Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part II)

Stopping in the ghostly arch

Day two of our trip to the Berkshires began with the blizzard still howling and virtually no visibility. We trudged our way over to the Mass MoCa complex, occasionally stumbling into snow drifts. (Luckily the museum did not close for the day, merely opened late.)

Mass MoCa is housed in a 19th century brick mill complex along a river. It has space for some of the largest museum art installations I’ve ever seen. They’re so big that the museum doesn’t keep most of them permanently. It rotates each art exhibition space around once a year. We first passed through a gallery of some vaguely creepy pieces covered with silk roses in dark wax and preserved peacocks hanging on a dead tree. Then up the stairs to something utterly surprising: a 150-foot-long gallery crossed by dozens of fishing filaments lit to create an arc of light points above a phantom tunnel. Wow. (The piece, Re-projection: Hoosac, by Tobias Putrih, echoes a local train tunnel known for its ghosts.)

Shadow play with lenses draped on string

Mass Moca has a single gallery that is longer than a football field filled with a multicolor moonscape of colored rocks and dirt amidst icebergs of Styrofoam. Other galleries we enjoyed included a decaying old-growth forest crafted from paper and shadow plays that drizzled down from suspended strings of magnifying lenses.

You can walk inside the paper trees and fiddle with their roots

The forms created from mounds of red fisherman’s line, uh, not so much.

Scott's hidden persona

The installation we spent the most time on was Secret Selves, by Leonard Nimoy. (Yes, that Leonard Nimoy.) He asked dozens of people from the Northampton area to pose as their hidden alter egos or their superhero selves. (I don't think any one of them said they were a secret Vulcan.) The exhibit included a video of Nimoy interviewing each person individually as they planned out the shoot. Two highlights: the former Junior League president who was a bruising, tenacious fighter, and the children’s book illustrator as rockin’ guitarist.

In the afternoon, with the blizzard nearly spent, we walked back to the inn and dug out our car. Then it was a new set of back roads, where we managed to get lost only twice, and a straight shot on the turnpike back to Boston.

Time to dig the car out

A few lessons from the day:

• The blizzard set me up to appreciate things I would have missed if we had been on an easy jaunt.
• Creativity is contagious—I came up with a bunch of new ideas for the blog and other projects without really concentrating on them.
• Silk long johns are really the only thing for winter weather wimps who insist on going outside.