I was poking around East Colrain last week, something I’ve done quite a bit lately, there and in Heath, another upland jewel in our western hills. Along the way, I bumped into a man I first met when we were both Frontier Regional schoolboys. He happened to abut the parcel I was exploring and was out tidying-up his lawn and tinkering with his lawnmower on an refreshing spring afternoon, around 4.

The snow had finally melted enough for a comfortable, in places soggy, walk through the crackly woods, which I had already completed when I popped into my old schoolmate’s back yard and stopped to chat about this and that, beginning with the long-overdue arrival of spring in the hills behind my home. He too was happy to breathe fresh, warm spring air, which undoubtedly had lured him out for afternoon chores, but he was quick to point out that it was still winter in the gorge below, the one known to natives as Bernardston Gore, before that Falltown Gore, a natural obstruction that created hardships for pioneer on both sides.

“I drove through Green River Road this morning and it’s still winter down there, deep snow and ice on the steep banks near where the road washed out,” he said. “Take a ride if you don’t believe me. There’s still a ways to go down there.”

Knowing the unforgiving terrain in that deep ravine, I didn’t doubt him but had no interest in revisiting winter. I had my fill weeks ago, to be perfectly honest. But it did get me thinking about that “gore,” the one our earliest colonial settlers, some of them ancestors living just west of the Green River, found to be quite an obstacle in their daily travels, particularly Sunday treks of an ecclesiastical nature.

Going back to the original early 18^th century land grants of Boston Townships 1 and 2, which have become northwestern Franklin County, a chunk of what is today Colrain along the western bank of the Green River belonged to Bernardston (Falltown), forcing residents to take an arduous, 14-mile weekly trip to church and back. The route meandered south through parts of the current Shelburne and Greenfield, then looped back north and east to Bernardston, presumably crossing the Green River near the Pumping Station ford. That trip became unnecessary once East Colrain built its own meeting house on Chandler Hill, but before Bernardston Gore inhabitants could attend the Colrain church, the colonial government in Boston had to annex it to Colrain, and, like any bureaucratic venture, it didn’t happen overnight.

Having fished that section of the Green many times over the years, even way before I moved into “the neighborhood,” I am familiar with the steep, picturesque Falltown Gore and can sympathize with early inhabitants whose 1771 petition to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson I recently reviewed. The petitioners with names like Workman, Clark, Henry, and Lukas ask the governor to approve setting off their section of Bernardston to Colrain due to hardship in travel to and from church services. They cited difficulty crossing Green River when swollen, and the impossibility of building a road through the gorge as the main reasons for their request. Before 1780, the request was granted and Bernardston Gore became an extension of East Colrain. Today, trout fishing, swimming and deer hunting are the primary activities there. An east-west road through there has never been attempted and never will be. You just don’t cross geographic divides like Bernardston Gore. You follow them through or go around.