Driving east on Route 2 one morning last fall, on his way to his teaching job in Devens, Bruce Watson was drawn in by the foliage, surrounding hills and the Millers River’s morning mist.
“It suddenly seemed as if I were westbound, crossing the Appalachians, headed for a better country, a country I used to know.”
Escaping the presidential campaign that seemed to bring out the worst in people about the country whose history he was teaching, Watson switched his iPod to “Shenandoah,” his long-favorite American song, listening repeatedly to Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger and a fiddling rendition from a Ken Burns soundtrack.
“I listened to it for an hour; I couldn’t get it out of my head,” says Watson, who moved to Montague Center a couple of years ago after living and writing in Leverett for a couple of decades. “I thought, this is what we need in this country. We need to go back to these roots.”
Watson, a 64-year-old freelance writer and author of four books, mostly about American history, and who has thought a lot about this country’s social history, reflected on how the song seemed to hearken back to a nostalgic past, a tradition, “a balm for all that ails us these days.”
Only later at home did he find Shenandoah’s various versions, about stealing a native chief’s daughter by offering him firewater, Watson wrote in a blog that grew out of his considering our forgotten, common traditions and histories.
“We have stopped listening to them. Hiding them in our attics, we prefer the shouting, the scandals, the half-truths,” Watson wrote in his blog, “The Attic,” named for his favorite home writing spot. “Just when we should be singing, we are insulting, accusing, brawling. … The various versions are all our song, just as this is all our country.”
For Watson, who earned a master’s in American history from the University of Massachusetts and has written for Smithsonian and American Heritage magazine, as well as books about Sacco and Vanzetti, the “freedom summer” of 1964, and the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, writing a blog was a way to seek out those hidden or forgotten American stories. (Another, more recent book, “Light,” is subtitled, “A Radiant History from Creation to the Quantum Age.”)
And while driving a support van for an eight-week bicycle cross-country trip this summer as a memorial for a Shutesbury boy who died of epilepsy, Watson also got to share stories from the road.
With stories about anthropologist Margaret Mead and baseball great Satchel Page, 1872 presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull and the sculptor Ricardo Rodia’s Watts Towers, Watson tells how he describes his blog, something he sometimes calls an online magazine of “true stories for a kinder, cooler America,” with songs, videos and photographs that try to do more than entertain.
As he was planning for a January debut for a “decidedly not political” blog for which there are about 200 nonpaying subscribers, Watson said, “I figured that no matter what had happened in November, American history had really been hijacked, in my opinion, by polemics, politics and angry arguments. I believe we’re a country, we’ve done both right and wrong. People should embrace that.”
The stories — the same kinds of vignettes about America, its culture, history and literature that he’d written for Smithsonian — aim at being the kind of Americana that “make you feel better about the country, and make you feel we aren’t either good or bad; we’re people,” he says.
Blogging — at the rate of a post a week, except for twice weekly while emulating late CBS correspondent Charles Kurault’s “On the Road” — felt similar to Watson as teaching at the Devens charter high school, or for that matter, the American history courses he’s taught at Hampshire College, Westfield State and UMass.
But it’s felt like a needed departure from his 25-year-old and often acerbic Daily Hampshire Gazette column.
“It’s very different, and a change I needed,” he says about the column that has at times been a satirical look at politics.
“There was always that political side, during the (George W.) Bush years, when I got pretty angry, as so many of us did, because there was so much to mock. Because I grew up on Mad magazine and National Lampoon, mockery comes easy to me. But it’s hard to be mocking, because there’s no point to it. … It just leaves you with ashes of residue. And you haven’t changed anything or anybody’s mind, you haven’t made them feel better. We need something different, I think. I need something different: I need to do more than make fun of things.”
Watson, who’s also written biographies of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, as well as plenty of his own satire, reflects, “Lately, I think we need to do something different, and to not just make fun of things. So it’s nice to find people to celebrate. My books, ‘Freedom Summer,’ ‘Sacco and Vanzetti,’ ‘Bread and Roses,’ we’re all about celebrating Americans who stood up, about finding Americans we can be proud of, although maybe they’re not mainstream. This is sort of in that tradition.”
Growing up in California, Watson says he never left that state until he was 18. But he’s crisscrossed the country eight or nine times and traveled around Europe when he was in his 20s. So he thought it would be great to join his wife on Clif and Arleen Reed’s 3,000-mile bicycle ride for eight weeks from Washington state to Boston as an Epilepsy Foundation fundraiser.
Watson pedaled 500 miles, fewer than most of the eight riders, and drove the van. And he wrote about people and places along the way, from the Grand Coulee Dam (“the biggest thing that man has ever done”) to cooler-than-expected Fargo, N.D., with craft beer, parmesan truffle fries, a juggling unicyclist and openings at multiple galleries.
“I thought, ‘We’ll see what we see.’ It’s who we met, with some surprising roadside attractions including an eagle in (Jim Falls) Wisconsin that it seemed had been recruited in the Civil War, and a wonderful guy we met on the Erie Canal who was a fountain of history and shared that local history.”
Along the way, he says, “People were wonderful, generous, kind,” opening up their wallets when they heard the story of the Reeds, whose son, Charlie, had died of epilepsy a year earlier at age 16. “People would give us $15, $20. One guy gave us a $100 bill, out of nowhere. Talk about a kinder America! It was really amazing. It was really moving.”
No one brought up politics along the route, largely across rural, red states.
“People just wanted to talk,” Watson says. “I was a little concerned there would be some political repercussion, that we’d get a lot of middle fingers, flags waved in our faces, people stopping us as Mass. liberals. If you ride by and you’re wearing spandex with plates that say Massachusetts, they know who you are. … That never happened.”
Watson, who’s wearing a T-shirt with the same Jasper Johns’ “Three Flags” that he’s posted a story about on The Attic, was a little surprised by all the flags he saw along the way.
“American flags are everywhere, all up and down every street, in front yards,” including painted on the wooden industrial pallets he saw as “a wonderful metaphor. They were all over. I think that’s great … I think it shouldn’t be just one side or the other.”
On the Web: theattic.space
Reach Richie Davis at
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