The DreamAway Lodge

Neon in the night

We took a lot of pictures on our trip, but there are some places that you feel would be almost sacrilegious to photograph. That is the way I felt about the DreamAway lodge.

The old county road is a narrow lane heading steeply up October Mountain, in the middle of a vast sea of the green forests of the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. These mountains are low and soft, rounded at the top, more like hills for those used to the towering steep mountains of the Rockies or the Sierras. Travelling through these hills, though, is like swimming under water in a murky pond. The thick mixed woods close in on every road, and what few vistas there are reveal no distinct landmarks to provide orientation: only a rolling ocean of undulating green.

The climb up the mountain seems endless. As the road curves back and forth, the shadows of late afternoon cover the road and steep the forest in a dark cloak, rich with the scent of broad leaf trees, thick with the oxygen of rich air, and heavy with mysteries that lie in the miles of woods.

Suddenly the road opens up to a clearing, ringed by a wall of trees, and there at the top is the DreamAway Lodge.

children barefoot in the grass
young lovers huddling on the edge of illumination
from the white light of windows
and the green and blue of a neon sign

innocence and age
untrained teenage waiters
the song of the soft guitar
the foot fall of ancient innkeepers

old pony-tailed musicians come back
to find missing pieces of their soul
while toddlers chase fireflies in the island of light
as night settles in on October Mountain