Yankee Magazine March/April 2021

N E W E N G L A N D ’ S M AG A Z I N E

2021 HOME & GARDEN SPECIAL THE MAN WHO SAVES CURB APPEAL A MAGICAL GINGERBREAD OLD HOUSES INSPIRATION COTTAGE FOR SALE

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E N G L A N D ’ S

M A G A Z I N E

N E W E N G L A N D.C O M / / / M A RC H / A P R I L 2 0 2 1

AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO

MARTHA’S VINEYARD BRIAN SKERRY’S UNFORGETTABLE UNDERWATER WORLD

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March / April 2021

CONTENTS Photographed off the coast of Rhode Island, a blue shark cruises through the water with a passenger on its dorsal fin, a parasitic crustacean known as a copepod. Story, p. 96

80 /// A Beautiful Hiding Place An insider’s guide to finding refuge on Martha’s Vineyard.

By Jamie Kageleiry 90 /// The House Whisperer What kind of person does it take to preserve classic New England architecture? A historian, contractor, craftsman, and puzzle solver— all in one. By Nina MacLaughlin 96 /// The Ocean Evangelist In photographing the drama and beauty of sea life, Brian Skerry hopes his extraordinary images can help save the future.

ON THE COVER A classic beach cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, updated by owner and architect Patrick Ahearn. Photograph

by Greg Premru.

Yankee (ISSN 0044-0191). Bimonthly, Vol. 85 No. 2. Publication Office, Dublin, NH 03444-0520. Periodicals postage paid at Dublin, NH, and additional offices. Copyright 2021 by Yankee Publishing Incorporated; all rights reserved. Postmaster: Send address changes to Yankee, P.O. Box 422446, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2446.

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BRIAN SKERRY

110 /// From Away Maine had been her haven since childhood. Then a virus arrived, and with it a fear of outsiders.

By Rachel Slade

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Feel Good to Your Core

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departments

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10 DEAR YANKEE, CONTRIBUTORS & POETRY BY D.A.W.

home

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26 /// How to Love a House

INSIDE YANKEE

See how self-taught DIY renovator Carli Alves brought beauty and new life to an abandoned Victorian in Cranston, Rhode Island.

14 FIRST PERSON Watching the lives of birds can bring joy—and community—in hard times.

By Susan Hand Shetterly

37 /// Curb Appeal In sprucing up your home’s exterior, what could be better than stylish accents created right here in New England? By Marni Elyse Katz

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44 /// House for Sale

Even among the famous rainbow-colored gingerbread cottages of Oak Bluffs, this one is a standout—and it could be yours. By Joe Bills

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food

24 UP CLOSE How a gift from Greece came to be the Boston Marathon’s symbol of victory. By Joe Bills

62 /// In Season

The secret ingredient in these delectable doughnut-inspired cupcakes? The humble potato, that hero of early-spring cooking.

By Amy Traverso

66 /// Weekend Away Feel the drumbeat of history in the storied Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord.

By Cindy Anderson 72 /// The Best 5 Stroll through neighborhoods that double as showcases of New England architecture.

By Kim Knox Beckius 76 /// Green Thumb Go-Tos We round up favorite places in every state where gardeners can unearth new ideas and inspiration.

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20 WEEKENDS WITH YANKEE Q&A As the new season of our public television show gets under way, we catch up with one of its featured guests: pioneering chef Lydia Shire.

54 /// A Recipe for Zen On the heels of a chaotic year, renowned Boston chef Douglass Williams shares a few simple recipes for making pasta at home.

By Amy Traverso

travel

FIRST LIGHT In the Pioneer Valley, asparagus is both a celebrated crop and a family legacy.

By Suzanne Strempek Shea

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LIFE IN THE KINGDOM Encouraging others to enjoy the land you own can transcend merely being a good neighbor.

By Ben Hewitt

ADVERTISING RESOURCES

Weekends with Yankee ..........21 My New England .............. 42 New England Gardens and Backyards ......................52 Spring Gift Guide ............. 64 Best of New England ........ 73 Things to Do in New England .......................75 Retirement Living ............116 Marketplace.......................122

C A R L I A LV E S ( H O M E ) ; M I C H A E L P I A Z Z A (C H E F ) ; N I N A G A L L A N T ( TO W N )

More Contents

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EDITORIAL Editor Mel Allen Managing Editor Jenn Johnson Senior Features Editor Ian Aldrich Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso Home & Garden Editor Annie Graves Associate Editor Joe Bills Senior Digital Editor Aimee Tucker Associate Digital Editor Katherine Keenan Contributing Editors Kim Knox Beckius, Sara Anne Donnelly, Ben Hewitt, Rowan Jacobsen, Nina MacLaughlin, Julia Shipley ART Art Director Katharine Van Itallie Photo Editor Heather Marcus Contributing Photographers Adam DeTour, Megan Haley, Corey Hendrickson, Michael Piazza, Greta Rybus

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Connect with Yankee

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EXTERIOR ANGLES A curated look at New England featuring standout shots from our Instagram community.

Jackie Ignall (@wanderandlash) Providence, Rhode Island

This Place in Maine (@thisplaceinmaine) Port Clyde, Maine

Hilary Savage (@from_hilsview) Boston, Massachusetts

Nicole Smulski (@_donutsandhibiscus) Cape Porpoise, Maine

Matthew Dickey (@_madickey_) Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

Jack Bouchard (@gnarbouchard) Portsmouth, New Hampshire

Use our Instagram hashtag #mynewengland for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue!

F O L L O W U S O N S O C I A L M E D I A @YA N K E E M A G A Z I N E

W E B E X T R A ! Q & A W I T H C A R L I A LV E S Feeling inspired by the stunning transformation of a run-down Victorian home featured in this issue (p. 26)?

Explore the creative world of the woman behind it—Rhode Island’s Carli Alves—as she describes her life as a DIY, home decor, and interior design guru at newengland.com/madebycarli.

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OUR READERS RESPOND

Winning Lineup

CONTRIBUTORS BRIAN SKERRY He may travel the world for National Geographic as one of the top ocean photographers working today, but this Uxbridge, Massachusetts, native stays true to his roots [“The Ocean Evangelist,” p. 96]. “The ocean is especially important to New England,” he says, “and to share some of my work and experiences in the sea with fellow New Englanders is a special privilege.”

RACHEL SL ADE Having detailed the El Faro tragedy in the Maine Literary Award winner Into the Raging Sea, freelance journalist Slade focuses on a more personal crisis in “From Away” [p. 110]—namely, her brother’s battle with Covid. Looking back after his recovery, she says, “2020 was horrendous, but some good did come out of it: The man we thought would always remain single married his longtime girlfriend in September.”

C A R L I A LV E S Feeling a tad homesick after moving out of a place she’d spent three years renovating, Alves found comfort in revisiting the project for Yankee [“How to Love a House,” p. 26]. “Reminiscing about our time there and remembering how it all started and where it ended up helped bring me closure,” says Alves, author of the blog Made by Carli, who lives in South County, Rhode Island, with her husband and four children.

MICHAEL PIAZZA A Boston-based photographer whose work has appeared everywhere from Edible Boston to Men’s Health, Piazza sees an unusual connection to his “A Recipe for Zen” subject [p. 54]. “I’ve photographed chef Douglass Williams so often in the past six months it’s almost funny. But the first time, for Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs, was the last time I worked for three months, thanks to the stay-at-home order.”

JAMIE K AGELEIRY This New Hampshire native came to Yankee as an intern after getting her graduate degree at Emerson College, and she’s been writing for and editing magazines and newspapers ever since. She returns to our pages with an ode to Martha’s Vineyard [“A Beautiful Hiding Place,” p. 80], where she lives and works as associate publisher of the Martha’s Vineyard Times and editor of Edible Vineyard.

HOK YOUNG KIM Born and raised in South Korea, this graduate of Florida’s Ringling College of Art and Design is known for making dramatic use of light and shadow in her illustrations, which she’s published in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among others. For the Covid essay “From Away” [p. 110], she homes in on a sense of isolation by transforming Maine’s rocky shoreline into both a physical and an emotional boundary.

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What a powerful set of stories to end with in the January/February issue of Yankee. Once I read Ann Hood’s “Memory House,” I couldn’t put the issue down. From there I went to the pictures in “The Winter Sea” and “Conversations: Rebecca Carroll” and ended with Ben Hewitt’s “The Lottery.” I felt transformed by truly understanding the perspective of the people writing those stories. What great story­telling.

You certainly achieved the mission of listening as stated in Mel Allen’s “Inside Yankee.”

As a Coloradoan who loves reading about and visiting New England, I’ve come to appreciate a completely different part of the country. My next trip is scheduled for October 2021. I can hardly wait.

Polly Archuleta Centennial, Colorado

On the Same Page I just f inished reading “Memor y House” by Ann Hood [January/February]. It took me a while, as I had to keep wiping the tears away to clear my vision. The author wrote so beautifully, with words that brought back happy memories and images of my own multigenerational Italian family home. I identified completely and appreciate how our common experience and feelings could be captured so beautifully and sincerely in print.

It is true: We may leave where we grew up, but we never really leave it behind. It is always within us.

Diane Grieco Hull, Massachusetts

Digging a Bit Deeper Julia Shipley’s article about the stonecutters of Barre, Vermont, [“Written in Stone,” January/February] is a very fine piece—but there was something missing. Although the company that quarried and processed the granite for Union Station in Washington, D.C.,

STEVE DE NEEF (SKERRY); CR AIG L ACOURT (SL ADE); INDIAN HILL PRESS (“THE FUNNY MONTH”)

Dear Yankee

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Make your own adventure.

THE FUNNY MONTH Banana peels on which we’ve slipped?

Or being told our fly’s unzipped?

Or rubber spiders on our head?

We may spend April Fool’s in bed.

—D.A.W. was indeed headquartered in Barre, the granite—the whitest granite in the world—came from a quarry in Bethel, Vermont.

And further, the article mentions a large sculpture of a granite worker that stands on North Main Street in Barre. It was sculpted by Phil Paini, a Bethel master carver.

Like Barre, Bethel had a great inf lux of Italian stone workers in the late 180 0s and early 190 0s.

Our quarry is still providing granite all around the world. La Grande Arche de la Défense in Paris is being repaired with Bethel White. A new airport in Abu Dhabi is being built of Bethel White.

And I understand that the Mormon Church has said that if any more Mormon churches are built, they will be of Bethel White.

Janet Hayward Burnham Bethel, Vermont

Create lasting memories in Maine.

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Inside Yankee |

MEL ALLEN

The Many Meanings of Home page links us to house, land, place. From a tale of modern DIY creativity remaking an abandoned Rhode Island Victorian [“How to Love a House,” p. 26] to the saga of a historic house uprooted from Connecticut and reborn in Savannah, Georgia [“The House Whisperer,” p. 90], these stories reveal how homes can change us even as we change them.

A home can also speak to deeper feelings.

It can mean identity, and where we know we need to be. Jamie Kageleiry’s “A Beautiful Hiding Place” [p. 80] is in many ways a love song to her island home. She wants others to know the secret places on Martha’s Vineyard, whose beauty and solitude offer refuge to today’s visitors as they have for many others over the decades. It is not so much a story about travel as it is a story of finding a sense of belonging.

Wherever you live, I hope these pages let you look at your own house, your own place, with new appreciation as we make our way ever so gingerly to the true spring that awaits— when the land turns green, and we open the windows here in the north, and watch in wonder as all the birds we have not seen in so long come back to nest, as we knew they would.

Mel Allen editor@yankeemagazine.com

To catch up on Mel Allen’s monthly “Letter from Dublin,” go to newengland.com/letterfromdublin.

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JARROD MCCABE

ince arriving in New England in 1970, I have called more than 20 different houses my home. That sort of rootlessness is no doubt why I am drawn to stories about people whose roots trace back through generations. When we moved into our current house in 2008, we researched the names of the men and women who had lived there since it was built in 1831. I knew they looked at the same brick walls, the same river; they built fires and made meals here. They saw horses and buggies where I see trucks and too many cars, but most likely we all walked many times in the cemetery just down the road, a place that is nearly as old as the town itself.

In New England, our house is one of the newbies. In many towns you see houses from one or even two centuries earlier. There are many ways in which this region is different from any other, but the home connection from past to present is near the top of the list. In some ways I think the core of Yankee has always been writing about the many meanings of home. And over the past year, our homes have also morphed into our offices, schools, fitness centers, restaurants, cinemas, churches— sometimes all in one day. We’ve had no choice but to burrow in.

Which brings us to this issue.

From start to finish, nearly every

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S U S A N H A N D S H E T T E R LY

Becoming a Flock Watching the lives of birds can bring joy—and community—in a time when we need it most.

t is late March 2020, and in Down East Maine, the nights are cold. The frog ponds freeze over with a thin glaze. The days, however, are longer and warmer, and the ponds melt back. Within these days and nights, the first birds from farther south return.

A blast of robin song. A whispered warm-up from a purple finch. A song sparrow, from deep in the forsythia, strikes up a bar and lets it fade. Buffleheads, buoyant little ducks, are staging together out in the bay, getting ready to head inland, and the birds that have spent the winter alongside us—the nuthatches, juncos, and chickadees—tune up their noisy extravaganzas.

But this particular spring also initiates a different kind of season. We wake up to reports of illness and death. We 14 |

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go about making coffee. We tidy up. All together and all apart, we take in the incomprehensible news of our own species, and begin our solitary hours.

My house sits at the end of a long driveway, in the woods with a field in front, on a road where neighbors, for years, have gathered together for picnics, a Saint Patrick’s Day party, or an especially good night to see the stars. Two weeks ago, we initiated the Social Distancing Bird Club. We’re a baker’s dozen, and we report what we see by email, a back-and-forth that has become a lively celebration of not only what it is to be neighbors in this scouring time, but a celebration of wild birds.

It doesn’t matter how much any one of us knows or doesn’t know about bird identification, because over the Internet we puzzle out together the songs, sightings, and behaviors we encounter on our walks alone or what we see from the windows of our homes. One of us heard a ruffed grouse drumming in the woods yesterday. A few have seen bluebirds. No warblers yet. No vireos. No hermit thrushes or tree swallows. No hummingbirds or common terns.

Spring is still to come.

The wild birds of Canada and the United States are having their own pandemic. Theirs has gone on longer than ours. Individuals lost to pesticide poisoning, habitat destruction, and climate change in the past 50 years number close to three billion. That number stuns. When I was first learning about wild birds, I had to practice patience, and focusing my attention, and let wild species take their time doing what they do. That’s how one becomes a birder.

And a witness. Becoming a witness changes how you feel about what you see and hear. It happens when a detail from a bird’s life lives on in your imagination. You choose to carry it against despair and for the spark of joy it offers.

In our neighborhood in these damp, changeable days of late March turning into April, we’re clear about some things. One is simply that we’re all in this together, the birds and ourselves. We don’t have to figure out what use a robin or a grouse is to our small community. They owe us nothing. We, on the other hand, owe them quite a bit. Perhaps, when we resume our lives, we won’t forget this cloistered time when we stood at our windows more than we used to and saw life go on despite crushing losses, despite fear: We see mating chases through the branches of the softwoods.

We observe a bit of nest-building as a mourning dove and a dark-eyed junco search for materials; the female dove for light, thin sticks, the female junco for pliant last year’s grasses. We watch the blue jays stream through in raucous bands, thuggish and beautiful, and the Cooper’s hawk shoot across the yard, which makes everyone stop, go still.

This morning a black-capped chickadee pair is checking out the birdhouse by the upper frog pond. I’ll add them to the email thread of the day very soon. Right now, I just want to watch.

K I M B E R LY G LY D E R

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MEGAN HALEY

LIGHT

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Spear of the Realm In the Pioneer Valley, asparagus is both a celebrated crop and a family legacy.

BY SUZ ANNE STREMPEK SHE A

T

he rough wooden farmhouse table in the black-and-white photograph holds a pyramid of asparagus. It also holds a softly smiling toddler just a little bit taller than the bunch of stalks in his hands.

That’s Dan Smiarowski, who today at age 56 uses the photo to answer the frequent question of how long has he been growing asparagus. “I just post this picture, saying, ‘This long.’”

The photo is a bit fuzzy but the picture is clear: Asparagus is a life’s work.

And in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, often called the asparagus capital of the world, it also can be a legacy. Dan’s surname is locally synonymous with the first and most revered of spring sprouts, as the extended Smiarowski family runs four separate

MEGAN HALEY

above :

A young Dan Smiarowski gets a handle on the family business in this c. 1967 photo. opposite , clockwise from bottom left : Asparagus emerging into the spring sunlight; Dan and his brother, Tom, in the fields; Dan getting bunches ready to go; fresh-picked asparagus outside Dan and Penny Smiarowski’s home in Sunderland, Massachusetts.

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farms and a large seasonal store in an area that since the 1930s has sprouted both Asparagus officinalis and asparagus family dynasties.

Hadley, Hatfield, and Whately are among the towns making the most of the perfect-asparagus combination of temperate spring weather and the ultra-rich ancient bed of glacial Lake Hitchcock, which once stretched 215 miles from St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to Rocky Hill, Connecticut. Its slow recession to what is now the Connecticut River created what Dan calls “some of the best soil not only in the country, but in the world”—said as all fact, no boast.

The distinctively sweet and grassytasting asparagus grown here manages to be both meaty and melt-in-themouth. Often called Hadley Grass— for both one of the wel l-k now n growing towns and the plant’s folk name of sparrow grass—it’s coveted by locals and far-f lung diners alike, having been served at the annual spring feast of Queen Elizabeth II.

The scourge of Fusarium, a soilborne fungus, obliterated the valley’s crop in the ’70s, throwing farmers’ focus onto corn, potatoes, and onions.

But disease-resistant varieties of asparagus, including the currently prolific Jersey Supreme and the popular Millennium, have meant the crop’s welcome return here, including at Dan and Penny Smiarowski’s D.A. Smiarowski Farms in Sunderland and Montague.

The couple spend this spring morning as they have almost every other one in their 27-year marriage, bunching and trimming freshly picked asparagus at folding tables in the double garage of their neat tan Cape in Sunderland. Crates of 24 bunches each are trucked daily to local and regional vendors, the farthest 100 miles away in the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. Two or three customers alone take up to two weekly orders of between 10 and 12 crates throughout the harvest season of early May to late June—think of it as asparagus farmers’ version of accountants’ tax season. | 17

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LIGHT

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OF THE REALM

For these months, the garage is command central amid the few square miles of Dan’s asparagus-entwined life.

The main fields are a three-mile truck ride north into Montague, past a sign for Smiarowski Road and past the former homestead of Dan’s aunt and uncle, Stanley and Betty Smiarowski, to the field across from the farmhouse where young Dan was photographed long ago. All around him now, 125 acres of brown soil are punctuated by spears of vibrant-green Jersey Supreme asparagus, poking skyward like surprises.

A tractor rol ls past land f irst planted by Dan’s Polish-immigrant grandfather, Alexander, then by Dan’s dad, the late Eddie Smiarowski, who ran a dairy and grew pickling cukes, sweet corn, and, of course, asparagus. Along this same stretch of road, Eddie’s late brother, Stanley, also grew the crop.

“I had my father, and I had my Uncle Stanley,” Dan says as he stands on land his uncle knew inch by inch.

“He was my second father.”

The fields along this road are his favorite. His late mother, Monica, worked here alongside her son, who would rise at 4:45 to pick before school.

High school and college kids have always picked asparagus throughout the valley. Dan planted additional fields 20 years ago, then needed daytime hands for the job of scanning the rows and bending to cut spears at ground level with a simple knife.

Seven to 12 migrant workers, many from Guatemala, now do his picking.

Garbed in sweatshirts, long pants, and gloves on a warm May afternoon, they chat with Dan at the edge of the field during one of several trips he makes to check on their safety and to collect the latest harvest awaiting in black plastic totes dotting the landscape.

Friendships have grown over the years, texts keeping the family and the seasonal employees in touch. A woman who’d picked for the family for 10 years brought her first baby to the farm last summer to meet Dan and 18 |

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Asparagus farmers here have “some of the best soil not only in the country, but in the world”—said as all fact, no boast.

Penny and their own children. Son Alex, a golf pro, and daughter Alina, a first-year nursing student, both join Dan’s brother, Tom, in pitching in.

“It’s a family farm—everybody has to help,” says Penny.

Like many farmers, she and Dan hold other jobs. Penny is an administrative assistant at Frontier Regional and Union 38 School Districts, and Dan works as district director for the USDA’s Massachusetts Farm Service Agency, which helps farmers seeking financial assistance. For 35 years, he’s gained insight into Massachusetts agriculture, which counts small new enterprises among its 7,755 farms. “It’s nice to see that younger farmer coming in,” Dan says.

With the pickers’ totes stacked in the back of his truck, Dan heads home, the wide Connecticut River sparkly through the trees. The Cape comes into view, just after a recently planted acre that’ll first be harvested this spring. Asparagus is a waiting game. Plant a field one year, pick only for a week the following year, for a bit longer the year after that, and for the season only in the third year. “But you’re not going to have true yield for five years,” says Dan, who in the meantime battles any farmer’s worries.

“You start thinking, is there going to be any wind, any rain? But I just go to bed. What can you do? You just hope.”

Back in the shade of the garage, where 33,60 0 pounds of asparagus were trimmed and bunched last year, Dan and Penny stand in shorts and T-shirts, working away. Nearby, an iron asparag us buncher from the 1800s rests next to a pyramid of bunches similar to the one in that childhood photo of Dan. “It’s Groundhog Day: doing the same thing day after day,” Dan says.

He might sink into thoughts of the annual end-of-harvest pizza party for the crew, of the treat of baconwrapped asparagus, of harvesting butternut squash and sugar pumpkins to round out the year. But also of next year. Last July, Dan ordered 15,000 asparagus crowns, and this spring planted them on an acre and a half next to the garage.

That’s farming. That’s legacy. That’s the hope. That’s the life, says Dan: “I’m always thinking of next year.” ➜ ONLINE EXTRA: If you would like to see Dan Smiarowski’s family recipe for sautéed asparagus (“preferably from D.A. Smiarowski Farms,” he jokes), go to newengland.com/asparagus.

MEGAN HALEY

First

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First

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W I T H YA N K E E Q & A

Lydia Shire

L

ydia Shire was a young mother of three, cooking her way through Julia Child’s books and nurturing French Chef dreams, when an unexpected divorce prompted her to actually find a job in the kitchen.

Six years later, she was running Maison Robert, the onetime top French kitchen in Boston, where Child discovered her and made her a protégé.

As Shire rose to national acclaim, running such legendary restaurants as Biba and Locke-Ober, she both redefined how Americans saw women in the kitchen and paved a path for the next generation of top chefs. Her 20 |

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relationship with Child continued until the end of her mentor’s life, a subject we explore in episode 1 of the brand-new season of Weekends with Yankee, which premieres this April. —Amy Traverso Q. When you began your career as a chef, it was not common to see a woman running a fine dining restaurant. How did you get your start?

I wanted to be a French chef, and the best French restaurant in Boston was Maison Robert. So I made a sevenlayer cake [to bring to a job interview there]. It was 1971, a humid, hot day

in July, and there weren’t a lot of airconditioned cabs then, but I found one. And my persistence paid off.

I started off as a salad girl, which I hated—I wanted to actually cook.

So I hawked my diamond ring, got $1,000 for it, and went to London to study at Le Cordon Bleu. When I came back to Maison Robert, I started on the line and worked my way up to be chef of the main dining room, which was really unheard of.

Q. Tell us a bit about how you got to know Julia Child. What was your relationship with her like?

MICHAEL PIAZZA

Catching up with the pioneering Boston chef and featured Weekends with Yankee guest.

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I think she loved the fact that Lucien Robert [the owner of Maison Robert] was paying this Irish girl from Brookline to be the chef there, that I had risen up through the ranks and paid my dues. Julia started introducing me to these young women who wanted to break into the restaurant business.

That was Julia’s beauty: It wasn’t about her. She was always trying to get people together to further the world of gastronomy.

Then as time went on, I went over to visit her in her home in Provence. She always had me making something and I was always nervous, but she was always appreciative. And then we became even friendlier. She would say things like, “Let’s go to Chinatown. We haven’t been in a long time.” Then one day she said, “Lydia, how would you like to go to London and eat oysters and drink

W I T H YA N K E E Q & A Sancerre at Harrods?” What do you say to that? Of course you say yes.

I also was very proud of the fact that on her last night in Boston, before she moved to Santa Barbara, she came to Locke-Ober. That was her last meal in Boston. She always had duck—she never had anything else in my restaurants.

Q. Your current restaurant, Scampo, has managed to hang in there during the pandemic.

What do you think the dining scene will look like in a postCovid world?

I know that people will always need to celebrate. They’ll always need to have someone else cook for them. They’ll always need to go to restaurants because they transport you to this beautiful world. And restaurants are going to be back better than ever. When people

are vaccinated, there will be scars left; those scars will remain for a long time. But you have to have restaurants. You’re not a society without restaurants.

Q. Where do you want to travel when you’re able to get out of Boston again?

Besides New York, I love Maine. To me, it’s a casual place, although there are fancy restaurants there too. But to go to Boothbay Harbor and sit on the dock at the wharf and eat lobster— that’s heaven on earth.

Season 5 of Weekends with Yankee, which includes a look at the legacy of New England culinary legend Julia Child, premieres this April on public television stations nationwide. To find your local listings—plus recipes and highlights from past seasons—go to weekendswithyankee.com.

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First

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CLOSE

Winners’ Circle

W

reaths have adorned champions almost since the dawn of civilization. In ancient Greece, the god Apollo was depicted wearing one; in the mortal realm, they were given to the victors of battles and contests. And when the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896, the winners were presented with wreaths, just as their forebears had been.

Among those participating in the first Olympics were several members of the Boston Athletic Association, who came home inspired. In 1897 they organized the first-ever Boston Marathon, with 15 runners competing and the winner receiving an olive wreath.

Early on, the marathon’s wreaths were made locally, and, for reasons unknown, thrust upon the winners while crossing the f inish line. The results were often comical: A famous 1955 photo shows Mayor John Hynes, 24 |

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wreath raised high, trotting futilely after winner Hideo Hamamura.

Today, the wreaths are presented at a post-race ceremony. They also come directly from Greece, a tradition that traces its roots back to 1946. That year’s Boston Marathon saw a battle between Massachusetts legend Johnny Kelley and former Greek Olympian Stylianos Kyriakides, who was running to raise funds for his homeland in the wake of wartime devastation.

Kyriakides, who at 36 was past his prime, surged late to become both the first Greek runner to wear a Boston winner’s wreath and the first charity runner in the race’s history.

To honor Kyriakides’s historic victory as well as the ties between Athens and Boston, the city often called “The Athens of America,” Greece in 1984 began donating the winners’ wreaths for the race. They’re made from olive

branches grown in Marathon, where the Greek wa rrior Pheidippides launched his famed long-distance run to Athens following the Battle of Marathon. In 2010, to mark the 2,500th anniversary of that battle, the wreaths came dipped in 24 karat gold; they were gilded again in 2014, in tribute to the victims and heroes of the Boston Marathon. They have been gold ever since.

Last year the marathon, which is traditionally run on Patriots’ Day, was held in spirit only—a first in its 125-year history. It went virtual, with registered participants running individual 26.2-mile routes later that year, wherever they were in the world. With no “winners,” the Greek wreaths were shared with community groups for fund-raising and educational purposes.

But the 2021 race is planned for this fall, and when it comes, new wreaths will be waiting. —Joe Bills

ADAM DETOUR

How a gift from Greece came to be the Boston Marathon’s symbol of victory.

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Home

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P R I VAT E TO U R

A HOUSE

A self-taught DIY renovator brings beauty and new life to an abandoned Victorian.

STO RY A N D P H OTO G R A P H S BY C A R L I A LV E S

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OPPOSITE :

Over the course of three years, Carli Alves turned this formerly rundown c. 1878 residence into a stylish family home.

THIS PAGE : Banishing layers of old wallpaper in favor of a panel molding wall treatment and fresh paint allowed the staircase’s warm wooden banister and detailed stair brackets to shine through.

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the house. The old Victorian in Cranston, Rhode Island, sat up high above a stacked stone retaining wall, stately, yet sad. My eyes locked in on the front door. I’ve always judged a home by its front door, and while this one had potential, much like the rest of the house, it needed love. The house had been built in 1878 but had stood empty for more than six years.

“Just wait,” my husband, Justin, said as he led me around to the back door, which was left unlocked for us. “You’re going to love this!” He could see the hesitation in my face.

We approached the old wooden door, which was green and chipped, the glass broken and boarded over—it was like something out of a scary movie. He pushed the door and it crept open. The smell of mold and dogs invaded my nostrils, and I quickly covered my face and gasped. Needless to say, I wasn’t impressed.

We walked through the door and were greeted by warped wood f loors and a dark, claustrophobic hallway clad in a sort of white fiberboard with mint green trim.

“Hmmm,” I said, ready to turn around and walk out.

But Justin grabbed my hand and led me through an arched doorway, which opened to a large dining room with light spilling in from the west-facing windows. Never had I imagined that such a space—with its 10-foot ceilings, original plaster medallions and moldings, built-in china cabinet, and original hardwood floors—would await me. When I walked into that room, my heart started beating fast, which happens when I get excited. I could see it, beyond the falling ceiling and grime-covered f loors, beyond the peeling wallpaper and dated fixtures. I could see what that space could and should be.

Justin gestured for me to follow him through another arched doorway, this one leading to the front of the house.

There I found a living room with a large bowed window and a foyer with peeling green toile wallpaper and a beautiful curved staircase.

We’d had no intention of moving. We were, in fact, casually on the hunt for a flip home. This house was so different from anything I had ever thought I wanted in a home, yet I became so smitten with it. I could see our family there and how we would enjoy it in the future: draping garland down the stair railing for the holidays, our teenagers walking down the grand staircase on prom night, and my husband and I enjoying coffee on the side porch while looking out to the bay and feeling the breeze. So. Much. Potential.

Richard Moe, the former president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, once said, “Preservation is simply having the good sense to hold on to things that are well designed, that link us with our past in a meaningful way, and that have plenty of good use left in them.” After the home became ours, I spent my days inspecting every detail and imperfection—the nicks on the stair railing, the stains on 28 |

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Beyond the peeling wallpaper and dated fixtures, I could see what that space could and should be.

clockwise from left :

The original ho-hum dining room ( inset) got a new personality with a richly colored board-and-batten treatment and an updated chandelier; the back-hall “mudroom”; another view of the dining room, reflecting Carli’s modern-leaning aesthetic; in the kitchen, a graceful mix of glass, tile, metal, and natural wood; dated pink tiling in the master bathroom was swapped out for white shiplap.

the wooden floor, the design of the ceiling medallions—and thought of all the lives that began and ended here. I was told that the home once belonged to the Lockwood family for several generations, and I wondered how their days were spent, what they wore, and how they decorated their spaces.

I took these thoughts and knew that I wanted to preserve all the beauty that remained in the home as best I could.

When people say the word “renovation,” I sometimes cringe. For me it brings to mind thoughtless gut jobs and cheap and trendy materials. My ideas for this home began with the front door; it set the stage for everything I wanted the house to be. “It’s a mess, it has to go,” my husband said.

“Let’s just install a new door.” But while this front door might not have been original to the house, it’s the only one I could imagine there. I wanted it to look as though it MARCH | APRIL 2021

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The living room, before ( inset) and after. Once the plaster walls were skimmed, Carli chose a neutral color palette to keep the southfacing living room feeling cozy. The bow window provides beautiful sunrise views over the bay, while the electric fireplace—which Carli built into a formerly bare wall— adds a cheery glow in winter.

had always been there and always been cared for, and had offered warmth and welcome to all who walked through. I was able to achieve this by sanding away years of weathered finish, filling holes and restaining the wood, and reinforcing the door to ensure its integrity. I installed some antiqueinspired hardware, a coordinating letter slot, and wall lanterns to f lank the door. I also had a sign maker install frosted-glass house numbers to add even more charm.

Over the three years we lived there, I took my time. I learned the home and allowed my design to be inf luenced by it: from the way the sun rose over the bay and filled the bedrooms in the morning, to how it set with warm golden light in the dining room in the evening. I learned how to make the most of the little nooks and the curved and sloped walls of the second level, and how to appreciate the slight hiss of the radiators and the creaks of the f loorboards.

While this home underwent several transformations, I always focused on that front door.

A few months ago Justin said, “It’s time to move on,” with a glimmer of hope in his eye. My heart sank, but I knew he was right. This Victorian was my first major renovation, and it ignited a fire within me. It helped me realize that I’m not 30 |

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As comfy as the revamped bedrooms were ( above ), the kitchen was the true heart of the Alves family’s home. After starting from scratch ( inset), Carli found she didn’t have enough space for an island, so she designed and built a peninsula ( top left) with wraparound seating. below left : Carli with husband Justin, eldest son Jyren, sons Kyle and Cayden, and daughter Nia.

just good at creating a home, I’m passionate about it—and that it would not be my last. Having the opportunity to preserve this home and bring back so much of its former beauty, through the good times and the bad times, was a journey I will never regret. After three amazing years, we have moved on to a new project here in Cranston, another front door with many opportunities to let my imagination and passion roam free.

Our new home, a 1945 Colonial, which I affectionately call the “Hosta House,” is another fixer-upper in need of vision and love. A wild wisteria vine climbed up and over the portico that framed the front door, and hostas grew from the roof and gutters, which made it quite evident that it had been a while since the home was inhabited. Having been built after World War II, it lacked the extravagant features that I had loved in our previous home. Luckily, what the Hosta House lacks in character and charm it makes up for in outdoor living, as it sits on a large wooded lot. I am ready for this new journey and to share the process with our followers, as we uncover the Hosta House’s hidden potential.

To follow Carli Alves’s design and renovation projects, go to fwmadebycarli.com.

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ensemble of buildings that I’ve been able to reinvigorate that makes the island so special for me.

Q: How did it all begin?

A: Thirty years ago my wife

Q& A

and I bought a little home in Edgartown that had been in foreclosure, and early on I had a sort of epiphany.

I saw potential with the deterioration of the house and the neighborhood, which each had incredible history. I started doing a home-of-the-week sketch in the newspaper—a vignette of what could be.

A discussion of classic Those vignettes turned into American vernacular 26 projects that summer wouldn’t be complete alone, and the rest, as they without mention of AIA say, is history. Since then, Fellow Patrick Ahearn, I’ve had a strong hand in whose timeless designs the revitalization of the balance the romance of community, especially in traditional architecture with Edgartown Village. The the ideals of modernism.

Atlantic Boathouse building With a career spanning at the end of Commercial more than four decades, Street really became a catalyst Ahearn is well known for that breathed new life into the elevating the Edgartown (6.75 commercial X 9.5) district. There’s Village Historic District now a rich background for on Martha’s Vineyard into retail, more restaurants and an exquisite seaside village shops, and a much more enjoyed by both visitors and vibrant feel overall. year-round residents. The Q: What are some of Vineyard holds important our favorite places on meaning for Ahearn, who Martha’s Vineyard? today shares what makes the island so special to him.

A: On the Vineyard, my Q: Why is Martha’s Vineyard favorite places are social, so significant for you? natural, and communal.

Socially, my favorite place A: The cumulative work to be is Alchemy on Main that I’ve done on Martha’s Street. They always have a Vineyard represents my terrific crowd and fabulous proudest professional food. Within nature, my accomplishment. It’s not go-to spot is Aquinnah. one particular project, My beach shacks up there because I’ve done nearly 300 are a peaceful island oasis on the island—residences, reminiscent of a bygone commercial spaces, and time. Communally, civic spaces alike. It’s the Edgartown Village tops my

list. I’ve restored so much of the town, and being involved so deeply in the resurgence gives me a sense of pride whenever I am there.

Q: Tell us about your work as chairman of the Vineyard Trust.

A: I’m now in my fourth

year as chairman of the Vineyard Trust, which was established more than 40 years ago to acquire endangered historic landmarks on the island, restoring them and putting them back into public use.

I’ve worked pro bono on a number of the Trust’s buildings, like Union Chapel in Oak Bluffs and The Carnegie in Edgartown.

Once in total disrepair, the chapel is now used for religious activities and community gatherings and is really the heart of the Campground. The Carnegie today is open to the public as a heritage center that tells the story of the Trust and its 20-plus properties. For me, as both an architect and preservationist, it has been a joy to be involved with the Trust’s work.

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Home

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CURB APPEAL

C O L ME E W

Home When it comes to adding curb appeal, what could be more inviting than decorative touches created right here in New England?

B Y M A R N I E LY S E K AT Z

Door Knockers

The tactile sensation of metal striking wood is grounding, perhaps even empowering.

Your visitors will appreciate the solidity of Michael Healy’s door knockers, which are sand-cast in brass, bronze, nickel silver, and black cast iron in his foundry on the banks of the Blackstone River in Rhode Island. Designs reflect Healey’s Cape Cod upbringing as well as more fanciful inspirations, like his newest release, the peacock. Scroll through his robust Instagram feed for ideas, then share your selection in all its glory with the tag #adoremydoor. Around $60–$140; michaelhealy.com

MARCH | APRIL 2021

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CURB APPEAL

Outdoor Pillows

Exterior Shutters

Done right, shutters add polish. Done wrong, and the neighbors, well, shudder. Seaport Shutter Co. founder Peter Malone turned a passion project into a bespoke business after fashioning shutters for his family’s fixer-upper in Harwich Port, Massachusetts. Twenty-five years in, the Brewster-based company dispatches carpenters all over New England to measure for and install shutters with a just-right fit. Hand-milled, handpainted shutters come with or without appliqués or cut-outs, allowing you to add gravitas to a Federal row house or funk up a quirky beach bungalow. Contact for quote; seaportshutter.com

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Doormats

Don’t get your twine in a twist—let Mystic Knot Work do it for you! Matt Beaudoin’s team of artisans follow in the tradition of his grandfather, whose knot-tying skills landed him a nod from the Smithsonian. Located in Mystic, Connecticut, the workshop makes all sorts of nautical-inspired knotted mats out of manila rope dyed in on-trend colors or left natural to silver like cedar shingles. Either way, the mats can withstand severe weather and decades of boot-stomping abuse. $60–$225; mysticknotwork.com

JAMES GOODNOUGH PHOTOGR APHY (SHUT TER); HORNICK/ R I V L IN (S W ING); T HO M A S -SO EL L NER / IS TO C K (B AC KGRO UND)

Start with a neutral base, then add color. This triedand-true rule makes it easy to update the look of your porch and provides an excuse to indulge in an array of accents, particularly pillows. The Pawtucket, Rhode Island, company Nantucket Bound offers pillows made from Sunbrella fabric in zippy colors and showcasing embroidered coastal motifs. New England favorites abound, such as a crab crawling across regatta stripes or, the company’s newest design, a trio of sweet-faced seagulls. Around $30–$50; nantucketbound.com

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1/15/21 11:15 AM

Porch Swings

A year of working and learning from home has taught us a valuable lesson: We can’t afford to overlook square footage. Turn the front porch into a hangout space (or napping place) with a swing. The hammock-meets-daybed designs of Penobscot Bay Porch Swings in Brunswick, Maine, draw inspiration from the laid-back looks that have been mainstays of New England camps and cabins for more than a century. The mildew-resistant Sunbrella swings come with high backs, low backs, or no backs.

If shaky isn’t your thing, there’s an extrastable style that behaves more like a glider. $995–$1,400; penobscotbayporchswings.com

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Home

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CURB APPEAL

House Numbers

Prevent friends from passing by with an eye-catcher from Massachusetts’s own Chatham Sign Shop, whose house number signs are inspired by the quarterboards found on the sides of ships. Opt for an oval with carved stand-alone numbers highlighted in gold leaf or metallic silver finish, or up your numbers game with a three-dimensional embellishment of seaside faves. Hand-painted lovelies such as periwinkle hydrangeas (or any image your heart desires) can be depicted too. Around $300; chathamsignshop.com

Designers consider lighting to be the jewelry of a room, even if that room happens to be outdoors.

Hubbardton Forge fixtures are hardworking adornments that balance form and function—no small feat, considering the corrosive nature of the coast. The Hubbardton, Vermont, company boasts one of the nation’s oldest commercial forges along with a collaborative team of engineers and artisans who conceive and construct lights that, one could say, bring the indoors out. $810–$1,380 for styles shown here; hubbardtonforge.com

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Rockers

Adopted from our New York neighbor, the Adirondack chair has become as much of a New England staple as a bowl of clam chowder.

Seaside Casual in Coventry, Rhode Island, modernizes classic Adirondack forms with ergonomic tweaks and a color palette that includes sky blue and acid green. The furniture bests its wooden cousins by being constructed out of a maintenance-free material made from recycled plastic bottles and containers. Prefer a plush perch?

You can also order custom indoor/outdoor cushions.

See website for details on where to buy; seasidecasual.com

V I SKO H AT F I E L D ( P L A N T E R )

Outdoor Lighting

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/20/21 12:58 PM

Planters

Martha Stewart has the largest private collection of Guy Wolff Pottery around. Monticello and the New York Botanical Garden are also fans. Working in a rustic barn in a tiny town in Connecticut’s tony Litchfield County, Wolff alternates between red clay and white, taking cues from 18th- and 19th-century English and Italian pottery. Over the years, collaborations have resulted in a Wolff stamp on a variety of vessels, though of late, most Guy Wolff Pottery comes from the potter’s own hands or those of Erica Warnock, his wife.

Around $50–$100; guywolff.com

Screen Doors

The thud of a screen door is an unmistakable sound of summer. Get that and a hefty dose of curb appeal from Wooden Screen Door Co. in Waldoboro, Maine. The primed mahogany doors come complete with tempered glass panels for the offseason. There’s an architectural profile for just about every kind of dwelling, from curlicue silhouettes for gingerbread Victorians to Craftsman styles that would make Frank Lloyd Wright proud. Per usual, cutouts of fish, pine trees, and such are part of the package. Around $600; woodscreendoor.com

Door Wreaths

They’re not just for Christmas. Jessica Billings, aka The Accidental Farmgirl, helps you get your greenery on year-round with wreaths crafted from artificial fruit, flowers, and foliage that seriously resemble the real thing. Springtime styles overflow with lemons, magnolias, and cabbage roses and might also sport fairy-tale pairings of pink and cream peonies. The long-lasting creations from this Exeter, Rhode Island, designer are popular among influencers, providing endless Insta inspiration on doors and beyond. Around $100–$150; accidentalfarmgirlco.com

MARCH | APRIL 2021

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1/15/21 11:20 AM

MYNew MY NewEngland England

CHILTON FURNITURE CHILTON FURNITURE

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Chilton is proud the warmth, texture and and natural beauty of wood.

Chilton is proud its long connection to local the local community is committed of itsoflong connection to the community and and is committed to to producing as much its furniture as possible in Maine. believe producing as much of itsoffurniture as possible in Maine.

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Follow along @YANKEEMAGAZINE #MYNEWENGLAND

CIRCLE FURNITURE LOCATIONS IN ACTON & FRAMINGHAM, MA Circle Furniture is a small, family-owned home furnishings company with six retail locations across Massachusetts. Circle is dedicated to providing a wide selection of unique, quality furniture with a team of talented designers to help you every step of the way. Besides sourcing expertly crafted and beautiful furniture, they take pride in being an important part of the local community—both by working with local factories and by supporting local charities.

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MARCH | APRIL 2021

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“Love Your Home” Giveaway

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Giveaway runs 3/15–29/2021.

Winner will be chosen 4/5/2021.

Enter at NewEngland.com/LoveYourHome

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1/19/21 2:01 PM

Home

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HOUSE FOR SALE

In the Pink One of Martha’s Vineyard’s most iconic summer homes could be yours.

or Maureen McDonald, it was love at first sight.

The year was 1975, and she was a teenager from upstate New York visiting a high school friend when she first walked the grounds of the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association, aka the Campground. “I had no idea we were going to see these amazing cottages,” McDonald says.

“It was all new to me, and I couldn’t 44 |

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believe what I was seeing. The Pink House was always my favorite.”

The Pink House has long been among the most memorable sites (and sights) in this historic neighborhood of rainbow-colored visions. And according to some tellings, the Pink House actually started it all.

The roots of the Campground go back to the year 1835, when a Methodist congregation from Edgartown

C O U R T E S Y O F M A U R E E N M C D O N A L D A N D A N C H O R R E A LT Y

BY JOE BILLS

FROM TOP : The Pink House in all its eye-popping brilliance, which has made it a favorite subject for local postcards; the cottage as it looked shortly after it was built in 1870 (long before it took on the eccentric hue that would make it famous).

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/19/21 9:46 AM

E VERY OBJ ECT HAS A STORY

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1/14/21 4:11 PM

Home

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HOUSE FOR SALE

Coin

A wall of windows installed in 1960Â floods the living room with natural light, casting a glow over the recently refinished pine floor. left : A view of the cottage kitchen, with its updated appliances and, yes, pink flooring.

began organizing retreats on a patch of open land in Oak Bluffs. These events would last a week or two, with participants staying in tents. Over the years the retreats grew in popularity, swelling to 200 tents by the summer of 1855. Not long after, the tents began to be replaced with cobbledtog et her wo o den shelter s. T he improved accommodations encouraged attendees to extend their stays, and an organized summer community began to form.

The cottage that would become known as the Pink House was built in 1870, but nearly three-quarters of a century would go by before it got 46 |

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C O U R T E S Y O F M A U R E E N M C D O N A L D A N D A N C H O R R E A LT Y

above :

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1/19/21 9:50 AM

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HOUSE FOR SALE

top :

Gothic doors are a recurring design element in the Pink House. Here, they provide access to the front balcony from a color-splashed bedroom. above : Although the Pink House may be a star among the Campground’s 300-plus Victorian cottages, its neighbors also put on quite a show.

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its eponymous hue. That change was made by New York City artist Lillian Cotton, who bought the rather run-down home for $200 in the aftermath of the Depression. Cotton’s color choice was supposedly controversial enough that she refused to leave the property while it was being painted, lest anyone try to stop the transformation. Cotton named the home Cattleya, after her favorite pink orchid.

While at first the color scheme may have raised eyebrows, before long Cotton’s neighbors were following suit.

In a matter of years, the Campground had transformed into perhaps New England’s most kaleidoscopic neighborhood. As for the Pink House, many owners came and went, but each maintained Cotton’s original vision.

Ever since her first visit, Martha’s Vineyard had remained in McDonald’s life as a vacation destination.

C O U R T E S Y O F M A U R E E N M C D O N A L D A N D A N C H O R R E A LT Y ( I N T E R I O R ) ; A L I S O N S H A W ( C A M P G R O U N D )

Home

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/19/21 9:54 AM

“SANDY NECK LIGHT”

At the entrance of Barnstable Harbor Forrest Pirovano’s painting “Sandy Neck Light” shows a lighthouse on the eastern tip of Sandy Neck Sandy Neck Light was built in 1826 to accommodate the whaling and fishing industries coming into Barnstable.

The current tower was built in 1857 and strengthened in the 1880s. In 1931 the lighthouse was decommissioned and its lens was moved to a steel skeleton tower closer to the tip of Sandy Neck. In 1952 the property was sold into private hands. In 2007, the owner, with the assistance of the American Lighthouse Foundation, was able to fund and install a new lantern. The lighthouse was relit as a private aid to navigation and is used today. This beautiful limited-edition print of an original oil painting, is individually numbered and signed by the artist.

This exquisite print is bordered by a museum-quality white-on-white double mat, measuring 11x14 inches.

Framed in either a black or white 1½ inch deep wood frame, this limited-edition print measures 12¼ X 15¼ inches and is priced at only $149. Matted but unframed the price for this print is $109. Prices include shipping and packaging.

Forrest Pirovano is a Cape Cod artist. His paintings capture the picturesque landscape and seascapes of the Cape which have a universal appeal. His paintings often include the many antique wooden sailboats and picturesque lighthouses that are home to Cape Cod.

FORREST PIROVANO, artist P.O. Box 1011 • Mashpee, MA 02649 Visit our studio in Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod All major credit cards are welcome. Please send card name, card number, expiration date, code number & billing ZIP code.

Checks are also accepted.…Or you can call Forrest at 781-858-3691.…Or you can pay through our website www.forrestcapecodpaintings.com

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Home

HOUSE FOR SALE

Former owner Lillian Cotton’s painting of the living room (showing the original pink walls and floor) is included in the sale.

She went on to college, married, and moved to Texas. But every few years, Martha’s Vineyard would call to her.

In the fall of 2013, McDonald saw an online listing for the Pink House. “I was intrigued, but it didn’t seem like it made sense for us, since we live in Texas,” she recalls. “The next summer, we went on a family safari, and when we came back, I decided I was done with seeing the world and was only going to return to my favorite places from then on.

“I checked, and the Pink House was still for sale,” she continues. “We bought it sight unseen—our f irst walk-through was on the evening before our closing.” The Pink House has been her family’s summer home ever since.

Since purchasing the cottage, McDonald and her husband, Brant Weatherford, have restored the backyard, complete with brick patio and stone alley way. The exterior was sanded down to bare wood and repainted; the side porch was rebuilt.

The kitchen was redone with new appliances, and the entire interior got a fresh coat of paint.

“We didn’t realize that Lillian Cotton had painted the interior of the cottage pink as well, until we came across a painting on eBay that showed the interior of the cottage with pink walls and f loor,” McDonald notes. That painting, which had previously been bought at the estate 50 |

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C O U R T E S Y O F M A U R E E N M C D O N A L D A N D A N C H O R R E A LT Y

F R E E P O R T, P O R T L A N D A N D S C A R B O R O U G H | M A I N E C H I LT O N S . C O M

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NEWENGLAND.COM

1/19/21 9:55 AM

C O U R T E S Y O F M A U R E E N M C D O N A L D A N D A N C H O R R E A LT Y

ArtRobtSextnPromise0108

11/19/07

10:05 AM

Page 1

The Promise A Most Unusual Gift of Love

sale of Lillian Cotton’s sister, now has a place of prominence in the Pink House. And some of the pink f loor has returned too. “I couldn’t resist,” McDonald admits.

Among the architectural highlights of the t wo-bedroom, onebat h room cot tage a re a t r io of Gothic double doors and a stainedglass balcony door. There’s also a wall of windows that makes the Pink House much brighter inside than many of its neighbors; it was installed in 1960 by then-owner Jean Spencer, a portrait artist whose work demanded the extra sunlight.

Though they still love being on Martha’s Vineyard, McDonald and her husband and their t wo adult children—who now have families of their own—have literally outgrown the Pink House. So they are moving to a property with two cottages just eight doors up the street. the poem reads: The Pink House is being sold “Across the years I will walk with you— with original furniture, as well as in deep, green forests; on shores of sand: paintings by Cotton and Spencer. and when our time on earth is through, Also included are two heart-shaped signs that adorned the cottage for 40 POEM READS : in heaven, too,THE you will have my hand.” years and are ready for restoration.

The cottage has been photo“Across the years I will walk with you— Dear Reader, graphed by the likes of Wa lker The drawing you see above is called The Promise. It is completely composed of green forests; on ashores ofplaced sand: Evans and Alfred Eisenstaedt. It has dots ofin ink.deep, After writing the poem, I worked with quill pen and thousands been featured on postcards and even of these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of my youngest brother and and when our time on earth is through, on a stereoscopic card from 1870. his wife.

And McDonald and her family have Now, I have decided to offer The Promise to those who share and value its in heaven, too, you will have my hand.” come to understand that you don’t so sentiment. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the much own a property like the Pink detail of the drawing. As a wedding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a House as sign on to become part of Dear Reader, standard for your own home, I believe you will find it most appropriate.

The drawing you see above called Promise.”

It isfully-framed completely composed dots oftone ink. After its history.

Measuring 14" byis16", it is“The available either in a subtleofcopper the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to “ We hate to leave t he Pi n k writingwith hand-cut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at gift in honor of my youngest brother and his wife.

House. We opted not to sell it last create this $105*. Please add $18.95 for insured shipping. Returns/exchanges within 30 days.

Now, I have decided to offer “The Promise” to those who share and value its sentiment. Each year because we wanted one more My bestand wishes are by with you. litho is numbered signed hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As a wedsummer here,” McDonald says. “But ding, anniversary or Valentine’s gift or simply as a standard for your own home, I believe you will Sextonart Inc. • P.O. Box 581 • Rutherford, CA 94573 now it’s the right thing to do. We find it most appropriate.

989-1630 need more space, and it is time for Measuring 14" by 16", it is available(415) either fully framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut All major credit cards are welcomed. Please call between 10 a.m.-5 p.m. someone new to fall in love with this mats of pewter and rust at $110, or in the mats alone at $95. Please add $14.50 for insured shipping Standardguaranteed.

Time, 7 days a week. and packaging. Your satisfactionPacific is completely absolute jewel of a cottage.”

A Most Unusual Gift of Love

The Pink House is listed at $635,000.

For more information, contact Lisa Lucier of Anchor Realty at 508-6967777 or lisa@anchorrealtymv.com.

MARCH | APRIL 2021

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are also accepted. Please include a phone number.

My best wishes areChecks with you. *California residents please 8.0% tax The Art of Robert Sexton, 491 Greenwich St. include (at Grant), San Francisco, CA 94133

Please visit our at card number, address and expiraMASTERCARD and VISA orders welcome.

Please sendwebsite card name, tion date, or phone (415) 989-1630 between noon-8 P.M. EST. Checks are also accepted. Please allow 3 weeks for delivery.

www.robertsexton.com

“The Promise” is featured with many other recent works in my book, “Journeys of the Human Heart.”

It, too, is available from the address above at $12.95 per copy postpaid. Please visit my Web site | at

www.robertsexton.com

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1/19/21 9:56 AM

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ION 2021 EDIT

THE ORIGINAL FARMER’S ALMANAC

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1/15/21 11:46 AM

A RECIPE FOR

ZEN

On the heels of a chaotic year, chef Douglass Williams shares simple recipes for making pasta at home.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL PIAZZA

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CHEF PROFILE

| Food

Mida chefowner Douglass Williams took his restaurant’s name from an Italian phrase for “he/she gives me,” which he says fits the spirit of generosity he hopes Mida embodies.

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1/11/21 11:42 AM

Food

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CHEF PROFILE

T

he pastry and pasta station at Mida restaurant in Boston is a small, tidy, dimly lit corner carved out of a subterranean kitchen. When chef-owner Douglass Williams stands at the counter where he makes his doughs, there’s perhaps eight inches between his head and the ceiling. Across the room, the commercial dishwasher clatters; line cooks bound up and down the stairs. But this spot is a sanctuary, the calm amid the storm of a busy restaurant, which itself has become a spot of calm amid the Covidrelated chaos that has devastated independent restaurants and left countless workers unemployed.

Of all the years for a chef to achieve national recognition, 2020 ended up being Williams’s. Last May, Food & Wine named him one of the country’s 10 best new chefs, calling Mida “a temple to carbohydrates.” It sang the praises of Williams’s pasta craft, which he learned at culinary school in his home state of New Jersey but mastered while working his way up through such kitchens as Boston’s award-winning Coppa and Radius restaurants. With the Food & Wine nod, a goodnews-starved media phalanx beat a path to his door. And though quarantine and temporary closures hit the bottom line, Mida was lucky enough to have its neighborhood rally around it, even before the rest of the country took an interest.

Mida sits on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Tremont Street, which puts it between two economically and racially distinct neighborhoods: the South End and Lower Roxbury. Since Mida opened in 2016, its dining room has stood out as one of the most diverse in the city, a frustratingly rare phenomenon in Boston. So with customers to feed, interviews to grant, and Covid precautions to devise, Williams finds his problem now is not struggling to survive as much as it is learning how to juggle it all. He is a warm person, a born nurturer, but his brain is always in fifth gear, solving logistical puzzles, putting out fires, scouting new opportunities.

The pasta kitchen is where he finds his peace. Cooking, like sports or dance, is an embodied profession. Spatial awareness is critical—in how you move in a tiny kitchen, or position meat on a crowded grill. Then there’s the muscle and sense memory of working with dough. The brain downshifts.

“The whole outside world beyond the table just disappears,” he says. “You’re trying to have your fingertips read the pasta and act as your eyes. All that has a meditative quality. I don’t outsource the pasta making, because the reason I opened Mida is that I wanted to teach pasta. To please people and to make people feel welcomed. It’s the need to make something that comes from my hands and from my heart.”

Williams chose the following recipes with both pasta newbies and experienced cooks in mind. Start with the gnocchi, which are very simple and quick to mix and roll out, even on a weeknight. The orecchiette are more of a weekend project, but they don’t require any special equipment. Finally, the pan-fried polenta with honey and Gorgonzola isn’t really pasta at all, but it is a signature dish and it’s wonderful.

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1/11/21 11:43 AM

GNOCCHI 101: Gently fold the flour into the wet ingredients (left) until fully incorporated. Then shape the dough into a log about 1 foot long (right).

Divide the dough into eight pieces, and roll each into a 1/2-inch-thick rope (left). Finally, cut the ropes into bite-size pieces (right) to make the gnocchi.

RICOTTA GNOCCHI CACIO E PEPE

Gnocchi are commonly made with potatoes, but here Williams makes the little dumplings with ricotta, Parmesan, flour, and egg, then finishes them with the classic cacio e pepe sauce.

“With this dough, you’re just trying to bring it together, not kneading it,” he explains.

When it’s time to roll the dough out, “you want to keep the log under your fingers.

Your palms are a little too heavy for this. Your fingers are the perfect weight.”

Ricotta Gnocchi Cacio e Pepe

For the pasta 4 cups whole-milk ricotta 2 cups finely grated Parmesan, divided 1 large egg, plus 2 egg yolks 1½ teaspoons kosher salt, plus more for the cooking water ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg 2½ cups all-purpose flour For the sauce 1 cup pasta water from boiling the gnocchi 2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1½ tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon unsalted butter 2 teaspoons lemon juice Freshly grated lemon zest, for garnish

First, make the gnocchi: In a large bowl, mix together the ricotta, 1 cup Parmesan, egg and yolks, salt, pepper, and nutmeg until smooth.

Add half the flour to the mixture (see step-by-step photos, above) , folding it in gently with a spatula or plastic bench scraper. Add the remaining flour, gently folding until it’s almost fully incorporated. (This should take less than 5 minutes.) | 57

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1/11/21 11:44 AM

Food

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CHEF PROFILE

ORECCHIETTE 101: After whisking together the flours and salt, make a well in the middle and add water (left); stir vigorously with a fork until well combined. Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead as shown (center).

... which you then cut into three even strips (left). Now cut the strips crosswise (right) to make ½-inch squares. Repeat the process until you’ve used all the dough.

After the dough has been rested, use a knife or bench scraper to cut a ½-inch-thick slice ...

Use your thumb to press each piece in a twisting motion to form the orecchiette.

Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe

Turn the mixture out onto a lightly floured surface and shape into a loaf about 1 foot long. Divide crosswise into 8 equal portions. Roll each portion with your fingertips into a “rope” about ½ inch thick, then cut into individual pieces. Toss the pieces in flour to coat.

Transfer to a lightly floured rimmed baking sheet, cover with a clean kitchen towel, and set aside.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. You’ll want to make the cacio e pepe sauce while the gnocchi cooks so that everything finishes at the same time.

Drop the gnocchi into the water and boil until it rises to the surface.

Meanwhile, make the sauce: Set a skillet (12 to 14 inches) over a burner, but don’t turn it on. Add 1 cup water from the pasta pot, pepper, salt, olive oil, butter, and lemon juice. Turn heat to high and wait for the mixture to come to a boil.

Now scoop the gnocchi out of the pot with a strainer or slotted spoon and add it to the pan. Cook the liquid down until it thickens into a sauce, then take the pan off the heat and sprinkle in the remaining 1 cup Parmesan, swirling and gently stirring the sauce until everything is blended.

Garnish with lemon zest and serve immediately.

Yields 6 servings.

ORECCHIETTE WITH SAUSAGE AND BROCCOLI RABE

Italian for “ little ears,” orecchiette are pasta cups that 58 |

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can be made without any special equipment. When this dough is fully mixed, it will be very smooth. “It should feel like a silk scarf,” Williams says. “That means the gluten has formed.”

For the pasta 2 cups semolina flour 2 cups Tipo 00 pasta flour or all-purpose flour 1³⁄4 cups warm water 1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more for the pasta water For the sauce 2 pounds ground chicken 2 tablespoons plus 1 tablespoon olive oil 2 teaspoons kosher salt 2 teaspoons pepper 2 teaspoons ground fennel seed 1½ teaspoons red chili flakes 3 cloves garlic, chopped 1½ cups white wine 1½ cups chicken stock 2 cups chopped broccoli rabe Grated Parmesan and extra-virgin olive oil, for serving

First, make the pasta: In a large bowl, whisk together both flours with the salt.

Make a well in the center of the bowl with the back of your hand and add the water (see step-by-step photos, above left) . With a fork, start from the middle of the well and stir vigorously, incorporating the rest of the flour until well combined. Once your dough comes together, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes. Wrap the dough in plastic and let NEWENGLAND.COM

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Food

|

CHEF PROFILE

Polenta with Gorgonzola and Honey

rest for 1 hour at room temperature.

Once rested, remove the pasta dough from the plastic wrap. Using a knife or bench scraper, cut a ½-inch-thick slice off the ball of dough.

Cut that slice lengthwise into three strips, each about ½ inch wide, then cut the strips crosswise to make ½-inch squares. To form the pasta into orecchiette, take one square of dough and press it into the palm of your hand with the pad of your thumb in a twisting motion.

Transfer pasta to a lightly floured rimmed baking sheet. Repeat until you’ve used all your dough.

Now, make the sauce: In a large bowl, toss the ground chicken with 2 tablespoons olive oil, salt, pepper, fennel, and chili 60 |

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flakes until blended. Set a large skillet over high heat and, working in two batches, cook the chicken mixture until browned, about 10 minutes per batch. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil and the garlic to the skillet and cook, stirring, for 1 minute. Add the wine and cook until reduced by half, then add chicken stock and cook for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.

Cook the pasta until it floats to the surface, about 4 to 5 minutes. Remove with a strainer and add to the sauce.

Cook for 1 minute, add the broccoli rabe, and cook for 1 minute more. Serve topped with Parmesan cheese and a drizzle of olive oil. Yields 6 to 8 servings.

POLENTA WITH GORGONZOLA AND HONEY

This is one of the dishes that will never come off the Mida menu—it’s just too good.

The only trick is to make the polenta in advance, so that it has time to chill and set up.

Then you can fry it, top it with the honey and Gorgonzola, and serve it as an appetizer.

4 cups water 1 tablespoon kosher salt 2 tablespoons plus ½ cup olive oil, divided 1 cup polenta meal (medium to coarse grind) ¼ cup grated Parmesan ³⁄4 cup crumbled Gorgonzola, divided ½ cup honey, divided Freshly ground black pepper

In a large pot, add the water, salt, and 2 tablespoons olive oil. Bring to a boil. Whisk in the polenta meal, then reduce heat to medium-low and whisk continuously for 7 minutes. Turn off the heat, add the Parmesan, and stir to fully incorporate. Pour the polenta into an ovensafe 8-by-8-inch baking dish and tap it on the counter to spread it evenly and release any bubbles.

Let this sit overnight in the refrigerator, uncovered, to set and form a crust on top.

Preheat your oven to 375°. Remove the polenta from the fridge and cut into 6 equal pieces. Pour ¼ cup olive oil into a large ovenproof skillet, then set each piece of polenta into the oil. Set over mediumhigh heat. Let the polenta cook until it begins to brown on the bottom, then transfer the skillet to the oven for 10 minutes.

Remove the pan from the oven and sprinkle equal portions of Gorgonzola over the polenta squares.

Return the pan to the oven to let it melt, about 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and plate the polenta. Drizzle equal portions of the honey and remaining ¼ cup olive oil over the polenta squares, then sprinkle with pepper.

Yields 6 servings.

Come along as we visit with chef Douglass Williams on the new season of Weekends with Yankee, premiering this April on public television stations nationwide. To learn more, go to weekendswithyankee.com.

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/11/21 11:51 AM

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1/14/21 1:44 PM

Food

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IN SEASON

Glazed Chocolate Doughnut Muffins The secret ingredient? Potatoes, those heroes of early-spring cooking.

Amy Traverso is Yankee’s senior food editor and cohost of our TV show, Weekends with Yankee (weekendswithyankee.com).

B Y A M Y T R A V E R S O

our neighbors. We could eat only so many mashed potatoes.

I wish I had thought of this recipe back then. These chocolate muffins are modeled after my favorite kind of doughnut: chocolate with a thin wash of translucent sugar glaze. More specifically, they’re modeled after chocolate potato doughnuts like the ones they serve at the Holy Donut in Portland, Maine. This Down East tradition makes good use of mashed spuds, folding them into the batter to make the doughnuts more tender and moist.

Any leftover mashed potatoes will work well here, as long as they’re not drizzled in gravy.

To boost the “doughnuttiness” of these little cakes, you grease the wells of your muff in tin, then sprinkle in some sugar before adding the batter.

It gives the exterior a bit of crunch without the mess and trouble of frying. Even better: You can serve these muffins for breakfast or dessert.

ST YLED AND PHOTOGR APHED BY

L I Z N E I LY

GLAZED CHOCOLATE DOUGHNUT MUFFINS FOR THE MUFFINS

ast March, as the f irst wave of t he pa ndem ic t hreatened to (maybe ? possibly?) disrupt our food supply chain, I added a second farm share to our usual rotation. It seemed a good way to keep our pantry stocked while 62 |

YK0321_Food_InSeason.indd 62

supporting local farms. And so it did. But it also brought to our door an abundant, self-renewing supply of carrots and potatoes, two late-fall crops that store well over the winter.

I did my best to keep up, but I finally ended up spreading the wealth among

6 tablespoons salted butter, softened, plus more for greasing muffin tin Granulated sugar, for muffin tin 1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar 2 large eggs, at room temperature 1½ cups all-purpose flour ¹⁄ 3 cup cocoa powder NEWENGLAND.COM

1/8/21 12:21 PM

1 ½ ²⁄ 3 ²⁄ 3

teaspoon baking soda teaspoon table salt cup riced or mashed potatoes cup buttermilk

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FOR THE GLAZE

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar 2 tablespoons milk Multicolored candy sprinkles, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 375° and set a rack to the middle position.

Generously grease a 12-cup muffin tin with butter, then sprinkle each well with granulated sugar. Tilt the muffin tin to fully coat with the sugar, then pour out any excess.

Using a standing or handheld mixer, beat the 6 tablespoons butter with the brown sugar until light and fluffy, 3 to 4 minutes. Add one egg and beat for one minute. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, add the other egg, and beat again.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Add a third of the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and stir to combine. Add the potatoes and half the buttermilk. Stir to combine again, scraping down the sides of the bowl as you do. Add the remaining dry ingredients and buttermilk and mix just until smooth.

Divide the batter evenly among the wells of the muffin tin (a large cookie scoop helps here). Bake until the muffins are firm in the center and just beginning to pull away from the sides, 15 to 18 minutes. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

When the muffins have cooled, make the glaze: In a small bowl, whisk the confectioners’ sugar with the milk until smooth. Set the muffins on their wire rack over a rimmed baking sheet, then drizzle evenly with the glaze. Decorate with sprinkles, and let the glaze set before serving. Yields 12 muffins.

MARCH | APRIL 2021

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Travel

|

W EEK EN D AWAY

LEXINGTON & CONCORD,

MASSACHUSETTS THESE HISTORY-RICH NEIGHBORS HAVE AN APPEAL THAT ALWAYS FEELS UP TO DATE.

BY CINDY ANDERSON â&#x20AC;¢ PHOTOGR APHS BY NINA GALL ANT

66 |

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NEWENGLAND.COM

1/8/21 12:38 PM

this page :

Local shops line Concord’s classic Main Street. opposite , clockwise from top left : Daniel Chester French’s Minute Man Statue at the Old North Bridge; refined fare at Woods Hill Table; Wendi Snider, owner of the gift shop Nesting; the upstairs study in the Old Manse where Emerson wrote “Nature”; paddleboarding on Walden Pond; delicacies at the Concord Cheese Shop.

MARCH | APRIL 2021

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1/19/21 11:11 AM

Travel

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W EEK EN D AWAY

Interested in Revolutionary War sites? Literary tourism? The transcendentalist movement?

Just outside Boston, the neighboring towns of Lexington and Concord offer all this, along with miles of inviting paths and waterways.

In Concord, especially, military and literary history commingle. Take the Old Manse, where minister William Emerson lived. Legend holds that early on April 19, 1775, Emerson walked from the house to nearby North Bridge to steady the hearts of men gathering to confront the British. Emerson died a year later after falling sick at Fort Ticonderoga, but the Old Manse housed Emerson family members for decades to come—including, eventually, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote the transcendentalist text “Nature.”

Later, author Nathaniel Hawthorne

and his wife rented the house; Henry David Thoreau planted them a garden.

FRI DAY After arriving in town, stroll the grounds of the Old Manse all the way down to the Concord River and across the bridge to the slope where the minutemen readied for that first large-scale conflict. You’ll see the plaques and the monuments, but mostly you’ll sense the weight of deeply lived and longremembered lives.

A place to stay: The 300-year-old Colonial Inn in Concord offers 56

rooms—some historic, others contemporary—and easy access to the downtown shops. It also has a restaurant and tavern, and there’s lots of colonial ambiance in the common areas, including a stone fireplace that invites relaxation. Expect mostly traditional fare—good chicken potpie, ditto the pot roast—and a fine Sunday brunch.

For a bit more luxury, head to the Inn at Hastings Park in Lexington.

With 22 rooms spread over three buildings, this inn feels like a cross between a high-end boutique hotel and an elegant old home. You’ll dine well at either place, but if you’re at Hastings Park, try the lobster fritters, succulent lamb or halibut, and golddusted s’mores.

Start your day on the Lexington Green. Here, 70 or so farmers, shopkeepers, and political leaders confronted the British troops marching west from Boston early on the morning of April 19. A quick scramble brings you up to the Old Belfry, which sounded a warning after Paul Revere rode into town with word that the British were coming. The Lexington visitor center and Buckman Tavern, where the local militia were headquartered, will fill in your gaps about what else happened.

Also worth seeing, about three miles away, is the Munroe Tavern, commandeered by the British as their headquarters and field hospital.

A note about the places described here: They’re worth visiting even if some of the buildings are closed. At

68 |

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J O N AT H A N KOZO W Y K ( PAT R I OT S’ DAY )

SAT U RDAY

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/8/21 12:42 PM

this page :

Readying the King Suite for guests at the Inn at Hastings Park, a four-star boutique hotel in Lexington. opposite : The spirit of the minutemen comes alive during the Patriotsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Day reenactment of the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

MARCH | APRIL 2021

YK0321_Travel_Weekend_rev.indd 69

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Travel

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W EEK EN D AWAY

this page , clockwise from far left :

The Lexington Battle Green’s c. 1799 Revolutionary Monument, the oldest war memorial in the country; a view of Concord’s historic Colonial Inn; the study at Orchard House (the large painting is a portrait of May Alcott, the inspiration for Amy in Little Women).

opposite :

The Old North Bridge, which is actually the fifth bridge built on this site since the 1775 Battle of Concord.

most sites, plaques and signs abound, and your cell phone can answer questions. Also, if you’re drawn to the history, time your trip to include the annual Patriots’ Day reenactment of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which begins at dawn on the Lexington Green.

A f te r lu nc h i n L e x i n g ton — choices range from pizza to curry to sushi—it’s a short hop to Concord. In fact, if you brought your bike you can ride the seven miles, which includes the bicycle-and-pedestrian-only Battle Road Trail.

In Concord you’ve got lots of options for your afternoon. For more Revolutionary War history, try the cell phone audio tour that begins just off the parking lot of the Minute Man National Historical Park visitor center; among its 13 stops along the Battle Road is the site where Paul Revere was captured. Also near the visitor center is the Robbins House: Originally inhabited by descendants of Revolutionary War veteran Caesar Robbins, a former slave, the house is now an African American history museum.

To learn more about the area’s literary and transcendentalist history, check out Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, where she wrote Little Women. Alcott and her three sisters 70 |

YK0321_Travel_Weekend_rev.indd 70

socialized with many of their transcendentalist parents’ friends, including Thoreau and Emerson. Alcott wrote a poem titled “Thoreau’s Flute” for the former and borrowed books from the latter’s well-stocked library.

If Orchard House is closed, you can still explore the grounds, including the Gothic Revival building that housed TRAVEL NOTE: Since many event organizers and local businesses are adjusting their operations in response to Covid-19 health concerns, please contact them directly or check their websites for updates before making travel plans.

the Concord School of Philosophy, founded by Alcott’s father, Bronson, and the Little Women Garden, with a section each for Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. You can also walk two minutes east down the street to Wayside House, where the Alcotts also lived for a while, as did Hawthorne.

If you’d like your transcendentalist history in a more visceral form, pay a visit to Walden Pond. Thoreau lived here two years, two months, and two days in a small cabin he built, an experience that later inspired him to write Walden. Look for a replica of Thoreau’s cabin by the parking lot.

NEWENGLAND.COM

1/15/21 11:41 AM

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You can walk the pond ’s 1.7-mile perimeter or, assuming the day is warm, take a dip in its clear waters. If there’s time before the sun goes down, circle back to downtown Concord and Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott are buried on a knoll known as Author’s Ridge.

Try dinner at the popular 80 Thoreau in Concord or at Woods Hill Table, a fine farm-to-table eatery in West Concord. If you’re a night owl and the evening is nice, consider driving over to Codman Farm in Lincoln.

The small 24-hour store inside the barn has everything from turmeric honey to local kombucha, along with ready-to-eat snacks like meat sticks and fig bars. (By day, this same farm bursts with life in springtime: new chicks and piglets, and luscious blooms on ancient lilacs.)

SU N DAY

On Sunday you can pick up lunch provisions at the Concord Cheese Shop and walk the Battle Road from the Old North Bridge east. This is the route the British took during their retreat MARCH | APRIL 2021

YK0321_Travel_Weekend_rev.indd 71

from Concord. Word spread quickly among the Americans that the British were headed back to Boston. Bands of militia kept intercepting them, at times shooting from behind boulders and trees, killing a total of 73 men. Revolution had begun. As Thomas Paine put it: “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must … undergo the fatigue of supporting it.”

If you’re traveling with kids, you may want to take some Sunday time to hop in kayaks or a canoe at the South Bridge Boat House and paddle the usually gentle Sudbur y River.

Another family option is Drumlin Farm in nearby Lincoln, which offers a busy farmyard, a wildlife sanctuar y, and four miles of easy trails.

And don’t miss a chance to check out the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum—even if a ll there’s time for is a look at the contemporary sculptures on the museum’s expansive grounds.

You’ll likely come away from your weekend with lots to think about: art and literature and the nation’s rich and complex history (and present).

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Travel

|

THE BEST 5

Buildings of a bygone era line State Street in Marblehead, Massachusetts, home to one of the best-preserved historic districts in the country.

Visiting these towns is like strolling through museums of New England architecture.

BY KIM KNOX BECKIUS

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Marblehead, MA “The houses are old,” George Washington wrote by way of explaining why he took a four-mile detour to visit this seaside town while on a 1789 trip. With America’s largest collection of pre– Revolutionary War structures (200plus) and hundreds more built before 1830, this peninsular town of narrow streets and tiny-plot gardens seems to have been gently treated by time’s passage. It is, however, the harshness of wars, storms, and fishing f leet losses that slowed Marblehead’s development and thereby helped preserve such landmarks as the virtually intact Georgian-style Jeremiah Lee Mansion, completed in 1768. Walk along Franklin, Washington, and Hooper streets, and you’ll feel as though you’ve completed a course in Early American architecture. Explore: Take a compelling, architecture-focused walking tour with historian Judy Anderson. marbleheadtours.com

Newport, RI Known for its flashy Gilded Age mansions, Newport also has more than 400 homes and religious and civic buildings that pre-date 1799. Some, such as the 1697 Wanton-LymanHazard House, are now museums, but many others remain the center of everyday life, including dozens of finely restored Colonial-era residences in the water front neighborhood known as the Point. Its warped brick sidewalks aren’t trodden by as many tourists as the mansion-lined Cliff Walk, but here is your rare chance to see what a wooden city looked like in a prosperous colonial seaport. Explore: Sample the walking tours offered by the Newport Historical Society. newporthistorytours.org Portsmouth, NH With their embellished door ways and authentic paint colors—mustard, dusty blues, cinnamon red, and earth tones—the well-preserved clapboard colonials in Portsmouth’s South End have irresistible allure for artists and photographers. Strawber y Banke Museum is home to 32 historic structures, dating back as far as 1695, that

E YA L O R EN

Places to See Historic Homes

wning a piece of New England ’s architectural past may be out of reach, but admiring resilient craftsmanship from the street, well, that’s free.

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Tour the 1914 mansion, dine on the lake-view terrace at the Carriage House, explore the estate’s 28 miles of trails and waterfalls, and more.

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A scenic lakeside family resort on Post Pond, near Dartmouth College, offering one- to threebedroom B&B or efficiency cabins. Easy access to lots of outdoor activities, area attractions, sightseeing and antiquing—or just relax at our sandy beach. Our Lodge Restaurant serves delicious, fresh local fare. Pet-friendly!

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Gifts at 136 offers a large selection of fine crafts and art from Maine, including furniture, paintings, sculpture, jewelry, pottery, glassware, lighting, and more. Gifts at 136 has won multiple awards for its well-curated collection of accessible art.

Open all year.

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Reconnect with S’ CH O OR T I I past Editors’ BEST OF NEW ENGLAND Choice winners TRAVEL and see for 2019 Z K EE A M AG yourself why they received Yankee Magazine’s highest accolade.

Stay in historic downtown Mystic! Newly renovated accommodations directly on the Mystic River. Many fine restaurants and shops are just steps away. Ideal for a romantic getaway! Enjoy a sunset cruise on the schooner Argia, sailing daily from our wharf.

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A must-see New England destination that tells the story of Plymouth Colony in the early 1600s and its shared history with the Pilgrims and Native people.

Visit the 17th-Century English Village, Wampanoag Homesite, Plimoth Grist Mill, and Mayflower.

508-746-1622 Plimoth.org

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illustrate this neighborhood’s 300year evolution; more vintage homes can be seen lining antique lanes such as Mechanic Street. Nearby are the Portsmouth Athenaeum and other brick beauties from the 19th century, the Federal mansions of Haymarket Square and Middle Street, Victorian showpieces like the Benjamin Franklin Webster House, and even the postwar Atlantic Heights neighborhood of Colonial Revival cottages built to house shipyard workers—all worth f inding, photographing, and admiring. Explore: Join in on one of Portsmouth Historical Society’s preservation-themed walking tours. portsmouthhistory.org Wethersfield, CT With so much architectural charm centered on the three historic homes of the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, casual visitors may think that’s the sole

reason to visit Old Wethersfield. On a brick sidewalk stroll, though, you’ll see many fine homes from the colonial and Federal eras, with Victorians and America’s oldest seed company, Comstock Ferre, salted in. Hop in your car or on a bike, and find vintage structures that stir the imagination: an imposing warehouse in Cove Park, last of seven built here c. 1690; the chromeyellow Richard Deming House, a rare surviving average-family home built c. 1710; the Buttolph-Williams House, another early gem and the setting for The Witch of Blackbird Pond. In all, Connecticut’s largest historic district has 150-plus structures whose stories begin before 1850. Explore: Pick up a self-guided Wethersfield Heritage Wa lk brochure at Webb-DeaneStevens. webb-deane-stevens.org Woodstock, VT New England builders didn’t have

HGTV or the DIY Network in the early 19th century, but they did have Asher Benjamin’s design-filled little book, The Country Builder’s Assistant, which popularized Federal-style architecture. Woodstock bears the beautiful imprint of this era, when homes constructed around the village green and along adjoining Elm Street ref lected the town’s rising stature as a hub of manufacturing, business, and county government.

The fun in walking around here is scanning the proliferation of Early American structures for details of later architectural evolution, from the tall windows, quoins, and overhanging eaves of the Italianate style to an add-on Queen Anne turret. Explore: Delve into the Woodstock History Center’s free I Spy…Architecture ! guide, available online or at the Town Crier bulletin board on Elm Street. woodstockhistorycenter.org

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Green Thumb Go-Tos A roundup of favorite gardens and nurseries for finding horticultural inspiration.

TRAVEL NOTE: Operating seasons

and hours—as well as peak bloom times—will vary by location. In addition, Covid-19 concerns may affect operations this spring and beyond. Before making your travel plans, please check the latest visitors’ information for individual businesses and attractions by going to their websites or contacting them directly.

ARBORETUMS & BOTANICAL GARDENS ARNOLD ARBORETUM, Boston, MA. Owned

by Harvard and designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the oldest public arboretum in North America is home to more than 15,000 plants— including some 4,000 kinds of trees, shrubs, and vines—but may be best known for the hundreds of lilacs that seemingly perfume the entire 281 acres each spring. arboretum.harvard.edu

BARTLETT ARBORETUM & GARDENS,

Stamford, CT. Named for tree expert Francis A. Bartlett, who once made his home and research lab here, this 93-acre Eden does have a wonderful collection of trees (dwarf conifers are a standout), but oh so much more. One of the newest attractions: a Sensory Garden emphasizing sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch that’s designed to be accessible for all. bartlettarboretum.org

BOTANIC GARDEN OF SMITH COLLEGE,

Northampton, MA. Where to look first, on a college campus designed to double as a living museum of plants from New England and around the world? We recommend the Lyman Conservatory greenhouses, home of fascinating specialty gardens such as the Palm House, the Succulent House, and the Camellia Corridor. garden.smith.edu

COASTAL MAINE BOTANICAL GARDENS,

Boothbay, ME. New England’s largest botanical garden is a 295-acre masterpiece that offers living proof that the coast can be a great place to garden, despite the wind and salt air.

Staffers harness a truly rugged environment and demonstrate what can be done with ledge, hillside, woodland, and waterfront. Don’t miss the second-to-none children’s garden: two acres of universal fun for all ages. mainegardens.org FULLER GARDENS, North Hampton, NH. If variety is the spice of life, it also makes for an eye-catching botanical garden at this historic summer estate just off a scenic stretch of Route 1A. Former Massachusetts governor Alvan T. Fuller liked his formal English perennials and masses of roses, but he was fond of Japanese gardens too. There’s also lots of inspiration in the dahlia collection, sculpted hedges, and tropical conservatory. fullergardens.org GARDEN IN THE WOODS, Framingham, MA. The headquarters for Native Plant Trust (formerly

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the New England Wild Flower Society) is a 45acre property that holds the Northeast’s largest landscaped collection of native wildflowers and woody plants. Home gardeners, take note: The trust also sells a selection of ready-to-travel natives at its two seasonal shops, here and at Nasami Farm in Whately. nativeplanttrust.org ROGER WILLIAMS PARK BOTANICAL CENTER,

Providence, RI. The showstopper here is New England’s largest indoor public garden: 23,000 square feet of greenhouse space filled with plant life in its myriad forms, from delicate orchids to spiky cacti and soaring palms. But there are also lovely things growing outside, amid grounds that include a winter garden, perennial display gardens, and a rose maze. rwpconservancy.org TOWER HILL BOTANIC GARDEN, Boylston, MA. Delight in the cutting-edge plantings, fragrant secret garden, heirloom apple trees, hardwoods, woodland “folly,” plant evolution display, wildlife garden (a birder’s paradise), and three miles of woodland trails. The Orangerie hosts winter displays. towerhillbg.org

GARDEN ATTRACTIONS BEDROCK GARDENS, Lee, NH. What was once

a historic dairy farm is now transitioning to a 20-acre showcase of horticulture and art for public enjoyment. Among the eclectic attractions are a rock garden, a Japanese garden and tea house, a 200-foot water channel planted with lotus and water lilies, an abstract “painting” made up of ornamental grasses, scattered sculptures, and woodland trails. bedrockgardens.org BRIDGE OF FLOWERS, Shelburne Falls, MA. Once a trolley bridge and now a footbridge, the Bridge of Flowers lives up to its name: a stately 400foot span with cascades of bright blooms from April to October, and greenery arching up and billowing over. Truly, this is a walk to remember. bridgeofflowersmass.org CELIA THAXTER’S GARDEN, Appledore Island, Kittery, ME. Tours are relatively few and offered by reservation only, so you have to plan well in advance to visit the garden made famous in Celia Laighton Thaxter’s An Island Journal—but it’s an experience like no other in New England. Here, a reconstructed version of the 19th-century poet’s flower garden is filled with heirloom plants grown to maturity on the mainland by the Shoals Marine Laboratory (which is based on Appledore and oversees the plot), then transplanted to the island to bloom all summer. shoalsmarinelaboratory.org/celia-thaxters-garden GREEN ANIMALS TOPIARY GARDENS,

Portsmouth, RI. Artistry meets arboriculture at the oldest topiary garden in the U.S., where you’ll find more than 80 trees and bushes sculpted into geometric forms and animal shapes, from a giraffe to a teddy bear. Part of the Newport Mansions, this former country estate also boasts vegetable and herb gardens, orchards, and a Victorian house overlooking Narragansett Bay. newportmansions.org KINNEY AZALEA GARDENS, Kingston, RI. Few places are as romantic as this hidden gem

in spring, when more than 500 varieties of azaleas come into bloom, and couples pose for photos at the signature Moon Gate stone archway. The public is welcome to explore the six-acre wonderland, which also has hundreds of types of rhododendrons and wildflowers, trees, shrubs, and evergreens. Donations welcome; many plants are offered for sale too. kinneyazaleagardens.com MOUNT DESERT ISLAND GARDENS,

Mount Desert Island, ME. The ultimate one-stop destination for garden inspiration. The Land & Garden Preserve maintains three of the island’s gems: the historic Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor (reservations required); and the Japanese-inspired Asticou Azalea Garden and English-style Thuya Garden, both in Northeast Harbor. Plus, you can visit the onetime home of landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand, Garland Farm, in Bar Harbor, or explore nature’s diversity in the Wild Gardens of Acadia, in Acadia National Park. gardenpreserve.org; beatrixfarrandsociety.org; nps.gov/places/ wild-gardens-of-acadia.htm MYTOI, Chappaquiddick Island, MA. Nearly destroyed by a 1991 hurricane, this 14-acre Japanese-style landscape of intimate gardens, winding paths, and hidden nooks has been brought back better than ever by the Trustees of Reservations. thetrustees.org PICKITY PLACE, Mason, NH. Step into a storybook at Pickity Place, crowned with a c. 1786 cottage that was the model for Elizabeth Orton Jones’s Little Red Riding Hood illustrations. It’s set amid 10 acres of woodlands and gardens that range from butterfly and bird themes to a kitchen garden that provides ingredients for the gourmet five-course luncheons served here.

Plus, there’s an herb shop, a garden shop, and a greenhouse with plants for sale. pickityplace.com

MUSEUMS BLITHEWOLD, Bristol, RI. Designed more than a

century ago, the grounds of this former summer estate on Narragansett Bay (now a lovingly tended house museum) still delight visitors today. Amid the 33 acres of gardens, lawns, specimen trees, and rare and unusual plants, don’t miss the springtime spectacle of one of the most expansive collections of daffodils in the area. blithewold.org THE FELLS, Newbury, NH. Located on the shores of Lake Sunapee, the Fells was the summer retreat of the Hay family, including John Milton Hay, who served as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary.

Pathways meander among hundreds of alpine and rock garden plants, while a 100-foot perennial border, a rose terrace, and 20 varieties of heather add a splash of color. thefells.org FLORENCE GRISWOLD MUSEUM, Old Lyme, CT. At the former art colony that saw the birth of American Impressionism, masterpieces of color can be discovered in the hundreds of heirloom perennials—hollyhock, iris, foxglove, heliotrope, and so on—that grace the gardens and grounds, restored to their appearance c. 1910. florencegriswoldmuseum.org

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HAMILTON HOUSE, South Berwick, ME. The

setting for Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Tory Lover, Hamilton House is a 1785 Georgian mansion set on 35 acres overlooking the Salmon Falls River. The lure for horticultural fans is its vast Colonial Revival gardens, first established over a century ago and now being restored by its caretaker, Historic New England. historicnewengland.org HERITAGE MUSEUMS & GARDENS, Sandwich, MA. Gardens and trails crisscross this 100acre property, where the gentle maritime climate encourages eye-popping displays of rhododendrons (10,000-plus), daylilies, hostas, and hydrangeas. Make a day of it and pay a visit the museum collections too, ranging from folk art to vintage cars. heritagemuseumsandgardens.org HILDENE, Manchester, VT. At the former home of Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert, now a museum, you can explore the stately grounds designed

by Frederick Law Olmsted protégé Frederick Todd and crowned with a French parterre garden famed for its stunning peonies. Other highlights: vegetable, butterfly, cutting, and observation gardens, and allees featuring hawthorn and apple trees. hildene.org LYMAN ESTATE, Waltham, MA. The crown jewels of this mansion museum are the four greenhouses that include one of the oldest in the nation (c. 1804). Together, they burst with a variety of living oddities and heirlooms, including century-old camellia specimens; the sales greenhouse is stocked with green things to take home. Outside, explore the 37-acre property’s beautifully preserved gardens. historicnewengland.org MCLAUGHLIN GARDEN & HOMESTEAD,

South Paris, ME. The living memorial to Bernard McLaughlin, who tended this landscape for almost 60 years, is a place of uncommon serenity and inspiration. From the 200plus lilacs in 125 varieties to the array of graceful plantings (daylilies, irises, native wildflowers, and so on), it demonstrates what one gardener’s patience and love can create. mclaughlingarden.org ROUGH POINT, Newport, RI. Frederick Law Olmsted designed the grounds at this grand seaside estate, best known as the home of heiress Doris Duke. The 10.8-acre property features ornamental gardens, a rose arbor, a large kitchen garden, and whimsical topiaries inspired by Duke’s former pet camels. newportrestoration.org/rough-point STRAWBERY BANKE MUSEUM, Portsmouth, NH. This living history museum takes its mission outside with six gardens representing different eras in the former Puddle Dock neighborhood. From a 17th-century kitchen plot to a WWII victory garden, each is true to the plant types and gardening techniques of its time. Meanwhile, the museum’s Horticulture Learning Center offers programs on heirloom plants, garden crafts, and more. strawberybanke.org

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NURSERIES, FARMS & GARDEN CENTERS BROKEN ARROW NURSERY, Hamden, CT. This

destination nursery is known for its knack with unusual and hard-to-find plants, most of which are propagated on-site. The Connecticut state flower, mountain laurel, is a specialty, although the offerings have expanded to include more than 1,500 types of perennials, shrubs, trees, and conifers, many of them natives. brokenarrownursery.com

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CAMPO DI’FIORI, Sheffield, MA. Container

A unique place in the history of American art, bringing alive the work of American Impressionists where they lived and painted. Galleries, gardens, and a seasonal café!

On view through May 23: Expanding Horizons: Celebrating 20 Years of the Hartford Steam Boiler Collection More at FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org

BAR HARBOR | 44. 3876°N, 68. 2039 °W

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aficionados will discover new ideas at every turn at this chic garden center, whose signature handmade, moss-covered pots stand out amid the array of accessories and plants.

Lush gardens sprinkled with statuary invite lingering. campodefiori.com COCHATO NURSERY, Holbrook, MA. The elegant display gardens are enough of a reason to visit—come for a scenic walk and stay for some great shopping. Owners Sue DuBrava and Chuck Doughty (who also directs landscaping for Northeastern University) bring a curator’s eye to their collections of hostas, perennials, shrubs and trees, and wildflowers. cochatonursery.com CRICKET HILL GARDEN, Thomaston, CT. Cricket Hill was founded in 1989 as one of the first U.S. nurseries to sell true-to-name varieties of Chinese tree peonies. Today these rare gems fill a six-acre display garden dubbed “Peony Heaven” that is a springtime must-visit.

Perennial peonies also share the spotlight, along with hardy fruit trees and ornamental trees and shrubs. treepeony.com ENDLESS SUMMER FLOWER FARM, Camden, ME. To see dahlias in all their dazzling variety, visit Karen and Phil Clark’s family farm, where they plant more than 4,000 of these beauties each spring and harvest the tubers each fall to store for spring shipments to customers. In between, pollinators and dahlia devotees alike take joyful refuge amid the 150-plus creamyto-jewel-toned varieties available for cutting. endlesssummerflowerfarm.com ISSIMA, Little Compton, RI. Dubbed “the smallest nursery in the smallest state,” Issima has an appeal that belies its size. Founded by veteran plant experts Ed Bowen and Taylor Johnston (a onetime horticulturist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum), this intimate coastal nursery is a treasure trove of rare and uncommon plants, including under-theradar hydrangea and delphinium varieties. issimaworks.com LOGEE’S, Danielson, CT. Wandering the six greenhouses and retail shop at this familyowned exotic-plant specialist is a bona fide treasure hunt. Marvel at such rarities as an orange tree bearing 10 varieties of fruit, a ‘Ponderosa’ lemon tree that’s been growing since 1900, and a spectacular jade vine, then load up on the makings of your own tropical escape. logees.com MARIJKE’S PERENNIAL GARDENS PLUS,

T H I S S T A Y. A N Y S T A Y. S T A Y W I T H U S . w w w. b a r h a r b or h o s p it alit ygr ou p.c om

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Starksboro, VT. Imagination and humor run wild at this retail nursery created by Dutch native Marijke Niles at her Green Mountain home.

Explore the possibilities in some 40 display gardens on her eight-acre property, where low-maintenance and “nature-nourishing” native plants and hardy succulents are specialties. perennialgardensplus.com O’BRIEN NURSERY, Granby, CT. The humble hosta is anything but at founder John O’Brien’s namesake nursery, which packs more than 1,600 hosta varieties into its ample display gardens. Japanese maples more your thing?

Find more than 100 kinds here, from ‘Emerald Lace’ to ‘White Peaches’ to ‘Crimson Queen,’ plus shade perennials, daylilies, conifers, and more. obrienhosta.com OLALLIE DAYLILY GARDENS, South Newfane, VT. Daylily fans, look no further: This threegeneration farm grows over 2,500 cultivars, filling its six acres of growing fields with all colors, sizes, and varieties. Peak bloom is midJuly through August; plus, there’s a collection of rare fall bloomers. daylilygarden.com

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Actually Fly a bird!

SNUG HARBOR FARM, Kennebunk, ME. Dubbed

“one of the most magical places in Maine” by a Yankee editor who stopped by a few years ago, Snug Harbor is a beautifully put-together nursery/garden center/farm stand/menagerie (miniature horses are only the beginning).

Topiaries are a specialty, filling two of the five greenhouses; among the array of plants, trees, and shrubs are examples of the elegant art of espalier. snugharborfarm.com WALKER FARM, Dummerston, VT. A family business since before the Revolution, Walker Farm is not only a one-stop shop for humdrumbusting perennials and annuals, but also a cornucopia of produce, including 125 heirloom tomato varieties and a variety of Asian and Hispanic vegetables, plus berry plants, rare dwarf conifers, and flowering shrubs. walkerfarm.com WHITE FLOWER FARM, Morris, CT. The 20-footwide, 280-foot-long perennial border is itself a reason to visit, but there’s lots more to see at this glorious garden center founded in 1950.

A self-guided walking tour leads through 10 landscaped acres, while the greenhouse and the farm store invite shopping for bulbs, plants, trees, and an array of garden gear and gifts. whiteflowerfarm.com WICKED TULIPS, Exeter, RI. When spring comes, more than half a million tulips erupt in layercake rows of saturated color at New England’s largest u-pick tulip farm. Wicked Tulips had to make some creative pivots in 2020 but, thanks to the support of fans and friends, plans to return in 2021 to keep sharing the tulip love. wickedtulips.com

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PUBLIC GARDENS & PARKS ELIZABETH PARK, West Hartford, CT. Elizabeth

Park’s 102 verdant acres are most celebrated for housing America’s oldest municipally operated rose garden, which dates back to 1904. Spanning 2.5 acres, it currently contains about 15,000 bushes of 800 rose varieties, including ramblers, climbers, and shrubs.

Elsewhere find specialty gardens devoted to perennials, annuals, tulips, and shade-loving plants. elizabethparkct.org

VERMONT

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HARKNESS MEMORIAL STATE PARK,

Waterford, CT. Wandering the grounds of a 1906 Roman Renaissance mansion, you may feel you’re on a movie set rather than in a state park. Adding to the allure are formal gardens shaped in part by landscape designer Beatrix Jones Farrand and, in summer, filled with the scent of heliotrope (former owner Mary Harkness’s favorite flower), propagated on the estate for more than 100 years. harkness.org

MARSH-BILLINGS-ROCKEFELLER NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK, Woodstock, VT. At the

only national park devoted to conservation history, you’re invited to immerse yourself in nature’s beauty, not only via the walking trails crisscrossing the 550-acre property but also in the formal plantings around the 1805 mansion that speak to four generations of stewardship. nps.gov/mabi PRESCOTT PARK, Portsmouth, NH. A fountaindotted oasis on the banks of the Piscataqua River, Prescott Park is the legacy of two wealthy sisters who in the 1930s bought up land in this formerly run-down area and began planting. Today you’ll find a formal garden with crab apples, maples, gingkos, and magnolias, as well as a springtime wealth of flowering bulbs, plus dozens of trial gardens filled with the best annuals for the New England climate. cityofportsmouth.com/prescottpark

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MAP ILLUSTR ATION BY M I C H A E L B Y E R S

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Hid i Let an insider be your guide to finding refuge on Marthaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Vineyard.

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Members of the decadesold swimming and social club known as the Polar Bears form an earlymorning exercise circle in the waters off Oak Bluffs.

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Cottages festooned with paper lanterns in preparation for the Campground’s signature event, the Grand Illumination.

The M/V Martha’s Vineyard docked at the Steamship Authority ferry terminal in Oak Bluffs.

The rolling pastures of Allen Farm, the oldest continuously working farm on Martha’s Vineyard (c. 1762).

An archival photo of the Baptist Tabernacle in East Chop, a place of welcome for Black worshippers in the late 19th century.

A summer snapshot at Shearer Cottage, c. 1931, a historically Blackowned inn still run by descendants of founder Charles Shearer.

The work of artists, photographers, and sculptors from Martha’s Vineyard and beyond fills the Granary Gallery in West Tisbury.

A family kayak outing on Sengekontacket Pond.

Gay Head Light, perched at the island’s westernmost point.

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A view across the coastal landscape in Chilmark, on the island’s south shore.

sat on my Oak Bluffs porch one late summer evening, reading a magazine and looking at the wash of sunset colors play out over Farm Pond.

The reeds crowding the edge of the pond chattered; Canada geese squawked. A woman in a straw hat pedaled up the dirt road on her bicycle. My normally vocal dog stayed quiet as she approached.

“Wow,” she said. “What a great place to hide out!”

“It is!” I agreed.

As she rode away, I thought about what she said, what she meant in the moment. No one could see me; I could see just birds, the pond, and, in the distance, a few taillights heading up Beach Road toward Edgartown. I did feel hidden.

I thought of all the other words that come to mind when I think of hidden: sanctuary, secret, refuge, escape, safety. The woman on the bike might not have intended to say this, but the truth is, if you have to find refuge somewhere, Martha’s Vineyard is a pretty good place to do it.

Last March, many of the 17,000 of us who are year-rounders thought we would have the island to ourselves for the summer, with sidewalks, trails, and beaches largely empty of tourists. It will be an old-fashioned summer, we said. Our days would be full of hikes, swimming, board games, and backyard burgers—none of the fancy events and swanky restaurant scenes that had come to be part of the Vineyard’s summer social life over the past 30 or so years. Old-fashioned, like decades before, when at most a few seasonal residents escaped to their cottages here for the summer.

Then the opposite happened. People with homes they usually visited for only part of the summer arrived in March—and they stayed.

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maybe farming, maybe making cheese or pounding nails. Martha’s Vineyard also draws celebrities (something for which we are known but is really only a tiny part of our identity): Writers, presidents, and movie stars all come to hide in a place where no one bothers them.

In the years I’ve been living on Martha’s Vineyard, I’ve gotten this question dozens of times: Why would you live in a place that is so hard to get to? So hard to leave?

And I always say, Because it’s so hard to get to, and so hard to leave.

Which makes it a very good hiding place, indeed.

A PORCH-SITTING ISLAND If you had to pick one architectural feature to characterize Oak Bluffs, it would be the porch.

Our town grew up around the tents that became gingerbread cottages (all with front porches) in the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association. And I think every single porch in town was used all day long this past summer. Riding my bike through neighborhoods jammed with cottages was like passing stage sets: On the porch of an inn, a man strummed a guitar; down the

P R E V I O US SP R E A D : C O U R T E S Y O F M A R T H A’ S V I N E YA R D M USEU M ( B A P T I S T TA B E R N AC L E ) ; M A R T H A’ S V I N E YA R D M USEU M / L E E VA N A L L E N (SH E A R E R C OT TAG E )

Visitors arrived, beckoned by the myriad opportunities to enjoy the outdoors, on bikes and trails and beaches and ponds. April looked like July.

But it would still turn out to be an oldfashioned bird-watching/porch-sitting/drivein-movie summer. Even when the island is full of visitors, you can hide here: We’re 96 square miles (making us the third-largest island off the East Coast), with miles of beach and pond shoreline, and a third of our land under conservation, much of it accessible to the public via hundreds of trails.

Long before this pandemic, Martha’s Vineyard has been a place of refuge. We are an island of refugees, of people who arrived over centuries to stay under the radar, to do things their way. Even the indigenous Wampanoags left their original tribe to settle on the southwest corner of a land that was not even yet an island.

Portuguese whalers jumped ship to stay here, rumrunners hid out just offshore, and toward the end of the 19th century, prosperous Blacks found safety and peace here. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, our population increased by 50 percent, as counterculture types found it easier to lead the life they wanted here—maybe fishing,

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block, neighbors shouted jokes to each other across the street. Grandmothers played cards with kids. Generations of women drank wine and hooted with laughter. As far as I could see, the entire social life of Martha’s Vineyard was occurring on the porches of Oak Bluffs, as it was on the porches, patios, and decks all over the island. On my own porch, friends came and we watched birds, played Scrabble, or ate takeout from the Sweet Life Café, our favorite spring and summer indulgence.

IT’S BETTER ON FOOT, OR BY BIKE We have more than 200 public trails. Starting in early spring, a friend of mine walked a different trail each day with her daughter, and they never ran out. Most mornings, my neighbor Laurel and I walked our dogs several miles a day—heading up-island to Sepiessa Point in West Tisbury, where we can walk out to the Tisbury Great Pond, or taking the counterclockwise Land Bank Trail that winds through the woods around Farm Pond, through Harthaven (a neighborhood of dirt roads and cottages founded 150 years ago), and back out to Beach Road along Nantucket Sound.

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At “the Inkwell,” the town beach in Oak Bluffs, the Polar Bears gather to swim and exercise early in the morning. The group was started about 80 years ago by Black women who were spending the summers in cottages nearby.

These days, men and women of all races stand in the water, linking hands. When they count their exercises in unison, it sounds like chanting, the sun rising up behind them, the ripples spreading out to the Vineyard from their circle.

On warm days, I put my dog in a backpack and ride my bike around the wide streets of Oak Bluffs. Sometimes I ride past the gingerbread houses of the Camp Meeting Association, or simply the Campground. If this had been a summer typical of the past 160 years here, this is what you would have seen on the third Wednesday in August: cottage owners hanging paper lanterns, some as old as the cottages themselves, preparing for the Grand Illumination. By nightfall, 10,000 or more people would wander the lanes admiring the twinkling lights.

I ride through the Campground, taking a different route each time, and out the other side to the Oak Bluffs harbor. I might stop at Suesan Stovall’s Groovy Sue Gallery, located in the

from left: Groovy Sue Gallery owner Suesan Stovall, surrounded by her distinctive artwork in Oak Bluffs; Simon Athearn delivers corn from Morning Glory Farm, which his parents founded in 1975, to the West Tisbury Farmers’ Market.

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back of her mother’s big house on Spruce Avenue overlooking Sunset Lake. Suesan creates mixed-media collages using bits of old advertisements, sheet music, buttons, maybe tiny spoons, her own photography and painting.

There’s always a new work; some are political, some are personal, some are both, with titles like “Hope” and “There’s a Place at the End of the Road” and “Looking for Guardian Angels.”

From there I pedal over to East Chop, where, despite my 35 years of biking around, I still find new routes. Though most visitors to the Vineyard know about the historic Methodist Tabernacle in the Campground, one of the oldest wrought iron structures in the country, many don’t know that there was a wood-frame Baptist Tabernacle in what has become known as the Highlands of East Chop. The structure is no longer there, but Baptist Temple Park remains as a little wooded dell threaded with paths.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Baptist church in the Highlands was welcoming to the newly prosperous Black vacationers from Boston and New York who’d begun to visit Martha’s Vineyard, and so it became an enclave for them. Harlem Renaissance luminaries such as novelist Dorothy West lived here; so did Adam Clayton Powell Jr. In 1903, Charles Shearer, who had been born into slavery but later prospered in Boston, bought a cottage overlooking Baptist Temple Park with his wife, Henrietta. They soon expanded it and opened a summer inn, catering to Black guests who were not welcome at other island establishments. Shearer Cottage became popular with Broadway stars such as Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters. The Commodores have stayed here; civil rights hero John Lewis visited a few years ago. Many Black homeowners in Oak Bluffs can trace their families’ first visits to the island back to Shearer Cottage.

Author Jill Nelson, who swims with the Polar Bears most mornings, described what Oak Bluffs meant to her in her book Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island: “Part of the magic of [the Vineyard] is that we were, all of us, more free here than anyplace else. On the Island, we did not have to worry about personal security. As important for African Americans was that on the Vineyard we were insulated from many of the racial assumptions and expectations, most of them negative, that at least intruded upon, and at worst defined many of our lives off-Island.”

ROAD-TRIPPING TO AQUINNAH In a year of traveling nowhere else, I traveled my own island. Early one evening, I get into the car, and I drive west. I head for Aquinnah, the town at the southwest corner of the triangle that is Martha’s Vineyard. It feels like a journey: I pass through the State Forest, and Alley’s General Store in West Tisbury; through the rolling hills of Chilmark, the roads bounded by stone walls centuries old; past Beetlebung Corner, where on most summer mornings this past year islanders would gather to kneel for nine minutes in honor of George Floyd. There are fewer trees and more views of water as I get to Aquinnah, which means “end of the island” in Wampanoag. For millennia, Aquinnah has been home to the Wampanoag people, who called the island “Noepe,” meaning “dry land amid the waters,” which suited their fishing and farming vocations. In her book Moshup’s Footsteps, Helen Manning describes the legend of how the tribe came to be in Aquinnah, when Martha’s Vineyard was still part of the mainland: “More than 5,000 years ago, [the giant] Moshup got a glimpse of the coastal plan and told his father that was where he wanted to settle; there was a magical call to him. Everything was perfect there and no one was yet continuously living on the coastal plain … Moshup dragged his great toes, permitting the waters of the ocean to rush in and surround the land we now know as the island of Martha’s Vineyard.

He dragged his foot once again and the majestic Aquinnah cliffs appeared.”

On this evening, I am headed for the restaurant at the Outermost Inn, a laid-back but luxurious shingled inn on Lighthouse Road.

Hugh Taylor, one of the musical Taylor family that includes James, owns the Outermost with his wife, Jeannie. Hugh also launched one of t he V ineya rd ’s more del ight f u l modes of transportation: the Menemsha-toLobsterville bike ferry.

Permit me to digress. Picture this: You are riding your bike around up-island, and you get to Menemsha, that little f ishing village where Quint had his boat charter business in the movie Jaws. Maybe you have a soft-serve ice cream from the Galley. Or you wander around the Ruel Gallery and talk to painter Colin Ruel and his wife, jeweler Nettie Kent.

Or maybe you take a lobster roll from Larsen’s and sit on the beach. Either way, eventually you’re looking across Menemsha Bight, and

C O U R T E S Y O F M A R T H A ’ S V I N E Y A R D M U S E U M ( M E N E M S H A ) ; U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A S S A C H U S E T T S B O S T O N , J O S E P H P. H E A L E Y L I B R A R Y , ARCHIVES & SPECIAL COLLEC TIONS: CONTRIBUTOR JOSEPH SCOTL AND (INKWELL BEACH)

In a year of traveling nowhere else, I traveled my own island.

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C O U R T E S Y O F M A R T H A ’ S V I N E Y A R D M U S E U M ( M E N E M S H A ) ; U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A S S A C H U S E T T S B O S T O N , J O S E P H P. H E A L E Y L I B R A R Y ,

Stately historic homes on North Water Street in Edgartown, once an enclave of wealthy whaling captains.

Lifelong fisherman Stanley Larsen, owner of the Menemsha Fish Market, harvesting mussels on Menemsha Pond.

front row, from left: Rose Guerin, Kate Taylor (sister of James Taylor), and Jemima James at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

seated, from right: Summer resident Vivian Mitchell with daughter Claire and son Roger at the Inkwell in the 1940s.

The Vincent House in Edgartown, the oldest unaltered house on the island. In the background is the tower of the Old Whaling Church.

Chilmark’s Stonewall Beach, a picturesque private beach strewn with an array of natural cobbles.

Islanders Andrew and Becky Nutton with kids Griffin and Beau at a Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival drive-in movie night.

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An archival photo of Menemsha, which remains a working fishing village to this day.

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Paddleboarding off State Beach in Oak Bluffs.

We are an island of refugees, of people who arrived over centuries to stay under the radar, to do things their way.

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across this open water is a very inviting beach, and you think, How do I get over there? And you look at your Google map and you think, That’s a pretty long bike ride. And just as you’re contemplating how badly you want to be on that deserted-looking white sand beach, a man steering a small pontoon boat pulls up to the dock near the Galley, and a few people roll bikes off it. You notice some other bikers waiting, and they get on the bike ferry—and then, so do you. The little ferry goes back in the other direction, and in a few minutes you roll off onto Lobsterville Beach. A bike is really the only way to get to Lobsterville, because there’s very little parking for anyone other than local residents, and the bike ferry is the only way to do it and not take all day.

Back to dinner at the Outermost: In winter most years, social life on Martha’s Vineyard is a series of dinners at people’s houses, sometimes potluck, mostly casual. We joke that when fall comes to the island, we get to see the faces of our friends again, so dispersed are we during the bustle of most summers. This summer— with no fund-raisers to attend, no visiting relatives, no bars or indoor dining—outdoor dinner gatherings are the thing.

We sit under lights strung from trees, which for a second lets me imagine I’m in Italy, or in a prosecco commercial. Deer stare at us from the

AT ONE WITH THE WATER So many shorelines tangled with bayberry, egrets and hawks circling, otters scampering across dirt paths—all quiet, but for your paddles. To me, Martha’s Vineyard’s magic is in its ponds; paddling is the way to find what would otherwise remain hidden. We have 27 estuarine ponds and more than 60 freshwater ponds, with hundreds of miles of shoreline and dozens of public access points. One day while making a routine circle around my pond with my dog, I see two little creatures staring at me from the water’s edge. Amber, with white spots and large dark eyes, they’re so still I think they are decoys. I quietly paddle closer. Two baby deer stare right at me, and then they are gone.

One Saturday, my friend Melissa and I kayak from Little Bridge on Sengekontacket (“Sengey” to locals), a brackish great pond that f lows to and from Nantucket Sound. We could take the long way and paddle the shores of Sengey for hours, but today we head to Felix Neck, the Audubon sanctuary in Edgartown.

We search the shore for a perfect slice of beach.

Do we want to face the sun? Have some shade?

We pull the boat up to the beach, and plunk our towels down. We spend a few hours swimming, reading, talking, eating egg salad sandwiches.

Last summer, author Wallace Nichols, who has a brother on the island, spoke at the Oak Bluffs Library about his book Blue Mind.

When we’re around water, says Nichols, “our breathing rate slows down, our heart rate slows, our skin temperature goes down, and our cortisol levels drop, leading to a reduction in inf lammation. In short, our chemistry changes for the better.”

Our chemistry has changed for the better, I can state. It’s August, and we’re on a deserted beach on Martha’s Vineyard. Across the water, we can see cars parked along Beach Road, from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown. But here we sit, watching least terns and sandpipers, seeing an occasional kayaker or paddleboarder, enjoying quiet, sun, and companionship.

Hiding in plain sight.

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ELIZABETH CECIL (BIKER)

hills sloping west. The sun sinks into Vineyard Sound. We toast each other, friends, and the amazing food.

MAKE YOUR OWN PERFECT VINEYARD DAY EAT & DRINK Alchemy: One of

this author’s personal favorites for going on 25 years now. Eat on the terrace or the porch overlooking Main Street. Edgartown; alchemyedgartown.com The Black Dog Tavern:

The place to go for terrific tavern food, right on the beach. Vineyard Haven; theblackdog.com Dock Street Coffee Shop: Classic diner

burgers at a counter, or takeout, on the harbor.

Edgartown; Facebook Lucky Hank’s: Comfort-

food specialist offering picnic tables under twinkly lights. Edgartown; Facebook Mocha Mott’s: The

Vineyard’s coolest coffee hangout. Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven; mochamotts.com Noman’s: Most of the

seating here is outdoors, with fire pits, music, and games like cornhole. Great menu with solid options for family dining. Oak Bluffs; nomansmv.com

ELIZABETH CECIL

Orange Peel Bakery:

Everyone knows Julianne Vanderhoop, whose family has run restaurants in Aquinnah for generations. Don’t miss bring-your-own-topping pizza nights. Aquinnah; orangepeelbakery.net

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The Pawnee House:

New in 2020, and featuring plenty of yummy vegan dishes to choose from. Oak Bluffs; thepawneehousemv.com Salvatore’s: Another

newcomer in 2020, serving top-notch Italian fare right off Main Street. salvatoresristorante.com State Road: An up-island eatery popular with in-the-know Vineyarders. West Tisbury; stateroadrestaurant.com The Sweet Life:

A favorite of the Obamas, offering takeout or terrace dining. Oak Bluffs; sweetlifemv.com STAY Harbor View Hotel:

Classic New England grand hotel overlooking the harbor; cocktails on the porch can’t be beat. Edgartown; harborviewhotel.com Lambert’s Cove Inn:

Farm-fresh meals and access to Lambert’s Cove Beach, one of the island’s most beautiful beaches. West Tisbury; lambertscoveinn.com The Oak Bluffs Inn:

Classic in-town Victorian charmer with rooftop cupola. Oak Bluffs; oakbluffsinn.com Outermost Inn: Sunsets,

wildlife, and great food and lodging in an

enchanting Aquinnah location. Aquinnah; outermostinn.com Shearer Cottage:

Five cozy studios with wraparound porches, nestled in the Highlands of East Chop. Oak Bluffs; shearercottage.com Winnetu Oceanside Resort: Cottages, pools,

Featherstone Center for the Arts: Celebrating its

Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary: Featuring

25th year in 2021, the island place for gallery shows, arts programs, and community events also boasts a summertime flea and fine arts market. Oak Bluffs; featherstoneart.org

miles of trails through beautiful woodlands, meadows, and salt marshes, and out to the shores of Sengekontacket Pond. Edgartown; massaudubon.org

Stina Sayre: Women’s

Greetings from Martha’s Vineyard Tours: Locals with the

European-style clothing from a Swedish-born champion windsurfer turned designer. Vineyard Haven; stinasayre.com Vineyard Artisans Festivals: Regular

showcases of island-made clothing, jewelry, dishes, and more, from May to December. West Tisbury; vineyardartisans.com West Tisbury Farmers’ Market: Local produce,

Atlantic beach, and at the Dunes restaurant, one of the best meals you’ll have all summer. Edgartown; winnetu.com

cheeses, meats, shellfish, condiments, and more, offered twice weekly from mid-June through October. West Tisbury; wtfmarket.org

SHOP

PLAY & LEARN

Art Galleries: Martha’s Vineyard is dotted with some 40 galleries, from Groovy Sue and Cousen Rose in the Oak Bluffs Arts District to West Tisbury’s Granary Gallery, the oldest and largest art gallery on the island.

Check out the directory at Martha’s Vineyard Online: mvol.com/ listing-category/galleries

African-American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard:

Bunch of Grapes Bookstore: Extensive

collection of island authors—William Styron, Lillian Hellman, John Hersey, Jules Feiffer, etc.—including some signed copies. Vineyard Haven; bunchofgrapes. indielite.org Edgartown Books: A

Main Street mainstay with a great café in back. Edgartown; edgartownbooks.com

Highlighting more than 30 sites, including the Shearer cottage and the homes of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Dorothy West. mvafrican americanheritagetrail.org Aquinnah Cultural Center: Housed in a

historical Wampanoag family homestead and filled with exhibits describing the lifeways of the island’s earliest residents. Aquinnah; aquinnah.org Bike Trails: Dozens

of miles of trails and endless destinations await (including, after a short ferry hop to Chappaquiddick, the lovely Japanese garden Mytoi). mvy.com/ bikingmv

inside scoop lead these driving tours, which culminate in a seafood picnic by the water. toursmv.com Island Spirit Kayak:

Proprietor Chick Stapleton dispenses kayaks and paddleboards from a stand at Little Bridge; tours and beach party events too. Oak Bluffs; islandspiritkayak.com Martha’s Vineyard Museum: Learn

about everything from suffragism on the Island and whaling history to Thomas Hart Benton and Jaws. Don’t miss the bookshop and the one-of-a-kind collection of oral histories from the museum’s own Linsey Lee. Vineyard Haven; mvmuseum.org Walking Trails: The Land Bank trail around Farm Pond in Oak Bluffs, West Chop Woods in Vineyard Haven, Sepiessa Point Reservation in West Tisbury, Sheriff’s Meadow Sanctuary in Edgartown— explore all these and more with links to the properties and a trail app at: mvtimes.com/ island-trails Wind’s Up: Water

sports sales and rentals of all kinds—surfboards, sailboats, and more— plus gear and lessons.

Vineyard Haven; windsupmv.com —Jamie Kageleiry

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Finding new homes for historic buildings is both a career and a calling for Bill Gould, shown in his Pomfret, Connecticut, workshop.

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THE

HOUSE

WHISPERER As Bill Gould dismantles and rebuilds classic New England architecture, he becomes historian, contractor, craftsman, and puzzle solver.

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H E OL D HO U SE S S PE A K .

Bill Gould knows how to listen.

On a warm July afternoon in Pomfret, Connecticut, Gould emerged from his workshop, stepping down off the thick granite step onto the grass, and his blond-white hair took the light the same way as the swaying hay in the field behind his house. He’s tall, lean, thick-forearmed, with the slight tight hunch in the shoulders that comes from 50 years of lugging lumber, prying, planing, painting, planting. The light in his eyes belies his 75 years.

Given his wire-rimmed glasses, shorts, and a loose T-shirt, one can picture Gould onstage with a banjo as easily as doing the work he does, preserving and relocating historic buildings and homes in southern New England and far beyond. Instead of letting a home or barn or even an old outhouse molder and disappear forever, Gould and his team step in and, piece by painstaking piece, dismantle the house, labeling each board, beam, baluster, threshold, sash, mantel, pane of glass, and stick of trim. Then they put it in storage until a buyer wants it reconstructed, at which point, piece by painstaking piece, they put it back together again. In the process, the structures reveal their secrets, and Gould has spent his lifetime listening.

An urge to build and make was inborn, he explained, sitting in his office on the second floor above his workshop, in a building he built himself in 1989 from the trees taken down when a tornado ripped through his land. He gestured at the walls, the floors, explaining

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that every board came from trees that grew right here.

How to explain the feeling of entering a place made from the material that came from the land on which the building sits, nails hammered by the arm of the person you’re sharing a conversation with? One sensitive to the language of houses will detect it. It’s a little like the difference between biting into a strawberry you’ve grown in your garden versus one shipped to the market from Chile in February.

Gould was born in White Plains, New York, and raised in Rhode Island, then went to art school in Connecticut.

He wanted to be a sculptor, but “I bailed out after three years. I learned how to get what I wanted, and who needs a degree when you know how to get what you want?” The urge toward art school reveals an attention to form, line, and beauty, and leaving school when he got what he’d needed from it suggests a deeply practical streak. The practical and the creative make an ideal combination for the work that Gould steered himself toward, which he did in part because he knew he had to make an actual living.

“Sculpture can be something you walk in—it doesn’t have to be something you put on a table.”

C A R L T R E M B L AY ( D E TA I L S ) ; B I L L G O U L D ( S A LT B O X )

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TOP ROW, FROM LEFT : Mahogany that’s been roughed to length for window frames in the Hills House (see p. 95); a cut list for window frame stock; the paint room in Gould’s workshop, including pigment in oil dating back to the ’40s.

MIDDLE ROW : One of Gould’s rare full-house restorations, a pre-1750 saltbox in Connecticut.

BOTTOM ROW, FROM LEFT : A bundle of salvaged molding to be copied; fireplace surrounds rescued from structures in Cranston, Rhode Island, and Old Saybrook, Connecticut; a nest of well-used coping saws.

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Gould talked of being alone in these old structures, and how that’s when he begins to feel the building.

“And you start to wonder, Who was here? What happened in this place?”

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all intertwined. Do walls talk?” he asked, as though the answer was self-evident.

In dismantling these old New England homes, Gould has found evidence of many sorts of stories, and in his way, he keeps these stories alive. Some get told through objects left under thresholds, behind walls, above doors.

Gould talked of slavery, of free and captive history, and his work with anthropologist Warren Perry, whose research focuses on slavery in the Northeast, and how slaves hid objects as well as parts of people deep within structures: you might find “a scab, some hair, a fingernail, a tooth.” Once he found a Bible from 1783 ripped in half, one part on each side of the lintel of the fireplace with an enslaved woman’s name written in it. There’s so much that’s not in the history books, he said.

As someone whose life’s work has him living in history, Gould straddles now and then. At the time we spoke, his flip phone was 16 years old. “You can’t do this with an iPhone,” he said, lifting his phone in its worn canvas case off the table and dropping it down three feet. Downstairs, in his workshop, he showed his hand tools with pride: a gouge, a plane. We stood and felt the difference between a railing that had been planed smooth and one that had been sanded. He showed the ribbons of wood he’d planed off the rail—long, translucent coils. Layer by layer pulled away, to reveal something underneath.

In the basement, cans of oil paint stand stacked on shelves and the sharp singe of turpentine fills the nose. He talked of the corner-cutting that goes on today, the shortcuts, the synthetics, and he’s sympathetic: Custom siding for a client is costing something in the ballpark of $50,000 for the clapboards alone. “Who can afford this?” he said.

One can tell he’s a man of high standards, of getting as close to perfection as possible, and he’s aware, too, that perfection is an illusion, that boards and buildings sag, wiggle, bend, as we do, over time.

“The work makes you conscious of the end,” he said.

“It’s all part of understanding humanity. How we live, how we die, and what we pass on.”

PRINTMAKER ’S INN (GOULD, E X TERIORS); C AITLIN E PHOTO (INTERIORS)

His website (historic-architecture.com) lists a variety of properties for sale, and typically the kinds of properties Gould takes on will run you between $30,000 and $90,000. A listing for a two-story house built in 1750 in Hartford has the specialized language of the work: Drop summers, small joists, deep chimney girts and end beams as well as gunstock posts make up the hewn oak frame. Images from another property, an 1837 Cape in New Hampshire, show intricate molding, scrollwork up a staircase, a shaft of light against beams in the attic. In the listing for the Hartford house, there’s a photograph of an early chalk drawing discovered on the roof sheathing, depicting the house with a stick-figure tree. Such are some of the messages the old houses hold. A ghosty-ness up there above the rafters, stories under the floorboards.

When asked if he believes in ghosts, Gould leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve never come in contact.” He paused for a moment. “But I do find myself to be a witness.

“My business marks the end of the line for a building,” he continued. And he talked of entering places “that have been abandoned or ruined by ignorance,” and being alone in these old structures, and how that’s when he begins to feel the building. “And you start to wonder, Who was here?

What happened in this place? ” Maybe a house had a small room, maybe it feels a little strange: “They didn’t deal well with oddities back then. Eccentricities. Deformities.

Incest. So they put them in a room and fed them through a crack in the floor.” He’s seen those cracks in the floor.

He talked of a house in Grafton, Massachusetts, standing in its kitchen and seeing light fall on a patch of floor, worn in the place in front of where the sink used to be. “It showed the wear of a woman standing there, who toiled there, worked there, took care of her family there.

You tear it up, and the story’s gone.” For Gould, these old buildings aren’t just accumulations of joined wood, walls, and stone. “There’s nothing about one thing,” he said. “Religion, politics, sex, desire, interests, they’re

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our years ago, Peter Galloway, who has loved historic architecture all his life, searched across the South for a vintage house he could move to the empty lot beside his 19th-century Printmaker’s Inn in Savannah, Georgia.

“Nothing panned out,” he says. Then he found the Hills House (1), which Bill Gould was rescuing from demolition in East Hartford, Connecticut. Much of the structure was built in the 1740s; experts attested that some timbers dated from 1692. “When I saw it in person, I knew it was the house,” Galloway says.

And when research showed that his family was distantly related to the original owners, it “made it almost seem like it was meant to happen.”

Piece by piece, the Hills House came down (2), with each component tagged and labeled for reassembly. Then it was shipped by flatbed truck to Georgia, where a brand-new foundation awaited. From a corner cupboard (3) dating to 1742, when Captain David Hills enlarged the original 1693 house, to the main staircase (4) and parlor fireplace (5), the house’s personality reemerged during reconstruction, guided in part by Bill Gould (6), his son Nate, and their crew.

In its new life the structure will be called the Hills-Galloway House and be part of the current inn. “There are not many folks left that do what Bill does, and I am just happy we are able to learn from one of the best,” Galloway says.

“Hopefully, we can do this again and help keep these exceptional buildings from rotting away, even if it is in a new location.” printmakersinn.com

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THE OCEAN EVANGELIST In photographing the drama and beauty of sea life, Brian Skerry hopes

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hi

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his extraordinary images can help save the future.

A North Atlantic right whale dives at sunset in the Bay of Fundy. These are the most endangered whales on earth, with fewer than 400 remaining amid threats from ship strikes and fishing gear entanglements.

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BRIAN SKERRY HAS COME HOME.

Having traveled to the most remote oceans on earth during the three decades he’s spent working for National Geographic, the world’s foremost underwater photographer now finds himself exploring where destiny seems to have led: the frigid depths of his native New England sea.

Skerry grew up in the central Massachusetts town of Uxbridge dreaming of exploration and discovery and adventure. When his family went on beach outings in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, he always had “a yearning to know what was under those sea waves.” And he remembers as if it were yesterday being 15 and putting on scuba gear for the first time and sinking into the deep end of the backyard swimming pool—“I felt I was Cousteau himself.” Soon after, he attended the Boston Sea Rovers dive show, where he saw the work of under water photographers. “I had an epiphany,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be an explorer with a camera. But I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t have anyone to guide me. My parents were mill workers. Nobody in my town did that. It was a lofty dream.”

Here’s how he made the dream happen: He attended Worcester State College, studying photography and film.

He worked on boat charters that took divers to New England wrecks, where the often murky and turbulent water taught him what would work with lighting and, more important, what would not. He researched marine life incessantly and sold his photos to magazines and newspapers, each dive adding to his craft.

In 1998, National Geographic asked famed underwater photographer Bill Curtsinger to shoot the pirate ship Whydah, which sank off Cape Cod in 1717 and whose cargo of treasure was being recovered. He declined, and asked his friend Skerry if he wanted to put in his name.

Curtsinger cautioned that visibility was terrible, the ship was covered in sand, and National Geographic editors gave only one chance to newcomers. But Skerry knew his way around wrecks—and his work on the Whydah has since led to nearly 30 major National Geographic magazine features, documentary films, and books such as Ocean Soul.

At first Skerry sought adventure, to be part of a mysterious, “indescribable” world unknown to most people, and to capture its breathtaking beauty. But as he witnessed firsthand the effects of climate change and overfishing and saw the lack of urgency to address them, his mission evolved. “I see the ocean dying a death of a thousand cuts,” he says. “I read a scientific paper that said 90 percent of all big fish have been taken. Coral reefs are dead or dying. I was in a unique position to reach millions of readers to give context to what the science was talking about.

“I don’t want to be the baron of doom. But you want people to care. To fall in love with these animals. To understand that every breath we take is connected to the ocean.”

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Which brings us to today, and to southern Maine, where Skerry, at age 59, lives with his wife and two daughters. Now much of his work will focus on the Gulf of Maine—going on dives off the Isles of Shoals or near Nubble Light, or making expeditions 90 miles off the coast to the little-known world of Cashes Ledge. His voice is resonant with awe when he describes what he finds there: “You see this massive kelp forest. It’s amber and crimson and burgundy, and there are codfish and lobster and pollack, and on the bottom, millions of blue mussels. It is spectacular. This could still be the future. This is one holdout, one little remnant of what it used to look like here.

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“We live on a water planet and we have inflicted great harm,” Skerry adds. “I like to think it’s not too late, that with good science and storytelling we can reverse the tide and help save the future. I know we are not going to reach everybody. But if enough of us are beating the drum, it can come together. That’s my hope.”

To see additional photographs by Brian Skerry, go to brianskerry.com. There, you’ll also find information about his four-part Nat Geo television series “Secrets of the Whales,” which is set to debut on Earth Day, April 22, as well as his brand-new book of the same name.

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SKERRY DOVE OFF THE COAST OF ACADIA NATIONAL

Park for three days straight, letting the gray seals there grow accustomed to his presence. On the last day, just before he surfaced, “a seal approached me like a family dog inching closer to be petted … [then] stopped and allowed his body to float slowly upward into a vertical position. The seal’s flippers were perfectly crossed as if he were posing for his picture, and then he swam away.” Skerry says he thinks of his career as “a long string of extraordinary encounters with wildlife—and the more you have, the more you want to have.” | 99

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ALTHOUGH SKERRY HAS PHOTOGRAPHED IN OCEANS AROUND THE WORLD, NEW ENGLAND’S WATERS HOLD A SPECIAL

place in his heart. “To make a perfect picture in my backyard is a quest for me that rivals or exceeds anything else I have ever done,” he says. “These waters soothe my soul, and I want others to benefit from that.” Increasingly now, he’ll be working in the Gulf of Maine, which stretches from Cape Cod to Atlantic Canada. One focus: the marine life in Cashes Ledge, a 22-mile-long underwater mountain range that is home to the largest and longest contiguous kelp forest in the North Atlantic. “It’s unlike anything I have ever seen in New England,” he says. And since the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other ocean, there is a real urgency to the project. “This is a place that is suffering greatly now.

If I can bring the spotlight to that, to celebrate the things that are still here, and show how it’s changing and to look at solutions, then I will have done something good.”

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clockwise from above: North American lobster, Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire; red cod amid the kelp forest of Cashes Ledge, Gulf of Maine; smooth sun star and sea anemones, near Eastport, Maine; Atlantic long-fin squid, outer Cape Cod.

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THOUGH SKERRY HAS

photographed many sharks during his career, it was a blue shark (like the one shown here, swimming off the Rhode Island coast) that provided him with his most memorable encounter. As he told Scuba Diving Magazine: “We were inside a cage for hours, with no sightings. Late in the afternoon, a female blue came along and I was so excited I thought I might explode. Without really thinking, I opened the cage door and swam out … back then, no one was going outside the cage. I vividly remember them telling me [afterward] I was crazy. I swam towards the shark as she nosed her way through the slick, looking for morsels of chum. I made a few frames before she swam away. To this day, I can remember that feeling of elation. For days I was walking on air recalling this special experience; it was like I knew a secret that no one else knew. I was instantly addicted.”

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IN HIS BOOK OCEAN SOUL,

Skerry writes: “Swimming over the volcanic sands of [Japan’s] Suruga Bay is like entering a fairy tale, with characters to be found around every turn.… I felt like Alice having entered the looking glass. At the depth of about 100 feet, I saw a soda can, its shiny exterior encrusted with marine growth. From inside the can I saw a flash of color and moved in for a better view…. I crawled to within a few feet of the can. From the darkness inside, a tiny yellow goby stared at me with green eyes from his pop-top window. I inched closer and watched the fish disappear and reappear like the Cheshire Cat. Thinking I might hear the goby speak at any moment, I focused my lens on the fairytale scene.”

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clockwise from left: Shortfin mako shark off New Zealand’s North Island; a tiny translucent shrimp (about half the size of a grain of rice) living in a sea anemone, Kingman Reef, Central Pacific; giant bluefin tuna and herring off Canada’s Prince Edward Island; blue cod and sea pens (a kind of soft coral), Te Tapuwae o Hua (Long Sound) Marine Reserve, New Zealand.

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ALTHOUGH SKERRY WANTS PEOPLE TO SHARE IN THE WONDER AND BEAUTY HE FINDS BENEATH THE WAVES, HE ALSO

wants them to be deeply troubled by how fragile the ocean ecosystem has become. While documenting the global fishing crisis for National Geographic, he photographed giant bluefin tuna—a species he calls “the thoroughbreds of the ocean” for their awesome speed and power—stacked up like cordwood on Tokyo fishing piers. That cover story came with a price: Skerry grew physically depressed by what he’d seen. He’s photographed sharks off Cape Cod, in the Bahamas, and in the Pacific, and while that work led to his book Shark, every frame he shot came with the knowledge that 100 million sharks are killed each year, many for their fins alone. But he also explores ecosystems that are all but untouched by man, and when he shows people those photos of surreal beauty—from, say, a remote ocean preserve in New Zealand, or Kingman Reef in the Central Pacific, “a diver’s holy grail”—he hopes they embrace the idea that even as we have damaged the sea, so too can we restore it. “I want my grandkids to have healthy oceans,” he says.

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WHEN PEOPLE TELL

Skerry they want to protect the oceans but the problems seem too vast, he will quote the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.” He finds hope and inspiration in the researchers who devote their lives to understanding marine life, individuals who have worked with him on projects around the world.

For instance, scientists have been studying spotted dolphins for more than 30 years, opening a new window on our relationship with these wild and beautiful animals.

This balletic photo of spotted dolphins in the Bahamas captures what Skerry has written about his own work: “I believe my most important role remains as an artistic interpreter of all that I see and as a storyteller.

I want to understand the science but want to see and capture the poetry.”

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FROM AWAY Maine had been my haven since childhood. Then a virus arrived, and with it a fear of outsiders.

By Rachel Slade ILLUSTRATIONS BY HOKYOUNG KIM

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On March 17, 2020, my husband and I f led our Boston apartment for Maine. I had no idea what the future held—at that point, no one did—but with the number of Covid-19 cases doubling every day in Massachusetts and New York, Sean and I activated our version of an escape plan.

Before the pandemic, we’d joked that if civilization ever teetered toward collapse, we’d abscond to his house in the Maine woods, get a few goats and chickens, and live off chèvre omelets. I secretly lived in that punchline, even though the closest either of us had come to animal husbandry was petting the sheep at the county fair.

Maine had always been my survival plan, though I wasn’t a Mainer, and neither was Sean. He was from suburban New York. I was raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia and had spent summers in Maine since I was a kid. My parents had honeymooned on Lake Sebago in 1967 and in spite of a miserably hot, mosquito-infested week, they kept coming back each summer, renting houses on the coast as the family grew from two to five, plus dogs, in-laws, and eventually, granddaughters.

In the city, my parents worked days, nights, and weekends to save up for their own place someday, leaving us kids to run feral in suburbia. But for one magical Maine week each year, we became a family.

At the end of August, my dad would methodically pack the Oldsmobile station wagon, my mom would empty the fridge into a portable cooler, and we’d drive 12 hours up the interstate to the Maine coast. Sometime after midnight, the sound of high weeds whacking the underside of the car would signal that our vacation had officially begun. After loading in and downing a beer, my dad would call in the dogs, switch off the lights, and climb the stairs to Mom, already unwinding with her chardonnay. I’d lie in the dark next to an open window, inhaling the cool sea air and listening to the awesome silence, which was sometimes punctuated by the bark of a harbor seal. At dawn, I’d wake and make my way to the water to watch the rising sun sparkle off the bay, captivated by the cacophony of seabirds feasting on a low-tide buffet.

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Maine put a spell on us. In Philadelphia, we were five people living in the same house. No one had any time; we merely tolerated each other. My brother Dan, for example, six years younger, was an inconvenience and annoyance, a scrawny kid at the dinner table carefully extracting curds of ricotta from his lasagna and wiping them on the side of his plate.

But in Maine, my mom cooked elaborate meals and my dad planned family hikes with his maps and trail guides. Cut off from friends and other distractions, my brother and I discovered that we had things in common. I began to appreciate that scrawny kid with the weird eating habits.

By the time my parents bought land on an island halfway up the coast to build a life quite separate from their suburban existence, Dan and I were in our twenties. The new house had more light and less baggage, which gave us room to start fresh as quasi-adults.

At the island house, we developed rituals that brought us closer together, like the twilight pilgrimages to the granite boulder at the water’s edge, where the two of us, cocooned in throws from the back of the living room sofa, watched for meteors while spouting half-baked philosophical nonsense and the occasional deep thought. When the mosquitoes found us, which they always did, we’d stumble back to the house, tripping over roots and rocks, clinging to our blankets like armor.

Those August nights with Dan were sacred. We might be small and inconsequential on a rock at the edge of the ocean under a vast universe of stars, but we were also siblings, which turned out to be another kind of marvel. Over the decades—between schools, jobs, cities, and relationships— we always found time to lie under the Maine night sky.

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the way to a life in Maine. And when I discovered that Sean unearthed a novelty bottle of hand sanitizer labeled “I *heart* had a place in Maine, I knew I’d found my man. The fact that my penis” in the back of a drawer while emptying out Sean’s he’d chosen to settle there guaranteed that we shared some- father’s desk, another Covid-eroded boundary. Sean stashed thing fundamental, almost like a religion. it in the cup holder next to the driver’s seat.

He’d bought his house in the ’90s, a decade before we Then we settled into quarantine life. met. His house was inland, about five miles from the sea. Its Maine felt like a natural place to wait out a pandemic. wide deck overlooked a small, murky pond where a neglected Mainers were survivors, I reasoned. They kept a low profile dock, occupied mostly by ducks and snapping turtles, strug- and minded their own business and didn’t go looking for gled to stay afloat. Inside, the home was a manifestation of trouble. My faith in Maine was based on a mythology I’d the erudite madman I loved. Sean had packed every closet pieced together from locals I knew. and cabinet with his books and records and magazines. On On the island, my parents’ next-door neighbor, Walt*, the second floor, the sun had bleached the Renys comforters for one, was a lobsterman and a descendant of God-knowshe’d thrown over the trappings of his life before we’d met: how-many generations of islanders. Walt plowed our driveold recording equipment, microphones, way in the winter and helped my dad get musical instruments. The house was also his small sailboat to the mooring in the BEING A GOOD a repository of family ephemera, includsummer. Sometimes, Walt would walk ing boxes of stuff dumped out of relatives’ the half mile down the driveway from “PERSON FROM desk drawers in haste after they died. his house to ours, stepping onto the front AWAY” MEANT Marrying Sean meant respecting porch in a tangle of my parents’ dogs, ACCEPTING this monumental accretion of history. who had followed him most of the way.

MAINE AS IT WAS. I worked quietly to nibble out a space Maybe his stopping by was just being WE PAID OUR for myself, and after 15 years I’d finally neighborly. Or maybe he was curious TAXES AND DIDN’T established a solid home in Maine with about us folks from away. my husband. By early 2020, I had my It was through Walt’s manner and MAKE DEMANDS ON own desk and chair, a drawer in a bureau, attitude that I gleaned basic Maine docTHE COMMUNITY. and a sliver of carpet on the second floor trine: Never give more information than WE KEPT OUR where I could lay out a yoga mat. As a required (standard fisherman’s credo), HEADS DOWN. test run, we spent the whole month of don’t bother your neighbors unless Januar y there. Our life together in you’ve got a good reason, and if you do Maine began to feel within reach. make a social call, keep it brief. Standing Just two months later, that theory in the living room in his Carhartts and would be put to the test. When the Bean boots and stroking his Abe Lincountry was shutting down, I gathered coln beard, he’d talk weather and boats provisions in our Boston living room, with my hopelessly nerdy dad, the scienthings my inner prepper thought we’d tist, born and bred in the city. In turn, need. There was the 25-pound bag of flour. There was the my dad had great respect for Walt, a man so unlike him. industrial-size bottle of ibuprofen. There was the extraI can say that Walt had a studied indifference to the large bag of cat food (for the cats, I should add). We packed modernity, the urban rush, and the comings and goings up the Subaru and headed north—this time, I thought, for of us summer people. I think he was grateful for his boat the long haul. and traps, things that protected him from a rapidly changAnd I sincerely wondered whether I’d ever come back. ing world. Practicing a kind of Olde American zen, Walt seemed to regard people like us, people from away, like the tide. We came and we went. Others would come when we arrived, Sean and I did a big, panicky Hannaford shop and, were gone. I suppose that’s one benefit to having a long famworried about bringing an invisible enemy into the house, ily history rooted to one place: You get to observe the human bathed our provisions in soapy water on the porch. I read struggle over the centuries from a remote and steady perch. somewhere that the pandemic would reveal which partner My mother spent much of her time trying to connect was a better prepper, and I was sure it would be me. Sean bought the food. I deep-cleaned and sterilized everything. I *Name has been changed for this story.

On the Sunday morning after we

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with the people of the island. She was eager to help. When masked, disinfecting everything in sight, knowing the she learned that a couple who owned an organic farm on pandemic was real long before anyone else did. As a veteran the island were struggling, she helped them write a busipublic health worker, he’d been in Africa during Ebola and ness plan to get grants, connected them with a graphic in Asia during SARS. He has friends in the WHO and the artist who could create attractive packaging for their homeCDC and USAID. He was also immunosuppressed and made goat-milk soap, and paid for the installation of underadhered to the most stringent health protocols. He assiduground pipes to get water from their house to the barn. ously followed the news, sending me links to pandemic To me, being a good “person from away” meant accepting stories almost daily.

Maine as it was. We paid our taxes and didn’t make demands I’d been sending Get out texts to Dan for weeks. Now on the community. We kept our heads down. I’d read on the he was free. porch while listening to dragsters racing down country roads His daughter worried about bringing the virus with and rounds of shotgun blasts echoing through the woods on them to Maine, which had few cases at the time. I was Sunday afternoons. I’d paddle out into the cove to extricate torn—I didn’t want them risking others’ health—but I plastic bottles, rubber gloves, and fishing line from the reeds. also wanted to protect my brother. I knew he’d be careLess easy to ignore, though, were the racist slogans that ful, but still. Sitting in my quiet house with little to do, I had recently appeared on sides of barns and road signs, and struggled with the ethics of it, thankful that in the end, it the Confederate f lags that seemed to wasn’t my call. crawl out of the ground like cicadas durAs Dan and his daughter made their I REMINDED THE ing the 2016 election. Maine had been way up the coast, they texted photos. a proud free state during the Civil War, Both wore the N95 masks he’d bought DEPUTY THAT and no state had a higher proportion of in Vietnam in January, when everyone WE’D LIVED ON men fighting in the Union Army. These there could see the storm coming. They THE ISLAND Mainers, without hesitation, had signed drove for 10 hours straight out of fear of WITHOUT INCIDENT up to end slavery; we have their letters to infecting themselves or others. I relaxed FOR 30 YEARS. prove it. But things were changing fast. when they finally got to the island. They HE ANSWERED, In August 2019, after enjoying the local were home. They were safe. fair for 40 straight years, we decided to The next morning, Dan texted me: CHILLINGLY, skip it. We’d seen enough “Beer, Guns, We took a walk last evening and the woods “NONE OF THAT and God” T-shirts, f lags, and hats the smelled funny. Maybe a chemical in the air MATTERS NOW.” or the ground? Like ammonia. Not the pine year before. trees I remember.

In the midst of our pandemic

quarantine, I took on writing assignments and FaceTimed my daughter, who’d stayed at her dad’s place in the city in case schools started in-person classes again. I implemented mandatory happy hour, just to keep up a routine.

Sean and I took walks down the country road during the day. Every night in my dreams, we were shopping or dining or traveling—so pleasant, until I realized in a panic that we were unmasked.

Time was an uroboros. Every day was the same. I wondered what would break the cycle.

Not long into this, Dan, then 44 years old, decided to leave Manhattan. He’d had the same impulse I did—to escape to Maine—but he’d stayed in his apartment until Mayor Bill DeBlasio closed the public schools. His plan was to drive to my parents’ island house with his 16-yearold daughter and their pug. My parents, inching toward 80, remained isolated in Philadelphia.

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I don’t want to recount every

detail of my brother’s descent because you’ve read enough about fevers and oxygen levels and all that. Suffice it to say that his fever shot up and didn’t quit.

He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. He lived in a delirium on my parents’ bed in a pool of sweat. He was already thin, and then he was thinner. It was alarming when his regular flurry of texts suddenly stopped. The few that I got were brief: Fever, can’t sleep. I prepared for the possibility that we would lose him.

My parents and I channeled our fear into action. We contacted the local volunteer ambulance company to inform the staff that Dan was there and might need to be transported at some point. We shared his New York physicians’ contact information. We alerted the local hospital and the Bangor hospital of his condition. The local pharmacist knew too, and arranged for curbside, contactless pickup of medications.

Everyone who might be affected if Dan needed to be moved was informed and prepared.

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My parents also asked Dan’s girlfriend, Laura, who’d stayed in New York, to drive to Maine to help. While she was heading up, Dan accidentally broke a pipe, the house being partly in winter mode. He called the plumber my dad had used for 30 years and explained the situation: broken pipe, leaking walls. As a public health professional, he also felt compelled to add that he was probably suffering from Covid.

The plumber didn’t come to service the pipes. Instead, he alerted the sheriff. The sheriff then called my brother and lit into him for coming to Maine. By then, Dan had been febrile for more than a week. “Rachel,” he rasped over the phone during our precious yet brief conversation the next day, “I have no fight left in me. All I could say was sorry. Sorry.”

The morning after Laura arrived, Dan’s physician recommended that he take albuterol to open up his lungs.

Laura called the pharmacy and arranged for curbside pickup, then started down the driveway to get the meds. Just before reaching the road, she discovered that someone had pulled a chain across the driveway and padlocked it tight, trapping them in.

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Apparently, the plumber had taken to Facebook. Someone, probably empowered by news that locals on the island of Vinalhaven had cut down trees to block outsiders from entering town, had taken the law into his or her own hands.

I picked up the phone and called the sheriff ’s office, and was transferred to the deputy who had taken the report.

Steadying my breath to hide my anger, I asked him for his account of what happened. He spoke to me coolly and professionally. There was nothing he could do about the chaining, he said. There was a time when he would’ve cut the chain himself. But those days were long gone. His department could be sued for property damage, you know? From where he stood, we were strangers, so he didn’t want to get too involved.

I reminded him that we’d lived on the island without incident for 30 years. He answered, chillingly, “None of that matters now.”

In that instant, I recognized the relentless power of fear.

During the bubonic plague, mothers abandoned children, husbands abandoned wives, sisters abandoned brothers.

Only fear has that kind of power over mankind.

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From Away

toilets. I filled buckets with snow and squeezed them into our pandemically packed fridge and freezer. I lit some (Continued from p. 115) candles and pulled up the covers. But without the Internet, neither Sean nor I could work. More than 180,000 famiThe deputy had only one question for me: “Why did lies lost power during the storm. It would be a week before your brother come up here, anyway?” our electricity was restored. We could fight off the cold I wanted to say it was because Maine had always been with the wood stove but the inability to teach his 10 classes our refuge. Because Maine had a magic that made us online made it impossible for Sean to stay. We packed up whole. Because if my brother had stayed in New York at the Subaru once again. the height of the pandemic when the hospitals were overI’ve left Maine a thousand times before, always with whelmed, he might have died. I wanted to say that Maine a faint sense of sadness and longing. That day, I felt only was home. relief. I was escaping from Maine. In the city, there’d be But I said none of that. He wouldn’t understand. And at no question of belonging or not belonging. I see strangers that moment, I wasn’t sure I did either. every day in the streets, on the sidewalks, in stores, and in the hallway of my condo building. We would wear masks.

Laura, who had no history with the place, We’d quarantine. We’d be fine. dealt with Maine like a true Mainer. She worked the chain Throughout the summer, I followed Maine’s Covid cases free and drove off to get Dan’s medicine. A day later she from my Boston apartment. Governor Janet Mills issued took him to the local hospital, where he was admitted for social distancing and mask mandates early on, and Nirav four days. In the small facility, he was treated with dignity Shah, the director of the Maine CDC, issued folksy, frank and concern, which made all the differupdates that made him a minor celebrity. ence. When you are sick with a mystePeople took the science seriously. I was THE DESIRE rious life-threatening virus, fear can right—Mainers were survivors after all. be as debilitating as fever. The nurses, In the end, outsiders like us wouldn’t TO BELONG IS wrapped head to toe in protective gear be the problem. In early August, a SanVERY DIFFERENT equipped with noisy fans, did their best ford, Maine, pastor who called masks a FROM ACTUAL to comfort him. Their kindness allowed “socialist platform” officiated a 65-person BELONGING, him to finally relax and heal. wedding in Millinocket. This one event ESPECIALLY IN Dan texted me a photo of himself resulted in more than 140 Covid infecA PLACE WHERE from the hospital. I looked past the fact tions in Maine and at least three deaths. that my handsome hiking, canoeing, It became national news. (Then again, “FROM AWAY” world-traveling brother was thin and maybe outsiders were the problem: The CAN CLING TO A pale propped up on a pillow in a blue pastor had moved to Maine from North FAMILY FOR hospital gown and yellow surgical mask.

Carolina in 1994, bringing his ideas of GENERATIONS. All I saw was that he looked … alive. faith, politics, and science with him.)

By early April, he was pretty much The desire to belong is very differhimself, working day and night on ent from actual belonging, especially in Zoom calls with his public health teams a place where “from away” can cling to in Africa and Asia, fighting to protect a family for generations, like an epigenmarginalized populations, as he always etic marker. You can say I belong here. But has. He even called the sheriff to let him it’s never really true. I envy the deputy’s know that he’d recovered and to volunfirm belief in his people. His sense of teer to assist the afflicted or elderly, offering his presumed belonging comes to him so easily. If the islanders broke the Covid immunity in service to the county. Dan later told me law, they did it with the best of intentions. In his world, the that the sheriff seemed genuinely grateful for the call. islanders had every right to defend their community from outsiders, even if those outsiders lived among them. ChainOn the evening of April 9, I gazed across ing the driveway was the most pragmatic way to contain the our pond watching the trees turn a dusky blue and was sur- problem. I get that. prised to see big, wet flakes slapping against the window. A But months later, I called Laura once again to confirm heavy snow had begun. It stuck to the pine boughs, draw- that I had the whole story. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t ing them low in graceful arcs. By the time we had cleared missing anything. This time, she added a single detail that the dinner table, the entire scene was thickly blanketed in changed my entire understanding of the events. white. We hadn’t had much of a winter until then. It felt as It turns out that the person who tried to prevent my though Mother Nature was taking a deep, cooling breath. family from leaving our house had hung a handwritAround 8 that night, the power went out. Sean’s house ten note on the chain, which somehow made the act less ran on electricity, but he didn’t have a generator. I started cruel, more human. The note read simply yet poignantly, a fire in the wood stove and used snowmelt to f lush the “Stay home.”

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Life in the Kingdom (Continued from p. 128) f ind evidence of other trail-goers: snowshoe or ski tracks in the winter, or a fresh set of boot tracks pressed into the mud. But for the most part, we have the trails to ourselves. The last person I saw on the trails was Bob himself, back in the spring. He was swinging a bladed implement to clear brush. It was raining, or maybe it was the aftermath of rain, when the trees are still dripping and the forest seems most alive. We chatted brief ly, and then I continued on my way, and he on his, and I climbed a small knoll upon which he’d long ago placed a humble bench. I’ve passed that bench probably 200 times or more, and not once sat on it. Not yet, anyway.

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There isn’t much public land in Vermont (approximately 16 percent of the state’s land base is classified as “public”), although in this regard, too, we are fortunate: Just up the road from us sits an entrance to an 11,000-acre wildlife management area that is open to the public 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. But the fact remains that most of Vermont’s land—and much of New England’s—lies under private ownership, with the right to share it belonging solely to those whose name appears on the title. Certainly one could debate the ultimate fairness of

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this, given the simple fact that not so long ago, this land belonged to no person in particular, and it was only through violence and coercion that it become “property,” something to be sold, traded, and owned, and to which access could be impeded. The phrase “no trespassing” enjoys relatively scant historical precedence.

Be that as it may, property ownership has become a constituent part of the American dream. It’s one that we, too, participate in, though we have chosen not to post No Trespassing signs, and I feel extremely fortunate that most in our community have also left their land unposted. Here— as I’m sure is true in many rural New England communities—there seems to exist an ethos of sharing, and perhaps beneath that, an understanding that no land can ever truly be “owned.” Oh sure, we might hold title to it, and we might by the declaration of law and economics draw boundaries and stake claims. But how can you own something that existed for millennia before you came into existence, and that will remain for millennia after you are gone?

How can you own something that is truly a living, breathing organism, as teeming with life and death and change and mystery as we are?

These are very big questions, and this is a very humble column, and so I come back to our neighbor Bob, his land, and his trails, from which I returned barely an hour ago. And I think about how, in the fractious era we inhabit, in which privatization has become so much the default that we forget it might once have been different, the simple act of encouraging others to enjoy the land you hold title to—perhaps even to come to love the land you hold title to— is a form of activism. A quiet form, to be sure—no raised fists, no yelling, no demonstrating. But perhaps something even more powerful: An invitation. A trust that others will respect this land the way you respect it. Maybe even an understanding, on some level, that we’re all here for only a short time, and that the land will outlive us all.

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Indigo

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Footrest may vary by model

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Life in the Kingdom

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BEN HEWIT T

Sharing the Land An invitation to trespass brings neighbors to a special place.

ILLUSTR ATION BY

TOM H AUGOM AT

long much of its northe a s t e r n b ord e r o u r land abuts the property of our neighbor Bob, who owns significant acreage; to know exactly how much would require a visit to the town hall (open four hours each and every week for your convenience!), but I’m pretty sure it’s in the hundreds of acres, rather than the dozens.

Bob’s a kind man, and I’m not saying this merely because I know he reads this column, but because he actually is a kind man, soft-spoken but not shy, one of those people you can tell is paying attention to the world and the people around him, even if he’s not making a fuss about it. I admire this quality in people quite a lot, per128 |

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haps because I’m a bit of a fuss-maker myself, which is not always the way I want to be.

Not long after we moved here, Bob told us about the trails on his property. He maintains a network of narrow paths that wend through stands of cedar and spruce and, high on the hilltop above his hayf ield, a large swath of sugar maples. From there, the trails connect to an old town road that’s long disused and is slowly returning to forest, but for the time being it offers a relatively unimpeded conduit to the back side of Flagg Pond, which sits in a shallow basin in the neighboring town of West Wheelock. Flagg Pond is surrounded by a f ine stand of white cedar, and

its shoreline is undeveloped, a rarity around these parts. The lack of development, coupled with the dense and shaggy forest along its shores, lends Flagg an ethereal, almost dreamlike quality; it’s as if it belongs to another era entirely, a time before humans had moved into all the wild places, in the process doing the thing we do so well, which is to consume their peace and beauty in our quest to realize their peace and beauty.

We travel Bob’s trails mostly in the winter, and mostly by ski, though occasionally we walk them in the warmer months too. We rarely see anyone else, though sometimes we (Continued on p. 126) NEWENGLAND.COM

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Photo by @KJP Kiel James Patrick

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