Glacial Potholes

Rachel and I like to visit the old-style swimming hole in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. On a hot summer day, the locals meander down to the glacial potholes at the base of the dam across the Deerfield River. Here the river courses through and across a series of rocks and ledges that had been sculpted by retreating glaciers thousands of years ago. The rocks are smoothed out and the round indentations named “potholes” were formed when the ice melted. The potholes are four or five feet deep and filled with water. The sun warms the rocks, and the potholes become natural hot tubs. Next to the potholes, water from the dam streams across the rocks and rushes across little waterfalls. It looks a little bit like an amusement water park, with pools, cascades, and rapids. But unlike an amusement park, it is all unplanned and wild.

Visitors to the glacial potholes display different levels of courage. Considering that officially they’re not open to the public, it takes some courage just to swim there. The older folks watch the proceedings from deck terraces in souvenir shops high above the rocks at the top of the dam. Slightly more adventurous types wander down onto the rocky ledges, some laying out blankets to read and sunbathe. The local teenagers really run the place, jumping off the ledges down into the pools of cool water. Some of the jumps are not so tall, only a few feet. Others seem like the cliff dives at Acapulco. During our last visit, it took Rachel an hour to steel up enough courage to try one of the jumps. But she didn’t try one of the high ledges, and her dad wouldn’t have given her the go-ahead anyway.

The village of Shelburne Falls is not well known for its glacial potholes. But it has made a name for itself from an interesting creation called the “Bridge of Flowers.” The town, at the eastern edge of the Berkshires, built a trolley line in 1908 that ran to neighboring Colrain. The trolley carried passengers and supplies to nearby factories. But it couldn’t compete with the trucking routes that came into service, and the trolley company went out of business $20\text{years}$ later. The company left a nice but unused, multi-span concrete arch bridge across the river. In 1929, the town came up with the novel idea of turning the bridge into a tourist attraction. Residents hauled over some topsoil, and planted the bridge deck with flowers, vines, and shrubs. The formerly nondescript trolley bridge was transformed into the well-known and acclaimed Bridge of Flowers, and visitors came flocking to the town. Now during the warm season, the bridge is lushly planted. Guests can walk down a pathway surrounded by a beautiful garden, where local and exotic flowers bloom for six or seven months during the year. Crossing the bridge is an exhilarating walk, with a colorful spectacle of flowers alongside the path, the novelty of shade trees planted on a bridge, and the wide river surging below.

But crossing the bridge is a short walk, and for the town to be a more complete destination, it needed more than just a flowering bridge. Fortunately, the village itself is charming and a nice place to visit. It is situated in a beautiful valley a mile or so off the Mohawk Trail, surrounded by modestly tall wooded hills. The village Main Street has a traditional layout, with nineteenth century storefronts and a defined town center that doesn’t dribble out into Walmarted parking lots with Burger Kings and KFC. Many of the stores are either deliberately or unintentionally retro, like the drug store with its counter of soda shop stools. After swimming in the river, Rachel and I sat on the stools and drank some Cokes. Elvis wasn’t playing in the background, but he would have fit in. Since the town was a bit out of the way, if Elvis was really alive and in hiding, he could have lived in Shelburne Falls. After some sodas, we retreated to the terrific bookstore (independent, not Barnes and Noble) to browse the assortment of new and used books. A block or so away was the not-Starbucks coffee house, with a glass shelf full of diet-breakers and several worn, plush couches spread out on an old hardwood floor.

For bridge fans, Shelburne Falls has a second river crossing, which is even more interesting than the Bridge of Flowers. Running alongside the Bridge of Flowers is an old, iron truss bridge. This three-span, through-Howe truss carries Route 2A over the river. This bridge was built in the nineteenth century. Its classic, industrial truss form, nestled in the sleepy valley, adds to one’s impression of the village as a place lost in time. The scale of everything here—the bridges, the village, the river—and the way it all fits into the little valley, is about right.

Much of Shelburne Falls’ layout can be attributed to history, geography, and luck. They just don’t build villages the way they used to. Nowadays, the town’s beautiful, quaint Main Street, with its blocks of two-story, brick-front stores and offices, would not be allowed by most suburban zoning codes. So if you proposed to build a version of Shelburne Falls from scratch, your proposal would be illegal. The town also benefits from its beautiful location, and of course it helps to have two great bridges.

But the town’s present condition is not just a happy accident. The terrific old truss bridge was scheduled for demolition in the 1980s. By the end of the twentieth century, the structure was deteriorated to the point that it was ready to go. In 1985, the state Department of Public Works announced plans to replace the structure. However, residents of Shelburne Falls understood that the bridge had value beyond the function of moving cars from one side of the river to the other. It also was a living museum, a town symbol, and a structure perfectly located and scaled for the village. Town residents banded together to save the historic bridge. Their story is documented in an article in The New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7DF133BF930A25750C0A96E948260). Public Works Commissioner Jane Garvey said, “There are times when an historic bridge is so special, it absolutely must be preserved.”

The bigger picture includes figuring out just what those times are, not just for historic bridges, but for our infrastructure in general. The more we build, the more the infrastructure become an amalgamation of new and old. The new facilities are obviously so much better than the old ones. They are sleeker, stronger, and provide better function and better capacity. But when we consider how older structures teach us about history and the meaning of place, and how they actually shape and define the places that we inhabit, the shiny new replacement structures are not so much better after all. Massachusetts, which has much older infrastructure than most of the country, is ahead of the curve in figuring out what to save and how to save it. Of course, we’re infrastructure neophytes in comparison to parts of Europe and Asia, where, for example, the ancient Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, still carries water thousands of years after its construction. Some time in the future, if residents of Segovia no longer need a water aqueduct, they could consider planting flowers on it, and then people will come to visit.