Our Fourth of July observance in 2002 involved no barbecues, no parades, no waving of flags or adornment with bunting. There were fireworks, eventually, but only in a coincidental way. That year, Ethan and I decided to spend the day attempting to visit, and photograph, every town in Berkshire County.
This was his idea, and I was skeptical, especially once he sent me this URL which lists all 32 Berkshire towns. Thirty-two seemed like a lot of towns to visit in one day. Berkshire's a big county, by New England standards; the north-south swath of state to our east (roughly equivalent in size to Berkshire) spans three counties, not one.
And to complicate matters, I had spread the word to our friends that they were welcome to meet us at 6 p.m. at a Steeplecats game in North Adams. I was convinced that, given that time constraint, we'd never pull it off. Still, I was happy to try.
The Fourth dawned sunny and clear, and by 8:45 we were on the road, taking one of our favorite back ways from our Lanesboro house into Hancock. Our second stop was south Williamstown, where we photographed Caretaker Farm. We go there weekly to get the week's share of vegetables, but the weekly dose isn't enough to inure me to its spectacular beauty.
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After grabbing bagels and coffee at the Store at Five Corners, where the proprietor knows our names (well...he knows Ethan's, anyway), we were off southwards, driving through the third Berkshire town in which we could once claim residence, New Ashford.
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In those days, we lived in a barn. We resisted the temptation to photograph it, figuring its new inhabitants might be kind of baffled, and instead headed south to grab a shot of the old stone church in Lanesboro, its steeple newly-replaced. The old one rested neatly in a corner of the exterior, behind a pair of trash cans.
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Pittsfield was where we came closest to a parade. We avoided the main streets, but we were still forced to detour by a friendly policeman and set of wooden barricades, and around us pedestrians carrying lawn chairs thronged the usually-empty city streets. At a crosswalk, we nodded politely to a large family, headed up by an older gentleman in military uniform.
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In Richmond, we stopped to photograph the combination post office/bistro/store. I'd eaten at the bistro before, but had never tried the store--which turned out to have one of the most impressive cheese collections I've ever seen. Local and global, cow's-milk and goat's-milk and sheep's-milk, pasteurized and raw-milk, enormous wheels and tiny herb-coated blocks: the selection was giddying. We picked up some sheep's-milk cheese, a link of hard dry sausage, a loaf of rosemary bread, and some cornichons for an anticipated picnic and got back on the road, promising to return.
We checked towns off our list as we photographed them. We spent as little time as possible in Lenox and Stockbridge, which the BerkshireLinks webguide calls the "orchid towns" of South County. They've always been a little too shi-shi for our tastes. We had fun peeking in on the art center in Becket, though.
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And West Stockbridge is charming. The main street is quirky; the package store (a northern euphemism for "place where one can buy liquor") is painted a vivid pink with teal trim; Baldwin's makes and sells the world's best vanilla extract there. With regret we skipped the daily glassblowing demonstration and avoided the myriad art galleries; we were on a mission.
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Our favorite town for the day came right after West Stockbridge: the hamlet of Alford, population 399. Alford is one of those towns through which no major (read: numbered) roads run, and as we approached the so-called town center we marveled that anyone lived in these far reaches of the county. The houses, tucked into fields and gardens, were beautiful. The middle of town held a wee white clapboard school, a wee white clapboard church, and the wee white clapboard town hall, all on a green beside a wee old cemetary. We were charmed instantly-and became even more so when an older fellow pulled his truck over beside ours to see if we needed help getting anywhere. He directed us to the next town, Mount Washington, via back roads (there's no other way; Mount Washington is devoid of numbered roads, too) and wished us a happy holiday. We figure we'd effectively met, and conversed with, a quarter of one percent of the town's population!
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Mount Washington is the smallest town in the county, population-wise; it is home to a mere 129 residents, and the BerkshireLinks guide just says "The ruggedly beautiful town of Mount Washington is the site of Mt. Everett (2nd highest peak in the commonwealth) and the spectacular, legendary Bash Bish Falls. Perhaps the ideal time to visit would be the end of June, when the mountain laurel is in full bloom." We decided to skip the second-highest peak in the commonwealth, but we hit the other two highlights; mountain laurel were blooming everywhere along the roads, and we decided to take a quick walk to the falls and photograph them as our memorial of Mount Washington.
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The trail to the falls is well-marked, and there were a few dozen cars parked at the trailhead; the sign just said "to the falls" and "no swimming," and didn't list any kind of distance or difficulty rating. We figured it'd be a quick stroll, so there was no need to take food or water with us. Besides, we could hear the waterfall from the top of the trail, so how far could it be?
Okay, so that wasn't our brightest moment. The falls are probably only a quarter- or half-mile from the road, but the trail goes almost straight down. In a few places there are steps; mostly it's a sandy scramble over tree roots. The waterfall is spectacular; the hike back up to the car was...hot. And unpleasant. And when we finally reached the tarmac, and I said a fervent silent prayer of thanks that we'd made it up the hill without my lungs collapsing or Ethan going into an insulin reaction, the truck battery turned out to have died.
A quick rendezvous with another truck and Ethan's jumper cables solved that problem, and we blasted off again in air-conditioned comfort.
As we drove, we talked; we listened to music; we caught two hour-long episodes of "Agents of Change" on WAMC. We stopped to buy soda and bottles of water. We ate weird crunchy things. We spent the day in the car, poring over maps, moving through space, stopping to see things, getting back in the car again. It was like the cross-country trip we took together six years ago, in intense microcosm.
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In Great Barrington we photographed a little airfield filled with small planes, long one of our favorite spots to drive by and admire. The heart of Sandisfield turns out to be the mid-eighteenth-century settlement of New Boston. In Tyringham, we admired the bizarre exterior of Santarella, the county's so-called "gingerbread house."
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One of the roads we traveled was rutted dirt through a long stretch of forest and "land for sale" signs. In Becket, we were caught in a fast rainstorm. Around the county we photographed town halls, libraries, Congregational churches, volunteer fire departments.
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In addition to the photographs we took, there were the ones we didn't take. Some, like the bizarre and beautiful tower at High Lawn Farms dairy, we avoided snapping because we didn't want to embarrass the people working there. Others, like the "Tyringham: A Hinterland Community" sign at the border of Tyringham, we missed because there were cars behind us and we couldn't pull over to snap the shot.
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In North Adams, we caught the first four innings of the baseball game, during which time we watched another rainstorm move over the mountains and drench the ballpark and move on to someplace else. We ate hot dogs and hamburgers and stood up and cheered when the Steeplecats hit a home run.
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Our last two towns were Adams and Cheshire, which we photographed on our way home. In Adams, Ethan snapped shots of the main street, one of our favorites in the county. In Cheshire, a town we navigate routinely, he managed to find and photograph the monument to the 1,235-pound Cheshire cheese presented by the town to President Thomas Jefferson. Finding something so strange and wonderful, in a town I thought I knew well, was the perfect end to our Berkshire adventure.
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By nightfall we were lounging on our deck, drinking cold beer and being eaten alive by mosquitoes and watching five distinct fireworks displays across our ten-mile view. The ones over Onota Lake, where we'd photographed the medical center in Pittsfield that morning, were tiny starbursts of color. The ones at the far end of our valley were dazzling; we saw their light a second or two before their sounds reached us. And now and then, somebody really close would set off a roman candle, and we would cheer. In between, we watched fireflies in our bushes.
Berkshire County takes a long time to drive through. There's a lot here, and the landscape has a different flavor when one's taking the time to see the county as a plane, as something spacial, instead of as a network of roads providing the shortest distance between any two points.
Ethan's been talking about a cross-county drive for a while now. We picked the Fourth of July as our date because it was a beautiful day, and a day off from work, and on some inchoate level it seemed like a neat thing to do on the holiday. We weren't looking for a "patriotic" way to spend the day-but celebrating the pan-political agglomeration of unique, historic, and beautiful towns in our county seems now like the perfect celebration for the Fourth of July. Patriotism means "love of, and devotion to, one's country," and what better way to express that love than by taking the time to explore the ins and outs of the very particular piece of country that we call home?
See all of our Berkshire County photos from 7-4-02 here.