Greylock is certainly the most literary of Appalachian mountains. Herman Melville, living
on a farm called Arrowhead on its western side, stared at it from his study window while
he wrote Moby-Dick, and, according to Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow in their excellent
Into the Mountains, a history of New England's peaks, claimed that its profile reminded
him of a whale. When the book was finished, he and a group of friends hiked to the top
and partied there till dawn. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edith Wharton also lived nearby and
set works there, and there was scarcely a literary figure associated with New England
from the 1850s to 1920s who didn't at some time hike or ride up to admire the view.
Ironically, at the height of its fame, Greylock lacked much of the green-cloaked majesty
it enjoys today. Its sides were mangy with the scars of logging, and the lower slopes were
pitted with slate and marble quarries. Big, ramshackle sheds and sawhouses poked into
every view. All that healed and grew over, but then in the 1960s, with the enthusiastic
support of state officials in Boston, plans were drawn up to turn Greylock into a ski resort,
with an aerial tram, a network of chairlifts, and a summit complex consisting of a hotel,
shops, and restaurants (all in soaring 1960s Jetsons-style architecture) but luckily nothing
ever came of it. Today Greylock sits on 11,600 acres of preserved land. It's a beauty.
The hike to the top was steep, hot, and seemingly endless, but worth the effort. The
open, sunny, fresh-aired summit of Greylock is crowned with a large, handsome stone
building called Bascom Lodge, built in the 1930s by the tireless cadres of the Civilian
Conservation Corps. It now offers a restaurant and overnight accommodation to hikers.
Also on the summit is a wonderful, wildly incongruous lighthouse (Greylock is 140 miles
from the sea), which serves as the Massachusetts memorial for soldiers killed in the First
World War. It was originally planned to stand in Boston Harbor but for some reason
ended up here.
I ate my lunch, treated myself to a pee and a wash in the lodge, and then hurried on,
for I still had eight miles to go and had a rendezvous arranged with my wife at four in
Williamstown. For the next three miles, the walk was mostly along a lofty ridgeline
connecting Greylock to Mount Williams. The views were sensational, across lazy hills to
the Adirondacks half a dozen miles to the west, but it was really hot. Even up here the air
was heavy and listless. And then it was a very steep descent--3,000 feet in three miles--
through dense, cool green woods to a back road that led through exquisitely pretty open
countryside.
Out of the woods, it was sweltering. It was two miles along a road totally without
shade and so hot I could feel the heat through the soles of my boots. When at last I
reached Williamstown, a sign on a bank announced a temperature of 97. No wonder I
was hot. I crossed the street and stepped into a Burger King, our rendezvous point. If
there is a greater reason for being grateful to live in the twentieth century than the joy of
stepping from the dog's breath air of a really hot summer's day into the crisp, clean,
surgical chill of an air-conditioned establishment, then I really cannot think of it.
I bought a bucket-sized Coke and sat in a booth by the window, feeling very pleased. I
had done seventeen miles over a reasonably challenging mountain in hot weather. I was
grubby, sweat streaked, comprehensively bushed, and rank enough to turn heads. I was
a walker again.
In 1850, New England was 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent woods. Today the
proportions are exactly reversed. Probably no area in the developed world has undergone
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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