Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I was driving through the snowless Berkshires the other week and saw a sad sign at a motel that catered to customers of nearby ski areas: “Think Snow.”
The low-slung Clark Art Institute
I was on my way, after meeting with a charity board colleague in the lively town of Great Barrington, to see the vast, exciting and low-slung Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown. It’s a museum mostly exhibiting European and American art, from the 14th Century on, created by Robert Sterling Clark (1877-1956) and his wife, Francine Clark (1876-1960). Mr. Clark was an heir to the Singer Sewing Machine Co. fortune.
The museum is in the very small academic town (Williams College) because the Clarks thought that its remoteness would prevent it from being destroyed in a Soviet nuclear attack! The number of cultural institutions in The Berkshires is astonishing – museums, theaters, musical venues, colleges, etc.
The region’s by turns bucolic and harsh beauty has drawn many famous visual artists and writers. One of the latter was Herman Melville (1819-1891), who saw the shape of a whale as he gazed at Mt. Greylock from Pittsfield while writing Moby-Dick, in 1850.
One of the strengths/quirks of America, and maybe a reminder that we have the West’s greatest income inequality, is how creators or inheritors of great wealth fund nonprofit institutions in a much wider range of places than you see in other Western countries – even in virtually the middle of nowhere.
Salisbury (Mass.) Beach
— Photo by John Phelan
Back to climate. Mother Nature has the final say. People with houses (mostly summer places. I think) along the beach in Salisbury, Mass., had passed the hat to spend $600,000 to rebuild sand dunes in front of the properties. Three days after the project was completed earlier this month, a storm washed away much of the dunes. And now the owners want the state’s taxpayers to help pay for restoration.
But many taxpayers are getting fed up with taking care of usually affluent people who insist on having houses virtually on the water. As I’ve written here before, it’s past time to sound the bugle to retreat inland. It’s worth noting that long before our era of global warming and rising seas, few people in New England towns lived right along the water. They built houses around town greens and on farms well above the highest storm tides.
Adapt, adapt! As warming winters cut in maple-sap collections, researchers are looking into getting much increased sap for syrup from such trees as birch and beech that are less affected by global warming. They aren’t as rich a source of syrup as maples, but they hold some promise at filling some of the gap. Hit this link from New Hampshire.
Southern New Englanders will also be growing more fruit trees that have typically been grown further south, such as peaches and heat-tolerant apple varieties. Hit this link.
Still, there’s the natural variability of weather as opposed to the march of climate. We’ll still have stretches in which the weather will be cooler than “average” (though “average” keeps changing), such as the weather forecast for this week.
I think of this quote (which I often drag out at this time of year) from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, his memoir of being a young man in Paris in the ‘20s:
“When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it was frightening that it had nearly failed.’’
Then it’s April in Paris and chestnut trees in blossom…
