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Campfire Songs
The beauty of the R.V. lifestyle is that it can be virtually anything you want it to be. For some people that means gathering around campfires and roasting marshmallows. But it doesn’t have to be. After three months of fulltime RVing, Shannon and I haven’t lit a single fire. We really have no desire to. Maybe that is because we don’t view our campgrounds as destinations but rather as basic places to stay. They’re like hotel accommodations for our house. The real draw for us is always activities available outside the campground.
This past Friday night, we took advantage of our proximity to Tanglewood, in Lenox, MA, and saw the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform Mozart’s Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio). Now those are what we call campfire songs.
Tanglewood Tip: In the event of rain, there are a surprisingly large number of bench-spaces under the pavilion that are available for “lawn ticket” holders. Arrive early and grab a spot to save the extra cash charged for an indoor seat. Tanglewood’s “Shed” isn’t that large so there is no advantage to buying the premium priced seats.
Norman Rockwell’s America
The Problem's We All Share, Norman Rockwell
“Perhaps there never was a country like the one on the cover of the Post, that I was stubbornly painting the best vision of us.”
– Norman Rockwell
When you imagine Norman Rockwell’s America you don’t usually think of it as a segregated one, but it was. And when you remember Norman Rockwell, you don’t typically recall an influential civil rights artist, but he was. Or so I discovered at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.
While the rather small museum displays only a tiny fraction of Rockwell’s reported 4,000 works, many of which were lost to fire, it contains some of his most famous. Within its walls, visitors will find the hopeful and entertaining paintings like Runaway, Going and Coming, and Freedom From Want, that are most associated with Rockwell’s 47 year career as a Saturday Evening Post illustrator. But they’ll also find the more serious, and powerful work of Rockwell’s later life when, after leaving the Post, he turned to topics of civil rights and poverty. It was these images I found most intriguing and surprising. I’d always known that Norman Rockwell was a good illustrator. At the museum I discovered he was a good man as well.
Conquering Moby Dick
View from Stony Ledge
“All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
My, oh-my, Melville must have hated Mount Greylock to have written such vitriol.* For it is rumored that the snow-covered profile of this gently sloping mountain peak provided the inspiration for his leviathan, Moby Dick. From a distance, and with enough psychotropics, you can definitely imagine the mountain as the hump of a great whale breaching the surrounding granite waves. But our objective today wasn’t to view it from a distance, it was to summit Massachusetts’ tallest peak.
Mt. Greylock as seen from Herman Melville's house
That certainly sounds impressive, and it might have been, if only we had taken the nine or so hours needed to hike the entirety of it. But we were short on time and ambition today so we packed a lunch and drove to the 3,491 foot peak. From the summit you can see several mountain ranges (the Adirondacks, the Catskills and the Green Mountains) depending on which direction you look.
Stony Ledge Trail
While Greylock’s vista is admirable, the better view, in our opinion, is from the lower summit of Stony Ledge. Some 900 feet beneath its larger sister, Stony Ledge gives an excellent view of Greylock, as well as the undeveloped valley on its western slope. The hike to the ledge would have been fairly easy, but the wide trail just begged to be tackled via mountain bike, which proved to be harder than we expected. The entire trip is a hill, halfway up, and halfway down. Going down is loads of fun, but biking a mile or so straight up kicked the asses of a couple of fatties like us. Good thing we got back early enough for a nap.
(* This will wind Shannon up good, because Melville loved Mount Greylock. Heh, heh, heh, heh.)
Cool Mountain Air
Mr. Heatmiser
The nightly news keeps saying we’re still in the middle of a heat wave, but you wouldn’t know it from Lanesborough, MA. It’s 61 degrees here as I type and it isn’t supposed to get much above 80 all week. When the sun ducked behind clouds yesterday it actually felt a little chilly. Maybe it’s the higher elevation (1,130 ft) or because we’re in a valley between Mount Greylock to the north and Brodie Mountain to the south. I don’t know, but whatever the reason, it’s pretty great.
Everywhere Once 