Millie and Joel had a timeshare week at a resort in the Berkshires and invited us to come up for the weekend (or more precisely, Friday and Saturday nights at the end of their week). We left after my work Friday, leaving Newton around 6:30, and headed for the Mohawk Trail. I’m always willing to drive out the Mohawk Trial at the slightest excuse.
The resort was at Jiminy Peak, one town from where I went to college. The ski area there had opened while I was in college, I think, or at least was very new then. I went there once skiing; they had (and, it turns out, still have) a lovely beginners’ slope that went all the way from the top of the mountain to the base. Well, I thought I’d be able to find the way to the place without checking a map. As it turned out, I had to admit, about 12 miles south of Williamstown, that I didn’t know where it was. I stopped at a motel to ask for directions. The turn for Jiminy Peak was another mile and a quarter down the road, so I wasn’t really badly lost.
Saturday we started out going (in Joel’s little red Toyota Celica convertible, with the top down!) to an open studio day in Pittsfield. Pittsfield has managed to keep its downtown alive, partly by turning old main street office space into artist studio space. It was a small-scale open studio thing. We might have only walked into twenty or so studios, but we had long talks with several of the artists, including a woman who does rubbings and prints of manhole covers, a fabric artist who does patchwork and applique paintings, and a man who does three-dimensional sculpture in paper, corrugated cardboard, and wood. The manhole cover rubbing artist had a book with photos of manhole covers. I thought she must feel about it the way I did the first time I went to a juggling convention — that it’s really nice to run into people who are more involved than you are with something most people consider oddball. She can look and say, here I go making these rubbings, but this guy spends way more time hunting for things to photograph than I do on the rubbings. I’m well within the bounds of normal!
Two other stops in Pittsfield (not to mention a pretty good lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant) were an antique store, Wild Sage, that had one room marked “le petit musee” with art, and a closet off that room marked “le plue petit musee” with art postcards on display, and a felting – yarn – miscelleny store that had a big selection of Debbie Bliss yarn and lots and lots of Noro, among others. I resisted buying anything, but Arlene got a yard or two of monkscloth to do a punch needle rug on. The woman running that store asked me if I was meticulous in my knitting. I said no, that I was working on a mistake rib scarf, and I had noticed a real mistake in the ribbing, but that it was going to stay that way. After all, if it’s a mistake rib pattern it had better be able to tolerate a mistake or two.
From Pittsfield we went east on route 9 looking for Waconah Falls. It was a small state park with a big, well, small if you’ve seen Niagara or Yosemite, waterfall. Still, for a small waterfall it was pretty impressive, maybe about thirty feet high, with lots of water going over it after all the rain we’ve had lately, and very secluded. At one point the four of us were the only people there. The many colors of gray rocks and green foliage were lovely.
The road up to the top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts at 3491 feet above sea level, branched off our route back to the resort a little before our turnoff. Joel drove us up the mountain. Arlene and I climbed the 90 or so steps, mostly a narrow spiral steel staircase, to the top of the observation tower. Millie and Joel had been up it earlier in the week and stayed at the base. Although I spent four years in college in the next town over, I had never been to the top of Greylock before. It wasn’t a particularly clear day, but the view was still spectacular.