In every region there is an evening drive which lures the city dweller from the cramped vistas of the office, the home, and the dingy streets to the limitless expanse of hills and valleys, where mental tension relaxes and vision broadens as the physical horizon expands and acquires depth. In less favored localities, the drive may be long and the relaxation short, but not so in the Connecticut Valley. Half an hour of travel, either to the east or to the west from any large community, provides an escape to the hills, where people, cars, houses, and all the minutiae of urban civilization are blurred on the canvas of upland and lowland.

Local pride and personal prejudice may proclaim one view superior to another; but the praise so liberally bestowed upon the heights beyond Westfield, the Mount Tom Reservation, the land called Goshen, Shelburne Summit, and many another site, merely bespeaks the rivalry of equally favored vantage points. Perhaps the trail to Pelham would not be singled out for special mention by the undiscriminating enthusiast, but the connoisseur of New England’s scenic beauty returns and follows it again and again. A good road may take some credit for its popularity, but there is a deeper cause than this which brings him back; for, if there is drama in scenery, he finds it here. The road leads out of Northampton, and from the graceful arch of the Coolidge Memorial Bridge he views the flood-scarred lowlands that border the river, and across the flat plain into Hadley he sees visible reminders that river and farmer periodically struggle over ownership of the land. Then a rise in the road constricts the view but offers a promise of something different. Ahead, rolling fields stretch to the beckoning hills beyond Amherst, but the hills appear and disappear in tantalizing cadence as the car tops each rise and drops into the ensuing hollow. Soon West Pelham comes into view, and the rise to the highland begins. Beside the road a brook tumbles into the valley; and as the car climbs the heights to Pelham, and miles of wooded land are suddenly spread before the eye, the wayfarer realizes that here is the dramatic climax to his trip and to the murmured story of the brook. But the long ridges reaching out to the north and to the south, the deep valleys between them, and the sky which meets the farthest ridge do not enclose the panorama. It has a fourth dimension—time—a dimension as limitless as the horizon.

With just a dash of imagination, the wayfarer may journey backward through time; through scenes of infinite variety; through countless years of unceasing change; through situations so different that he would scarcely have recognized his New England. The scarred plain of the river, the brook, the soil, the rocks, the upland and the valley,—all tell a fascinating and a logical, if surprising, geological tale. A detour down this fourth dimension promises as much interest as a journey through the other three.