Western Massachusetts to Hudson, New York
The plan was a list. Not a four-page script, just a running order of places mapped against where I was and sorted into something that made geographic sense. Williamstown first, then up to Mount Greylock, back down through Stockbridge for the Norman Rockwell Museum, and then on to Hudson, New York for the night. State twenty-four by the time the day was done.
I got a humongous sandwich in Williamstown. Frank would be proud.
Williamstown
Williams College was founded here in the late 1700s and the town essentially grew around it, which is a particular kind of place. The streets are clean and the buildings are intact and everything works, which is a marked contrast to North Adams the day before. Where North Adams had been waiting for the museum to open, Williamstown seemed like it had no particular waiting to do. The college is the engine. The town runs.
I parked and walked Spring Street, which is one of those compact commercial blocks that small college towns do well when they’re doing well. Spring Street Market and Cafe. A few shops, fully occupied, a population that seemed to have places to be. I almost kept driving. The sandwich argument won.
What is my rush, I asked, to nobody in particular. Quite right.
Mount Greylock
The hyperlapse from the windshield on the way up Mount Greylock shows something I want to point out: the gradual color change as you gain altitude. At the base, still a lot of green with color starting to mix in. Halfway up, yellows beginning to dominate. Near the summit, the oranges and browns, and then bare branches at the top where the season had already finished its work. The mountain doesn’t do fall color all at once. It does it in layers.
The summit is the highest point in Massachusetts, and it has a Veterans War Memorial tower that rises out of the peak — a lighthouse-style structure built in the 1930s, designed by the Civilian Conservation Corps as part of a broader landscape project. The views stretch into Connecticut, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire on a clear day. The day was not entirely clear, but the clouds that were sitting in the valleys below the summit had their own quality that I’d take over a blue sky any time. Standing on a mountain above the cloud layer while fall color burns through the gaps is its own category of light.
I sat at the Fitch Overlook for a while, ran some time lapses, had a few brief conversations with people who stopped at the same pulloff. These are the unhurried exchanges that only happen when everyone is already doing the same thing: standing somewhere beautiful and not particularly trying to get anywhere else.
Stockbridge
Stockbridge is the kind of New England village that makes you slightly suspicious of your own reaction to it, because it looks so completely like what a New England village is supposed to look like that you wonder if anyone designed it that way. Someone did once, sort of: Norman Rockwell lived and worked here for twenty-five years, and the paintings he made of Main Street look exactly like Main Street still looks.
I went into the country store. The building was constructed in 1820 and the woman behind the counter knew this the way people know things that are simply part of the air they breathe. I asked if the floors were original. Some of them, she said. I bought a couple of things and didn’t ask how much of the ceiling was original, which I probably should have.
I didn’t make it into the Norman Rockwell Museum. The Red Lion Inn was across the street looking exactly as it should look. I needed to get to Hudson.
Hudson, New York
I arrived in Hudson after dark, checked into the Wick Hotel, and took a walk down the main street before settling on dinner. Hudson felt like a town in the middle of becoming something — construction visible on a few blocks, the bones of an old city that had been through various cycles and was currently in what I’d call a state of rebirth after about an hour and a half of observation. Warren Street had the kinds of shops that show up when a town is starting to attract a certain kind of attention: antiques, restaurants, a few galleries. The Amtrak station was right there, connecting Hudson to New York City, which explains quite a bit about what’s happening here economically.
Dinner was at a place called The Farmer and the Chef or something close to that — half a dozen oysters, a steak medium rare with small marble potatoes and sweet onions I’d never encountered before. Good light sauce. The guy at the restaurant was taking the Amtrak back to the city and didn’t know whether it went to Penn Station or Grand Central. I found that oddly endearing.
I’m going to find out what the Wick Hotel used to be. It has that quality of a building that was clearly something else before, something industrial or institutional, and has been made into something current without erasing what it was. I like that in a building.
Catskills tomorrow, maybe. Or another morning here first. I haven’t decided.
