Mount Greylock — named for the Abenaki war chief Gray Lock — and how Herman Melville watched it like a great white whale while writing Moby-Dick.
That great long mountain rising over Williamstown and North Adams — the highest ground in all Massachusetts — is Mount Greylock, and it carries two stories worth telling, one old and one that changed American books forever.
The old one is in the name. Greylock is for a man — Gray Lock, the Abenaki called him Wawanolewat — a war chief with a streak of gray in his hair who fought the English settlers up and down this frontier for decades in the early seventeen-hundreds. He was a phantom. He'd strike and vanish back into the mountains, and the colonial soldiers never once caught him or beat him. He fought on his own terms his whole life and died an old, old man, never surrendered. They named the biggest mountain in the state for him, and I'd say he earned it.
Now the second story. About a hundred and seventy-five years ago, a young writer named Herman Melville was living just south of here, in Pittsfield, at a farmhouse where the window over his writing desk looked straight out at Greylock. And all that long winter he sat there, staring at that mountain — its great pale hump rising white with snow out of the dark forest — and he wrote a book about a man hunting a giant white whale across the sea. Some folks swear that when Melville looked at snow-covered Greylock, humped up on the horizon, he was looking at Moby-Dick himself. He loved that mountain so much he dedicated the next book he wrote to it — to Greylock's, and I'm quoting him, 'most excellent Majesty.'
So there it stands: named for an unconquered chief, and shaped, in one man's eye, into the most famous whale in the world. Not bad for a hill in the Berkshires. Take a good long look at it on your way by.
Photo: user:Kelson · CC BY-SA 1.0
