New Hampshire Magazine June 2020

N E W H A M P S H I R E M AG A Z I N E JUNE 2 02 0

T H A N K G O O D N E SS FO R N U R S E S!

and learn how they keep us all well — even in the worst of ear’s “Most Excellent” times – Page 4 Meet this y 2

M OST E XC E L L E N T N U R S E S C O V I D - 1 9 : W H AT ’ S N E X T F O R N H ?

Great Bay

magazine

That’s One

Explore our most famous estuary and meet some of the people who work to keep it great – Page 66

E X P L O R I N G G R E AT B AY

Live Free.

REDISCOVER CAMPING

What’s Next?

june 2020 $5.99

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So, how’s everyone doing with the whole COVID-19 thing? And, an even bigger question: What should we all be doing to prepare for the brave new world to come? – Page 56

Congratulations

Our nurses set the standard for excellence!

Recipients of the Nursing Excellence Award

Lisa Lang, RN, BSN

Kelly Snow, RN-BSN, CMSRN

Ambulatory Care Nursing Foundation Medical Partners

Medical-Surgical Nursing Elliot Hospital

Patricia Roncone, RN, BSN

Pamela Laflamme, BSRN-BC, CHFN

Maternal-Child Health Nursing Southern NH Medical Center

Cardiovascular Nursing Elliot Cardiovascular Consultants

We applaud all of you, and we are so proud of your clinical care and leadership to support the highest quality patient care.

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In honor of National Nurses Day, more than 900 meals prepared by New England’s Tap House Grille were delivered to our health care workers. We would like to thank our sponsor, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, and our advertisers for their support of New Hampshire Magazine, our community and this mission. Together we are Granite State strong.

Sponsor:

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PHoToS by KENDal J. buSH

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5 STAR RATING: Rated in the top 5 beaches in US and in the top 10 values for resorts in America for water quality and safety by the National Resources Defense Council.

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A messAge from our sponsor

nhmagazine.com

Vice President/Publisher Ernesto Burden x5117 eburden@mcleancommunications.com Editor Rick Broussard x5119

editor@nhmagazine.com

‘Thank you’ doesn’t seem like enough Every day, healthcare workers get up and face the unknown head on. They do not back down, do not look away, and continuously put their own health and safety at risk to help people in need. They are working with patients who are experiencing some of the worst days of their lives, and yet their selflessness and resilience is uninterrupted. In today’s current health crisis, an even brighter light is on all frontline healthcare workers from nurses and doctors to office staff and security, and every employee in between.

While saying thank you just doesn’t seem like enough, we’re proud to support The Meals of Thanks Program and all of our healthcare workers, yesterday, today and into the future.

Art Director Chip Allen x5128 callen@nhmagazine.com

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Production Manager Jodie Hall x5122 jhall@nhbr.com

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

Contents THANK GOODNESS FOR NURSES

from left: photos by kendal j. bush and jerry monkman; inset photos from right by stillman rogers, john bridges and courtesy

42

56

June 2020

66

First Things

603 Navigator

603 Informer

603 Living

8 Editor’s Note 10 Contributors Page 12 Feedback

14 Hunting for “Buried”

Treasure in Old Books

24 Food & Drink

76 The Heart of Adventure

DOCUMENTING FOUND ITEMS

by Rebecca Tuttle

Features

by Katie Small

17 Review

40 Transcript

WELCOME WEEDS

30 Blips

NH IN THE NEWS

by Casey McDermott

32 What Do You Know?

Meet storyteller Papa Joe.

by David Mendelsohn

42 Thank Goodness

for Nurses

Meet this year’s Excellence in Nursing Awards winners.

photos by Kendal J. Bush

56 OK, What’s Next?

No matter what happens, the world is about to change — has, in fact, already changed. As we continue to endure the pandemic, we asked experts in various fields what our new normal will look like.

THE JOYS OF CAMPING

by Meag Poirier

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

83 Local Dish

by Erica Thoits

SWEET GREENS OF SPRING SALAD BOWL

20 Our Town

recipe by Liz Barbour

84 Health THE TAYLOR POND HERMIT

ARE PLANT-BASED BURGERS GOOD FOR YOU?

by Barbara Coles

by Marshall Hudson

66 The Shifting Tides of

by Karen A. Jamrog

35 Artisan

86 Seniority

by Susan Laughlin

by Lynne Snierson

36 Politics

88 Ayuh

by James Pindell

by Adi Rule

Our Great Bay

Great Bay may not be so “great” in terms of size, yet it played an important role in New Hampshire’s early history, and in recent decades, Granite Staters have worked to protect this special place.

by Anders Morley photos by Jerry Monkman

ELOUISE LANE QUADROS

ONLINE DATING

A TALE OF TWO FLUS

HILLSBOROUGH

by Barbara Radcliffe Rogers

MY NEW NORMAL

38 Out and About

YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE

ON THE COVER A photo of Great Bay, which you can learn more about in “The Shifting Tides of Our Great Bay” starting on page 66. Photo by Jerry Monkman

Volume 34, Number 6 ISSN 1560-4949 nhmagazine.com | June 2020

7

EDITOR’S NOTE

Since the old order of things has been tossed and everything is changing, here’s a thought. What if I appointed you, dear readers, to take over some of my editorial duties?

Don’t laugh. It’s happening.

M

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

uch of the content of this issue was along with the dangerous, so now more than tossed and rethought this spring ever, our cultural infusions are needed. as we pulled the stories together.

This brings up something important hapMagazines like ours tend to plan a year in pening next month: our annual Best of NH advance and tend not to factor in global issue. The votes from our readers’ poll have pandemics, but we’re figuring it all out as we been in for a while, and winners have been go. Hope you are too. notified. We plan to run that list in our July One happy coincidence is that we were issue — with a caution to check the status already planning a feature story to honor the of each destination as the business sector state’s most excellent nurses this month. The emerges from its induced coma. We also indecision three years ago to add nursing to clude a robust list of picks by me and the other the professions we honor seemed inspired editors here, gleaned from a year of research at the time. Now it seems prescient as we’ve and experience, to round out the readers’ picks. all been given a tutorial on the sacrifices and Here’s where you come in. challenges these valiant healthcare workers I’m inviting our most attentive readers face without much notice beyond the hos(like you) and a variety of other friends, local pital walls. Read the profiles we’ve collected personalities and celebrities to submit the (page 42), and get just a glimpse of the jour2020 Editor Picks for our July issue. ney required to rise to the top of a career that The broad categories we cover are Food runs on humility and self-sacrifice. and Drink, Shops and Services, Fun and We’ve also realized how dependent we are Adventure, and Arts and Culture. Visit upon others we take for granted, like the scien- bestofnh.com for examples of previous years’ tists and activists and concerned citizens who picks, and then come up with your own have worked to keep our state’s biggest estuary, nominations along with a brief write-up the Great Bay, from being overwhelmed by the explaining why they merit being singled out. growing Seacoast communities that bound it.

Then send it to me at editor@nhmagazine.

Read all about it starting on page 66. com along with your name, hometown and And, finally, we’re increasingly aware of contact info. We’ll consider everything subhow dependent we are upon the many small mitted and narrow the winners down to what businesses of the state, shops, restaurants, we can fit into the issue. The deadline comes pubs and attractions that both constitute and fast (June 5), but we will feature many that sustain so much of what we refer to as the don’t make it into print online. state’s “culture.” It’s a word that is sometimes In truth, our readers have always served as used to describe the active ingredients in honorary editors. Great story ideas frequentyogurt or beneficial bacteria in our guts that ly appear in my email, and letters we publish keeps us healthy. The recreational culture of add missed details and all too often offer our towns and communities is just as import- corrections to facts or (gulp) grammar that ant for the gut health of New Hampshire. Our appeared in a previous issue. It’s sometimes role has long been to cultivate this culture embarrassing, but it’s mostly just good to by discovering, sampling it and sharing it know you’re paying attention. between regions and communities of interest.

So, get busy improving our state’s gut health.

The coronavirus lockdown has struck this Our Best of NH issue isn’t going to edit itself. culture in much the way that a strong dose of antibiotics will often delete the good bacteria

photo by p.t. sullivan

Honorary Editors

Bringing local food to the front lines.

As a not-for-profit health plan, we put people first. That’s why we’re partnering with local restaurants to deliver meals to health care workers and people struggling across New Hampshire, to bring comfort when they need it most.

See what we’re doing to help our communities at HarvardPilgrim.org Harvard Pilgrim Health Care includes Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of Connecticut, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care of New England, and HPHC Insurance Company.

Form No: NH_CC37706_0520

Contributors

Jerry Monkman, who took the cover photo and the photos for the feature story “The Shifting Tides of Our Great Bay,” is a conservation photographer, filmmaker and writer. Though he’s written 10 books and directed a feature-length documentary film, you will usually find him shooting nature and outdoor lifestyle imagery. Along with his wife Marcy, he runs EcoPhotography, their Portsmouth-based stock and assignment photo business and video production company. Their books include two National Outdoor Book Award-winners, and their work has been featured in a number of national publications, including National Geographic Adventure, Audubon, Men’s Journal, The Washington Post and others. Visit ecophotography.com to learn more.

Anders Morley, who wrote “The Shifting Tides of Our Great Bay,” is a freelance writer and translator. His first book is due out this fall.

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

Joe Klementovich, who specializes in outdoor photography, provided photos for this month’s “Living.” See more at klementovichphoto.com.

for June 2020

Kendal J. Bush took the photos for the Excellence in Nursing Award winners, “OK, Now What?” and “Out and About.” See more at kendaljbush.com.

Author Rebecca Tuttle, who wrote “First Person,” grew up on “America’s Oldest Family Farm” in Dover. See more at rebeccatuttleauthor.com

This month’s “Living” section was written by Meag Poirier. She and her husband Ben are the team behind The Wild Drive, thewilddrive.com.

Longtime former New Hampshire Magazine managing editor Barbara Coles wrote the feature story “OK, Now What?”

Jared Charney took the portraits in “OK, Now What?” Charney specializes in portraiture, and you can see more of his work at jaredcharney.com.

Adi Rule, who wrote “Ayuh,” is the author of several young adult novels, the latest of which is “Hearts of Ice.” See more at adirule.com.

About | Behind The Scenes at New Hampshire Magazine

Meals of Thanks New England’s Tap House Grille co-owner Dan Lagueux at Elliot Hospital

like to thank the following businesses for making this all possible: Amoskeag Beverages LLC, Molloy Sound and Video, Novel Iron Works Inc., Geneia, Granite State College, New England Wire Technologies, Petro Home Services and Citronics Corp. You can see more of Kendal J. Bush’s photos in “Out and About” on page 38.

And, speaking of nurses, make sure to read about this year’s Excellence in Nursing Award winners starting on page 42. These 13 outstanding women represent the best of their profession, and it’s our honor to recognize their invaluable skills and contributions to the healthcare community.

Chef Scott Patnode, and Heather Trembly from New England’s Tap House Grille

On May 6, which happened to be National Nurses Day, the staff at New England’s Tap House Grille in Hooksett was busy preparing more than 900 meals for healthcare workers at three local hospitals — Dartmouth-Hitchcock Manchester, Catholic Medical Center and Elliot Hospital. Sponsored by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, the Meals of Thanks program was a collaboration with Harvard Pilgrim, the Tap House and New Hampshire Magazine. In the pages of this issue, you’ll find a number of ads thanking healthcare workers — in addition to Harvard Pilgrim’s sponsorship, those advertisers helped fund the meals. We’d

nhmagazine.com | June 2020

11

Feedback

nhmagazine.com, facebook.com/NHMagazine & @nhmagazine

We would like to say thank you to Marty, the winner of the July Spot the Newt Contest. We received a very nice letter from him recently, saying how pleased he was with our candles and that we “have affiliated ourselves with a fantastic magazine.” It’s things like this that make your day!

Pat and Jon Windsor Candle

Photo Approval Planning Ahead

I was so excited to receive Best Places with my New Hampshire Magazine subscription.

What a great edition! It is just what I need to visit New Hampshire from my favorite cozy chair. I have lots more places to go when that is allowed, as well as something helpful to hold on to until then.

Bedrock Gardens looks so beautiful on page 41 [“The Path Less Traveled”]. We sincerely appreciate your coverage.

Sending a virtual tour of Bedrock Gardens at bedrockgardens.org/videotour.html.

Hope it offers a moment of serenity.

Stay safe. Be well. Let us grow through what we go through.

Thinking sunshine, Kate Bashline Community Outreach Coordinator Friends of Bedrock Gardens, Lee

Thank You Part 1

This letter is so overdue, it’s embarrassing! I won the July 2019 Spot the Newt drawing, and I’m finally, in March 2020, writing to thank you. I apologize immensely for this huge delay in writing. My prize was a set of candles from Windsor Candle. They are absolutely great! They seem to last forever — I’m almost at the very end of the first candle and will start burning the second candle soon. (They were “toasted coconut” and “pineapple paradise.”) Again, I want to thank you for this great gift, and for being chosen in the Spot the Newt drawing for July of last year.

Marty Sullivan Manchester 12

nhmagazine.com | June 2020

Rick, I enjoyed the latest issue and your “Editor’s Note” [April 2020]. Great photo and sentiments!

I also appreciated the tie recommendation — I will purchase next Christmas for the New Hampshire men in my life.

Jenn Higgins Pitre Kingston

Missing Piece To Anders Morley: An interesting article about Tamworth [“Tamworth Distilled,” March 2020], but, as a Tamworth resident, I have to ask: How could you miss the most “authentic” part of Tamworth village, The Other Store? With its interesting history, pioneering owner and incredible diversity of offerings — from hardware and paint to locally sourced groceries and produce, gifts, crafts and more — [plus] a café for breakfast or lunch, coffee or ice cream and free concerts in the summer — now there’s the “real deal”!

Barb Bloomberg Tamworth A note from Anders Morley, the author of “Tamworth Distilled”: Yes, I hoped to include it and was in touch with Kate Thompson, the owner of the Other Store and also head of the Historical Society, but [working on the story] was a whirlwind two days, and by the time I got a chance to visit the store, I walked up to it and found it closed for the day. I told Kate Thompson I’d like to keep her on my list of contacts, as she may be useful for other stories. She was fine with this. Hers is a very old family in town, I gather. I’m sorry to have disappointed the reader. She is right.

Save Forest Lake

I always enjoy reading your magazine, as I love everything about life in the Granite State. My wonderful wife and I moved here six years ago from Upstate New York, and there is a stark and profound difference (for the better!) in the quality of life we have found here in the North Country.

However, it’s with a very disturbed heart that I write today. The things we love about our life here — the clean air, fresh water, beautiful landscapes, the absence of urban traffic congestion and of course our beautiful Forest Lake, are all threatened by an adjacent 180-acre garbage landfill being proposed by Casella Waste Systems of Rutland, Vermont. This battle to protect and preserve our North Country way of life, (and vacation destination for many) is proving to be a true David vs. Goliath battle that I am certain your readers will want to know more about. Our website has lots of information as does our Facebook page.

Please, help us save Forest Lake.

Jon Swan Founder, Save Forest Lake

best places cover photo by joe klementovich

Thank You Part 2

Birdwatching

photo by tom thomson

Send letters to Editor Rick Broussard, New Hampshire Magazine, 150 Dow St. Manchester, NH 03101 or email him at editor@nhmagazine.com.

emails, snail mail, facebook, tweets

Hope you are doing well during this very strange time. I have been spending as much time as I can in the woods marking boundary lines, and at the end of the day, my wife Sheila and I drive around to bogs or ponds to look for various birds. Below is a nice male wood duck. I will also send you a photo of a pair of ring-necked ducks — feel free to share.

Tom Thomson Orford

Spot four newts like the one above (but much smaller) hidden on ads in this issue, tell us where you found them and you might win a great gift from a local artisan or company. To enter our drawing for Spot the Newt, send answers plus your name and mailing address to:

Spot the Newt c/o New Hampshire Magazine 150 Dow St., Manchester, NH 03101 Email them to newt@nhmagazine.com or fax them to (603) 624-1310.

April’s “Spot the Newt” winner is Barbara Whipple of Mont Vernon.

April issue newts were on pages 19, 25, 76 and 97.

NEED A GOOD REASON FOR SPOTTING THE NEWT?

One lucky Newt Spotter will win a branded Little Big Farm Foods tote bag overflowing with their premium baking mixes — and a spatula too. Little Big Farm Foods is a small baking mix company located in Portsmouth that takes pride in making premium baking mixes that are free of artificial colors, flavors or preservatives.

Their favorite family recipes are time-

Boulder opal necklace in 22k & 18k gold and sterling silver on leather.

Inspired by Sangre De Christo Mountains.

Designed by Jennifer Kalled.

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tested and easy to make. Learn more at littlebigfarmfoods.com.” Little Big Farm Foods is a proud member of New Hampshire Made, the state’s official promoter of locally made products and services: nhmade.com.

the

Kalled Gallery nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 Navigator “What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not foolin’ a soul.” — Neil Gaiman, “American Gods”

The Bayswater Books staff found a rare fishing fly in a 119-year-old book.

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Review 17 Our Town 20

Hunting for “Buried” Treasure in Old Books

Some books have more than one story to tell

BY KATIE SMALL

E

veryone knows that a book tells a story.

But what most people don’t realize is that the story printed in the pages of a book is only the first tale the book has to tell.

What I’ve discovered, working in the used book section of Bayswater Books in Center Harbor, is that what the owner of a book leaves behind in its pages can be just as fascinating as the book itself.

In 2017, Bayswater Books’ owner Michelle Taft decided (due to popular demand) to devote the entire second level of the store to used and old books. Today, it’s brimming with thousands of books of every genre, and has become a nirvana for customers who enjoy browsing through the stock looking for a well-loved title, something new by their favorite author or simply an interesting book at a bargain price.

With the expansion of Bayswater’s used book section came a steady stream of donated books — each one looking for a new home. And as the Bayswater crew and I began the unpacking and sorting process, we started noticing that many of the books had items hiding inside; they’d float innocently to the floor as we put the books on the shelf. We’d find ticket stubs, letters, political ephemera, dried flowers, bookmarks, test scores, awards, Bible passages, photos and maps — just to name a few. These bits of memorabilia belonged to the book’s previous owner and, to me, were tangible evidence of the owner’s relationship with the book and how they’d actually “lived” in it for a spell. Hence,

the book lives on but with a very personal story to tell about its former owner.

Some of these artifacts were so intriguing that the staff and I decided that we should not be the only ones to enjoy them, thus our “Find of the Week on the Used Book Floor” blog was born. In each post (currently there are 55), we describe the “find” discovered during the week and the book in which it was hiding, along with insight into the found object and its possible significance.

Some of the “finds” are historic, while others are thought-provoking, sentimental, humorous or downright bizarre.

One of our most significant discoveries was a series of letters written by Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1971. Penned in response to a concerned citizen who wrote to him sharing unease about the Vietnam War, Kennedy passionately expressed his understanding of the writer’s concerns and promised action in his return reply. These

letters had been hidden for over 45 years before we stumbled upon them, tucked into the pages of a 1970s textbook.

Although “Antiques Roadshow” has yet to invite me or my Bayswater colleagues to appear on their show (most of our discoveries have little monetary value), the artifacts we uncover can still spin a heck of a tale. Some of our favorite finds include: an off-the-chart test score from a 1969 National Engineering Aptitude Search test, a rare fishing fly found in a 119-year-old book and a 1961 map of the Colorado Rocky Mountains with an “X marks the spot.” Sometimes the story lies in the discovered object itself; other times, it’s a date that’s stamped on the object or a long-forgotten address. No matter what the intriguing aspect might be, the found object never fails to provide a look at the previous owner’s life and the events that were taking place at the time they read the book.

As a rule, our research is based on our finds and, for the most part, not about the person who left it. When we come across a discovery with a first and last name on it, as sometimes happens when we find letters and pictures, most often we choose to leave the person in anonymity. There are exceptions to this self-created guideline, as we returned the Kennedy letters to their original owner, and we once wrote about the former poet laureate of the United States, Louis Untermeyer, because we found a 1962 letter written by his wife hidden away in his book of poems.

Despite this display of restraint, we are quick to surmise and create possible scenarios that accompany our finds, however, (with glee, I might add) and these are often found in our more humorous blog entries.

One of the found objects was this test score from a 1969 National Engineering Aptitude Search test. nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 NAVIGATOR

LOST & FOUND

See “Review” starting on page 18 for a book recommendation from Bayswater Books owner Michelle Taft, who is pictured above.

Although “Find of the Week” has also become a column in the Meredith News and Laconia Daily Sun and garnered us a segment on the “New Hampshire Chronicle” TV program, it’s truly the character and community importance of Bayswater Books that gives our blog and discoveries any platform at all from which to spring.

Visit any day in search of our used book floor discoveries, and you’re likely to find us, the store’s crew, discussing books and gift suggestions with customers or chatting with a shopper who is sharing their latest personal news — and always with a hot pot of tea at the ready. We are consistently seeking to discover not just the interesting info behind our finds, but your story, as well. After all, a bookstore is full of stories — both hidden and in-person.

But, don’t take my word for it. You can catch up with our previous “Finds of the Week on the Used Book Floor” blog posts at bayswaterbooks.com, or better yet, stop

by Bayswater Books and check out the used book selection for yourself. The next possible discovery could be yours, but if not, a cup of tea, a world of books and a visit with our amateur book detectives await you. NH Editor’s note: As of this issue’s press deadline, Bayswater Books was still closed in compliance with Gov. Sununu’s order intended to slow the spread of COVID-19, though plans may change due to the Stay-at-Home 2.0 order, which does allow shops to reopen starting May 11 (before this issue went to press). Though we can’t wait to once again browse the shelves in person, many bookstores — including Bayswater — are available for curbside pickup, shipping, delivery and, of course, excellent recommendations. See page 18 for pandemic reading suggestions from Bayswater owner Michelle Taft.

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Top: The letter written by Louis Untermeyer’s wife the staff found in a book of his poetry.

Above: Bayswater Books in Center Harbor

(603) 436-7950 noveliron.com

Novel Iron Works, Inc would like to thank all of those working on the front lines and their families for their sacrifice and bravery during these unprecedented times.

nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 NAVIGATOR

REVIEW

Just Keep Reading Bookstores, even if their doors are closed, are still here for you

BY ERICA THOITS

A

s this issue was just about to go to press, Gov. Sununu announced the Stay-at-Home 2.0 order, which included guidelines for reopening retail shops beginning May 11.

The protection requirements — for both employees and customers — are strict and detailed, and while some shops may decide they are feasible, others are planning to keep their doors closed.

Fortunately, places we consider essential (especially when we all have much, much more forced free time on our hands) — bookstores — have been supplying both reading material and recommendations since the first stay-at-home order in March. While there’s no replacing the joys of browsing through a bookstore, rather than turning to impersonal Amazon and its mysterious book-choosing algorithms, you can still rely on a local bookseller for excellent recommendations. Happily, many independent bookstores are offering curbside pickup, shipping and, in some cases, home delivery. No, it’s not the same as walking among the shelves, but it keeps you reading and helps support local independent bookstores. A real win-win.

We’ve asked a few store owners to let us know what they’re reading, and to share how they were serving their customers at this time. As the governor’s 2.0 plan continues, it’s best to check with your local shop to see what’s potentially changed since this issue was published.

Katharine Nevins

MainStreet BookEnds

“We closed the bookstore off to the public on March 17, and have worked hard to switch into full-throttle curbside delivery, taking orders online, through email and on the phone, and doing a tremendous amount of shipping. We receive daily requests to gather things for a birthday or graduation, 18

nhmagazine.com | June 2020

holiday or anniversary, and as I am the only person in the store now, I often will FaceTime with customers to help them make selections. I never doubted that independent bookstores are an ‘essential service,’ and our community has responded with so much enthusiasm to keep us going. Bookstores have always been places to find solace and to counsel each other, and I feel our mission is stronger now more than ever.

What am I currently reading? ‘The Resisters,’ by Gish Jen and totally loving it.

My favorite quote right now comes from Dave Hollis of Over Grow the System: ‘In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.’ Will we allow this pandemic and worldwide crisis to move us closer to authoritarianism, or open us up to the possibilities of healing the earth and our

democracy? This wonderful book addresses these possibilities.

I also wish to congratulate one of my favorite small publishing houses Danielle Dufy Literary out of Brainerd, Minnesota, for their fifth small reader of poems, small fictions, and short essays, this one entitled ‘The Relevance of the Rural’ and dedicated to Wendell Berry. I go no further when needing to put just the right little inspiration into a friend’s hands.”

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Bayswater Books

“Bayswater has been staying busy by providing curbside pickup and direct-to-home deliveries.

We are also offering some books for free, as many of our used books have come to us as patron donations. Until we are open for business as usual, these books are available 24 hours a day on our front porch.

What am I reading? ‘Station Eleven,’

by Emily St. John Mandel, the story of a swine flu pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population, and how a group of artists and musicians travel together to newly established settlements to keep their art alive. The story spans decades exploring how humanity falls apart and ultimately comes back together.”

Bayswater Books 12 Main St., Center Harbor (603) 253-8858 bayswaterbooks.com Facebook Want more great book recommendations and information on where to find independent bookshops around the state? Visit nhmagazine.com for a complete list.

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OUR TOWN

photo by stillman rogers

603 NAVIGATOR

Behind the Curtain Take a peek into the past in Hillsborough

BY BARBARA RADCLIFFE ROGERS

A

quest for painted theater curtains took us to Hillsborough, following an interest we had acquired while exploring Haverhill for an “Our Town” article a few years ago. In our research we learned of a few other such curtains in the state, and we were particularly intrigued by the story of the two that are now on display in Hillsborough’s former fire station.

The story of the two curtains, which originally hung in the Hillsborough Grange Hall, is a longish one involving the town of Goshen’s Grange Hall, where several curtains were discovered. Three of these were identified as originating in Hillsborough because of landmarks they depicted — one of the still-existent Rosewald Farm, one of the town’s distinctive Twin Bridges, and a third showing a Main Street scene with several identifiable businesses.

These curtains had been painted for the

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Hillsborough Grange and, when it disbanded in the 1960s, were sold to the Sunapee Mountain Grange in Goshen. They had been stored there ever since. Large hand-painted canvases such as these were common in Grange halls in the years from the end of the Civil War through the 1930s. Used as backdrops for performances and for Grange rituals, they were painted by itinerant artists and often financed by selling advertising to the local businesses, which were identified in the paintings.

The curtains needed restoring, and even with the help of volunteers the project was too costly for Goshen to undertake alone. So an agreement was reached between the two towns: In exchange for two of the curtains, Hillsborough would pay for the restoration of the third, to be kept in Goshen.

The two chosen were those with the most distinctive local scenes, the stone arched

The Franklin Pierce Homestead

Twin Bridges and the curtain advertising Hillsborough businesses, which preserved a snapshot of the town in the 1930s. Fundraising by the Save our Curtains! Committee combined with a grant from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation financed the cleaning and stabilization of the curtains, which are now displayed in the Hillsborough Heritage Museum.

The museum is a project of the Hillsborough Historical Society and the Fireman’s Association to save the century-old fire station as headquarters for the society, and a place to store and display firehouse memorabilia and historical collections.

The building, which is located on Central Street, is easy to spot from Main Street by its tall hose tower. The museum is normally open on Wednesday and Saturday mornings.

Hillsborough’s bestknown historical attraction is the Franklin Pierce Homestead, on the 2nd New Hampshire Turnpike

photo by stillman rogers

OUR TOWN

(now Route 31) near its intersection with Route 9. Also managed by the Hillsborough Historical Society, this Federal-style house was the childhood home of the 14th president, built by his father in 1804.

Benjamin Pierce, a prosperous and influential man who had twice been governor of New Hampshire, entertained here some of the day’s most notable figures, including Daniel Webster.

The house has been beautifully restored, with the vivid colors matched from remaining paint samples. The walls of the parlor are hand-stenciled, and the French Balfour wallpaper is some of the finest in any restored home. A ballroom extends across the entire second floor — not uncommon for a prosperous gentleman’s home in the early 19th century.

When Franklin married Jane Means Appleton, he and his bride moved to a nearby house (not open to the public) across Route 9 on the 2nd New Hampshire Turnpike.

Follow that road downhill through Fuller Corner and the tidy little Union Village, with its small Union Chapel, and across one of Hillsborough’s five stone arch bridges.

The best view of it is from Barden Hill Road,

Union Chapel in Hillsborough’s Union Village

to the right just past the bridge.

The 2nd New Hampshire Turnpike was once the main road between Boston and Claremont, and three more stone bridges lie not far from it, north of Route 9. Shedd Road leads off to the right shortly beyond the Franklin Pierce Homestead, and

603 NAVIGATOR wanders through hilly woodlands to the double-arched Old Carr Bridge at the intersection with Beard Road. Not far to the left, Beard Road crosses over the Gleason Falls Bridge, spanning a rushing little waterfall. A third stone bridge crosses the same stream off Gleason Falls Road, just beyond.

Now bypassed by Route 202 at its intersection with West Main Street, the fifth — Sawyer Bridge — formerly carried Route 202 to its intersection with Route 9 but was bypassed years ago. It once had a third arch slightly separated from the other two and giving rise to its nickname of Twin Bridges, but it collapsed in 1988.

At one time, Hillsborough had twice this number of stone arch bridges, which replaced earlier timber bridges that were repeatedly washed out by flooding. They are built of closely fitted stones with no mortar, a method known as dry stone. These were sturdier than those built with the mortar that was then available, and have lasted more than a century and a half with their stonework intact. The five remaining bridges have been named National Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks.

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Butler Park and the Hillsborough Heritage Museum

HISTORY TELLS US ...

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Center Road to Hillsborough Center feels like driving back two centuries. Two beautiful hillside farms seem to frame a gateway to an almost pristine village ensemble of houses and two churches set around a sloping green. Next to the Methodist church, built in 1863, is a former tavern dating from 1816.

There’s an authentically furnished one-room schoolhouse, a town pound and a cemetery with stones dating from Colonial times.

The barn of one of the historic homes is now The Gallery at Well Sweep, with works of local and other artists and fine craftspeople. Preserved here are the last reminders of one of Hillsborough’s more eccentric attractions, the Kemp Museum.

No longer can we wander through Dick Kemp’s collection of more than 150 antique trucks, which were auctioned off in 2009, but paintings and photographs of them displayed here hold onto that piece of local history in much the same way as the theater curtains recall their era. NH

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 Informer “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.” — A.A. Milne

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

Courtesy photo

Blips 30 What Do You Know? 32 Artisan 35 Politics 36 Out and About 38

Welcome Weeds With a slightly different perspective, an unwelcome invader becomes dinner

BY REBECCA TUTTLE

The humble lamb’s quarter, though cultivated in some places, is mostly considered a weed.

A few years ago, my husband Bob and I took a trip to Los Angeles to visit our youngest daughter. On a bright Sunday morning we walked the few blocks from our daughter’s apartment to the Hollywood farmers market. Such abundance! Such variety! And it was only March! Ahh, California.

I remembered something my late father, a 10th-generation New Hampshire vegetable farmer, had told me after his own first trip to California: “If the Pilgrims had landed on the West Coast, they never would’ve bothered finding New England. They harvest three entire crops a year there! Can you believe it?” nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 INFORMER

And so there I was on a Hollywood sidewalk that Sunday in early spring, gasping over the bushels of gigantic artichokes, the just-picked strawberries, the stacks of fat asparagus, the pungent fresh garlic, the beautiful green bunches of ... wait. What is that? The cheerful dreadlocked young woman on the other side of the table said, “It’s lamb’s quarter, man. It’s super-good for you.”

My astonishment at, as a woman in my early 50s, being called “man” was matched only by my amusement that these cheeky Californians were actually selling lamb’s quarter — a weed. Oh, what a kick my father would’ve gotten out of this. How many acres of lamb’s quarter had he and I (and all the generations of Tuttles before us) uprooted over the years while cultivating our crops on the old family farm on Dover Point? I moved along, chuckling and shaking my head. Of course, I was a Yankee farm girl. I wasn’t gullible enough to buy a bunch of weeds for five bucks.

When Bob and I got home in late April, I rototilled and then staked out and planted my own vegetable garden with the early cold-resistant crops: peas, lettuce, beets, carrots, chard, radishes, scallions and the

FOOD & DRINK

When writer Rebecca Tuttle’s broccoli rabe seedlings didn’t make it, she reconsidered her thoughts on lamb’s quarter, using the latter instead in her pasta dishes.

brassicas: my usual broccoli, cabbage and Brussels sprouts seedlings, plus, for the first time, a row of broccoli rabe. Growing rabe was new to me, but we’d tasted it at a friend’s house, sautéed in garlic and mixed with pasta, and Bob and I’d both loved it. Plus, it

was fast-growing and would be ready nice and early. In mid-May, I took a chance on the absence of frost in the forecast and spent a day planting everything else.

I should explain here that my garden is not at our house, which is on the

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603 INFORMER

FOOD & DRINK

Welcoming the Volunteers

Before there were refrigerated trucks shipping produce from Florida and Mexico and California, people living in the northern latitudes had no access to fresh vegetables in the winter.

Dandelion greens, the first “weeds” to appear in the spring, were a prized spring tonic. My grandfather, Penn Tuttle, would get a jump on both the weeds and the market soon after the ground thawed, digging up dandelions all over the farm with a double-tined hand tool. He’d wash the sandy soil off of them in the deep concrete tubs of the washhouse he and his father had built. He’d pack the greens into crates, load them into his 1915 Jeffrey truck, and drive the three miles from the farm to the town of Dover to sell them wholesale to the many small local groceries that thrived before the first A&P came to town.

A kinder word for “weed” is “volunteer” — a plant that was once grown as a crop but now self-seeds and spreads without any assistance from the farmer. On our farm, it was horseradish. Some Tuttle ancestor decided to plant a field of it. My grandfather and my father never forgave that long-gone and unknown relative. No amount of hoeing or digging or mowing would eradicate that hardy perennial with its gnarly, foot-long roots.

When I was a kid, there was an elderly Greek couple who’d come with burlap sacks and a shovel every spring and leave with all the horseradish roots they could carry, but they barely made a dent in the unwanted bounty.

After falling in love with fresh salsa verde on a trip to Mexico a few years ago, I decided to grow tomatillos in my garden. I had no idea what to expect, having never seen them growing. I sent away for a packet of seeds and started them down cellar under grow lights. They grew twice as fast as the tomato seedlings I’d started, and were tall and gangly by the time it was safe to transplant them into the garden. The plants grew into beautiful huge bushes bearing hundreds of what looked like Japanese paper lanterns, each one containing a hard green perfect tomatillo. There were so many I couldn’t possibly use them all; I filled the freezer with them and sold the rest to a Mexican restaurant.

Even so, there were many that fell to the ground before the first frost killed the plants.

The next spring, as I rototilled the garden, I saw a clump of familiar-looking “weeds.” I shut down the tiller and looked more closely. Tomatillo seedlings! And instead of being tall and gangly like those struggling under lights in my cellar, these were sturdy and healthy. Every year after that I welcomed the volunteers and never had to buy seeds again.

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gravelly, steep bank of a lake, surrounded by pine forest. Nothing would grow there, except herbs in containers on the deck, so for years I’d been borrowing a sunny, fertile patch of land from a friend who lives a couple of miles away. Even better, there was a pond nearby. I had a six-horse Honda irrigation pump, many feet of rigid black pipe, and a system of sprinklers, all of which needed to be set up anew every season.

It was a hot, dry May that year. Bob and I took advantage of the bright warm weather and worked for weeks painting the exterior of our house. We were so busy using every minute of daylight that I didn’t have the time or energy to even visit the garden, let alone set up the irrigation or even do any weeding. But it was always on my mind.

One late afternoon in early June, I couldn’t stand it any more. I climbed down the ladder, cleaned my paintbrush, and drove to the garden. I told Bob that I was hoping the broccoli rabe would be ready, and if so, I’d make it with pasta for dinner that night.

I was worried that the entire garden would’ve succumbed to drought due to my weeks of paint-spattered neglect. The sun was getting low, and I knew I wouldn’t have time to load up my irrigation equipment, get everything in place, attach the pipes and hoses, set up the sprinklers, prime the pump, fix the inevitable leaks ... so I settled for putting my hoe in the bed of my Ford Ranger in hopes of getting at least something accomplished.

My fear was realized: All four rows of broccoli rabe had withered and died. No amount of watering would revive it. I had planted it in the sandiest, driest part of the garden, a strategy that works well for early crops in wet springs, but not in years where it doesn’t rain one drop the entire month of May. So, with a deep sigh, I took up my hoe and set to work hoeing and weeding everything that was still alive (which was, happily, most everything else). I got the strawberry patch cleaned up first, then I hoed the tomatoes and peppers and eggplant and tomatillos, the green beans and shell beans and Romano beans, the Lincoln peas and the snow peas, the lettuce and mustard greens, the corn and squashes and cucumbers and pumpkins and sunflowers and zinnias. Last, by now swatting mosquitoes, I set my sights on the six rows of potatoes. They looked great, nice and even and about six inches high. I’d planted them in a fertile and

603 INFORMER

FOOD & DRINK

Seemingly, there’s not all that much difference between broccoli rabe and lamb’s quarter, as Rebecca Tuttle’s husband Bob didn’t notice any change.

relatively moist part of the garden. I started hoeing the weeds, noticing an abundance of lamb’s quarter, which my father had once told me was a sure sign of healthy soil. The

lamb’s quarter was thick and lush, a carpet of green encircling every hill of potatoes, as if I’d planted it there.

I paused in my work, the dread-

locked woman’s voice in my head. “It’s super-good for you, man.” And then I remembered something else: When I was about 12, my father had told me that what we humans call a “weed” is nothing more than a plant out of place.

In a strawberry patch, he’d said, squinting into the sun, a stray corn plant is a weed. And in a cornfield, guess what?

A strawberry plant is the intruder to be pulled up and tossed aside.

It was sunset, and I was getting hungry. I set down my hoe and began pulling fistfuls of baby lamb’s quarter, stuffing it into the bag I’d intended for the broccoli rabe.

I brought it home, washed it and removed the bigger stems. I heated olive oil and slivered garlic in a wok, then tossed in the lamb’s quarter and cooked it for a few minutes, adding a sprinkling of sea salt and a shake of dried cayenne pepper flakes. It was beautiful and fragrant and bright green, and I served it on thin spaghetti with some good Parmesan. Halfway through dinner, Bob refilled his plate and asked me if there was any more “broccoli rabe” still growing in the garden. I assured him there would be a steady crop all summer. NH

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603 INFORMER

IN THE NEWS

Blips

courtesy photos

Monitoring appearances of the 603 on the media radar since 2006

Lt. Col. Jason Fettig, director of “The President’s Own” US Marine Band, from his video

Central Pep and Prep Manchester high school alums offer inspiration to grads

By Casey McDErmott When news came down that schools across New Hampshire needed to close to keep everyone safe for the foreseeable future, the staff at Central High School in Manchester knew they wanted to do something to support their students through the uneasy new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. So they turned to their vast alumni network — with ties to Broadway, the NFL, Hollywood and beyond — to ask for some help.

And that’s what landed Lt. Col. Jason Fettig, director of “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band, back on the homepage of his alma mater’s website, assuring The Little Green community: “You will get through this.”

“Work hard, and keep your chin up,” Fettig says in a video produced for the school’s now-weekly web series of virtual pep talks. “The way you persevere

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through challenges like this one is actually part of your education and will make you better prepared for other challenges you overcome in your lives.”

Central’s principal, John Vaccarezza, says school officials reached out to businessmen, politicians, professional football coaches and players — “anybody who can be an inspiration for kids at this time” — people who graduated within the last decade, and others who last walked the halls in the 1960s. Their contact list included author Gloria Norris, director Tyler Spindell and even Adam Sandler, class of 1984, who posted a video just as this issue went to press.

In addition to offering a bright spot in otherwise dark times, Vaccarezza says he also hopes this shows students there lots of different ways to succeed.

“These people are living out their

dreams,” Vaccarezza says of those who’ve contributed to Central’s videos.

“Each person’s dream is different and unique to them.”

The series was initially only intended to last through early May, the length

Max Clayton, class of 2010

603 INFORMER

IN THE NEWS

courtesy photos

Kaleigh Cronin, Class of 2007

of the state’s initial school closure order.

But by the time it became clear that students wouldn’t be returning for the remainder of the semester, the Central alumni network stepped up big time — providing enough messages to

last through the year.

One of the videos comes from Max Clayton, whose recent Broadway credits include “Moulin Rouge! The Musical!” and “Hello, Dolly!” (Vaccarezza says Max’s mom, Central’s assistant principal, Jane Clayton, was the key to making the series happen since she “has contacts to everybody.”)

“I hope that you know that after this we will all come out stronger on the other side.

We have to, and we will,” Clayton said from his home in New York City. In the background, you could hear echoes of the now-nightly cheers for frontline workers trying to make sure that can happen. NH

Well Rooted: Playwright and Hopkinton native Tina Satter has earned a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. As she recently told her alma mater, Bowdoin College, Satter’s grateful for the honor because it’ll allow her to delve into one new project inspired by her Granite State roots. It will feature a protagonist who’s “an assistant field hockey coach in a small town in New Hampshire.”

Standing In: When the New York Times went looking for a small town to stand in for the plight facing rural economies across America in the age of COVID-19, they settled on Bristol, New Hampshire. The resulting story drew mixed reactions — including a public letter from the town administrator assuring his neighbors, “Despite what you have read in recent news stories, do not let one person’s perceptions define you or our community.” But plenty of people said they welcomed the chance to learn more about the community.

“When these trying times are finally over, I would like to visit Bristol,” wrote one commenter.

Resort Support: Ski resorts from Newbury to Jackson and inns from New Castle to Concord to Durham are vying for recognition in the 2020 Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards.

The annual roundup of travel spots is driven, as the name suggests, by public input — and Granite Staters can cast votes of support for local spots through the end of June, with finalists announced later this year. “While visitors may not be able to travel to New Hampshire right now, this is a perfect opportunity to recognize a number of the extraordinary destinations and attractions that make the Granite State special,” a tourism official said in the state’s announcement celebrating the recognition.

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31

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

Socially Distanced

Perley Swett lived alone but was not lonely by marshall hudson

I

n 1962, at the age of 75, Perley Swett, the Taylor Pond Hermit, dug his own grave. The hermit selected his final resting place beside a large boulder that would serve as his headstone. Using roofing tar, he painted “Taylor Pond Hermit” and the date of his of birth, “2-6-1888,” onto a board that he affixed to the boulder headstone. Including the date of his death posed a problem as he couldn’t predict the exact date of his inevitable fate, but Perley solved this dilemma by picking a date he

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liked. He chose “11-26-2013” and painted it onto the board, commenting that he would die on that date, if not before. Perley must have been feeling optimistic when he selected November 26, 2013, as that would have made him 125 years old.

Satisfied with the physical arrangements of his final resting place, the hermit then put his wishes into writing to fend off any legal challenge to being buried in this selfdug grave. In a handwritten letter, Perley “commanded” that he be buried at the farm

where he had spent most of his life, alone for more than 25 years of it.

Perley Swett, hermit of Taylor Pond, not only left behind burial instructions, but also many handwritten “last will and testaments” and other end-of-life instructions for the disposal of his property. The hermit wrote poetry and kept a daily journal, and, being part packrat, he saved all his quasi-legal documents, diaries, poetry, letters, newspaper clippings and other paperwork. These papers provide a peek into the life of the Taylor Pond Hermit, and allow us to piece together why he came to be living alone in the unpopulated woods where Stoddard, Sullivan and Munsonville collide.

To begin with, Perley was born there and never really left. Perley’s grandfather bought the rocky hilltop farm in 1864, and he froze to death on it in 1876 while walking out for food supplies. The body was not found until the following spring. The farm passed to Perley’s mother, and Perley was born in the family home in 1888.

In the book “Perley: The True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit” (by Sheila Swett Thompson, the hermit’s granddaughter) Perley’s father, Daniel, was described as “shiffless,” and when he died in 1922, as the coffin was carried to the grave, it was suggested “that was the fastest ol’ Dan ever moved.” Perley had three older siblings and three younger siblings, but they all moved off the ancestral farm, leaving only Perley and his mother. As Perley said, “How easy to become a famous hermit just by not moving or dying.”

The road that ran past the family farm had been a stagecoach route before the Civil War when farms in the area prospered. A school district once existed there before the advancement of railroad routes, free land out west, the Depression and two world wars reshuffled the population away from remote New Hampshire farms. As the town changed and the neighbors moved away, the town discontinued maintaining and snowplowing the road. Perley’s home at the end of the road became more isolated and inaccessible during the winter and spring mud season.

In 1911, Perley married Helen Whitney, and they raised six children on the farm. Unfortunately, Perley and Helen’s marriage had problems from the beginning. Perhaps Helen had been unfaith-

photo by quentin white courtesy of sheila swett thompson

603 INFORMER

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

Swett created his own headstone, complete with his predicted date of death — he chose November 26, 2013, which would have made him 125 years old.

Perley Swett’s burial wishes

photos courtesy of sheila swett thompson

While jailed, Swett wrote letters and petitions complaining about unfair treatment.

ful, perhaps not, but a divorce ended their marriage in 1933. The divorce decreed that Helen and the children would remain on the farm and receive weekly child support payments from Perley. Perley felt this was unfair and protested to anyone who would listen.

He felt he was being wrongly punished by the court as his wife had been unfaithful, not him. Perley also felt that since his wife

603 INFORMER

had been given his ancestral farm with three teenage sons to work it, he had no way to earn the money he had been ordered to pay her. He stubbornly refused to comply with the court order.

The courts gave Perley the option of deeding his ex-wife the land, making payment to buy her out or going to jail. Believing he had been wronged and standing on principle,

Perley opted for jail. The court sentenced him to the Cheshire County Farm in Westmoreland until he made the payments or deeded her the land. While in jail, Perley wasn’t exactly a model prisoner. He wrote letters to authorities complaining about unfair treatment and circulated petitions among the prisoners demanding improved conditions. He also wrote poetry to the superintendent’s wife. None of these endeavors endeared Perley with the superintendent, who responded by moving him into solitary confinement. He adapted to solitary and continued his protests and poetry, earning yet more time in solitary.

Though Perley could have secured his release at any time by complying with the court, he refused to leave, demanding instead that the order be revised, and he receive an apology. This stalemate resulted in Perley serving three years in the county lockup, and he likely would have served longer, but his ex-wife died and therefore could no longer receive either money or the farm.

While the score may have been settled with his ex, Perley was still obligated to make the court-ordered payment to her estate — the heirs of her estate being Helen and his six children. Perley had had little fatherly interaction with the children during the three years he was in jail, and the oldest sibling, representing the interests of the six children, began legal proceedings to force Perley to comply with the court order and give them Helen’s half of the estate.

Eventually, Perley conceded and conveyed 300 acres to his six children as their inheritance from their mother. The lawsuit was now settled, but his relationship with his children was strained.

When released from Westmoreland, Perley moved back to his family homestead to care for his 85-year-old mother. When she died in 1944, Perley could have nhmagazine.com | June 2020

33

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moved somewhere with electricity and indoor plumbing, but alienated from family and perhaps adjusted to solitary living, he began a reclusive existence, gardening, fishing, cutting firewood and caring for his herd of goats. He accepted the life of a hermit, frequently going several months without seeing anyone. Hunters, hikers and townspeople willing to risk losing mufflers or getting mired in the mud came to check on him periodically, bringing groceries and exchanging mail.

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Swett doing chores at his Taylor Pond home

Cheers to our nurses and front line workers.

We appreciate you!

With the passing of time, his relationships improved with some of his children, and they visited occasionally. Perley also became a bit of a celebrity in 1953 when Yankee Magazine published an article about him, which brought curious visitors to his door. Some of these visitors became pen pals or fast friends, who made return trips to bring supplies or just to check in on him. After decades of hermit life, Perley now enjoyed friends he cared about and who genuinely cared about him. Perhaps finding redemption, Perley gave money and gifts generously to these friends and down-the-road-apiece neighbors who looked after him in his final years. The Taylor Pond Hermit died in 1973 at the age of 85, somewhat short of his 125-year aspiration.

And yes, he was buried in the grave he dug for himself 10 years earlier. NH A thank-you to Sheila Swett Thompson for her assistance in preparing this article. Sheila is the granddaughter of the Taylor Pond Hermit, and the author of “Perley: The True Story of a New Hampshire Hermit.”

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603 INFORMER

ARTISAN

Here Comes Summer Capturing beauty of the garden in oil paint

BY SUSAN LAUGHLIN

courtesy photos

E

louise Lane Quadros of Nashua is very happy that painting flowers is now her full-time passion. Sure, she has a degree in fine art, and loved drawing as a kid, but the road to this destination was not direct.

Quadros started teaching art to a few neighborhood kids, and it soon developed into a full-time booming business. She even had a waiting list. For 25 years she taught drawing and painting to the young and old.

One day, a few years ago, she walked into an antique shop in Amherst and discovered a clutch of artists working in the garret upstairs. She said to herself, “This is what I want to do.” Since then, she has dedicated her time, five to seven days a week, to painting at that studio, Gallery 46. It’s a shared space filled with great light and room for

several artists to commune and comment on each other’s work.

Quadros paints in oil, starting with a medium tone for a background, and then quickly puts in lights and darks to find the contrast she is looking for. “I love the drama of high contrast and deep colors,” she says.

She uses subtle blending and many layers of thin paint to build her final realistic images that shimmer with a wondrous translucence.

She manages to capture that rare moment when the light is just perfect.

Teaching was rewarding for Quadros, but she is happier now pursuing her own painting career. “Being the best I can, by painting every day and doing what I was meant to do — this is satisfaction,” she says, and that really says it all. NH

Quadros’ work can be found at Gallery 46 and the Northlight Gallery in Kennebunkport, Maine. Or follow her work via Gallery 46 on Facebook.

Find It Gallery 46

46 Route 101A, Amherst elquadrosart@aol.com

Northlight Gallery Kennebunkport, Maine northlightgalleryofmaine.com Usually opens on Memorial Day Prices range from $360 to $1,800.

Galleries may or may not be open due to COVID-19. nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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POLITICS

illustration by peter noonan

603 INFORMER

A Tale of Two Flus and two NH governors, a century apart

by James pindell

T

he last New Hampshire governor to serve during a major pandemic wasn’t remembered so well. That was not his fault.

His name was Henry Keyes, a Republican from North Haverhill. He served a single term as governor from 1917-1919, presiding over the state during the horrible days of the 1918 Spanish Flu. He, in fact, got the flu himself, and was almost among the 2,700 in the state who died from the disease. Nevertheless, he survived, and was elected that fall to the first of three terms to the US Senate.

Despite the fact he held statewide office for two decades, it wasn’t until nearly a century later that the Statehouse finally put up his correct photograph among the portraits of governors that line the walls. You read that right — originally a picture of someone else was mistakenly identified as Keyes. And then that picture fell off the wall.

If the first few months of New Hampshire’s response to the coronavirus are any guide, the state’s current governor, Chris Sununu, might be treated with a tad bit more respect.

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Sure, there was some grumbling among his own Republican base about his decision, like nearly every governor in the country, to close all commerce except essential services. But the truth is that Sununu, who was already among the nation’s most popular governors, has watched his approval ratings get even better.

In late March, a University of New Hampshire Survey Center found 73% of the state’s residents approved of Sununu’s handling of the coronavirus in the first weeks of the outbreak. This included 63% of registered Democrats.

These numbers for Sununu stand out for two reasons. First, not all leaders are universally loved in this time of crisis. The same UNH poll found that only 41% of Granite Staters approved of the way President Trump was handling the epidemic.

The number of registered Democrats who approved of Trump? Three percent.

Second, Sununu’s numbers are especially impressive when they are compared to Gov. John Lynch, the Democrat who has been

viewed as the most popular governor of the state in polling history.

Lynch saw his poll numbers soar after his hands-on approach to floods in Alstead during his first year in office. But the greatest crisis he faced as governor was the Great Recession in 2008. During that time of strife, Lynch saw his approval rating go down 11 points (though that was over a longer period of time than Sununu has so far faced in the current crisis).

Sununu, of course, is up for reelection this year. The filing period opens up in June.

As of this writing, two Democrats were hoping to challenge him. It appears that their jobs just got harder. Making it even tougher: Sununu appears to be getting along fine with the state’s pairs of US senators and representatives, all Democrats.

It is too early to be concerned about where Sununu’s portrait will be hung on the Statehouse wall. And if a full-blown recession hits, he could well be blamed by voters for playing a part in causing it by making businesses close. But now, as hunkered-down residents of the state see the governor all over WMUR-TV, this has been a good moment politically for Sununu. NH

Your binge-worthy options just got interesting.

nhpbs.org/watchmore

nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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603 INFORMER

Out and About In Honor of National Nurses Day

5/6 The Meals of Thanks Program

New England’s Tap House Grille in Hooksett prepared more than 900 meals for healthcare workers at three area hospitals — Dartmouth-Hitchcock Manchester, Catholic Medical Center and Elliot Hospital. Sponsored by Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Meals of Thanks was a collaboration with Harvard Pilgrim, the Tap House and New Hampshire Magazine. We’d also like to thank the additional sponsors who made this program possible: Amoskeag Beverages LLC, Molloy Sound and Video, Novel Iron Works Inc., Geneia, Granite State College, New England Wire Technologies, Petro Home Services and Citronics Corp.

1 From left: Heather Trembly and Chef Scott Patnode of New England’s Tap House Grille 2 Kylie Lavoie of New England’s Tap House Grille 3 Valerie Vanasse, New England’s Tap House Grille co-owner 4 New England’s Tap House Grille co-owner Dan Lagueux 5 New Hampshire Magazine sales representative Josh Auger (left) with Dan Lagueux (right) and healthcare staff at Elliot Hospital 6 The first meal delivery of the day at Elliot Hospital 7 Nancy Comai of New England’s Tap House Grille (left) at Elliot Hospital

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photos by kendal j. bush

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nhmagazine.com | June 2020

TRANSCRIPT

603 INFORMER

Tale Spinner Photos and interview by David Mendelsohn He dwells mainly in the forest, scouring for food, taking simple pleasures by a stream, likely just playing his recorder. He knows where all the wild berries grow. When the elements bite, he seeks refuge in his gypsy van. And he tells stories for a living. From toddlers to grandparents, he’s been enthralling people for 35 years. His arms soar and gesture, his face contorts to mimic the character, and his voice booms and bellows, then drops to a knowing whisper. Meet Papa Joe Gaudet, raconteur and gentle soul. He keeps his life unencumbered, liberated from those silly things that distract the rest of us. He has all that he needs. And he’ll make you smile.

The first story I told was Doctor Seuss’ “Horton the Elephant Hatches An Egg.” I was 4.

I’m often asked where the stories come from. The answer is, it depends. I tell about 30 tales I learned from my mother. Of those, a half-dozen were from oral tradition, passed on from other tellers.

Being an avid reader, I read every book in every library’s 398.2 shelves (the folklore section for those of you who don’t know the Dewey Decimal System).

I studied every book on plots and motifs (the guts and parts of stories) for years. And I collected my favorites until I had hundreds of stories in my head.

Stories can be viral and spread through time and space.

Anthropologists and folklorists study how the stories spread and change to learn things about cultures and societies that can’t be understood through archaeology, because storytellers use the mundane parts of life that are often left out of official reports.

I love to perform an energetic rendition to an enthusiastic audience of thousands on a festival stage. But it’s just as satisfying to murmur a sweet and gentle narrative to a single child as they slip off to sleep. And I could have used the same story for both. That’s art.

If you really want to influence your children’s lives, tell them stories every day. And sing to them all the rest of the time.

“Telling” to infants is easy. They respond instinctively and immediately, completely without guile. I can read their level of interest, adjust the hooks and enjoy the ride.

Living outside of the mainstream is difficult. I have no loans or credit cards or credit reports. To live the life of a swallow, one must accept what gifts are given gracefully.

Once I start playing on a sidewalk, and that sweet flute starts working its way down the alleys and around the corner, we begin redefining the ambiance of the city. Folks remember to smile. Maybe those difficult First World problems back up a little as our memories take a trip back in time while the notes of “Beautiful Dreamer” float past.

Where is Papa Joe? When he’s not on a gig or foraging for fruit and mushrooms in the woods and fields, or playing his baroque tenor recorder by some gurgling stream, you can usually find him snug in his “vardo” (gypsy caravan), a 2013 Ford van (bought with the help of friends and fans) that he’s named “Grateful.” You can also find him on his website (papajoestorytelling.com) or on his Facebook page (facebook.com/papa.joe. gaudet) where he hosts a daily 10 a.m. “telling” for kids of all ages. Papa Joe says it’s important for storytellers to practice every day, even during (maybe especially during) a quarantine. “I believe that every day I indulge my art, I improve,” he says. nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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THANK GOODNESS FOR NURSES AND THANK NURSES FOR THEIR GOODNESS Until recent events reminded the world of just how much we need them, nurses were the unsung heroes of the medical community.

These talented individuals provide their skills and sacrifice on a daily basis, and now thanks to COVID-19, we have a glimpse of the debt we owe. New Hampshire Magazine, in partnership with the New Hampshire Nurses Association, is proud to say thanks to them all by calling out a few in our Excellence in Nursing Awards. This past winter, we accepted nominations for New Hampshire nurses in 13 vital specialties, from pediatrics and public health to leadership and education. The winners were selected by an independent committee of nursing leaders from adjoining states. Each nurse profiled in the following pages represents the very best in nursing — those who go above and beyond to comfort, heal and teach.

Photos by Kendal J. Bush

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Kelly Snow

BSN, RN, CMSRN, Resource Nurse

Medical-Surgical Nursing Elliot Hospital

When Kelly Snow looks back at her career, which began in 2002 at Elliot Hospital (in the same unit she's in today), she doesn’t point to one single story or person that inspires her to strive for excellence, rather the collective experiences and lives of all of her patients.

“I do remember all the stories that I have heard from my patients,” says Snow. “[Stories] about when they were growing up and where they live, their war experiences, their careers, where they have traveled throughout the world, and the way they talk about their families.” Some stories, she says, are happier than others, but she always wants to “get to know them as a person and not just for the reason they are in the hospital.”

That ability to be a good listener, she says, is a key trait of being a nurse, along with compassion, empathy and communicating openly. She’s lucky, she adds, to work with a team that's become more like family, allowing them to work together to care and advocate for their patients.

“We care for [patients] and give them emotional support during what can be a scary and vulnerable time for some,” she says. “At the end of the day, I like to live by the Golden Rule — ‘Treat others the way you want to be treated.’ So far, this rule has made my nursing career successful.”

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Sharry Keller RN, CHPN

Hospice and Palliative Care Medicine Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Palliative Care Team Though nursing wasn’t Sharry Keller's first job (she was briefly a journalist, then taught elementary students after getting her master’s in education), it’s what she was meant to do. “From a single, memorable encounter during my student nursing clinical experience, taking care of a woman with a cancer diagnosis, I knew I wanted the opportunity to specialize in oncology nursing,” she says.

The valuable lessons she learned — that in addition to clinical competence she needed to be a good listener while also providing emotional support — have served her well since starting at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in 1985. Looking back on that formative experience, she says, “It was being able to care for the whole person, who happened to have a serious illness diagnosis, that resonated with me, and still does in my work in palliative care.”

Along with her interdisciplinary team, she makes sure families and patients are getting what they need — social work, healing arts, chaplaincy and volunteer services.

“Compassion and good communication skills — both careful listening and sensitivity and clarity in responding — are two of the things at the core of what we do.”

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Julie Percy RN-BC

Gerontologic and Long Term Care Nursing Dartmouth-Hitchcock Concord Primary Care For those with older loved ones suffering from chronic illness, there is comfort in knowing that there are dedicated, compassionate healthcare professionals who are able to provide care when they cannot — people like Julie Percy, who’s spent the better part of two decades caring for the elderly.

When she began working at the internal medicine department at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in 2000, she says she “instantly fell in love with the geriatric population. I attended many geriatric conferences and was moved by the passion I found in my heart for these folks.” She adds, “I immediately decided to focus my specialty in this area.”

Her professional “aha” moment at Dartmouth-Hitchcock was preceded by an experience at an end-stage Alzheimer’s facility a year earlier. A determined mom of twins, who was convinced her sons (now 65 years old) needed rescue, managed to get outside. With Percy’s quick thinking, kindness and help, she calmed her patient and helped her walk safely back inside. Ever since, she says, “I have been dedicated to the elderly.”

Over the intervening years, she says she’s been inspired by many doctors and colleagues, but “the most important inspiration are my patients and their families,” says Percy. “This is an ever-growing, vulnerable population of patients.”

Julie Reynolds RN, MS and Chief Executive Officer

Nurse Leader Cornerstone Visiting Nurses Association For Julie Reynolds, being in hospice care is both challenging and fulfilling. It requires communication and business skills, she says, plus the ability to set good boundaries, and, more importantly, passion for what she does. Reynolds, the CEO at Cornerstone VNA, encapsulates all of these qualities. She both educates and supports her patients and their families and her staff, while ensuring everything runs smoothly so that her providers can do their jobs well — giving the best care possible to patients in their homes.

After working for several years in a hospital, Reynolds transitioned to working in homecare in 1986, when the need for skilled care at home was increasing. “This is where I found my passion,” she says. “I could see the results of my work and the benefits of patient education, care at home and the teamwork required for it,” she adds. “It was apparent that there was a learning gap in the homecare industry, and this really drove me to learn more about it and share my knowledge with my peers.

It’s very rewarding to be able to look back from then to now and see the amazing strides that we have made along the way.”

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Rachel Ritter APRN-CRNA

Advanced Practice Registered Nurse Collaborative Anesthesia Partners Rachel Ritter is the last person you see before you fall asleep when you receive anesthesia, and she’s the first person you see when you open your eyes.

As a nurse anesthetist, her job is to meet you and create a unique plan for your anesthesia, keep you asleep, give you medicine and perform life-saving procedures to keep you safe. “I provide care across the lifespan and spectrum of services,” says Ritter.

“Services range from ear tubes for your child to spinal anesthesia when your mom needs a knee replacement, to labor epidurals to emergency intubations or surgery, and from nerve blocks to special intravenous lines.”

Ritter draws inspiration from her coworkers, but most of all from her patients, whose strength, resilience and grace encourage and inspire her to excellence each day. One of her most special memories was witnessing the love that her patient’s son was able to give to his father in his last moments.

“His father lingered longer than we anticipated, and his son repeated his quiet litany of love, again and again,” recalls Ritter. “I still consider it one of the most beautiful moments I’ve witnessed in my career. As nurses, we are privileged to be part of pivotal moments in people’s lives, and for this I am truly grateful. It is an honor that we are trusted to care for people when they are most vulnerable.”

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Samantha Presby BSW, RN

Pediatric and School Nursing Lafayette Regional School Being a school nurse is anything but easy. During any given day, she might see a student for conjunctivitis, take multiple temperatures, and meet with a parent or two — all before 8 a.m. As difficult as it can be, Samantha Presby also knows how rewarding it is to lead by example, and to have a positive impact on students.

Looking back, it was her mother’s perseverance through adversity that inspires her to be the best nurse that she can be. “My mom instilled strong work ethics, goal achievement skills and empathy in me, which when combined with my passion for nursing allow me to serve my students and their parents to the best of my abilities,” says Presby. Providing comfort, a sense of calm and establishing trust with students and their families is a gift, she says, and she believes that it’s imperative to holistically approach and educate the next generation of nurses about this special field of care. nhmagazine.com | June 2020 47

Patty Roncone BSN, RN, Clinical Teacher NICU

Maternal-Child Health Nursing Southern New Hampshire Medical Center Great educators know that learning never ends.

After 28 years in a NICU/Special Care Nursery, clinical teacher and nurse Patty Roncone says she still learns something new every day at work. Her drive to continue her professional growth comes from wanting the very best for her patients. “I want to be the type of nurse that I would want to care for my own family and loved ones,” says Roncone.

Her original plan to become a midwife changed right out of nursing school when she was offered a full-time position in a NICU. It was there she “fell in love with the privilege of caring for premature infants and their families. It was divine intervention and I have never looked back.”

Empathy, she says, is one of the key traits for someone in her specialty. “Having an infant in the NICU or Special Care Nursery is often times a scary and overwhelming time that should have been happy and joyful,” she says. “Most families did not even dream that they might find their baby requiring intensive or special care. Having empathy helps you connect and build a relationship with the families of the infant you are caring for.”

Inspiration comes both from a role as an educator and from her patients, who she calls “amazingly resilient.” Watching patients grow from such early adversity into healthy, thriving children is “why we do what we do,” she says. “To help families cope and become competent caretakers of their infants with our guidance in the beginning.”

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Kimberly Anick

BA, BSN, RN-BC

Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, New Hampshire Hospital Of all the ailments that require the support and healing powers of a nurse, the least understood are illnesses of the mind. So it makes sense that, when asked what trait is most important for a psychiatric nurse, Kimberly Anick replies, “Advocacy.” Prior to becoming a nurse in 2014, Anick spent five years in Boston as a research assistant interviewing people with serious mental illnesses. After listening to countless stories of struggle, resiliency and recovery, she decided that she wanted to help. “As a nurse, I continue to listen and learn so much from my patients, and then utilize emerging treatment approaches and

evidence-based practice to be able to provide them with the best possible care,” notes Anick. “I am a fierce patient advocate and I try to empower my patients to advocate for themselves and for others with mental illness. The majority of my patients are admitted involuntarily, but they deserve the right to actively participate in their treatment.” Mental health outcomes might sometimes seem less clear than those in surgery or internal medicine, but she finds ample inspiration: “My patients’ courage inspires me. Caring for them is a great honor and responsibility, and they deserve my best every day.”

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Kelsey Anne Pearl

BSN, RN

Emergency Department Nurse Wentworth-Douglass Hospital, Dover With a dad who was a police officer, Kelsey Anne Pearl grew up in a family accustomed to community service.

It’s also a family with strong bonds, ensured by her mom, “my biggest cheerleader,” says Pearl, “and the glue that holds the family together.” That homespun blend of selfless service and camaraderie is also what she loves about her work in the emergency department at Wentworth-Douglass.

“The ED is a completely unpredictable environment requiring you, in a matter of seconds, to transition from treating a young child’s cuts and scrapes to helping save a patient in cardiac arrest,” she says. “You never know what is coming through the ED doors next, and that is what makes life in the ED so challenging and rewarding.”

She began her career as a licensed nursing assistant, advancing to become an RN (Registered Nurse) in a geropsychiatric unit and then to a “float pool” that allowed her to explore other specialties. Soon after discovering that emergency work was her passion, she joined the ED team at Wentworth-Douglass.

“My ED family provides the camaraderie of a sports team, the dysfunction of a Thanksgiving dinner with distant relatives, and friendships that felt like they have existed since childhood. No matter what kind of day it is, we are all there for each other, and we push each other to excel,” says Pearl.

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CONGRATUL ATIONS TO OUR 2020 EXCELLENCE IN NURSING AWARD WINNERS Left to right: Julie Percy, RN-BC, Care Coordinator – RN, Primary Care, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Concord; Sharry Keller, MEd, RN, CHPN, Nurse Clinician, Palliative Care, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

PROUD, COMPASSIONATE, RESILIENT Thank you to all of our 3,400 nurses for going above and beyond to deliver expert, compassionate care to each and every patient. It takes someone special to be a nurse, and we’re proud to have the most dedicated on our team.

More locations than any other health care provider in New Hampshire dartmouth-hitchcock.org

Lisa Lang BSN, RN

Nurse Educator, Ambulatory Care Nursing Foundation Medical Partners Like the science that empowers it, nursing is a self-improving system when properly practiced. It's by passing on the lessons learned that each new generation of nurses can build upon the hard-won successes of those who have gone before.

As a nurse educator for a multispecialty health organization of 70 southern New Hampshire practices, Lisa Lang is a crucial link in this chain of success. Her primary focus is strategies for infection prevention and control, and emergency response. The scope of her work includes everything from one-on-one mentoring to mock emergency drills to basic life support recertification classes. “I always try to consider what opportunities can arise from various situations, thinking, ‘how can this be done differently, more efficiently, cost-effectively, or made safer for staff?’”

Her specialty, ambulatory care, is an evolving arena of nursing that’s rooted in relationships, so her relations with aspiring nurses are fundamental. “Working alongside our nursing leadership team or staff nurses within their clinic setting, provides me with a valuable opportunity to hear their voices, see their concerns, and advocate on behalf of their needs. This is a privilege I do not take lightly,” says Lang.

“In addition, I maintain hands-on nursing skills by working per diem in our walk-in clinics,” she says.

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Pamela Laflamme BS-N, RN-BC, CHFN

Coordinator, Elliot Cardiovascular Consultants Heart Failure Program and Co-chair Elliot Hospital Multidisciplinary Heart Failure Committee Pam Laflamme wanted to be a teacher, but a high school guidance counselor talked her out of it. She looked into nursing, attended a three-year diploma program where she was introduced to clinical rotations in her second month and was hooked.

It was during her critical care rotation that an instructor — “My first nurse-hero,” says Laflamme — modeled a passion for caring for the critically ill with “evidence-based practice and guideline-directed therapy. Although I have not seen her since graduation, I think of her often and still hope I am meeting her tough standards.”

She returned to school after 20 years to complete a Bachelor of Science in nursing, obtaining her certification in cardiac-vascular nursing in 2015. “In 2016, I was the first nurse at the Elliot to earn certification as a certified heart failure nurse,” she says.

“When first diagnosed with heart failure, most patients are eager to learn everything they can about their condition,” she notes. “As they begin to feel better, however, many patient revert to their old habits ... and often ‘forget’ the importance of taking their medications and continuing with medical follow-up.”

Reflecting on the irony of her guidance counselor's advice, she says, “As patients ‘forget,’ I use every opportunity to interact with them, take a few extra minutes to reassess their understanding of their current treatment plan, their adherence to it and then re-teach anything they may have ‘forgotten.’”

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Alyssa O’Brien Ph.D., RN

Assistant Professor, Department of Nursing University of New Hampshire Alyssa O’Brien describes herself as a “boomerang.” She started as a nursing student at the University of New Hampshire, and is now back at the University of New Hampshire teaching students and encouraging them in the same way that her nursing mentors encouraged and inspired her during her educational journey. She brings experiences, stories, and a passion for family-centered care into the classroom, as well as a deep level of patience when working with her students.

“I use my therapeutic communication skills with students every day,” says O’Brien. “I don’t try to immediately provide the answer or solve the issue, but instead I take a back seat and provide support while they work through it on their own. You need to let students, and patients, determine their own goals, motivation and answers.” Being vulnerable and sharing of yourself through your teaching is crucial for allowing students to see that you are all human and always learning. “They need to hear faculty say, ‘That is a great question and I don’t know that answer, but let’s figure it out together.’

This helps them to create a foundation of lifelong learning, an understanding that they don’t always need to be perfect, and a realization that a curious mind will help them to be better practitioners.”

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Theresa Calope BSN, RN

Public Health Nursing City of Nashua, Division of Public Health and Community Services The most essential traits for a public health nurse are the genuine desire to provide care and advocate for the needy, and Theresa Calope embodies both. “By keeping these two traits in mind, a nurse is able to serve and help every patient with great compassion,” says Calope.

She has always felt that this profession was a higher calling. She perused a variety of opportunities, from being a 2D echo nurse in the Philippines to taking on the dual position of health unit coordinator and licensed nurse assistant in the United States. Eventually, she settled into her role as a public health nurse after working at a rehab nursing facility for two years.

She enjoys having the opportunity to serve the community, improve the overall well-being of individuals through preventative health services like immunization and STD clinics, lead home visits, and educate the public about various illnesses and ways to spread awareness and knowledge regarding prevention, a service that has become increasingly important in the time of COVID-19.

“It took many years, but I am now realizing the importance of something that Florence Nightingale wrote in 1870, ‘It would take 150 years for the world to see the kind of nursing I envision,’” recalls Calope. “I feel as though I am continuing this very vision every day in my nursing career, and especially in the times that we are now in 2020, and I think other people will realize it too in this pandemic time.”

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OK, WHAT'S

NEXT?

Red Cross nurses photographed at the Amoskeag Red Cross Carnival at Manchester’s Textile Field (now Gill Stadium) in 1918 Photo Courtesy Manchester Historical Society

The plague, the Spanish flu.

We all read about them when we studied history in school.

Such horrors seemed like artifacts of the past, long-ago tales of unimaginable death.

But here we are, in the midst of another pandemic. Fortunately, with our contemporary medical knowledge, the toll is not likely to be as great. But in this respect, it is the same as it was in past pandemics — it will change us, in ways large and small. We talked to people in various fields to get their perspectives.

By Barbara Coles nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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Dean Kamen, working with Sen. Shaheen and Gov. Sununu, secured shipments of personal protective equipment.

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job and make a baby in one month. There are certain things, like this, that require a lot of time and a lot of energy by a lot of smart people because we don’t know how to solve it.”

Some of those smart people are the scientists and engineers that are needed to design, develop and manufacture needed systems, and Kamen says the country is struggling with the fact that there aren’t enough of them: “We’ve outsourced a lot of those skills over the last few decades.” His solution — having more people with those skills in this country by encouraging young people, especially girls, to pursue careers in science and technology.

It’s something he’s been working on for the past 30 years, creating the groundbreaking FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) program in 1989 to motivate those young people. Kamen says, “The most valuable thing this country can produce is really smart kids that have the right tools, the right attitude, the right leadership, and the courage and conviction to use those tools for the benefit of humanity.”

Something that didn’t exist when he started FIRST, something he calls “truly terrifying” — a distrust in science by a significant part of the population. Now, he says, fact is mixed with opinion.

“These days, political leaders start a statement, because they realize science is important, with ‘Well, I’m not a scientist,’ but then they go on to talk. They should say ‘I’m not a scientist so I’ll shut up and let someone who knows what they’re doing address this issue.’ To give yourself leeway to make statements that aren’t verifiable, that may not be true, it’s doing a disservice

to the whole intellectual concept that separates science from opinion.”

Another worry for Kamen — resistance to much-needed change. It could be, he says, that people are simply traumatized by the pandemic. “If a cat jumps on a hot stove, he won’t jump on a hot stove again, but he also won’t jump on a cold one. People may be permanently traumatized, not allowing them to move forward in a positive way even when the risks are reasonable or nonexistent.”

And then there are those who avoid change because it involves effort, and perhaps risk.

He says, “If you’re fat, dumb and happy, and you’re on top, who wants to change?”

If you’re an optimist, Kamen says, the pandemic will act as a catalyst to rethink things: “There may be some permanent changes that result in us being better off than before this happened. I hope that’s what happens.”

A PUBLIC POLICY PERSPECTIVE Michael Ettlinger, director of the prestigious Carsey School of Public Policy, hopes so too, because he also thinks significant change, particularly economic change, is needed. But a look back at recent history isn’t reassuring.

Take, for instance, the Great Recession, he says: “It really exposed weaknesses in our unemployment insurance system. People came up with plans for addressing it and nothing happened, right?”

And, he says, look at what’s happened, or not, with wage growth since the recession.

Even during a time of full employment, which typically pushes up wages significantly, he says wage growth has been “pathetic.”

Now, with unemployment figures soaring

photo by thomas roy

hese times will be a test of our humanity, bringing out the best, or the worst, in us.

If there are to be benefits that come from this pandemic, Dean Kamen thinks that is one of them.

“In a crisis like this,” he says, “it helps us see clearly the people who are hoarding or gouging or taking advantage or leveraging fear or exploiting people, and who are the people who stood up and did the right thing for the right reasons.

When the dust settles, the people from whom we’ve seen the best will rise in everyone’s hearts and minds.”

Most people would say Kamen is one of those best. An inventor, an entrepreneur and an advocate for science and technology, Kamen is using his talents to invent and produce medical devices that are advancing healthcare worldwide through his Manchester-based company, DEKA Research & Development. Several are to specifically address the COVID-19 pandemic (see sidebar on page 65). And recently, he facilitated the purchase, at cost, of literal tons of personal protective equipment (PPE) for New Hampshire healthcare facilities.

The fact that the country couldn’t even supply enough PPE for the frontline healthcare workers highlights a flaw in the supply chain that has long concerned Kamen and many others. He says, “This whole situation where we essentially have to beg China to continue to supply critically needed stuff to us, even though most of it was originally invented here, this could be a wakeup call.”

Part of that wakeup call could be taking a hard look at “just in time” manufacturing in this country. To maximize profit, Kamen says, many companies have very little inventory and manufacture their products “just in time” to fill an order.

“The whole mentality of optimizing our very complicated systems for what looks like a short-term win — we are structurally becoming more and more fragile. To think the biggest, richest, most sophisticated country in the world can’t make simple masks to put on people when we need them ...”

Fixing that, Kamen says, involves more than lawmakers throwing more money at it: “They say we’ll give you 10 times as much money, and solve it today. But, as the old joke goes, you can’t put nine pregnant women on a

toward Great Depression levels, workers will have far less power in the labor market and wages are likely to be lower. “When businesses hire workers back,” Ettlinger says, “you are going to have four waiters for every one job that’s available at restaurants, so they are going to pay less.”

Then there is paid sick leave for people who don’t have the luxury of working from home. “We should not make it an economic imperative to go to work sick,” he says.

“That isn’t just being nice to those people, it’s about public health.”

But Ettlinger questions whether that will mean policy interventions like the minimum wage being raised or paid sick leave made available: “Does it create an impetus to do that or do we go back to business as usual? It’s a choice.”

If we do go back to business as usual, he says, it can exacerbate inequalities that were already a challenge for society: “Assets are likely to rebound, but wages are likely not to.

People don’t like that, especially when they see others attaining fabulous wealth. You get political backlash when those circumstances align. I can’t predict exactly what that backlash will be, but it seems unsustainable.

When things get worse, people want action.”

One sign of wealth is second homes, often in tourist areas, and they have become an

Something that didn’t exist when Kamen started FIRST, something he calls “truly terrifying” — a distrust in science by a significant part of the population. Now, he says, fact is mixed with opinion. issue in this crisis. “Those places have been hard hit, partly because people are coming out from cities going to their second home to isolate and unintentionally spreading illness.” And many of the people who live full time in those areas have seasonal work at resorts or other low-paying jobs, which are less likely to provide paid sick leave.

When the history of this time is written, Ettlinger says, it could go in a number of di-

rections: “There could be a big chapter on the decline of the United States as a world power, or it could be chapter on how the country took this moment as a wakeup call and took governance and our role in the world seriously. It could be a chapter on the first major change since the 1960s, one offering a robust social safety net. Or it could be a chapter on a new Gilded Age where people’s wages lagged and inequality grew massively. Or it could

An encouraging note at Center Woods Elementary School in Weare

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THE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT When history considers the pandemic from a psychological point of view, it will be seen as a time of trauma. “Yes, absolutely, this is a trauma,” says Dr. Loretta L.C. Brady, a clinical psychologist, Saint Anselm College psychology professor and director of the college’s Requity Labs, which focuses on resilience and social equity.

It’s traumatic especially for essential workers and healthcare providers who are on the frontlines in the battle to cope with the virus. As Brady says, “You’re going to work every day with the sincere fear that you are going to not only potentially contract a disease with a high death rate but that you might be the person who is responsible for bringing that back home to your loved ones.” Then there are the families dealing with the death of a loved one, perhaps having to say goodbye on FaceTime.

And the impact goes even further. “It is a trauma whether you’re touched by it directly or not,” she says. “You participate in the trauma simply because you exist in the world.”

In the face of such trauma, people are likely to either approach or avoid the situation.

“It’s two sides of the same coin,” Brady says.

“Look at 9-11. You couldn’t stop watching CNN even though the planes had crashed, the buildings had fallen, and the fires were put out, there was still an incredible approach to that information. We do that because it helps us feel like we have a sense of control.” Others, she adds, avoid the situation by turning the TV off.

Above: Michael Ettlinger, director of the Carsey School of Public Policy Right: Dr. Loretta L.C. Brady, a clinical psychologist, Saint Anselm College psychology professor and director of Requity Labs

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“We are wired to be in relationship and in physical contact with others,” says Brady. There are systems in the body that are actually responsive to the presence of other people. The contagious yawn is one example.

“Our sense of control, our sense of mastery, autonomy, competence — these are very powerful experiences that humans are motivated by and respond to,” Brady says.

“When those things get dramatically altered, we don’t respond well.”

Brady believes that dramatic alteration is likely one of the things that provided the impetus for the recent statehouse rallies, demanding that states reopen. “That sentiment that’s being tapped into is real,” she says. “It wasn’t just in this live-free-or-die state; we were seeing this across the country.”

The harmful effects of isolation are added to those that come from a feeling of loss of control. “We are wired to be social,” she says. “We are wired to be in relationship and in physical contact with others.” She points out that there are systems in the body that are

actually responsive to the presence of other people. The contagious yawn is one example.

Dealing with the negatives of the pandemic, which could be lasting, takes resilience.

Brady says it allows people to confront “the terribleness of it all” and still see the positive. She worries that young people, many of whom have been shielded from difficulty, will be less resilient. “One way of fostering resilience is allowing things to be hard sometimes,” she says. “Getting a little psychological muscle memory can help them know they can, in fact, endure.”

But even for an earlier generation lauded for its resilience, there were impacts that carried forward. Brady tells the story from her childhood when her grandfather found food that she had thrown away one Halloween night. She wasn’t allowed to go trick-or-

courtesy photos

be something in between. I don’t know what those chapters are going to look like. There are a lot of choices we have to make.”

photo by jared charney

ECHOES OF 1918 It was September when the flu was first mentioned in Concord newspapers. There were 80 cases of it. The next day, there were 102. The day after that, 204.

The worst pandemic since the Middle Ages had reached New Hampshire. More than 2,500 people would die in just four months. Across the country, more than 675,000.

“What New York City is going through now, almost every community in New England went through in 1918,” says Bryon Champlin, an independent historian who has researched and written about the “Great Influenza,” often called the “Spanish flu,” and how it played out in Concord.

The flu, a virulent H1N1 virus, hit the capital city in full force during September and October of 1918. As the gravity of the situation became clear, Champlin says, city officials “closed theaters, soda shops, barbershops and other places where people congregated. Churches discontinued Sunday services.

Schools closed and public meetings of all sorts were voluntarily canceled in hopes of slowing the contagion.”

Despite the rising toll, the danger was downplayed. Champlin points to an admonition from Dr. Charles Duncan, a state Board of Health official at the time: “[W]e want a calm, cool public citizen to work with and not one ‘panicky’ and ‘jumpy,’ who will think a hand clap is a clap of thunder.”

But it was a clap of thunder. Champlin says the city’s two hospitals were quickly overwhelmed with patients; an emergency hospital was opened at the Elks Club building. At one hospital, 25 of the 26 nurses got sick and one died. Priests who had been performing last rites died. There was one funeral after the other, sometimes a double funeral for two members of a family. Orphaned children were taken in by neighbors.

The devastation in Concord and elsewhere was part of a “second wave” of the flu. After circulating in a mild form in this country in the spring of 1918, it found its way to Europe with the troops sent to fight in WWI. It mutated there, returning here in the fall as a much more deadly flu. Champlin says, “There was no attempt to flatten the curve. When it peaked, it peaked strongly and fatally, most of its victims young men in the prime of life.” By late winter, though, it had run its course and life began to return to normal.

What is happening now in the pandemic of 2020 is such an echo of the 1918 pandemic that it’s curious that so few people know about it; it seems to have been forgotten. Champlin thinks the reason is twofold: “On the one hand, the big news of that period was WWI, the war coming to an end in November of 1918. The other thing is, I think it was such a traumatic event that people just wanted to put it behind them; they didn’t want to dredge up those memories.”

Bryon Champlin photo by jared charney

For the religious community, it’s been a disorienting time, a time when core practices have been altered. “There’s such a bedrock belief about what it means to be a church — that we gather in person, that you get to see your pastor, that the pastor can come to the hospital when you need it. All of that has been taken away,” says Rev. Jason Wells, executive director of the NH Council of Churches.

The Easter season was unlike any in their lifetimes. Wells says parishioners were commenting on how they especially missed the fragrance that the lilies always provided at Easter Sunday services. That the pandemic began to unfold during Lent, a time of sacrifice, didn’t go unnoticed. “It put a spiritual dimension onto the sacrifice we’re feeling,” he says.

A sign in Lebanon instructs people where they can drop off donations of supplies for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

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The shutdown of city services has inspired many neighbors to take charge of their turf with homemade signs, like this one in a Concord park, to encourage good behavior.

Like other parts of society, the churches have turned to technology to retain some semblance of normalcy. Wells says churches are usually slow agents of change, but no longer. “There has been an explosion of energy to bring things online,” he says. “There’s a readiness for a new way of being.”

That new way of being means much of

photo by rick broussard

SPIRITUAL SUSTENANCE

what churches do is now done online: Sunday sermons, prayer groups and Bible studies. Even last rites.

Wells says one advantage of online church life is that people can access sermons when it’s convenient: “People can download sermons and listen when they want. What people normally did on Sunday, they can do on Tuesday. They don’t need to be there.” Also, he says, it makes it easier for pastors to check in with parishioners.

When the crisis has passed and church life returns to normal, Wells predicts pastors will continue to utilize technology. “If we just hit the play button on what we used to do without the technology, I think we lose something. I think it’s enabling something that wasn’t possible before.”

Another opportunity the pandemic has created is for families to play a larger role in their children’s religious life. Wells says, “Parents may think, my daughter’s in Sunday School, so we don’t need to talk about the Bible or our faith at home. I think the longer we go on with this, you’ll find a greater readiness of families to be a center of faith rather than thinking of the church as a place to outsource faith. Every pastor would want to see their families engaging in faith discussions at home.”

Those families, like all families, are stressed

photo by kendal j. buxh

treating. “He was a loving man, but that response was absolutely because he was a Great Depression-era child.”

The psychological ripples will take time to settle. In the meantime, Brady says, “My hope is that we can better understand the unifying truth of our connectedness to one another.

Anything that affects a portion of our community is affecting all of us, and this moment more than any other cultural moment we’ve experienced brings that ringingly home.”

by the disruption created by the pandemic, especially the loss of jobs. That loss means fewer donations to the church are possible, so church staff is being laid off as well. There’s also the fear of the virus to deal with.

It’s a frightening time, Wells says, a time when people are comforted by their faith.

One way he draws comfort is to recall a bit of wisdom imparted by the always-reassuring Mister Rogers, who said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers.

You will always find people who are helping.’”

Certainly the churches are. So are many others, most notably those on the healthcare frontlines. Wells says, “There’s a growing realization of who is my neighbor, a growing realization that we’re all in this together.”

THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

photo photocourtesy by jared saint charney anslem college

Our concept of heroes may be changed by the pandemic, at least professor Casey Golomski hopes so.

A cultural and medical anthropologist teaching at UNH, Golomski says the new he-

“I think the longer we go on with this, you'll find a greater readiness of families to be a center of faith rather than thinking of the church as a place to outsource faith.”

— Rev. Jason Wells roes are the bus drivers, grocery store baggers, nursing home workers and others who have, quite literally, risked their lives during this

pandemic. “Those people are heroes,” he says, “but they don’t wear the symbolic clothes that mark them as heroes.” Medical workers do, as do police and firefighters, so their contributions are more easily recognized.

“I think it would be a profound cultural change if we see them as a new kind of heroes,” he says, “if we see memorials to them, something that lets us not forget that they helped us keep some sense of continuity in all of this, amid the shock.”

Golomski has made a study of disease epidemics, writing a book about the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa that told the story of ordinary people there doing the work of caring for the sick and dying, and burying the dead.

The book, “Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom,” also details cultural changes that the massive amount of death produced, like the creation of a market for life insurance and an altering of the rituals around death.

Drawing from his experiences in Africa, he says it’s likely this country will have a heightened perception of risk that will be

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Lines of people waiting to enter grocery stores, like this one at Market Basket in Nashua, have become part of the new normal.

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ongoing. The high exposure people have had to information about the risk of covid-19 will likely mean they’ll continue to assess situations, asking, “Am I safe going to this place or am I endangering others by interacting with them?” He adds, “The epidemic also reveals a kind of hierarchy, like who has the power to remain safe, and who is more vulnerable in these situations. I think our communities can best flourish when people aren’t left to their own devices to suffer.”

With economic suffering widespread, affecting almost every sector of the economy, Golomski says there’s a growing realization of how interdependent the economy is. “You start knocking down dominoes — well, what if I can’t pay rent, what if my landlord can’t pay their mortgage, then what is the bank going to do. It’s revealing how ecologically and economically connected we are.”

And, at least for a time, there’s a political coming-together. “The immensity of a disease epidemic and its mortality really pulls people out of their political silos and says, OK, this is something of major physical existential proportions,” Golomski says. “I think this has changed people’s outlook on reality.”

As evidence, he points to the across-theboard political support for economic remedies, like the $1,200 check, that likely would have been considered radical in other times.

If nothing else, he says, this moment in time is a consciousness-raiser, perhaps a catalyst for cultural change: “We were walking like zombies, assuming things will continue to go easily. Now people are being pushed into an awareness that a lot of the ways we thought the world worked ... they were taken for granted, and you can’t do that anymore.

When people’s consciousness is raised, that’s when we can retool our vision for what we want the future to look like.” NH

photo by kendal j. bush

Casey Golomski, a cultural and medical anthropologist teaching at UNH, wrote a book about his experiences in Africa during the AIDS epidemic.

LEAPING TALL BUILDINGS

photo by thomas roy

Not many humans have been called a superhero, but Dean Kamen has. And no wonder.

Though he’s best known as the inventor of the Segway, his work, and his company’s, extends far beyond that, much of it focused on how to use science and technology to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

That’s especially so now that we’re in the midst of the worst pandemic in a century.

As other companies have been shutting down, Kamen’s company, DEKA Research & Development, with 800 mostly technical employees, has gone into overdrive to do all it can to help. Projects that were in the works are being accelerated and new ones are being created. “We’re doing this because we can’t not do it,” he says. “And it’s needed, and we don’t know any other way to get it done, so we’re doing it.”

One of the projects is engineering and building tools for people who are making vaccines. Another is a dialysis machine that can be used at home. “Now people who are

Dean Kamen (center) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport greeted the plane that delivered 91,000 pounds of protective equipment.

already fragile now have to go to a center where they’ll be in close quarters and maybe get exposed to the virus,” Kamen says.

Another project — antiviral materials that can be put onto or into masks and gowns. “What if you could spray something on surfaces that will stay on those surfaces that is nontoxic to you, but any virus that touches that surface is going to have a really bad day,” Kamen says.

Yet another, a water purifier to deliver the sterile water needed to make IV solutions, something that’s likely to be in short supply in coming days. “They would distributed to pharmacies around the country that could make the IV bags of water that will be desperately needed in hospitals,” he says. “We’ve gotten massive support from HHS to help us do that.”

Some of the Kamen-inspired FIRST groups of young people have taken a cue from his efforts to help humanity, among them a group in Israel that designed and

built a small ventilator. They’re now in the process of putting plans in an open-source file for others to use.

Also at work is the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit in the Manchester Millyard that was launched

by Kamen to engineer the production of human organs. Of late, the Institute has been tasked with creating portable devices that allow medicines to be made onsite, especially important in difficult-to-reach areas. It’s another project done in partnership with HHS. Add to all that, Kamen recently spearheaded an effort to get masks, face shields and coveralls for New Hampshire’s healthcare workers, who were facing dire shortages. Tons of it were procured, all atcost. “I would feel guilty if I made a penny on this,” he says.

Kamen gets high praise from those he worked with to make it happen. Gov. Chris Sununu says Kamen “worked tirelessly to make it a reality.” Ditto Sen. Jeanne Shaheen: “Thanks to Dean Kamen’s leadership, we are all a little safer today.”

How does Kamen do all he does? Two part-time jobs, he says. “I work half a day at my day job, that’s 12 hours, and half a day on all the other stuff. That’s the other 12 hours.”

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The Shifting Tides of Our Great Bay Great Bay is the deepest pool in the web of tidewater that flood the Piscataqua Basin. It’s also a symbol of the tenacity of both nature itself and of the goodwill and enterprise of those who are inspired to help preserve it.

By Anders Morley, Photos by Jerry Monkman A tidal creek flows through a salt marsh into Great Bay in the Nature Conservancy’s Lubberland Creek Preserve in Newmarket.

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hen it began in the 1960s, the environmental movement was not action but reaction. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” drew a link between pesticide overuse, declining animal populations and cancer. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was so slicked with flammable chemicals that it occasionally caught fire. And on two occasions in the middle of the decade temperature inversions in New York City trapped enough air pollution at ground level to cause nearly 600 deaths.

A few years later, in 1973, residents of Durham were put on guard when anonymous outsiders began buying up options on large tracts of land around Great Bay and in the Isles of Shoals under dubious pretenses. Then as now, New Hampshire was an idyllic sort of place that had mostly been spared the ravages of heavy industry. But it was also an era, with Meldrim Thomson as governor and William Loeb directing the New Hampshire Union Leader, when “Live Free or Die” was often glossed as “open for business.” The seacoast real estate buyers, who turned out to be agents of Aristotle Onassis’ Olympic Refineries, had evidently

Salt marsh in Stratham along the Squamscott River near where it empties into Great Bay, which is visible in the distance

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gotten the message. The shenanigans entered the light of day when Gov. Thomson announced that a $600-million oil refinery was to be built on Durham Point.

It really wouldn’t have been surprising if the project had gone off without a hitch. The ingredients were there: a business-friendly, regulation-wary population living in a place still unspoiled enough that environmental catastrophe might not register automatically as a possible outcome. This wasn’t Gary or Pittsburg, where inflamed lungs or sludge in the waterways were daily reminders that the world was getting filthy. But a hitch did come.

An impressive grassroots opposition took shape. In one memorable episode, Onassis was helicoptered over the planned site, only to see a message stomped in the snow telling him to leave. Despite intense lobbying and unabashed support for the project from the state’s most powerful quarters, the residents of a town of 5,000 handily beat back the ambitions of one of the planet’s richest men.

The victory over Olympic Refineries was a rare instance of farsightedness trumping myopia. Sufficient consensus was mustered to say “Stop” before the dirty work could gain momentum. It was the advent of a movement to protect Great Bay that was in-

spired not by regret at what it had become, but by appreciation of what it was.

Strictly speaking,

Great Bay is only the most recessed pool of the tidal basin behind Portsmouth. It is shaped like Australia would be shaped if Salvador Dalí were its cartographer, melting south at both ends. Moving back oceanward from Great Bay proper, you pass north into Little Bay, then thread your way between Goat Island, Dover Point and Fox Point, turn sharply southeast, and enter Long Reach, a straight section of the Piscataqua River that runs almost to Portsmouth Harbor. John Winthrop, early governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, referred to this meeting of waters and the surrounding constellation of English settlements as “Pascataquack.”

The word is a variation on Piscataqua, thought to mean something like “branch of a strong-flowing river.” Drawing on its geologic past, one author called the basin the Drowned Valley. In a broad sense, this whole web of tidewater is Great Bay. Circling the estuary today is a perimeter of trees, fields and meadows that subtly gives way to salt marsh and then, depending on the time, to open water or mudflat. Forest

occurs in patches, not the blankets that cover most of the state, hinting at the pastured look of an older New England. The heights of a broad promontory north of the Lamprey River afford a panoramic view over the otherwise mostly flat basin. There is almost no commercial development, only the occasional house designed to waken a sense of the pastoral, although a few working farms remain. The impression is of a salubrious rurality. Set back from the bay, along each of its affluent rivers, are towns: Dover on the Cochecho, Durham on the Oyster, Newmarket on the Lamprey, Exeter on the Squamscott, and Greenland on the Winnicut. The towns are small, but not tiny, and guard picturesque vestiges of their light-industrial pasts.

Thanks to a ball set rolling with the Olympic Refineries fiasco, much of Great Bay today falls under the umbrella of the Great Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which includes more than 10,000 acres of protected land and water. At the organization’s Great Bay Discovery Center in Greenland, exhibits teach youngsters about estuarine ecology.

A boardwalk outside takes visitors through the woods and over the salt marsh to the water’s edge. The view northward is over Great Bay proper, which resembles a lake and alone has a shoreline longer than the New Hampshire seacoast.

Across the water,

where Adams Point nearly pinches off Great Bay from Little Bay, is the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory.

It is quiet early on a May morning. Inside, the smells of a library, a school science lab and the beach mingle agreeably. Surrounded by the tools of his profession — microscopes, field samples and scientific journals — marine biologist Raymond Grizzle sips coffee and looks out a window on low tide.

Great Bay is unique, Grizzle explains, because although it is in a cold-water region, it is sometimes home to intermediate-zone species. The average water temperature at its southern end is significantly higher than at Dover Point, and species that historically have not lived this far north are moving in.

Similarly, the bay’s mildness makes it suitable for certain disjunct species, which exist in exclave populations beyond their normal ranges. The tidal range is about 8 feet, and half the volume of inner bay goes out to sea twice a day. A given molecule of seawater spends between 20 and 30 days inland before returning to the ocean.

Grizzle speaks with a slow Southern accent

Marine biologist Raymond Grizzle of the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory stands guard.

that gives an elegant cast to the sharpness of his thoughts. He is nearing retirement and hedges less than a younger professor might on controversial subjects. Although he’s an unapologetic critic of the growth economy and its deleterious impact on natural systems, he understands that those systems, when treated with a reasonable measure of regard, are quite resilient. The twice-daily water changeover, he explains, “is part of the reason why it’s hard for the bay to go eutrophic.” Eutrophication, often caused by agro-industrial pollution, results from an excess of nutrients in runoff and promotes an overgrowth of plant life detrimental to other

aquatic species. Relatively low population density and a post-industrial economy leave today’s Great Bay in pretty good shape compared with other estuaries. Grizzle’s blend of skepticism (about our economy, doomsday prophets and our checklist approach to addressing environmental problems) and optimism (about nature’s ability to forge ahead without any of our character flaws) looks curiously like reason — a mental habit that sometimes appears to be headed for the endangered species list.

Outside, where the water is about to begin its six-hour flood, more than half the bay floor is exposed. Three of the five habitats of this ecosystem are visible. At the edge of the land in most places is a tough grass, dun-colored at this time of year, growing in spongy soil. This is salt marsh, workhorse of the land side of the estuarial system and the habitat most obviously threatened by our everyday activities. Salt marsh extent around Great Bay may have decreased by as much as 50% since European colonization. Below the grass, on a shelf of rock, greenish-brown algae called rockweed lies in heaps. Rachel Carson, who was first a marine biologist, called the rockweed zone “a fantastic jungle, mad in a Lewis Carroll sort of way” that dances in the pulse of the brackish water twice a day, for a few hours, until the ocean withdraws, causing it to sag into sodden piles that retain “the wetness of the sea, and nothing under their protective cover ever dries out.” The next zone seaward is mudflat, huge expanses of whose bubbling muck delight shorebirds with each ebb of the tide. Just below the surface at low are the eel-

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Salt marsh, which will be most immediately affected by higher water levels, is adapted to migrate.

The rub is that it needs room to do so.,

Salt marsh near Moody Point at the Nature Conservancy’s Lubberland Creek Preserve in Newmarket

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grass meadows, another place teeming with life because of the shelter and sustenance its nutrient-rich leaves provide to subtidal creatures. Finally, the deepest part of the bay is the channel bottom, which for Grizzle also means oyster beds. Oysters are his expertise.

As recently as the 1970s, oyster reef covered as much as 1,000 acres of the floor of Great Bay. By 2009, coverage had shrunk to 120 acres. Not only are there fewer oysters, but those remaining have shorter life expectancies, reach reproductive senility earlier, and are smaller. There were still reports in the 1980s of bivalves nearly a foot long being pulled from the Oyster River. Grizzle strongly suspects — although he makes no sweeping statements, saying the evidence is not yet clear — that the main culprit for the depression in size, population and reproductive capacity is disease, likely introduced by contamination from shipping. The object of UNH’s oyster restoration program, which operates under Grizzle’s guidance, is to create habitat that will encourage healthy oyster populations to rebound and thrive, so that they can perform their vital ecological function of filtering water. In nature, the reefs on which oysters exist consist of old shells.

If there are fewer oysters as the generations go by, there will be less habitat. The pro-

gram collects discarded oyster shells from local restaurants and buys large quantities of crushed clam shells. These are then “planted” on the bottom of the bay in hopes that spawning oysters will seek them out. In the last decade more than 20 acres of reef have been created this way.

There are larger estuaries along the At-

Great Bay is a beautiful place for a hike, where paths wind through habitats like forests, salt marshes, mudflats and more.

lantic coast and arguably more interesting ones. Grizzle talks about Great Bay the way a parent might of a kid who has generally been kind, well-behaved and had Bs in school, but is perhaps somewhat lacking in ambition or originality. “It’s a nice little estuary,” he says, “with its piddly rivers flowing into it. On the whole it’s in pretty good shape.” The clearest threat he sees is rising sea levels. He looks

toward the wooded shore of Newington and remarks, “I always say in a few years we’re going to have to start calling it the Island of Newington.” Salt marsh, which will be most immediately affected by higher water levels, is adapted to migrate. The rub is that it needs room to do so, and whether or not it has room will depend on how humans develop, or don’t develop, the land around the estuary. When a salt marsh no longer has healthy conditions to live in, it is swallowed up by less picky mudflats; a habitat dies and an ecosystem suffers the loss.

The tide has turned, and it’s as if this is Grizzle’s cue to turn to his work. There’s still a slight chill in the air as he walks uphill toward the lab, and he says, “I like it here, but the winters are getting longer and longer. Most of my family is still down south.” He looks up to see a magnolia tree, growing on the south side of the building and now in full flower. “It’s a real gem,” he says. “We’re lucky to have it.”

Before there was New Hampshire

the indigenous people of this region, various bands of the western Abenaki, were the only human beings to call it home. Their lives moved along as they had for genera-

Mill buildings at the dam on the Lamprey River in Newmarket

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tions, following the cycle of the seasons in an economy that, some experts say, aspired to stability rather than growth. In the round of hunting and gathering, Great Bay — with its mollusks, its lobsters and its fish that swam upstream into weirs — represented an embarrassment of riches. The first European known to have sailed into the Piscataqua was Martin Pring, who came in 1603 and observed, “We found no people, but signs of fires where they had been. Howbeit we beheld very goodly Groves and Woods replenished with tall Okes, Beeches, Pine-trees, Firre-trees, Hasels, Witch-hasels and Maples. We saw here also sundry sorts of Beasts, as Stags, Deere, Beares, Wolves, Foxes, Lusernes, and Dogges with sharp noses.”

It would be another 20 years before the first permanent colonial settlement took hold, under the aegis of the Council for New England. Several settlements were made in 1623, but the one that lasted was on Dover Point at the end of a neck that reached down into the Piscataqua Basin, offering visibility and defensibility. (Today it’s where westbound travelers on the Little Bay Bridge make landfall.) Pockets of settlement formed around the north side of the basin, and 15 years later John Wheelwright, a dissident Massachusetts Puritan, founded Exeter along the Squamscott River, at the bay’s southern end.

For half a century, the colonists got along peacefully enough with the Abenaki, as the English to the south did with their Wampanoag and Narragansett neighbors. But in 1675, war broke out between natives and settlers in southern New England, and over the next 20 years the effects rippled northward. The situation was exacerbated by French pressure north of New England and, most importantly, according to Professor Meghan Howey of the

Abenakis pictured in traditional garments

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Mill buildings at the dam on the Lamprey River in downtown Newmarket.

Great Bay is visible in the distance.

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University of New Hampshire, by the shrinking availability of fish.

Howey, who is an anthropological archeologist, says she never imagined herself working in historical archeology, where written sources complement the material ones. “But 17th-century New England is interesting,” she says, “because you have a moment of initial contact between two societies, you have nascent capitalism, and you have two ways of relating to the landscape and thus two basic economic modes — an extractive economy and a subsistence economy. I’m not really interested in anything that happened around here after 1700.” The clash that so fascinates Howey came to a head in a series of what have traditionally been called “Indian massacres” around Great Bay in the late 17th century.

Howey stands on a bank 10 feet above the

Martin Pring meets Abenakis.

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river, near where it meets the bay. The bank is crumbling, with large stones protruding from the soil or perched on the slope in an arrested tumble. A few are in the water. There are clearly more stones per square yard than nature dictates here, and Howey says these are traces of a garrison foundation. Bricks of local 17th-century manufacture are strewn in the shallows, tickled by seaweed swaying in the tide. “Those are from the central chimney,” Howey explains, “which probably collapsed when the garrison burned.” The site is one of 14 garrison houses known to have stood on either side of the Oyster River in the late 1600s. Howey found them marked on a contemporary map and has been surveying them one by one. In Colonial history, “garrison” denotes little more than a house built defensively, with an overhanging second story and sturdier design. When settlements

came under attack, colonists took refuge in these slightly safer houses. But, in a fire, one wooden house was as vulnerable as another.

Howey’s study of this site has led her to believe that native resentment at being crowded out, mistreated and deprived of the fish on which they had always relied reached a new pitch in the Oyster River Massacre of 1694.

Some houses appear to have been deliberately spared, which to Howey suggests their inhabitants may have been friendlier with the Abenaki than their neighbors were, while at this site she has found vitrified bricks.

“The bricks had literally been transformed into glass,” she says. “That doesn’t happen when you just set fire to a place, run away and hope it catches. Something different had to be done to make the fire burn that hot, but I don’t know what yet. What it tells me, though, is that this was calculated, systematic violence — an act of war.”

But the New England Indian Wars came too late to have any lasting defensive effect for indigenous people. The settlers were building an economy that relied on control of the land, the imperative to extract resources from it intensively, and the right to exclude those who stood in a nonproductive relationship to it. Seemingly limitless resources meant that this budding economy could sustain an ever-larger population. A combination of disease, competition for resources and habitable land, and violence pushed the native population north and west, eroding its numbers as it did so. It was a horrific chapter in history, the kind one wishes undone. It’s tempting to see a less gruesome parallel in the struggle against Onassis three centuries later, and to interpret its happier outcome as the result of a lesson learned from the past.

But there’s a question that won’t go away: What if the Abenaki had sent a clear warning to Martin Pring when he came up the Piscataqua in 1603?

But history doesn’t have a rewind button.

Already by 1675, there were 15 water-powered lumber mills around Great Bay. It was at about the same time that a significant decline in fish was noticed. This earliest New Hampshire economy was one of crude extraction — cutting trees down and pulling fish from the water, with no thought for the finitude of either. Over time, industry developed: Mills and plants began converting the raw materials into lumber, bricks and ships.

These facilities required water power, so the population moved back from the tentative bayside settlements and up the inflowing rivers to the first waterfalls they found. This

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Settlers were building an economy that relied on control of the land, the imperative to extract resources from it intensively, and the right to exclude those who stood in a nonproductive relationship to it.

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was also the point reached by tidewater, and large boats could be brought up under favorable conditions, giving easier access to markets. The early economy drew hard on its land base, but it had an integrity and an elegance. A symbol of this was a shallow-drafted wooden barge known as the Piscataqua gundalow (a rejigging of “gondola”). These tidewater workhorses relied primarily on tidal currents for locomotion, as the larvae of some marine invertebrates do, although they could also be sailed. Gundalows carried timber, cordwood, bricks and other wares in the periodically shallow waters and were beachable for easy loading. They delivered hinterland goods down to Portsmouth, and there are even reports of them sailing on the ocean in calm spells.

Then, in the 19th century, came highways and railroads, which needed bridges. Bridges, however, interfered with the flow patterns of the waterborne economy. As early as the mid-18th century there was strong opposition to a planned bridge over the Squamscott River. Many feared it would curtail Exeter’s commercial usefulness. Nearly 30 years passed between the initial proposal of a fixed crossing and its erection in 1773. Textile and paper mills later became a major player in the area’s industrial maturation. Taking their raw materials from farther afield, they inten-

Today there’s something pleasing

William Wood’s 1634 map of New England Below: Dawn over tidal creek salt marsh near Moody Point at Lubberland Creek Preserve in Newmarket

sified the explosion of the microcosmic Colonial-era economy and spilled harsh toxins into the ecosystem. But after their demise, the mills became emblems as powerful as the gundalows — and now their brick and granite shells are succinct reminders that the legacy of any past is complex.

about the mills as they rise in blocks of red or gray above flat water that shows the trembling reflection of tall trees where once there was stubbled pasture. The great cathedrals rose in dark times, but do we wish them gone? It took 300 years for this place to settle into its current quiet, so perhaps it’s no wonder that the residents of Durham in 1973 were unwilling to see it ruined again overnight.

On William Wood’s 1634 map of New England, the basin behind the New Hampshire coast is marked simply “the Bay.” By 1676 it had been promoted, on another map, to “Great Bay.” The change reeks of a public relations trick.

But somewhere along the way people must have grown into the name, accepting that New Hampshire was a little place, though perhaps not insufficient. When you have only 18 miles of coastline, calling your only biggish bay “great” is a reassurance that your world is whole.

Great Bay may not look like much to the commuters who stream down the Spaulding Turnpike every morning — but there are no gas flares on the horizon, and the water and the air are pretty clean, and the places around have stories to tell, and there are people who love it enough to fight for it. Maybe all these goods add up to a great. NH

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603 Living “Fill your life with adventures, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.” — Unknown

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Photo by Joe Klementovich

Local Dish 83 Health 84 Seniority 86 Ayuh 88

The Heart of Adventure Discover the joy of camping in the Granite State

BY MEAG POIRIER

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Camping provides an abundance of meaningful exploration and memories.

he what, where and how of camping is as diverse as the landscapes and activities we live for across the Granite State.

Maybe when you close your eyes and think of camping you picture an oceanfront RV site in a 40-foot motorhome. Maybe you see an ultralight tent nestled among the trees somewhere deep in the Pemigewasset Wilderness. There is something for everyone in New Hampshire and for that we’re grateful. Though many of our trips may be on hold, there’s still joy to be found in planning ahead for good times outdoors in the future.

My husband Ben and I both grew up in New Hampshire. We share a deep love for camping, hiking and biking in nature. We’ve spent countless nights in the backcountry after long hikes. From 2018 to 2019, we worked remotely and glamped through 39 states in our 31-foot motorhome, I mean, our 1989 bus that we converted into a tiny home on wheels. I’m not surprised that after all of our travels we’re drawn back to New Hampshire. There are over 1,000 lakes and ponds, hundreds of mountains, and countless miles of wooded trails for hiking, biking and ATV exploration here. There is so much to love and so much left to explore in the seasons ahead through activities like camping.

Camping is not as simple as booking a hotel room or vacation rental, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. There is more to consider, plan, pack and nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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prepare. Get the family involved and keep things light. Give yourself time to plan ahead, but if you forget something, it’s OK. Every camping trip becomes a little easier as you get to know the essentials. It doesn’t matter how fancy the camping unit is or even what the campsite looks like; it’s all about who you’re with and what you do once you get there.

Choosing where to camp is a good place to start. New Hampshire has seven regions in the state with hundreds of different camping options, ranging from resorts, campgrounds and state parks to Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) huts and National Forest shelters, cabins and campsites. (Editor’s note: As this issue went to press, AMC announced it will be closing its high mountain huts for the season as well as other facilities, but both Pinkham Notch Visitor Center and the Highland Center at Crawford Notch are still slated to open July 1.) All seven regions have their own unique charm and things to do. From sandy beaches on the seacoast to miles of thick forests in the Great North Woods, it’s easy to find the perfect place to set up camp.

PREPARE

our travels. Planning a camping trip can be just as fun as the camping itself. Sit back, grab a notebook, settle in with a cup of tea or coffee, and start planning for future fun outdoors. Thankfully, we have plenty of resources online to draw from in the comfort of our own homes. There’s nothing worse than

Above and below: For more information about Meag Poirier and The Wild Drive Life, visit thewilddrive.com, where you can read more about her adventures with husband Ben in their converted bus.

arriving to a destination to find out it’s closed or full. When in doubt, call ahead.

Ben and I have become big fans of planning ahead. Driving a 30-year-old bus around is challenging enough. Before I choose a camping destination, I like to review the website, property map and

guest reviews. Our preferences are usually guided by pet-friendly policies and access to outdoor fun nearby. The same goes for state parks and backcountry sites as well if we’re out with the van or our tent.

If you’re new to New Hampshire or aren’t sure where to start, check out Visit NH (visitnh.gov), where you can explore the state by region or season, and Camp NH (ucampnh. com) to really dig into the wide variety of campgrounds across the state.

Brainstorm what your trip preferences and needs are, based on your family, camping unit and desired activities. Do you have pets or children? Would you prefer to be secluded in nature or closer to amenities and conveniences? Once you have a basic idea, start finding answers to your questions.

Are there dirt or paved roads? Is it wooded or an open field? How close together are the sites? Are there any extra fees upon arrival?

Should I bring cash? Are campfires allowed?

OPTIONS

If you don’t have an RV and tenting is not for you, don’t fret. There’s always an option to rent a camping unit for a weekend, week or more. Many campgrounds and state parks in New Hampshire offer rental cabins or RVs onsite. You can also search for “RV rentals in New Hampshire” to find

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Now more than ever, it’s crucial to research in advance to make informed decisions about

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places where you can pick up a rental RV or have one delivered to the campground you’re staying at. Prices range from $50$200 per night for this option. If you’re unsure of which camping unit you’d like to invest in, renting is a great way to test and try before you buy.

Primitive campsites (also known as basic) have no hookups or services onsite. They are the least expensive option and are suitable for tents, vans and some small campers.

Most state parks and campgrounds include a fire pit and picnic table on each site. We have a portable power station that always comes with us on our car camping adventures. It has USB and AC outlets for all our power needs at the campsite, and we can charge it in our van as we drive. With that and a jug of water with a spigot, it’s almost like we have a water and electricity campsite.

When reserving a tent site, I like to confirm how level the site is and if the site is on gravel, sand, dirt, grass, or if there is a tent platform (usually made out of wood). I also want to know about proximity to water, restroom facilities, showers, and a sink to wash dishes. Check if the showers are free or coin-operated so you can gather some change before arrival. We always have antibacterial wet wipes (Wet Ones) and body wipes (Epic Wipes) on hand to save water and clean up at our site.

If we’re not in our bus, we either car camp or backpack. The benefit to car camping (driving to your campsite) versus backpacking (hiking to a remote shelter or backcountry) is that weight is not a concern. You can bring extra items to feel right at home, like folding chairs, a small table, extra blankets, a tarp, games or even an air mattress.

RV campsites on the other hand, have one or more services like water, sewer and electricity available. A full-hookup site features all three services. Naturally, they’re more expensive and typically larger. They’re suitable for pop-up campers, fifth wheels, tow-behind trailers, motorhomes, etc.

Always confirm the length of your site and how level it is to plan accordingly.

Parking your camping unit will either require backing in or pulling through, depending on the site type. Pull-through sites are always reserved first because they are much easier to pull in and out of.

Back-in sites require a bit of experience and guidance from a partner or friend, but with practice you’ll be a pro in no time. A backup camera helps too.

CAMPING AT HOME

Backcountry camping is a fun experience, perfect for every adventure seeker.

Most RVs have holding tanks for their gray water (sinks) and black water (sewage).

This provides more flexibility for where you can camp and what you need when you get there. If there are no full-hookup sites available at a campground, ask if there is a dump station onsite. This enables you to save some money, camp at a water and electricity site, and just dump your holding tanks before you depart.

Overflow camping includes areas like parking lots or extra parking that campgrounds and parks offer if the main sites are at full capacity. Ben and I stayed in overflow sites a few times around the country; they’re usually less expensive and include a longer walk to the restrooms. I honestly didn’t mind it.

Bookmark these sites for plenty of excellent information and ideas: AMC - Lodges, huts, camps, cabins and remote campsites outdoors.org NH State Parks - Browse NH’s 93 state parks, 20 of which offer camping. nhstateparks.org Camp NH - The New Hampshire Campground Owner’s Association camping guide ucampnh.com Visit NH - Statewide tourism information, a great place to start visitnh.gov Bring Fido - Pet-friendly travel tips, accommodations, and more bringfido.com

Camping right at home in your backyard is a fun alternative or last-minute idea when you have the camping itch. I have such wonderful memories of doing exactly this as a kid with my family. Set up your tent, plug in some string lights, get the grill, and get your lawn games ready. Remember, the most important reason we love camping is the process of it all — it’s exciting. It’s about setting up camp, building a fire, and laughing and sharing time with those we love. Camping reminds us to pause and find joy in the simpler things: the nature around us, our loved ones, the peace and quiet, the meals, activities and memories we share together. Simple can be joyful too.

If you’re new to backcountry camping, tenting for a night in your backyard can be great practice. I know it sounds a little lame, but it’s better to work out any gear kinks at home than to be stuck 15 miles in the woods with a tent that leaks or a sleeping bag that leaves you freezing your tush off. You can even take it one step further, and fill your backpack and walk around for a couple of hours. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than making it a few miles in before you realize your pack weighs as much as the Titanic. Try to use a little imagination, it could be fun.

SEASONS

The typical camping season in New Hampshire is from mid-May to mid-October, and there are mini-seasons within that season too. Camping at different times during the season offers you an entirely different experience. It’s all about deciding what vibe, activity level and setting is most important to you and planning your dates accordingly. Those few highly coveted toasty warm summer weeks are the most popular times to camp, but there is plenty to love about the earlier and later parts of the season too.

MAY-JUNE Many destinations are still waking up during these early season weeks. You’ll likely find lower prices at private campgrounds and quieter settings. Some facilities and seasonal businesses may still be closed or have limited hours. Make sure to call ahead to confirm these details before you hit the road. The outdoor temperatures are mild, but cooler, and can be unpredictable at times. The leaves are their richest green and you can spot many ephemeral wildflowers during this time. This is the perfect time to put on some layers and head out for a bike nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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Huttopia is now allowing New Hampshire residents to make reservations from May 31 and beyond. Visit canada-usa.huttopia.com/en/site/ white-mountains for more information.

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ride or scenic walk. Check out the annual Lupine Festival in Sugar Hill for some of that wildflower magic.

JULY-AUGUST Peak summer season lasts through the months of July and August, with another short burst around Labor Day in September.

During this time period, you’ll find some of the warmest weather and plenty to see and do around the state. Remember, this will be the busiest time of the year to travel so it’s essential to plan ahead with reservations as soon as you know your preferred travel dates.

photo by joe klementovich

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER This is my personal favorite time to camp.

Similar to the early season, the weeks following the Labor Day holiday tend to be calmer overall. Expect crisp days with some warm bursts here and there and cooler nights in the 30s and 40s. You’ll observe the outdoor landscapes begin to change as temperatures cool, giving way to brilliant foliage throughout the state. This is the perfect time to take a drive along one of the many scenic byways throughout the state, which you can learn more about at visit-newhampshire. com/state/scenic-drives.

TIPS

Once you decide on the campground, it’s important to make sure you can get there safely. We’ve had to adjust our travel routes many times in order to accommodate the limitations and size that our bus camper presented. Always research and verify in advance if your trip plan involves roads with low-clearance bridges or high grades that should be avoided. We used mobile apps like Trucker Path and CoPilot.

At least a week before you leave for your camping trip, make a packing checklist.

It helps to break the list down into three categories: kitchen, bed and bath, and recreation. Be prepared with plenty of at-thecampsite games, books and supplies. Bring a mix of options for independent and group activities to keep things interesting.

Meal planning is a great way to save time, money and energy on your camping trip.

There’s never a wait for a table at your campsite.

Stock up on staple meal ingredients at your local grocery store before hitting the road. Focus on simple to prepare meals like tacos, burgers, sandwiches and salads. Bonus if your dinner makes enough for lunch leftovers the next day.

HAPPY CAMPERS

As we collect more experiences through our lives, the recollection of the ready-made, overly convenient hotel vacations seem to fade into the background. What shines through are moments we spent setting up camp and creating our own fun in the outdoors. As a matter of fact, two of my fondest memories involve having to rest an injured ankle for two days deep inside the Pemigewasset Wilderness and hiking into the Grand Canyon in a torrential downpour only to wake up the next day in a green oasis exploding with waterfalls and wildlife. These deeper sensory memories are the ones that stick with us.

If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t take our health and relationships for granted. The ability to enjoy the grandeur of nature is a privilege that we should take advantage of and appreciate while we can. So get outside, have fun, and experience. Time is too fragile to be spent on the mundane. NH As this issue went to press, Gov. Sununu announced Stay at Home 2.0. Included in the new rules were guidelines for reopening state parks and campgrounds. Among other requirements, reservations will be limited to New Hampshire residents. Visit nhstateparks. org for updates on opening dates and more information related to COVID-19.

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BACKCOUNTRY KNOW-HOW

There are many backcountry areas to love and explore.

Here are a few highlights.

by meag and ben poirier

There are backcountry camping guidelines in place to protect you and the wilds of New Hampshire. You can’t just go pitch a tent and roast some hotdogs anywhere in the woods. In most cases, you have to be at least 200 feet from a trail, trailhead, road or body of water. In some parts of the Whites, you need to be a minimum of 1/4 mile from a trail or body of water, and many areas prohibit fires. Before you head out, make sure that you are prepared with water, food and knowledge, and a plan for where you are going.

Practice “leave no trace”

This one’s just like it sounds. Don’t disturb the wilderness.

That means packing out what you take in and disposing of your waste properly.

Come prepared

Search online for “10 essentials for camping and hiking” and commit the list to memory. Here are a few highlights: Even if you know the area by heart, still bring a real map. Best not to rely solely on technology. Know where you’re going and tell a friend.

Bring enough (and a bit extra) high-energy, nonperishable food.

Remember that if you’re hiking you’ll be burning extra calories.

Water is the heaviest thing you’ll carry. Drink often to stay hydrated; a good rule of thumb is one liter for every two hours of hiking. Research whether there are safe water sources in the area you plan to hike or visit. New Hampshire is teeming with streams and ponds, which makes it much easier to plan your trip. Boiling and chemical treatment are the safest ways to be sure there are no organisms left in fresh water, but filters have come a long way. Even if you don’t plan to rely on natural water sources, it’s important to bring a means to purify water safely.

Don’t forget, many prepared backpacking meals require boiling, so it’s a good idea to make sure there is a water source within walking distance of your site, just as long as you are the proper distance away according to the area you’re in.

Backcountry camping is allowed in all of the White Mountain National Forest as long as you follow a few important guidelines. It’s free to camp, but most parking areas require a parking permit that you can fill out at a kiosk onsite and hang on your car. There are spots within the National Forest that usually have more restrictions on camping, so be sure to check your area and confirm the rules before heading out. For a full guide on backcountry camping rules, including geographical specific information, go to fs.usda.gov. You should also visit fs.usda.gov/whitemountain for specific information related to COVID-19 and the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF). As of early May, the WMNF was beginning a phased approach to reopening trail heads and other sites.

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The Appalachian Trail in the southern Presidential Range

The Great Gulf Wilderness

Cradled in the northeastern side of the Presidential Range is the Great Gulf Wilderness. The Gulf and its surrounding forests are home to some of the best remote spots in the Whites. Many of the presidential mountain streams feed into the west branch of the Peabody River, which flows toward the quaint town of Gorham (a great place to snag supplies).

Pemigewassett Wilderness

Home to the infamous Pemigewassett Loop trail, a 29.9-mile ridge traverse that will buckle the knees of even the most experienced hikers, the Pemigewassett Wilderness, aka the Pemi, is a must-see. It’s made up of three different mountain ranges that form a ring around the wilderness.

At the epicenter is Owl’s Head Mountain, one of the most remote hikes in the Whites. The Loop can be busy but boasts a perpetual stunning view (weather permitting) almost the entire hike, including the iconic Bond Cliff (no yoga poses, please, Instagrammers). Thru-hikers don’t typically use the heart of the Pemi because of how out of the way it is, and day hikers steer clear because it’s not a “there and back again” type of story.

Sandwich Range Wilderness

There’s something old world, ghostly even, about the Sandwich Range Wilderness. The way the morning mist snakes through the old hardwoods at the base of the peaks feels like something out of Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Presidential Range — Dry River Wilderness

Home to Crawford Path and established in 1819, it’s the oldest hiking path in the United States, and it shows. Generations of foot traffic have carved deep grooves in the landscape on some parts of the trail that wind through the southern Presidentials. Originally used as a bridal path for horses, this is a moderate hike for all experience levels but the views are spectacular. I highly recommend sunscreen on long ridge hikes like these.

Wild River Wilderness

The forests east of the Carter-Moriah range were a major hub for logging in the late 1800s. In a time when little regard for sustainability was exercised, much of the land was wiped of anything that could be harvested. After a major fire set by careless campers decimated what was left of the landscape in 1903, the Forest Service stepped in and purchased the land from the logging industry. What can be seen today is a wonderful example of a forest in the making.

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LOCAL DISH

Sweet Greens of Spring Salad Bowl by Liz Barbour of The Creative Feast

Salads don’t have to be boring. Take advantage of the bounty of spring available at local farmstands with this refreshing and dazzling dish.

Makes 2 servings

8-10 thin asparagus spears 1 cup sugar snap peas 2-4 ounces baby lettuce, arugula or other spring greens 1 cup cooked whole grains, rice or noodles 1 avocado, halved, sliced thinly ½ cucumber, sliced thinly or spiralized 2 spring onions, chopped 4 small radishes, thinly sliced 4 hard-boiled eggs, cut in half lengthwise, or grated ½ cup mint vinaigrette (recipe below) Garnish: Greens and edible flowers from the garden such as violet leaves, Creeping Jenny, sorrel, chives, lovage, pansy, tulip petals, lilac blossoms or violets Steam the asparagus with 1 teaspoon salt for 3 minutes. Prepare an ice bath in a larger bowl. Add the sugar snap peas to the steaming asparagus and continue to cook for 2 minutes more. Immediately strain the vegetables and put into the ice bath to cool. Remove and dry the vegetables.

Divide all of the ingredients onto two shallow bowls or rimmed plates. Place each ingredient individually for an artful presentation. Your salad can be composed ahead of time, covered with plastic wrap, and refrigerated until you are ready to serve.

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Drizzle the salad with the mint vinaigrette. To make a creamy vinaigrette, add 1-2 tablespoons of mayonnaise, sour cream or plain yogurt to ½ cup of the vinaigrette and stir until combined.

Drizzle over salad.

Liz Barbour of Hollis has been teaching and making food look beautiful for more than 12 years. Her kitchen garden plays muse for many of her inspired dishes and delightful platings. In normal times, she teaches at various venues, from libraries to club meetings for nonprofits, corporations, plus she offers private lessons.

Classes range from knife skills to mixology to low-carb meals. Currently, she is teaching live on Facebook and offers online classes. thecreativefeast.com

Garnish with garden-gathered greens and edible flowers. Serve immediately.

Mint Vinaigrette

Makes 1 cup ¾ cup avocado or olive oil ½ fresh mint, roughly chopped ½ cup fresh, flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped 3 tablespoons rice vinegar 1 teaspoon sugar Kosher salt and pepper to taste *Optional to make a creamy dressing: 1/3 cup mayonnaise nhmagazine.com | June 2020

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HEALTH

Where’s the Beef?

Are plant-based burgers good for you?

BY KAREN A. JAMROG

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rom Tofurky to oat milk and meatless burgers, more plant-based foods are shaking things up at the supermarket and at some restaurants. Meat-mimicking burgers such as the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger, in particular, have garnered lots of attention and sales. But how do these newfangled options compare nutritionally to the conventional foods they aim to replace, and are they good for you?

Savvy consumers know that it’s important to look beyond marketers’ sly come-ons; just because the label shouts “all natural!” or “organic!” doesn’t mean the product is a healthful choice. Those who do take the

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time to read the fine print — which in the food world is the nutrition label and list of ingredients — will see that even though swapping vegetarian foods for meat can bring a litany of health benefits, choosing a plant-based meat alternative over meat “is not always a black-or-white decision,” says Eileen Behan, RDN, a dietitian at Core Physicians in Exeter.

It’s good that food manufacturers are steering consumers toward plant-based eating. Major health organizations promote a diet that is heavy on the veggies, and products such as Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger can provide meat lovers with a tasty

and approachable entrée to more healthful eating, serving as “transitional foods,” health experts say, for those who want to eat less red meat but struggle to go plant-only. Plus, mounting evidence shows that compared to beef, Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger are better for our beleaguered environment, as they require significantly less water and land to produce, and they generate less greenhouse gas emissions.

The problem is that, to deliver a highly palatable product that replicates the taste, texture and mouthfeel of meat without including meat in their ingredients, manufacturers heavily process ingredients, and add saturated fat and a lot of sodium.

The nutritional results are not ideal. A serving of Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger, compared to the same amount of 85% lean ground beef, is significantly higher in sodium, and equal in calories, fat and saturated fat, says Heather Wolfe, MPH, RDN, LD, a health and wellness coach at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. The saturated fat in some meat mimickers comes from tropical oils such as coconut oil and palm oil, which are not good for heart health. Plant-based alternatives do not have cholesterol, though, “because plants don’t have livers,” Wolfe says, “and they offer a little bit of fiber, which you do not get in a [meat] burger.”

Clearly, although many consumers perceive commercial meat alternatives as more healthful than meat, that is not always the case. Data about the direct effects that highly processed foods have on human health is still emerging, Wolfe says, but at a minimum research has shown that in general, nutrient loss occurs when a food is highly processed.

“These newer meat alternatives don’t remotely resemble anything in nature,” Wolfe says. “When we get further away from what our grandmothers would have recognized as real food, it raises questions about digestion and absorption and chronic disease down the line because we don’t have the data yet to know.” (Also, in case you’re wondering, Impossible Meat products contain genetically modified organisms or GMOs, while Beyond Meat products, according to the company’s website, do not. The jury is still out on the clear risks and benefits of GMOs, Wolfe says.)

Ideally, people who hanker for a burger will make their own using ingredients such as black beans and brown rice, or they will buy products such as frozen black bean burgers that might have high sodium but are

illustration by gloria diianni

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likely to be less processed than faux meat, and to have very little saturated fat.

Otherwise, since there currently seems to be no clear winner in the nutritional contest of meat vs. highly processed plant-based alternatives, choose based on what matters most to you, Wolfe says, whether it’s the environment, sodium intake, cholesterol or something else. As you weigh your options, remember to factor in sodium-heavy condiments and side dishes that you plan to enjoy with your burger. Marinade, barbecue sauce, cheese, pickles and fries can compound nutritional damage, so “think about the meal as a whole when you create it,” Wolfe advises.

“Meat mimickers or meatless alternatives ... can be good for people who might want to take steps toward a plant-based diet,” Wolfe says.

“But there’s no health halo” around these products. “Anything highly processed should just be eaten on occasion ... not three times a week.”

Indeed, “these products are not perfect, but they’re a step in the right direction,” Behan says. NH Visit the online version of this story to find recipes for black bean or tofu burgers.

Up next: Lab-grown meat File this under “Uh, waiter? There’s a chicken wing in my petri dish.”

Just as we’re trying to get our collective heads around the notion of milk made from oats, and sausages and burgers that don’t contain any meat, scientists are busily concocting lab-grown “cultured” meat by nourishing animal cells in a lab, coaxing them to grow into future steak, sausage, chicken nuggets and more. The same principles are also being applied to seafood.

Cultured meat raises hope on a number of fronts, including the potential to ease world hunger and spare countless animals that would otherwise be raised for industrial agriculture, and it bodes well for the environment, as it generates less greenhouse-gas emissions and uses less land and water than commercial meat production does.

Consumers hoping to try lab-grown meat will have to be patient because cultured meat products are not yet widely commercially available. Vegetarians should note that unlike meat imitators such as Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat products, lab-grown meat is not plant-based but is, in fact, meat.

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Finding Love

Navigating online dating websites and matchmaking services

BY LYNNE SNIERSON

H

ollywood star Sharon Stone’s Bumble account was blocked by the dating app last year because everyone assumed her profile had to be a fake. Though the 62-year-old blonde bombshell was let back into the hive after she proved she was the real deal, experienced online daters know there are plenty still out there who truly are too good to be true.

“Eighty percent of the men I see online misrepresent themselves in one way or another.

Some do it intentionally and others do it because they are blind to themselves. They have no idea who they are,” says Lesley Palmiter, 72, a voiceover artist who has been on Match and other sites over the past dozen years.

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“It is to the point where I’ve met many men who have put different profiles on different sites, and some go so far as to have different profiles even on the same site.

They say they’re separated or divorced when they’re married. They also lie about their age, their height and/or their weight. They use old profile pictures from 20 years ago so they’re unrecognizable if you do meet. I’m often told by men that women do the same.”

Then when the time comes for that first coffee date or glass of wine, it’s immediately obvious that the person who claimed to be 5'10 is only 5'3. From the get-go, he or she has been marked as disingenuous and untrustworthy. So why

do romance seekers do it?

“It’s simple. When there is nothing invested, there is nothing to lose. They treat it as easy come, easy go. Swipe right, swipe left.

They want something for nothing,” explains professional matchmaker Elaine Saunders, the owner of Dynamic Introductions in Nashua, whose verified and extensive client roster is mostly in the 50-plus range. “The person who walks through my door is willing to make a time investment, a financial investment, an emotional investment and a spiritual investment. There is accountability.

There is no accountability on the internet.

That makes all the difference. My clients come to me to avoid the internet.”

Online senior dating can be intimidating and overwhelming, especially with the myriad of sites. To help, SeniorLiving.org conducted a study of the 10 most popular age-specific sites and determined that Our Time, with 1.5 million members as of October 2019, is superior overall; Silver Singles offers the best pricing starting at just $25 per month; and Senior Match is tops for active seniors. For anyone looking to connect with a partner who practices a specific faith, Christian Mingle or JDate (for Jewish people) are good resources. Plenty of Fish is free, but because of that users have to sort through plenty of scammers and fake profiles, and the other drawback is that it’s not age-limited.

“I’ve tried Match, Plenty of Fish and Our Time. It’s a lot of work. It’s like a part-time job. You’ve got to work it. Timing is everything,” says Dr. Pierre Angier, 60, a primary care physician from Wolfeboro. “My goal with online dating, and I’ve told women this right up front, is to make a friend. If it turns out to be more than that, wonderful. That takes all the pressure off. A lot of people go into this thinking that on the first date they’re going to get a diamond or get lucky.

I’m all for going slow.”

The COVID-19 virus pandemic has forced people to slam on the brakes.

They’re still searching and flirting online and then meeting in person, it’s just done another way now.

“When this pandemic started, I asked myself how I can capitalize on this, so I changed my profile. Now it says ‘Seeking a friend for the end of the world. Looking for a partner to make the most of life, since it might be short,’” laughs Angier. “I have gone on some dates since COVID-19 started, but in keeping with social distancing, I

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went with a lady for a walk on Rye Beach before they closed it. I took a bike ride with another lady and had another date to go for a neighborhood walk at the appropriate distance. It’s very different, but in a way it’s good because you avoid that awkward end-of-date question as to whether you give a kiss or shake hands. Now we don’t even do that,” says Angier. “In all of this, you have to go very slowly, and you can get to know someone better before you dive headlong into a relationship. It’s almost like an oldtime, old-fashioned courtship. That’s not all bad but it does present some challenges.”

Despite the new hurdles, the old do’s and don’ts for creating an enticing online profile still apply.

“Use current and sincere pictures that convey who you think you are. Keep it light.

Keep it aspirational. Keep it on the positive.

Keep it open,” says Palmiter. “In their profiles, too many men say about the woman they seek, ‘She has to be this. She must do that. She will do that. She should act this way.’ That is a total turnoff. State what you’re looking for in a partnership and say what it is you can offer in return,” she says.

“I’m an optimist.

You’re never too old to find happiness.

You’re never too old to fall in love.”

- Lesley Palmiter

When it comes to dating pointers, Saunders can help, particularly for the recently widowed or divorced, people who have been out of the scene and are out of practice.

“Coaching my clients on how to date is part of the services I offer,” says Saunders.

“A lot of people are confused about what to do, about what they’re doing right or what they’re doing wrong or if they should fish or cut bait with someone,” she says, adding that she only accepts clients who are stable, sincere, and relationship-seeking, whether that entails marriage or companionship.

There is rarely a standard charge for a matchmaking service as it is a private contract between individuals, but on average, the cost can range from $250 for the basics to in excess of $5,000 for VIP services. For those who have found love and marriage this way, it’s a small price to pay.

So what keeps Palmiter on the online sites with monthly charges, searching there for The One? “I’m an optimist,” she says. “You’re never too old to find happiness. You’re never too old to fall in love.” NH

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My New Normal

Apparently, misery really does love company

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food exists in his beady eyes.)

My husband was exposed to the virus at work early on, so we stuck out our 14 days of quarantine next door to my parents. My dad was a champion of not interacting. It’s one of his superpowers. Give him a fox terrier, single malt, and online videos of people riding Trains of the World, and he’d be set in the bunker until the new robot overlords dug him out. My mom tried. Occasionally, we’d find a pie outside the door. The world comes to you. And slowly, a new normal.

Through isolation, I’m learning to be more social. I figured out video calls. We still play cards with Uncle Jim every Sunday.

(We prop up his cards facing the screen and he dictates which to play. Occasionally signals get crossed and things go very wrong, but hey — whist isn’t for the faint of heart.) Writing groups, ukulele practice, role-playing adventures, movie nights — through video, you’re always accessible from the comfort of home. A blessing and a curse.

All this high-tech communication means the extroverts are coming for you. There’s nowhere to hide.

Uncertainty is the new normal. A dozen eggs incubate on my kitchen table, handed to me by my mother, who had a hankering for chickens. We had chickens when I was a kid, but I never hatched them. Nowadays, the internet provides a multitude of opinions on the process. Anxiety dogs me. Will they die? Get infected and explode? Hatch basilisks instead of chickens?

The new normal has many of us revisiting, or discovering, a closeness to nature.

Just after WWII, 50 to 80% of US vegetables were grown in victory gardens. Now, seeds are popular again. Gardens are back.

Bees in my fridge await perfect weather.

They’re newcomers to this strange situation too. Most hibernate peacefully, but a few emerged during transport. (Have you ever received a package of awake bees? It’s like ... receiving a package of awake bees.)

They’re chilling in the crisper until all this uncertainty blows over. Some days I’d like to join them. But I’m here for the duration, haunting, video chatting, hatching, writing and awaiting the next turn, better or worse.

Pass the snacks. NH

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he phrase “Let’s Stay Home” adorns my wall, faux shiplap and felt flowers surrounding chalkboard lettering.

Was I channeling Nostradamus last year when I purchased that decoration on clearance?

As both a writer and borderline hermit, I tended to be in pseudo-lockdown even before COVID-19. “Why do I have to put your socks in the hamper and your Monster cans in the bin?” I would whine at my husband.

“Because I’m the one who goes into the world,” he’d say pointedly. True. He worked elsewhere. He braved the outside in search of pizza, gas and cat-soothing-hormone diffusers, while I held down the fort, washing socks, sorting recyclables and tearing irate cats off each other.

Now our new normal involves haunting this apartment 24/7. We’re pale, nonessential ghosts bumping the walls, taking our temperatures, unable to grasp the passage of time, reliving and reliving. Dreamlike. Did I check my email? Have I taken a bath this week? Wait — did I take a bath today? Have we fed the parrot? (The parrot says no, but he now knows about Cheez-Its and no other

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YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS HELP KEEP OUR COMMUNITY HEALTHY. On behalf of everyone at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health, thank you. It’s taken the full force of our communities to face the COVID-19 pandemic, and you have risen to the occasion.

We are ever so grateful for our heroic first responders and every single Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health employee. We are also humbled by the generosity and outpouring from our local businesses, community partners and individuals who have given nearly 2,000 monetary contributions, their time and talents and continue to send us donations and messages of support. We could not have done this alone. In-kind donations as of April 28, 2020: 18,615 Sewn masks

740,465 Pairs of gloves

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