“There’s no tonic like the Housatonic”
By Dave Read, Lenox, MA, May 18, 2025 – What a treat to spend an afternoon in the middle of May, with Spring in full display, paddling a kayak from Pittsfield to Lenox on the Housatonic River. My enjoyment was enhanced because I’ve been reading the Ralph Waldo Emerson biography written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This stretch of the river meanders through the Audobon Society’s Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary, which in the 1840s, was the summer “cottage” on the estate the Bostonian Holmes named Canoe Meadow!
Besides Old Ironsides, his poem of homage to the U.S.S. Constitution, Holmes is remembered for coining the maxim, “There’s no tonic like the Housatonic.”
Here’s a treat – a gaggle of geese and goslings (with a good still of the furry little ones in the slides below:
Oh yeah – what’s that they say about New England weather, if you don’t like it, wait a minute? As ideal a sunny day in May it was for 99.5% of this trip, just as we neared the exit ramp in Lenox, we were hit with what felt like a hurricane! That noisy, lightning-scary episode only serves to keep the outing bookmarked in memory.