck would seem to be the geographical connection between the discrete Quillinan block and the greater Naugatuck State Forest farther upstream. The river—as well as State Highway 8—divides the East and West blocks, just north of Beacon Falls. But the “Naugatuck” designation is more historically related to the town of Naugatuck, which was home to an early 20th-century industrialist and developer, Arthur Harris Whittemore. He put up buildings and houses throughout the town, but then, late in life, he oversaw the planting of tens of thousands of trees there and along the river, 2,000 acres of which his heirs donated to the state.
But even ostensibly state-protected trees can be cleared again; the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection allows for sustainable harvesting and other interventions. I was reminded of that when the Woods Road at one point widened to a truck-sized roundabout with miniature earth-moving equipment parked inside. But the presence of a reservoir at the end of the path tilts the balance in favor of keeping trees—forests protect reservoirs by holding back runoff and breaking down pollutants—which is why Regional Water Authority forests and state forests are often entangled. Evergreens in particular are purposefully planted by water authorities to prevent leaves and other less desirable organic matter from entering their reservoirs.
Evergreens were indeed the first sign that I had arrived at the Quillinan. The Woods Road narrowed to a footpath, hemmed in by juvenile pine and taller, spear-like white pines. They darkened the woodscape and carpeted the path with needles. The reservoir itself at first registered as a pool of sunlight behind a dense thicket. A line of big hemlocks formed a barrier, their lowest branches slanted toward the very edge of the water.
An unofficial spur trail led to an opening in the thicket, revealing the full, placid width of the Quillinan, with a view of the houses on the far side. To the right was the more sheltered part of the reservoir, with stalk-like vegetation and furred, partially submerged logs. Somewhere behind them was the “mouth” of Beaver Brook. There was no visible birdlife, and the hawk I had heard at the beginning of the trail had gone quiet or wheeled away.
In theory, reservoirs return the favor to forests by drawing wildlife to them. As it happened, upon returning to the footpath, I surprised three or four frogs, their getaways trembling the underbrush. Minutes later, the evening stillness was broken by a barred owl, her great, fussy wings negotiating a landing on a branch of elm, perhaps attracted there by the reliable presence of the frogs. I on the other hand was an unreliable visitor. I stopped and stared at the owl for a good, long while, and the owl stared back, patiently waiting for me to begin the inevitable, non-glacial retreat to my car.
Written and photographed by David Zukowski.
