Getting Out: Berkshire Weekend

Finding the spot

Justin had been vacationing in the Berkshires, visiting his friend Johnny (aka Biltmore). Johnny worked for the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) as the director of the northeast region or something like that. He lived in a cabin of sorts on the property of an organic meat farmer named Dom. Justin had been out there a handful of times, including a weekend where they slaughtered some of Dom’s chickens at a neighboring farm.

Back in July, I had organized a camping trip out near Conway, NH with some of the Portsmouth folk. Justin enjoyed the hiking and that, but wasn’t overexcited about staying in a campground with strange camp hosts and cars all around and just general reminders of industrialized life. He preferred backpacking trips where you hike all your gear and food in and immerse yourself in the wilderness. The idea is nice and doable for people who have the gear and the will, but getting a number of friends out on the trail might have been more effort than it’s worth.

So on one of his weekends out in the Berkshires, Johnny showed Justin a cabin that was about ¼ mile off a remote road. The spot would allow for the car camping types to have access to any desired amenities and the backpacking types to be away from the cars and the people and everything else that might detract from the experience. The cabin had a woodstove and bunks to sleep eight or so. It was also right on the Appalachian Trail so we wouldn’t have to drive to get to great hikes. So he came back from a weekend out there and described the place and started getting a weekend together.

As he started getting it planned, it turned out that first available weekend was the first one of November. The idea of how cold and miserable it might be in the mountains in November was a bit of a deterrent, but the cabin with it’s wood stove and the chance of foliage counterbalanced the weather. Justin sent out the email to get people going and Johnny and his girlfriend Kate and her sister Meg and our friend from growing up Jason and I signed up.

Getting out

Justin was working down in our old hometown, Medfield. He was building his second spec house in hopes of selling it for some kind of profit. I was living Portsmouth, NH and working up in Portland, ME Monday-Wednesday and from home Thursday and Friday. Earlier in the week, Justin had been up in Portsmouth and we text messaged Jason from a bar one night to see if he really was coming. He confirmed and said that he’d be up Saturday morning.

I drove down to Medfield Friday morning to meet Justin and make the longish drive out to western Mass together. Arriving at his house a bit late after a horrible traffic jam, Justin was in the shower. I had stopped in downtown Medfield and picked up a sausage pizza from Royal, which makes the best pizza in the world. Justin’s dad, Chuck, who I’d known for over 15 years was home and invited me in to his office to chat. So I went in with my pizza and started eating and Chuck asked me if I was still in the stock market. I said not really and he said him neither. In fact, he had just sold everything and bought a house in Florida. It was 3:30 and he was drinking a glass of wine and the news didn’t really surprise me so much as make me wonder what strange chain of events had led to this purchase.

At the same time, I was inhaling my pizza. He tried to hand me the photo album with the pictures of the house and I showed him my greasy hands. Chuck was also a photographer of sorts. He offered to get me a napkin, and I grabbed the cloth napkin I had grabbed off the kitchen table on the way in. I reluctantly put down my pizza, wiped off my hands, and started leafing through the album.

And as I leafed through the album, Chuck told me the story of how he came to own this house. The details were many and perhaps private and but suffice it to say bizarre. Either way it was a good way to pass the time and I was able to finish my pizza and reunite with Chuck, who I was always happy to talk with.

Without further ado, Justin came down from his room and we gathered his dog Izzy and jumped in the SUV and were off. The ride went fairly quickly and we stopped at a liquor store in Great Barrington and Justin picked up a small bottle of Jagermeister and a magnumof Shiraz and soon enough we reached Dom’s farm.

The Farm

It was dark when we pulled up along the side of the road outside the farm. Izzy had known for a couple miles before arriving that we were almost there and had been whining and wheezing and straining from the backseat, as if she wanted to jump in the front seat and take the wheel and double the speed. We got out of the SUV and Izzy jumped out and a pack of dogs started barking and coming toward us. We walked across the lawn in the dark and a little black lab, Johnny’s dog Goober approached me with something that looked like a toy or a ball. I reached down to grab it out of her mouth and stopped just short upon smelling the foul rotting flesh smell radiating from the thing. Izzy joined the pack of dogs and they went off into the night to do their dog things.

Justin and I entered the house. Meg was positioned at the stove stirring a pan of fragrant chopped meat. She put down her wooden spoon and gave us a hug. Meg was tall and thin with curly brownish hair and the thick plastic rimmed glasses of an unabashed academic. Just behind her was her older sister Kate, who also gave us a big hug. Kate was short and blond and fit and happily covered in traildust. Behind the stove was an old rustic table where sat Johnny and a trail worker named Kevin (not to be confused with the author).

I had met Johnny and Kate and Meg several times before as Johnny and Kate sporadically came out of the mountains and down to Portsmouth for a bit civilization and at least one night of all out partying. Johnny and Justin had met at UNH years before. After a prolonged academic experience prior to graduating, Justin went on to pursue a number of unconventional occupations including working for a band that toured the country for a year and a half, managing a fleet of ice cream trucks, day trading, becoming a carpenter and then building his own spec houses. When Johnny graduated, he went into the woods. I could never have claimed to have known Johnny’s personal philosophy, but it seemed to have somewhere it core: Nature = Good; People Messing With Nature = Very Bad. He was a blond pony-tailed, long bearded guy who had gone off to work in the mountains. Kate and Johnny shared many of the same expressions and implementations of how humans should live within Nature and spent a lot of time together on the trails in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Alongside studying botany or forestry in college, Johnny seemed to be an ardent student of nature and could point out many of the interesting plants and trees and other details of the forest as you walked along with him. On top of that, he was a walking encyclopedia of many things historical including architecture, politics, sports and who knows what else. In a nutshell, he was the kind of guy you’d want to have with you when playing trivial pursuit or out for a night of pubquiz.

As we settled in, the conversation quickly turned to alcohol. Justin mentioned the Jagermeister that he had picked up and Kate gleefully proclaimed that we should drink it now while we all had empty stomachs. After doing a reality check to see if that was really was what called for, Justin went out and got the 375 bottle. I asked for a beer and Justin, Kate, Meg, and Dom quickly polished off the bottle (amounting to about two good size shots a piece).

The next item on the agenda was dinner. Dom had suggested a café down in Great Barrington that turned into a Mexican restaurant on weekend nights. We headed into town and Izzy burped a dead animal burp. The cafe was found and immediately greeting us was a Mexican man asking if we had made reservations for 6 people prior to seeing a movie. The fact that we were 7 people and weren’t going to see a movie and didn’t make a reservation seemed to desperately confuse him. Nonetheless, he sat us in the corner and rolled out the menus and waters and chips and salsa and took our drink orders and Meg exchanged unknown thoughts with him in Spanish.

The décor of the space was fascinating. The regular coffee shop furnishings had been overlaid with Mexican ones, including a Virgin Mary with a candle, Aztec looking birds, handwritten signs about the virtues of patience, and more. It became difficult to discern what decorations originated from the café and what had been overlaid by the Mexicans. Starting into the Margaritas and beer, we tried to imagine the operation of putting them up and taking them down every weekend night.

The menu itself was another whole world. The appetizers included fried grasshoppers and spicy corn on the cob while the entrees included braised goat and funky pork along with the expected choices of enchiladas and chile rejanos. The kitchen also prepared 6 or 8 different moles (pronounce mol-ehs). The moles were traditional Mexican sauces of which the waiter had brought out samples so each could select an appropriate one for their dish. Some were green, some were brown, some were red and each somehow very similar to one another and yet vastly different. When it came time to chose the mole, some of us worried quite intently if it would indeed be the proper choice.

Many other events occurred including Meg trying to use Kate’s cigarette rolling machine outside on the porch, volunteering Justin for a sexual experiment, Meg trying to eat the friend grasshoppers, Johnny’s reaction to the huge funky pork covered in a dark mole, and one of the attendants, enchanted with Meg’s Spanish, giving her his phone number. But it was time to get on to the cabin after a quick stop at the grocery store for supplies.

Friday night at the cabin

Driving quite a ways into the dark Berkshire woods, we arrived at the trail up to the cabin. We all ported our stuff up the short trail under the light of our LED headlamps. The other Kevin had already arrived and was inside reading. We broke out essential supplies including the magnum of wine, a twelve pack of beer, a bottle of skunked fancy beer, a jug of beer from a brewery, cigarettes, a propane lantern, sweaters, sleeping bags and pads. We sat around the provided table, casually drinking and talking. The girls started getting tired and Johnny hadn’t had a good night of drinking for a while and asked if anyone wanted to join him in building a fire and tackling the jug of beer. I volunteered.

Johnny and I pulled up on the bench before the fire with the steady wind at our backs. Justin sat another table by the fire with his bottle of wine. Johnny and I slugged on the beer and smoked cigarettes and we all talked about the lay of the land and where to hike the next day and we threw logs on the flames. Justin made his way to his sleeping bag and Johnny and I finished the business of the jug and then Johnny retired.

I grabbed another beer from the 12 pack and sat alone on the bench by the dying fire. The sky absolutely clear and the stars vibrated out their yellows, reds and blues. Planning for the trip back in a cold, rainy and windy October, I had pictured rain, gray skies, cold and remembered the mild hypothermia I experience hiking with Jason and Justin in the white mountains more than a decade before. The night before we left, I had packed a hat and gloves and polypro thermal underwear and wool socks and my winter parka and an extra wool blanket to buffet my 20 degree sleeping bag. Instead, at midnight the air was most of sixty degrees, practically tropical for November in the Appalachians. I knocked down and spread out the fire the best I could and crawled into my bag and slept soundly, with the exception of Johnny’s dog Goober approaching too much like a member of the weasel family a few hours later.

Hanging in the breeze

I heard the stirrings Saturday morning as the people who went to bed before me pissed and made tea and oatmeal and eggs and whatever else people do in the morning. Snug in my bag and dreaming about something that was at the time fascinating to my subconscious, I drifted through the early morning. At some point later on, Jason arrived at my post and woke me up. Dude, it’s ten-thirty, time to get up! Holy Jesus, Jason was already there and he had already driven 2 or 3 hours that morning. In as much as I might be said to hop out of bed, I hopped out of bed and made my tea and smoked my cigarette and got myself outfitted for the hike, which, in keeping with my blustery November visions, consisted of jeans a t-shirt, a fleece vest with a polypro top and a rain/wind jacket in my bag. When I lived in Colorado, you might freeze your butt off hiking in late July, so, despite the absolutely balmy weather, I decided to prepare for the worst that November in Berkshires at 2500 feet could deliver. Justin rounded up the ingredients for his trail pizzas: pita bread, pepperonis, pizza sauce, and packets of cheddar cheese. The girls and the other Kevin went off to other things, promising to return with the fixings for dinner that evening.

Johnny, Jason, their dogs Izzy and Goober, Jason and I all headed off for a hike to a mountain right where Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York all converged at one point. The first part was a relatively steep ascent on a trail through the brush that overlooked the bright yellows and reds of the trees below. In varying degrees of fitness, we hiked along as the dogs scurried back and forth between the first hiker and the last. Although I was sweating bullets in my jeans and fleece vest, I was sure that they would become necessary as the winds would pick up closer to the top. I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was in the sixties and the shone shone brightly through the dry air, but I left on my vest out laziness, stubbornness, or some perverted act of punishment.

While state boundaries are often at least semi-arbitrary, for some reason the marker where the threes states converged was an item of interest. The rubbed our hands on it and read the state names and wondered aloud about whether the actual boundary was there or somewhere else. The dogs marked the general area with their piss shots and I took some pictures. And even if our conduct was somewhat self-conscious or ironic, how intrigued we were with the rational idea of boundaries laid atop our physically congruous world.

Leaving the marker behind, it was a pleasant jaunt to the top of the mountain. Along the way, we saw a couple of hunters standing by a fork in the trail, one with a mustache and the other with a rock in his hand. They stood flat on their feet and their eyes darted a bit and a camouflage backpack rested on the ground. We continued on and soon came up behind a man who labored under a huge egg shaped backpack that was almost pointed at the top and sagged hopelessly at the bottom. He had a clean long brown ponytail and neither his shorts nor his boots were dirty enough to be those of a backpacker. We passed him and arrived at the top and wondered about the man with the saggy pack. Just as we started to put it together, another woman near us on the top started pulling a parasail out of a similarly shaped pack. It turned out that the ridge where we had hiked to was an opportune spot for parasailing and both the New England and New York parasailing clubs were meeting there that day for some thermodynamic fun.

As more and more parasailers arrived, we all moved out of the way and over to a spot where we could eat our lunch and watch the activity. Golden brown grass blanketed the top yielding to stunted pine and brush. A fog hung over the valley beneath us and Johnny pointed out that it was not fog, but rather pollution from the factories of the Midwest and all the cars and emissions from the Northeast corridor that became caught up in prevailing weather patterns and snaked its way through the mountains at certain favorable altitudes. He went on to talk about the degradation of lung capacity that had been measured in hikers climbing through this layer of noxious particles. I had been camping all my life, hiking around the mountains of New England since adolescence and nobody had ever told me that quaint fog that hangs over valleys was quite often pollution, especially if seen on a dry day such as that one. It really shifted my world view of the tangibility of pollution in places so remote from its origin.

We sat down in the grass and pulled out the fixings for trail pizzas and the dogs sniffed around and we watched the parasailers get ready. Many of them were from other countries and the man with the long brown ponytail shouted loudly to the Brazilian or the Russian various things about their ethnic character. He drank a red bull and smoked a cigarette and threw the butt in the rock cairn marking the mountain top. Johnny spotted this and yelled over for the guy to pack his trash out. The man joked that that was where they always put them. Some of the others apologized for the man, saying that when they go to dinner they make him eat in the car.

As the first one filled his sail with the warm air of a thermal rising up the ridge and floated precariously over the trees before making a steady ascent, Goober started barking and retreating toward the pines as if some massive and predatory bird had entered the sky. Johnny tried to calm her down, but she wouldn’t relent and ran off into the cover of the trees.

We lazed for an hour periodically napping, eating, checking for ticks, and keeping tabs on Goober. Jason popped off for a quick poop in the woods at one point. Izzy scoured under every blade of grass for dropped crumbs. About a dozen people were gliding around on the thermals as Johnny coaxed Goober out of the woods and headed back down the trail. Along the way, we found that the hunters had made a fire where we found them and left it smouldering with a plastic ice tea bottle melting over the coals. Johnny scowled and picked up the bottle and covered their firepit with rocks and dirt and we made our way back to the cabin.

Saturday night at the cabin

Upon arriving back at the cabin, we took off our boots and made tea and speculated on when the girls and Kevin would show up with the ingredients for dinner. Jason went down to the car for a beer run. Johnny and Justin read some national geographics and I played with the dogs. I found a good long stick and went over to the stream where the land sloped down to on either side. From atop one bank I would hurl the stick like a javelin to the other side and watch as the dogs ran down one slope, through the stream and up the other to find the stick. They would then wrestle each other for the stick until I called them back and they would both carry it back down through the stream and back up to me so I could it throw it back to the other and start all over again. I did this until it got nearly dark. Then we collected firewood and got the fire going.

Jason returned with the beer and we pulled some out and put the rest down in the stream to chill. On relatively empty stomachs, we started to drink the beer and wait for the other to arrive. Hours went by and we drank beer. I started to think they thought we could fend for ourselves and decided to do something different. Around that time, a search helicopter started to circle above us, shining its spotlight down through the trees. Long after the girls had arrived, the helicopter continued to circle and circle.

They brought hamburger from Dom’s farm and we chopped garlic and patted out burgers and cooked them up with some soup Justin had. Meg and Kate had brought rum and coke and they quickly started catching up on the drinking work we had done while they were gone. We wolfed down the food and did some good sitting around the fire while the spotlight occasionally streaked across us.

Meg was planning on publishing a small literary magazine with an old short story of mine, a couple of her poems, and works from others down in the Manhattan area. We asked her to read some of her work and she reluctantly retrieved a few sheets of paper and read aloud three for us. We then passed around one of them and some of us read it aloud again so we could hear what it was like when different people read it. She told us some of the stories behind the words.

The night wore on people drunkenly started slipping off to bed. At one point, Jason said he saw a flare go off somewhere in the distance behind me. I thought it must be the people the helicopter was searching for. Others said it might be the rescuers telling the copter they had found what they were looking for and not to bother anymore. I decided I had to go down and make sure nobody was in need of help. Justin protested that he had heard three cars drive by since the flare and they would have been able to provide whatever service was required. I pictured people lost and injured in the night and out of the sight and earshot of cars and steadfast in my intoxicated maintained that I would bring Izzy with me and go. Probably out of fear that I would wander off the trail and require my own search party, Jason accompanied me and Izzy as we tromped through the mud and puddles left over from heavy rains weeks prior. We staggered down to the road and I shouted out … Is anybody out there? … Does anybody need help. There was no answer and we turned around and went back up the hill and had another beer and went to bed.

The long trail home

By the time I got up on Sunday, everyone but Jason and Justin had left. I made my tea and smoked one of Kate’s cigarettes, since me, Jason and Johnny had smoked all the ones I had brought for myself. I packed up what was left of my stuff and we hiked down to the car. Jason actually had to visit a worksite in a faraway place in northeastern Massachusetts that afternoon and needed to get on the road. It was Johnny’s mother’s birthday so him and Kate and Meg and Kevin went back to the farm so he could ride his bike out to see her. Justin and I drove out to a trailhead to take a hike up the other side of the valley. This side was thickly forested, the ground covered in leafs. We followed Izzy up the trail which wound through the trees and broke onto craggy rock near the top. We walked along the ridge, looking down farmland and land preserves and lakes and ponds and the roads that wound through it all. At a little nook in the trees, we sat down to eat up the last of the trail pizzas. We sat in the sun for a while and talked about the phenomenon of watching two people talking who are misunderstanding what the other is talking about, the strangeness of watching two people carry on a conversation that somehow moves forward without shared meaning. As we finished up the last of the pepperoni and cheese, we speculated on cholesterol actually does in our bodies, besides pile up in the arteries. As we started down, I found some animal crap that had lots of hair in it tried to imagine what predator had dropped it and we walked back down the hill.

From there, we went back to the farm to see the animals and say goodbye to Kate and Meg. Justin and Izzy and one of the farm dogs showed me around the property. We saw two female pigs with a bunch of sucklings. Justin pointed out that the mothers don’t care which piglets are their own and share their teats with all indiscriminately. We then walked on to cows and slid under the electric fence and went to visit the big tan one named Buttercup. As I stroked her face, she made a big groan and then farted and let out a massive pattie. That being done, we started back and ran into Meg and Kate with Goober by the pigs. Poor Goober accidentally bumped into the electric fence and yelped only to be attacked by the farm dog. The farm dog chased her a bit until Goober stopped, put her tail between her legs and did what Justin called, the “submissive piss”, which apparently is the lowest level a dog can sink to in the pack hierarchy, short of exile I would have guessed. After that, it was on to visit the baby cows that have a tendency to stick their nose in a human male’s crotch while looking for milk. And then onto the big highland cows that were kept across the street in a separate field. We walked over, were greeted by another farm’s dog who tried unsuccessfully to intimidate everyone one of us except Goober. These highland cows had long shaggy hair and large horns. They gave the impression they could mess you up if they wanted. Our assignment from Dom was to walk along the perimeter of the electric fence and make sure no stick or other debris was touching the wire. Justin and Kate walked one way and Meg and I the other met somewhere near the middle.

Justin and I were on our way to Great Barrington to get some food and visit a teahouse and get me some smokes. We tried to convince Meg and Kate to come along, but Meg was going back to New York soon, so they stayed behind to get ready to depart. We drove along into town and I got an ostrich burger at 44 Railroad St or something like that. And finally, we hit the road and headed back to Medfield, with me sleeping much of the way. I transferred my stuff from Justin’s truck into mine, stopped in and said hello to my parents for a brief moment before heading back up the hour and a half to Portsmouth. My mom had made me a baked ziti to bring back to my house, which was much appreciated. I also begged some of their good tea for bring back for the morning, as I had none at the house. I wearily drove home up the I95 and said goodnight to my Berkshire weekend.