Remember those elementary school field trips? As a girl, I always looked forward to the chance to burst free of the confining classroom and push my way onto the big yellow bus with my crumpled permission slip that would take me to see dinosaur bones, plays, and planetariums. It’s been (ahem) quite a few years since I’ve taken a school trip, but in these days of high gas prices and little time, like many others, I’ve once again joined a search for brand new experiences close to home. The current goal: to find a place with autumn color and quiet trails that won’t empty the tank along the way.

My search leads me to a pretty corner of Talbot County where The Pickering Creek Audubon Center sits on 400 acres of farmland, forest, and wetlands just nine miles north of Easton. In 1984, Margaret Strahl and her brother George Olds donated their family farm to the Chesapeake Audubon Society, creating an environmental center with free access for the entire community. A mecca for migrating bird life, the place is now a hub for youth environmental education, where teachers can drag local kids away from their computer screens and reintroduce them to the outdoors.

Director Mark Scallion isn’t surprised to hear the news that, as an adult, this sanctuary is new to me. “People used to think the only way to get here was on a school bus,” he tells me. “Everyone under eighteen knew about us, but no one over eighteen knew who we were.”

A long gravel drive leads down to the center’s main office, bordered on one side by fields of soybeans and corn ready for harvest. The property is also a working farm; more than two-thirds of the land is dedicated to low-impact agriculture, maintaining its strong connection to the Eastern Shore’s rural heritage. But the old fields to the left of my car window no longer resemble farmland. At their far edge, tall trees dressed in autumn’s scarlet and gold stand sentinel over fallow ground returning to wetland and scrub, crucial habitat for most of the region’s creatures. Somewhere in there are the two miles of walking trails I’m planning to tackle.

As I step outside my car cocoon, I notice I’m one of only two cars in the lot. It’s so quiet that I can almost hear the spent leaves falling to the forest floor. I breathe in, and instantly notice the smells of fall: musty vegetation and smoke from some distant fire. While I’m virtually alone here today, some 16,000 people come through here each year. A large percentage are children who attend school and summer programs on ecology, gardening, water conservation, biodiversity, animal life, erosion, soils, pesticides, and even canoeing and orienteering. There’s a small classroom featuring live reptiles and amphibians, a continual source of fascination. There are adult programs also, including guided nature walks, but today I’m on my own.

The trailhead starts near a line of colorful beached canoes (available for members to use), stacked near the water. I pause on a bench by the water. Pickering Creek is still and glassy, a silent mirror reflecting the calm, colorful trees surrounding me. Wings fanning, a couple of ducks come in for a landing, their rippled wakes disturbing the perfect picture as I turn to head into the woods.

The four-mile Farm to Bay Trail leisurely winds its way through the trees, its ten habitats home to white-tailed deer, the endangered Delmarva fox squirrel, raccoon, skunk, fox, turtles, and countless songbirds, shorebirds, and waterfowl. I’ve chosen to walk the path backward, starting from the water, through the hardwoods, past a freshwater pool, through marshland, and into the reclaimed fields.

Every small creature makes a racket as it makes its way through the forest; a chipmunk rustling in the dead leaves sounds as big as a deer, and the deer, well, they might as well be Bigfoot. As I walk across a wooden boardwalk placed over the marshy soil, I jump almost as high as the two does.

I startle just off in the trees. They crash through the woods as I emerge into an old field filled with saplings, sweet gum trees reclaiming their former territory. Here, the brush is thick, muffling the cries of migrating geese overhead. The path narrows, becoming almost maze-like, giving me an idea of what it must have been like to navigate through these clearings long ago. Human habitation seems far away.

The peaceful trail ends too soon, spitting me out near the Children’s Imagination Garden. Though there are no school kids here today, the garden’s lanes of native plants and flowers seem like the perfect place for kids to get messy and run a little bit wild. As I stroll back down the gravel lane toward my car, I realize that, for this grown-up, this field trip has been long past due.

Pickering Creek Audubon Center
11450 Audubon Lane, Easton, Md. 410-822-4903, pickeringcreek.org Trail and viewing areas are open from dawn to dusk 365 days a year. Canoes are available to National Audubon members during office hours, Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sat. 10 a.m.–4 p.m. To obtain a Pickering Creek membership, $20 annually, visit http://www.audubon.org.

When she’s not exploring nature preserves, Sara Edelson hikes her Northern Virginia home.