I’ve had my share of commuting. Like maneuvering my moped to my A&P cashier job back in my teens.
Like riding my bicycle in my early 20s five miles to a life-guarding job in Sea Bright, N.J., 10 miles inland to a waitressing job, and then six miles back home at midnight on unlit roads.
Mostly I’ve not minded the commute. I used to travel 40 minutes from Shelburne Falls to Northampton each day for a reporting job, and I liked the variety of it: the winding, pastoral Route 2 and the straight-as-an-arrow I-91, with views of old barns, fields, woods and the Holyoke Range. Like most people, I found it peaceful, me in that tiny tin can of a car with my NPR, books on tape, and soul CDs.
After that, I strolled half a mile with a kindergartner each day just before 7 a.m. to my job at the local elementary school, stopping to check the water level of a stream and scanning the trees for birds. Nowadays, I walk down the hill, across the Iron Bridge and up two flights of stairs to my workspace in an office above McCusker’s, where I write.
When I read this, I think of the blood-pressure-elevating commutes my suburban friends and family have. Bumper-to-bumper. Tolls. Near collisions. Horns. My older brother used to commute two hours each way from Fair Haven, N.J., to his Manhattan job — car, train, subway, long walk and back again. Now, at least, he rides the ferry most of the way, with the smell of the ocean and the sunrise as perks.
With my son in his senior year in high school, I begin to mourn the loss of our morning commute from our Shelburne Falls home to the Academy at Charlemont.
I’ve been driving my children and exchange students to school off and on since 2007. My daughter is now in college, Yen (from China) is at McGill in Canada, Regan (from China) is at American University in Washington, D.C., Masha is back in Russia, and my son will graduate from the Academy in June. They occasionally took the FRTA bus from the Arms Library in Shelburne Falls, but that leaves at 7:20 and they preferred leaving the house in our car at 7:45.
To be honest, I relished having my children and international students stuck in a car with me for 10 minutes. I occasionally heard what they were actually doing at school that day.
About papers and exams and new teachers and field trips and studio blocks on filmmaking and sketch comedy and knitting I hadn’t known were happening. About sports and college applications. We might even discuss the meanings of words or politics or where they see themselves in 10 years. Or maybe even something that was bothering them. And not always what was bothering them about me.
My son is the only one left. He rolls out of bed at 7:30, and we leave the house by 7:45. Not much scraping of the Honda’s windshields this year, thankfully, but always a block from my house, as we turn left onto the Mohawk Trail, I ask him to get the heat going. We head west, and quickly the winding road opens to views of Catamount and the Buckland hills.
The Trail crosses the Deerfield River, covered with jagged ice like chunky frosting on a cake most winters. We pass the Park & Ride parking lot to the south, built originally for Yankee Rowe workers shortly before the plant closed for good.
Still, someone’s carpooling. Across the highway stands a two-story Native American chief with a feathered headdress cascading to his feet. It’s one of the Mohawk Trail’s famous Indian trading posts, with signs advertising moccasins, arrowheads, western hats and candy. Two teepees and a bison stand in front of the shop. The houses along the way include ranches and Capes and some classic New England white farmhouses, with Greek porticos and pillars and cornices and flaking white paint. They are beautiful! The barns are massive and some are of unpainted wood.
Impromptu ponds have appeared in the fields. Across the river, a cargo train with what looks like 200 cars is parked, one car covered in graffiti, like the New York subway cars I rode with my grandmother in Brooklyn. We go by CrabApple Whitewater, King Awnings, Hill Top Motel with kitchenettes (No Vacancy), a fishermen’s turnaround by the river, a “Preserved Farmland” sign, Hall Tavern Farm, a new house here and there, and someone’s rough camp on the river.
Even after driving this stretch for eight years, I find mysteries. What is the General Hap Adams Memorial Intersection at the corner of the Mohawk Trail and East Oxbow Road?
There’s been an awning store here all these years?
What is a buffalo doing in Massachusetts?
The fields are full of corn stubble. We pass the Little Red Schoolhouse, built in 1828, West Oxbow Road, a gorgeous brown barn with a steeple, Otters Resort Motel (Pool Closed), Maranatha Bible Chapel (“Prayer: The Most Reliable Wireless Connection”), Giovanni’s Red Rose Motel, a house from which a woman sometimes sells her colorful quilts (I’m hoping to get one for my son to take to college), Mile Long Farm with calves and adult cows frollicking outside, a “Network for Freedom” sign at a house and Avery Brook Road.
We pass a “Massachusetts Scenic Byways” sign featuring a Native American, the Indian Plaza with its powwow grounds, The Olde Willow Motel, Williams’ second-hand store, and then the large green house with the nice porch, the landmark that tells me I’m just around the corner from the school. At the school, the flag is at half-staff for Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. We’ve arrived.
Today, we haven’t seen the giant flock of Canada geese, complaining or singing or whatever they do, we didn’t notice any eagles, and the small flock of turkeys we spy occasionally was missing. But it’s been a beautiful trip anyway. The curve of the road. The river. The gray, leafless trees. The glowing blue sky. The grace of the solitary wind turbine on Berkshire East, whose blades make a full circle only every three seconds.
And then there are the familiar students and staff, rushing into the building. Trying to get their things in their lockers before the school’s wonderful all-school morning meeting.
I’ll miss it all: The road, like those my family drove up to Vermont from New Jersey, with not a chain store in sight. The river. The hillsides. The cows and birds. And my son, hopping out of the car and saying “Thanks, Mom.” Only a few more times.