What is this land we’re standing on? When we talk about the Berkshires, we’re looking at a range of hills on what is now the Western edge of Massachusetts
— they run along the border with the Taconics and New York state and merge into the Green Mountains in Southern Vermont.
And it’s a rare place. We live in a high green country with a vivid creative life. Up here a choreographer from Brooklyn can walk into a 200-year-old meetinghouse and imagine black American Shaker dance. And then he can create his own movement and perform there.
In some ways it’s an in-between place, across the state from Boston and up the Hudson River from New York, and as a cultural area and as a geographic one, it spills over the state line.
Berkshire County is a long, lean stretch. It runs from Connecticut north to Vermont, 50 miles from end to end. But it’s a beautiful amble. You can take an hour to get from Cobble Hill in Brooklyn to an old friend’s wedding in Manhattan, and here in that time I can cross the length of the county and tool along country roads, watching for wild turkeys on my way to see a play before it opens Off-Broadway.
Some of our history in the Berkshires is alive because we still use it every day, to make cheese or cider or a cup to drink it in. And some of our history we are reviving in new ways, as in a silo at Hancock Shaker Village, new music invokes Shaker hymns with contemporary artists and technology.
These hills have always been a crossroads. As long as people have lived along the wide rivers to our east and west, they have come up here to the high valleys. Their people have seen revolutions — and led them.
In the Berkshires, many people and communities make one, like streams running across the slopes to to the Housatonic. People live and build and transform and celebrate who they are. And the community comes together to honor them.
These hills and river valleys are the homelands of the Mohican nation. Many of their community now live in Wisconsin now, and they have always returned and kept in touch.
In response to Covid-19, Berkshire camps have adapted, moved online or closed, with strong effects on campers and families, communities and local businesses.
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