Northampton - Sunderland Loop

24 miles       Paved Roads
Parking: Damon Road and Rail Trail Bridge
Northampton, Hadley, Sunderland    

There is no way I can make indoor winter training into an interesting post. Other people are good at it, but it is beyond me. January 2nd, over three weeks ago, was my last outdoor ride.

Today, my training plan called for 2-1/2 hours of easy riding, preferably on a flat to rolling course outdoors.The first photo is yesterday, out my window. The second is what I found out there, when I went out to investigate.

The next pictures shows you what I decided. Those tracks are Papillon (for you nonregular readers, that's my sweet bike) and me, well, our tracks, emerging from barn storage. What's wierd about the next photo? Papillon does not have a kickstand and she stands proud and upright in the icy snow.

 

I drove over to the Connecticut River Valley, and rode from Northampton up to Sunderland, crossed the river, and back to the car. The weather is different there, 1600 feet lower. Today's is a very flat ride that I enjoy a few times a year, usually when it is cold or icy in the Berkshires. My ride passed by a preserved house, and that is fine, a good thing.  Someday I'll stop and go in. It is a pretty, expansive building that doesn't show well in the photo. There is history here, old by US standards, where that means towns that date from the early to mid 19th century. Not very old really, but still it is difficult for us to keep even that.

I continue to wonder that our culture requires preservation trusts to keep using our old houses. Every time I am there, I regret the ongoing loss of farmland, and today I saw adjacent signs both advertising different  60+ acres for sale. Both specified buildings and more than 80% tillable. Judging from the barns, right now it is tobacco land, not a laudable crop. But if the land is lost to suburbs, it is lost to the possibility of any crop.

I rode past these two empty houses, that almost certainly were once working farms, and wondered what would become of them, if they would obtain a huge community-wide effort to continue using them, or if they would be lost to history and replaced by...?

It's odd to me that buildings don't just ... last, stay maintained, go on through time, since they exist and house and serve people. In our culture it takes such an effort not to tear things down and destroy them, why is that? It is also true, I think, that we humans tend with time to accept whatever is going on around us as "normal," and sometimes, scary thought, as "right." But it could be equally "normal" and "right" to maintain our housing and farms, support our old schools and not throw away or destroy everything in favor of the new.



Cross Connecticut River on pedestrian bridge. First left, unmarked, then left on Rt. 47 Left again on Rt. 116 and across the Connecticut River in Sunderland. First left onto River Rd.Follow to  Main St. /Elm St./left onto 5/10. Left, then left at Rt. 9 back to parking lot. Click here for this route on Map My Ride, with cue sheet and map.

Berkshire Cycling: The Landscape of Home, 3

Land Use

This weekend brought three sunny days in a row, and it is a good start to November when I get on the bike every day. Though most of last weekend's snow has melted, when the sides of the road are white, it's chilly on a bike. There's a skim of ice on the swamp, which doesn't melt off until the  afternoon sun has some time to do its work.


It is always warmer in the valleys, so Friday I drove to Pittsfield, parked in the giant and oh-so-American parking lot at the giant grocery store on Rt. 7 (where everything anyone actually needs is located in the perimeter aisle or two) and rode across Dan Fox Drive, then south on Swamp Road to West Stockbridge. I was hoping for lunch at Cafe Pomo d'Oro, but it was past tourist season, and Scott is only open on Saturday and Sunday.


Sunday, looking for somewhat warmer temperatures, I drove to the Connecticut River Valley with temperatures rising into the 50s. Parking on Damon Rd., I used the rail trail to cross the river, rode up Rt. 47 to Sunderland, crossed back west over the river on Rt. 116, and returned south on River Road. It makes a nice, very flat 26 miles, with not much bothersome traffic, although the road is busy, and cluttered with shopping malls on the west side at Northampton.

This is traditionally farmland. Sadly, most has been lost to housing. There remain some small vegetable farms, and tobacco, a profitable crop. You still see drying barns on the landscape. I know next to nothing about its history: one of the remaining large farms had a sign reading: established 1953. I wondered if 58 years makes an old farm here.

This time, more than my other trips, it has been a hard re-entry, from riding in southern France to riding at home again, and I'm not yet sure precisely why. Maybe a part of it is returning at the approach of winter, the time of year to put the bike away for months. But for whatever reason, I am constantly conscious of the cultural differences. The similarities and differences between the two countries fascinate me.

The landscape is beautiful here, also. Differently, though there seems so little open space between towns, we fill most every spot along the road with houses. And the more houses we have, the bigger we make the roads, and the more traffic they accommodate, the further away from jobs and towns go the houses, and  the more houses (and so commuters) there are, the bigger we make the roads. One man I met in France, talking about suburban sprawl around Toulouse, said that France of course keeps space for farmland, it needs the food. He said, compared to the U.S, it is a small country, so there must be space for farms. Now, you need to know that  Toulouse is a beautiful, cosmopolitan city, with major industry, the fourth largest city in France, and I was, by the efficient, affordable, train system, less than  hour away ... still,  commuting is just arriving there. Try to imagine that: outside the 4th biggest city in the US,  an hour away by train, there is virtually no commuting, a distinct local culture, and a small city surrounded by productive farmland. It is almost unimaginable, in a place where there is barely a rural gap between Boston and Richmond.




Riding along, it is impossible not to notice that along these roads our culture  leaves far more litter, thrown from car windows. I have no idea why we do this, or what we are thinking, when we do it ... probably we are not thinking. The roads here are also beautiful, though there always seems to be more traffic. The two things may be related. We are always driving somewhere, and always eating and drinking: coffee, chips, donuts, a soda in hand as we go ... and then thrown out the window into the landscape. Not to mention, based on the litter, how much boozing goes on in cars. It escapes me, but is perhaps because generally, culturally, we don't walk or cycle our roads, and experience them only as  passageways that we speed insularly through. In any case there is a constant stream of litter roadside here.


Three days off work, all sunny, three rides. A fine weekend and an excellent beginning to November.

Berkshire Cycling: The Landscape of Home, 2

Why Cycling?

Every local ride is a little more delicious now, stolen from the encroaching winter season. This week I rode most every day after work (the semi-annual change in the clock will put an end to that all too soon) and got in one flat, fast ride on Friday.


Chores took me to Northampton, in the Connecticut River Valley, and I couldn't resist riding north along the river, crossing over the bridge to Sunderland, and returning south on the east side. Unfortunately, you can only really see the river from the two bridges. The landscape in between includes a few working farms hanging on amidst the ever-encroaching suburban housing that we call North America. The land itself is very fertile farmland, but the development pressure on it is intense.

I got to thinking again about the quality of cycling experiences. One contributing element is sport, the sheer, unadulterated, physical pleasure of it. The feeling of pushing and pulling those pedals around, and around. The challenge of the hill, the speed of the descent, the pace of rolling hills or long flat stretches. The varying experiences that different weather conditions create. This physical quality is enough to keep cycling fun, engaging, an important part of my world. Similar in many ways to the role of cross-country skiing.


Also though, an element of the best cycling experience is travel. The excitement found in exploring and experiencing a new landscape and culture. That irreplaceable sense of adventure, of change, of not knowing what the days will bring, of something-new-is-going-to-happen. Traveling by cycle offers the perfect pace to experience, to see, smell, touch, interact with the landscape and culture. It provides an excellent way to meet people. All that, while still including the physical experience.



Putting traveling and cycling together is a dangerously exciting combination in my world.  Especially when the riding is really, truly, class-one, super-excellent, unquestionably great riding. And if that unbelievable riding is paired with and immersed in a brilliant, very old  culture, rich with history, art and architecture, not to mention incredible food, it can become an amazing experience. Intense, and containing the possibility of changing the person experiencing it. Certainly not replicable, but perhaps an experience that can be built and expanded on. Therein lies more of the difference in the quality of riding in my home landscape and in France.


But back to today. I was riding along at a decent pace, musing about this kind of thing, probably getting slower and slower with reflection,  when four cyclists passed me. Not so unusually, my competitive switch had been somehow left on, and I picked up my pace. Unusually though, I kept up with those riders, until it began to feel a bit rude since I wasn't sure the man in green knew I was behind him. Hello, I said, I usually ride alone and sometimes get lazy, where are you headed? Turned out he is from Spain, south and west of the Pyrenees, though lives in CT now, and the group had driven north to ride in the river valley. Some of his friends caught up, they slowed as their own conversation started, and I picked my pace up a bit more and finished out the ride.




Right now, I'm left remembering something one of the funniest, most ironic and facetious, of writers I've read said: "We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible." ---Oscar Wilde. Ironic as it is, I'll go for that!

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