As we continue under lockdown, and in New York City under a nightly curfew, join me in celebrating the joys of Quaranteam travel
The hope is that these dispatches might inspire us to value things we had taken for granted, to draw strength, wisdom and compassion from deeper engagements with nature, whenever we can resume our hikes, treks and voyages.
Adams Massachusetts from the Summit of Mount Greylock. Tuesday May 26, 2015.
“Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him”
Portrait of Melville By Joseph Eaton. 1870
Getty Images (Reproduced under Fair Use, etc.)
Herman Melville (1819-1891) devoted an entire chapter of Moby Dick to the color white, which might resonate with us today, when people of color are being targeted by bigotry to suffer physical and mortal abuse. Having recently re-read the book, I had forgotten how much of it is meandering digression—a pre-Joyce stream of consciousness ranging from whaleboat mechanics to a field-guide to killing, butchering and rendering the wild leviathan. Spermaceti and ambergris; pale illumination ans seductive scents were the fruits of bloody slaughter.
The ship Pequod was a world turned upside down. Seldom present, under the spell of a mysterious west Asian, the monomaniacal captain may also be insane. Apart from his officers, the stars of the ship’s company are the harpooneers, people of color; a Pacific Islander, an African and a Gay Head Wampanoag. Ordinary Americans today may not imagine such diversity truly existed at that time. Yet a century or more before the novel is set, every seafaring tongue from around the globe was spoken on the waterfronts of New York and Nantucket.
Rising 3,489 feet above sea-level lies Mount Greylock, in the northern Berkshires. Viewed from his Pittsfield farmhouse, its snowy form resembling a whale is said to have inspired Melville. Nathaniel Hawthorne hiked its slopes. Other literary lights of the day such as William Cullen Bryant ascended its heights. Henry David Thoreau spent a night on the mountain in the summer of 1844. When he awoke, a cloud-bank rested on the summit.
“As the light increased
I discovered around me an ocean of mist,
which by chance reached up to exactly the base of the tower,
and shut out every vestige of the earth,
while I was left floating on this fragment
of the wreck of the world,
on my carved plank in cloudland;
a situation which required,
no aid from the imagination
to render it impressive.”
On more than one occasion I have found Mount Greylock buried in clouds. Large sheets of rock lie exposed at the summit, which has been cleared. The bell-shaped Veterans Memorial Tower stands on the highest point of ground. Its beacon marks the location at night. The northern end of the mountain faces Williamstown, North Adams, and the Mohawk Trail—Route 2, which runs between Troy, New York and Boston. Below to the east. the Hoosic River flows northward, entering the Hudson River near Stillwater, just above the falls. Mill-towns like Adams Massachusetts, birthplace of women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony. As a center of light industry and textile manufacturing, the town flourished during the nineteenth-century. A century later it fell into decline and economic hardship. Today the town is enjoying a revival, as Berkshire County has become a popular destination for weekenders from New York and Boston.
Asher B. Durand (1796-1886). Kaaterskill Clove. 1866. Yale University Art Gallery
Working at such an elevation (2,700 feet above the valley floor) presents one with an almost aerial perspective. My approach to drawing is sapient rather than mimetic. Drawing on my knowledge of mapmaking, I sought to privilege certain landmarks for purposes of measuring the space and correcting it to scale. The town presented a rational footprint. Just to the north a quarry or gravel-pit cut a pale slash through the verdant bottomlands. Just beyond, high-tension towers marched up the ridge, in a diagonal pathway hewn through rising woodlands. Organizing the foreground in these dramatic vistas is always a challenge. My first encounter with kind of picture-making was in 1979 at Grant’s Last View of the Valley on the shoulder of Mount McGregor in Wilton New York. Here I was reminded of Asher B, Durand’s painting of Kaaterskill Clove. Instead of following the Claudian convention of a low diagonal leading us into the space along the bottom of the frame, colliding with a cluster of trees framing the scene, Durand framed his view with two of these compositional devices mirroring one another, and then echoes it in the overlapping arcs of the hills stepping back into the distance. Locating a pair of rocky ledges on the right and an alpine pasture on the left, I punctuated the left edge of the frame with a scrubby-looking spruce.
Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). A print from his Liber Veritatis. Claude Gelee, called “Le Lorrain” was a lowborn French expatriate who enjoyed a very successful career in Rome, which at the time was an international city, like New York, Singapore or London. Art-historians often classify him as “French” while neither he nor fellow Gallic expat Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665) had much use for a homeland where a hidebound caste-system would have hindered their advancement.
Looking East from Mount Greylock. Tuesday May 26, 2015.
Check out April 2020 Quaranteam Traveler Dispatches
(A preview of SKETCHBOOK TRAVELER by James L. McElhinney (c) 2020. Schiffer Publishing).
Copyright James Lancel McElhinney (c) 2020 Texts and images may be reproduced (with proper citation) by permission of the author. To enquire, send a request to
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