Route 5

You’re in a vehicle heading South. Its November in Massachusetts. The road stretches far behind you to the North. As it moves under your feet, you see that it goes on for a long time ahead of you.

In Greenfield, there are strange things. There is a road that will mysteriously pull your vehicle uphill when stopped in neutral (but that's not the road you're on).

On this road there are many dusty little antique shops, fruit and tobacco stands. From start to finish the road follows the ancient Connecticut River.

Next you cross the Deerfield town line. On the right is an indoor butterfly sanctuary called “Magic Wings.” On Halloween seven years ago my cousins got married inside there, two years later they got divorced.

If you turned right you would head up to my father’s picturesque sagging farmhouse. But you keep going, past that turn a few hundred yards is the flagship Yankee Candle store. You can smell it even though your windows are rolled up.

You slip through traffic lights absentmindedly as you now shift into the town of Whately. The only significant thing here is the big neon 24-hour “Whately Diner,” a popular truck stop for the biggest trucks and the hungriest truck drivers. (I’ve only been to eat here between two and five am).

You don’t stop there because you aren’t very hungry and it doesn’t look very friendly. “Entering Hatfield” says the sign flying by. The road curves slowly and luxuriously, you cruise at an easy speed of 45 miles per hour past meadows, farms, and very small businesses. There are quaint bed and breakfasts, more than two trailer parks, and a haggard strip club called “Castaways,” lost in an empty weed-riddled parking lot.

Hatfield starts to feel ghostly. But just ahead is the colorful town that I spent my teenage years hanging out with intellectual homeless people. Something magical and secret sleeps in Northampton, Massachusetts. Only some people pick up on it. You get a prickle of it down your spine as you pass through the main intersection in the center of town.

The clock there says “11/17, 4:38pm, 47 degrees.”

The road opens up again as you leave Northampton and its cluster of buildings behind. To the left - a large expanse of harvested cornfields, beyond which the Connecticut River moves forcefully, filled with fish, slime, and trash. We used to call these fields “The Meadows,” we totaled our cars off-roading there and built fires to drink beer and play music around because it was so quiet and empty. Don’t swim in the river, you will get a horrible rash.

You look right after a handful of I-91 turnoffs peter out. You glimpse a row of beautiful and strange bodies - black, naked silhouettes of trees rising straight out of river pools. The sun appears for the first time all day and reflects stinging white off the water, which is so high it’s almost parallel with the road.

This exact spot is known as the Oxbow Marina, on the cusp of three towns. The painter Thomas Cole sat on Mount Tom - (you look up and see its peak) - in 1836 and painted “The Oxbow,” which now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I rode the yellow bus past this spot every day for four years of high school.

The stretch between Northampton and Holyoke is where things start to get weird.

On the naked rocky bank of the river, tourists gather to walk amongst ancient dinosaur tracks frozen in stone. Dinosaurs ruled this planet before us (230 million years ago), and for much longer than us (160 million years).

You hug the long and languid curves of the wide road. Running water is to the left and to the right a mountainous forest obscures something large, sprawling, and eerily void of human activity. A water park for smiling 1960s families now stands still and abandoned through the trees. You can’t see it from the road, but you know its there.

You aren’t there yet but Holyoke is coming. This heap of bricks once boomed with industrial glory a century ago. Poor immigrants and resourceful artists have colonized the ghetto- gridlocked streets, gigantic derelict warehouses and factories dominate the landscape. Bizarre junk fills every corner, nook, and cranny.

This is where I first fell in love.