10-July-99 Mass MoCA
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We finally took a weekend overnight trip! Between weddings, stamp convention, and being ill, we haven't gone away in a long time. The long-awaited Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened a couple of weeks ago in North Adams, one town away from the Northwestern corner of the state. Charley went out right away and brought back an enthusiastic report. Arlene was all set this morning for me to call an 800 number of a motel chain and reserve a room, but I looked first for the town of Savoy (which was a mistake) and then Florida MA in the AAA tour book and found the phone number (413 - 662-2625) of the Whitcomb Summit Motel, which I've driven past a zillion times. They had a room for about $70, lots less than the Globe article about the MoCA had said we could expect to pay in Williamstown.
Just in case anyone wants to use this journal as a Michelin Guide to the Mohawk Trail, let me recommend the Charlemont Inn for a casual lunch. The menu says “A place with character” and it's not an exaggeration. They have their own line of root beer and cream soda, good hamburgers, and really crisp french fries, and the old ski area signs and license plates on the walls look as though they belong there, not as though they were snapped up at flea markets to produce that effect. I mean, when the mirror behind the bar says, “It's a jeep thing, you wouldn't understand,” you have to figure they feel that way, it's not what their decorator recommended. And when you look out the back window and see a 20-year-old stakebed truck in the parking lot, "Robichaud Lumber and Forestry" on its rusting door, homebuilt wooden sides with ten coats of barn-red paint, you know you're not in the big city.
The MoCA is in an immense old mill complex that once housed textile companies and more recently Sprague Electric, a leading manufacturer of capacitors (not capaciTAtors, much as I like that pronunciation). Yes, immense. One gallery has forty foot ceilings and had paintings the size of two of the screens in the BIG auditorium at your local cineplex. The paintings, "Swimmer in the Econo-mist", featured swirls of color twenty feet in diameter that pulled you inso strongly that I found myself swaying on sea legs trying to maintain my balance. Another gallery was over 100 yards long and had a big work by Rauschenberg. Others had projection video works, neon light sculptures, a motorcycle mounted high overhead on the wall with puffs of neon lights (well, not really neon, real neon is red and this was blue but you know what I mean) in fibonacci numbers for exhaust fifty feet along the wall...
I think my favorite was two walls parallel to each other and about eighteen inches apart that you could walk between sideways. The walls were probably plain white, but were lighted from above in bright lime green. All you could see as you worked your way between them was a bright green surface much closer to your eyes than you're accustomed to seeing anything. That was strange enough; but when you got out all you could see for the next minute was red afterimage.
We headed west from North Adams, through Williamstown, where I went to college, and north on US 7. We turned off and drove through the Pownal valley (don't expect a description here, just look at a picture postcard from Vermont), to North Pownal (a road intersection and a church) and up the back road up the hill back to route 7. I remembered the turnoff to Old Bennington. We parked at the base of the Bennington battle monument. It's an obelisk on the general scale of the Washington monument, but of much rougher stone and kind of overall huskier looking, an unabashedly phallic structure that dominates the view for miles around. I guess you can go up it in an elevator if you get there about 15 minutes earlier than we did. The revolutionary war battle it commemorates was really in New York, but Vermont was part of New York in colonial times, so it doesn't seem to matter.
I tried to find the back road from there towards Bennington College -- you might think I'd know, after the number of times I bicycled and hitched and drove that way from Williams -- but I missed a turn and we found ourselves over the border in New York state. We did get reoriented and found our way back over the covered bridge that's still there.
We parked in downtown Bennington and searched for a place to eat. To my surprise, Arlene picked out the Madison Brewing Company. Yes, a brewpub; but there's no smoking in restaurants in Vermont, and it's the smoke that Arlene doesn't like about bars. I had bangers and mash from the "Pub Grub" section of the menu and a glass of their Suckerpond Blonde beer. It was better than the name might indicate, but I wasn't tempted to bring a six pack home when I can get Pilsner Urquell.
The final of the women's world cup soccer was on the TV in the brewpub. We hadn't been thinking about it, but it was great to see it among an enthusiastic audience. Today will be remembered as a turning point in American sports, the day soccer and women's sports together becamse mainstream.
To my amazement, on the upright piano between me and the soccer-game-showing TV was something I had first seen in a picture in another journal yesterday, though I had heard of it in a song my dad used to sing forty years ago -- a growler, a bottle for taking beer home from a place that has it on tap.
This is getting too long, I'll skip the Elk monument that the Elks club put up in 1923 just down the road from the motel.
My biggest reason for wanting to stay at Whitcomb Summit was the sky. I was hoping that away from big cities and 2800 feet above sea level the air would be clear and the sky would be dark. I went out on the balcony around 9:30 to check. It wasn't really dark yet. There was a red beacon way off on the horizon. When I looked again there was a tiny geodesic dome of white lights near it. How had I missed it the first time? As I watched it sank below the line of distant hills, only to be replaced by a tiny sphere of red lights. D'oh! It was less than a week after the fourth of July. I was seeing fireworks thirty or fifty miles away. I went back in to get Arlene and our binoculars. We sat on the porch and enjoyed the distant show. Some of the fireworks, particularly fancy ones that had an equator of one color sparks and streams of another color out the poles, looked better from a distance than similar ones had from nearby in Newton. All the bursts were beautifully spherical in a way you can't appreciate when they fill the sky near you.
A little later I was enjoying the darkest sky and the most stars I've seen in years. On the summit there was a wider expanse of sky and a lower horizon than we almost ever see in New England. Almost all of Scorpio was visible as was the teapot of Sagittarius. Even the milky way, which I've seen less than a dozen times ever, was visible. I went back to the room to tell Arlene the stars were worth checking out. On the way out she spotted something just as exciting -- a luna moth fluttering around the lights on the porch. Most of the few luna moths she's ever seen had damaged wings, but this one was in perfect shape, five or six inches long with those question-mark curls at the end of the wings, the exact pale green it's supposed to be. We saw it later outside fluttering around some flowers, doing the pollination thing that moths are supposed to do.
So, fans, am I going to check the date of the Perseid meteor shower and make a reservation back at Whitcomb summit? Is it worth a three hour drive just for a beautiful view? Probably not, but don't be surprised.
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