THE CLEAN SOUND OF ICE SKATES SKIMMING across an indoor skating rink is nothing like the sound of those blades on a frozen pond or lake. Outside on the lake, there are bumps and cracks and ripples; there are frozen-over bubbles with thin layers of surface ice that crackle like paper. And then there’s the slightly frightening booommm! that echoes now and then across even the thickest-frozen waters as the ice expands or contracts, and cracks. The face of the lake is like the membrane of a drum, sending the sound reverberating from shore to shore.

In western Massachusetts, the A.T. meanders around the edge of Benedict Pond in Beartown State Forest, which includes a popular campground and picnic area in the summer, complete with a small beach. During the warmer months, smoke rises from campfires and kids splash in the water. In July, A.T. volunteers, staff, thru-hikers, and members of the local trails community get together to celebrate Great Barrington A.T. Community Day, serenaded by the Berkshires’ own ukulele band. But in winter it’s a different world, gleaming and still.

On one of those lucky days when the pond had frozen solid but hadn’t yet been covered in snow, I went ice skating with a young friend only about three years old. He was just learning, pushing an old folding chair across the slippery pond, and he was justifiably frustrated. “I don’t want to learn, I want to know!” he declared, pouting where he sat after falling again. I laughed, not so much at him but us, because haven’t we all felt that way at some point, not wanting to go through the pain and humiliation of learning something new?

But, of course, we often have to learn even the simplest things over and over — like the value of community and what it means to have and know a place. Or, for that matter, learn a place. Learn it in the lush summertime and the stark, wind-whipped winter. Learn each root and rock on a familiar piece of trail. Learn the plants and animals who make that place home. Learn the people who make it home. Learn how a forest community can have both human and nonhuman members. Learn how to care for it. Then, finally, somewhere within the infinite process of learning, we can begin to know it.

There on the ice, I prop up my disgruntled friend. “Watch this!” I say. I close my eyes, spread out my arms, and let the wind push me, bumpity bumpity, across the gleaming pond. Here, winter is long and summer is sudden. Pay attention, or you’ll miss what comes in between. Warm days and soaking rains will quickly turn ice to water. Spring peepers and red-winged blackbirds will raise a racket, and the humans will follow. We’ll be learning this familiar place all over again, as it shudders into spring.