Having been to several varied cultural excursions I have chosen what I have found to be the most interesting.  The trip to the Boott cotton museum, The Kerouac pub crawl, and a concert at a local art gallery.  

    I will start my response journey at the Boott cotton museum, by far the most tame of my excursions into Lowell.  I have always loved museums, especially ones devoted to a single topic,  in focussing on a small piece of history niche museums are able to suck museum goers into that point in time much better than large art and history museums whose collections span centuries.  We started our museum tour with the mill room,  a simulated mill room with period accurate looms chugging out spools of cotton textile.  I could barely hear myself think as I walked down the isles of antique machinery. The deafening roar produced by just a few active machines was enough to make me physically uncomfortable, imagining what it must have been like to work in worse conditions for hours really gave the building a sense of pain and drudgery that still lingers.  On an interesting side note I enjoyed the miniature loom they had for guests to use, the confusion I had at the operation of the mechanical looms was alleviated when I got a hands on look at the machinery, and I felt in touch with my engineering ancestors.  

When on the cotton museum tour we were told we would be in character as laborers I was truly excited.  I have always loved when someone get’s to play a role, be it drill sergeant at an exercise camp, or civil war reenactors.  They represent an opportunity to forcefully pull others into your land of pretend and make them extremely uncomfortable in the process.  So I played along with our tour guide/factory foremans little game, conjuring up a bit of Cool Hand Luke, I proceeded to act as civilly disobedient as I could.  Writing rebellious unionist messages on the paper napkins we produced.  Sadly my line mates weren’t as immersed as I and just wanted the monotony to end,  happy with the measly one Boott buck they had earned from their struggles they punched out and continued with their  lives.  Still riding my Molly Maguire high I proceeded to the worker housing.  The lack of interactivity here upset me, but the fact that a good 30 of us were confined into such a small space did a good job immersing me in the cramped living spaces the working girls endured.  The voice section gave the room a personal albeit disembodied and ghostly, touch.  By the end of the latter half of the tour I had become restless and claustrophobic.  I passed the shrine that was Kerouac’s typewriter without so much as a passing glance nor did I closely examine the wall of nations.  

For that trip at least my attention had been dissipated.  

    Moving on from Lowell’s mill town era to the 40’s and 50’s the next stop on my tripple excursion outing was the Kerouac pub tour.  I went into it sceptically, a pub tour without alcohol, the mere thought  brought me back to dreary family vacations and school dances.  Once I got there however I realised I didn’t need alcohol to enjoy myself, first off there was no ever present warning about the dangers of the devils drink,  no parents to protect me from the drunk and the drinking.  

    The real experience of the pub crawl wasn’t so much the pubs as it was the people.  They ranged in age and level of disheveledness but all were some form of retired bohemian.  

Everyone had a story to tell of how they had gotten caught hopping trains, or how they woke up naked on a park bench.  Needless to say, as far as drinking company goes these were the guys you wanted to be with.   There was the alcoholic divorcee whose floppy hair hungover his sweaty face making him look like the living embodiment of alcoholism,  I spent some time listening to his life story before I realised he was just describing Carla from “Cheers”.  Next was a man, who from head to toe every article of clothing was denim.   Eerily enough he was the spitting image of David Carradine and I have no doubt if he were still alive David and the denim clad man would have similar stories to tell.  The denim clad man whom I will refer to as David (as that is quite a bit easier than saying “denim clad man”)  was one of two makeshift tour guides. The other tour guide looked and spoke like Jimbo from Southpark.  If you were to encounter him on anything other than the Kerouac pub tour you would see a proud republican with a subscription to both the NRA and John Deere newsletters, on the tour however he shared his rich travelling history, of bus stop girls, and a host of experimental hallucinogens in various cities.  There was an old lady who carried herself like a nun, between pints she would press us sober youngsters for spare change to fund next years pub crawl.  Also among the group was a professor reliving his glory days, a vacationing family complete with completely disinterested teenage daughter,  and a host of other inebriated oddities.
    We ended up going to several bars.  The first was a dive called “The Old Worthen” which looked like most dive bars, with various sentimental scraps of paper tacked to the wall and ornate seating packing the floors.  Other than our motley crew the bar was packed with hipsters and dreary locals angrily eying their hip young millennial counterparts.  Here we got to see the Kerouac tour turn from average adults, to over enthusiastic teeter totters.

Following that we went to an upscale Italian bar called “Ricardo’s Cafe Trattoria”  where Kerouac doubtlessly took the girls he had just met, or discussed his next rushed out book with publishers.  The white walls were marked with Tuscan arches,  the ornately tiled ceiling was chalked full of overactive black ceiling fans.  It was the kind of place your grandparents go, where vest clad old men serve G&T’s to aging couples.  David and Jimbo knew the keepers and shared stories as the party became more incoherent they left after only a few minutes.  

On the way to “Ward Eight” a pub, we entered an art gallery, we watched our company shamble through various local artists works as they impatiently pined for the next bar.  

Ward Eight was a new age pub built on top of an older bar, trendy records lined the wall and the menu was stocked with craft microbrews.  Nothing here really stood out, the tour had mellowed out by this point and I had heard their stories.

I left the last bar “Cappy’s Copper Kettle” early,  It was like any other dive bar it’s only claim to fame being that Kerouac had drank himself to death there.  The tour was almost asleep by that time so I beat a hasty retreat back to reality.  If I was to derive a lesson for this it would be,  “Drinking with old people is weird”.

My final excursion I didn’t really end up planning,  one friday night my roommate asked me if I wanted to go to a hardcore concert in downtown Lowell.  Never having been to one I decided to carpe nocte and seized the night.  The show was at the unchARTed art gallery,  a small loft on Merrimack, the walls were lined with moody pictures of the boxing club across the street.  The crowd at the show was a mix of rugged punks with their 40’s of Colt 45 and beanie festooned hipsters with their 40’s of PBR.  The headliners were the Fake Boy’s a local band of 4, if asked to describe their sound I would liken it to sex in the back of a greyhound bus,  loud enough to make the neighbors uncomfortable, rough enough to hurt in the morning, and almost certainly drug fueled.  The crowd ate it up, my room mate even started a mini mosh pit.  I found the whole show interesting not only because I’d never seen a hardcore show but also because it felt like I was a part of Lowell,  I was dancing with the people of Lowell, to music from Lowell, surrounded by art from Lowell.  

After I had been through these three experiences I struggled to connect them,  then I realised that my three adventures all featured some kind of counter culture,  weather it was my unionist adventure in the Boott cotton museum, walking in the footsteps of Kerouac or jamming out to the Lowell punk scene,  I had been living like a revolutionary.