Beautiful Sadness - Leaving Dalton

Today we left Dalton, Massachusetts after visiting the shorter and more widely known cousin of the N2N-TCP...the AT or Appalachian Trail.

Dad and I visit the famous Yellow House on Depot Street in Dalton, MA that sits along the famous Appalachian Trail.

As we headed out toward Pittsfield, Massachusetts, we passed the dam on the Housatonic River that once served a factory that sets at the junction of Main Street and Depot Street in Dalton.

Dam on the Housatonic River that once powered the shuttered factory to the left side of the photo.

This dam and this shuttered factory are emblematic of the change that’s rolled over the small towns that we’ve been traversing as we pushed westward through Massachusetts.  The Industrial Age was born here, lived a good long life, and was eventually replaced in the last several decades with the new labor of the industrial age.

Some of the towns have tried to adapt as the industry that made them manufacturing power houses slowed, dried up, and eventually died.  Some of these factories have been reborn as arts, fitness, and pet centers, but many, many more have not.

They sit on the riverbank and the clank of machinery and the hiss of steam has been replaced by the gurgling of the river and the twiter of birds.  Good riddance say some, but I’m not sure. The creeper vines are slowly pulling the brickwork and glass of the factories slowly into the riverbank to be consumed as time and “progress” march inevitably forward.  There is a beautiful sadness about it all. How one way of life has blossomed and lived and died like the fog rolling down off the hillside to settle on the water and eventually be banished by the rising son.

I feel for the people trapped by the pace of change.  How they have seen their how way of life...no, the whole of their life’s work grow and then slowly wither and be memorialized by the shuttered factory slowly returning to the soil.  So much work and innovation and labor returning to a more basic state as nature exerts her influence over these fragile works of humanity.

I’m grateful to feel this beautiful sadness.  It’s something that surrounds you and you can feel in your soul at the slow pace of walking.  You can breath it and live it and feel it all around you and in you. The beautiful sadness of endless change.