I CAN SEE FOR MILES
Jamie James drives the Berkshires in search of Melville, Hawthorne, and the Who
B Y J A M I E J A M E S P H OTO G R A P H S B Y J O D I H I LT O N
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Sunrise at The Ponds, a neighborhood along Rt. 7 in Berkshire County. Pontoosuc Lake in Pittsfield with it’s view of Potter and Sheep’s Heaven mountains in the distance.
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MY ROOMMATE JONATHAN PROMISES THAT TONIGHT WE WILL SEE HISTORY BEING MADE: THE WHO IS PERFORMING TOMMY, our favorite band’s genre-bending rock opera, at Tanglewood, just off Route 7 in the woodlands of western Massachusetts. It’s a hot day, this July 7, 1970. ¶ Jonathan and I have been here since mid-morning to stake out a spot on the lawn, the cool place to be, just behind the covered shed at this Berkshires landmark where the Boston Symphony makes its summer home. Frisbees are flying in the breeze, and so is the shoulderlength hair of the mostly male fans. As the golden haze of midsummer deepens to a dense violet twilight, the Who finally takes the stage. The crowd jumps to its feet and cheers lustily. Pete Townshend leaps around like a mad cricket, Roger Daltrey tosses his microphone high into the air, and when the overture to Tommy begins, I can feel Jonathan’s prediction coming true. FORTY-SOME YEARS LATER, that night endures—if only in HD
and hyperbole by aging fans like me. I’m driving north through Berkshire County, returning as a guest lecturer to Williams College, my alma mater, just shy of the Vermont state line. It’s New Year’s Day, two days after a deep snowfall, and the broadshouldered, smoothly curving highway is nearly empty of traffic. But the rearview mirror of my mind is all swirling stage lights and marijuana smoke, twinkling fireflies and thundering bass lines. I follow Route 7 along the Housatonic River, on my left, as the road wraps around steep hills cloaked in evergreen forest. The river is frozen in wide, white sheets, punctuated by intense rapids where the rocks poke through. On my right, steep cliffs of dark purple granite beetle overhead, dripping icicles thick as a man’s leg. The morning light picks out tiny rainbows in the ice, intense golden gleams from veins of quartzite. Even in the austerity of winter, retracing this trail of youth brings fading memories into vivid light. Following my meditative ramble through deep wilderness, it’s almost a shock to find civilization when I roll into the village of Great Barrington. In my college days, the only place to stop here was Alice’s Restaurant, made Dan Stone, who grew famous by Arlo Guthrie’s folksy up in nearby Pittsfield, musical monologue of the same looking out from name. Alice and her restaurant are the Devil’s Pulpit on long gone, so I pull over at the Home Monument Mountain Sweet Home Doughnut Shoppe. The which overlooks the countryside of neighname is ye olde hokey, but at least boring states Vermont it fits the place, which occupies the and New York. General ground floor of a two-story frame store in Stockbridge. house, white clapboard with red People gathered for an antique auto show on shutters. The coffee is fragrant and the main street (Rt. 7) strong; the classic glazed doughnut in Great Barrington. about perfect. Three kinds of apple I pay my bill and chat with the cider donuts at Home pop of this mom-and-pop business. Sweet Home Doughnut Shoppe. A Connecticut native, John Scalia moved here three years earlier with
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his wife, Debbie, after their children flew the nest. “Business is booming around Northampton, but it feels too urban,” he explains. “We liked the vibe in Great Barrington, so we opened shop here.” The Scalias’ doughnut shop may be new, but it’s typical of the Berkshires that I remember. You see few national chains and franchises; here most businesses have names like Three Brothers Pizza, Tom’s Muffler Shop, the Mountainview Motel. I’M ON THE ROAD AGAIN, recharged by sugar and the primeval chords of “My Generation” on the Who mix I downloaded for the drive. I’m making some progress in my attempt to feel like a kid. I slide around a curve in the road and come abreast of the regional middle school. I know just where I am, and pull off the road to admire the Devil’s Pulpit. My mind slips back to the day after graduation: barreling down Route 7 to meet some friends at Simon’s Rock, the experimental “early college” where first-year students enroll at 16. Nathan, Mimi, and I planned to picnic on the Devil’s Pulpit, a rock pillar that looms over the Monument Mountain nature preserve on the northern outskirts of Great Barrington. When we got to the park entrance, gray clouds lowered ominously. I pointed to the sky, saying, “Looks like rain.” “No problem,” Nathan replied sunnily. Nothing was ever a problem for Nathan. “We can always find a cave or crag to sit under.” We chose the steeper path, where the trail follows a cut in the rock, thickly wooded with evergreens and a few stands of oak and maple in full leaf, a brighter green. The forest shaded a tapestry of wildflowers, accented by flashy pink lady’s slippers. At the first big turn in the trail is Inscription Rock, a flat boulder with an elegantly carved epigraph claiming the mountain for “the people of Berkshire as a place of free enjoyment for all time,” dated October 19 A.D. 1899. The rough-hewn granite steps of the trail wind just below Squaw Peak, the highest point, to the Devil’s Pulpit, a dizzying column with a view almost to Vermont, nearly 40 miles away. The prospect takes in a few church steeples and smokestacks
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along the curling ribbon of Route 7, but mostly what we saw was to revisit may not still be there, but when I get to Pittsfield I have an undulating sea of forest. Just as Mimi opened the picnic basthe opposite experience. One memory triggers another: driving ket, a light rain began to fall. No problem: As Nathan foresaw, here one crisp fall day in search of Melville’s house, where he an overhang nearby proved just wide enough for a cozy picnic. wrote Moby Dick. I found 780 Holmes Road easily enough, but As I gaze up at the Devil’s Pulpit from the roadside, a lecture it was a private home, a white Cape Cod cottage with a bronze from one of my English courses at Williams struggles up to the eagle over the door, like a thousand houses in the Berkshires. surface: When Nathaniel Hawthorne was living in Lenox and A severely disinviting sign in the driveway warned: PRIVATE. Herman Melville in Pittsfield, the two men met for the first time on a climb up Monument Mountain with some friends. Caught in a thunderstorm, they sat together for IN STOCKBRIDGE hours under a rock—perhaps the very place I picnicked with Mimi and Nathan. The two writers brainstormed MAY SEEM FAMILIAR. IN 1967 NORMAN for hours, the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Some ROCKWELL COMPLETED A PANORMAIC scholars believe that this encounter was when Melville came up with the idea for his novel about a man’s PORTRAIT OF THE WEST SIDE OF THE demented quest of a great white whale, Moby Dick, the STREET AT CHRISTMASTIME. first and still a leading contender for the title of the Great American Novel. He dedicated the book to Hawthorne. Four decades later, judging by what I’ve seen on the ground, the view from the Devil’s Pulpit looks much the same. Now Arrowhead, Melville’s home, is open to the public as a There’s a good reason why Berkshire County has kept its wilmuseum, and I’ve been eager to make a return pilgrimage. I disderness: Local law protects fully one-third of the land from cover the house has been painted mustard yellow, the original development. color, and filled with sturdy wood furniture that was here when Melville owned the place. A mammoth chimney, velvety black EVEN IF IT’S YOUR FIRST VISIT, Main Street in Stockbridge with centuries of soot, dominates the ground floor. Melville may seem familiar. In 1967 Norman Rockwell completed a panwrote a story about this chimney. The volunteer tour guide, a oramic portrait of the west side of the street at Christmastime. local woman who obviously loves the place, tells us that after The eight-foot-long oil painting hangs on permanent display at Melville moved out, his brother Allan carved a few lines from the Norman Rockwell Museum, just off Route 7, and showcases the story in the chimney. Tracing the opening lines in the blackthe town’s iconic collection of intact vintage architecture—the ened stone, she reads them aloud, “I and my chimney are setredbrick Town Hall with its Dutch stepped roof, the neoclastling together.” She grins. “Isn’t that neat?” sical bank, and the baronial Red Lion Inn, fronted by porches Upstairs, through the window of his study, we take in lined with tall rocking chairs. the postcard view of Mount Greylock, the highest point in I stop for lunch at the Red Lion. I’m not surprised to see the Massachusetts, covered in snow. The guide says that this view menu hasn’t changed in decades, and the long dining room, inspired the idea of the great white whale. I consider mentionembellished with lace curtains and cupboards full of fanciful ing the alternative creation myth, that the novel’s genesis was antique teapots, looks as if it hasn’t changed in a century. I order his literary summit with Hawthorne at the Devil’s Pulpit, but the famous native turkey dinner with all the trimmings. Served decide against it. I don’t want to offend the guide. on Blue Willow china, the thick slices of turkey are moist, the By the time I hit Williamstown I’m deep into the strangely nutty dressing delicious, all smothered in a comforting blanbeautiful fable of Tommy. As “Pinball Wizard” booms, the wide, ket of gravy. white lawn of my alma mater sweeps before me. The federal Tanglewood, just down the road, is closed for winter, but I wedding cake of the president’s house tops the hill in the midmake a quick detour to have a look. I park on the road and hike distance; beyond it loom the gray Gothic spires of the college across the parking lot, deep in snow. The lawn slumbers under chapel. I won’t say that I feel 18 again, exactly, but cruising in a flawless mantle of snow, gleaming on Route 7 sure feels like a homecoming. bluish in the shade. Slanting afterA few days later, wandering the galleries of the small, excelPeople visiting the noon sunbeams light up a row of lent Clark Art Institute, I pause in front of one of my favorite Norman Rockwell icicles running along the eaves of pictures, Winslow Homer’s oil painting of two mountain guides. Museum and studio, looking at the entrance gate, like a blindingly Immersed in fall foliage, one man is grizzled, the other freshRockwell’s depiction bright pipe organ. Next summer’s faced—a dichotomy not lost on me as I contemplate my own of Stockbridge at program is posted: Tanglewood coming-of-age in this place, still stuck in time in so many ways. Christmastime. Scenes long ago banished hard rock in I can almost feel the wind on my face: It could have been an from Tanglewood, sumfavor of folk and country. As I pull open window on the Berkshires. mer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, back onto Route 7, I defiantly test during a performance the limits of my car speakers with JA M I E JA M E S tx_bio goes here facepudam as tx_bio ital of music by Prokofiev, my Who mix. nobisciist hil tx_bio voluptae T X _B I O N A M E nostotatur, ipid Stravinksy and The risk in taking a sentimental et ut inctatis nis aut fuga. Et molorepre nim sitas que nonseBeethoven conducted by Andris Poga. journey is that the places you want quia es et que qui ut
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