After spending a week in the woods for my solo writing retreat in Warwick, MA, I decided to explore the surrounding area a little bit before heading eastward towards home.

My first stop was was to the Montague Bookmill at the recommendation of my Airbnb hosts. They knew my New England bookish soul would swoon for this used bookstore housed in an old 1840s grismill. I absolutely loved this place. After spending way too much time exploring all the used books in every room, I got some tasty lunch and coffee at The Lady Killigrew next door.

I thought my little detour couldn’t get any better, but then I stopped in Turners Falls which I’d seen on a map as a little mill town with a canal walking trail. What a surprise gem of a town! Well, not technically not a town, but a village in the town of Montague. There was free and easy parking near the start of the Canalside Rail Trail, a walking path running along a canal beside to the Connecticut River with views of a mostly-vacant and shuttered paper mill. After some rain, the river was so high, and the cloudy weather against all that faded brick was a vibe.

I followed the trail loop back through downtown, an avenue cutting through a grid of streets and multi-family homes clearly built to house mill workers. So much brick. The avenue, Avenue A, looked to have some cute shops and restaurants, but most things were closed due to it being a Monday during a pandemic.

It’s hard to put my finger on why, but I was just so charmed by this place. I later learned that during the 1970s, Turners Falls was home to the Renaissance Community, “one of the largest and most enduring communes in the northeast U.S” according to Wikipedia. Which honestly only makes Turners Falls even more intriguing. I’d love to go back and spend more time there once things open back up again (please let it be so).

We went to the North End for the first time in forever. Got some brunch at Parla and then said hello to Paul Revere. Looked at his house from the outside. Despite it being July 4th, there were no festivities going on during the day. Ah, such is a pandemic.

We were about to leave North Adams after our MASS MocA excursion when I saw on Google Maps that we were less than ten minutes away from something called Natural Bridge State Park. A state park? With a bridge? That is natural? SPONTANEOUS DETOUR!

As we drove down a windy road, we saw that parking would be $5 for our car with MA plates. What a steal! An even better steal—when we finally got to the park, we saw a sign claiming that the $5 fee was waved for the day—hurray! The only other car in the parking lot was the state park maintenance folks. Because this was shaping up to be a little horror-movie-esque, we skipped the Welcome Center (which appeared open, maybe?) and went straight to the trail to find this so-called “natural bridge.”

But first! A dam! And not just any dam, but the ONLY white marble dam in North America (according to the sign)! What!! So cool.

We followed some short trails over some iron (i.e. unnatural) bridges and stairs that led us in between cool rock formations with water running between them.

We walked down to the marble quarry which was an equally impressive sight. I’d only ever seen quarries by the ocean, filled with water. This quarry had a vast grassy lawn at the bottom. It would make a great picnic spot on the right day.

All in all, the park is kind of small, though it would’ve been worth the $5. And I’m still not sure which bridge was the natural one? Hmmm!

Aisha and I took a mini vaxxed vacation to North Adams MA to visit one of the largest contemporary art museums in the country—Mass MoCA! This was Aisha’s first time to the museum, and I hadn’t been in over a decade. My underlying motivation for this particular destination was to take photos for visual inspiration for my novel-in-progress, which is set in and around a similar (albeit much smaller) New England mill building. Also, I wanted to see some weird stuff.

Mass MoCA is enormous. We went on a Monday with our timed tickets, and it wasn’t particularly busy. We had some whole exhibits to ourselves for wandering and photo-taking. We spent about four hours there, including a break for lunch at the museum cafe, and I’m still not confident we saw it all.

One of the main draws of Mass MoCA is the James Turrell light exhibit, which required a separate timed ticket for entry. The exhibit involved standing in a totally white room with a handful of strangers as colored lights changed and flashed around us. Felt very Willy Wonka, minus the candy.

We also kept accidentally walking through this incredibly giant room that had epic music, moving shadows, and strobe lights going on sometimes. One of the times we walked through, I just absolutely cracked up because I mean… how did we get here?

I loved the three-story Sol LeWitt exhibit. Very colorful, with lots of surprises around corners (all except for one harsh orange and green mural that is forever burned into my retinas). It was around the LeWitt exhibit that we were trying our darndest to get to one of the buildings on the map, and we just could NOT figure out how to get there. We finally got to it by going outside, checking out a couple outdoor exhibits while we were out there, and then climbing up a fire escape. Pretty sure we weren’t supposed to do that, but another visitor saw us and let us in and it was all good.

After the museum we walked around North Adams’ downtown a little bit. There wasn’t much to see or do, and lots of things were closed on a Monday. So we got some beer at Bright Ideas Brewing and some A-OK BBQ and ate in the tented picnic table area in the museum parking lot. Yum.

We stayed a couople nights at Porches Inn which we both enjoyed so much, especially the pool and the “granny chic” aesthetic. Oh, and the porches, of course!

Came for the gardens, stayed for the statues.

Tower Hill Botanic Garden was very much under construction in late May. After showing our timed ticket at the gate, we were greeted by a yellow beeping backhoe, and signs guiding us around a literal mountain of construction. But hey, we drove all the way to Boylston, so we were going to make the most of it.

The indoor Orangerie was oranger-empty. The Limonaia? More like Lame-onaia. Okay, okay. Once we got past the confusion of “where are the heck are there any gardens around here?” we did enjoy walking through the wooded trails, which were dotted with little sculptures and surprises, like a statue of Pan and a big bird’s nest that was fun to sit in.

We enjoyed the Rustic Overlook and the Rustic Pavillion, both rather rustic, as well as the shade garden that had some cool mossy steps.

Finally towards the end of the trip we located some flowery gardens, more like what we were expecting. The Lawn Garden and the Not-so-Secret Garden were lovely and I especially enjoyed all the azalea bushes.

I’d like to go back sometime in a different season, maybe when all the construction is finished!

Aisha and I celebrated my official vaccinated status by going to the Franklin Park Zoo in Dorchester. Because if I’m going back out into the world, why not start with the zoo? The park was operating at limited capacity, so we bought timed tickets online in advance.

It’s wild that Franklin Park Zoo is smack-dab in the middle of the city. It comes out of nowhere. As we were approaching and the GPS was saying that we were only 4 minutes away, I was like, “Where? How?” And then BAM — there’s the zoo!

Franklin Park Zoo has some adorable animals. I loved seeing the giraffes and zebras, and the lions and tigers (no bears, oh my). The prairie dogs were very cute and yippy. A few exhibits were under major construction or only partially open, I’m guessing, because of Covid times. For example, the hyenas were MIA. And there was a whole big flight cage with what appeared to be only one or two vulture-ish birds inside. Like, no shade to the vultures, but did they really need a whole flight cage to themselves?

One thing I wasn’t expecting was the peacocks that were freely roaming the zoo. I’m glad they weren’t confined to a cage, but they were very screamy and kind of scary. They weren’t putting up with anyone’s nonsense!

The zoo also has what I can only describe as a “90s Jurassic Park” vibe. Not that there were any dinosaurs. But there was a safari jeep for kids to play in (pre-Covid… it’s now closed off), and some structures looked like they hadn’t been painted since the 90s either.

The most tedious part of the zoo was waiting in line to get into the indoor Tropical Forest exhibit, which only allowed certain number of people inside at a time for social distancing. We almost gave up, but it turned out to be worth the wait because it was our favorite exhibit. Not only were there pygmy hippos, but there was a fresh BABY pygmy hippo, which is maybe the cutest animal in the world. There was also a baby gorilla but the gorillas in general were staying far away from the glass and people, understandably so. It looked like an open-air version of the Tropical Forest exhibit was under construction beside the indoor one. Thank goodness!

But probably my favorite part of the zoo was how it wasn’t busy at all, and that’s likely thanks to the timed ticket requirement. On an overcast May Sunday in any other year, we might’ve not seen as many animals as we did, or we might’ve had to wait and wade through even more people. Limited crowds is one perk from Covid times that I hope sticks around for a little bit longer.

We’re coming out of Covid winter (please let this be true!) and I’m ready for more socially distant outdoor wanderings. I’ve been meaning to return to the Medfield State Hospital in Medfield, MA. The shuttered college-like campus of the former psychiatric hospital is one of the stranger places I’ve visited in the Commonwealth. A cloudy February day made for perfect conditions for being around eerie decaying brick buildings, and Aisha and Laura brought along their fancy cameras.

When I first visited Medfield State Hospital back in 2014, there wasn’t a whole lot written about it online. I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I got the sense that it wasn’t widely advertised that the historical landmark was open as a public park. Maybe that was to keep vandals away, or maybe because the hospital closed in 2003, only about a decade prior.

Seven years ago, the park was heavily patrolled and there weren’t many people there. One older woman who was hanging out there with her family and dog, was surprised we were going around taking pictures. She told us that she grew up on the campus, as her mother worked on the hospital staff cutting patients’ hair. She described a largely self-sustaining community of farming and trade work, patients and staff living all together on campus, like what’s described in this 1997 video, one of the few in-depth historical resources I can find about the hospital: 

Seven years later I was pleased to read online that the campus was still open as a park, and I was curious how it’s changed, if at all. Well I observed at least one major change to the hospital campus and it was this: DOGS. 

So. Many. Dogs. Big dogs. Little dogs. Dogs on leashes. Dogs off leashes. Dogs sniffing each others’ butts. Dogs sniffing my butt. Corgis and huskies and dachshunds and dalmations and very many mutts. That’s right—Medfield State Hospital seems to now serve mainly as a dog park. And everyone in Medfield must have a dog, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dogs in my life (Aisha and Laura are in agreement with me on this—there were a LOT of dogs). 

Besides all the extra dog poop, the campus is largely the same as I remember. The most prominent building is the chapel, with its wooden clock perpetually stuck at the wrong times, made famous by its pseudo-appearance in Shutter Island (2010). The brick buildings seemed mostly in the same condition, with their boarded windows and crumbling steps. Not all the pathways were plowed, just the main roads, but the snow was minimal enough for us to crunch through to go up to buildings (and get away when there were too many dogs convening). 

Patrolling must be working because I saw little to no evidence of vandalism or break-ins. Every building is locked shut with large signs warning against unlawful entry and hazardous conditions. My morbid curiosity burns stronger wondering what the insides of these buildings must look like now after all these years. I imagine mold, mice, and asbestos. The few photos I can find online say to me that even rulebreakers don’t even dare trespass.

Someone or some people had decorated the campus for Valentines Day, hanging hearts on lamp posts and candy conversation hearts on the buildings. A strange choice, in my opinion. I guess that’s one way to lighten up a somber atmosphere of a former psychiatric hospital. But something about a decaying “Womens Convulsive Ward” saying CALL ME or TEXT ME just didn’t really sit right, but hey, I’m just a tourist. 

Speaking of the Women’s Convulsive Ward, that was something new I noticed this time around—each building was labeled with a number that corresponded to a map at one of the main parking lots. The map listed each building’s former purpose. If the map existed back in 2014, I don’t remember seeing it. Since we parked in a different spot, we didn’t even get to the map until we were over halfway done exploring the campus. I took a picture of it for reference as we toured the rest of the hospital so we could identify the buildings.

Another new addition was the presence of haikus on some of the buildings. A little sealed paper next to each poem explained that this was part of a larger town-wide Medfield Poetry Project put on by the Medfield Public Library, Medfield TV, and the Cultural Alliance of Medfield. Their goal is to “bring people together to enjoy the property and build support for future arts and cultural activities on the grounds.” 

There were also quite a few sap buckets tapped into maple trees around the hospital campus. Taken together, these present-day details—the sap buckets, the poetry, even the candy hearts—made it comfortably clear that the hospital grounds are being watched over and cared about. The millions of dogs made that pretty clear too. I’m curious to know what will come of the historical hospital in another seven years. 

Also, I apparently contributed an article about Medfield State Hospital for Atlas Obscura back when I first visited. I was reading the article when researching this adventure and was like, “Hey I wrote this?!” Ha.