We took a trip Sunday. It was my dad’s idea. He thought the kids would be interested in seeing llamas.
How he heard about Tregellys Fiber Farm in Hawley, I do not know. What he failed to tell us when we met up at the Creamery in Cummington is that is is a forty-five minute drive into the middle of nowhere.
He and my mom cruised on ahead, no doubt listening to classical music on the radio, chatting and enjoying the scenery.
In our car, Rebecca immediately starts on a migraine. The kids occupy themselves by making as much noise as possible: scatological screeching, punctuated by repeated demands for various things that cannot be procured on a small country road in Ashfield.
On and on we drive. We’ve been going for miles on a single-lane dirt road through a pine and beech forest. It’s been fifteen miles since we passed even a house.
Jane starts to feel carsick. Poor Rebecca is sitting silently with her eyes closed looking tense. I am thinking how much I would rather be almost anywhere than in this car on a beautiful fall day, and about the hydrocarbons we’re emitting, and global warming, and wondering what on earth my father was thinking; and also trying to concentrate on my out-breaths and relax into the moment, which is not working. I am not relaxing.
Then, suddenly, we come into a clearing and we’re in…
Tibet.
This farm is set on a steep, rocky hillside overlooking a forested valley. Just beyond the farmhouse, the ground falls away steeply and you can barely see to the bottom of the ravine, where another mountain rises just as severely, filling up the horizon.
Okay, it’s not the Himalayas, but it’s an incredibly beautiful, secluded corner of western Massachusetts. The hill above the road is figured with large stone terraces. At the edge of the rise stands a tall stupa (Tibetan prayer shrine).
In large wire pens, or roaming about free, are animals such as Bactrian camels, Royal Pinto Yaks and Icelandic sheep and rams. Plus pigs, sheep and chickens, and a pet duck who swims around in a spectacular hand-laid slate fountain the size of a small pond.
The kids, of course, had a great time running up and down the terraces and petting the animals. No, they had not, previously, seen Bactrian camels (native to the steppes of eastern Asia and domesticated around 2500 B.C.E., we learned).
Apparently Ed Cothey and Pamela Steward bought the land thirteen years ago and raised conventional animals there. They got a story in the local paper when they bought a llama. This attracted some visitors from Tibet, nostalgic for home. One thing led to another, and soon they had several Tibetan families living with them.
Then they started to import Asian animals. One of their guests contributed the terracing and the stupa; and stayed to open a Tibetan stonework business based on the farm.
Ed is an accomplished weaver, and Pamela is quite a good poet. She has a book with the University of Chicago Press.
Such a place, in the hills of Western Massachusetts. Who knew?
Plus they told us about Tibet Fest 2007, in Goshen, Connecticut. So we have next weekend planned already.
It was indeed a wonderful place. I was amused that in addition to her enthusiasm about the various unusual animals and birds, Janie was completely taken with the owners’ dogs. She is very good with dogs — gentle and quite unafraid. It was also nice that Pamela was so casually generous — finding a sun hat for Nophie in the lost and found pile, and giving the girls those little embroidered purses for free, to hold the bracelets I’d bought for them.
It should be spectacular in a couple of weeks at the height of the fall foliage — let’s go again, and this time we’ll take the kids in our car for part of the trip!