Category: Fall

Dancing Crow Pumpkin

On by in Fall, HM, Visions

This may or may not be my official pumpkin carving for the season. I have wild ambitions for something really complicated, a cylindrical frieze featuring the Mayan death god. But that will require several hours of dedicated free time, and considering how neglected this here blog has been of late, such time may never materialize.

So just in case I never get around to it: Happy Hallowe’en! Grab that fiddle and a jug of barley-wine and head down to the fields for a moon dance!

Cold Mountain water
the jade merchant’s daughter
Mountains of the Moon,
Elektra, bow and bend to me
Hi ho the Carrion Crow
Folderol-de-riddle
Hi Ho the Carrion Crow
Bow and bend to me

—-Robert Hunter, “Mountains of the Moon”

Berkshires in Late Fall

On by in Fall, Visions


This is some kind of serious glacial anomaly I came across after getting my socks soaked in Chesterfield Gorge. The picture doesn’t really convey the size—-the rock is maybe 9 feet across and at least 3 feet tall (not including the part of it that’s submerged in mud). It doesn’t match any of the rock of the surrounding gorge, as you will note from the next picture. It’s sculpted so smooth by the water it almost looks like carved marble. I wonder how it got here.


The usual local rock, sedimentary shale.


Horse Mountain, Haydenville, MA. The white fuzzy stick-animals are alpacas.

King Philip's Rock

On by in Fall, Visions

King Philip’s Rock aka South Sugarloaf, from River Road in Whately, MA. This is only one of many rocks purportedly belonging to King Philip between here and the Atlantic. Not unlike inns proclaiming “Washington slept here”—except of course that all those rocks actually did belong to King Philip, aka Metacomet, a sachem of the Wampanoag.

I’m thinking of doing a little climatological observation. I took this the last week in October. Every three months I’ll take a photo from the same spot. I wonder what will happen.