Scenes from the June Roads

The high time of summer, the long days, the bright sun bearing down from a relentlessly blue sky.

Muschopauge Rd, Rutland

The long country roads shaded by hardwood canopy. The farms with faded barns and expansive green fields. The livestock gazing in grass-fed splendor.

The Bedouin have come to watch Team Shad train
Rutland, June 14, 2016

Two Wachusett summits recently.

One, on June 12, the 40th anniversary of my first Dead show, a wildly cloudy day that, while warm enough at the lower elevations, was actually chilly on the gray summit.

Dub on the Mountain

Grateful Dead, live at the Boston Music Hall, June 12, 1976

And the second, a week later on what would have been my brother's 59th birthday, June 19, 2016, a classic summer Sunday, but very hot.

Captain Swelter and Franklin's Tower

Unusually, I didn't do a loop on the 19th. Instead, I started from Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts where I'd attended a Father's Day Brunch.*

En route back to Woo City, I succumbed to the pull of the Mountain and detoured north despite it being a sweltering day of remorseless sun heat, the kind of day where you drink so much water that you feel sick and don't want to drink anymore but you HAVE to drink more because you're sweating so much you're losing water at a rapid pace and need to replace it.

Departure from Fruitlands, June 19, 2016
the peak of Mt. Wachusett visible in the distance

Sterling

Looking south toward Woo City

* Father's Day brunch honoring Team Shad's founding father, Vladimir Andersshadokov, visiting from Sverdlove, a small village two hours or so northeast of the Black Sea port of Odessa. The brunch was more or less a success, marred only by the well-intention'd caviar that the old patriarch declared to be of Iranian origin and so obviously inferior to the Russian.* 

* Yes, he said "Russian," not "Ukrainian"