2000s Archive

Pioneering Spirit

Originally Published November 2005
On a fine fall day, ‘Happy Valley’ in Massachusetts may be as close to Rural Bliss as you can get.

Every fall, a mysterious stranger sends scores of long-stem roses to the Emily Dickinson Homestead, in Amherst, Massachusetts—one blossom for each year that has passed since the poet’s birth. This year, assuming tradition holds, 175 of the flowers will appear in time for the birthday celebration, on Saturday, December 10, and be given away to those who are there. Last year, I dropped in for the 174th birthday, a convivial open house attended mostly by local residents. I met some old friends, among them an academic couple who years earlier had arranged to have their marriage ceremony conducted in the poet’s bedroom. I had some gingerbread cookies made from Dickinson’s recipes, and collected a yellow rose to take home to my daughter. The world regards Emily Dickinson as a genius. People who live in Amherst don’t disagree, but they also tend to see her in rather personal terms.

History—especially cultural history—is an emphatic presence in the Pioneer Valley, best known these days as the home of the “Five Colleges”—Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. For the traveler, and for those of us who live here, too, it’s the perennial collision of tradition and youth that manages to provide the place with much of its agreeable texture.

Fall is the valley’s best time. In the morning, the high ground may be bathed in sunlight, but mist over the Connecticut River covers the valley floor; it burns off by midday, revealing a sudden sky of cornflower blue and an afternoon of that soft light and solemn stillness known at no other time of the year. Where better to be during this season than on a college campus? The calendar year may be winding down, but for students time is just beginning: term papers, finals, graduation, life itself—all that is an eon away. Walking among the backpacks, you may recall the eternity that an autumn day could once contain.

The two biggest college towns, Amherst and Northampton, serve as the twin hubs of the valley, and the life of the campuses inhabits and energizes them. It hasn’t always been thus. Once town and gown kept to themselves, and the place was beautiful but austere. Then, a generation ago, something happened: Essentially, the kids forgot to go home. Yurts sprang up in the hills and, even as the tie-dyed revolution ran its course, the Happy Valley, as it came to be known, turned into a popular place for young graduates not only to hang out but to hang on. Some alumni (like me) went away for a few years only to be drawn back by a place that was a lot livelier than the one we had left. Today’s gray-haired ponytailed set includes many a former communard, a little tamer now, of course. That guy who toppled the electric tower to protest nuclear energy? Now he sits on the planning board. Students still choose to settle and seek a fortune as countercultural merchants, organic farmers, artists, and artisans. A group of people pursuing careers their parents hadn’t imagined for them: This tends to produce a certain egalitarian spirit. Your massage therapist has his doctorate in philosophy, and maybe that’s why he understands you so well.

I remember a valley that had essentially two restaurants to choose from when parents came to town. Both places are still here: Wiggins Tavern, in the Hotel Northampton, and the Lord Jeffery Inn, in Amherst. (Two restaurants, but essentially one menu; what else would the young man have but shrimp cocktail and “prime rib au jus”?) Recent years have seen a flowering of cuisine, much of it ethnic. You can find about a dozen Asian restaurants of one variety or another, from Thai to Tibetan, in Northampton alone. Nor has Western cooking been ignored. We don’t yet have that worth-a-journey restaurant, but adventurous chefs, notably at Sienna, in South Deerfield, and Circa, in Northampton, are making great use of local farm products, and each has won a devoted following.

Both Amherst and Northampton mercifully escaped the “urban renewal” that ravaged Springfield, to the south. The town centers maintain stolid 19th-century brick façades that have nicely accommodated New Age business. No megamalls, but for a certain sort of shopper it’s paradise enough. Especially for the bibliophile. Along with boutiques and cafés, new- and used-book shops stud the streets of both towns. And a few miles up the road, in the village of Montague, there’s the mammoth Book Mill, with its charming slogan: “Books you don’t need, in a place you can’t find.” The truth is, we have discovered the joys of commerce here, but we like it topped with irony. The proprietors of Fly by Night Furniture would agree.

Culturally, the valley has always stood a bit apart from the world, provincial and proud of it. Settled a generation after Plymouth, but lying 100 miles inland, the region developed a literary sensibility that endures to this day. No other similar stretch of American turf has accounted for so much of our great verse, from the 17th-century metaphysical poet Edward Taylor to a giant of our own time, Richard Wilbur—with Emily Dickinson presiding over all.

Puritanism died hard here, if indeed it’s fully dead. Current incarnation: poli-tical correctness. Northampton, after all, was the home of preacher Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening he led in the 18th century. We live at the outer edge of Boston’s sphere of influence—drive an hour west, to towns like Lenox and Great Barrington, and you’ve entered cultural New York. I once had brunch in Great Barrington, and, good Lord, they were drinking Bloody Marys and listening to jazz! In Northampton, you’re more likely to go to the Haymarket Cafe for coffee and some petition signing.

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