Mill Brook House News

Black Swallowtail

Sugarshack Restaurants in Western Massachusetts

Gould's, the iconic sugarshack restaurant on Route 2 in Shelburne, has closed.  Gould's has served tourists and locals alike since 1960 and will be sorely missed.  In partial compensation, Hager's, the popular farm store on Route 2 just west of Greenfield, is offering special maple syrup breakfasts on weekends during sugar season along with evaporator demonstrations outdoors just beyond the dining room.
Since the 1930's, the Hager family has been sugaring on their farm in Colrain, where they have their big evaporator and produce about 2000 gallons of syrup per year.  The farm store is open year round, offering baked goods, cooked food for breakfast and lunch, produce, and meat, but the maple breakfasts are only in sugar season.  Delicious doughnuts with maple cream frosting are available from their baked goods case throughout the year, however.

Chip Hager demonstrates boiling sap with a small evaporator.

                                       Davenport Maple Farm Sugar Restaurant

West of Hager's, off Route 2 at 111 Tower Rd. in Shelburne is Davenport Maple Farm with a restaurant, sales area and evaporator to view.  The restaurant is opens in the sugar season March to mid-April, 8:00-3:00. Their pancakes and other syrup delivery items are quite straightforward and include gluten-free options, but their "Finnish" pancakes are unusual and delicious! Diners are served a 2 oz. bottle of maple syrup to use with their breakfast and take home as a souvenir.                                       Sap buckets hang near Davenport's evaporator.

The Red Bucket Sugar Shack's red buckets         

Worthington in western Massachusetts is far off the beaten trail from Charlemont, but when the Red Bucket Sugar Shack topped a 2013 Fox News survey of the ten best sugar shack restaurants in the U.S., we had to go.  The Red Bucket is located at the end of Kinne Brook Road, off Route 112, south of Route 9.  It’s open Saturdays 8-2 and Sundays 8-3 from the beginning of March to early April. 

The state-of-the-art evaporator is located right in the consequently steam-filled waiting room, where all kinds of maple products are sold.  In addition to every size of syrup, there is maple cream, loose sugar, shaped soft candy, maple cotton candy, maple popcorn, and maple-frosted doughnuts.

The restaurant menu is similarly replete with breakfast specials and many kinds of eggs, French toast and pancakes.  We had to try the “signature” Almond Joy French toast and were glad we did: thick but incredibly light slices encrusted on both sides with shredded coconut and almonds with tiny chocolate chips strewn evenly over the tops.  It takes awhile to produce this amazingly delicious dish, but there is plenty to look at while you wait.  The back of the restaurant is glassed in and looks out on a beautiful wooded landscape while antique  farm equipment  hangs from the rafters.

We’re happy to report that Fox News has much better taste in restaurants than in politics!   

 

The sales area fills with steam from the evaporator (above).

Worthington boasts two other sugar restaurants, both open in the foliage season as well as the sugar season.  Just north of Red Bucket, off 112, Windy Hill Farm claims to be the oldest sugar shack restaurant in Massachusetts and is certainly the most rustic.  If you need cream for your coffee, an open pint will appear on the table, family members grab breakfast among the guests, and if you need to use the facilities, a genuine outhouse awaits you. 

Windy Hill Farm: the oldest sugarshack restaurant in Massachusetts

But the food is plentiful and good: feather-light French toast, waffles, or a variety gigantic pancakes—apple, pumpkin, chocolate chip, blueberry—that you can mix and match, and the restaurant has a loyal following and a longer season than most.  It’s open from 8-2 in a sugar season that lasts from late February until Easter and re-opens in foliage season.

Inside Windy Hill

South of Windy Hill and Red Bucket, right on 112, the High Hopes Farm sugar restaurant, open from 7-2,  serves an all-you-can-eat buffet... 

 

Satisfied customers at High Hopes Farm

 

 

 

 

 

...with pancakes, French toast, scrambled eggs, home fries, bacon, sausage, ham, and a variety of beverages including tea, juice, and coffee.  A pitcher of pure maple syrup sits on every table, and, if you sit near the window, you'll look down on a beautiful gorge, carved out by the Little River.

 

 

The Little River runs behind High Hopes sugar restaurant.

 

 In the fall, High Hopes turns its evaporator room into a haunted house and serves the same plentiful buffet.

 A number of sugarshack restaurants serve the I-91/Northampton area. Steve’s Sugar Shack at 35 North Road in Westhampton is open weekends from late February through mid-April from 7-1. The menu is limited, but the French toast is delicious and the blueberry pancakes look great. Steve’s employs an efficient system for ordering your meal. Guests are seated at long tables near or below the evaporator. On Sundays, a neighbor brings his oxen, who, ostensibly, pull a sled outfitted with a tank to gather sap from buckets in the woods. (When we were there, however, the oxen mainly greeted visitors, while their owner explained how he used them for his logging business as an environmentally friendly alternative to a truck.)  

 

 

 

 

Oxen greet visitors and (maybe) help with sugaring at Steve's Sugar Shack in Westhampton. 

 

Williams Farm Sugarhouse, located on Routes 5 & 10 just south of Historic Deerfield, is open daily mid-February to mid-April and serves a variety of delicious pancakes, waffles, French toast and various sides, including maple cream doughnuts.

The Williams family began sugaring on Mt. Toby in Sunderland in the 1850’s and opened their more conveniently located sugarhouse in Deerfield in 1994. Patrons order at the counter and can visit the evaporator in the next room while they wait for their food. 

 

 

A Williams family member stirs the boiling sap.  A sign from the original Mt. Toby Sugarhouse sits against the wall.

 

 

 

 The North Hadley Sugar Shack is conveniently located on Route 47 three miles north of Route 9 for those who want to visit the Amherst area. 

 They serve the standard French toast, waffles, and pancakes, with eggs if you want them and ice cream, fruit and whipped cream toppings also an option.  Breakfast is served every day in sugar season (mid-February to mid-April) from 7:00-2:00.  Compared to the more out-of-the-way sugar restaurants, service here is very fast.  Visitors can view the evaporator, which sits right outside the dining room, and a well-stocked farm store is open for most of the year. 

 

 

       Tending the evaporator at the North Hadley Sugar Shack

 

 

 

 

The Strawbale Cafe at Hanging Mountain Farm at 188 North St. in Westhampton is open year round for breakfast every Saturday and Sunday from 9-2 except in January.  The cafe has a full breakfast menu, including pancakes with a wide variety of add-ins, during most of the year but is more limited in sugar season because of the large crowds.  The menu is simplified at that time and pancakes are limited to chocolate chip and blueberry, but, of course, the sugar house is working and can be visited.  Seasonal vegetables, like asparagus, are added to the menu as they become available.  The cafe is so named because it is made from bales of straw although these are covered by wood and stucco, so you won't see any straw when you visit.  

 

 

Apples in the ‘Hood

Outside the store at Pine Hill Orchards

No country experience satisfies like picking apples in the fall, especially when it’s followed by pies, soufflés, pancakes and every other sort of apple delight.   In Charlemont we’re favored with four orchards in three nearby towns, Shelburne, Colrain, and Ashfield, and they all offer “Pick-Your-Own," from mid-September through late October.  Two orchards sit close together just over the Shelburne line as you drive west from Greenfield on Route 2.  Many years ago, the Peck family owned these and more; consequently, you’ll find your first orchard on Peckville Road, which meets Route 2 just where it makes a sharp left at the top of the rise coming out of Greenfield.  Apex--turn right on Peckville Rd--has a new store selling cider, apples, peaches, honey, beeswax products, and other items.  You can pick your own Macs, Cortlands, Gala, and Honey Crisps at any time during the week and enjoy tractor rides out to the orchard on weekends.  Apex also features spectacular views from which one can see all the way to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire.

 Apex' Cortlands, ready for picking

 

 Hager's orchard in bloom

The second Peck orchard is owned today by the Hager family, which has a thriving Farm Market right on Route 2, just up from Peckville Road.  The store is open year round, offering locally grown vegetables, frozen meat from the Hager farm, home canned goods, baked goods, breakfast, lunch and ice cream!  The orchard faces Route 2, and U-Pick is available every day.

Pine Hill Orchards offers tractor rides to the trees ready for picking.

Turn right on the next road, Colrain-Shelburne, and follow it into Colrain, where it becomes Greenfield Road.  Up a few miles is Pine Hill Orchards' farm store and restaurant, which are open every day.  U-Pick is also available every day for those who don't mind walking out to the orchard, but tractor rides to the orchard are offered on weekends.  Pickers have a wide variety of apples to choose from: Jonagold, Delicious, Spencers, as well as Macs and Cortlands.  In addition to a great breakfast (see Breakfast Along the Mohawk Trail), Pine Hill has a beautiful pond, picnic tables, and a small petting zoo.  Cider from Pine Hill’s substantial cider mill is sold out of its spacious cooling room in the farm store, where visitors will find peaches in season and an array of apples, including Honey Crisp. 

Bear Swamp Orchard in Ashfield is further afield for people willing to go out of their way for organic products.  Bear Swamp offers U-pick from 11-5 on weekends, but the orchard is small, so go early in the season.  For sale in their tiny farm store, Bear Swamp offers their own delicious organic cider, soft and hard, along with organic apples, pears, and peaches in season.  To reach Bear Swamp Orchard, take Route 112 south to Ashfield and turn right on Hawley Road (the other side of Route 116 East).  Beautiful views from the farm are a bonus, as are the many hiking trails in the Bear Swamp Reservation, half a mile back on Hawley Road.

Check millbrookhouserecipes.com for apple recipes.

You can also find Apex Orchards, Bear Swamp Orchard, Pine Hill Orchards, and Hager's Farm Market on Facebook.  

 

 

                                                                                               Bear Swamp's traditional harvesting ladder

  

Kagoshima, Mon Amour

My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is personal, for Kagoshima holds a special place in my heart that stretches back to childhood.

It all began in 1957 when my parents took me to see Teahouse of the August Moon, a service comedy about the early days of the American Occupation of Okinawa. I adored it. (That Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, was being played in yellow face by Marlon Brando went by me completely.) I watched my first grown-up movies (Oklahoma!, Tammy and the Bachelor) that summer, but in retrospect I realize that the trip to see Teahouse was meant mainly as a softening up tactic. A few weeks later, my mother confided that we ourselves would move to Okinawa that fall. I was thrilled.

When did I become a Japanophile? Was it pouring over Little Pictures of Japan from the My Book House series (of which we owned every volume) or playing with the clamshell novelties my mother brought back from New York’s Chinatown that opened up into beautiful paper flowers when soaked in a glass of water? Didn’t all children at the time try to dig a hole to China (which, we were told, lay just below us on the opposite side of the earth)? Perhaps we were all incipient orientalists. But in my case, it lay very close to the surface.

Eagerly anticipating a land of pine-covered hills and kimono-clad geishas, I was horribly disappointed six months later to find myself on a sub-tropical island, whose bright sunlight was blindingly intensified by the ubiquitous coral dust. A battle 12 years earlier had scoured the island, leaving much of it treeless. Pampas grass and sugar cane grew where vicious fighting once took place and often covered deadly unexploded ordinance. As ubiquitous as the coral dust were American military vehicles and installations. No pine trees lit by moonlight, no geishas, no soft breezes, no distant mountains. Teahouse, it turned out, had been shot on the Japanese mainland, not on Okinawa. (A recently constructed Teahouse of the August Moon did exist in Okinawa, but it had been inspired by the movie, not vice versa.)      

Although the island abounded in ancient local arts, whose revival the American military government had encouraged (and—as per the movie—cricket cages were for sale in every local tchotchke shop), at nine I had no more ability to appreciate the local pottery and textiles than I had to discern Marlon Brando under his make-up. I longed for the classical arts and picturesque landscapes of “real,” Japan, land of lanterns, ukiyoe and fireflies.

I was ecstatic, therefore, as I embarked with my mother and sister on my first trip to the main islands of Japan. We left on the overnight boat from Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and landed the next day in Kagoshima, the southernmost port city of Japan’s four main islands. This time it was love at first sight. My mother had splurged and booked us into a genuine ryokan [Japanese inn]. Our tatami-mat-covered room opened onto an exquisite garden, and waitresses in kimono served our dinner and made up our beds, futon [thick quilts—the foam rubber kind hadn’t been invented yet] spread on the floor.

The inn sat atop the kind of pine-covered hill I had been waiting a whole year to see and looked down over the city. Houses with black tile roofs lay below, a contrast to the red tile roofs of the more affluent homes in Okinawa, and they had good reason to be black. Sakurajima, sitting majestically in the distance, issued a thin plume of smoke from its conical peak. Smoke billowed, too, from the steam locomotives that pulled the trains that wound around the city in the valley below us.

I had not been on a train since I was three and could only dimly remember the experience. Trains did not even exist in Okinawa, so I could barely contain my excitement, knowing we would soon be on that train, heading north to other cities in Japan.

Watching the train and actually riding on it were two different things, however. These steam-driven vehicles had no air conditioning, and, it being summer, the windows were all open, allowing soot from the smokestack to blow in, covering passengers, seats, and floors alike. Tunnels, of which there were many, particularly on the tracks between Kyoto and Tokyo, proved particularly obnoxious as the smoke had nowhere to go except into the train. Passengers rushed to close the windows, rendering the carriage hot and stuffy. Mostly, though, the long slow journey—Kagoshima to Kyoto required an overnight trip—felt incredibly boring to a ten-year-old.

At stations, hawkers filled the platforms, selling bento [lunch] boxes, constructed from the thinnest of thinly shaved wood, and tiny clay pots of tea, and passengers purchased these refreshments through their open windows. Once their contents had been consumed, the empty boxes and teapots, along with disposable chopsticks, all ended up on the floor of the train. Bored by the journey and  fascinated by the perfectly shaped clay pots, whose covers served as tiny cups and which varied in color, shape, and markings from station to station, I amused myself by crawling underneath the seats on the train’s dirty floor to collect them, much to our fellow passengers’ surprise and my mother’s chagrin. (Incredibly, this saintly woman, at my insistence, carried a very large basket of these discarded vessels back to Okinawa for me.)

The little teapots and many other charms of mainland Japan notwithstanding, the trip was hard on one as young as I. The shrines and temples in Kyoto began to all look alike, and in Tokyo I spent a whole day in bed, possibly sick but probably just exhausted. We broke our return journey in the spa town of Beppu—no one had warned us how tacky spa towns in Japan can be—but the long trip south was as tedious as the trip north, and the inn in Kagoshima beckoned like a long lost friend. (Trains, I decided, were best experienced from that hill above the city.)

 Besides Sakurajima and the beautiful ryokan, Kagoshima featured Satsuma-ware, an elegant white ceramic with a crackled glaze covered by delicately painted bird and flower decorations. Shiny and colorful—in contrast to subtle earth tones of much Japanese pottery, including Okinawan—it captured my ten-year-old heart and has never lost its charm for me.

Satsuma-ware derives its name from the feudal Satsuma Domain, which was ruled by the Shimazu daimyo from Kagoshima. Satsuma,
along with other southern provinces, led the revolt against the moldering Tokugawa Shogunate that produced the Meiji Reformation. Satsuma had, in fact, colonized Okinawa in 1609, making it a vassal state, although the island remained “officially” independent until 1879—one reason its culture remains so distinctive—when it was officially annexed to Meiji Japan.

Two summers after that first rocky trip to mainland Japan, we returned to the U.S. (though not before docking in Tokyo Bay in the midst of the 1960 Anpo riots), but 1964 found us back in Okinawa.  The following summer my mother and I made a three-week trip to Kyushu, Honshu and Shikoku where we visited with family, friends, and an array of Japanese potters. Once again Kagoshima welcomed us and became the first stop on our pottery tour, where my mother hunted down the Korean potters whose ancestors had developed Satsuma-ware. The ryokan had been a one-time extravagance, so we stayed in a modern hotel with a large accommodating garden.

Although the shinkansen [bullet train] now ran between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kagoshima to Tokyo still required an overnight journey, but diesel engines had replaced the steam engines, and, sadly, plastic teapots had replaced the charming clay ones formerly sold on station platforms. (Progress, as we know, is a two-edged sword.) I had looked forward to this trip as keenly as the first one, but, at 17, I was old enough to relish every aspect of it. Mist rising from acres of rice paddies graced by egrets, wooden houses with sliding doors and tile roofs, blocks of traditional wood-framed storefronts with their goods out front for customers to see and living quarters—with a cup of green tea for special guests—behind the store—today these things are mostly relegated to movies, museums and theme parks, but they were my Japan. In Shikoku, emerald green rivers ran down the mountains alongside the road our bus travelled. In Tokyo I joined Hiroko, my father’s former secretary, at her local public bath, and far up in the mountains of Kyushu, we visited potters in Onda, where all day long pestles, fueled by water flowing off the mountains, pounded clay. Thrilling but tiring, our trip ended once more in Kagoshima, where our gracious hotel and our ship home to Okinawa awaited us.  

A year later I went to camp in Tokyo with my Girl Scout troop. We travelled TDY in an Army cargo plane, but when I stayed on after camp to visit Hiroko in Tokyo, I was back to using local transportation. I rode the shinkansen for the first time to visit friends in Kyoto, then, late one night, boarded the overnight train to Kagoshima. The next evening I met a family in the garden of the hotel where my mother and I had stayed the year before, and, seeing I was alone, they scooped me up the next morning and brought me to their home for tea and a visit before my boat departed. This would not be my last encounter with the warm hospitality of Kagoshima.

I returned to the United States, went to college, became an art historian, and spent many years in Europe. Finally, in my mid-30’s I reunited with my Asian past when I began to study the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. (Ironically, in Okinawa Hiroko had taken my father to see Ohayo, one of Ozu’s late films, and he had described the delightful comedy to me in some detail. When, many years later, I finally connected the film he had described, which for a long time was marketed in the U.S. under the title “Good Morning,” to my beloved director, I asked my father if he remembered it. Although his account of the film had imbedded itself in my mind all those many years before, he had no recollection of it at all!)

In 1991, I returned to Japan, having accepted a teaching job at a college near Nagoya. That summer, my husband and I travelled south, visiting friends and tourist destinations and managing to attend memorial ceremonies for the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Nagasaki, we headed, for nostalgia’s sake, to Kagoshima to catch the boat to Okinawa. No overnight sleeper this time, but our destination nevertheless required us to travel all day by bus, ferry, and train. The city had modernized, of course, but its rolling hills and comparative lack of congestion made a soothing contrast to the crowded cities of Honshu. I purchased my own Satsuma-ware, and rediscovered the hospitality I had enjoyed as a teenager when the young host at our minshuku [Japanese-style B&B] insisted on performing a tea ceremony for us.

We took the ferry to Sakurajima, but the majestic volcano seemed less benign than before. A thin layer of ash lay over the city and more thickly on the volcanic island itself. Several volcanoes near Nagasaki had erupted within the previous two years, and the ash around Kagoshima looked ominous.

Sakurajima’s largest eruption in modern times actually occurred in 1914. Thirty-five people on the island died and lava poured into the sea, creating the land bridge to the city of Kagoshima that exists today. The city itself was covered in a thick layer of ash but otherwise remained intact. Subsequently, the volcano lay quiet until 1955 when small eruptions began, hence the smoke I witnessed first in 1957. In 2009 the volcano spewed lava and ash more than a mile above its crater and exploded most recently on Feb. 5, 2016. No one was injured and Kagoshima-jin [people] considered the 2016 eruption “average.”

The threat posed by Sakurajima’s increased activity arises mainly from the fact that the Sendai nuclear plant in Satsumasendai, former capital of the Satsuma Domain, lies only 30 miles away. The first Sendai reactor was built in 1984, the second in 1985. (Japan’s first nuclear reactor was built in 1966.) After all of Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, Sendai was the first to re-open (2015). Why Japan builds reactors close to live volcanos or on tidal plains or builds them at all, given the likelihood of earthquakes, is a mystery beyond solving in this essay.

Mainly, Sakurajima’s 2016 eruption reminded me of a city dear to my heart, which, like so much of Japan, lives on the edge of disaster with calm and dignity and grace.

 

Sakurajima photographs by Steven Sternbach 

 

 

Maple Sugaring Along the Mohawk Trail

When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England.  Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants.

Colonists first learned about the sweetness of maple sap from Native Americans, who collected it from V-shaped slashes they made on the trunks of maple trees, and the newcomers subsequently developed their own techniques for tapping trees and reducing the sap to syrup or sugar.  When England forbid trade with the West Indies in 1765, colonists looked to maple sugar to fill their sweet needs.

In earlier times, farmers with a substantial "sugar bush" set up sugar camps in the woods, and the whole family would move to the camp to help with the labor-intensive process of gathering and boiling sap.  So originated the one-week "winter vacation" still observed every February by New England schools, a custom non-natives find bizarre--who wants their kids home in February when they can't go outside to play?   What began as time off from school to work at a sugar camp is, today, an opportunity to visit a modern-day sugarhouse.

During the Civil War, cane sugar became scarce once again, and maple sugar, supplied to the troops and used at home, was considered the "patriotic" alternative to sugar produced in the South.  Metal buckets with lids, such as you see here, were developed to aid in collecting sap, and the development of the tin can in these years allowed syrup to be preserved, shipped, and used year round.

Today large sugaring operations use less quaint, time-saving tubing to collect sap, but small producers still use sap buckets, and many larger operations use buckets to collect sap from outlying trees.  A single farmer may tap the trees on many properties, paying his neighbors for sap in gallons of finished syrup.  The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1--forty gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup.

In the 1960's, three Franklin County sugarhouses, Gray's in Ashfield, Davenport's and Gould's in Shelburne, began offering maple-syrup-laced breakfasts during the sugar season, an early foray into the now popular "agri-tourism."

Gray's, still in operation at 38 Barnes Rd. in Ashfield, has closed its restaurant and South Face Farm Sugarhouse in Ashfield has ceased operations, but  Davenport Maple Farm, up Little Mohawk Rd. off Route 2, still offer breakfast during the sugar season as does Gould's. (See  Sugarshacks and Sugarhouse Restaurants.)  A Route 2 landmark, Gould's Sugarhouse offers breakfast and lunch in both the sugar and foliages seasons.  Six generations of Goulds have been sugaring on this farm, which began producing maple products in 1960.

Gould's Sugarhouse

The evaporator at rest

Gould's evaporator in action

Monitoring the syrup

 

While Canada, mainly Quebec, produces 80% of the world's maple syrup and Vermont leads the U.S. with around 1 million gallons, Massachusetts, ninth in the nation, produced about 75,000 gallons in 2015, worth 5-6 million dollars, and interest in this local industry is growing.  Eighty percent of our 300 plus producers are located west of I-91, and 75% of those are in Franklin County.  Sales of Massachusetts syrup are mainly within the state.  For more information visit www.massmaple.org.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Syrup flows from the evaporator

 

Maple syrup production benefits the environment by preserving forests and woodlots, important habitat for birds and other animals.  By making commercial use of forested areas, sugaring saves them from other uses that might destroy the trees.  Sugaring preserves approximately 15,000 acres of open space in Massachusetts.                  

Unfortunately, maple sugar production everywhere is is threatened by the invasion of the Asian longhorned beetle, which destroys hardwood trees, particularly maples.   It was  discovered in Worcester, MA, where 25,000 trees were destroyed to stop its spread.  Today officials urge people to keep an eye out for the pest and, most particularly, never to transport firewood from one location to another, but always to burn local wood.  For more on the beetle and how to identify it, see www.beetlebusters.info.

Maple syrup is high in minerals and low in fructose.  For recipes that use maple syrup, visit millbrookhouserecipes.com.

Wim Wenders’ Salt of the Earth

I once wrote a book about Wim Wenders.  It covered the first 20 years of his career, his breakout years in Germany, where he became one of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, which sought to separate itself from the mostly mediocre studio films of Germany’s postwar economic-miracle era, and his foray into American filmmaking, a rocky period which, nevertheless, culminated in the highly successful collaboration with Sam Shepherd on Paris, Texas (1984).  In a recent interview with NPR, Wenders noted that critics characterized these years by three A’s: angst, alienation, and America, and that’s not a bad summation.  The angst was always male; women, if they appeared in the films at all, inspired the intensest angst.  Relationships never worked out (on or off screen).  Wenders collaborated with Peter Handke, a more disciplined, but even more alienated artist, on many of the German films.  They were slow and contemplative and asked more questions than they answered.  Composed of inner journeys and outer landscapes more than real stories, they anticipated Wenders’ eventual turn to documentary, as many of them were already quasi-documentaries.  Kings of the Road (1976) documented the last of Germany’s rural movie theaters; Lightning Over Water (1980), supposed to be a collaboration with Nicolas Ray on a last movie, ended up documenting Ray’s last days, while The State of Things (1982), though fiction, chronicled the all-too-real dilemma of a film crew stuck with an unworkable project.

Although preceded by two short films for French television, the delightful, Chris-Marker-like Tokyo-ga (1985), represents Wenders’ first notable foray into documentary.  The film explores idiosyncratic aspects of Japanese culture on the way to finding out more about Wenders’ hero (and mine), Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.  Another decade of both fictional and documentary films followed, culminating in three Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary: The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and, this past season, Salt of the Earth (2014).

With Salt of the Earth Wenders has achieved his most compelling work to date.  A chronicle of the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the film takes us through Salgado’s short-lived beginnings as a revolutionary, which effectively exiled him from Brazil for a decade, his decision to give up a comfortable life as an economist to become a photographer, and the many photo projects he embarked on, projects that increasingly centered on the world’s marginalized.  The title “Salt of the Earth” is also the title of the 1954 Herbert Biberman fiction film about a strike by mine workers in New Mexico.  In early interviews Wenders sometimes named the Biberman film as one of his favorites, though his inward-looking early films gave little indication of own interest in such subject matter.  

As chronicled by Wenders, Salgado’s photo career reaches a literal dead end when he photographs the Rwandan genocide and its less publicized aftermath, the death by starvation or disease of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, expelled from Rwanda when the Tutsis regained power.  Emotionally and artistically exhausted, Salgado returns to his father’s farm, where he grew up.  It too has been devastated—by drought and poor farming methods—but, together with his wife and life partner Lélia, Salgado successfully replants a rainforest, tiny tree by tiny tree, and the couple establishes the Instituto Terra (earth institute) on the farm, which has since become a national park, to teach others how to restore devastated land.  The reclamation project restores Salgado’s faith in living, and he goes on to become a nature photographer, giving to these images the same breath-taking depth, beauty, and grittiness that had characterized his earlier work, continuing to travel the world and risk his life—as the film documents when the crew has to crawl on its collective belly to elude a polar bear while Salgado photographs walruses in the Arctic.

In creating the film, Wenders collaborated with Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, who accompanied his father on the later expeditions recorded in the film, both to get footage for his own film and to get to know his so often absent father better.  The collaboration with Wenders, the young with the old, was, according to both men, difficult, and editing alone took about 18 months.  However, struggling through hours of footage and differing visions of how to shape the film eventually brought the depth, breadth, intensity, and plenitude that characterize the end product.    

The film is structured around ever-widening circles of family (something a young Wenders found difficult to believe in).  First, there are the three generations of the Salgado family, central to which is the life-long love affair and partnership between Sebastião and Lélia that endures constant separation, yet survives and flourishes; next the human family that Sebastião photographs in all its variety, pathos, and savagery; and finally the family of all living things, at the same time fragile and resilient.  No more angst, alienation, or America.  Wenders confidently embraces the world in this rich, mature, affirmative work of art.

Wim Wenders, 1980's

 

Late Autumn

 

Late Autumn is the name of a film by Ozu, who often named his films after seasons: Late Spring, Early Spring, Early Summer (despite being best known for Tokyo Story).  Western culture doesn’t usually draw such fine distinctions between the seasons, but country life has sharpened my sensitivity to the differences between the early, late, and mid of any given season.  Late autumn is a particularly delicate time of year--often gray, an impression heightened (so to speak) by the tall bare deciduous trees all around us.  But within that grayness, muted splashes of color still abound.  Baby trees, with perhaps only a dozen leaves, are bright red or yellow.  Weeds, touched by frost, color up.  The fuzzy, cream-colored tops of goldenrod gone gray nod in the fields and white splashes of milkweed seeds unfurl.  Juncos settle on the fields to enjoy the weed seeds and fly up when startled, darting and tumbling like a gust of leaves in a fall wind.  They, too, are gray with a striking splash of white on their tails, which fan out when they fly.

With trees and bushes bare, I can better see the contours of the Mill Brook and down into the mini-gorge below the dam: the ancient retaining walls, crumbled cabins, and abandoned machinery, covered in rust and fallen leaves.

Late autumn brings hunting to Massachusetts, and last year we discovered a refugee in our backyard, a male pheasant unable to find his way past the new fence that cut off the back fields from the front.  He walked up and down the fence, staying close to the gate as if he knew that was the way out if only it would magically open.  He seemed not to think about other options.  He could have flown out or gone back the way he came, but he apparently felt  strongly about walking through the gate.   We watched him for some time, sure he would momentarily take to the air, but he stayed stubbornly by the fence.  Steve grabbed a camera and, coming quite close, photographed him, then took pity and opened the gate.  Magic at last!  Our bird strode through the opening and only then took flight.

 

Mill Brook House Reopens June 1

Flower by flower, Mill Brook House is coming back.  There are bluebirds in the birdhouses, yellow-bellied sapsuckers tapping up a storm in the woods, and a great blue heron is frequenting the Irene-enlarged stream that runs behind the house.  Having channeled the entire Mill Brook for one week, the stream is now large enough to support thumb-sized minnows that interest the heron.  Frogs, silenced by the cold snap after the March heat wave, will be calling and singing again soon. 

 

 

A giant log swept in by the storm and lodged against one bank of the Mill Brook, where it runs through our land.

 

It has been an arduous and sometimes frustrating road to recovery, but we are almost there.  All of our systems had to be rebuilt or replaced, work that was finally complete by Christmas 2011.  Our humble thanks to the diligent tradesmen who persisted until everything was working again.  Thanks, too, to our neighbor Ian, who had the good sense to tie our propane tank to the deck, lest it join hundreds of other tanks washed down the Deerfield in the storm.  Sadly, our secure dog pen, which took the full force of the flood, was completely destroyed.

Clearing sand and debris, front and back, so that our garden and driveway could be restored took most of the fall.  We continue to work on resurrecting the garden, the lawns and the meadows and removing flotsam from the woods.

 

 

Jonathan Winfisky clears sand from the backyard.  Jonathan runs heavy equipment in the summer and blows glass in the winter. 

 

Living with our cheerless landscape through the fall and snowless winter was depressing, but with spring’s renewal finally here, each survivor that pokes its head up in the garden, each new blade of grass—even the garden’s unwanted grass, which we carefully remove and plant elsewhere—and every returning bird bring enormous joy.  Mill Brook House is coming back!

We will be ready for guests on June 1.  For prices and availability, please check our listing at: http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p144555 .

 

Look what the cat dragged in!

Jonathan Winfisky's glass (above) can be purchased

at the Grow Gallery in Shelburne Falls. 

 

 

Re-Opened Route 2 Greets the New Year

A year that started out so hopefully for us in Charlemont, a new windmill and an old store turned 150, turned out to contain multiple weather disasters for Western Massachusetts with Hurricane Irene causing the most distress in the hilltowns. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avery's store c. 1880

 

 

The Mill Brook off course during Hurricane Irene 

As 2011 drew to a close, however, there was much to celebrate in the re-opening of Route 2 between Charlemont and North Adams.  Six miles of this major artery, closed since the hurricane on August 28, re-opened the week before Christmas.  Until we traveled the newly opened roadway, we had no idea of the magnitude of the damage: entire mountainsides had washed onto the road, which had toppled into the river in many places.  With crews working round the clock, what should have taken an entire year to complete was finished in less than four months, although men and machines are still at work to stabilize the landscape.

Route 2 in Savoy, December 30, 2011

Stabilizing the banks of the Cold River

Thankful for this 23 million dollar Christmas present from our state and federal governments, we pray that continued "recovery" continues to bless us all in 2012.

 

Happy New Year from Mill Brook House!!

 

Good-bye, Goat Rising

 

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

With enormous regret we announce the departure of John Miller and Goat Rising from the farmstead at the corner of Route 8A North and Mountain Road.  Goat Rising, under new ownership, has moved to Plainfield while John and his Jerseys have joined the centuries-old Appleton Farms in Ipswich.

John and his aunt purchased the farmstead in 2003, the year before we bought Mill Brook House. As John added Jersey cows to the goat farm, the herd increasing each year, the farm’s limited pastureland became an increasing liability.  The addition of the Curtis Country Store to the farm’s enterprises, delightful though it was, turned into another liability.  Recession, bad tenants, and a devastated real estate market combined to make for steep losses.  But the straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been Hurricane Irene and the damaged bridge over the Mill Brook in front of the farm.  The months-long four-mile detour over dirt roads meant headaches for John and his family getting out and deterred customers for the farm’s store from coming in.  More losses. 

 

Ironically, the week John moved, the bridge was finally repaired.

 

 

 

The boutique farm with its prize-winning cheeses, raw milk, fresh eggs and delightful animals was the highlight of our neighborhood, a favored destination for a walk for ourselves and our guests, a wonderful of source not just of local produce, but of produce from animals we knew personally.  John’s mother was a superb baker, and after the Country Store closed, her cookies and muffins appeared serendipitously next to the ice cream freezer in the farm store, providing a quick pick-me-up after a day of painting or laboring in the garden.

 

 

True, it wasn’t all Irene’s fault, but the loss of Goat Rising after so many other losses from the hurricane is painful and deeply felt.

I attach my review of Brad Kessler's memoire of goat farming, which evokes our own fond memories of Goat Rising.

Book Review: Goat Song

This book was a natural choice, given the goat farm down the street from us.  Raising goats is clearly not for the dilettante or the faint-hearted, and we’ve seen evidence of that, too, in our immediate neighborhood.  One neighbor thought she would rescue a male kid, slated to be shipped off to more or less certain death by Goat Rising.  (Few males survive in the world of domesticated goats, where milk and cheese are the goal.)  Our friend stuck it out for several years, taking him for walks among the stones and boulders in the Mill Brook, but he finally became too much for her (though I believe she found another home for him, where he could continue being a pet).  Further up the road in Heath, we met a woman keen to raise goats as a hobby, but the young kids we saw on her property at the time have long since disappeared. 

            These failures become understandable when one reads of the sheer hard labor involved in raising goats in Brad Kessler’s Goat Song, which Kessler’s poetic style does not disguise.  The book makes a good companion and intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year-long quest to live off her land or that of local farmers.  Where Kingsolver is polemical, Kessler is lyrical and philosophical (and far more economical with words).  Where Kingsolver gives us current information about government policies and the sad, wasteful state of our food supply, Kessler delves into our pastoral and etymological history—all the English words that derive from Indo-European, Greek, and Hebrew for goats and herding, along with slivers of poetry and wisdom on same, passed down from the earliest civilizations to the present.  Where Kingsolver may leave us feeling frustrated at the imperfect state of our of lives and our government—most of us don’t have the time, the land, or the money to eat as much local produce as we’d like—Kessler leaves us feeling ennobled by our rich pastoral heritage, even as we experience it vicariously through his labors            

     Surprisingly, this tiny, erudite volume involves a certain amount of suspense: when one of the goats sickened, I couldn’t stop reading until I learned the outcome.  Ditto when the herd was threatened by coyotes.  (The battle with the coyotes calls to mind Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where two characters duel over the merits of conserving vs. killing these predators.) 

            Romantics will revel in the connections Kessler discovers between pastoralism and the notion of a lost paradise, as well as his discussions of shepherd-kings, poet-herders, and the haunting music of herding. Animal-lovers will understand better what they already intuit but society too often denies: that out of our deep connection to animals arises our humanness. Foodies will enjoy Kessler’s blow-by-blow description of cheese-making, although theologians and devout Christians may wince at the parallels he draws between cheese-making and Christianity, however much the two crossed paths in ancient monasteries.

            By the end we understand that this rich tale has been Kessler’s own spiritual journey, even as it has rubbed off on us and contributed  to our own enlightenment.  “A goat has led me here,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph.  “I’m the boy in the Yiddish tale who’s followed her all along—she always knew the way back home.”

 

 

Goodnight, Irene

        The beautiful Mill Brook

Downgraded to a tropical storm, Hurricane Irene made its way relatively languidly through the northern Appalachians, dumping record amounts of rain and causing massive flooding.  Little Charlemont, which, in the past, had escaped floods, ice storms, and tornadoes, took a direct hit.  The beautiful Mill Brook, for which our place is named, decided to play Niagara Falls for a day and roared down the valley, ripping out trees along the banks, which smashed into bridges and destroyed them. 

The bridge by Goat Rising

In DuPree’s horse pasture, the brook jumped its banks, tumbled across the field and roared around our house, wiping out the dog pen and turning our meadows into moonscapes.  For five stomach-churning days, it continued to race past us along the beds of two small streams that surround the back field, while its normal course lay empty. 

Trees and silt caused the brook to change course.

On Thursday, Jerry and Brian DuPree tried, with backhoes and a small bulldozer, to force the brook back into place, only to watch it jump out again in the wake of another flash flood.

At 5:00 Friday afternoon the cavalry finally arrived. 

Help at last

National Guard troops with giant bulldozers moved earth and rocks and trees to get the Mill Brook back on course.  No Frenchman on D-Day was ever more elated to see American soldiers take to the field.  They worked through the Labor Day weekend, securing the brook, and on Monday, with more flash floods predicted, they showed up on our property to cut up trees already in the brook to prevent them hitting the Bissell Bridge, which, thankfully, received no injuries from the storm.

Entertaining the troops at Mill Brook House       

Badly in need of relandscaping, Mill Brook House is presently closed to guests.  We hope to open again next summer.  Goodnight, Irene.

(Photos courtesy of Steven Sternbach and Jerry DuPree.)

Neighbors

Culling our video collection prior to the latest renovation project, I came across some old dubs of Northern Exposure which we’d made in the mid 90s.  (Both TVs at Mill Brook House have video playback, so most of our videotapes have migrated here.)  While I’d seen the shows broadcast, I’d never actually watched these tapes.  Throwing one into a video player, I quickly entered a time warp.  Intelligent people being kind to one another, enjoying quiet moments of self-realization and personal growth—when was the last time I had seen that acted out on television?

         What gave these old dubs even more resonance, however, was how much more I could identify with the residents of Cicely now that I know Charlemont; the need to accept people, whatever their politics, religion, sexual preference or profession because they’re all you’ve got, was suddenly very real.  I used to wonder about the eight principals on Northern Exposure—why only them?  Didn’t other people live in Cicely?  But, in fact, my circle in Charlemont is pretty much confined to the same ten or twelve people I encounter regularly as neighbors, tradesmen, shopkeepers, farmers—and not to forget the post mistress.  For me, Cicely, Alaska, has become a little less of a fantasy town than it used to be.

         Below are some of my four-footed and post-and-lintel neighbors.  Just out of sight are some really great people.

 

The Hallenbeck House in Winter

 

Bissell Bridge and Waterfall 

 

Fawn in our Front Meadow

 

 
Former One-Room Schoolhouse

 

Schoolhouse seen from Goat Rising Farm

 

Goat Rising Goat

 

Goat Rising Cow

 

Next Door Neighbors