11-July-99 Potholes
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We headed back towards North Adams after the continental breakfast that came with our room. In all the time I've spend around that area, I had never checked out the natural bridge just north of town.
Natural Bridge State Park is only about half a mile up route 8 from where it leaves route 2. As soon as you leave the main road you're on a dinky dirt road that might or might not be wide enough for a car to pass you coming the other way. The road comes up to a little meadow surrounded on three sides by sheer walls of rock thirty feet high, and continues up beyond that to a parking lot. We paid $2 to park and started walking the way the signs were pointing, and found ourselves next to a little mill pond with a dam made of white marble -- the only white marble dam in North America.
Why, you wonder, would anyone build a dam of marble? Well, silly, right here it was cheap. This was where the marble came from. That meadow down below was a marble quarry, the top edge is just across the path from the mill pond, and the dam provided power to saw the rock. The stream below the dam had cut a chasm through the rock, not much more than ten feet wide but fifty or sixty feet deep in places, with smooth swirling potholes and curves.
At some point the rock is still there on top of the chasm, and that's the natural bridge. There are paths all around the top, fenced off so you won't fall in the chasm, and stairs going down to the bottom of the quarry. One sign called your attention to a glacial erratic, a granite boulder the size of a desk sitting on top of all the marble. Natural Bridge is a marvelous little site, surely one of the best values for $2 in the state.
Back in downtown North Adams we looked in at Western Gateway Heritage State Park. It's several restored buildings in the old railroad yard, one of which has a large museum showing the history of North Adams. As we walked in a bell on the door started swinging and kept ringing for about a minute. A minute later a clock on the wall struck noon with a recording of a train going past. “Yes,” said the attendant, “we have several things in here that make obnoxious noises.” We were the only people in the museum while we were there. The most interesting exhibit was about the construction of the Hoosac Tunnel, a 25000 foot long railroad tunnel that was one of the longest tunnels built up to that time -- about 1873. It was blasted out with nitroglycerine, because that was before dynamite was developed. There was a lot to read about the engineering problems of lining up the tunnel so that excavations from opposite ends would meet properly (they did, to within a few inches) and so the pitch of the tunnel would allow proper drainage. Because of ground water, it was raining inside the tunnel most of the time people were excavating! Oh, and you know those dynamite detonator things you see in cartoons, like a milk crate with a T-shaped handle on top that someone pushes down? There was one of them on display!
Outside in the rail yard was a caboose you could look into. I walked up onto the platforms at the ends, but the doors were locked. bummer. At least you could look in and see what a caboose looks like on the inside.
OK, you gardeners and other flower lovers, when you drive the Mohawk Trail, keep your eye out for signs to Shelburne Falls and the Bridge of Flowers. A former trolley bridge over the Miller's River between Buckland and Shelburne Falls has been planted up as a garden, with enough space in the middle to walk along. There are lots of signs by plants to find out what's what, so it's like a little linear botanical garden. Daylilies were out in profusion, and other lilies aplenty. Basically anything that grows in this part of the world was probably there. We parked near the Buckland end, walked across, and wandered through Shelburne Falls. We peeked in at the North River Glass Company, where you can see someone doing serious glass blowing (with a big honking long blowpipe, a furnace glowing yellow hot, and a big blob of hot glass, not just lampworking with a little torch -- though that's interesting to watch too) . Then we walked over to the falls that the town is named for, where there are big glacial potholes in the rocks going down the cascades. You can walk down some steps and pick your way down to the rocks below the falls, and lots of people were sunbathing and picknicking on them, and some were even swimming in the river down at the end of the cascade.
We got sandwiches and pastry at a food store where we had parked and drove on to Barton's Cove, on the east side of Greenfield. It's a cove in the Connecticut River, and there were a couple of picnic tables at a boat rental place. They didn't mind our stopping to eat lunch there, and we enjoyed watching the canoeists in the cove. If we hadn't been expecting company at home this evening we would have liked to take a kayak out for an hour or so; maybe on another trip.
Sure enough, we were home in plenty of time to make dinner for Jerry and Marion. Jerry and his sons had run Bay to Breakers, so we heard a little about that, and then about their plans for Switzerland this summer. I grilled some chicken marinated in lime juice and cilantro, and didn't overcook it, and (natch) eggplant. They brought cookies and a quart of homemade mango sorbet. Between the company and the food it was worth passing up the kayak ride for.
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