I fastened my helmet and threw my leg over the back of my boyfriend’s big BMW motorcycle. We had a perfect sunny day as we rode out of Amherst, past neat houses and farms, past acres of serene woodlands. It was July 4, 1974, and when Russ had read the announcements of the holiday activities, he had decided that visiting the Leverett sawmill was a must-do. That’s guy stuff! Why would I care how planks are cut? Besides, I’m a city girl. What do I want out in the country? But he had driven all the way from Cambridge to celebrate this holiday with me. I was a graduate student at Harvard and had come to the University of Massachusetts Amherst for the eight-week Linguistic Institute they were hosting that year.

After a while, the mill appeared — a weathered wooden barn-like building, across from a yellow house and a church at a T-intersection. We drove around the corner to get a better view of the water. The placid mill pond reflected the blue sky and powder-puff clouds. The rushing rapids of the falls raised my pulse. Maybe this could be fun. Entering the mill, we saw that we were the only visitors. The one man running it welcomed us, then squared his shoulders and stood tall.

“This mill has been here since before the Revolution. It’s powered by the river outside. That’s the Sawmill River.” Pause. “There used to be 22 mills on this river, but this is the last one left.”

“Where’s the wheel?” Russ asked.

“You can’t see it. It’s under the floor over in that corner.” He pointed. “The water wheel turns this saw and makes the log carriage move, but I can disengage it with this lever here,” he said proudly. “See that log on the carriage now? This mill can cut one up to 42 feet long.”

The carriage was a long, narrow platform carrying a straight log about 14 inches in diameter. It ran lengthwise in the building, and the saw blade was near the middle of the structure. When the operator turned it on, the blade whirred, and the log and carriage traveled smoothly into it, with no jolt when the log hit the blade. The saw blade made lengthwise cuts of the whole log.

“Wow! How cool!” I gushed. “Do you own the place?” I ventured tentatively, wanting to prolong the conversation.

“Nah. I just work here part time. It’s been owned by a lot of people — the Glaziers and Taylors, right now the Kirley family’s got it.”

The operator didn’t offer to repeat the cutting, but we still hung around until he seemed to grow tired of us. Reluctantly, we put our helmets and leathers back on and pulled out onto the road. Some guy things can be really interesting, I admitted to myself.

I held onto this experience for decades, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the name of the town. Then, in 2009, my husband, Jim, and I moved to UMass as faculty members. We looked at houses in Amherst, Northampton, and Pelham before finally finding one that we loved in Leverett. A couple of months after moving in, we were driving down Cave Hill Road, when I spied the mill. Recognizing it immediately, I said to Jim, in a voice full of excitement,

“There’s the sawmill I was telling you about … Right here in Leverett!”

I was thrilled to have it as my neighbor. Though time has changed many things, the mill is still there. It reminds me that I should always be ready for adventure of any kind — guy thing or not.

This story previously ran in the Montague Reporter.