Call of the wild

First published in Berkshire Magazine, August 2012.

By Felix Carroll

Atop the Mohawk Trail, a.k.a. Route 2, on the northernmost latitude of Berkshire County—the top shelf where we hold for safekeeping such lovely curiosities as the town of Florida—we first lay eyes on this county we now call home.

In the approach into North Adams, before the famously harrowing hairpin turn, there’s an observation deck with one of those coin-operated steel binoculars set on a pole. You know what I mean: the ones with the heart-shaped faces and beady eyepieces that, combined, render something resembling a stick-figure Martian. And, indeed, we pull the car over, drop a quarter into the slot and marvel at a landscape hitherto alien to us. Below, buttressing North Adam’s downtown—its famed church steeples that perch slightly tilted like top hats of men of high standing—glorious green hillocks nudge against the ankles of mighty Mount Greylock.

This was 12 years ago. My wife, dog and I were weekend escapees from the maddening gridlock and summertime maw of outer Cape Cod, where we lived. Somehow—improbably, shamefully, stupidly—we had never heaved ourselves up and over the Hoosac Range and into Massachusetts’ western wonderland.

Our quarter allotment expended, the binoculars go blank and we motor down the mountain till we’re doing what weekend visitors do in North County: We crane our necks to get a glimpse at the broad-shouldered summit of Mount Greylock. From gridlock to Greylock, we’ve come a crooked mile to hear the call of the wild.

On the spur of the Moment, we find ourselves in the sports aisle of K-Mart in North Adams buying a hundred bucks worth of Coleman camping equipment —a two-person tent, a coffee percolator, a flashlight, sleeping bags, all that stuff. With groceries loaded and a campsite secured, by late afternoon we downshift the car and claw-hammer our way up the steep road to Massachusetts’ tallest peak. Now 3,491 feet up at the summit, we park, get out, and adjust our eyes to spectacular, five-state views that seem at that moment to negate the need for the Colorado Rockies.

We know we’re in a boreal forest, because the sign says so. We know what “boreal” means now, because the sign explains it. Since we hail from sea level, against which mountains are measured, this environment is new to us. We don’t know the names of the flora and fauna or that northbound bird that just went past that sounds like a squeaky toy.  We don’t know the names of all those bogs and uplifts and lakes and meadows below that, together, stretch out into the distance like a dog on its back begging for a belly rub. All we know is that we want these things in our lives. It seems important.

That evening, even though we forgot the bottle opener, even though it poured, even though our cheap tent leaked and we slept in a puddle, even though the dog himself seemed disappointed with me, we survived to climb out of the tent in the morning, make coffee over a rekindled fire, hike out to the summit again and say something to the extent of: “It’s really specular, isn’t it? Imagine living here.” Three months later, we became residents of Berkshire County.

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The famous transcendentalist, Berkshire visitor and backwoods slacker Henry David Thoreau famously wrote: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” 

I respectfully suggest that’s a lot of pressure to put upon oneself. We who sometimes feel like office slaves in a Dilbert comic strip—our soul waning, its reflected light blocked by the orb of an oppressive mortgage payment—already know the essential facts of life: You’ve got to scramble your way through it, laugh as much as possible and keep in mind the big picture. For me, the big picture includes that stunning view from Mount Greylock that morning, which serves not as a call for philosophical introspection but rather a reminder that we’re duty-bound to disembark whenever possible from the forward-heaving herd to chill the heck out.

If I were to choose an archetype for summertime in Berkshire County, it wouldn’t be Thoreau. Rather, it’d be any one of Norman Rockwell’s colorful clutch of soaking-wet ragamuffins, unshackled and on the move from the duller pursuits of adulthood. So when the mass migration begins from the lower lands, when the canoe-topped cars arrive in a conga line each June we can take it as our cue. Get barefoot. Seek lakes. Sit beside them. Swim within them. Paddle upon them. Steal time amidst the workday world to pretend you’re a tourist. Take a hike. Learn what that weird looking fern is called.

Here, the good life has got us surrounded.

With founding-fathers-like foresight and the ultimate gesture of their love for the land, disparate individuals and agencies—preservationists, politicians, sportsmen, private landowners, and environmentalists over a span of nearly two centuries—have seen to it that a significant portion of Berkshire County be protected for posterity. If you could snap a chalk line from any point along Berkshire County’s southern border with Connecticut and northern border with Vermont, from A to B—from, say, the verdant bottomlands of Sheffield to the hardpan of Clarksburg—you could not help but to bisect enough protected wilderness, campgrounds, trail systems, wildlife management areas, and public lakes that it would take years to fully explore. I do my time. We walk the line. Having a young son like we do serves as the great motivator. Relying on guidebooks, word of mouth and impulse, we become amphibious.

Amidst the near-deafening roar of Bash Bish Falls in Mount Washington, we’ve joined the tough boys with tattooed biceps, girls in bikini tops, parents with picnics, and babies with binkies to laze about like hippopotami in the falls’ natural pool—radiant green, rimmed by huge jagged rocks carved like arrowheads by the sandblasting sediment of thousands of years. (Swimming is prohibited there. But people swim there).

We’ve plunged into the woods at Pittsfield State Forest and poked sticks at herring-bone-shaped rock forged through 500 million years of tectonic grinding.  We’ve scratched our heads while beholding the forest’s famous Balanced Rock, a large, precariously perched chunk of limestone coughed up during an impressively executed geological Heimlich Maneuver.

My son perfected his first cannonball from off the dock at Prospect Lake Park in North Egremont—a favorite campground of ours due to its old-Berkshire, no-fuss, no-muss, sepia-toned-postcard vibe that allows you to forget what decade it is.

At Benedict’s Pond in Beartown State Forest, on the border of Monterey and Great Barrington, we met a day-tripper who changed my life. Really. Named Miguel, he had emigrated from somewhere in Central America. It was a Sunday. He had packed up his beat-up hatchback with his wife and three young children. They drove up from Poughkeepsie, N.Y. At the forest-backed, fern-furred pulchritude of Beartown, with their floats, food, baby things, a cooler, a battery-operated boombox set at low volume, and firewood all laid out beside a big blanket, Miguel unwittingly served as chief theorist and main adherent in how to spend a day off. It was getting to be dusk. As we were packing up, they were lighting a campfire and entering the next phase of their day trip. As I was feeling the stale, badgering breath of the workweek ahead, they were singing and jigging for yellow perch to flash-fry on a skillet with peanut oil. Lesson for me: Seize the day, you dummy. Secondary lesson: This isn’t Newport. It doesn’t take wads of money to enjoy yourself here in the Berkshires.

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Easily, Mount Greylock, Bash-Bish, Pittsfield State Forest, and Beartown State Forest, should be considered among of Berkshire County’s “Greatest Hits.” But we’ve discovered some B-side gems. Take Questing. What the heck is that? Well, it’s a 438-acres preserve in New Marlborough that, in addition to being a haven for wildflowers and butterflies, contains an abandoned colonial settlement known as Leffingwell. Or Wahconah Falls? Where is that? Dalton. It’s spectacular. And there’s Chester-Blandford State Forest just over the county line, where you’re reminded that the Berkshires is part of the ancient Appalachians after all. Indeed, walking its 2,308 acres, coming across place names like Mica Mine Road and Gold Mine Brook, you feel you could be in Kentucky or West Virginia. Bluegrass could have spawned in these parts. It has the integral ingredients: the chimney-topped town of Chester down below and Sanderson Brook Falls flowing at breakneck banjo speeds, and off in the distance, the Westfield River could be mistaken for moonshine dripping from the lip of Tekoa Mountain. Round and callused, these hills groan in a non-standard key.

But if it’s a major-C you’re wanting, enter the stave of furrowed hay fields at Gould Meadows in Stockbridge, where you’ll find a mannered ensemble at what’s known informally as “Tanglewood Beach” on the elegant Stockbridge Bowl, where Leonard Bernstein used to swim in his skivvies. The trailhead begins on Route 183 just south of Hawthorne Road. Then there’s another favorite of ours—the little-known hike up to Flag Rock, on the backside of the famed Monument Mountain. (There’s a marked trailhead on Route 183 in Housatonic, just a quarter mile north of Taft Farm.) It’s there where we keep tabs on an American Bald Eagle. It nests down past the bruised brick and abandoned mills of Housatonic. This magnificent, white-hooded bird of prey with his beak clinched like a bent nail and his piercing eyes rides the thermals to eye level with Flag Rock and veers like some giant, radio-controlled airplane, stiff-winged and a bit jerky on the turns. Another amenity of Flag Rock is that you can watch and listen as the pug-nosed, yellow and green diesel train of the Housatonic Railroad pass by twice a day, blaring through railroad crossings, wild-eyed and shrill like a T. Rex in chase. It’s a temperamental train. In its quieter moods, it thumps furtively like a feral cat on padded paws along the trails and canoe launches of the Housatonic Greenway—through Sheffield cornfields, Stockbridge orchard grass and Lenox Dale swampland. (Henry David Thoreau once criticized train whistles that interrupted his reverie at his hideaway at Walden Pond. He and I may never see eye to eye.)

On summer weekdays after work, we iron out frazzled nerves by making a dash to our closest water trough, Lake Garfield in Monterey, where we coax the sun to stay put, take a dip and maybe grill dinner with friends. As the motor boats strut back to shore, as the little waves lap up on the sand like the tongue of a dog licking a dinner plate, as the sun sets in a juddering transition behind the stand of white pine—its light going, going, then coming, coming, then going for good as if controlled by tiny hands backstage in a grammar school play—we tilt back in tilted chairs on a tilted beach on a tilted planet and engage in astrological rubbernecking. From Windsor down to Mill River, these hilltowns sport the darkest night skies in Massachusetts—and the best stargazing.

What’s that light up there?  Probably some sort of offspring of Comet Whatever-the-Heck, a careening, super powerhouse of a super, giant, brilliant, white-hot star. It’s all a far bigger picture to ascertain than the big picture that got me giddy up on Mount Greylock 12 years ago. I’ve still got a lifetime of wild spaces in Berkshire County to explore.

The stars will have to wait.