“Laws change; people die; the land remains.” Abraham Lincoln said it with his usual clarity, and the Greenwich Land Trust says it every year with its actions. The land is what stays, what endures. And whether it endures in beauty or diminishes in neglect is up to us.
This October 19th, the Greenwich Land Trust will host the 26th annual “Go Wild!” Family Field Day at the Greenwich Polo Club . It is, on the surface, one of the happiest afternoons of the year. Children run free between the games and the pony rides. There is a corn maze, a petting zoo, a bungee trampoline. Jumbo trucks wait for little explorers. Families gather over plates from Walter’s Hot Dogs, Garden Catering, New Haven Pizza Truck, and sweet cones of Van Leeuwen ice cream. Parents listen to live music from bands with names as merry as “Jumping Jams.” For three and a half hours, from 2:00 to 5:30, it looks like Greenwich at its sunniest and best.
But beneath the balloons and the laughter is something deeper, quieter, and more lasting. The proceeds from the day go not to another festival, not to a one-time cause, but to the slow, serious work of preservation: keeping open space open, protecting the natural resources, historical character, and scenic beauty of Greenwich.
It’s worth pausing here. Because this is what the Land Trust does: it resists the easy lure of development, the press of expansion, the temptation to treat land as merely commodity. Instead, it holds ground. It says: here the meadow will stay, here the marsh will remain, here the woodlands will stand. These 848 acres, scattered like jewels across our town, are not only pretty views. They are working spaces for the earth— habitat for creatures, protection from floods, clean air for lungs not yet born.
That is why “Go Wild!” is more than a party. It is a reminder of what is at stake. To walk the fairgrounds that afternoon is to walk a metaphor: you can see what it looks like when a community invests in joy, invests in its children, invests in the long haul.
And there is something about the simplicity of the day that feels exactly right. When so much of life is online, so much mediated through screens, here is an afternoon grounded, literally, in the grass. You see your neighbors face to face. You watch your child’s delight as she climbs a rock wall. You share a laugh with the stranger standing in line for pizza. And all the while you know that your ticket has done more than buy admittance— it has purchased, in some small but real way, the continued existence of the open spaces around us.
Doug Tallamy, the conservationist who has spoken at Land Trust events, reminds us that conservation is not only for great tracts of wilderness. It can happen in backyards, in neighborhoods, in every patch of ground where human intention meets natural possibility. That is the work of the Trust: to knit those intentions together until they form something durable.
Lincoln’s phrase comes back to us: “the land remains.” But remains what? That is the question. Remains free and green, or remains paved and gone? The answer depends not on chance but on choice. On whether we show up, whether we care, whether we see land not as a transaction but as a trust.
On October 19th, when families stream into the Polo Club, when children’s voices carry across the field, when the Ferris wheel turns against the autumn sky, it will be a day of celebration. But let us see it also as a day of covenant—a public declaration that we will do our part to ensure the land not only remains but thrives.
