When the Brunswick Naval Air Station closed finally in 2011, the town’s economy took a hit, but Brunswick also received a gift: hundreds of acres of land reverted to the town after more than 50 years of Navy use. These years later, thanks to the vision of the Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority and other entrepreneurs, the old base is home to a hive of new enterprises. And for those of us who find inspiration outside, there’s another vision growing: other expanses of land are reverting too — to forest, trails and sand plain, to habitats where we can feel the rejuvenated touch of nature.

One such site is the former transmitter station just off the old Bath Road in East Brunswick. There the town received the gift of a rare landscape, a 66-acre sand plain and grassland. Unremarkable at first glance, the Captain Fitzgerald Recreation and Conservation Area (named for the Air Station’s final commander) is an open, rumpled landscape of sand and grass and blueberry bushes, stippled with some pitch pines. But as the Parks and Recreation Management Plan of 2015 makes clear, this town land is truly remarkable:

These unique sand deposits are now associated with a rare natural community known as Little Bluestem? Blueberry Sandplain Grassland. A natural community is an assemblage of interacting plants and animals and their common environment and includes all of the plants and animals in a particular physical setting as well as the setting itself. The Maine Natural Areas Program ranks the rarity of natural communities and lists the Little Bluestem?Blueberry Sandplain Grassland as an S1 community, meaning it is critically imperiled in Maine because it is so rare… – Fitzgerald Management Plan, Brunswick Parks and Recreation.

That such a sand plain grassland requires fire as part of its cycle is only one of its unusual attributes. It also provides home to unusual ground-nesting birds and supports plants that get shaded out in typical wildlands. In celebration of this natural area, Brunswick’s Conservation Commission will hold a Field Morning there on June 10th, offering tours of the site and, for those so inclined, a chance to cut and contain and understand a patch of invasive knotweed at the center of the property. The work begins at 8:00 a.m. and the walking tours a little after 9:00 a.m. All of this is part of an ongoing effort to help this land be itself and become better known as another of our region’s remarkable land-gifts.

Here, in anticipation, is a little story from a former cutting of the knotweed stand:

June 10th, 2015: It’s a short drive from home to the site of the Captain William A. Fitzgerald USN, Recreation and Conservation Area. There, five of us, working as the town’s Conservation Commission, arrived at the battered gate, took the old access road in and pulled up at our evening’s work – a clump of invasive knotweed.

The weed, first brought to North America as an ornamental in the late 19th century and since become an invasive pest, was well rooted, and, from its stand, clearly eyeing the acres of open ground around it. But it was also the only knotweed we’d spotted in the acreage, and so we could surround it and take it down, prevent it from spreading and dominating. We were doped for bugs and tick wary, and we had our cutters and loppers ready to have at the knotweed.

The setting (part of a former naval base), the term “invasive,” and our “attack” on it had cast my mind in a military set. As I reached a thumb-thick stalk of knotweed that rose to head height, memory of a moment in Henry Thoreau’s Walden flashed to mind. He too did battle with invasive weeds, though his were not a trans-oceanic kind. Still, as he labored among his rows of beans during year one at Walden Pond, he fought with the weeds that would crowd out those beans; he went at them with fervor:

A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty, crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. – Walden

Ah, the mock heroic. And yet, in its dailiness, in its usualness, the real heroic too. This work of helping the land say, Beans, or, in our case, Grass or Blueberry, is part of the cultivation that forms culture, that, in the long run, helps us “to know beans” about where we live.

I sized up this knotty Hector and cut him down.

Well, all this metaphorical battling is a bit bloody for what we actually did, but just as Thoreau came “to know beans” and weeds through his close contact with them, we too came to know knotweed. And that brought me a little closer to knowing the variousness of this piece of land and what it might become. I gained also a sense of knotweed’s tenacity and power. We may have leveled this year’s stand, but clearly, the weed would be back for another round.

So too would we, returning in 2016, and, now, on June 10th this year.

This little story of combat in service of one of Brunswick’s new parklands is also repeated invitation: Join us on June 10th’s morning, for a closer look at the Captain Fitzgerald Recreation and Conservation Area.

Directions: The Captain Fitzgerald Area is on the right off the Old Bath Rd. near Lindbergh Landing, about 1.4 miles from the Bath Rd. The access driveway, guarded by an old gate, which can be walked around, is about a quarter of a mile long. Park near the gate.

Your Land is a monthly column about public open space worth a visit. Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident and chair of the town’s Conservation Commission. He writes for a variety of publications and has a book, Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains, due out from University Press of New England in the spring of 2018.