828. Cambridge, Middlesex County (MA02)

Middlesex County was new only to me. The rest of the fellowship had found a cache here on the drive from Connecticut to New Hampshire, and Cambridge came to represent a bit of a pickle for me. Middlesex County was originally divided into two regions, each having one of the county’s two seats: Lowell in the North District and Cambridge in the South District. However, in 1998, the county governments of Middlesex and all the western counties of Massachusetts were dissolved, leaving them as regional areas run by the state. This raised the question of whether I should consider Middlesex as having dual seats and, therefore, two courthouses that I should visit. After some consideration, I left it at Cambridge. While Lowell was a county seat and had a courthouse (and a lovely one, in use until the Time of Cholera), Cambridge actually still possesses some functional county offices that are not administered directly by the state, making it, in my opinion, the functional county seat of Middlesex. All this really means for our purposes is that I am under no personal obligation to go to Lowell to see its courthouse. Knowing me, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if I come back to see Lowell when I go for the rest of western Massachusetts.

That said, I was happy to get to use one of my two Massachusetts jokes at its comedic ground zero.

A man at a grocery store goes to the checkout line, sees the sign that says, “10 items or less,” and places his eleven items on the belt.

The checker looks at the items, then up at the man, and asks, “Did you go to MIT or Harvard?”

Surprised, the man replies, “Harvard! How did you know?”

The checker replies, “Well, you either went to MIT, and you can’t read, or you went to Harvard, and you can’t count!”

Cool with morning air, Middlesex County served as a source of sadness for two reasons.  First, it is home to Catkin&Golden, one of my patrons, and I had hoped to meet her at an Event the previous evening, but our time in Maine made us unable to make it to Massachusetts before late in the evening, so we missed the Event.  I felt very sorry to have missed her.  Second, it was the final day of our trip.  We would be boarding a plane in the late afternoon, returning to Austin.  My only solace was that I got to tell my only Cambridge-based joke! That, and something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done not unbecoming folks that strove with Gods or some kind of crap like that.  And it began first thing in the morning at a hill.

The fellowship parked in the back of a hospital parking lot at a trailhead and set off (originally in the wrong direction, but whatever).  It didn’t take long to figure out that we would have to fight a lot of gravity to find our quarry.  Some of us were not up to the climb and stayed behind while the better climbers pressed on, up the trail and over the basalt (which was probably granite, but what do I look like, a geology person?).  By the time we better climbers made it to the top, there was a lot of wheezing and commentary about our fitness levels because that hill was no joke. 

We lagged at various spots to photograph the beauty and catch our breath, but, once at the top, the walk from there was quite leisurely to what looked like a small dam (possibly a weir because I absorbed some geology, thankyouverymuch).  We walked across, and Godot dropped over the side, moved a piece of slate, and revealed an ammo can.  

Ladies and gentlemen (or however you identify—I don’t mean to be gender assumptive), I give you First Mass, the oldest cache in Massachusetts!  Putting our ink on this log was an excellent way to start the morning!  But this was about to go into our rearview mirror.  We had to go to Salem before swinging by the Middlesex County Courthouse on the way to our ultimate destination. You probably don’t need a map to figure out that we were going to fly out of…