Month: November 2012

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A Guarded Craft

By Shoki Yashiro.

When I was about nine years old, my father had just moved back to Japan, and my mother began looking for ways to support our family. She worked odd jobs—sometimes as a secretary at a nutritional company called Ultimate Energy in Acton, Massachusetts, sometimes as an assistant manager at a Japanese bookstore in Cambridge, and every winter as a ski instructor at Nashoba Valley Ski Area. One day, however, she took a vacation, and fell in love.

It was Nantucket Island—the small, whale-shaped piece of land thirty miles off the coast of Massachusetts. To her, it was a high-end paradise—something she could aspire to in America.

Nantucket is a beautiful, pristine coastal island—the beaches are flat, and extend onward into the horizon as the land curves out around the Atlantic, covered in muted shades of dune grass. The roads are quaint and narrow, winding around the densely populated town, occasionally falling into spots where the cobblestones from generations past still cover the ground. The people here are wealthy—Nantucket has the highest median property value of any Massachusetts town—the people who have houses here are either extremely wealthy, or have had the house in their family for generations. Even the people who do have houses here rarely live here—the population in Nantucket increases from 10,000 people in the offseason to 50,000 people during the summer months.

But it wasn’t the wealth, beauty and class of Nantucket that brought my mother back time and time again—it was the baskets. Nantucket baskets are a high-end woven basket, intricately crafted with Polynesian reed, cane, wood and ivory. The craft is fiercely guarded by the locals of the island, who were at first quite unwelcoming of this middle-aged Japanese woman, begging to be taken as an apprentice under one of the premier basket weavers. They were afraid she would bring the craft outside of the island, and expose this hidden art form to the general public—to be fair, this is exactly what she did. In any case, after a few years of nagging, a very respected and accomplished basket maker named Alan Reed (no pun intended) agreed to teach her.

An old-style Native American woven wood basket with square-woven bottom.

The Nantucket basket has a long history, deeply rooted in the culture of the island. Its first influences lie in the “some 3000 natives of the Wampanoag tribe” that inhabited the island, known in their tongue as “faraway land” (Oldham). The natives wove utilitarian baskets out of ash splints and weavers with a square woven bottom for use in and around the home. In 1659, the island was purchased to be settled as and English colony by a few names you will see all over this island, even today—names like Coffin, and Macy, Swain, and Pike. The purchase document, preserved in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association, reads: “all right and interest that I have in the Island of Nantucket… for and in consideration of the sum of Thirty pounds … and also two bever hats one for myself and one for my wife” (Oldham).

Eventually, the Nantucketers discovered whaling—inspired by the natives, who rode out in canoes to kill small whales offshore, the predominantly Quaker settlers began to hunt “right” whales off the coasts—so called for the ease with which they were hunted, and the large amounts of fuel oil their blubber yielded. However, in 1715 a sperm whale was taken by a Nantucket sloop blown out in a gale, and a new era began. The sperm whale’s gigantic skull is filled with a goopy, sperm-like oil that burned in a clean, smokeless fire and with efficiency which was unheard of then. Nantucket became the premier whaling port of the world, along with New Bedford just down the coast, as they began sending large whaleships around the world, voyages lasting typically two to five years. Each whaleship was outfitted with everything it needed to hunt the enigmatic creature, as well as to “try out” the blubber, boiling it into a burnable fuel. In order to store the oil, each ship had to have a cooper—a barrel-maker.

An authentic 19th Century Lightship Basket, made by Captain Andrew Sandbury.

The whaling coopers, whose only task was to repair and make barrels onboard a four-year journey, were the first to make what is now called a Nantucket basket. With all the tools to craft wood, the coopers began to weave hybrid baskets incorporating elements of the Wampanoag baskets with a wood base from New Hampshire work baskets. As the whalers traveled across the world, they came upon a strong, beautiful cane reed in the South East, and particularly in the Phillipines. Using this cane as weavers, the Nantucket basket slowly emerged.

As the discovery of petroleum emerged in the late 19th Century, the whaling era of Nantucket ended, and the island settled down. However, in 1856, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts commissioned “lightships”—large, floating lighthouses to help guide ships through the dangerous South Shoals, and Davis’ Shoal. These approximately 10-man crews, like the whaling coopers, found themselves with plenty of time to kill. They began weaving “Nantucket lightship baskets”—refined versions of the baskets woven on the whalers. These baskets were widely used around the island, and became popular with visitors. The craft of basket-making became a cultural symbol of the island, and “was passed on from one man to another along with molds, tools and trade secrets” (“Nantucket Lightship”). Even as the lightships were decommissioned, the craft continued on the island.

Jose Reyes inserting a new weaver into his untapered cane staves. Courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association.

However, everything changed with the arrival of Jose Formoso Reyes, a Filipino man who came to Nantucket to settle after graduating Harvard and later fleeing the Philippines during World War II. Intrigued by the baskets all around him, Reyes quickly mastered the craft and modified it to his own taste. From the Nantucket Rafael Osona Auction House:

By 1948, [Reyes had] invented lids fashioned in the same manner as the baskets themselves: cane weavers fixed into a grooved wooden plate that had been bolted to a mold, with staves – or ribs – splayed out around it, as a framework for the weavers. A hardwood rim mirrored the rim on the basket; the lid affixed with cane-wrapped leather loops. […] Eventually, the addition of ivory whales, shells or gulls carved in relief and centered on the plate added interest – and status – to the various baskets. Quite suddenly, Reyes’ uniquely stylish Friendship Baskets were attracting the attention of Nantucket’s ladies and visitors alike. Wait lists for a José Reyes Friendship basket grew from months to years, as his practical invention evolved from becoming locally fashionable to a bona fide cottage industry. (Walsh)

The Nantucket Friendship Baskets became a symbol of status and elegance, and were used as everyday purses and handbags.

Reyes’ signature and etching of Nantucket island on the wood base of a Friendship Basket. Courtesy of Google Images.

Now, the Nantucket basket is a rare and valuable piece of history—it is perpetuated on the island by well-known basket-makers such as Nap Plank, Michael Kane, Judy Sayle, and Alan Reed—all names you will find on the website of the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum.

When Alan Reed, a “grumpy and sour old man”, as described by my mother, finally agreed to teach her, she was ecstatic. She began making multiple trips to the island from our home in Arlington, often for single days at a time, until Alan started letting her stay at his home. Even the other local shopkeepers and basket makers on the island began to warm up to her, welcoming her as a familiar face. Eventually, Etsuko became one of Alan’s best students, learning how to soak and soften the wood staves and rim pieces, how to tight-weave the reed and carve latch-pieces and hinges out of wood, and eventually ivory. Now, Etsuko Yashiro’s Nantucket baskets sit in the displays at the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum, and she is one of the better weavers in the world. By her own account, “there are a few that are still better than me. Alan, definitely. And Michael Kane, and Judy [Sayle].”

Meanwhile, as her other jobs began to fall apart (Ultimate Energy went bankrupt in the late 90s, and Sakura, the Japanese bookstore in the early 2000s), she began teaching basket-weaving in our basement to bored Japanese housewives in America. She did this steadily from 1996 to about 2002, when some disgruntled neighbors complained to the town about the number of cars that were parking near our house. Prohibited from running a business out of her home, Etsuko decided to take out a loan and open a studio. “I started GrayMist Nantucket Basket Studio in 2002, and we decided to open a gift store as well, to cover the rent. It’s in Cambridge, so the rent is very high,” she says, partly in English, though turning steadily into Japanese. The store is located in Huron Village, and focuses on selling Nantucket and New England gifts, as well as every material and supply needed to craft Nantucket baskets: tools, reed, cane, molds, bases, rims, lids, handles, knobs, wooden washers, straps, hardware—even ivory carvings, though, as Etsuko says, “we only buy and sell fossilized mammoth ivory and recycled antique ivory”.

However, GrayMist is only a fraction of the New England Nantucket Basket Association (NENBA), founded by Etsuko Yashiro after the studio opened. Many of the people who learned to make baskets from my mother in turn wanted to teach Nantucket basket-making. These people, almost exclusively Japanese housewives with plenty of free time, eventually spread out across America and Japan, teaching the guarded Nantucket craft under my mother’s contract. Now, there are more than two hundred people teaching under her, from as diverse locations as Washington State, to Okinawa, Japan, and even out to Lanciano, Italy.

Disney Sea Japan’s toy “Cape Cod Basket”
A double-handled oval purse with ivory latch, base, and carvings. Made by Etsuko A double-handled oval purse with ivory latch, base, and carvings. Made by Etsuko Yashiro, currently at the Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum. Notice the double handle—something you will see in no one else’s baskets. Courtesy of GrayMist Studios.

Two years ago, one of her students sent her a plastic toy Nantucket basket, made by Disney and sold packed with candy at the “Cape Cod” area of Disney Sea Japan—which would have seemed like a coincidence, if Disney had not used a distinctive double-handled basket style that my mother had invented years earlier.

And so, the craft of the Nantucket basket is not so well-guarded anymore—my mother saw to that. But still, there are some things that even Etsuko will never reveal. Alan Reed, a master in every facet now of his craft, has taught her things that no student will ever pry from her—how to carve an ivory latch, how to hide nails in the rim of the basket, et cetera. And perhaps that’s why the Nantucketers no longer cast conspiring glares at my mother, why they instead welcome her as one of their own—there’s an unspoken contract there. They allow her to learn, and to teach the craft, as long as she continues to guard the most important secrets of her trade, a trade deeply rooted in Nantucket’s culture.

Works Cited

“Nantucket Lightship Baskets; A Historic Perspective.”Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum. Nantucket Lightship Basket Museum, n.d. Web. 31 Oct 2012. <http://www.nantucketlightshipbasketmuseum.org/LightshipBaskets.html>.

Oldham, Elizabeth. “A Brief History of Nantucket.”Nantucket Historical Association. Nantucket Historical Association. Web. 1 Nov 2012. <http://www.nha.org/library/faq/briefhistory.html>.

Walsh, Carolyn. “Jose Formose Reyes (1902-1980).”Rafael Osona Auctions. Rafael Osona Auctions. Web. 4 Nov 2012.

Yashiro, Etsuko. Telephone Interview. 2 Nov 2012.

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The Shoah

By Noah Robbins.

My skin felt bare and cold as we huddled together in the dark corner of the grey- cemented death chambers. I held my best friend’s hands tighter than I held my father’s as a child while we prayed silently. I kept my eyes closed as tightly as I could, bracing for the burn of death to overcome the darkness. My teeth were rapidly chattering in fear as the tears began to flow uncontrollably from my clenched eyes. I waited with my eyes closed, tears flowing down my cold face, for the gas to come and to take away my breath. It never came. I finally opened my eyes as my friend nudged my shoulder. As so many before us never did, we walked hand in hand out of the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp, Majdanek.

I only made it a few steps out onto the grass on that cold Polish-winter day before collapsing to my knees and letting the tears become audible sobs. My heart felt like it was going to burst with the combination of anger and anguish. Majdanek was one of the six major death camps during the Holocaust and was responsible for the death of at least 80,000 innocent people. I had stood, breathed, and lived in the same place where so many of my ancestors had their final breathes stolen from them.

When I was finally able to collect myself I rose from my knees and looked around to my fellow classmates, all of who were mourning as I was. Majdanek marked the second of the three major death camps we were viewing on our five-day tour of Poland. The day before we had stood in the forest outside of a small Polish village called Tikochin. On a winter afternoon at the beginning of the Holocaust, not so different than the one on I endured during my visit, the whole Jewish population was wiped out in the matter of an afternoon by the Nazi’s mobile killing units, or in German, Einsatzgruppen. They were taken from there homes, marched into the woods where I stood a day before, lined up, and shot dead into a mass grave which they had been forced to dig for themselves. A survivor I met, in her last few years of life, told me she was saved by faking dead under the weight of her beloved brother and sister’s dead bodies while the Nazi’s murdered the rest of her community. I will never forget her wrinkled face and sad black eyes as she told me her story of loss and survival

As my group and I made our way through Majdanek the reality of what had occurred there was impossible to ignore.  My best friend, Isaac and I stood beside a small memorial pond and attempted to grasp what we had witnessed through philosophical conversation. Questions such as could there really be a God or what the hell are we doing with our lives were thrown around aimlessly as we both fought to hold back the pure sadness behind our eyes. I bent down to pick up a small ceramic looking rock to examine what it might be. To my utter horror and dismay my friend informed me that I was holding a piece of human bone.  With a gasp of astonishment I dropped the bone chip to the ground where I discovered there were many fragmented human remains just like it beneath my feet. After discussing it with Isaac we decided to collect a small bag of the bone fragments and bring them back to Israel with us where we would give these people a proper Jewish burial.

We traveled through Poland, a group of one hundred American students, viewing the many different death camps and mass graves where our ancestors unceremoniously lay. All of us were of the tender ages of fifteen and sixteen, barely experienced in life, let alone in death. After living in Israel for two months, the striking evil of what had occurred in Poland and the aura that lingered decades later was amply evident.  The bus rides from death camp to death camp were long, and quite, as most of the students would stare solemnly out the windows into the woods, wondering if they were unmarked graves.

The only bright moment of Poland surprisingly occurred at Auschwitz, the most infamous of the concentration camps. My group and I were up in the bell-tower, shown in Schindler’s List, discussing all the souls that had passed through the gate and never came out, when a brigade of Israeli soldiers arrived. It is tradition for Israel soldiers in training, which is every Israeli youth between 18-20, to visit Poland and the death camps, as to be reminded of what they are defending.  In the elegant form of a marching band, they marched in with Israeli flags raised high, accompanied by pounding drums, and triumphant blows of trumpets and trombones. I stood in the bell-tower watching hundreds of Jews proudly walk over the same tracks where they had once been shuttled in like cattle to their death. My face grew red with overwhelming pride as tears slowly streamed down my face to my open smile.

Before we left Majdanek we stood over a massive bowl that from afar looked like a domed football field on the outer limits of the death camp. When we finally made our way to it we discovered that it was a giant bowl, no less than a hundred feet deep, filled with human ash. The Nazi’s burned so many bodies in the adjacent ovens that they ran out of places to put the ash so they created this giant bowl to hold it all.  For weeks and months after the trip I would awake with cold sweats in the dead of night from nightmares. I would be jolted from my sleep as the horror of being stripped of my clothes and herded into gas chambers as everyone I knew suffocated around me. The cold sweat was probably from the final part of the dream, where I would stand hopelessly outside of my body, as it was burned into ash in the ovens.

*shoah: holocaust in hebrew

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Pluto, 1930-2006

By Carl Mead.

I learned when I was a kid that Pluto was a planet. This was a big thing for me. I loved space. I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to go to the planets. I wanted to know all about all the planets. I had a mobile above my bed that I had made–or maybe my brother had made it–with the planets in order, and Pluto was a small Styrofoam ball colored with a dark blue marker hanging on the outermost ring. In third grade, I made a Jeopardy!-style board game where players had to answer questions about the planets, and Pluto was the final spot with the hardest questions. There was the Magic School Bus episode I recorded on the VCR where Miss Frizzle took her students on a field trip to each of the planets, and Arnold, having been upset during the entire trip, reached Pluto at the end of his tether and took his helmet off, turning his head–and hair–to ice, just like in real space (Meehl and Stevenson).

None of those things is entirely important, and I realize that, but they are experiences that are all mine. And now, they’re not just unimportant; they’re meaningless. They’re archaic. On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomy Union announced its new definition of planets, which removed Pluto from consideration (Inman). And so, I and what I knew about space became wrong. If I were to dig out any one of those old things – the mobile, the board game, the VHS – and give them to my kid, however many years from now, my kid would look up at me and ask why it was wrong. Pluto’s not a planet.

Even so, Pluto’s not exactly irrelevant either. It hasn’t disappeared from our system or our culture. Pluto’s demotion initially stirred interest in astronomy, at least for a little while, as people wrestled with the announcement (Inman).

The tv show “Psych” capitalized on the demotion of Pluto with this running gag of a pick-up line (Franks).

Seeing this, or perhaps recognizing that there is something special about the work of Percival Lowell and Clyde W. Tombaugh even if it wasn’t quite what they’d hoped, the International Astronomical Union created a new category of space object, variously called dwarf planets, plutons, or plutoids. This has enhanced our understanding of just what’s out there, and as we identify more and more what’s in our reach, as we make smaller cell phones and smash bosons together, discoveries like that of Tombaugh will shed some light for us when we start again to search beyond what we can already see close-up.

In 1781, William Herschell discovered Uranus. In 1846, working from irregularities in figures relating to Uranus’s orbit, John C. Adams and Urbain Le Verrier independently and nearly simultaneously discovered Neptune. From 1906 to his death in 1916, Percival Lowell unsuccessfully searched for a ninth planet following irregularities in figures relating to Neptune’s orbit. After a prolonged legal battle following Lowell’s death, Clyde W. Tombaugh continued the search for a ninth planet. In 1930, Tombaugh confirmed his discovery of Pluto and confirmed it as the ninth planet in our solar system (Arnett).

Is Tombaugh’s discovery now as meaningless as my third grade board game? On the one hand, Tombaugh would probably fade to obscurity without Pluto as his other discoveries amount to the tracking of some 800 asteroids (Darling). On the other hand, that’s not really how the declassification of Pluto would work. It’s not as though, now that Pluto is considered a dwarf planet instead of a planet, Tombaugh didn’t see the object in the sky and track its movements. He saw something which we now better understand to be a far-flung piece of the Kuiper belt, similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter but much further from the sun. It was Tombaugh’s work–which was an extension of Lowell’s work, which in turn extended Le Verrier’s and Adams’s work in discovering Neptune, which was based on discoveries and figures led by Herschel in the discovery of Uranus–that led to the discovery of the Kuiper belt, but more than that, led to the investigation of the possibility of its existence. Before Tombaugh, there was no hint that anything of the magnitude of the Kuiper belt might be out there.

Also, despite being stripped of its status, Pluto maintains at least some level of unique cultural impact. For instance, there’s the cartoon dog, Pluto. Whether the Disney character is named for the planet cannot be known for certain, though it is supported by some of the people involved; Disney animators and Venetia Phair, who suggested naming the planet Pluto, give contrasting accounts (Wikipedia). In any manner, there is no denying the fact that Pluto the dog was named within two years of the naming of Pluto the planet, and without that, Pluto would have been a far less likely household name, especially considering the relative accessibility of the other “big five” of Disney: Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Daffy. They all end in the same diminutive sound. Pluto doesn’t sound the same at all. I would think, ordinarily, a name like Pluto would have something of a higher threshold to get over in terms of acceptability in contrast with names like Goofy and Mickey. However, drawing on alliteration, the writers at Disney drew out Playful Pluto and turned the Roman name of the god of the underworld into something for children to latch onto. The name adds something unique in that way; without Tombaugh’s discovery, Pluto would likely have defaulted to a more normal name like Fido and may have become something of a one-off. But with the name of the planet to either inspire it or at least play off of, Pluto the pup was able to become one of the Disney mainstays such that I know who he is even if I know almost nothing else about him. He’s the one that doesn’t talk, right? Whether Pluto’s a planet or not, that dog is here to stay.

On the other hand, with the demotion of Pluto, Gutav Holst’s musical suite The Planets returns–rightfully, I’d say–from eight movements to seven movements. From 1914 to 1916, Holst wrote this suite with each movement reflecting and developing the personalities of each planet drawing primarily from their characterizations in western astrology (Oxford “Holst”). As such, the movement titled “Jupiter” was not about a big red spot or a whole lot of moons, nor was it about being the lord of the gods in ancient Roman religion; instead, “Jupiter” bears the subtitle “The Bringer of Jollity” as fits its astrological characteristics. In 1930, following the discovery of Pluto, people implored Holst to write a new movement for the new planet.

Pluto’s astrological sign (Wikipedia).

Let’s ignore for a second the fact that Pluto, immediately following its discovery, likely did not have an astrological personality associated with it, and let’s also ignore the fact that adding an eighth movement would have necessitated a change in the ending of “Neptune, the Mystic,” which was one of the earliest fade-out endings in music. And then there’s the whole thing where it had been a decade and a half since he’d written the original piece, as well as the fact that his health was deteriorating to the point where he would die four years later. Ignoring all that, Holst had come to dislike the suite, seeing that it had overshadowed what he considered to be his stronger works and refused to write the new movement (Oxford).

When I first heard the piece, I wondered why there wasn’t an eighth movement myself. I was sure that over the years there were many attempts to tack one on. I didn’t know it then, but by the time I became familiar with the piece, someone had indeed written one. In 2000, Colin Matthews was commissioned to change the ending of “Neptune” write a new movement, “Pluto, the Renewer.” But it did feel tacked on, to me anyway, whether because it really wasn’t as good or because I like the original seven too much. With the new definition of planets in 2006, there was no longer any perceived need to add an eighth movement, and the Matthews could be shelved away or relegated to YouTube. And it was really all a shame because for seventy years, there were idiots like me who were saying this piece was incomplete because the number of planets had changed. But that wasn’t it at all; the planets, whether there are eight now, nine ten years ago, or six four hundred years back, are the same. They are there, wherever they are, moving around, and what we think of them has nothing to do with them. Holst’s composition wasn’t incomplete. It was complete at that point. Even that board game I made in third grade isn’t now wrong. It’s just that it now used to be right.

Works Cited

“File:Pluto’s astrological sign.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 20 Oct. 2006. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

“From the Earth to the Starbucks.” Writ. Steve Franks. Psych. USA. 26 Jan. 2007.

“Gets Lost in Space.” Writ. Brian Meehl and Jocelyn Stevenson. The Magic School Bus. PBS. 10 Sept. 1994.

“Holst, Gustav.” Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

“Matthews, Colin.” Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

“Pluto (Disney).” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

Arnett, Bill. “Pluto,” “Neptune,” “Uranus,” and “Chronology of Solar System Discovery.” Nine Planets: A multimedia tour of one sun, eight planets, and more. Ed. Bill Arnett. N.p., 2 June 2007. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

Darling, David. “Tombaugh, Clyde W.” Encyclopedia of Science. Ed. David Darling. N.p., 4 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

Inman, Mason. “Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule.” National Geographic Online. National Geographic, 24 Aug. 2006. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

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Not So Peaceful After All

By Annette Gildshtein.

New England is known for rich historic towns, victory of expelling the British, and subsequently fueling the economy with thriving ports. One town in particular is uniquely notorious for its paranormal past and many historical landmarks that have been restored over the years. The present day Danvers, Massachusetts, was once Salem Village, homestead for the witch trials of 1692. Salem, Massachuestts still continues to attract tourists with its mystical colonial architecture and galore of nick-knack witch shops.

The town was founded in 1626 by Roger Contant and named after the nearby Naumkaeg River. Two years later John Endecott and the Massachusetts Bay Colony renamed it Salem, derived from the word salaam in Arabic and Hebrew shalom – meaning peace. Ironically, during the witchcraft era, having not lasted even a year, nineteen men and women were put to death because of alleged witchery accusations. The mass hysteria took over this newly founded town as quickly as it went away.

January of 1692, eight young girls contracted a strange illness. The symptoms included: seizures, fever, hallucinations, and painful skin. This was so odd that doctors saw no medical treatment possible and diagnosed it as bewitchment. The first few who reported sickness was the pastor’s daughter Betty Paris and his niece Abigail Williams. Since the community was closely knit, kids often played together around the neighborhood, it was no surprise that soon their good friend Ann Putnam also got infected.  A main suspect was their Indian slave Tituba, only because she had been telling tales of voodoo from her South American heritage. To see if this disease was contagious she made a cake with Bettys infected urine and fed it to the dog. Her actions only further hurt her case. Not only are animals associated with witches considered “accomplices”, but their dog started acting crazy too. Infuriated, Samuel Parris (Bettys father/her owner), continued to beat the slave until she cried a confession. During her admission, she named Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, claiming they were apart of the witch community too. This was the first confession of the gruesome trials. She was then thrown into jail. Luckily, after thirteen months of being isolated and sitting in a cold, dark cell, an unknown person paid the seven pounds bail – releasing her into their possession.  Throughout the trials, hundreds of innocent people were accused and imprisoned. The many who did confess to their allegations of devilish work, only did so because of torture or other forms of coercion such as various ways of being put to death. When the non-guilty admitted to their claims, they would repent and be released back into society. Since news travels fast, sometimes they were reluctant to return under the publics eye and being labeled as a witch.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SALEM.HTM

Someone accused of witchcraft was essentially accused of working with the devil and such crimes were against their government. If caught and convicted, the punishment would result in death. Majority of these citizens would confess their faults in order to be released. Eventually over the years, witches were seen in a different light. Witches claim to be the exact opposite – focusing on the good and positive. They are prideful in their spirituality, believing in human rights and have a great appreciation for nature. Most on the contrary do not have any connection with the devil and don’t succumb to black magic.

http://www.salemweb.com/tales/images/corwinhse.jpg

One of the only structures still standing today, and tied with the trials, is the home of Judge Jonathan Corwin. He was a local magistrate who served on the Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) to rule the witchcraft accusations that have plagued the town. These rulings sentenced an alleged nineteen villagers, thought to be doing the devils work, to be hung. He bought the home in 1675 and moved in with his wife Elizabeth Gibbs and their ten children. They lived in this home for about forty years and it remained in the family until the 1800’s. Today this home has been restored as The Witch House Museum, to show off the architecture and lifestyle of families living during the 17th century. Wood, being cheap and durable, was clearly a main element from head to toe when this home was originally being built and designed. The rooms are relatively simple, with appropriate amounts of decoration and narrow spiraling staircases leading upstairs. The central piece of what seems to be the dining/living room, is a long, dark wooden table with four chairs surrounding it. Though they are obviously 20th century made, there is something about the extended backs and specific, fine details of these chairs making everything seem that much more authentic. The ceiling too is made of huge, thick chunks of wood criss-crossing to support the decrepit structure. Incidentally, the fireplace is the only piece of the puzzle that seems to be made of bricks. I suppose that was a smart idea, it seems as though too many things during this era were set on fire.  The stained, white walls and scattered candles are the only things giving the place a lighter feel. In a sense, it was restored eerily too perfectly. As if the Corwin’s souls descend from the heavens every night for their usual family meal at six o’clock.

http://www.salemwitchtrialsfacts.com/gallery/Gallows-3.jpg

If the name Gallows Hill was tossed around in conversation, every bystander would cringe at the image that pops into their head. The Hill was the designated location for the accused to be hung. The condemned were carted up and ironically not hung on gallows but on a “Hanging Tree”. Since witches weren’t considered worthy of a proper burial, the bodies were simply tossed down onto a rocky edge or some were merely piled into one big dug out. Bridget Bishop, consistently denying claims of her sorcerous practices, was the first to be executed here. Until this day, the exact location of the Gallows remain unknown. When the trials were put to an end, the city of Salem was embarrassed of its actions. Even judges publicly confessed their guilt and error in the false convictions. Therefore, people who knew of the location wouldn’t acknowledge it. The little evidence of the location we have is from a the book Salem Witchcraft written by Charles Upham in 1867, until this location was later disproved by Sidney Perley. He was able to counter the original location thanks to the story of John Symund’s birth place – where it was mentioned you could see the people hanging from his window. There was also the documentations of Rebecca Nurses hanging, where her youngest son, Benjamin, took a boat down the North River to retrieve her body. It’s clear that official Gallow Hills Park does not follow the historical evidence. As supported by Nurses’ story, there is no body of water close enough for the events to make sense. Also the dirt of the land is too weak and thin to be able to nourish as large vegetation such as trees.

After the trials had been put to an end October 1962, apologies and condolences were sent to the families of the victims for such unnecessary horrific acts.  The various, thought-to-be hanging grounds are now overgrown with shrubs and weeds. It is a place hidden, forgotten, and shunned. An embarrassment and shame of the community. Trying to think on the positive side, the town today embraces it’s spiritual roots. You can take a historical tour with various reenactments of the trials and the beautiful scenic routes lined with Victorian architecture.  Now that diversity has deeply integrated into society, many new-age “witches” actually live in Salem. There is even a tour called “The Salem Witch Walk”, where tourists learn about magic and witchcraft. Looks like Salem is forever left to redeem itself of its past, and it looks like its taking steps in the right direction.

Bibliography:

Boudillion, Daniel V. “Gallows Hill, Salem, Witchcraft.” Gallows Hill, Salem, Witchcraft. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://www.boudillion.com/gallowshill/gallowshill.htm>.

Driscoll, Kimberley. “Welcome to Salem, MA.” Welcome to Salem, MA. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://www.salem.com/pages/index>.

“Museum.” Museum. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://www.witchhouse.info/museum.html>.

“THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALS: A Biographical Sketch of Tituba.” THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT TRIALS: A Biographical Sketch of Tituba. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/asa_tit.htm>.

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South Street Stables

By Lauren O’Brien.

I grew up in the sticks of Auburn, Massachusetts.  Almost every house on the street had a large plot of land and grew an extensive amount of vegetables which they sold to the neighborhood.  Two streets down from my house was a large farm that was part of my daily five-mile walking route.   A few houses down from mine, on the nearby South Street, was a blue house with a horse stable.

I remember that these natural fixtures in the neighborhood were a comfort to me, but walking the street now, the field is visibly overgrown, the white fence broken.  The man who lives in the blue house is named Charlie and uses the space to hold his trucks and scrap the metal from old cars.  He rents the house from my late great grandfather, who once owned three streets on this side of town.  It’s easy to interview him, as he works from home.

I approach him on a Saturday morning when I see him working out in the yard.  The tools he’s running make it impossible to hear, and he doesn’t see me approaching.  To the left of where I stand is a Rottweiler, barking wildly, a sign ‘Beware of Dog’ behind him, as well as a few ‘Private Property’ signs.  I’m not worried about the trespassing as much as I am about Charlie abruptly turning around and attacking me with whatever tool is in his hand.  It’s well known that Charlie is addicted to pain pills and has had some trouble with the law.  He notices me to his right and shuts down the tool, asks me what I need.  I say to him, “Hey Charlie, I have an assignment for class, I just want to ask a few questions about this house and the fields and such.  You know, the horses and Melissa, the previous owner.”

“This house is shit,” he says, “falling apart. I pay too much for it.”  I find the comment to be asinine, as the amount of land that accompanies this house makes it worth much more than he is paying.  I poke and prod about the subject, what the land used to hold, why it was abandoned, who owned it, etc.  Charlie gives me a brief summary.

He tells me that the house belonged to a woman named Melissa, who passed away from lung cancer at age 52.  She hoarded animals, having no less than three cats a time.  “She was stupid,” he said, “every cat she had got killed on this street and she just kept getting them.”  He said that the cats were her obsession but that she had two horses named Dolly and Simmy.  Simmy died young, an accident, and Dolly lived until she was old.  Charlie was close friends with Melissa’s husband, who owned a car garage across the street.  The two divorced young, and he married her sister.  He said she let the fields go after that.

I asked if he would show me around the fields, and he agreed.  The fence has large gaps in it now, to make it more accessible for Charlie’s work.  He told me that the fence always had problems and that the horses used to escape into the road.  “That’s how Simmy died,” he said.  “Your great grandfather tied him to the fence, rope around the neck, to try and keep him out.”  I’m alarmed by the comment.  My great-grandfather owned this street yet told us nothing of its residents or the land.  “He was dumb, sold an entire street of his for 1,000 dollars about twenty years ago.  Flurry family wanted to purchase it, asked him to name a price, and he said, ‘Just give me how much I paid for it,’ which was 1,000 dollars at the time.  Street was easily worth $80,000 now.”

It’s almost impossible to reach the horse stables now, as the path to them isn’t cleared.  They still exist, in a far corner of the plot, part of the roof concaved.  Charlie tells me that the field was never great for walking.  He said that everywhere you’d walk, you’d get burrs stuck to your shoes, or almost step in huge piles of ‘horse shit.’  He told me that Melissa’s grandchildren would try and push each other in it or ‘piss off the horses’ by pulling on their tails.

He told me that it was inevitable that this land die.  Auburn became a town of industry after the ’60s, abandoning our farming roots.  We cared more about Goddard’s rockets than we did about the hundreds of farms that existed in our town.  He pointed across the street to the sewerage company owned by my grandfather.  “You should know better than the rest,” he said; “your grandfather used to be a farmer.”

I think back to the stories my mother told me when I was growing up.  Ones like the day that her family barn burned down, how traumatizing it was to lose such an important piece of history.  When my grandfather lost his farm, my mother would walk to one nearby, harvest vegetables, ward off pests, and earn enough money to go see a movie with her friends later that night.  The farm she used to work on is one of the few that remains intact.  I often wonder if they’d accept the help of a college undergraduate, so that I can somehow connect myself with the experiences of my mother.

I want to bring life back to these farmhouses and stables that were replaced, bulldozed, and talk to the families that had to shift their ways of life.  I walked to another house, across the street from this horse stable, one that belonged to my great grandparents for quite some time.  I remember asking my great grandmother, Rita, what the neighborhood was like, about her neighbors.  She told me that they were “not all there.”  I asked for particulars and she told me that once her neighbor, Tracy, chased her husband around their large backyard, topless and carrying a hatchet.  The area was remote enough that one could ‘get away’ with such a spectacle.

I’m envious of my grandparents for knowing the town when there were only a few notable families.  On my side of town, which has the few leftover farms, everyone is referred to by last name.  “Mahlert came over today,” my grandfather would say, or “Flurry should come by and fix those cabinets.”  The families were tight-knit, the population small.  It took a specific type of family to flourish here.  The thing they had in common was their love of hard work – all farmers, carpenters, mechanics, etc.  My mother would describe a few of them to me, saying, “I remember one of my neighbors, Ian, had a bunch of goats. There was a day he was standing behind one of them, none of us were sure what he was doing, but it didn’t look appropriate.  So we walked close enough to get the whole thing on video, and narrated over it.”  She had another one, about David, whom she described as someone who “was so obsessed with keeping the land pristine that if our lawn was ever overgrown, he would just come over and mow it.  We tried to offer him beer, but he would just grunt at us, tell us he didn’t drink.”

I am fascinated by reconstructing Auburn’s farms and the odd characters that my family and friends describe.  The town has a rich colonial history, one that cherished small family-owned general stores, small soldier graveyards.  The land now has realtor signs all over it, or has already birthed numerous businesses (the majority as car dealerships).  I often tell new friends of mine that I am from Auburn, a farmtown next to Worcester.  The first thing they say to me is, “Oh, exit 10 from the Pike? Your mall looks huge.”  Other times they ask, “Oh, the Auburn Rockets, with the phallic mascot?”  It’s better than our other name, though, ‘E-Town’.  Due to the ‘tough suburban life’ in my town, we had an issue with students selling and taking ecstasy, and all I can think of is that they’re bored, that these problems came as a result of losing our town’s major extracurricular activity.  It’s a shame that we’ve become a sort of joke, and that the older generations have to witness this deterioration.

Websites often list our town’s industries, or Goddard’s rocket launching site, as our notable tourist locations.  In a way, our emphasis on this town icon, the rocket, is as much a removal from our past as our popular shopping mall, car dealerships, and industrial parks.  The rocket itself is emblematic of progress, and once this type of scientific industry began taking over our town, the number of Auburn farms reduced from over 100 in the 1850s to only 4 operating farms in 2012, according to the Auburn Town Guide website.

The website also contains this quote: “While Auburn is struggling to maintain its small town flavor, there has been major business development along the main roads.”  The choice of the word ‘struggling’ highlights the nature of the Auburn resident.  We crafted our homes on history.  We take pictures of the outside of the colonial buildings, forgetting that the inside is a renovated nail parlor.  Unless we focus on interviewing the older residents, the town’s few Republican-party-war-veterans, we come nowhere near the town’s past.  Most residents don’t know that the town was once called Ward and that the name was changed for individuality – that it sounded too similar to Ware.  I often hope that our ability to adapt to a town name change and mascot change from the ‘Dandy’ to the ‘Rocket’ would carry into our ability to cope with this massive industrial takeover.  Except, we ‘struggle’ with it, become residents with large plots of land, overlooking machinery and growing nothing.

Works Cited

 “Welcome to Auburn, MA.” Welcome to Auburn, MA. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. <http://www.auburnguide.com/pages/index>.

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Ireland’s Forgotten Island, Revisited

By Antonia Moore.

When I was younger, my father, who was very full of Irish pride, would frequently take me aside to show me a favorite photo album of his. I was young and impatient and would squirm, antsy, in his lap as he did so. His trip to Ireland to visit where his parents came from was, not so obvious to me at the time, one of the pinnacle adventures of his life. We would flip through the pictures, taken with a disposable camera, of endless green, my father posing awkwardly next to his small and wrinkled uncle, framed by sheep as far as the eye could see. He would always explain, once we got to his favorite section, “The Blasket Island,” that this was where his mother grew up. I would politely feign interest and wait for him to move on, retaining very little of what he told me. One picture, of my aunt standing in front of a crumbling building, always stuck in my mind because of how silly a sweater she was wearing.

Recently, I was given the opportunity to study abroad in Ireland the summer before my senior year of college. When I had discussed it with my father, he was overjoyed to know I was going to be traveling to where his parents had come from. He went on and on, endlessly listing places and people and how they were all related, throwing me back to a time when he had told me all of this before. His mother lived on the Blasket Island, he would tell me, and his father lived on the main land of County Kerry. Stupidly, I still didn’t pay much attention. I was going to Dublin, the center of the Irish universe! An insignificant island off of the southwest coast was the least of my concerns at the time.

But as the date of departure neared, I started to get nervous. I wanted to take a piece of family with me so that I could make this trip vicariously special for my dad. And then it hit me: the picture of his sister. I asked to see it again.

The photo album was once again ceremoniously brought out and flipped expertly to the correct page. My father explained to me that this was a picture taken in front of his mother’s house on the island. I took it out of the album and asked if I could bring it with me. Avidly, my wish was granted.

I looked closer at the picture in my spare time. My aunt was wearing a huge, obnoxiously colored sweater in front of a cement building with no door, roof, or windows. But she was smiling. I decided I wanted to learn more and recreate this photograph for my father.

I left for Ireland at the end of June, with my picture tucked safely away, leaving home for the first time. I stayed at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, but never forgot for the seven weeks I stayed that I had a much more important journey ahead of me.

As the end of the program neared, I realized time was running out. I bought my train and bus tickets, and with a few fellow students in tow, I headed toward County Kerry to pursue the meaning behind the picture.

We arrived and stayed at An Oige (The Youth Hostel). Out of the window of our room, I could see the island, not too far away, blanketed in a teasing fog.

Courtesy: Google Images

 

The next day, I went to The Blasket Centre, a ten minute walk from where we were staying, to meet my cousin, Michael DeMohrda, for the first time.

When I walked in, I was greeted first by an enormous stained glass wall, representing the Blasket Island. The water, hills, and various houses were etched into large colorful pieces, and my cousin was waiting at the front desk for me. He was a middle-aged man with a thick head of dark hair, and was accompanied by a young blonde woman with a pair of headphones and a microphone. Michael approached me, shook my hand, and introduced me to the woman, Louise, who was from BBC Radio. She wanted to interview me for a piece she was producing about the Blasket Island. I was of particular interest because I was visiting where my grandmother came from for the first time. I was not the only one trying to rediscover something forgotten.

We carried through the museum, past plaques, posters, and displayed of island life. I learned the inhabitants were very self-sustaining, as getting to the main land in the flimsy wooden canoes was very dangerous and difficult. They lived, isolated, without running water or electricity for hundreds of years.  Pictures of crumbled rock buildings hung everywhere. Great autobiographers like Peg Seyers and Tomás Ó Criomhthain lived in such houses. From the main window of the museum, facing the island, I was able to look out over the water and see three very small white houses on a hill overlooking the coast. The smallest on the left, my cousin explained to me, was my grandmother’s.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait any longer. My childhood antsyness was once again getting the best of me. I wanted to get to the island to see where this picture was taken. It’s very rare a boat is able to make it to the Blasket because the water is so choppy. A friend in the group had warned me that she had tried to get out to the island in the past, but was denied access for almost four weeks. By some miracle, I got passage to the island right away. As I was rocking back and forth heavily on the boat, I couldn’t take my eyes away from the tiny white house that was getting bigger. This looming and monstrous place had been so vague to me all of these years, and just now was I realizing its importance. When the boat docked, we climbed the rocks to the village. At one time, the island was home to almost 300 people. Now, it was empty. It was abandoned in 1953, when the remaining ten people were evacuated because it was so dangerous to live in a place with such bad weather and few resources. I could only imagine that had become of the crumbling building I saw in the picture. Several other houses remained standing for the most part. The schoolhouse shared a wall with the childhood home of my grandmother, The Kearney house.

Courtesy: Google Images

 

As our tour guide brought us to the other living area of the island, we passed by a large and unmarked grassy area. He explained that this was where anyone who died unbaptized on the island was buried. Sometimes, the weather was so bad that people were unable to get their children to be baptized on the mainland for weeks, who would frequently die. An expert on the lineage of the families here, I was singled out by the guide and informed that two of my grandmother’s siblings were buried in this unmarked grave.

A chill washed over me from the damp winds and the discovery of the darkness in which my grandmother lived, still drawn in the direction of the houses I had seen in the distance. The island was an enormous time capsule and memorial. This feeling was only perpetuated as we passed a rock engraved in Irish, a portion of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s “The Islandman”. It read, translated:

I have written minutely of much that we did, for it was my wish that somewhere there should be a memorial of it all, and I have done my best to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the likes of it will never be seen again.

When I was finally close enough, I made a beeline for my grandmother’s house. It looked very different from the picture. It had been miraculously restored to its full originality from when she had lived there. Someone, very much in the spirit of the Gaelic League (who sought to restore and preserve Irish history and culture), had purchased my grandmother’s house to rebuild and repaint it. It had a second floor reinstalled with a set of stairs, and was given windows and a front door. The only thing that had changed from its original form was the running water and electricity that was installed, and I would not be allowed to go inside. Someone else owned a part of my history now.

I had only one requirement of my adventure of finding the source of this picture: take one of my own. I had intentionally worn clashing clothes in the spirit of my aunt, forcing a green crew neck to mesh with an orange shirt and purple pants. I had learned so much about my grandmother’s way of life, the history of the island, and how it changed since my grandmother left the island once and for all to pursue a better life in Springfield, Massachusetts for the sake of her family. I was able to appreciate much more of the meaning it had meant to my father.

When I returned home, I was able to make a photo album of my own, which I have just as enthusiastically displayed as my father always had. Now, it was my turn to sit him down, and flip to a page where the photograph of my aunt that had stayed with me through all of my travels sits proudly next to a picture of my own. Seeing the pride well up in my father as he gazed on the pictures made me understand how rewarding the time he had spent to show me this island’s importance was.

Courtesy: Antonia Moore and Thomas Moore

 

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Two Sinks, Two Toilets, Two Showers, and Too Much History

By Amy Laprade.

“Wow, Mom. Cool. I can definitely see its potential,” I exclaimed as she led me up the stone steps to an enormous colonial house, in the shape of a bracket. It was a faded, brown-grey, suggesting the first hints of dry rot on the outside, with splashes of white paint here and there that resembled scabs.

Mom brushed the newly fallen snow from her stone steps and let me in through the side door, on the south side. We stepped into a brightly lit kitchen with a high-peaked ceiling and a pot belly stove. In the corner, to my left, was a pantry with an electric oven tucked deep in its corner. According to Mom, the pantry had once been a walk-in freezer when the house had been the original Academy at Charlemont, a privately funded, college preparatory school. Though while the Academy thrives to this day, its original location, this house, was abandoned for a modern building along Route 2, back in 1981.

The house was originally built in 1880 by the Duprey family of Charlemont Massachusetts. It’d been a two-family house until around1981, when it was sold by Burt and Evelyn Duprey to David and Patricia McKay, two of several founding members of the Academy who took six boys and six girls as their boarding students.

The kitchen floor, warped with age and sloping heavily along the western wall, was accented by a large window to the north, consisting of many sections of old, rippled glass. Outside, beyond the snow bank, cardinals lighted on a bird feeder, which dangled from an ancient crab apple tree. Beyond, muted forrest surrounded the property of 8.8 acres on all sides, except the north, which boasted a view of a meandering pot-holed road, which ran parallel to a rolling horse pasture, before vanishing into the hills of Jacksonville Vermont.

“I love it.” I held my gaze out the window a moment longer, watching snow flurries whisper from out of the December sky.

Mom shrugs. “Your sister was like, oh, Mother! What a dump! She was right. It needed a lot of work. The ceiling was full of holes from all the broken water pipes. Before we got the new panelling for the living room ceiling, I feared something would fall from among the pipes and land on my head. It was really creepy in here, especially after having been empty for nine years. The previous owners, the McKays, moved out of state, after the Academy relocated. They couldn’t handle the expense of keeping the house heated. It got so cold in the house that the pipes burst. Still, Marty and I got a really good deal on the house, and it’s in the country, which is all I wanted.”

I scoped out the place while Mom hung her new curtains. I was home from San Francisco for the holidays, and not only was excited to see snow again, but couldn’t wait to see ‘the house.’ For my mother, who, having lived in a trailer for ten years, this was like owning a mansion, even if the linoleum in the kitchen was warped in some areas and peeled, thus exposing plywood, in others. It was an estate even if it did have faded, sooty wall paper from many years of smoke from the wood stoves.

I entered the dining room, and then the living room where I was greeted with cheap, brown, industrial carpeting and Gilbert, Marty’s brown and black-spotted beagle, who bounded off the sofa, wagging his tail and howling as though I were his long lost pal. His clammy nose brushed my hand as if he were signaling for me to follow him deeper into the old house.

We passed a small bathroom with antique-looking rose patterned wall paper and a glass doorknob and through the living room where we entered another large room, which looked like a parlor with long, rectangular windows. There was yet another pot-bellied, wood stove. Through the archway and to the left was a hall that led to a small bath with a claw tub and pedestal sink. The large staircase at the start of the corridor dominated what used to be the house’s main entrance.

I pondered which way to go next, and decided to go straight ahead, through a heavy, modern-looking door that was missing its knob. It swung shut behind Gilbert and I, leaving a chilly breeze. The narrow hall was devoid of light and clammy, and its carpeting smelled vaguely of wet sock. A tiny ray of sunlight escaped through the crack of the first door to my right. I entered another bathroom, only this one had two sinks, two toilets, two shower stalls, and looked modern compared to the rest of the house. On my right, a small bedroom with a window facing north, toward the horse pasture, would later become my room, for indefinite stays, and would later have lavender walls and a silver-framed mirror over a small, vintage dresser. Across the hall was the door to the basement. Ahead was another door which opened onto another hallway with three more rooms off the side, thus comprising the north end.

I heard thumping and banging sounds under the floor. Gilbert began to whine. Perhaps Marty is in one of these rooms, I thought. I stepped into the room on the left. No one was there. It was cluttered with plastic lawn furniture, a roll away wardrobe,  and an unprecedented amount of odds and ends stuffed into cardboard boxes. Of all twenty-four rooms I’d either just explored and had yet to explore, this one made me feel uneasy. I wasn’t scared, per say. Just a little uneasy. It felt as though it had a presence. There wasn’t anything exceptionally eerie about the room, except that it felt colder than the other rooms and had one window, placed at an odd angle–as though it were slumping toward the corner of the room, toward the closet, rather than standing erect and centered, the way windows are in newer houses. Nevertheless, it faced West and had a view of the crabapple tree and of the woods beyond.

It had a decent-sized closet. The door squealed when I tugged at the glass door knob. The smell of old plaster tickled my nose as a slit of darkness met my eye. I stared dumbly at the gaggle of wire hangers. Yep. Just a closet. But then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I noticed a small door. It didn’t have a knob and was more like a panel in the right side of the wall. I pulled it out and discovered a narrow staircase that, to my amazement and disappointment, vanished into the ceiling.

“The Academy closed it off so the girls wouldn’t sneak down to visit the boys at night,” Mom later explained.

A loud crash, omitting from the floor below, sent Gilbert bolting to the basement door. Marty was fiddling away with the water heater, but invited us to come down to have a look. The ceiling was so low, coming down the steep wooden steps, I had to duck or I’d have hit my head.

The floor was made of hard-packed clay and was damp. Hand made beams, cut from old growth trees, fused together with hand cut iron nails, supported the house, and ran parallel to the frenetic artery of heating ducts and sewer pipes. Cobwebs dripped from the single, naked bulb, hanging from the pull chain–the only light the basement provided, as there were no windows. It stunk down there, too. Like something died.

“That’s our next project. Sealing up all the holes. A skunk found its way into a crack in the wall, of the basement cellar, never found his way out, and died.” Marty explained as he pushed a step ladder against the stone wall. Above the top of the ladder was a dark, rectangular hole. I watched with curiosity as Marty scrambled up the ladder and shined his flashlight in. I wondered if he was checking for skunks, then wondered warily if anything else, besides skunks had ever found their way in.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the rectangular hole.

“You know, Amy. I don’t really know. It’s a crawl space. It starts here, runs underneath the wall of the dining room and along the length of the kitchen, where it comes out in front of the door. I crawled through it once, trying to instal lights there, in case the pipes should burst again.”

Mom would later tell me that there was a longer, larger trap door, under the floor in the southwest corner of the dining room. Gilbert refused to go anywhere near that corner of the room. Mom thinks that it may have been used as part of the underground railroad and that the house is haunted.

Leaving Gilbert with Marty, I went to scope out the upstairs. To the top of the landing was a wrap around hall way, corralling the stairwell. I followed it and came out into a room filled with taxidermy deer and fox, gazing at me from their blank, glassy eyes.

A door, on the other side of the room, opened on another hallway. To my left was another bathroom, identical to the one downstairs, with: two showers, two sinks, and two toilets. To my right was a narrow door that led to an enormous attic filled with bat droppings. From the landing, another door opened onto this northern side of the upstairs and onto a row of dormer rooms which were to the left and the closets to the right. This section is where the Academy’s girls were housed.

I retraced my steps, following a different hallway, just outside the attic staircase. I came upon two more doors, opened one and ended up in another room. There was yet another hidden door in the back of its closet. A stench of must and mothballs wafted out upon opening the panel. In the pale lighting, coming from the west window was a hidden staircase, and the back way to the attic.

A hunger pain stabbed my stomach and I could hear Mom calling “Amy?” from somewhere in the house, but when I stepped out of the room I became confused when I ended up in a whole other hallway, I hadn’t yet seen. Across the hall was another bedroom that overlooked the road and faced east. To my right, through the archway, was another whole apartment with a living room and kitchen on the south facing side.

I began to wonder how many more rooms there were in this house as I made my way back down the hall. On my way, I noticed yet another bathroom on the left. It wasn’t one of those funky double-of-everything bathrooms, but just a bathroom with an antique, pedestal sink, with a faucet with knobs made of porcelain and had rust-streaks around the drain. The walls were a delicate shade of periwinkle.

I wanted to check my hair, but the mirror was missing. It looked as though there’d been one there at one time, because I could see the silhouette of a rectangle among the tobacco-stained wall. And there were holes and cracks in the plaster where screws had been. It looked as though the previous owner had carelessly yanked it out of the wall.

“Amy?” I heard Mom call again, and Gilbert’s muffled barks.

I returned the way I came and ended up in the hallway by the attic door again. Then I went back through the side room again which led me to that hallway and back to the apartment. It was then that I noticed another staircase to the left of the bathroom that I hadn’t noticed before, because it was dark and narrow. I made my descent, and came out into the downstairs living room where I’d started out. Gilbert was waiting at the landing with my favorite socks in his maw.

“Coffee’s ready, Ame.” Mom sat a steaming mug for me on the stand.

“I almost got lost up there.”

Mom laughed. “I almost did too, my first day here.”

“There’s a whole other living quarters above us,” I said in amazement, taking a seat on the ottoman.

“That was where the staff lived. The Academy added on the extra kitchen, extra living room, the two double-showered bathrooms, and the dormer rooms.”

“So then. What happened that they stopped using the house?”

“The Academy thought that the boarding house would turn a big profit. The opposite happened. It became too costly to house kids. And they grew tired of babysitting the students, who really trashed the place. Ripping the wall paper off of the walls….plus the insurance and the food the Academy had to provide, just proved too much. So, the Academy closed the house.”

“There’s something up there. A vibe, Ame. I don’t know. But the first night I spent here, I was sound asleep on the living room floor, in my sleeping bag, when I heard a really loud crash from upstairs. It sounded like glass shattering. At first I thought it was a break in. Then I thought it was maybe one of the animals, but then thought, ‘that’s not possible,’ because Gilbert was still at the trailer with Marty and the two cats were sleeping in the living room with me.

“When I went upstairs, I found glass all over the floor in that bathroom,” Mom points at the ceiling, indicating the one I’d just been in with the porcelain faucet handles and periwinkle walls. “The mirror had fallen off the wall and shattered. But you know the strange thing is that there weren’t any shards in the sink. They’d all landed two feet away from the sink, in the middle of the floor. And one, very large shard of glass, triangular in shape, stood poking out of the linoleum in a perfect upright position. I mean, it wasn’t as though the mirror simply fell from the hook in the wall. If that were the case, don’t you think that there’d be glass in the sink?”

“Well, I mean, it could be that….” My voice faltered as I began to think about the barren space on the wall, framed in tobacco smoke. “I don’t know.”

Work Cited

Judith O’kulsky, personal communication, 1995, 2012.

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Abigail Adams House: First Women’s Dormitory

By Ashleigh West.

The opportunity to attend college has never been easy, and women especially, are all too familiar with that long hard road.  The University of Massachusetts Amherst was founded in 1863, originally under the name the Massachusetts Agriculture College, and did not begin admitting women until 1903, forty years after its initiation.  With the number of women enrolled at MAC steadily increasing, there was still another matter to be tackled—where would they house all the women?  And thus the Abigail Adams House was born in 1920, a fitting time in women’s achievements, with the addition of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution ratified that very year.

The Abigail Adams House, which housed around 100 female students, was located on North Pleasant Street, now home to the John W. Lederle Graduate Research Center, for after a devastating fire on Saturday October 28th 1962 and several attempts to restore the forty-year-old building; the House was demolished in 1967, to make way for the future GRC.   Originally, the Abigail Adams House was to be erected atop Orchard Hill, as was the hopes of MAC President Kenyon L. Butterfield, who looked further into the future and dreamed of a whole women’s agriculture college up on the Hill.  Unfortunately, for reasons unexplained, this was not the case and the building of Massachusetts Agriculture Culture’s first women’s dormitory began in 1919.

While not much is known about the Abigail Adams House in its actual existence, the dedication and naming process of the building was quite a lengthy and publicized process.  In the Spring of 1920 a contest was open to all Massachusetts high school and Home Economic club girls for the submission of their choice of name for the new women’s building.  There were many regulations, such as: the name could not be from any living person at the time, the name had to be of a Massachusetts woman, and she must have pertained to agriculture in some way.  A reward of twenty-five dollars was offered, which is roughly $280 today, as well as recognition at the dedication ceremony to be held on October 8th 1920.  All submissions were directed to Miss Edna L. Skinner, the namesake of the future Skinner Hall and the Advisor of Women at MAC, but the Board of Trustees would make the final decision.  The contest closed on July 20th after receiving over forty entries, four of which all named Abigail Adams as the most desirable choice, among them Katherine B. Ehnes, the fourteen year old from Medfield, who ultimately won the contest for her eloquent explanation after much debate from the Trustees.  Ehnes wrote Skinner on May 14th stating that Abigail Adams was an exemplary choice because she was “the first farmerette of Braintree”.  She quoted James Morgan, a reporter for the Morgan County Weber River Independent Newspaper, when describing Adams as the “mother of the republic [who] had to stay home to rock the cradle, cook…and tend to the farm, milking and churning, knitting and darning, teaching and praying, toiling and saving, she supported the family, [and] helped her husband’s progress”.  Ehnes stressed, “To Abigail Adams alone belongs the glory of being one of the most interesting women in ‘Farming’ or ‘Country Life’”.

Abigail Adams was the first choice for the name of the new dormitory, but was shot down by the Trustees in August.  With the dedication ceremony only two months away, the Committee On The Women’s Dormitory submitted two additional names from the contest entries—their second choice being Wolcott House, the third Mary Mattoon House—to be considered by the Trustees.  The deadline was looming—just over a week away—when in a rather audacious letter, especially given the time, Edna Skinner urged President Butterfield on September 29th to “encourage the Trustees to decide upon the dormitory name before the dedication exercises” on October 8th.  She wittily remarked that there “will be absolutely no other fitting occasion for the announcement of the name” and that it would “be most unfortunate if the building is left nameless at the close of the dedication exercises”.

In an October 11th article for New Salem’s “The Transcript”, E. O. Marshall reported on the Abigail Adams House dedication, for which the need for more farm homes and farm service were themes of the sixteen speakers’ addresses.  Marshall wrote, “Appropriately, this home for 100 girls is provided just as women are entering new political duties and will need every facility for improvement”.  As if the newly built dormitory alone will better the women as citizens, and with their newly appointed right to vote, they so desperately need “improvement” now that they are actually allowed to utilize their freedoms.  The article itself quickly departed from coverage of the new dormitory—with no mention on the thoughts of the women about the House, the process of its existence, or its future—preaching instead of the advantages to agricultural life over those of the weak and ignored city dwellers, which have “no room to store half a loaf of bread” (Marshall).  Little praise or recognition was given to the women for their long awaited achievement.

The Abigail Adams House, more affectionately referred to by its residents as “The Abbey”, was designed in the Georgian-revival style; a three-story brick building equipped with a reception hall, living room, two parlors, a fireplace, a housemother’s sitting room, an office, a laundry room located in the basement, and kitchenettes.  The room costs were priced at $75 each in 1920, which is roughly $862 today, and it is not known whether the rooms were always shared, though in a 1948 scrapbooked article by Sandra Feingold, she noted that the Abbey has more single rooms than any other dorm on campus.  She also describes the Abbey as a “friendly close-knit dormitory”, especially due to its “comforts”, such as dark wood paneling, a spacious lounge, bay windows, the fireplace, a garden, and a grand piano.  The Abbey boasted numerous artworks, including a portrait of its namesake, which hung in the lobby.  The Abbey was also used as a barracks during World War II, the girls being temporarily displaced from their happy home.  Besides the ruling housemother—who enforced the 7:30pm curfew, among other regulations such as the girls must be at least clothed in a robe if outside their rooms, popular music is considered “undesirable” on Sundays, beds must be made by 9:00am, and bathrooms should not be used after 10:00pm—the Abbey also included a House Chairman, who was in fact a woman, Counselors, a Dorm Senator, and a Social Chair, all of whom were female students elected by their fellow housemates.

Sadly, on Saturday October 28th 1962, a fire that “spread rapidly through combustible acoustic ceiling tiles” (YouMass) destroyed the Abigail Adams House and all its glory and comfort.  An article from “The Bridgeport Telegram” reported on Tuesday October 30th 2012, that faulty wiring could also be related to the $300,00 damages the Abbey suffered, which would be roughly $3.5 million by today’s standards.  The fire damage was devastating and the Abbey was almost completely burnt down.  The female students were displaced for good, with the campus not becoming co-ed in the dormitories until 1970; many of them completely lost all of their belongings in the destruction.  Besides the damage the University suffered to its bank accounts, little was reported about the fire that destroyed the first women’s dormitory.  There were no repots of whether anyone was injured, nothing was stated on the students’ reactions to the fire, let alone the loss of their home, or where the girls would be relocated, and there was utter silence on the fact that this significant piece in the history of the University was destroyed.  Several attempts were made to restore the Abigail Adams House, but it was never again a dormitory.  Until 1967, the Abbey was used as offices for faulty—a shell of its former glory—but it was demolished that year to make way for the John W. Lederle Graduate Research Center, to support the ever-growing research in the sciences, which at the time was majoritarily a boys-only club.  The first women’s dormitory was destroyed for a second time—this one was for good.

Unless one goes digging deep within the decades of the University’s history, sifting through the numerous folders, documents, journals, biographies, articles, photographs, books, the history of the Abigail Adams House remains hidden, a secret stuck in the shadows.  The Abigail Adams House was and still is an important achievement and a significant aspect to the history of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the women themselves on this campus, past and present, yet its existence remains largely unknown to the majority, if not all, of the campus community.  The Class of 2013, myself included, marks the 100th class of women graduates from UMass Amherst, yet even a decade into the new millennium, women everywhere are still fighting for equality.  With every step we get a little closer, and there are more opportunities for women than ever before imagined, but how many classes of women must graduate, must prove themselves “worthy”, before we are all truly equal?

Works Cited

“Abigail Adams House.” YouMass: UMass Amherst As A Wiki. Special Collections & University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries, 18 2012. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/youmass/doku.php?id=buildings:a:adams.

“Abigail Adams House: House Regulations.” Dean of the College William L. Machmer- Box 15: Folder 1: Skinner, Edna L. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , n.d. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/6-1dean-of-college/b15f1skinner/19260900/01.htm.

“Contest Open To All Massachusetts Girls.” President Kenyon L. Butterfield – Selected Records Related to Women’s Education: Folder 56: Abigail Adams House. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , n.d.  Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/3-1president/abigail-adams/1920contest/.

Ehnes, Katherine B.. “Contest Submission.” President Kenyon L. Butterfield – Selected Records Related to Women. Five College Archives Digital Access Project:             University of Massachusetts , 14 1920. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/3-1president/abigail-adams/19200514/index.shtml?page=1.

Feingold, Sandra. “Abigail Adams Dorm Shorn Of Stand-Offish Air.” Dean of Women: Helen Curtis- Folder 23: Women’s Residence Halls. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , n.d. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/30-3dean-of-women/23residence/index.shtml?page=2.

Jefferson, Lorina P.. “Supplementary Report of Committee on the Women’s Dormitory.”President Kenyon L. Butterfield – Selected Records Related to Women. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , n.d. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/3-1president/abigail-adams/19200800supprpt/.

Marshall, E. O.. “The Transcript: “Dormitory for Women”.” President Kenyon L. Butterfield – Selected Records Related to Women’s Education: Folder 56: Abigail Adams House. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , 11 1920. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/3-1president/abigail-adams/19201011/.

Rand, Frank Prentice. Yesterdays at Massachusetts State College,1863-1933. Amherst: The Associate Alumni Massachusetts State College, 1933. 148. eBook.

Skinner, Edna L.. “Letter: To Kenyon L. Butterfield .”President Kenyon L. Butterfield – Selected Records Related to Women. Five College Archives Digital Access Project: University of Massachusetts , 29 1920. Web. 1 Nov 2012. http://clio.fivecolleges.edu/umass/3-1president/abigail-adams/19200929skin/.

“$300,000 Fire Probed.” Bridgeport Telegram[Bridgeport, CT] 30 Oct 1962, Page 24. Web. 1 Nov. 2012.   http://newspaperarchive.com/flashviewer/seofullviewer?img=83012900.

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The Remnants of Whalom Park

By Emily Mitchell.

The land is desolate. Gone is the Flyer Comet, gone are the bumpers cars, gone are the circus animals that came to life on the platform of the ancient carousel. People no longer comb the area, children tugging at the arms of parents, mesmerized by all of the excitement. Teenagers no longer man the tilt-a-whirl or sell popcorn with practiced boredom on their faces. For awhile, before everything had been completely destroyed, high school kids had broken in at night spreading graffiti over the rusted skeletons of the park. Eventually even these remnants were gathered up and thrown away. And with these relics, over a hundred years of American history have been condemned to stay in the past.

Photo Courtesy of Retrojunk.com

Whalom Park was not just an amusement park. It was an institution of tradition in Central and Western Massachusetts. While other kids bragged about getting Mickey Mouse’s autograph at Disney World or touring Universal studios, the children I grew up with treasured the dilapidated park and everything it had to offer. The wood chips that would threaten to blind you in the old roller coaster’s tunnel, the sticky steering wheels on the bumper cars that had more than once flown off their track, everything was familiar and because of this, also cherished.

Photo Courtesy of ultimaterollercoaster.com

My most distinct memory of the Park is connected to the most prominent structure on its old landscape. The Flyer Comet, a rickety old thing that had been constructed in the 1970’s, when theme parks took on a new attraction that was a bit more thrilling than the tilt-a-whirl. Many birthdays had been spent at Whalom and on one of these particular birthdays we had all grown tall enough to be let on the Flyer Comet. I had reveled in my shortness as I was only just under the height requirement. My relief had not even sunk in before the attendant ushered me through saying that if I sat with an adult it would be all right.  As I sat down next to my friend’s mother in the back of the cart all of the other kids excitedly picked seats in the front, fighting over the first two seats. I was stunned to observe that anyone would think it an honor.

As the car made its ascent I nervously held on to the adult’s hand. She attempted to comfort me lightheartedly as I squeezed her hand tighter and tighter. I shut my eyes the entire time after the first descent, when I opened my eyes I was surprised that I was still breathing and relieved that it was over. I was never one for roller coasters and still avoid them but I was proud of myself as a little kid, that although I hadn’t exactly enjoyed the ride I’d gone through with it.

Photo Courtesy of Whalom.com

After my experience with the roller coaster I usually stuck to the old classics, tilt-a-whirl, bumper cars, and the most prized possession on the whole Park’s grounds: the carousel. A true blast from the past, the carousel was one of the Park’s first attractions. Before becoming an amusement park Whalom was a marketing ploy used by the owners of the Fitchburg and Leominster railroad line (Roger). The Park lay at the end of the Fitchburg line and encouraged passengers to pay a full priced fair in order to experience the scenic beauty of the garden and lake that awaited them (Roger). The park opened in 1893, but the carousel wasn’t purchased by the Park’s owners until 1914. It was the most extravagant piece of equipment yet bought by the Park.

The carousel was handcrafted by Charles Looff during the golden age of carousels in America (Malia). Looff set up shop in 1875 building his first carousels from discarded furniture and before long he opened his own company in Coney Island, New York (Fraley).

The carousel’s popularity in American culture peaked in 1915 and Whalom was right with the rest of the country (Fraley).

Photo Courtesy of Whalompark.com

The carousel was beautiful, featuring exotic animals and carefully constructed details. Even after over a hundred years it outshined the rest of the park with its turn of the century gilt and glitter. Generation after generation rode the carousel and never tired of its idyllic beauty.  Of seven thousand carousels built during the golden age, only two hundred are still functional today, and sadly the Whalom Park carousel is no longer apart of that two hundred (Whalomparkcarousel.org).

When the Park was finally dismantled a group of past park employees attempted to set up a fund and buy the pieces as they were sold at auction (Whalomparkcarousel.org). They managed to acquire most of the original work of Looff but the carousel no longer has a home where the community can use it. Today the artwork of Looff is sitting in boxes waiting for someone to take interest in it.

Photo Courtesy of Whalomparkcarousel.com

There is one way I can still get a glimpse of Whalom’s carousel: in the video for the Cars song “Touch and Go.” While the lanky lead singer explains that “all he needs is what you got,” the carousel spins in obscurity behind him while music video girls ride the alligators, ostriches, greyhounds, and seahorses. This is how America documents its history. Not in museums or textbooks but in cheesy eighties music videos.

Photo Courtesy of Retrojunk.com

Whalom and the carousel and the Flyer Comet were not forgotten by everyone. Although the city, the development company, and the owners did not do enough to cherish the memory of Whalom Park the people of the community that were raised on it won’t forget.  Websites pepper the Internet with black and white photographs depicting the old days of the park and stories of the Park.

Photo Courtesy of Hometownarchive.com

The Worcester Telegram has an entire webpage dedicated to the memories of people from the area. To this day letters are still sent in where people lament the closing of the park and lovingly share their memories with the rest of the community. Lori Cowee wrote, “Cannot tell you how many times we rode the coaster (always trying to nab the very first car or the very last car in the back). You would hear the click-click-click as the ride began and then we were off for an amzing ride that included heart in your throat plunges and turns – as soon as the ride was over my sister and I were clamoring to ride again. I am so glad I had the opportunity to experience the park at its height of popularity – it truly was a magical experience for a little girl.”

Mark Watson of Sturbridge wrote, “My father went down the slide in the fun house and didn’t protect his shoes with the burlap sack and it burned a big hole in his shoe – he was quite upset. My Aunt got in the rotating barrel and fell down we watched as all the contents of her pocketbook went all over the place. Great memories and nothing like it now.”

George of Leominster wrote, “when my Dad smoked cigarettes, there was some free passes that used to be on the cigarette packs and he would save them so we could go more than he could afford by using simply his money. Funny to think now, we would root for Dad to smoke so he could get more free passes to Whalom Park.”

And lastly, Stacy from Dudley wrote, “Whalom Park, we miss you like the dickens!!!!!!”

Simply through these testimonials it’s easy to see that Whalom Park was not a place that went unnoticed. It struck a chord with every kid and every family that stepped foot in it. You could go to Whalom and see familiar faces. The world of the old-fashioned amusement park is gone now. Whalom evolved and moved forward with the American people for over a hundred years. The Whalom I knew was not the Whalom my grandparents knew, but its history was still and always will be relevant. Instead of being immortalized its replaced with nameless and cold experiences at million dollar theme parks where you wait an hour and a half to have your brain scrambled around in your skull.

Despite its absence from my future I’m still grateful for its presence in my past. I can cherish the stories my grandmother told me of her and my grandfather going to Whalom Park on Saturday nights and dancing until she had to go home for curfew and my own memories as a child. The layers of concrete which will now be raised in its place won’t make me forget.

Works Cited

Fraley, Tobin. Carousel Animals: Artistry in Motion. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2002. Print.

“Gone But Not Forgotten.” Gone But Not Forgotten. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Nov. 2012. http://cf.telegram.com/submissions/gonebutnotforgotten.cfm?CATEGORY=WHALOMPARK

Leo, Roger. “Whalom Park Gave Us “a Whale of a Time”” Telegram and Gazette [Fitchburg] n.d.: n. pag. Print.

Malia, Peter.”Flying Horses: The Golden Age Of American Carousel Art, 1870-1930.” Publishers Weekly 258.42 (2011): 44. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

“Whalom Park Carousel Association.” Whalom Park Carousel Association. N.p., 2000. Web. 06 Nov. 2012.  http://www.whalomparkcarousel.org/

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The Great Outdoors

By Ashleigh West.

I decided to pack for the elements—this was New England after all—and out here in Western Mass the weather can be especially unpredictable.  It was Friday, sunny, and obnoxiously hot—the air in the sweaty and almost uncomfortable 80s—for the first week of October, the first day it hadn’t rain all week.  Dressed in shorts and sandals, I packed my purse with a light sweater and scarf, carrying my thrift store boots in case of any impromptu hiking.  After checking for the sixth time that I had remembered my keys, camera, and wallet, I set off on my solo adventure to the Quabbin Reservoir.

I hopped in my teal 2000 Camry and immediately turned on the car, rolling down every window and the sunroof to let the less scorching air pour in.  I began the tedious process of programming my destination into my GPS, my temperamental lifesaver.  When “Quabbin Reservoir” returned no results, I glanced at my dashboard and noted my intense need for gas, since wandering the roads of Western Mass seemed to be in my future.  I searched again for a more general location and upon finding a “Quabbin Park” about 30 minutes away, decided it was my best bet and said a silent prayer for lots of signs.

As I pulled out of Lot 44 of North Apartments, beginning my quest for cheap gas, priority number one was finding a suitable soundtrack for this epic adventure.  With the radio stations of Western Mass pumping out 60% static, 40% music, this was no easy task.  My seek button became my best friend, as I surfed through the chart toppers and teenyboppers in search of some good ole classic rock, throwbacks, and indie tunes.  With the likes of Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses, and AD/DC focusing in and out of my speakers, I cruised on to the cheapest gas I could find: Stop & Shop at $3.86 a gallon.  I use my Stop & Shop rewards card every time, hoping I spontaneously acquired points to lower the gas price, even though I always shop at Big Y for its better deals.  With my tank half filled, I pulled out onto Route 9 and began religiously following GPS’s dictations.

GPS lead me through the winding roads of Amherst, Belchertown, and Palmer, where the speed limits jumped from 30 to 55 within seconds of one another.  Driving through the streets with the windows down, the air, smelling both fresh and woodsy, was cooler and felt wonderfully crisp on my skin.  The trees flamed red and orange as I cruised past, and after four years of calling this area home, I still marvel at its beauty when dressed in autumn.  The drive was freeing, relaxing even, melting away the stress of the workweek and I tried not to worry that the route was almost identical to the way I go to get to the Mass Pike to head home.  I comforted myself with the cliché, but usually true, notion that it’s not about the destination it’s the journey.  Even if I didn’t make it to the Reservoir, I would have an interesting tale of how I got lost with a GPS.

As I rapidly approached what was suppose to turn into the Quabbin Reservoir in approximately two minutes, but remained yet another winding road littered with orange and red, “A-Punk” by Vampire Weekend leaked through the speakers and I was surprised that an alternative radio station had actually found me through the immense static.  Bopping along, I whizzed pass a sign for the Reservoir entrance.  GPS tells me that I still have another minute to go until I approach my destination.  Foolish GPS.  I wanted to turn around and head back to the sign, but I kept passing all the potential areas to pull into.  GPS alerted me that I have now reached my destination and what do you know, another entrance!

The road was strange; somehow it was both paved and dirt and there were no signs to welcome me.   I began to panic, wondering if I’ve entered in the out way.  A couple cars passed by and I frantically searched their faces for signs of outrage or puzzling confusion for this obnoxious Camry that was plowing through the exit.  They didn’t seem to notice.  So, I continued on my way, slowly and eyes peeled for signs of parking.  After a few minutes on the partly paved, partly dirt road, I spied off to my right a small parking area with a few spaces left open.  I quickly pulled in and got my bearings.  I decided to ditch my boots, as the way looked flat and I preferred not to all Jane of the Jungle alone.  Grabbing my purse and readying my camera, I set off to explore.

The air was warm but not as smothering as it was on campus, for a canopy of trees provided some shade.  The sky burned a clear blue up ahead and the whole place seems to scream Fall, but in a rather peaceful manner.  There were some patches of flies, but I figured once I had made it to the open road that surrounded the Reservoir it would not be as buggy.

I was wrong.  Since it had rained every day the past week and it was freakishly hot, the bugs had a field day.  They were everywhere.  Swarms.  Herds.  Packs of bugs.  Everywhere.  And not just flies.  There were bees, hornets, yellow-jackets, what have you, but they were buzzing about all over the place.  Giant insects the size of my pointer finger, and which I can only describe as a sort of flying cricket, ruled the air.  They leaped and jumped and seemed to be after me—as if they could smell my fear.  The Quabbin Reservoir was in desperate need of some air traffic control.  The ironic part was that I—with an intense, boarding on insane phobia of bugs—seemed to be the only person who even noticed their existence.

Swatting, I ventured out of the trees and into the clearing, where the sky seemed to stretch on forever, all blue and cloudless melding with the water.  The bright sun streaming down made even the air sparkle and the whole Reservoir smelled of what Yankee Candle tries to bottle with labels like “Perfection” or “Tranquility”.  I wanted to be brave and not let my out of control fear ruin my trip, so I attempted to make my way past a concrete barrier and towards a better view of the sprawling valley.  I noticed an elderly couple was just on the other side enjoying the scenery, and they seemed perfectly content and bugless.  As I neared the barrier, it became apparent to me that a colony of bees had marked their territory, calling this place home.  I scooted as quickly as I could, and as far up on the grassy bank as I could, to get around the bees, but it was no use.  They were everywhere.  The couple seemed not to notice them, and thankfully paid no attention to my fitful panic attack, as I swatted and ran, silently screaming, for my life.  Safely—or rather simply amid a smaller swarm of bugs and bees—on my original side, I stretched my five foot three inch self as tall as I could, and with the camera over my head, snapped a picture of the breathtaking—no pun intended—valley.

This was my experience of the Quabbin Reservoir: a continuous and tiresome series of shrieks, shrills, swatting, sprints, and snapping of pictures, until having made it about half way down the paved path opposite the barrier, I could fair no more near death encounters and retreated half-jogging and sweaty to the safety of my Camry.  I checked myself as best I could for extra passengers clinging to my clothes and hair and very literary, jumped into my car locking the doors, as if the bugs might attempt a break-in.  My breathing finally began to calm, and just as I was about to start my car for a little air, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a cell phone sized insect attached to my passenger side window!  I screamed for about three minutes, alarming the man climbing into his car beside me, and decided that being a little warm wasn’t the end of the world.  I was disappointed that I never made it far enough to actually see the Reservoir, but I knew there was absolutely no chance of me leaving the vehicle until I was back at my apartment.  Then it hit me: I would drive through.  All the other cars that did not stop at the tiny parking lot were continuing onto somewhere; I might as well join them.  It was truly the best of both worlds: I was safe from the bloodthirsty insects in my rather warm tank, all the while snapping pictures of the fiery foliage as I slowly crawled along, keeping tabs on the whereabouts of my unwelcomed guest, should the bug attempt to MacGyver his way into my car.