Go west, young man

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Today, I woke up at the Fox Pond Bed and Breakfast in Marblehead.

I had moved out of my apartment over the weekend, and needed a place to stay.

I chose this place because it was the closest bed and breakfast to Boston that was affordable, and it has very good reviews.

It’s roughly a ten minute drive from downtown Salem, which was very convenient for getting food before watching the Oscar broadcast the night before.

Fox Pond is owned by an architect and marine painter.

The rooms are decorated with his pictures of boats and seashores.

His family has lived in the Boston area for over 300 years, and several ancestors fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

There are portraits of some of them in the main rooms of the house.

The owner loves to chat, and can talk about the history of the area for days.

As much as I wanted to stay, today was the day to start out on the road.

Johnny Appleseed

I started the journey by heading west on Route 2.

This is not the most logical choice to make this time of year.

Its late winter in New England, which means that travel is messy at best.

The obvious choice is to head south, where both the latitude and the closeness to the ocean promise less chance of snow

I went west instead to honor the dream of the younger me that inspired this journey in the first place.

Also, route 2 is one of the most historic and beautiful roads in the state.




As I should have expected, the weather was lousy.

It had snowed the day before, so everything except the roads was covered in white.

The precipitation had then changed to ice rain and then just rain, so it was cold and clammy.

The road was foggy to boot.

This nastiness held scenic gold, however.

As I drove, the white-covered landscape emerged from the fog like some sort of dream.

Everything was black, white, and green.

The effect was like driving though an Ansel Adams print.

I drove more slowly than normal for safety reasons, but also to drink it all in.




My first stop investigated a childhood myth.

Every school kid has head of Johnny Appleseed, who wandered through the Midwest in the early 1800’s, sowing apple seeds as he went.

One of my first book reports was on a biography.

Fewer school kids know that Johnny Appleseed was a real person, Jonathan Chapman.

Very few know that he was born in Leominster, in central Massachusetts.

I wanted to find his birthplace.




Until a decade ago, this would have been difficult.

In the centuries after Johnny left, Leominster evolved from an agricultural town to an industrial city, much prouder of being the birthplace of the plastic injection mold (and its most infamous product, the pink plastic lawn flamingo) than anything related to an American myth.

As the local plastics industry went into decline, however, the city rediscovered the tourist value of its role in mythic history.

There is now a tourist center on Route 2 with a display on Jonathan Chapman’s life, and how he became the myth of Johnny Appleseed.

The most important difference between reality and myth is that Jonathan Chapman was actually a pretty clever businessman.

He carefully tended the orchards he planted, and sold much of the fruit to new settlers in the Midwest.

When he died he owned a large amount of land and was fairly wealthy.

As you would expect, the tourist center gift shop sells almost everything apple related, including apple cider, apple butter, and apple jam.




After that stop, I could find his birth place.

After pulling off the highway, I drove past a working farm (which grows corn, not apples, sadly) and down a long hill to a river bridge.

From here, a side road heads into the hills beside the river.

The road is now called Johnny Appleseed Lane.

One important difference from Johnny’s time is that the road is now lined with houses instead of farms and woods.

The birth site is pretty tricky to find, because it falls in the middle of the road instead of the end.

The site itself has a simple marker along with the replica of a frontier cabin.

I then got back on Route 2 and pushed west.

French King Gorge

The next significant sight is one of the best views in all of Massachusetts, the French King Gorge.

The Gorge is a glacial valley of the Connecticut River.

It’s very pretty.

What makes it special is that in the 1930s the Works Progress Administration erected a bridge over the gorge at the height of the cliffs.

In some ways, it is the New River Gorge Bridge of Massachusetts.

The bridge is almost as pretty as the view.

Soon after it was built, people started stopping on the bridge to admire the view.

This was a major safety hazard, so the state built parking lots on either end and added a pedestrian walkway.

This is one of the few areas where one can look down into a valley, from high in the air in the middle.

With the snow on the ground it was especially pretty, with the trees reflected in the river.




The name dates to the early days of European settlement, when a French explorer found the valley, planted his flag on a rock on the river, and declared “I claim this land for the French King”.

Although the English ultimately took over, the name remained.

The rock is still visible in the river when the water is low enough.

Mohawk Trail

Soon after French King is the start of one of the most famous scenic roads in the state, the Mohawk Trail.

It began life as an actual Indian trail.

The Mohawks, who lived in the upper Hudson Valley, would travel over the Berkshire Hills to raid the Algonquians to the east.

After the English took over, the trail was widened into a wagon road.

It was converted into an auto road in 1918, the first paved road in this part of the state.

Soon afterward, people started showing up in large numbers to admire its beauty, especially in the fall.

It was quickly declared the first official scenic highway in the state.

The road is still beautiful, marred only by the pseudo-Indian gift shops found periodically along it.




The first part of the official road rolls though hills west of the Connecticut River valley.

Normally, these have very good views, but I couldn’t see them due to the fog.

It then drops into the valley of the Deerfield River.

Scenery comes thick and fast at this point, with the river flowing on one side and rounded hills stretching away on the other.

Soon enough, the river turns north and the road starts to climb westward.

It does so by following an increasingly narrow series of valleys up the side of major ridge.

The trees stretch far above the road at this point, a world of beautiful white.

The road itself is filled with tricky curves, including the notorious “dead man’s curve” where it makes a near 180 turn around a rock fin.

The gruesome name dates to the wagon road days; this curve is where a wagon driver was most likely to lose control of their horses.




Once at the top, I went from a world of white to a world of pea soup.

The road was now higher than the cloud deck, and visibility was now measured in yards.

I stuck the car in low gear and crawled along.

Soon enough, the road made a hard turn to the right and dropped.

This is the Western Summit, where the trail encounters a U-shaped glacial valley.

The original wagon trail dropped straight down the side, but this was far too steep for an auto road.

The engineers’ solution was ingenious.

They turned the road north, and dropped down the side of the valley wall.

About a third of the way down, they made a 180 degree turn, and continued down heading south.

The end effect is that the road ends up at the bottom of the hill it was previously at the top of.

Westerners will recognize this immediately as a switchback, but the concept was a revelation in 1917!

This is the only switchback on the entire road (and one of only a few in the Eastern US) so it has become the most famous part of the entire trail.

Someone even set up a restaurant at the U turn (which is must better known for the view than the food).




While driving this stretch, I got a small revelation.

In the upper portion I was in the clouds, and could barely see where I was going.

I then dropped below them, and the renowned view appeared all at once.

This view is the first of many amazing views on this trip.




The last item on the trail is an important psychological crossing for me.

Like most New England families, we spent our driving vacations entirely within New England.

We did see other parts of the country, but we always flew there.

The idea of driving to update New York was as remote as the moon.

The border between Massachusetts and New York runs roughly along the Taconic Mountains, so they became the barrier between the known and the unknown, something that is never crossed.

I must note that I have crossed the mountains to visit Albany, the Adirondacks, and other New York sites at this point, but the thrill of that crossing still remains.




The most dramatic of all the Taconic passes is the one used by the Mohawk Trail, Petersburg Pass.

It’s created where two cirques, glacial valleys, almost touch.

The road winds its way up the side of one valley, crosses the thin ridge at the top, and then winds its way down the side of the other.

The views throughout are spectacular.

At the top is a small park with a rather large parking lot.

A quick climb reveals the reason, a massive view containing the Hudson River Valley and Catskills to the west, and Mount Greylock and the Berkshire Hills to the east.

Unfortunately, all I got to see was fog.

Hudson River Valley

Once over the pass, things initially looked similar to the land I had just gone through: rolling hills, farms, and forests.

It could still be the Berkshires except for the funny highway numbers.

That changed soon enough.

While still rolling, the road was definitely doing more down than up.

Soon enough, signs of civilization appeared: houses, stores, and parking lots.

Then the road really changed.

It became ramrod straight, changed to multiple lanes, and started to drop down.

Down, down, down.

I was clearly heading into something new.

Eventually, a long bridge appeared over a wide river.

I was now in Troy in the upper Hudson River Valley, the road trip equivalent of the next town over.

It’s clearly not home, but not very far away either.

The scope of what I was doing finally hit in earnest.




I bought my dinner this night from a convenience store.

Not just any convenience store, however, Stewart’s Shops.

This chain, which is only found near Albany, specializes in selling really good snack food.

It’s so good; it tastes like items from gourmet stores that cost at least three times as much.

I never fail to load up whenever I’m in the area.

Since I had many days of driving ahead of me, I limited myself to one dinner’s worth this time around.

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Photos

Johnny Appleseed
Statue of Johnny Appleseed outside the visitor's center

Route 2 in snow
Roadside on Route 2, covered in snow

Ice tree
Tree covered in ice at the visitor's center

Johnny Appleseed birthplace
Reproduction of the colonial cabin where Johnny Appleseed was born

French King Bridge
Famous bridge over the Conneticut River in central Massachusetts. It was called the most beautiful in the country at the time of its completion in 1936.

French King Gorge
The French King Gorge, as seen from the French King Bridge. The rock for which the gorge is named is barely visible in the middle of the river in the center of the photo.

French King bridge
Hiking across the French King Bridge

View from the Hairpin Turn on Mohawk Trail
During my drive down the trail, the view went from pea soup fog to this. I took the picture at the hairpin turn halfway down.