Flashes of Panic

I have a weird fascination with the Quabbin. I think it was between my junior and senior years at The College, when I spent the summer here in Amherst, that I really began to feel the pull. The Quabbin is a massive reservoir to the east of us, created when the Metropolitan District Commission (read: Boston) dammed the Swift River (a tributary of the Chicopee River and therefore the Connecticut) in Belchertown and Ware, flooding (and forever erasing from the map) the four towns of Greenwich, Prescott, Enfield, and Dana. The water stored in the reservoir eventually flows through one of the longest tunnels ever built to become Boston city water. Large sections of the watershed around the reservoir are part of the Quabbin Reservation, a vast, restricted-access wildlife preserve intended to keep the water clean, I suppose.

I think the Quabbin is the real dividing line between Western and Eastern Massachusetts. Eastern Massachusetts is essentially a big suburb of Boston, out to the secondary center of Worcester. Western Massachusetts is more independent, sometimes more liberal (if you can imagine it,) vastly more rural and less populated, and significantly more ornery.

Part of the orneriness is a lingering resentment towards Boston for the removal of the four towns (and the maiming of a fifth; neighboring Pelham is geographically weird due to the borders of the reservation.) One of my employers that summer had framed maps of the four towns on the walls of his house. The primary dorms at Hampshire College are named for the four towns. And there’s a certain feeling that Boston did it once, they could do it again.

I’m not as fascinated as some people. For instance, there’s the UMass crew that got permission to go diving in the reservoir and make a film about it. Mark Erelli roomed with one of the producers, and wrote a song about it, “The Farewell Ball,” which we heard when he opened for Nanci Griffith at the Calvin.

Tomorrow we’re running a race in New Salem, northwest of the reservoir. The race is named for the railway line that ran down into the Swift River Valley from New Salem, the Rabbit. When you drive up Route 202 from Belchertown to New Salem, you see a handful of “ghost roads” crossing the route and heading down into the Reservation. Eventually, I imagine, they dead-end at the waterline. Apparently this race covers some of those roads, though there’s not a lot of race information around to tell where. I’m curious.