I’m just back from a walk after the rains of Hurricane Isaias. The storm lost strength as it headed inland, but still managed to soak us from Saturday night till early this morning.
We received several inches of much-needed rain, but could use even more, I’ve learned.
Still, there’s a fresh breeze and a feeling of satiation. We have branches and leaf clumps to pick up, but so far (touch wood) no major limbs lost. The wind is picking up even as I type these words. I hope it behaves itself.
I can’t remember when it dawned on me that most people named Anne are not spring chickens. For a while “Anne” seemed to be the air I breathed. My grandmother was Ann — without an e, a travesty my mother corrected when she named me — and classmates (and their mothers) were also named Anne. It also made a handy middle name.
When I shared an apartment after college, it was with my friend Anne. We lived on the second floor of a house in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Below us lived another Ann, who said she didn’t need an “e” in her name. We pretended to be shocked by that, but of course did not believe her for a second. Every Anne needed an “e,” as far as we were concerned.
Funny … I didn’t intend this post to be about Annes, only about Lake Anne, which I walked around yesterday. It’s named for Reston founder Robert E. Simon’s then wife, Anne Wertheim Simon. She was a writer who penned articles for McCall’s, where I was an editor, and her sister was historian and author Barbara Tuchman.
Next time I walk around Lake Anne, I’ll be thinking about Anne Simon, the namesake of this charming body of water.
The light is fading but it’s primo walking weather. I’ve stepped out the last couple of days into low-humidity afternoons with the kind of blue skies that throw anything in front of them — roofs, tree tops, telephone poles — into high relief.
We have scant fall color here but the crispy, brown leaves that collect along the sides of the trail make the most delicious crunching sound when I tromp over them.
Mornings have been cool enough (the 40s!) that I’ve postponed outdoor activities till later in the day, which gives me time for “brain work” early. I’ve needed it.
And speaking of that, let the brain work proceed ….
Still high on last week’s trip, I recalled the name of a book, How New England Happened by Christina Tree. Suddenly I wanted to read it. I believed we owned it, had acquired it when we lived in Massachusetts.
I looked upstairs and down and even in the basement, where books are double-shelved behind a small rainbow-painted table. The volume was elusive, didn’t appear in any of these places at first, but I decided to search again in the upstairs nook where most of the travel tomes are housed. And there, as if it were a magnet pulling me shelf-ward, was the very book.
I spent part of yesterday perusing it, trying to figure out the magic ingredients of this special place. Is it the architecture, the climate, the inhabitants themselves? A combination of factors, of course. For one thing it was “America’s first finished corner,” Tree writes, “with a look and a style all its own.”
And then there was this: By the end of the 17th century, Tree says, “one trait could be said to distinguish this region from other British colonies. It was a sense of belonging. People no longer talked of ‘going home’ to Britain. The first person on record to use the word ‘American’ for a colonist rather than an Indian was the Boston Puritan Cotton Mather. That was 1684.”
(Big white churches on a hill: a distinctive feature of New England.)
Our New England adventure ended a few days ago, but it left an impression. It was a rare road trip with my sister, scoring high for that reason alone. And then there was the scenery.
I’m deep into research for my thesis, thinking a lot about place and places, why we feel the way we do about a physical location. The trip reminded me that suburban sprawl is not everywhere. Pockets of the country are not paved and pureed. They are compact and walkable with narrow lanes, old houses and a palpable sense of the past.
Patterns of settlement matter. Protecting those patterns matters, too. Families built the homes, churches, villages and town squares of New England, and their modern-day descendants make sure they remain in some form. Beauty is the result, and beauty is not insignificant.
In his essay “The Beauty of Belonging,” the late British philosopher Roger Scruton says that what most inspires visitors to Venice are not the grand canals and cathedrals but the “ordinary doorways on the backwater canals, the marble-lipped bridges across them, the shrines and niches that punctuate the walls, the sense all about you of a meticulous but effortless aesthetic order, in which all the residents have willingly collaborated over centuries.”
Most American cities do not have this order, Scruton says. Americans are good neighbors, but its “sense of community stops short of taking collective decisions as to how the neighborhood should be constructed so as to belong to them all.”
Beauty matters, Scruton argues. And after spending a few days in New England, I know what he means.
Like any mountainous area, the White Mountains feature attractions that involve moving oneself closer to the action. You can drive to the top of Mt. Washington (6,288 feet), take a cog railway, or hike to the summit. We stayed a little closer to sea level, but we still took a perfect mountain hike.
The Flume Gorge Trail in Franconia Notch takes visitors up a crevasse into the heart of Mount Liberty. We hiked past streams, waterfalls, boulders and across covered bridges.
A boardwalk and stairs took us close enough to the walls and water that, well, let’s just say I didn’t linger in some of the scarier stretches. Now I learn from the website that the boardwalk and stairs are removed at the end of the month for the winter. Mt. Washington is expecting snow today. The fairytale world of red-treed peaks is ephemeral. It’s vanishing, leaf by leaf and flake by flake, even as I write this post.
When we first talked about taking this trip I looked up the “leaf schedule” and thought we would probably miss peak fall color, be here just a tad too early.
That was no problem. We didn’t plan the trip for that purpose — it was worked around Ellen’s schedule and a rare opportunity for us to travel together. That was so good in itself that it seemed greedy to ask for anything more.
But somehow, in a miracle of perfect timing, we hit it just right. Since that seldom happens in life I want to take a minute to celebrate it here.
Peak fall foliage plus splendid autumn weather equals a time to remember in the White Mountains.
The sun peeked out just as we reached Pemaquid Point Lighthouse yesterday, making an already picturesque spot even more exquisite. Ellen and I strolled the grounds, snapping photos and learning about the lighthouse. It’s been active since 1835, and is one of 65 in the state. The light it produces reaches 14 miles out to sea.
Before we climbed the tower we learned about its Fresnel lens, how it’s only one of six still in service in Maine and we absolutely could not touch it. We obeyed!
It was only later I read that Edward Hopper painted this lighthouse and it’s featured on the Maine quarter. Was that why it seemed strangely familiar? Or was it from some long-ago road atlas photo?
Ellen and I laughed about how Dad always said he wanted to visit the “rockbound coast of Maine” but drove us west to California instead. We wished he could have been there with us. And, in a way, he was.
Many years ago, we lived in Groton, Massachusetts. I loved the small-town life — village meetings, friendly neighbors, big white churches on a hill. The past was all around us in New England.
Today I remembered all over again why I hated to leave this area: the beauty and charm, the sense of place that’s in short supply elsewhere in the country.
Boothbay Harbor, Maine, looks like a picture postcard: boats in the harbor, a mist rolling in. Today we may see a lighthouse, too.
I don’t fly into a nor’easter every day … but I did yesterday, taking off in the morning for Boston Logan.
The occasion is a trip with my sister, a rarity that we’ve both been looking forward to. Was a little rain (OK, a lot of rain) gonna stop me? Of course not!
But it did feel counterintuitive to travel into a storm, and I was hoping that we would be able to: a) take off, and b) land.
We did both of those things and now we are in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the first stop on our New England tour.
We’re not listening to the weather, but we are hoping to see a little less rain and a little more rainbow.
