Tag Archives: New England

The Beaches and Their Stories

October 8, 2016

Now and then, you get glimpses of Old New England. Not the chic galleries and pride flags along Commercial Street in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Not the farm-to-table fine dining with views of the coast. Not Boston and its history of Irish immigration. You get it walking on the beach on a windy day when no one is around, those windswept sand dunes undulating like the sea before a storm, and you start to picture what the Pilgrims saw when they landed in Provincetown in 1620. This fact gets lost in our Thanksgiving story—we Americans are so gifted at myth-making—but on November 11, 1620, the Pilgrims came ashore on what is now one of the most LGBTQ-friendly, art-loving communities in America. They deemed the sandy shores too difficult for farming so they explored further inland, looking for a good spot to till and hoe. Five weeks later, they made their way to what is now called Plymouth, Massachusetts, naming the location after the port from which they had sailed.

We spent last weekend in Cape Cod. It had been two years since our last visit. Haunting seems like an appropriate, yet overused word to describe the area. Cape Cod—and New England—is a region, but also a mood. Every time I’m there, I think of hardship and resilience, isolation and community, beauty and danger. A trite phrase often used in travel writing is to describe a destination as a “place of contrasts,” which you could say about almost anywhere. Cape Cod—and, really all of New England—is a study in cyclical conflict, made all the more poignant by its four very distinct seasons. Winters are exceptionally cold, brutal and long. By April, the land and sky soften and you feel yourself willing to forgive. By August, you sit on the beach enjoying a lobster roll picnic, and you can’t remember winter’s fury. In October, when the leaves turn, when the pumpkins are everywhere, when the air shifts, you know you’re in the most beautiful place on Earth, yet you start to wonder what the darker months ahead will bring, and if you’ll be prepared.

Cape Cod reaches about 65 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. On a map, it literally looks like a flexed arm putting its fist up to the Atlantic’s many storms, protecting the rest of Massachusetts. I walked out on part of that flexed arm last weekend; a sign warned me about sharks and to stay away from seals, which get eaten by sharks. Looking out to the sea, you felt Cape Cod protecting you from all that happens in the ocean. Go past that barrier at your own risk; for centuries, this stretch has been dubbed an “ocean graveyard.” The National Park Service reports there are one thousand shipwrecks between Wellfleet and Truro, which is less than five miles long. The first recorded shipwreck occurred six years after the Pilgrims landed. Winter months, not surprisingly, were the worst, with an estimated two wrecks every month during the early 1800s. The region gets pounded by storms, blizzards, hurricanes. A category 3 hurricane hit the area in 1635, a force of nature settlers born in Europe had never heard of or seen before. The beaches, no doubt, could tell us many, many stories, everything from who showed up and when, to the horror unspooling in the waves, to the objects fishermen accidentally reeled in, to children scampering about getting a sunburn. The beaches have seen it all.

When I think about leaving the Northeast, I think about escaping New York City, but when I think about leaving New England, I hesitate. Jobs brought and kept us here, in New York, but New England pulls us away from all that. I grew up vacationing in Mystic, Connecticut. As a child, I remember being fearful of all those oil paintings featuring angry sperm whales attacking sailors. I got married in Vermont on the coast of Lake Champlain. My first newspaper job was in Dover, New Hampshire, the Granite State’s “Seacoast,” a 40-mile stretch of oceanfront. On my days off, I used to sit and chill on the sand in York, Maine, another beach that has seen its own share of shipwrecks. In fact, in 2013, a storm washed away enough sand to reveal the bones of sloop dating between 1750 and 1850.

Today, back in suburban New Jersey, I miss coastal New England. The gray weather here doesn’t feel intriguing like the gray weather there. Last weekend, on an overcast rainy day, I visited the Provincetown Library, an impressive building given to the town in 1873. The first thing I saw walking in was its “Mysteries” section. New Englanders love their spooky yarns. Stephen King is a lifelong Maine resident. Before King, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in Salem, Massachusetts,—witch trial central—was writing about all the shit in the woods that could kill you, or, at the very least, emotionally scar you for life. Somehow, when you drive west and cross the Connecticut border back into New York and turn south to head into New Jersey, New England’s haunting beauty dissipates. It’s not going to compete with malls or the Manhattan skyline or traffic. You have to go there to feel it.

We rented a condo in Provincetown, just two blocks from Commercial Street and all its wonderful restaurants and galleries, and every morning as I poured myself a cup of coffee, I would look out from the kitchen and see the Provincetown Cemetery, a few of the taller headstones poking up from a hill. There are stones dating to the early 1800s, also worn by Cape Cod’s mercurial weather. If you read the dates on many of these graves, you realize a number of people barely made it to age 45. Many graves lack a birth date because the information wasn’t available.

And that’s Cape Cod, and much of New England right now: orange and brown leaves blowing past old headstones; people curling up indoors reading a good mystery; waves and winds hitting the beaches harder; fireplaces going strong inside restaurants serving chowder because it’s getting cold and warming up takes more effort. And it’s all beautiful, even when it feels creepy.

Burlington, Vermont, the Creative, Resourceful, Lumbersexual Capital of America

April 8, 2015

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I’ve been married to a lumbersexual all these years and didn’t know it until we were walking around downtown Burlington, Vermont, and I lost count of the bearded, bespectacled, flannel-wearing fellas—some bearing ink, some not—crisscrossing our path. Mike was thrilled to know a look he’s been rocking for over two decades has finally become hip. He was home-brewing and coffee-snobbing and being particular about how the bacon was smoked and preferring higher-end flannel and a well-trimmed beard long before whippersnappers made it trendy.

And me? I’m donning my Iceland wool, my hand-knitted scarves, my black boots and feeling at home, too, even though there isn’t a name for whatever it is I am or am doing. I’m just walking around as the proud wife of a lumbersexual.

It’s nice to look around and see your tribe. Since moving to the New Jersey suburbs over 11 years ago, my husband and I have felt like fishes out of water. We live less than 10 miles from midtown Manhattan but it might as well be Antarctica or rural China. New Jersey has a reputation for over-development, bad driving, bad attitudes, killer pizza, and being home to Pharmaceutical Row. All of it is true. At the diner near our old apartment, we ate breakfast with the mob, old guys with Italian-American accents and pinky rings kissing each other on the cheek and talking about contracts. Back in the day, we used to see casting calls for extras in “The Sopranos” . To top it off, Manhattan’s competitive, helicopter versus free-range parenting styles have seeped into our community. No wonder Mike and I are viewed as the neighborhood hipsters; that’s not hard to do in our stuffy ‘burb.

Why rant about New Jersey? Because it explains what lures us to Vermont and why we keep schlepping up here, snow (which is what it is doing now), rain or shine.

A high population density of lumbersexuals aside, what draws us to Vermont is the state’s independent-thinking and commitment to local entrepreneurship. I know that might sound like marketing-speak, but dangnammit, it’s genuine marketing-speak. Where else can someone sew wool pillows, sell them for over a $150 a pop, and become so in-demand that your studio is by appointment only? Where else does someone take old cheese graters or rusty farm equipment from Virginia and make funky light fixtures? Where else are sap buckets reimagined into planters? Everything is reclaimed and repurposed, and it’s not a fringe movement, it’s mainstream business here.

(Sap buckets as planters in the lobby of Hotel Vermont, which features Woolly Mama Fiber Arts pillows throughout the hotel as well as the work of many other local Vermont artisans.)

(Photo courtesy of Woolly Mama Fiber Arts)

And that’s just the stuff the Vermonters want you to buy. Switching gears to what they want you to eat, the grassroots philosophy continues. Agribusiness is big business, and although there are fewer than a thousand dairy farms in this state of 626,562 people, its output of artisanal cheeses is exemplary. Every cheese here comes with a story. Everything you eat here is farm-to-fork. Every menu seems to have a listing of local farms so that you can find out where your cow grazed before it was either squeezed or slaughtered. Even our Mexican takeout tonight from El Cortjo featured farm-to-table tacos where you get a listing of who made your cheese, your chicken, your vegetables, your cilantro! Is outsourcing illegal in Vermont or does it come with some steep penalties, either financial or shunning by neighbors? One wonders.

(Conant Metal & Light will take any scrap of anything and turn it into something illuminating and beautiful.)

To go back to New Jersey means greasy calzones, cream cheese for bagels made from who knows where, or, my favorite, “farm fresh” eggs that look and taste like grocery store eggs because the chickens are fed the same cheap bulk feed instead of being able to run loose and scoop up backyard worms or eat table scraps like our chickens did back in Taos, New Mexico (I’ve got a thing about chickens I’ll go into another time). Though running loose in New Jersey, no matter what species you are, comes with its own risks, so maybe Jersey chickens prefer the coop.

We feel at home here in Vermont (and we were married here) even though our home is about 250 miles south. We don’t abandon it all to raise chickens and sew wool pillows—as nice as that sounds—because although we’re both dreamers, Mike has a sweet corporate gig that honestly, in this economy, you hold on to until someone from HR says otherwise. So we stay. Because it’s good for the long-term. It’s good for our kid. We’ll cash out and join the lumbersexual masses eventually. We know where to find them.

Vermont: A Study in Red and White

February 21, 2015

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Zigzagging over Vermont this week brought to mind this very meditative William Carlos Williams’ poem titled “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which was first published in 1923:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

In February, actually—I’m guessing throughout much of the winter—the Green Mountain state is a study in red and white, red barns dotting snow-covered fields so white and smooth and completely unblemished they look lakes reflecting the sky. A few times we would look at a field and ask aloud “Is that a pond or a field?” because there were places where the two appeared identical and we couldn’t tell what lay beneath all that alabaster snow. There are several weeks, actually a few months more to go before white chickens and red wheelbarrows will be back outside, but the poem repeated in my mind like a song as we drove scenic Route 100, a north-south road that twists through the center of the state’s forests and farms.

Everyone drives a Subaru Outback in Vermont, but the red barn is the state’s true workhorse, the one that has weathered not just the 20th century, but the latter half of the 19th century as well. No one can convert a Subaru Outback into retail space or houses of worship, but Vermonters have converted old red barns into artists’ studios, ski shops, flower shops, restaurants, welcome centers, event space (with for rent signs out front), and one peach-painted barn served as the town synagogue. I stopped to look at a red barn decorated with weather-beaten Buddhist prayer flags. Some red barns simply stored hay, housed cows and served as a place to keep tractors until grass grew again. I learned about this beautiful, five-story barn that’s part of the Farmhouse Inn in Woodstock, Vermont. Built in 1915, this barn protects about 40 dairy cows from harsh winter weather. I wanted to go inside, but we were just passing through on our way to meet a friend for lunch in Brattleboro.

I drove by some gorgeous red barns that I wanted to stop and photograph, but there were no where safe places to pull over. Plowing had created four-foot high snow banks alongside the road, so I reluctantly passed up some gorgeous, iconic red barns, some still with Christmas decor clinging to giant front doors. At our lunch in Brattleboro, our friend told us about his brother’s annual fall festival barn party and I invited myself simply to go spend an October weekend partying in someone’s barn—because partying inside a historic barn probably feels a lot different than sipping cocktails on some midtown skyscraper rooftop. I grew up surrounded by barns and sometimes miss them living in suburban New York City. Red barns exude endurance and hospitality. There’s something very reassuring in seeing these barns stand strong against windy white winters; someone has taken great care of the land that nourishes the animals and people residing there, that inside the barn it is warm and safe and welcoming, that the snow will always melt and that spring will always return.

I’m Happy Not Being Edith Wharton

November 11, 2014

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Edith Wharton had one thing I’d love to have (but that likely won’t happen) and many things that I’m happy not to have. I’d love a Pulitzer or some literary recognition, and I’m grateful to not have any other part of her sad life. Last week, I toured The Mount, Wharton’s home between 1901 and 1911, where she had her most prolific writing period. The weather during the tour can only be described as Bronte sister gray: rainy, cold, ominous. Outside fit the mood inside. Entering the halls of The Mount, I was initially excited: classic Italian architecture, literary history, the ghost of a giant lingering in her own halls. But as we walked from room to room, I felt increasingly sorry for Edith Wharton, and that’s when the interior of the house started to feel like the weather.

(The view at The Mount.)

(One of the offices at The Mount.)

Sure, she was born into money; I’m first-generation middle class. She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer in 1921 at age 59; I’m still trying to write my first novel at age 41. She preferred dogs; we have cats. But for all her financial comfort and literary success, she had a lonely, very interior life, or a life I found exceptionally lonely and too interior for me. An empty marriage. No children. Affairs with wealthy men who liked to keep their options open. Ornate dog bowls in every single room of the house because the dogs were her children, her constant companions always in her arms or on her lap, appearing in far too many photos. I got the sense Mrs. Wharton spent way too much time indoors, lost inside her head. She was a player in the Gilded Age, a pioneer in a field dominated by men, but I left the tour with a reduced opinion of her and thankful I wasn’t trapped in that era of corsets and expectation.

There’s a lot of old money in the Berkshires. You see it; the old estates sit like proud lions on hills. You smell it; the food is thoughtful, not rushed. You hear it; people talk about books, business, travel, not reality TV shows or sports. You touch it; hotel linens are crisp yet soft, sofas and settees are velvety. Down the road, while Mrs. Wharton’s servants were unpacking her belongings, Blantyre was being built. It was 1901, a new century and new beginnings at these two estates designed to echo what America still loved about Europe. Blantyre is where I spent last week, hiding out from moody skies, eating too much bacon and drinking too much wine. For six days, I wandered around Blantyre with a side trip to The Mount, thinking about old-money families with their big, airy houses, their little dogs, their multi-course meals, feeling thankful for my more scrappy upbringing, my happy marriage, my small 1926 colonial with its clawfoot bathtubs and erratic power circuits, my healthy, quirky tween-age daughter. While at Blantyre, I paid off my student loan, nearly $50,000 in debt that had been trailing me since 1996. No one paved my way, and when I was in my 20s that annoyed me. But after walking around Edith Wharton’s house the day after that final payment, I felt grateful. Living small, I thought, feels good.

The problem with the Berkshires is that I keep enjoying it through windows, usually the windows of very beautiful places like Blantyre and The Mount. I was there in January visiting Kripalu; I returned in November and spent most of the week indoors at Wishing Stone Writers Workshop, which is worth every penny, and that’s coming from a gal who didn’t start out with a lot of pennies.

(The main entrance at Blantyre and then below, elsewhere around the estate.)

(The music room that served as our class room at Blantyre, a dreamy place to discuss words.)

As wonderful as Wishing Stone was, for the most part I again experienced the Berkshires from the inside looking out. I didn’t hike the mountains; I looked at them from a window. I didn’t walk through the leaves; I watched them fall while sitting in an ornate music room critiquing stories. The branches were bare after my week there, as if fall had finished falling while I was inside reading and writing. Twice when I walked back from the main house to my room at the carriage house by the end of the road, I stood outside looking at the gibbous moon until I was too cold, grateful to have the long walk back just to walk about. Did Edith Wharton ever feel that way? Did she ever look out her window and worry the seasons were passing too quickly and she was missing out? I love burrowing into a good book on a cold day, but the Berkshires makes me want to stay outside longer even when the temperatures suggest otherwise.

So I will go back to Western Massachusetts. Again. And again. And again. Spring. Summer. Another autumn there and definitely more of winter. While visiting The Mount, I wondered, did Edith Wharton enjoy the seasons as I do? Did she find beauty in small things? She struck me as a woman so consumed by her wealthy lifestyle, her books, her dogs. She didn’t come across as someone I would enjoy talking to or want to know. But that’s the problem with history; you’re not there to tell your own story. Maybe she’s a peach.