Yankee Magazine January/February 2015

80

In far-north Aroostook c ounty, Maine, where subzero temperatures often linger for days, local folks live by one winter rule: “If you can’t embrace it, you’re never gonna like it.” by Jaed Coffin

90 ///

Nanny, Rose, and I

A painting showed a young woman what love looked like. And then it came to life. by Naomi

Shulman

92 /// Return to Silver Fields

From his farm in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, naturalist and historian robinson produced 14 books of stories and essays celebrating New England’s timeless beauty. today, a new generation of readers is rediscovering his graceful, poetic prose, a paean to the mystical power of the landscape around us. by

Leath Tonino

98 /// The Big Question

Ski-resort snowmaker Doug Fichera explains the art of beating Mother Nature to the punch. interviewed by Ian Aldrich

o N th E coVE r

80 /// Culture of the Cold

features

the guide

travel

34 /// Finding the 1930s

Across the high country of Vermont and New Hampshire and down the coast from Portland to Boston, our time-travel adventure takes you from ski slopes to cities where classic New England endures. by Bill Scheller

48 /// The New Yankee Craftsmen

From letterpress printing to boatbuilding to stone-wall construction, these determined New Englanders are keeping our region’s traditional arts and trades alive. by Bridget Samburg

food

60 /// Franks & Beans Revisited

Inspired by an heirloom-bean farm in southern Maine, Yankee finds five new ways to celebrate a favorite New England pairing. by Molly Shuster

68 /// Local Flavor

Our food editor visits Olneyville New York System, an old-style Providence diner where the banter is as distinctive as the wieners. by Amy Traverso

70 /// Best Cook in Town

From her kitchen in Arlington, Mass., home chocolatier Denise Eckhardt creates rich, delectable gifts for friends and family. by Edie Clark

72 /// Recipe with a History

Beantown’s venerable Parker House was the birthplace of Boston cream pie, a chocolate-glazed wonder of a cake, thanks to that yummy, gooey filling beloved by generations of New Englanders. by

Aimee Seavey

8

On the Web

9 dear yankee

10 inside yankee

12 mary’s farm

The Art of the Trades by Edie Clark

14

Life in the kingdOm

A Hard Winter: First in a new series, the story of a homesteading family making their way in northern Vermont. by Ben Hewitt

20 first Light

Yankee rescues a cache of precious photos of old-time New England … 5 best easy ski trails … and more …

110 cOuLd yOu

Live here?

Bennington, Vermont by Annie Graves

116 hOuse f Or sa L e

The Yankee Moseyer visits a White Mountains home with plenty of pastureland and spectacular views.

118 events ca L endar

122 p Oetry by d. a .W. 128

publisher : Brook Holmberg

editorial & production

e ditor: Mel Allen

art director: Lori Pedrick

managing editor: Eileen T. Terrill

senior lifestyle editor/

f ood, home & g arden: Amy Traverso

senior editor: Ian Aldrich

photo e ditor: Heather Marcus

a ssociate e ditor: Joe Bills

a ssistant e ditor: Aimee Seavey

intern: Taylor Thomas

contributing lifestyle e ditor: Christie Matheson

c ontributing e ditors: Annie Card, Edie Clark, Tim Clark, Jim Collins, Annie Graves, Ben Hewitt, Justin Shatwell, Ken Sheldon, Julia Shipley, Caroline Woodward

c ontributing photographers: Julie Bidwell, Kindra Clineff, Sara Gray, Corey Hendrickson, Matt Kalinowski, Joe Keller, Joel Laino, Jarrod McCabe, Michael Piazza, Heath Robbins, Kristin Teig, Carl Tremblay

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yankee publishing i nc. established 1935

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ro BB & B eat rix sagendorph

Social

Have you heard the tale of Room 9—the honeymoon suite—at the Waybury Inn in East Middlebury, Vermont? In 1987, newlyweds discovered a secret drawer hidden behind a bit of fretwork on the room’s quirky antique desk. Read the story of how that discovery sparked a tradition that has spanned almost three decades! Go to: YankeeMagazine.com/Spotlight

How well do you know New England? Test your knowledge every Wednesday when we post a new mystery photo at: Facebook.com/YankeeMagazine

Pinterest.com/ YankeeMagazine

‘A Real New England Christmas’

I want to extend my gratitude for the way you truly captured a New England Christmas on the cover of the November/December issue.

A couple of years ago I e-mailed you stating my utter disappointment in the November/December issue. Last year was better, but this year was spot-on. I also like the way you included the food issue as its own mini-magazine.

Overall, the issue was surprisingly in keeping with what I had grown to love about Yankee Magazine and, frankly, what had been lacking in recent years. This year you really got it right—well done.

Victoria Sullivan Manchester, New Hampshire

‘Ask the Expert’

I’ve been roasting chickens for at least 50 of my 72 years, most times with success, but not always. Today, we tried the recipe in “Cooking the Perfect Roast Chicken” [November/December, p. 24]. I don’t think we’ll ever roast a chicken any other way again—it was the best! Thanks to you and to Marjorie Druker.

Bob White Caribou, Maine

‘First Light’

Your otherwise superb November/ December issue was marred for me by a single word, the author’s choice of “lumbers” in the story on Stockbridge, Massachusetts (“Home for the [Norman Rock well] Holidays,” p. 14), in the sentence: “A pale turquoise ’55 Studebaker lumbers [emphasis mine] into place.” Believe me, ’55 Studebaker beauties did not “lumber.” They slunk, glided, or slid smoothly into parking spaces.

Peter Kushkowski Portland, Connecticut

‘Most Controversial Animal in New England’

I read with interest Richard Conniff’s article about gray seals [September/ October, p. 106]. My brother, a friend, and I have fished for stripers out of Provincetown for 15 years. Over the last five we’ve been seeing more and more seals. The article stated that no striper was found in seal scat. I don’t know very much about seals, but this past June we were running our boat between Long Point Light and Woods End Light when a large seal surfaced near us and proceeded to wolf down a striper. I can say for sure that one seal ate one striper in early June 2014.

Bill Garrison Maurice River Township, New Jersey

‘The Mohawk Trail Turns 100’

Your September/October issue was one of the best ever, especially since I grew up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and still live and work nearby. I was, however, disappointed that you left out Waine Morse in your story about the Mohawk Trail [p. 84]. He’s the proprietor of Old Greenfield Village, which sits at the base of the Trail. Over his lifetime, Waine and his lovely wife, Peg, have put together a wonderful “old town” reminiscent of what this area was like in the 1800s. An old-time stagecoach and horse greet visitors; there’s a general store, a blacksmith shop, an ice-cream parlor complete with marble soda fountain, a drygoods store, and so much more. You can feel the Morses’ passion and desire to educate folks about the past.

Cindy Hunter Gill, Massachusetts

Open weekends and holidays from May 15 to October 15. More information at: mtdata.com/~mmwm33/ —Eds.

Follow along with two intrepid photographers who, in the most ambitious photo project in Yankee’s 80-year history, documented Maine’s re-creation of Thoreau’s epic canoe expedition into the state’s northern wilderness. Then get cozy with a special issue devoted to New Englanders’ love of old homes.

Opening the Attic Door

hen I came to Yankee 35 years ago last October, the magazine was so ingrained in the life of the region that it was sometimes hard to know whether New England was shaping Yankee or the magazine was somehow defining how people saw New England. Probably a bit of both.

Yankee exists because of New England, but I also think it’s fair to say that many people’s vision of New England has come from our pages—because even though New England’s landscapes and lifestyles have changed over the decades, Yankee ’s heart has stayed faithful. Capture the voices and the distinctive character of six states and bind it between covers. Let readers know the people who work here and play here. Let readers see how the four seasons shape not only the landscape but how we live.

When Robb Sagendorph began Yankee in September 1935, he created a blend of country wisdom, stories of people ignored by glossy publications, and photos that invited readers inside and into a way of life. Now, 80 years later, we kick things off with “Finding the 1930s” (p. 34), an ode to the time when Robb would have traveled New England finding stories for his fledging magazine, and likely stayed in the same places that our writer, Bill Scheller, did last winter. “Life in the Kingdom” (p. 14) portrays the enduring Yankee character: self-sufficient, hardworking, independent, tied to the land. “The Right Home” (p. 20) introduces a priceless collection of early-20thcentury photographs that had drifted deep into oblivion in Yankee ’s offices—until rescued, so that future generations can now share the bond between past and present. “Return to Silver Fields” (p. 92) does what Robb always wanted to do: find people long forgotten who should be remembered, especially when they have timeless things to pass along. “The New Yankee Craftsmen” (p. 48) shows that even as technology propels us forward, there remain people who still practice ancient arts and trades, whose work possesses rare beauty and stands the test of time.

As 2015 unfolds, check in at YankeeMagazine.com and follow our Facebook page for a variety of bonus content that comes along with our 80th year. All year, I’ll be opening an attic door where hidden treasures await. When I find them I’ll want to share them. I’m reading through hundreds of stories, and in time my editors and I will choose our 10 all-time most unforgettable Yankee stories. I want all of you to come along when that door opens.

This issue begins a year-long series we call “Life in the Kingdom” (p. 14), about Ben Hewitt’s daily life with his family on their 40-acre homestead in northern Vermont; photos by his wife, Penny, complement the text. The turning of the seasons on the Hewitt land means ever-changing work and play—and, as readers will discover, the two blend seamlessly in the family’s life.

Ben’s 2014 book, Home Grown , tells how the couple’s two sons are learning about the world—not inside a classroom, but in the woods, among animals and their own unfettered imaginations.

Mel Allen, Editor editor@YankeeMagazine.com

Ben’s new book, The Nourishing Homestead, comes out this winter.

Mel Allen

The Art of the Trades

ast New Year’s Eve, I bought a new car, something I do every 10 years or so. Two days later, I had to drive three hours north, to the White Mountains, to teach a workshop. In a blizzard. Baptism by fire. The car charged through it like a filly heading for green pastures. I passed accidents along the way, but I arrived without incident and felt lucky to be only a couple of hours late. The hotel was a grand historic structure from the Victorian age, restored to keep the feeling of the old while offering the luxury of the new. The car was whisked from me on arrival and put into a valet parking lot. In the morning, I took in the breathtaking view of the Presidential Range, which seemed to advance outward in every direction. Two or three days later, temperatures were forecast to plummet as low as 30 to 40 below zero. Maintenance men were on their knees in the hallways, applying blowtorches to frozen pipes. I called a friend at home to ask her to please check on my house. Her report was what I feared: The pipes were frozen. I called Glenn, my plumber, who has always been there for me at times like this. This time was no exception. He went right over. Yes, he told me by cell phone, the pipes were frozen and cracked and needed to be replaced. He set right to the task, and by the end of the day, everything was in order.

People know that this isn’t what usually happens when temperatures fall below zero. Finding a plumber then who might be available is like looking for a ripe, sun-warmed tomato in the dead of winter. Over the years, I’ve had two plumbers. The first one was Dan, whose wife was a friend of mine. They’d met in college, both of them art majors. While in college, Dan worked as a plumber’s assistant to help pay his way through school. When he got out of school, he kept on plumbing. The pay was good. He never returned to the art, but his work became his art, pipes aligned and plumb and tidily labeled. People noticed. After a while, he was in such demand that I couldn’t get him, so I switched to Glenn, who once worked for Dan and whose work was just as lovely. But I wonder what it’s like for an artist to labor in obscurity like that, the result of his work hidden behind a wall. Eventually, Dan’s wife, who had a career as a graphic artist, joined Dan in his business and now goes out on calls with him, leaving her art behind the way Dan did. Apparently, art is a dangerous profession.

A friend of mine, who once taught English and drama to high-school students, tells me that he used to counsel his students to be able to find a job in the trades, even despite high aspirations. “Something to fall back on,” he says.

Is there a lesson here? Arriving home from the White Mountains in my eager new car, I managed to back into my porch, a sickening crunch in the dark of a moonless night. In the morning, I called Michael, another artist in the trades who’s there to help when I need him. In time, the porch, too, was fixed: an erasure of the fact of my late-night miscalculation.

At the time, it all felt catastrophic, a lightning bolt from God, but in retrospect, everything has been restored, as if nothing had ever happened. I don’t know whether there’s a lesson here, but certainly a reason for me to be grateful.

Edie Clark’s latest book is What There Was Not to Tell: A Story of Love and War

Order your copy, as well as Edie’s other works, at: YankeeMagazine.com/store or edieclark.com

When pipes freeze and other calamities occur, a hero is someone with a wrench and knowhow.

Garden Adventures

RHODE ISLAND FLOWER SHOW

FEBRUARY 19–22, 2015

THURS. - SAT. 10 AM–8 PM • SUN. 10AM–6PM

The 2015 RI Flower Show promises to be the best ever! Our theme Garden Adventures delivers plenty of excitement and fun for the whole family! Speakers and demonstrations will provide valuable, cutting edge information. Visit flowershow.com for more information or call Karen Brol, Ticketing Coordinator, 401-253-0246

A Hard Winter

A homesteading family creates a world unto itself in northern Vermont. First in a year-long series.

iven that this is our first column together, I suppose it makes sense to begin with a description of our place, its features both natural and manmade, the folds and hollows of field and woodland, and the hard, etched lines of house and barn and outbuildings. Probably, too, I should introduce myself and my family, whose faces (especially those of my children, so often the subject of my wife Penny’s photography) will undoubtedly be a commonplace sight in these pages.

I am Ben Hewitt, and I live with Penny and our two sons, Finlay, 12, and Rye, 9, on a 40-acre hill farm in Cabot, Vermont, just a few miles from the traditional boundary of the Northeast Kingdom. You’ve probably heard of Cabot; it’s where Cabot Creamery cheese comes from. Fin and Rye are unquestionably products of their environment. They know how to milk a cow. They know how to butcher a hog and wield a splitting maul. They can identify at least six different edible wild mushrooms in our woods. They can shoot a gun and drive a tractor and erect a watertight shelter of twigs and leaves. They know many of the things most children their age once knew in this country.

photographs by penny hewitt

CABOT

My family and I don’t farm for our income, at least not in the common understanding of income as being composed solely of money. That’s not to say we don’t sell some of our farm products, because we do. But the majority of what we produce stays in our home, or finds its way to the homes of our immediate neighbors and family, often via informal barter. Meanwhile, the bulk of our moneyed income is earned via my writing, both in these pages and elsewhere.

I once heard a writer describe his craft as a poor living but a great life, and I can find little to disagree with in that sentiment. Come to think of it, I once heard a farmer say the same thing. He was right, too.

On our farm we currently have six cows, two of which are in milk, the rest of which will become beef at some later date. We have a small flock of sheep, usually a half-dozen or so; we raise them for meat and for wool. Each year, we fatten a few hogs on waste milk from our cows and from the dairy farm located a quarter-mile up the road. There’s a flock of laying hens, of course, and the boys husband a small herd of goats. Every summer, we raise a batch of broiler chickens for the freezer.

We have 100 mature blueberry bushes, which means there’s a day every summer that one or both of the boys come running down the field, clutching the season’s first ripe speci-

mens in a grubby fist. It also means that we eat blueberries all winter long: over pancakes, in yogurt, straight out of the bags we freeze them in. There’s a small orchard, which is really more like two small orchards, though we’re slowly filling the space between them with more trees. Every spring, we hang 60 or so sap buckets, enough that we don’t buy much maple syrup, or even sugar, for that matter. There are gardens, three of them totaling perhaps a quarter-acre, and from these we harvest enough vegetables to satisfy our annual produce needs.

opposite : When you heat only with wood, it helps if splitting and stacking count as a family outing. From left, Penny, Rye (age 9), Ben, and Fin (age 12) Hewitt. this page , bottom : The Hewitt farmhouse amid snowcovered ever greens. above : A greenhouse projects from the front of the house; at left is a multipurpose shed and workshop; at right in this shot are solar panels for generating electricity.

My family and I live in a house we started to build in the late ’90s, although, truthfully, it’s still not quite finished. This is because we built the house around us, like a crustacean growing its shell, sleeping and working in a construction zone for years. That’s not a bad way to make a home, but it does become tiresome, and as it becomes tiresome, “done enough” thinking begins to take root. The unfinished trim along the stairwell is done enough. My office, with its windows still in primer, is done enough. That temporary heat shield behind the stove? You guessed it: done enough.

Still, it’s a proud house, simple, sturdy, and tight. It’s a humble house, too, which might seem a contradiction, but isn’t. It’s proud of its humility. It knows what it is, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. House or human, I think that’s not a bad way to be.

This is a hard winter. I know this because Rye has just returned from morning chores. “It’s warm out,” he says, shrugging out of his sweater and hanging it on a peg by the woodstove. It’s 7:25 a.m.

I glance at the thermometer: three degrees above zero. “Warm out,” says my son. Three degrees above zero is warm only when it’s the first morning in nearly two weeks when the temperature can be measured in positive numbers. Three degrees above zero is warm only if the day before it never got above three degrees below zero and you had to break the ice on the cows’ water four times between morning and evening chores. Three degrees above zero is warm only if the mind and body have come to understand that cold is subjective: What is cold can feel warm. Presumably, what is warm can also feel cold, though it’s hard to imagine that now.

And I know this is a hard winter because we’re burning through our firewood at an alarming rate. “Half your wood and half your hay by Ground hog Day” is what the oldtimers say, speaking from a reservoir of experience that eclipses my own by decades, if not generations. As of yesterday, a bit more than two weeks until this traditional midwinter measure, the empty portion of our woodshed comprises at least half the available space, and no matter which angle I choose, or how determinedly I squint my eyes, the emptiness remains, the wood it once contained having literally gone up in smoke.

We put up about six cords of firewood each year. This generally leaves us with a half­ cord or maybe a bit more to carry over into the following autumn. I don’t mind passing that remaining row of wood during the muggy days of early June, when the unfilled portion of the woodshed serves as a quiet admonishment. Every year we plan to have all the coming winter’s firewood under cover by the end of May, and every year, we don’t.

clockwise from top left : Rye collects eggs from the family’s dozen or so hens; the Hewitts raise a few hogs each year for meat; Rye and Fin take a break from clearing the roof.

We cling stubbornly to a self-imposed deadline that we know months in advance will be broken—a deadline I can already see breaking by the end of February, when we still don’t have enough logs hauled from our woodlot—because relinquishing it feels like a slippery slope; we might fall even further behind. And in a way, I’ve come to understand that if we have all our firewood under cover by the fourth of July, we’ve actually hit our deadline. This is damaged logic, I concede, but it’s damaged logic that keeps us warm year after year.

I used to think we burned a lot of wood, until I told our neighbor, Melvin. He didn’t merely chuckle; he flatout laughed. “Six cords?” he said. “Try 15.” Melvin is a dairy farmer in his mid-sixties; his farm abuts the southern and western boundaries of our land. He still puts up most of those 15 cords himself, one tractor-bucket load at a time, typically gathered only a handful of hours before he’s to feed it to his furnace. Melvin has deadlines for putting up firewood, too; they just happen to be a bit more pressing than ours. I often see him on his way to the woods, high in the cab of his big New Holland. He always waves and smiles; he doesn’t seem to mind the work, nor does the lack of a shed full of dry wood seem to cause him consternation.

I try to remember this now, with our wood disappearing into the hungry maw of our big Elm stove one precious wedge at a time. Three degrees above zero may seem warm to my son, but it’s not warm enough that we

Choose a life that gives you more time to enjoy what you love, new friends who share your interests and peace of mind for your future.

RiverWoods in Exeter, New Hampshire. A retirement community that is more than you’d expect.

Sunday is our day to work on firewood as a family. Some families go to church; we cut and split wood. Sometimes I think there’s not much difference between the two.

can stop stoking the fire that is all that stands between us and frozen water lines. We have no backup heat; it’s not as if we can just decide to stop burning wood when the shed is empty, and I suspect it may not be long before Melvin and I are passing each other on our tractors on our way to our respective woodlots. I resolve to wave and smile at least as broadly as I know he will.

With the exception of two winters in my early twenties when I inhabited rental properties, I’ve been warmed by wood for the entirety of my 42 years. When you become accustomed to the particular heat of wood—dry, contained, and forceful in a way that somehow seems to embody the labor required—you develop partial immunity to other heating fuels. I can never be truly warm in a house heated by electricity or oil; the heat they produce is like a ghost heat to me, and no matter the temperature, I find myself always looking for the source, the place where I can stand, rotating front to back like a rotisserie chicken.

Sunday is our day to work on firewood as a family. Some families go to church; we cut and split wood. Sometimes I think there’s not much difference between the two. Both are expressions of faith in forces beyond our control. At the landing where I’ve deposited the lengths of beech, maple, birch, cherry, and ash, Penny and I use chainsaws to buck the wood into stovelength rounds. We split by hand; this is everyone’s favorite chore, because the satisfaction of watching a piece of wood cleave beneath a wedge of steel propelled by your own muscles is one of those distinctly rural charms, like snitching the season’s first almost-ripe tomato straight off the vine before the boys get to it. Such charms don’t wane with the passage of time.

When we split, Fin and Rye hoard the rounds of ash, which seem almost to fall into perfect wedges at the mere threat of being struck. At their ages, it’s fair enough for the boys to get the

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT : Fin (left) and Rye head out across a snowy field; Rye splits a log for firewood; “Apple” is in the lead as Rye brings some of the herd in. The Hewitts keep six cows, most of them Jersey/Milking Shorthorn crosses.

easy-splitting wood, though it occurs to me that at some point in the nottoo-distant future, this arrangement will reverse itself. “Here, Papa,” they’ll say, “you take the ash.” I’ll pretend to be

etition, thousands upon thousands of swings, until it’s unquestioned. Split enough wood and you don’t need to think or hope you’ll hit the target; you needn’t even plan to hit it. You will hit

Just as we could buy so many of the things we produce on this land, we could buy our firewood. It wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive, and I suspect that were I to calculate the moneyed returns on our efforts to fill the woodshed, I’d come to view minimum wage as something to aspire to. I’d come to see that putting up our own firewood is illogical.

offended, and perhaps I will be, just a little. But mostly, I’ll be grateful.

For now, though, I’m vigorous enough to revel in the labor necessary to reduce even the most recalcitrant logs to stove-size pieces. I love the way swinging a maul quickens the pulse, limbers the muscles, and raises beads of sweat across our brows before falling to melt divots into the snow. And I love the unheralded skill splitting wood requires, a skill that’s acquired only through seasons of countless rep-

it, and you know you will hit it, and this knowledge is quietly pleasing in a way that says something about what it means to have mastered a task so essential to your well-being.

For all its abundance and convenience, the modern world offers precious few opportunities to cultivate these skills, and I sometimes wonder if that’s what truly draws Penny and me to this life. It’s an attraction that’s not easily explained in terms of logic and reason.

But when I’m in the woods taking a break, and the tractor and saw are shut off, and it’s so quiet I can hear a pile of snow slough off a spruce bough and whump to the ground 30 feet away, I’m reminded that one of the greatest measures of wealth is the freedom to decide for oneself what makes sense. And what makes sense, in this particular moment, is that I get off my butt and haul a pile of logs back to the house so we can keep on splitting.

Ben Hewitt’s fourth book, The Nourishing Homestead: One Back-to-the-Land Family’s Plan for Cultivating Soil, Skills, and Spirit, will be published this winter by Chelsea Green.

Split enough wood and you don’t need to think or hope you’ll hit the target; you needn’t even plan to hit it. You will hit it, and you know you will hit it.

First LIGHT

Chewing the fat around the woodstove in the Cilley General Store, Plymouth Notch, Vermont, February 1926. President Calvin Coolidge’s father, John, owned the building from the late 1860s until 1917. Son Calvin was born in 1872 in the house attached to the back of the store, and as president used the store’s second-floor hall as his office during summer breaks from Washington.

The Right Home

A priceless collection of 2,000 glass-plate negatives that captured New England life from the 1890s through the 1930s had been forgotten in a box in the cellar of Yankee’s offices. Then they were rescued.

hey’ll often start, ‘I have a funny question. You may not be interested, but …’” As the senior curator of Historic New England’s archive, Lorna Condon fields countless phone calls from people concerned about the future of their most personal treasures. Family Bibles, paisley shawls, albums of vacation photos—Condon has welcomed them all into her collection. Although the reasons for the donations vary—a death in the family, or the selling of a home, perhaps—she says it usually boils down to one common sentiment: “I really want to find the right home for it.”

The photos you see on these pages come from Yankee ’s own donation to Historic New England, the Boston-based preservation society. Like Condon’s other petitioners, we just wanted to find a better place for them than their previous home, which until the 1980s was a box, forgotten and molding in the cellar of Yankee ’s offices in Dublin, New Hampshire.

The collection—around 2,000 glass-plate negatives dating from the 1890s through the 1930s—is a relic from this magazine’s early days. In the 1960s the editors bought up vintage negatives to use as stock photography. In the collection you’ll find idyllic landscapes and portraits alongside documentary news photos, many taken by early New England photojournalist Alton Blackington, for whom the collection is named. Most of these photos were packaged into nostalgic coffeetable books with titles like Yankees Remember: Stories and Pictures of Good Old Days in New England as Remembered by Old-Time Yankees. But by the 1970s, they had fallen out of use and were bundled away into a dark corner, lost for a decade until stumbled upon by our then-archivist, Lorna Trowbridge, daughter of Yankee ’s founder, Robb Sagendorph.

She catalogued and cared for the negatives, but in terms of publishing, they received little more use than they had in the cellar. (By the 1980s, Yankee wasn’t printing that many photos of Calvin Coolidge.) Like most things kept for sentimental reasons, they were, to us, effectively useless, but we couldn’t just get rid of them. Some things don’t go in the trash.

Condon notes that although Historic New England doesn’t take everything it’s offered, she always ends up thanking callers: not for the donations, but for being conscientious about finding a proper home for their collections, for stopping to consider that someone else might be interested in their stories and objects, and for not just throwing them away.

You see, this is the first step in building an archive. There are climatecontrolled rooms in every museum and library across the country filled with things that someone, somewhere,

h aying in t homaston, Maine, 1928. t his image and the one opposite at bottom were part of b lackington’s collection but might have been shot by another photographer.

Who Was alton Blackington?

a lton Blackington (1893–1963) was a yankee after our own heart. Remembered by his son as “a barefoot boy from Rockland, m aine, who never forgot his roots,” he built his career—and a fair amount of fame—by chronicling and celebrating the stories of n ew englanders. He began his career as a photojournalist for the Boston Herald, rising to prominence with his on-the-ground reporting of the Hurricane of ’38. By that time, he’d also branched out into radio, in 1933, with his long-running program Yankee Yarns, on which he regaled his audience with the lore and history of n ew e ngland, accompanied by as much folksy charm as you’d expect. He later produced a book with the same title and its sequel, More Yankee Yarns . Blackington’s close friendship with Yankee founder and editor Robb Sagendorph facilitated the donation of his photos and papers to the magazine after his death. a t the time, Sagendorph wrote that the acquisition represented “one of the finest collections of n ew e nglandiana in existence.” —J.S.

sometime, decided not to chuck into a dumpster. Preservation starts at home. Every one of us is a frontline archivist, each time we hold something back from a tag sale, explaining to our spouse, “No, no, I think I want to keep this,” or, on moving day, when we stand in decisively over a box of mementos, still sealed from the last move, but, with a sigh, finally set our creaking back to hoisting it onto the truck, bound for some new attic to haunt.

i n n ew h ampshire’s White Mountains, a lton b lackington films the sunrise from the summit of Mount Washington.

There are reasons why some things survive the countless purges of our lives, and it is exactly those reasons that Lorna Condon is most interested in hearing. She recalls one seemingly bizarre donation, a bundle of 250 greeting cards. With it came a memoir from the woman who’d kept them, explaining what each had meant to her when she and her family received it. And just like that, a story elevated into history something that many would consider rubbish. “If we can put the story with the objects, that’s really what’s important to us,” Condon explains. “It’s the story of why these things are saved.”

But for some artifacts, that’s just the beginning. They continue to tell us tales long after those who donated

them are gone. That can be especially true of photographs. Though the pictures remain the same, their meanings have a tendency to shift over time. “We bring our own sensibilities, our own perceptions, to images,” Condon says. “It’s an ongoing revelation when you work with a photographic archive.”

She produces two photos of the same building as an example. It’s an impressive, cupola-topped house in Dorchester, Massachusetts. In the first image, shot in the 1870s, the foreground is filled with people in country finery, genteelly enjoying a game of lawn tennis. In the second, shot in the 1960s, the lawn is replaced by a bleak street. Steel fire escapes rudely bolted to the home’s façade indicate that it has been divided into a boardinghouse. “When you put those two photographs together, the story becomes so much

more complex,” Condon says. “What happened to that neighborhood in the 90 years between the first photograph and the second? There’s a tremendous amount of history and story there.”

And what story do Yankee ’s photos tell us? They remain an immersive window into New England life in the early 20th century, but perhaps their most interesting tale is the one they tell about the changing tastes of the magazine’s editors. Those coffee-table books left out many of the images from

the 1920s and ’30s, presumably because they weren’t “old-time” enough. Why show a Model T when you can show a horse and buggy? But those same images neglected by our 1960s progenitors are the very ones that make 21stcentury editors swoon, which I suppose is evidence that not even nostalgia is immune to the changing hand of progress. Our sentimental connections to the past keep marching along beside us: our constant companions and baggage. That is, of course, until they aren’t. Until the day comes when we just can’t justify lifting that box onto yet another moving truck, or when we really do need that extra space in the cellar. Until that day when we decide to unburden ourselves of the responsibility of being the only one who remembers, and we place a call to someone like Lorna Condon to see whether it’s time for our personal history to become part of everyone’s history. It may seem like a funny question, and she may not be interested. But …

Historic New England holds a vast archive of images from across the region, many of which are accessible online at: historic newengland.org/collections-archivesexhibitions/collections-access/highlights/ photography. See more archival shots from HNE’s Yankee Publishing Collection at: YankeeMagazine.com/historic-photos

Former Yankee associate editor Justin Shatwell recently returned to New England after working as a reporter for the Virgin Islands Source.

right : Calvin and Grace Coolidge with their chow, Blackberry, at Vermont’s Plymouth Cheese factory (founded by John Coolidge), 1931. Although the Coolidges made Northampton, Mass., their primary residence, they returned often to their home state. Blackington’s collection included more than 250 images of the former president and first lady. below : Boston’s North End, c. 1925; Engine 6 of the city’s firetruck fleet is in the foreground.

Yankee Zodiac

Babylonian astronomers created the first zodiac, a division of the year into 12 sections, each represented by an animal or other symbol. The Greeks used the zodiac to develop a system of astrology. The Chinese zodiac can be used to determine a person’s destiny based on his or her birth date. Not to be outdone—and feeling it’s high time we New Englanders had a stake in this game—we proudly present the Yankee Zodiac. (Or semi-proudly.)

By ken sheldon

JANUARY: moose

You are reserved and somewhat aloof, but people still seek you out. When you do let others get close to you, they may find you a little scary. You never throw anything away, and you have enough return-address labels in your desk to last you for the next 27 years. Avoid Black Flies.

febRUARY: beANs

You have a hearty, wholesome nature that appeals to many people, but not all. You enjoy being with people and are often seen at potlucks and church suppers. You make friends easily, but often find later that they’re gone with the wind.

mARch: mApLe sYRUp

Your sweet personality makes you well-liked, but you do have a dark side, which some people actually prefer. Others find your taste too expensive. You are compatible with most other types, especially Beans. You will find success in culinary settings, but may want to branch out into new areas.

ApRiL: bLAck fLY

You are strong-willed and quick-witted, with a biting sense of humor that people don’t always appreciate. In fact, almost never. You have a vast collection of resealable plastic containers and lids, none of which match. Avoid Loons.

mAY: Loo N

Devoted to family, you are otherwise standoffish and complain loudly when upset, giving you an undeserved reputation for being crazy. Thrifty by nature, you bring home unused ketchup packets from restaurants. Choose partners carefully; you are compatible only with other Loons, and sometimes not even them.

decembeR: cRANbeRRY

People find you cranky and somewhat bitter, but they do appreciate your straightforward honesty, even if they tend to string you along. You don’t mix well with other types, except for Turkeys. The last weather person you trusted was Don Kent.

NovembeR: tURkeY

Unlike many Yankees, you are gregarious by nature and prefer to flock with friends rather than go it alone. You’re also a bit flighty and can lose your head if you’re not careful. Your ancestors met the Mayflower when it sailed in. Avoid Stoves.

octobeR: stove

Your natural warmth draws people to you, though you can sometimes get overheated. Even then, you have a glow about you. You have a reputation for being frugal and have been known to get three cups of tea out of a single teabag. You are very compatible with Beans.

septembeR: cANdLepiN

You like to think you stand alone, but when the ball gets rolling you have a tendency to fall in with the crowd. A true homebody, you’re rarely seen outside of New England. You hate waste and always bring home those little bottles of shampoo and conditioner from hotels.

AUgUst: LighthoUse

You are known for your steadfastness, your reliability, and your extensive collection of Moxie memorabilia. Although you prefer a solitary existence, you are nevertheless quite popular and very photogenic. You don’t necessarily like meeting new people, and your relationships are often rocky.

JULY: cLAm

A true New Englander, people think of you as quiet and taciturn, although your real personality sometimes bubbles up, giving you away. In your opinion, the novel Ethan Frome was a laugh riot. Avoid Turkeys.

Rebmetpes

JUNe: LobsteR

Yours is a shy, somewhat prickly personality, and you have a tendency to snap at people. It’s sometimes hard to get you out of your shell, but when you’re on a roll you can be delightful. You are most compatible with Clams. Lucky numbers: 2 and 4. Don’t ask why. Some people think you’re paranoid, but you simply avoid social situations for fear you might get trapped and couldn’t get out.

illustration by mark brewer

USEFUL STUFF FROM 80 YEARS OF YANKEE

What Readers Asked Yankee in 1938

Q: What would an ingenious Yankee do if he were caught out without an auto defroster?

Scene: cold, sleety night.

—Robert Carson, Iowa City, Iowa

A: An ingenious Yankee would pour some salt into a handkerchief and wind it around the windshield wiper. Or he would possibly cut an onion in half and rub one of the halves over the windshield to form a frost-resisting film. And if he were very ingenious, he would not only do that but would also take home the remaining half (or even both halves!) as a donation to the weekly boiled dinner.

Q: When should Christmas greens be taken down?

—Avis Adams, St. Johnsbury, Vermont

A: January 7, in the morning, or the fairies decree bad luck.

Q: How may winter squashes be kept all winter without rotting?

—Mrs. T. T. Rolph, Littleton, New Hampshire

A: Store them in the old brick oven of a used chimney. They’ll keep firm and fresh well into the next summer.

—excerpted from “I Want to Know,” a column of questions from readers with responses from Yankee contributors, January 1938

WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG

“Under the microscope, I found that snowflakes were miracles of beauty; and it seemed a shame that this beauty should not be seen and appreciated by others. Every crystal was a masterpiece of design and no one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted, that design was forever lost. Just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any record behind.”

—Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley (1865–1931), farmer and photographer. Growing up in Jericho, Vermont, young Bentley had many winters to observe snow. His fascination with the budding field of macro photography led him to capture his first snow-crystal image in 1885. His legacy became a collection of more than 5,000 images of snowflakes, showing that no two were alike.

NEW

ENGLAND

By the Numbers

100-200

postcards sent by retired Maine newsman Edgar Comee (1917–2005) to media outlets decrying use of the term “nor’easter”: “a pretentious … practice of landlubbers”

1837

earliest use of “nor’easter”

TWO

nor’easters dubbed “Storm of the Century”: Eastern Canadian Blizzard of 1971 and Blizzard of March 1993

48 inches of snow fallen on Bennington, Vermont, in the Blizzard of 1888, “America’s Greatest Snow Disaster,” prompting Boston to develop the first subway in the U.S.

44,000,000

volume in acre-feet of water dropped by the Blizzard of 1993, which if converted strictly to rain would have drenched 44 million acres in 1 foot of water

3,500

cars buried on Boston’s Route 128 during the Blizzard of 1978; total of 10,000 cars buried on Northeast roadways

500 width of average nor’easter in miles

TWELVE months of the year when nor’easters can occur

ZERO

nor’easters counted by the National Weather Service on a monthly, annual, decade, and century basis (NWS counts only hurricanes)

COMPILED BY JULIA SHIPLEY

How to Cook Boston Baked Beans

Baked-Beans Basics

Simmer your beans in water for an hour; then drain them and layer them on top of a chopped onion. Next, Dragonwagon says, cover your beans with “some form of fat, sweet, and savory.”

(For the traditionalist route, she recommends a melted mixture of brown sugar and molasses with pork or bacon tossed in.) Next, let the dish bake six to seven hours, “long enough for everything to permeate each other,” she says. Dragonwagon takes the lid off for the last hour of baking, “for crustiness on top.”

Buying Your Beans

Standard baking beans are Maine yellow eye or navy beans. Dragonwagon stresses the importance of finding recent-crop beans, because old beans won’t get tender or creamy. She frequents farmers’ markets, where the growers know how old their crops are. If you’re shopping at the grocery store, check the bag for a harvest date.

The Bean Pot

“There’s no logical reason why beans in a bean pot should be any better,” Dragonwagon says. But bean-pot loyalists believe they are, and you can usually find one at a good secondhand store; any pot with a tight lid, though, will work. Dragonwagon recommends ceramic, because it heats slowly. She also has no qualms about using a slow cooker.

Soaking the Beans

so that they cook evenly. Dragonwagon soaks her beans overnight or does what’s called a “quick soak,” in which she brings the water to a hard boil. Here’s an added benefit: Soaking reduces cooking time, and as Dragonwagon points out, that’s crucial for the economical Yankee.

Pork or Veggies?

Traditional baked beans use salt pork, but for vegetarians (including Dragonwagon), that’s not an option. When replacing any ingredient, Dragonwagon asks, “What role does that ingredient play?” Salt pork lends smokiness and saltiness and is a source of fat. For vegetarians, a good alternative is butter or vegetable oil. To get that smoky flavor, Dragonwagon adds chipotle pepper or smoked paprika.

The Complete Meal

Dragonwagon serves baked beans with cabbage salad or slaw. Instead of carrots and mayo, she suggests diced apples and a slightly sweet vinaigrette with a touch of honey or maple syrup. The full traditionalist route, of course, calls for steamed Boston brown bread, which is surprisingly easy to make. (Find it at: YankeeMagazine.com/ recipe/boston-brownbread-steamed ) Together, the beans and bread can be made in advance, for “the perfect cold-weather dish.”

rescent Dragonwagon finds baked beans comforting, relaxing, and fragrant. “It’s very much a Yankee preparation,” she says, “because they cook really slowly, so you get the residual heat, and you get the aroma of the beans cooking that whole time.” For beginning cooks, especially, they’re ideal. They’re straightforward, Dragonwagon notes, “and don’t need fussing. Beans are very forgiving.”

Soaking your beans in water is like “putting on your underwear before you get dressed,” Dragonwagon says. It’s the important first step. Why? Because soaking lets the beans absorb moisture slowly during baking

More beans! For a traditional New England–style franks-and-beans supper, plus four other hearty recipes, see p. 60 in this issue.

For a vegetarian baked-beans recipe, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/ veggie-beans

Beginner’s Luck

Lifelong skier and longtime ski journalist Moira McCarthy spends her winters skiing trails everywhere. And sure, she loves the steeps, but here’s a secret McCarthy can share: Some of the most beautiful moments on a mountain can be found on … wait for it … the green-circle trails. Here’s a list of her favorite easy trails in New England.

Toll Road, Stowe Mountain Resort

Stowe is famous for its gnarly brotherhood of expert trails called the “Front Four,” but skiers in the know head to the four-plus-milelong, tree-lined beauty of a green that personifies the word “meandering.” Cruise along the winding curves of Toll Road to a clearing with a delightful stone chapel you can ski to. (And reflect in. It was built in memory of a young girl who loved to ski but lost her life to cancer.) Turn past thick woods, open vistas, and sometimes even a peek at some wildlife. Toll Road was cut in the mid-1800s as a natural way to the top of the mountain, and hasn’t been changed—because good things happen when you let nature lead the way. Stowe, VT. stowe.com

Wild Kitten, Wildcat Mountain

This being Wildcat, you might have expected Polecat as the favored green. Not so. Wild Kitten is on the opposite side of the mountain and is even better. As you glide along this long yet gentle trail, you look right into the belly of Tuckerman Ravine and at the greatness that is Mount Washington. Like all good old-school Eastern trails, the Kitten isn’t wide, but it’s forgiving enough to let the skier feel at ease while taking in that incredible beauty. From top to bottom, it gives every skier a chance to experience all the awesomeness that is Wildcat. Breathtaking and gentle, all in one mellow run. Pinkham Notch, NH. skiwildcat.com

Hudson Highway, Saddleback Ski Area

One of the original trails cut at classic Saddleback, Hudson Highway sweeps you out wide from the top of the mountain to the bottom, allowing you varied views of the Rangeley Lakes, which seem to go on forever. At 9,800 feet, it’s long enough to make you feel worthy, with a drop of a gentle 2,000 vertical over that length, keeping you moving just enough. It’s the only green circle from the top of the Rangeley lift and is known as a “must ski” by even the hardiest locals. As an early-day warmup or a late-day cruise to take in the distant alpenglow, Hudson is true green-circle goodness. Rangeley, ME. saddlebackmaine.com

West Meadow—Drifter Link—Old Log Road, Stratton Mountain Resort

Sure it has three names, but this long, pretty, varied trail flows from top to bottom as one. As you wind out with a view to the east, you take in majestic Mount Equinox. Then, as it turns you to face the west, the distant Adirondacks take up your view. This long run (8,000 feet total) swings you by all that is Stratton: lovely homes, thick woods, open views, past the mogul hill where you can watch World Cup–level bump skiers (and dream!), and yes, right into the base area, where you can ski up, grab a homemade empanada at a booth, and catch the lift to do it all again. Stratton, VT. stratton.com

Bear Claw, Loon Mountain Resort

Bear Claw is a great green for group skiing. Not only is it fun enough to stand on its own (this winding trail is almost like a gentle roller coaster), but it also offers quick jumps onto more challenging trails—and then empties them back out onto Bear Claw. That means you can ski along and make choices as you cruise, always coming back to green again (or meeting up with those who veer off for a bit). It’s the longest run on Loon and is serviced by the comfortable gondola. It also has access to the resort’s Lil’ Stash, where nature meets park skiing—and where you can take a selfie with a statue of Paul Bunyan. Lincoln, NH. loonmtn.com

at); illustrated portrait by Martin Hargreaves

Wildcat Mountain’s W ild Kitten trail, pin K ha M notch, n e W h a M pshire

The Collector

When people come to the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts, they gaze at the volumes and say, “Who ever knew such a literature existed?”

By justin shatwell

on’t you know Yiddish is dead?” When Aaron Lansky (inset, top), then a graduate student of Yiddish literature, first proposed saving the world’s Yiddish books in 1980, many scholars were pessimistic, and with reason. Just 40 years earlier, Yiddish—a 1,000-year-old language that blends Germanic, Hebrew, Romance, and Slavic tongues—was spoken by more than 11 million Jews, but within a single generation it had almost vanished. With it, the key to the community’s books was slipping away as well—an entire canon of Jewish literature perilously close to being forgotten.

In 1939, Yiddish was spoken by three-quarters of the world’s Jews, but the horrors of the Holocaust combined with the pressure of assimilation forced the language out of the mainstream. (There are only around 155,000 speakers in the U.S. today.) Except within some Orthodox communities, Yiddish simply wasn’t being passed down, and Lansky feared what would happen to the older generation’s books when left to the children who couldn’t read them. He founded a grassroots organization of volunteers to scour basements and attics across the globe in search of forgotten tomes. When he began, academics were estimating that there were only some 70,000 Yiddish books left

outside of libraries. So far, Lansky and his team have found 1.5 million.

A sliver of that collection is on display at the Center’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on the campus of Hampshire College, Lansky’s alma mater. Row after row of books stand sentinel, their titles, written in goldleaf Hebrew letters, glinting in the sprawling, sunlit hall. “When people come here,” Lansky says, “they stand on the balcony, look over the books, and say, ‘Who ever knew such a literature existed?’”

And what a literature it is. On the Center’s shelves you can find everything from memoirs and modernist poetry to potboilers and detective novels. Yiddish presses from Warsaw to New York to Buenos Aires pounded out titles in every conceivable genre, a cacophonous symphony of creativity that’s now gone almost silent.

The Center is filled with displays and programs to make the story of this literature accessible to the estimated 99 percent of visitors who don’t read Yiddish, but perhaps its most important and exciting work is its effort to give these books new voice. Like excavating a pyramid one grain of sand at a time, the Center’s translators are revealing these stories to the English-speaking world, page by page.

opposite : Main exhibit area, with children’s corner, foreground, and Yiddish literature on shelves, background. this page , from top : Vintage type from the Center’s re-created Yiddish print-shop display; Dos kluge shnayderl (The Clever Tailor) , by Solomon Simon, 1933.

13 Yiddish Words We All sAY

Chutzpah: nerve, extreme arrogance, brazen presumption. In english, chutzpah often connotes courage or confidence, but among yiddish speakers, it’s not a compliment.

glitC h: Or glitsh. Literally “slip,” “skate,” or “nosedive,” which was the origin of the common a merican usage as “a minor problem.”

klutz: Or better yet, klots. Literally “a block of wood,” so it’s often used for a dense, clumsy, or awkward person.

kosher: Something that’s acceptable to Orthodox j ews,

especially food. In english, when you hear something that seems suspicious or shady, you might say, “That doesn’t sound kosher.”

kvetsh: In popular english, kvetch means “complain, whine, or fret,” but in y iddish, kvetsh literally means “to press or squeeze,” like a wrong-size shoe.

maven: Pronounced meyven a n expert, often used sarcastically.

nosh: Or nash. To nibble; a light snack, but you won’t be light if you don’t stop noshing.

It is incredibly slow work (to date, only 2 percent of the estimated 40,000 individual titles have been translated), but the mystery of it is infectious. What sleeping masterpiece is just waiting to be awakened?

“Is there a Moby-Dick on our shelves? It’s too early to know,” Aaron Lansky says. “We’re waiting to see what will emerge.”

Yiddish Book Center

1021 West St., Amherst, MA. Sunday–Friday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 413-256-4900; yiddishbookcenter.org

(adapted from The y iddish Handbook: dailywritingtips.com)

sC hloC k: Cheap, shoddy, or inferior, as in “I don’t know why I bought this schlocky souvenir.”

shlep: To drag, traditionally something you don’t really need; to carry unwillingly. When people “shlep around,” they’re dragging themselves, perhaps slouchingly.

shmaltz Y: e xcessively sentimental, gushing, flattering, over-the-top, corny. This word describes some of Hollywood’s most famous films. from shmaltz, which means chicken fat or grease.

shmooze: Chat, make small talk, converse about nothing in particular. but at Hollywood parties, guests often shmooze with people they want to impress.

shtiC k: Something you’re known for doing, an entertainer’s routine, an actor’s bit, stage business; a gimmick often done to draw attention to yourself.

spiel: a long, involved sales pitch, as in “I had to listen to his whole spiel before I found out what he really wanted.” from the German word for play

winter in vermont

REBECCA AND

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

Comfort, pure and simple.

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

Stowe, Vermont 800-729-2980

brasslanterninn.com

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

“Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

“Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.”

∙ “Having stayed at many a New England inn, I simply cannot remember any place as lovely and welcoming as the Snapdragon.” Robin, Massachusetts

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragon inn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragoninn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragon inn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

Windsor, VT - 802-227-0008 - www.snapdragon inn.com - innkeeper@snapdragoninn.com

www.VermontVacation.com

“Our trip has far surpassed any expectations we had. From the delicious breakfast to the roaring fire, we were captivated by your charming Inn.”

JESSE, PENNSYLVANIA

The GUIDE TRAVEL

THIS PAGE : In Stowe, Vermont, skiers of the 1930s take to Mount Mansfield’s slopes on the Nosedive Trail, newly cut by the Civilian Conservation Corps and soon to become a world-class racing trail. Mansfield’s ski patrol, founded in 1934, was the first such group in the U.S.

OPPOSITE : Skiers at today’s Stowe Mountain Resort on the Sunrise Trail. Mount Mansfield and neighboring Spruce Peak together are now crossed by 116 trails.

Finding the 1930s

A time-travel adventure from ski slopes to cities where classic New England endures.

by Bill Scheller

Contemporary Photographs by Mark Fleming

’ve spent the past couple of days skiing at Stowe, riding the rope tow and hitting the handful of trails cut over the past few years by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’ve been spending nights in the village, at the Green Mountain Inn, where I bumped into Lowell Thomas. The renowned globetrotter and radio pioneer was broadcasting his show from the inn, talking up the skiing on Mount Mansfield and signing off with his signature “So long, for now.” So long, Mr. Thomas. I’m going to hop into the Packard and head east on the next leg of my journey.

The rope tow? A scant few trails?

Lowell Thomas? A Packard?

Only in my imagination. I’m in Stowe, Vermont, all right, and I have been skiing at Stowe Mountain Resort , which today sprawls across Mount

Mansfield and Spruce Peak. I’ve done those early trails— Nosedive, Chin Clip, Lord, and a few others—that still thread Mansfield, although I rode chairlifts and the gondola instead of that infernal rope tow. And I’m checking out of the Green Mountain Inn , still Main Street’s only place to stay. But Lowell Thomas said his last “So long” more than 30 years ago, and I’m traveling by Subaru instead of Packard. Still, my reverie this week isn’t going to wander far from reality. I want to recreate the sort of trip a winter traveler might have taken in the late 1930s, skiing in the North Country and then meandering down the coast to Boston. I’ll drive no Interstates, stay in no motels, and mostly eat in places where FDR’s voice once came across the radio behind the counter … a counter where a

thumbed-through copy of that new magazine, Yankee , might lie next to the cash register.

“New England is a finished place,” wrote historian Bernard DeVoto in 1932, three years before Yankee made its first appearance. Well, we now know that our region was still a few shopping malls shy of completion in DeVoto’s day. But the remarkable thing is that so much of what was “finished” in the ’30s is still with us today.

I drove south from Stowe on Route 100, the road that 1930s skiers would have traveled by bus on their way north from the train depot at Waterbury, Vermont. From Waterbury, I took old two-lane U.S. Route 2 to Montpelier.

A classic Vermont town, Stowe sits by the Little River, just east of Mount Mansfield State Forest. Home to both a lively arts scene and year-round outdoor adventure, it has hosted travelers since the mid-19th century. INSET : Writer, broadcaster, and world traveler Lowell Thomas, 1934.

LEFT, FROM TOP : At Stowe Mountain Resort, modern amenities keep visitors returning to this venerable New England ski area. Here, a gondola rides high over the slopes; guests relax by the fire in a common room at Stowe Mountain Lodge, a rustic alpine-style hotel that opened in 2008.

ABOVE RIGHT, FROM TOP : Welcoming visitors since 1833, Stowe’s Green Mountain Inn hosted many of Lowell Thomas’s radio broadcasts in the 1930s; Yankee’s January 1937 issue featured a special “Winter Sports” section, with cover art by Beatrix Thorne Sagendorph, wife of the magazine’s founder, Robb Sagendorph.

Montpelier, Vermont’s capital, today has as many fast-food outlets as it had in the late ’30s—that is, none. Much of downtown looks as it did when George Aiken, who throughout his later Senate career preferred to be called “Governor,” presided in the State House. I dropped in to look around the place, which any citizen can enter with no more fuss than in Aiken’s day, then had lunch just east of town at the Wayside Restaurant . It’s been around since 1918, and it’s easy to imagine Vermont lawmakers tucked into Wayside booths, wrangling over the New Deal proposal for a ridgeline Green Mountain Parkway. Voters shot the idea down in 1936, leaving the spine of the Green Mountains looking mostly the same 80 years later.

U.S. Route 302 took me from Montpelier to Barre, then as now a granitequarrying town and a center of Vermont’s Italian American population. In the ’30s, the Italians I would have seen on Main Street/302 would all have

been of normal size; it wasn’t until 1985 that a 23-foot granite statue of a mustachioed, leatheraproned Italian stonecutter rose above Dente Park.

I motored on past that working-class hero, continuing through a downtown that looked just as busy as it must have when men with those big black mustaches were a common sight along the sidewalks. They might have gawked at a Packard with a wooden ski rack on the roof, wondering what sorts of idlers were turning up in their workaday Vermont, but today the Subaru draws nary a look.

Route 302 passes through a thinly settled corner of Vermont that likely looked much the same then, although there were no doubt more dairy farms. I crossed from Wells River—still a ringer for Frank Capra’s Bedford Falls,

right down to its own small savings bank—into Woodsville, New Hampshire, on a bridge that’s been carrying traffic over the Connecticut River since 1923.

I was on my way to North Conway. But it was getting late in the afternoon, and snow was threatening, so I put off crossing the White Mountains till the next day. I was hoping to spend the night in Littleton at Thayers Inn . By the late ’30s, Thayers had been standing behind its grand white columns for nearly a century. I should have made a reservation—Thayers was booked solid for a wedding party. I felt funny ask-

Nestled amid the magnificent White Mountains, New Hampshire’s iconic Omni Mount Washing ton Resort first opened its doors in 1902 (as the Mount Washington Hotel). Built by Italian artisans, it was owned by turn-of-the-century coal magnate Joseph Stickney. INSET : A vintage postcard highlights one of the hotel’s many sitting areas, this one next to a ballroom and fronted by expan sive windows.

from top : In New Hampshire’s western White Mountains, the historic Littleton Diner features a classic interior and traditional comfort foods; scenic mountain vistas along Pinkham Notch Road (Route 16); the grand lobby of North Conway’s Eastern Slope Inn, in Mount Washington Valley ski country, built in 1926 (as the Randall House hotel) in the elegant Colonial Revival style.

ing the manager if he could send me anywhere else that was around before World War II, but he had just the place: The Beal House Inn, a few blocks west on Main Street.

As local lore has it, when Marjorie Beal ran the place from 1933 to 1980, she had a sideline in antiques. Everything in the house was for sale, and

there are stories of skiers who returned from a day on the slopes to find their mattresses neatly made up on the floor, because the beds in their rooms had been sold.

Morning broke clear and snowless. At the Littleton Diner, I enjoyed a breakfast that conformed to the dietary guidelines of 80 years ago. There’s been a diner here since 1930; the present incarnation has been on the site since 1940. Driving southeast, I passed the site of the Crawford House, gone these 40 years, but was happy to see another legendary institution, the Omni Mount Washington Resort , spiffy as ever, open in the winter as

I enjoyed a breakfast that conformed to the dietary guidelines of 80 years ago.

it never was in the ’30s as the Mount Washington Hotel.

My destination was a smaller hostelry in North Conway, the Eastern Slope Inn , which opened under that name in 1937. That same year, the inn’s owner, Harvey Gibson, launched a ski area he called Cranmore on the mountain overlooking the town. Gibson brought the great Austrian instructor Hannes Schneider to the U.S., creating the template for all the American ski schools to follow. In 1938, he took one of the first steps out of the rope-tow era by installing the Cranmore Ski mobile, a fleet of conveyances resembling gokarts on rails. The system survived until 1988, and a few of those little vehicles remain today as storefront fixtures downtown.

Like a ’30s skier just off a Boston & Maine “Snow Train,” I stayed at the sprucely restored Eastern Slope Inn and skied Cranmore, enjoying the fact

that I could be relaxing in my room, looking up at the trails I’d just navigated, not 20 minutes after clicking out of my bindings.

I’d decided to take the coast route down to Boston in the morning, all the while checking to see how much of New Deal New England remained unchanged. That meant taking 302 to Portland, Maine, by way of Bridgton

and the southern tip of Long Lake at Naples. When I was a squirt, and the ’30s were only as far back in the rearview mirror as the ’90s are now, I took my first seaplane ride here. I didn’t see any seaplanes on the winter water, but the dock looked pretty much the same.

Portland has changed immensely over the past 80 years, its working harbor now hemmed round by one of the most smartly gentrified downtowns in New England. It’s become a renowned restaurant town, and a traveler in the ’30s would have been surprised to find a little bistro ( Duckfat ) famed for cooking French fries in duck fat. But I found something he’d have no trouble recognizing: The Porthole restaurant, a fixture on Custom House Wharf since 1929. Fishing boats were docked right nearby, and the chowder—unlike so many modern attempts—was loaded with clams.

Legendary Austrian ski instructor Hannes Schneider (right), originator of the Arlberg technique, with son Herbert in front of the base lodge at their new home mountain in New Hampshire, Cranmore, c. 1940. Herbert served in the 10th Mountain Division during World War II and succeeded his father as director of Cranmore’s ski school in 1955; later, he was the resort’s owner and manager.

In 1938 one of the first steps out of the rope-tow era was the Cranmore Skimobile, a fleet resembling go-karts on rails.

Built as a log-cabin shelter in the 1940s, the Meister Hut atop Cranmore Mountain is now a full-service restaurant offering warmth, food, and great views of New Hampshire’s Intervale and the high country beyond.

opposite , top, far left : The distinctive U.S. Custom House near the Portland, Maine, waterfront, built in 1867–1872 of granite, with marble and walnut interior.

opposite , right, from top : The exotic design of the Egyptian Dining Room in Portland’s Eastland Hotel, built in 1925–27 for Henry and Adeline Rines, prominent local business owners and world travelers; old meets new at the Westin Portland Harborview; the hotel’s new Top of the East Lounge.

I was also pleased to find the Eastland Hotel, an old favorite of mine—I’d probably slept there as a child dreaming of the day’s seaplane ride—now freshly reborn as the Westin Portland Harborview. The new proprietors have transformed the old Moorish lobby along sleek, minimalist lines but have left enough of the 1927 building’s original details to remind travelers that this is indeed a historic property. For years it’s been the place to stay in Portland, with 16th­floor views of Casco Bay that are as spectacular today as they were 87 years ago.

I left Portland to do what just about no one does anymore, since I­95 is right at hand: I kept to old U.S. Route 1 all the way to Boston. Saco, Biddeford, Kennebunk, York, and Kittery—right through downtown every one, the way highways used to go—past the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and across the Piscataqua River into New Hampshire. I must have added two hours to my trip, but then again I was subtracting 80 years.

South of Newburyport, Massachusetts, I drove straight past the ’30s and into a luminist’s scene of the century before. Here were the great marshes Martin Johnson Heade had painted, and a hand­lettered roadside sign that read “Salt Hay for Sale.” You don’t see those domed brown hayricks along I­95.

Our 1750s style cape home building system boasts beautiful timbered ceilings, a center chimney, wide board floors and custom, handmade features in the convenience and efficiency of a new home.

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OPPOSITE , TOP, FROM LEFT : Opened in 1900, Boston’s Beaux Arts–style Lenox Hotel, in the Back Bay, has been a magnet for celebrities and newsmakers for more than a century; Old World ambience at the Caffè Vittoria, established in 1929 in Boston’s North End.

OPPOSITE , BOTTOM : Snowball fight in Boston’s Public Garden, January 1932. The bronze statue of George Washington was designed by Charlestown sculptor Thomas Ball and cast in Chicopee, Mass.; the granite base was erected by Boston masons. Even the horse who modeled for Ball, Black Prince, was a local resident.

And so into Boston. Once, the traveler would have crossed into the Hub by way of Cambridge and the Boston University Bridge; now the 1950 Tobin Bridge makes the leap across the Mystic—the river that, as old Boston wags have it, here meets the Charles to form the Atlantic Ocean.

I put up at The Lenox Hotel , on Boylston Street in the Back Bay. The Lenox was the tallest building in Boston when it was constructed in 1900, but by now it’s been sufficiently eclipsed by far-larger hostelries to call itself the city’s “original boutique hotel.” To me, the term conjures up mingy little modernist joints with uncomfortable dove-gray furnishings, but that doesn’t describe the Lenox. Now that the old Ritz isn’t the Ritz anymore—it’s the Taj—the Lenox epitomizes traditional Back Bay luxe.

The Lenox Hotel was the tallest building in Boston when it was constructed in 1900.

When You Go …

STowe MounTAin ReSoRT Stowe, VT. 802-253-3000; stowe.com

G R een Moun TA in i nn Stowe, VT. 802-253-7301; greenmountaininn.com

V e RM on T STAT e H ouSe Montpelier, VT. 802-828-0386; vtstatehouse.org

wAySide ReSTAu RA n T Berlin, VT. 802-223-6611; waysiderestaurant.com

T HAye RS i nn Littleton, NH. 603-444-6469; thayersinn.com

T H e Be A l HouSe i nn Littleton, NH. 603-444-2661; thebealhouseinn.com

liTT le Ton dine R Littleton, NH. 603-444-3994; littletondiner.com

oM ni Moun T wASH inGTon ReSo RT Bretton Woods, NH. 603-278-1000; omnihotels.com/hotels/ bretton-woodsmount-washington

eAST e Rn SloPe i nn ReSo RT North Conway, NH. 866-592-0094, 603-356-6321; easternslopeinn.com

C RA n M o Re Moun TA in ReSo RT North Conway, NH. 603-356-5543; cranmore.com

d u C kfAT Portland, ME. 207-774-8080; duckfat.com

T H e Po RTH ole Portland, ME. 207-773-4653; portholemaine.com

u .S. CuSTo M H ouSe Portland, ME. 207-780-3326; portlandmaine.com

w eST in Po RT l A nd H ARBo RV iew Portland, ME. 800-937-8461; westinportland harborview.com

T H e lenox HoT el Boston, MA. 617-536-5300; lenoxhotel.com

MoTH e R Ann A’S Boston, MA. 617-523-8496; motheranna.com

C A ffè ViTTo R i A Boston, MA. 617-227-7606; vittoriacaffe.com

TH e Pu BliC GARden Boston, MA. 617-723-8144 ; friendsofthepublicgarden.org

Where to turn to celebrate the end of a long winter drive, while staying true to the world of eight decades ago? Locke-Ober is no more, and I didn’t feel like wurst at Jacob Wirth’s. So I walked across the Public Garden and the Common, past Government Center, and into that old neighborhood that the 1937 WPA Massachusetts guidebook called “noisy, garrulous, good-natured, and vital”—the Italian North End.

I dined at Mother Anna’s , here on Hanover Street since 1932. Like the other older North End eateries, this is a place that leaves northern Italian food to the northern Italians, and serves up the southern classics. And for dessert—and a shot of grappa— I strolled up Hanover to the Caffè Vittoria , a 1929 temple of espresso, cannolis, and ricotta pie.

Walking back across The Public Garden to The Lenox, I found it easy to keep those eight decades stripped away, as long as I kept my eyes on the little stone footbridge and the ducks paddling the half-frozen lagoon. When I lifted my gaze toward downtown, I saw what seemed a curtain of lights dropped from above, but which I knew were the after-hours office windows of what Archibald MacLeish called “these fantasies of glass that crowd our sky.” Well, they didn’t crowd it in the ’30s, and they needn’t crowd it for me this night. I turned toward the stately, human-scaled streets of the Back Bay, glad to have turned back the decades, from the ski slopes to the city.

View more photos at: YankeeMagazine .com/1930s

Bill Scheller’s byline has run on more than 300 articles. He lives in northern Vermont, 18 miles south of the Canadian border. He has been writing for Yankee and its family of publications for half of our 80-year history.

Hawaii Four-Island Tour

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Departs Monthly. Experience a true tropical paradise with perfect climate year round, stunning scenery and exquisite beaches while visiting the islands of Oahu, Kauai, Maui and the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Explore Pearl Harbor and world-famous Waikiki Beach on Oahu; enjoy an entertaining cruise on the Wailua River to romantic Fern Grotto on Kauai; visit Lahaina, the old whaling capital of the Pacific on Maui and on the “Big Island,” tour Volcanoes National Park; the black sand beaches and more. Your vacation will be fully escorted by a friendly Polynesian Tour Director who will provide an insider’s perspective of the islands and also includes beachfront or centrally located hotels, inter-island flights, baggage handling, transfers, sightseeing and special events. *PPDO. Plus $199 tax/service/government fees. Seasonal charges may apply. Add-on airfare available.

Cuba ~ Its People & Culture

Departs April - July 2015. Discover legendary Cuba on a unique people-to-people educational exchange program. Start in Miami and spend one-night before your charter flight to Santa Clara where you’ll begin your exploration of this rich heritage island nation. Spend 2-nights in Cayo Santa Maria and 4-nights in Havana along with your full-time program of educational activities. Other highlights include Old Havana, Revolucion Plaza, Ernest Hemingway’s house, and visits to the scenic towns of Remedios and Santa Clara. Plus, Vinales, Pinar del Rio; musical and artistic performances; cigar rolling and more. This fully-escorted program includes round trip airfare from Miami to Cuba, 7-nights hotel accommodations, Cuban tourist visa, a fulltime schedule of activities per itinerary, a YMT tour manager, National Cuban guide and 14 meals. YMT Vacations has been issued license CT-2013-301339-1 by the U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control. PPDO. Plus $299 tax/service/government fees. Airfare to/from Miami is extra.

Classic Italy Tour

Various departure dates available in 2015. Fly into the historic city of Rome. Explore this Eternal City including the famous Colosseum, Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, The Vatican City and Sistine Chapel. Travel North to the ancient town of Orvieto followed by Montecatini Terme, Pisa, where you will see the iconic Leaning Tower and the capital of Tuscany, Florence. Continue Northeast to Bologna, a city best known for its worldrenowned culinary tradition and the amazing city of Venice, with a sightseeing tour where you will see the Grand Canal. You will then head to Verona, best known as the setting for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Lake Garda, Italy’s largest lake and Lake Maggiore, with an included scenic lake cruise. Your journey concludes in Milan, with highlights including the Piazza del Duomo and La Scala Opera House. Tour includes 15 meals.

PPDO. Plus $299 tax/service/government fees. Seasonal charges may apply. Add-on airfare available.

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Departs May - August 2015. Start in Seattle where you’ll board Norwegian Cruise Line’s Jewel. Relax on a sevennight Alaska cruise through the scenic Inside Passage. Visit Ketchikan, home to the world’s largest collection of Native American totem poles; Juneau, the capital of Alaska; Sawyer Glacier, with incredible colors that constantly sheds huge chunks of ice; Skagway, where the Gold Rush began; and Victoria, BC. Disembark and enjoy a sightseeing tour in Seattle, including Pike Place Market. Then you’ll board the Amtrak Coast Starlight train for a scenic journey to San Francisco. Unwind in your Amtrak roomette-sleeper at night (includes VIP lounge). Following arrival, visit world famous Sonoma Valley and one of the area’s wineries. Complete your adventure in San Francisco with opportunities to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Pier 39.

PPDO. Based on inside stateroom, upgrades available. Plus $299 tax/service/government fees. Seasonal charges may apply. Add-on airfare available.

The GUIDE HOME

John Kristensen’s business, Firefly Press, is built around three antique letterpress printers that he calls his “dinosaurs.” The machines and the process may be old, but his products are timeless.

The New

Yankee CraftSmen

Against all odds, these men and women are keeping New England’s traditional arts and trades alive.

by Bridget E. Samburg

“It’s somewhat inexplicable, the attraction we have to these sorts of things,” says Graham McKay, rubbing his hands together to warm up on a chilly winter morning. McKay is a wooden-boat builder and the manager of Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, Massachusetts. And, like all the other people profiled in this story, he’s a craftsman devoted to preservation. But he’s not just interested in the conservation of objects—he’s trying to save an entire tradition. The following artisans are prac-

titioners of lost arts, of trades mostly replaced by the usual forces of mass production. And yet, in this era of enlightened consumerism—from locavore ethics to Etsy shops to the DIY revival—these folks are finding it possible to make a living making things by hand. Some have even devoted themselves to traditional New England crafts, working with materials and techniques that date back centuries. Here, they share the passion that inspires them to forge connections across time.

photographS by jarrod mcCabe

john kristensen Letterpress Printer

In his modest workshop on the western reaches of Boston, John Kristensen introduces a visitor to a row of antique machines lining the wall. “These are my dinosaurs,” he says, gesturing at two Linotype and three Monotype machines adorned with metal arms and movable parts. They seem to have personalities even when lying dormant.

Kristensen runs Firefly Press, producing letterpress invitations, business cards, notecards, and other printed media. This is the three-dimensional, real-world version of desktop publishing. Kristensen chooses his fonts from among 300 different cases of type. He methodically places each metal letter in turn to form words, proclamations, invitations, and announcements. Then he threads paper into one of his machines, cranks a handle, and watches as the paper and letters meet, leaving behind a distinct impression. “The problem with letterpress is that it’s slow,” he says. He must continually load single sheets of paper one by one

and crank the handle hundreds more times to complete just one order. But that’s one of the appeals for Kristensen: “I’m a traditionalist. I believe in the great tradition of letterpress.” There’s something so simple and elegant about the pressing together of paper and type. The imprint revealed is tactile, the smell of ink is intoxicating. But for all its appeal, letterpress nearly disappeared. “This is the way practically all text was produced,” Kristensen explains. “And then it wasn’t fast enough anymore.” A few

Kristensen’s process is slow, as he sets each letter of type manually, loads each sheet of paper individually, and applies ink to paper by turning a hand crank. The end result ( below ) remains in high demand.

letterpress printers remain around the country. Several are in New England, all enthusiastic, working to keep the art alive. “The human spirit isn’t willing to let these things go,” Kristensen says. Thanks in part to relationships with Harvard University and some other Boston colleges, Kristensen has much business to keep him occupied.

“There’s a very great visceral attraction,” he says. “It’s so much fun.”

FireFly Press

Boston, MA. 617-987-0599; fireflyletterpress.com

graham mckay Boatbuilder

Graham McKay grew up near Lowell’s Boat Shop and apprenticed there as a high-school student. Although he left for college and lived in England for a time, he was drawn back to Amesbury, Massachusetts, and the life of a builder. “I’m drawn to old-timey things,” he says. “This place has so much character. Plus, I love playing with boats.” And you can’t beat the view: Perched along the Merrimack River, the shop’s windows frame a perfect and uninterrupted view of the water.

The firm dates back to 1793, making it the oldest continuously operating boat shop in the United States. Simeon Lowell first began designing and building his signature dory skiffs, a popular fishing vessel of the time, in the late 18th century. For the next seven generations, Lowells built the boats here, right up through 1976,

Graham McKay loves to play with boats, and that passion shines through in the skiffs he builds at Lowell’s Boat Shop, a fixture in Amesbury, Massachusetts, since 1793.

McKay and his fellow boatbuilders work with many of the same tools that the Lowell family used more than a century ago. from top : Rigging a handmade sail; a skiff’s finely crafted interior.

when Ralph Lowell finally sold the shop to Malcolm Odell. Today, McKay works with many of the same tools— giant chisels and hand planes—and techniques that his predecessors used more than a century ago.

Some of these vessels are bought by local boating enthusiasts, others by people just looking for a high-quality rowboat for their families. And one, beautifully painted in deep hues of blue-gray, is waiting for its ride down to New York City, where it will serve as the dinghy for a much larger boat. The shop produces eight to ten of these skiffs a year to sell (in 1911, its peak year, Lowell’s produced 2,029); four to six more are built by students in the classes offered at the shop. A traditional painted dory might run $8,000 to $9,000. McKay says the price keeps the dories competitive with many of the dinghies that boaters buy to trail behind their yachts.

There are always several boats propped up in various stages of completion at Lowell’s. Sawdust lightly coats the floor. McKay and the others who spend hours putting these boats together no longer smell the intense aroma of cut wood—once pine, now a mix of cedar plank, mahogany, cypress, and black locust—that permeates the building. The shop now runs as a nonprofit organization, school, and museum.

Visitors are welcome to come by year-round and watch the boatbuilding process. “There’s still a market for this,” McKay says. “As a nation, or a world, we’re losing little bits of history, and then we try like hell to get it back.”

Amesbury, MA. 978-834-0050; lowellsboatshop.com

LoweLL’s Boat shop

andrew pighills

Stone Wall Builder

Andrew Pighills learned his craft out of pure necessity. His father was a farmer; the fields needed delineating. He was 11 when he first assisted with the building of walls on the family’s land in Yorkshire, England. “As a small child I loved jigsaws,” Pighills says. “Dry stone walling is nothing more than a threedimensional jigsaw.”

In his craft, which he now practices from his home in Killingworth, Connecticut, Pighills seldom uses mortar. “The only two things holding a wall together are gravity and friction,” he says. Walls make up the majority of his commissions, but he also creates pillars and other landscape ornaments. (In a break from tradition, he’s also started building outdoor bake ovens, which do require some mortar.) Some of his customers have an understanding of dry stone walling as a craft, but Pighills says many come to him merely by reputation, drawn to the aesthetics but unaware of

the method. He later convinces them that the mortar isn’t necessary, since it ultimately weakens the wall.

Traditionally, New England stone walls were built with rocks and pieces dug up from the land as it was cleared for farming—a great example of the waste-not Yankee ethos. “Some clients insist that the stone come from their property,” Pighills says, but he uses stone from quarries or stoneyards as well. Working steadily, he can build about six linear feet of a four-and-ahalf-foot-high wall per day. He’s outside until late December or early January, when the cold temperatures and frozen ground make construction impossible. He spends the winter indoors, designing gardens and other projects with his wife, Michelle Becker, for their landscape business, English Gardens & Landscaping. He usually starts building walls again in mid-March.

“You get so focused on the work, you can let your mind wander,” Pighills says of his craft. “It’s a very rewarding feeling to step back and know that it’s lasting.” Ever aware of history, he has studied the evolution of stone-wall design, both here and in England, and keeps a collection of artifacts he’s unearthed during construction—such as cannon-

balls from the English Civil War in the 1640s, and antique glass.

“Here in New England [the walls are] such a wonderful, historical record,” he says. “I try to make that history a part of people’s lives.”

english gardens & landscaping

Killingworth, CT. 860-575-0526; englishgardensandlandscaping.com

garrett hack

Furniture Maker

Using traditional hand tools and joinery, Garrett Hack has been making furniture for more than 35 years. Both modern elements and traditional designs blend gracefully in his eyecatching pieces. “I have the freedom to pick up a tool and do amazing things with it,” Hack says. “I love the creativity.” Much of his work involves tables of varying shapes (elliptical elements are his passion as of late), although he makes chests and chairs and other furniture as well. Hack sometimes finds native cherry, basswood, maple, and aspen in the woods around his house, and uses his Belgian workhorse, Jazz, to help haul the logs.

garrett hack

Thetford Center, VT. 802-785-4329; garretthack.com

tremont nail company

Restoration Nail Manufacturer

Using machines from the mid- to late 1800s, Tremont produces the only full

As a dry stone wall builder, Andrew Pighills chooses and places each rock with care, utilizing gravity and friction to render mortar unnecessary.

Pighills sees his stone walls as 3D jigsaw puzzles. On a good day, he can construct about six linear feet of a fourand-a-half-foot-high wall per day.

Lisa Curry Mair, shown here in her studio in Perkinsville, Vermont, has painted more than 1,000 floorcloths during the two decades she has devoted to her craft.

line of square-cut nails in the world, its signature product since 1819. The four-sided design adds character to old or new floors and backs up good looks with performance. “Because of the design of the shank, it has almost twice the holding power,” says Eric DeLong, Tremont’s president. These nails are a nod to an era when blacksmiths handforged every metal element in your home and farmers made their own during the cold winter months.

TremonT nail Co. Mansfield, MA. 508-339-4500; tremontnail.com

bill laurita Blanket Weaver

Bill Laurita is an expert on natural plant dyes, creating colors—some from roots and insect shells—and dyeing wool for his handwoven Swans Island blankets. He learned every aspect of the business when he bought the company 10 years ago and has since overseen a tenfold growth in the Maine-based operation. With five weavers, one finisher, and two dyers, Swans Island produces some of the most exquisite blankets in New England. It’s a time-consuming process, from choosing the right sheep to getting the wool spun into yarn and weaving the products. “All that handwork, natural ingredients, and attention to detail—that’s what’s so appealing,” Laurita says. The blankets cost several hundred dollars each, but they last for generations, and the fine weave, subtle colors, and impeccable craftsmanship are unparalleled. “They’re for people who want meaning in the stuff that’s around them,” Laurita adds. “There’s a story behind them.”

SwanS iSland Co. Northport, ME. 207-338-9691; swansislandcompany.com

lisa curry mair Floorcloth

Painter

Once made from the worn sails that graced New England’s boats, floorcloths nearly disappeared after the invention of linoleum in the mid1800s. But Lisa Curry Mair, who completed her 1,000th cloth last year, has seen somewhat of a resurgence in these decorative and colorful floor coverings. Relying on historical patterns as well as some of her own designs, Muir paints vivid floorcloths and wall murals, all on 100 percent cotton canvas. Her murals mimic those of Rufus Porter, the renowned 19th-century artist and inventor, who is also a distant ancestor. After more than 20 years, she has mastered Colonial, Early American, and country styles, and often does work for museums.

CanvaSworkS FloorClo ThS Perkinsville, VT. 802-263-5410; canvasworksfloorcloths.com

jeff pentland Potter

“My pottery is very traditional,” says Jeff Pentland. “I don’t consider myself much of an artist.” Those who admire his work might argue—but still, Pentland’s English-style, terra-cotta pots aren’t embellished with whimsical additions or designs. Rather, they retain a simple elegance harking back to Pentland’s training in England. He then spent 15 years working at the Simon Pearce facility in Quechee, Vermont, before founding his own business. He built a wood-fired kiln and

Saving The loST arTS: Trade SChoolS For TradiTional CraFTS

Many traditional arts and crafts are still passed down from mentor to student in apprenticeships; other craftspeople are entirely self-taught. but there are schools and formal apprenticeship programs, as well, around n ew england that offer entry into one of these remarkable trades. Here are a few of the leading venues.

North Bennet Street School

Intensive classes in crafts and hands-on trades. furniture making, bookbinding, and carpentry are only a few of the offerings. Boston, MA. nbss.edu

Lowell’s Boat Shop

This working museum and nonprofit offers classes and seminars in boatbuilding. Amesbury, MA. lowellsboatshop.com

Shackleton Thomas

furniture maker and teacher Charles Shackleton offers students a unique opportunity with a fouryear apprenticeship program. a fter seven years, a student is considered a master in his or her field. Bridgewater, VT. shackletonthomas.com

The Stone Trust

The only year-round dry stone walling certification center in n orth a merica, The Stone Trust offers workshops and classes, indoors and outdoors. Dummerston, VT. thestonetrust.org

The WoodenBoat School

Offers boatbuilding courses for children and adults. Brooklin, ME. thewoodenboatschool.com

Massachusetts College of Art & Design

Letterpress printing classes and workshops are offered throughout the year. Boston, MA. massart.edu

left : David Claggett’s tinware shop occupies a portion of the historic Old Mill in Weston, Vermont, where visitors can also see grain being milled just as it was 75 years ago. below : Claggett soldered together 133 pieces of vintage green-patina tin in various shapes to create his electrified “Philadelphia Ballroom” chandelier.

works much as farmers would have centuries ago, gardening and tending his pick-your-own blueberry patch during the warmer months and making pottery during the winter.

Pentland Pottery

Hartland, VT. 802-436-9122; pentlandpottery.tripod.com

david Claggett Tinsmith

David Claggett started working with tin as a hobby, but by 1985, he was running a renowned tinsmithing shop, selling his wares to Colonial Williamsburg and producing reproduction pieces for museums. He even made ornaments for the White House Christmas tree in the early 1980s. Today, his mainstays are sconces, lanterns, chandeliers, and light fixtures. He typically relies on patterns harking back to the late 1700s and early 1800s, and his clean-lined, Early American style exudes warmth. “It’s a nice feeling when you start with a flat piece of tin and end up with a beautiful object,” he says of his craft.

david Claggett Master tinsMith

Weston, VT. 802-824-3194; vermonttinsmith.com

marietta ellis Soapmaker

“We go back to how it was done in the 19th century,” explains Marietta Ellis, owner of The Soap Factory, where she has been producing castile soap since 1985. Ellis makes her bars with sodium hydroxide (lye), which, combined with olive oil and cooking lard, were the primary ingredients in 19th-century New England soap. A chemistry major in college, Ellis spent years researching historic soapmaking traditions at libraries around New England and at Old Sturbridge Village. Scented with bay rum, lavender, rose mint, and jasmine, her castile bars are simple and practical. For those who want animalfree products, her liquid soap is made without the lard (and with potassium hydroxide, or potash, in place of the lye), and Ellis has also added a bar made of olive and palm oils.

the soaP FaCtory Bedford, MA. 781-275-8363; alcasoft.com/soapfact

Bridget E. Samburg collaborated on The Long Road Home, by ABC senior foreign-affairs correspondent Martha Raddatz, and The Survivors Club, by Ben Sherwood, president of the Disney–ABC Television Group and former president of ABC News. Bridget lives in the Boston area.

bottom : Tinsmith David Claggett’s workshop is a testament to more than

of

of beauty, for clients ranging from Colonial Williamsburg to the White House.

The GUIDE FOOD

this page , front to back : Bumblebee, Appaloosa, and peregion beans. opposite , clockwise from top left : The perfect complements to tender beans: franks, bacon, lamb sausage, hot Italian sausage. props courtesy of bowerbird and friends, peterborough, nh

Franks & Beans Revisited

Inspired by a Maine farm, we found five new ways to celebrate a classic New England pairing.

by Molly Shuster

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DETOUR

FOOD AND PROP STYLING BY MOLLY SHUSTER

eans are one of the founding foods of America, a staple that kept the European colonists alive long enough to get their project underway. The Pilgrims arrived on these shores toting seeds for peas, but when those plants failed to thrive, they followed the example of their Native neighbors and turned to indigenous beans. From England, they also brought a taste for sausages, which functioned as a way to preserve meat and to use up scraps at butchering time.

Over time, beans met sausage in every kind of variation, from soups to long, slow bakes—a pairing that reached its zenith (or nadir, depending on your perspective) in that cafeteria classic, franks ’n’ beans.

We were inspired to revisit this combination after being introduced to Charley Baer, who grows heirloom beans on his 80-acre farm in southern Maine with the able help of four assistants: Jonathan Zoba, Nicholas Hanlon, Harvin Groft, and Jenna Darcy. Under the brand “Baer’s Best,” Charley sells old standbys like kidney, cannellini, and black turtle beans, as well as rare varieties like bumblebee, money, calypso, and Boston Roman. Some of the farm’s oldest varieties, including yellow eye, Jacob’s cattle, and sulphur, date back to Colonial times.

Charley discovered farming in the early 1980s, while visiting friends in central Maine who had apprenticed under

a bean farmer. The farmer had taught them his trade, then sold them his equipment. Charley came to help on weekends, the farm grew, and one or two bean varieties became five, then 10 and 20. “You get your first tractor and it’s all downhill from there,” he says.

Charley’s heirlooms are not only healthy, they’re beautiful. Ranging in size, shape, pattern, and color, they’re a world apart from commodity beans. The farming methods and equipment used to produce them—his gear includes 1948 and 1952 International Farmall tractors, a 1950s Bidwell bean combine, and century-old sorting tables— hark back to a time when local, smaller-scale food production wasn’t the zeitgeist but simply the way of life.

Just down the road from Charley’s farm, his neighbors, Becky and Phil Brand of Brandmoore Farm, produce highquality bacon, pork chops, and sausages (as well as raw dairy products, including grass-fed milk, yogurt, and cream). Young and ambitious, they’ve been running Brandmoore since 2012. “We’re having fun, and we have no trouble falling asleep at night,” Becky says with a smile.

Rich and savory, Brandmoore’s sausages are a perfect counterpoint to Charley’s beans. Meanwhile, in other corners of New England, you can find additional delicious sausages and smoked meats, some made only with locally raised animals (see “Sourcing Local Sausages,” p. 66). Inspired by this abundance, we explored this classic pairing in many forms—in pasta, soup, classic baked beans, stews, and even a salad.

this page : Charley Baer still uses a 1952 International Farmall tractor to tend his bean fields in South Berwick, Maine. He’s one of just 18 dried-bean growers in the state. baersbest.com

opposite , from left : Baer in front of his barn; Jonathan Zoba, an assistant at Baer’s Best, sorts freshly harvested beans; Baer inspects a bean pod.

ClassiC Baked Franks & Beans

total time : about 6 to 8 hours ; hands- on time : 30 minutes

We couldn’t call this story “Franks & Beans” without this classic, could we? This from-scratch recipe will have you seeing the dish in a new light. Serve with brown bread for authenticity.

1 pound dried yellow-eye beans or other white beans such as great Northern or navy (see “A Special Note,” middle column, top)

3 bay leaves

6 slices thick bacon, cut into 1/2 -inch pieces

1 onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1/2 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons molasses

1 1/2 teaspoons dry mustard

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

3 hot dogs, sliced into ½-inch rounds

Place the beans and bay leaves in a 3to 4-quart pot and cover with about 4 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil; then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer gently until the beans are tender but

a speC ial n ote: Charley baer’s beans come to market fresher than most of the beans you’ll find at the supermarket. If you’re using fully dried beans, give them an overnight soak before cooking. Drain the beans; then proceed with the recipe as written.

still hold their shape, about 1 hour 15 minutes. With a slotted spoon, transfer the beans to a bowl, reserving the cooking liquid. Discard the bay leaves.

Preheat your oven to 275°. Set a 4- to 5-quart pot over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until golden and crisp. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the bacon to a plate, leaving the drippings in the pot.

Add the onion and garlic to the pot, and cook, stirring, until translucent, about 6 minutes. Add the tomato paste and cook for a minute or two until fragrant; then remove the pot from the heat. Stir in the maple syrup, molasses, mustard, and salt. Add the beans and bacon and stir gently to combine. Pour the beans’ cooking liquid in, just to the level of the beans, about 1.5 cups (add a little water if necessary). Cover with a lid.

Bake until the beans are tender, at least 4 hours or up to 6 hours. Stir in the hot-dog slices for the last hour of cooking. Yield: 6 servings

Warm Bean & squash salad

total time : about 1 hour 40 minutes ; hands- on time : 40 minutes

This dinner salad, with sweet squash, savory sausage, and crunchy kale, is a meal in itself.

1 cup dried peregion beans or other beans, such as pinto or cannellini (see “A Special Note,” middle column, top)

1 acorn squash, quartered, seeded, and cut into 1-inch-thick slices

2 tablespoons olive oil, divided, plus 1/2 cup olive oil

1 teaspoon kosher salt, divided, plus more to taste

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, divided, plus more to taste

12 shallots, peeled

1/2 clove garlic, minced

1/2 lemon, juiced

3 tablespoons apple-cider vinegar

2 teaspoons dijon mustard

4 sausages of your choice (about 1 pound total)

1 bunch kale, ribbed and finely shredded

Put the beans in a 3- to 4-quart pot and cover with about 4 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil; then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer gently until the beans are tender but still hold their shape, about 1 hour 15 minutes.

pasta with sausage, arugula & breadcrumbs recipe, p. 65

warm bean & squash salad recipe, p. 63

bean& chorizo stew recipe, p. 65

classic baked franks & beans recipe, p. 63

Once the beans have been cooking about 40 minutes, prepare the vegetables. Preheat your oven to 400°. Toss the squash with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and season with ½ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Roast 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, on a second baking sheet, toss the shallots with 1 tablespoon of olive oil and season with the remaining salt and pepper.

Once the squash has roasted 20 minutes, flip the slices. Return to the oven, along with the shallots. Roast both on baking sheets another 20 minutes, or until the vegetables have browned and become tender.

Meanwhile, make the dressing: Put the garlic, lemon juice, and apple-cider vinegar in a bowl and whisk to combine. In a slow, steady stream, whisk in the remaining ½ cup olive oil until emulsified. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Prick the sausages all over with a fork. Set a skillet over mediumhigh heat and cook the sausages until browned and cooked through, about 5 to 6 minutes per side.

Once the beans are tender, drain them. Toss with about a third of the salad dressing. In a separate large bowl, toss the kale and roasted vegetables with the remaining dressing. Top with the beans and sausages. Serve immediately. Yield: 4 servings

Pasta with sausage, arugula & BreadcrumBs

total time : about 1 hour 35 minutes ; hands- on time : 40 minutes

Beans and pasta are a popular combination in Italy, as anyone who has eaten pasta e fagiole can attest. Earthy and topped with toasted walnuts and breadcrumbs, this pasta salad can be served hot or at room temperature—a great choice for buffets.

1 cup dried sulphur beans or other beans, such as cannellini or navy

(see “A Special Note,” p. 63)

1 bay leaf

1

8 cloves garlic, divided

3 slices crusty white bread, crusts removed

1/3 cup toasted walnuts

4 tablespoons olive oil, divided

1/2 pounds hot Italian sausage, casings removed

1 medium-size onion, thinly sliced

8 ounces short dried pasta such as campanelle, gemelli, or fusilli

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

3 cups arugula

Place the beans, bay leaf, and 3 lightly smashed garlic cloves in a 3- to 4-quart pot and cover with about 4 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil; then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer gently until the beans are tender but still hold their shape, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Drain, reserving 1 cup of the cooking liquid. Discard the bay leaf and garlic. Meanwhile, prepare the remaining elements as the beans are cooking. To make the breadcrumbs, tear the bread into chunks and put in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until finely ground. Add the walnuts and 1 garlic clove, and pulse until finely ground.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a medium-size skillet over medium heat. Add the breadcrumb mixture, and toast, stirring often, until golden-brown. Transfer to a bowl. Chop the remaining 4 garlic cloves finely and set aside.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet over medium heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking it up with a spoon as you go, until golden-brown and cooked through. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a plate, reserving the drippings in the skillet. Add the onion and chopped garlic to the skillet and sauté until translucent, about 6 minutes. Return the sausage to the skillet. Keep warm.

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook according to the package directions until al dente ; then drain. Add the pasta and cooked beans to the sausage and onions. Toss to combine. If dry, add some of the reserved bean cooking liquid. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Add the arugula and toss gently to combine. Transfer to a serving platter and top with the breadcrumbs. Serve immediately. Yield: 6 servings

Bean & c horizo stew

total time : about 1 hour 45 minutes ; hands- on time : 30 minutes

Sausage, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and beans are the familiar basis of this cozy soup. What’s so surprising is how much zesty flavor explodes from such a simple preparation.

1 cup dried Appaloosa beans or other beans, such as soldier or pinto (see “A Special Note,” p. 63)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 medium-size onion, finely diced

2 carrots, sliced into 1/4 -inch rounds

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

6 cups reduced-sodium chicken stock

2 medium-size ‘Yukon Gold’ potatoes, cut into 1-inch dice

8 ounces dried chorizo, sliced into 1/4 -inch-thick rounds

Jonathan Zoba (left) and Nicholas Hanlon bag beans in loose-weave burlap, ready for slow drying in the barn.

Sourcing LocaL SauSageS

Brandmoore Farm

Brandmoore produces an array of fresh goods that are available from the farm store, open daily. Products include free-range pork (bacon, ham, sausages, pork belly, and special-order cuts), grass-fed beef, grass-fed raw milk and dairy products, organic eggs, hay, and a range of organic produce.

70 Sligo Road, Rollinsford, NH. 603-828-2402; brandmoorefarm.com

m eat m arket

Winner of a Yankee Food a ward for its dried sausages, this butcher shop also earns praise for its excellent fresh sausages in flavors such as sweet i talian and sriracha–cilantro.

389 Stockbridge Road, Great Barrington, MA. 413-528-2022; themeatmarketgb.com

n ew e ngland CharC uterie o perating out of m oody’s Delicatessen while building their own facility a mile down the road, this café and gourmet food market produces a variety of homemade meats and charcuterie. n ew england c harcuterie also offers a beautiful selection of prepared foods and provides catering services for private events.

468 Moody St., Waltham, MA. 781-216-8732; newenglandcharcuterie.com

n orth Country smokehouse

Producing a variety of artisanal smoked goods, n orth c ounty offers a wide selection of pork products and also sells smoked chicken, duck, turkey, and cheese.

471 Sullivan St., Claremont, NH. 603-543-0234; ncsmokehouse.com

Vermont smoke & Cure

Under its “Five k nives” branded line, Vermont Smoke & cure produces delicious links using only Vermont-raised pork.

10156 Vermont Route 116, Hinesburg, VT. 802-482-4666; vtsmokeandcure.com

3 cups shredded savoy cabbage, lightly packed Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Put the beans in a 3- to 4-quart pot and cover with about 4 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil; then reduce heat to a simmer. Cook until the beans are tender but still hold their shape, about 1 hour 15 minutes. With a slotted spoon, transfer the beans to a bowl, reserving the cooking liquid.

In a 4- to 5-quart pot, warm the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until translucent, about 6 minutes. Add the carrots and garlic and cook until the garlic is fragrant and softened, about 2 minutes. Add the potatoes, chorizo, chicken stock, beans, and 2 cups of the reserved bean cooking liquid (add a bit of water if needed).

Simmer until the carrots and potatoes are tender, about 15 minutes. Add the cabbage and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Cassoulet

total time : 3 hours 45 minutes ; hands- on time : 45 minutes

This is, admittedly, a Sunday dish, something to make over the course of the afternoon, likely for guests. Still, we’ve simplified this classic French recipe, cutting the long list of ingredients into something more manageable. What remains: plenty of flavor and pure cozy comfort.

1 pound dried bumblebee beans or other white beans, such as great Northern or cannellini (see “A Special Note,” p. 63)

5 bay leaves, divided

6 tablespoons duck fat, divided (or substitute chicken fat, olive oil, or butter)

3/4 pound lamb sausages (or substitute pork sausages)

3/4 pound pork sausages

1 medium-size onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

1 14.5-ounce can diced tomatoes

2 whole legs duck confit, cut at the joint into thigh and drumstick (about 1.5 to 2 pounds total)

21/2 –31/2 cups reduced-sodium chicken stock

1 1/2 cups fresh breadcrumbs

Place the beans and 3 bay leaves in a 4- to 5-quart pot and cover with about 4 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil; then reduce heat to a simmer. Simmer gently until the beans are tender but still hold their shape, about 1 hour 15 minutes. Drain, and discard the bay leaves. Set aside.

Preheat your oven to 350°. In a 4- to 5-quart heavy-bottomed pot, heat 4 tablespoons of duck fat over medium heat. Add the sausages and sear, in batches if necessary, until well browned on all sides. Transfer to a plate.

Add the onion and garlic to the pot and sauté until softened and translucent, about 6 minutes. Add the beans, thyme, tomatoes, and remaining 2 bay leaves, and season with freshly ground pepper. Stir gently to combine.

Nestle the sausages and duck confit into the beans so that they’re mostly submerged. Add enough chicken stock to just cover the ingredients. Bring to a boil; then cover the pot with a lid and place in the oven. Bake 1 hour. Uncover and bake 30 minutes more.

Meanwhile, warm the remaining 2 tablespoons of duck fat in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the breadcrumbs and toast, stirring often, until golden brown.

Top the cassoulet with the breadcrumbs and bake another 30 minutes, uncovered. Let cassoulet cool slightly and discard the bay leaves before serving. Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Share your favorite bean recipes with us at: Facebook.com/YankeeMagazine

Molly Shuster is a food stylist, writer, and recipe developer in Boston and New York. mollyshuster.com

Olneyville New York System

gagne

A Providence diner with its own brand of dinner theater.

By Amy Tr A v E rso

lneyville is a little wedge of land on Providence’s west side, a former mill district with no mills left. Signs here read “Cash for Gold,” “Grow supplies,” “Rent-a-Center.” If Rhode Island’s economy has been in the doldrums, Olneyville’s looks more like clinical depression.

It’s an old neighborhood, home to successive waves of immigrants: Irish, French, Polish, Dominican. Industries and people come and go. But at the corner of Plainfield and Dike streets, one little diner with a red neon sign serves as both anchor and magnet, drawing people back to the neighborhood with dinner for five bucks and a floor show for free.

Olneyville New York System makes hot wieners. Not hot dogs. Order a hot dog and they’ll pretend they can’t hear you. The wieners (pronounced “wee-nehs”) are a mixture of pork, beef, and veal in natural casing, cut into lengths, served in a steamed bun with meat sauce, mustard, chopped onion, and celery salt. That’s called “all the way.” You order two or three or six wieners all the way, with a coffee milk and a side of fries with vinegar and salt, maybe ketchup.

Olneyville’s wieners are snappy, tangy, and richly meaty. They’re smaller than hot dogs, which means you can down three with great pleasure and only a little guilt. But the food, good as it is, is only half the draw. The rest is in the theater of the place. When customers take their stools, they expect a show, and the men working the line have been rehearsing their act for years. They work to a constant rhythm of oneliners and banter. No subject is sacred: their ethnicities, their wives, included.

Dennis Dias at the wiener station by the front window gets the most abuse. When he forgets to hold the onions on an order, manager Jim Saccoccio shuffles over. At 61, Jim has worked at Olneyville for 47 years. “Fix it, fix it!” he scolds.

“I used to like you,” Denny mutters.

“I never liked you,” Jim says. “I liked your wife and kids.”

Later, when Nick Barros—at 15 years on the line, he’s the newbie— decides that Denny’s moving too slowly, he lays in. “You need a nap?” he asks.

Jim joins in: “I’ll call your wife, tell her you’re gonna take her down the Cape for that romantic weekend. Cuddles and bubbles.”

“I’ll take her to McDonald’s,” Denny says. “Give her a treat.”

“McDonald’s?” Jim says. “Don’t spoil her. Next thing she’ll want Wendy’s.”

Collectively, they’re the Henny Youngmans of the wiener world.

The story of Olneyville goes back to the 1920s, when a family of Greek immigrants arrived in New York, land of Coney Island hot dogs and the burgeoning diner craze. Soon after, one cousin, Nick Pappas, headed up to Fall River, Massachusetts, and opened Nick’s Original Coney Island Hot Dogs. Another cousin, Augustus, opened New York System on Smith Street in Providence in 1927. A third cousin, Anthony, with his son Nicholas, worked at Nick’s Original until 1946, when they branched off to open Olneyville New York System in Providence.

All three places served the meat sauce. All three assembled the wieners “up the arm,” lining the buns up from wrist to shoulder, stuffing them with the meat, and lashing them with toppings. But in an unsubtle jab at the latecomers, the New York System shop on Smith Street was later re named “Original New York System.” And

Olney ville, today operated by fourthgeneration owners Greg Stevens and his sister Stephanie Stevens Turini, went on to open two more branches, in Cranston and North Providence.

Cooking is a brutal profession. It’s rare to find a chef still working the line after 20 years. But Denny is. Sal O’Brien, who shuffles between the back kitchen and the wiener station, started in 1976. All the men limp. Nick’s back is bothering him. “Forty-six years on your feet, it’ll kill you,” Jim says. But why would they leave? At 2:00 a.m. on a Saturday night, the place is full of regulars, college kids, everyone tossing back whatever abuse Jim can hand out. “This is Rhode Island’s best,” he loves to say. “You can’t beat it with a stick.”

Olneyville n ew yO rk SyStem 18 Plainfield St., Providence, RI. 401621-9500; olneyvillenewyorksystem.com

Read about another classic New England eatery at: YankeeMagazine.com/red-dogs

Each month, we profile an iconic New England eatery in our “Local Flavor” column. We’re looking for venues with great stories that capture the spirit of a place. Got a favorite you’d like to share? E-mail editors@yankeepub.com and put “Local Flavor” in the subject heading.

opposite : From left, Nick Barros, Dennis Dias, Jim Hennessey, Jim Saccoccio. above , from left : Colorful neon beckons diners; owners Stephanie Stevens Turini and her brother Greg Stevens; wieners “up the arm.”

The Chocolate Giver

Follow in Denise Eckhardt’s footsteps to make someone very happy on a special holiday or as a Valentine’s Day surprise.

By EDIE clark

hirty-seven years ago, when Denise Eckhardt was pregnant with her first child, a friend brought her a box of Serenade Chocolates, a locally cherished brand made by a beloved chocolatier in Brookline, Massachusetts. The box contained a wonderful and colorful selection, and Denise was inspired to begin making her own chocolates, decorating them beautifully and then giving them away.

Later, she took a cake-decorating class, and the course included a little bit about chocolate making. “I took that and ran with it,” she says now, standing in her compact kitchen in Arlington, Massachusetts, where, for three decades, she has spent more than a week each year making and assembling nearly 75 onepound boxes of assorted chocolates to give as Christmas gifts. The list of the lucky recipients is long, and it changes as her life changes. “In the early years, I always made a box for my pediatrician,” Denise says. “Of course, he’s not my pediatrician anymore. My daughter is 37!” Denise has no problem finding others in her life for whom she’s grateful. “I can think of all kinds of people I want to give to,” she says.

A small woman with a cloud of strawberryblonde hair, Denise raises Bengal cats for a living. They roam about her house like a pack of small adoring leopards, mewing and winding around her ankles as she talks.

Her friends come over to help her during her chocolate-making extravaganza and try to keep up with Denise’s conveyor belt, placing the candies—something like 2,175 in all—into paper cups and assembling them into

p H o T o G rap H s B y ma TT K al INOWSKI

boxes. Every flat surface of the house becomes covered with freshly dipped chocolates, so Denise’s husband, Richard, an MIT-trained engineer, has helped to streamline the process. He designed a ring on a wire handle so that Denise could dip the chocolates without dropping them into the pot, a costly and time-consuming mistake she often made when using a fork for the job. And, even more innovative, he engineered a tray with tube-like slots so that she could cut many center fillings at once, instead of working on just one log at a time.

Each one-pound box of decorated chocolates contains 29 pieces—buttercream, coconut, maple walnut, chocolate-covered cherries, rum balls —the list is long and delicious. Denise decorates each piece differently— using sprinkles, stripes, foil wraps, and so on—which takes the guesswork out of choosing a flavor. She also includes a guide inside each box. “I never wanted to bite into something I didn’t expect,” she explains.

In high school, Denise worked at Hebert Candy Mansion in Shrewsbury, that great New England roadside institution. She did things like cut fudge into squares and wrap caramels in cellophane, twisting each end tightly, never thinking at the time that it would lead to her benevolent tradition. By her own admission, she’s not an expert chocolatier—just someone who enjoys the making and the giving.

“If you want to know the truth, the true gift here is the labor of love,” she explains. “That’s better than the chocolates.” But the chocolates are pretty good too, if you want to know the truth.

Rum Balls

total time : about 6 hours ;

hands- on time : about 1 hour

A box of these rum balls could make some of your friends very happy, whatever the occasion.

NOTE: Denise buys special “couverture” chocolate for the outer shell of her bonbons. Made by the Guittard Chocolate Company, a Californiabased chocolatier, couverture has a high cocoa-butter content, which gives it a glossy, lustrous appearance. However, you may substitute regular dark chocolate for dipping if you prefer.

1 cup heavy cream

1 pound 6 ounces dark chocolate, chopped

1 ounce rum extract

2 ounces dark rum

1¼ pounds couverture chocolate, such as Guittard (see “Note,” above)

In a heavy saucepan, heat the heavy cream to near boiling— but don’t let it boil. When it’s good and hot, take it off the heat and add the chopped dark chocolate. Stir until all the chunks are melted and the consistency is smooth. Add the rum extract and the dark rum (Denise uses Bacardi Select). Mix well.

When the filling is smooth, let it cool; then push a sheet of waxed paper

down on top of the mixture so that it doesn’t develop a skin. Let cool completely, about five hours. (Don’t refrigerate it.) When the filling is cool, scoop it with a melon baller, rolling portions into perfect little balls; set them aside on a sheet of waxed paper. Now melt the couverture chocolate in a slow cooker at the lowest setting. (For best results, chocolate must be melted very slowly.) Pour the melted couverture into a two-cup measuring cup (easier to manage than dipping into the slow cooker). Dip each ball in the melted couverture until it’s coated; then set aside on another sheet of waxed paper. Work quickly, because the couverture will gradually cool and harden.

Sprinkle chocolate jimmies on top of the rum balls, to distinguish them from any other flavors you may be making. If there’s any couverture left over in the slow cooker, scrape it out and spread it on a sheet of waxed paper; add it to the pot when you make your next batch.

Share your favorite chocolate recipes with us on Instagram! Tag them: #yankeemagazine

Denise Eckhardt’s chocolate samplers include bonbons, chocolate-covered cherries, white-chocolate-dipped pretzels, and truffles.

Boston Cream Pie

How a French-inspired cake became New England’s favorite pie. Well, sort

hen is a cake not a cake? The answer, of course, is when it’s a Boston cream pie. Described by The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink as “that much beloved half-cake, half-pie mutt,” this two-layer yellow cake, filled with thick pastry cream and topped with a glossy chocolate glaze, appears unmistakably all cake. So why “pie”? And where did this signature New England dessert come from?

Boston’s Parker House Hotel (now the Omni Parker House) is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of what today we call Boston cream pie, and its first chef, by the name of Sanzian, its creator. Starting with a rich butter sponge cake filled with a rum-infused pastry cream, he coated the sides with toasted sliced almonds and spread a layer of chocolate fondant on top, embellishing it with a delicate spiderweb of white fondant. At that time, pie and cake tins were often considered interchangeable, as were the words themselves. This lax approach to labeling is likely why Sanzian’s French-inspired concoction débuted as “Chocolate Cream Pie” in 1856, and why subsequent versions continued to be called pies rather than cakes.

With a few minor tweaks, the original recipe is still the one served in the famed Parker House dining room, but in kitchens across New England, a simpler adaptation emerged. It’s thought that home cooks, smitten with the gourmet Parker House cake but unable to recreate it, simply turned to a similar recipe and

of …

improvised. The most popular such confection of its time was “Washington pie,” a jam-filled layer cake topped with powdered sugar. By swapping pastry cream for jam and chocolate glaze for powdered sugar, the modern Boston cream pie was born.

Today this classic combination is a favorite not just in Massachusetts, where it became the official state dessert in 1996, but nationwide. Betty Crocker produced a boxed Boston cream pie mix for sale in grocery stores for more than 30 years, and Boston cream pie cupcakes, ice cream, and even doughnuts (another official Bay State favorite) are other popular variations.

Although it may be a challenge to explain how our curious cake-meetspie originally came to be, enjoying a slice of it isn’t hard at all. As long as New Englanders’ beloved Boston cream pie remains on the menu, well, we’ll just keep trying.

Adventurous bakers may visit the Omni Parker House Web site (see the sidebar, p. 74) for the original gourmet version, but our own Boston cream pie recipe relies on the familiar combination of golden cake, sweet pastry cream, and smooth chocolate glaze. We find that the small amount of gelatin in the pastry cream helps ensure impressive, stable results.

Boston Cream Pie

total time : 1 hour , plus chilling ; hands- on time : 30 minutes

For the Pastry Cream:

1 1/2 cups whole milk, divided

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1/2 heaping teaspoon plain gelatin

1/8 teaspoon table salt

2 large egg yolks

1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch

1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Recipe with a histo R y

Where to find the Best Boston Cream Pie in n e W e ngland

omni parker h ouSe

e very n ew englander should venture here to sample Boston cream pie at its birthplace. c hef Sanzian’s 1856 recipe lives on in creamy glory. 60 School St., Boston, MA. 617-2278600; omnihotels.com

roSie’S Bakery

Judy Rosenberg makes some of the best cakes in Boston, and her cream pie is no exception: golden and buttery, with a rich chocolate glaze. 9 Boylston St., Chestnut Hill, MA; 617-277-5629. 243 Hampshire St., Cambridge, MA; 617-491-9488. 2 South Station, Boston, MA; 617-439-4684. rosiesbakery.com

n or a Cup C ake Company

a frequent winner of regional “Best of” awards, this c onnecticut bakery makes cupcakes in flavors that run from classic (vanilla) to quirky (bourbon blackberry fizz). n oR a’s Boston cream pie version packs big chocolate and vanilla flavors into a small package. 700 Main St., Middletown, CT. 860-788-3150; noracupcake.com

Litt Le BigS

We can’t talk about Boston cream pie without mentioning its kissing cousin, the Boston cream doughnut, and the folks at this gourmet bakery make theirs with vanillascented filling and quality chocolate in the glaze. 340 Main St., South Portland, ME. 207-747-4233; facebook.com/LittleBigs

SC iaLo BrotherS Bakery

Boston cream pie is hardly i talian, but most i talian bakeries sell some variation of it. Scialo’s version is so good that chef Lidia Bastianich featured it on her PBS TV series. 257 Atwells Ave., Providence, RI. 401-421-0986; scialobakery.com

Bring 1 1/4 cups of the milk, along with the sugar, gelatin, and salt, to barely a simmer over medium heat, whisking well to dissolve the sugar and gelatin completely.

Meanwhile, in a medium-size bowl, whisk together the yolks, cornstarch, and remaining 1/4 cup of milk.

Pour 1 cup of the hot milk mixture into the egg mixture and whisk to combine; then strain this mixture back into the remaining hot milk.

Whisk the egg/milk mixture continuously over medium heat until thickened and bubbling in the center, about 5 minutes.

Remove from the heat and strain again into a medium-size bowl; then add the butter and vanilla extract. Whisk until smooth; then cover with plastic wrap, pressing it directly onto the surface to prevent a skin forming. Chill the pastry cream thoroughly, preferably overnight.

For the Sponge Cake:

1/3 cup unsalted butter, plus extra for pans

1 cup granulated sugar

2 cups cake flour, plus extra for pans

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon table salt

2 large eggs

3/4 cup whole milk, divided

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Pastry Cream (recipe, p. 73, continued above)

Preheat your oven to 350°. Butter and flour two 8-inch round cake pans.

In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer until light and fluffy.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt; set aside.

Add the eggs to the butter/sugar mixture one at a time, stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula after each addition. Add one-third of the dry ingredients to the

butter/egg mixture and stir until just moistened; then add one-third (¼ cup) of the milk. Repeat until all ingredients are combined. Stir in the vanilla extract.

Divide the batter between the prepared cake pans. Rotating halfway through, bake until tops are lightly golden and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean, about 25 to 30 minutes. Let the layers cool 10 minutes in their pans; then remove them from their pans and transfer them to wire racks to cool completely.

To assemble, place one layer top side down onto a large cake plate. (If the cake has a domed top, use a serrated knife to gently remove the dome first so that the cake will sit flat on the plate.) Spoon the chilled pastry cream onto the center of the cake and spread evenly until the cream just barely reaches the edge of the cake.

Gently place the other cake, dome side up, on top of the pastry cream. Store the cake in the refrigerator while you make the glaze.

For the ChoCoL ate gL aze:

3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips

3–4 tablespoons heavy cream

1 tablespoon light corn syrup

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

In a medium-size saucepan over medium heat, combine the chocolate chips, 3 tablespoons of cream (use more for a thinner glaze), and corn syrup, stirring occasionally.

When the chocolate is completely melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla. Pour over the top of the chilled cake, letting the glaze drizzle down the sides.

Let the glaze firm up; then serve immediately. Store any leftovers in the refrigerator. Yield: 10 to 12 slices

“Would you and Sally like to build a house here?”

Uncle Robb (i.e. Robb Sagendorph, who founded Yankee Publishing Inc. in 1935) laughingly asked me one noon hour as we stood gazing at Mt. Monadnock on a fi eld he’d recently purchased off Valley Road in Dublin, New Hampshire. We were on our lunch break from Yankee, located four miles up the road. I’d been working for him there for about a year. On nice summer days he often liked showing me his latest land acquisitions and sales. He was constantly buying and selling land or, actually, most anything. So I didn’t take his off-hand question seriously. At fi rst. But our son, J.D. Hale, Jr. (now a Vice-President at Yankee) was about to come into the world that summer, which put Sally and me in a sort of “nesting” mood. Maybe, I thought later that afternoon, if we could convince Uncle Robb to give us or sell us that new fi eld of his, we could, indeed, build our dream house there. That evening I drove Sally over to see it—and she loved it.

Well, over the next few weeks, it all came to pass. Uncle Robb sold us the field (yes, as I recall, we paid him something) and not long afterwards we’d hired a local contractor to build us our dream house up there overlooking Mt. Monadnock.

We moved into it a year later. If somebody had told us then that we’d be living in that house for the next fi fty-fi ve years we’d have laughed. Fifty-fi ve years into the future was impossible to even fathom back then. We were concentrating on the

present, on everyday living. What we didn’t know, however, was that we were also in the process of creating something that promised to nurture and sustain us after those fi fty-fi ve years were part of our past. We were creating memories.

The Retirement of a Lifetime

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YANK0115

What sort of memories? Well, to be honest, not so much the sad ones. More the ones that later made us laugh. Like our annual Christmas party to which we’d always invite about half the town. How could we ever forget the elderly couple (who will remain nameless) who drank so many glasses of our very potent “fi shhouse punch,” thinking it was simply delicious fruit juice, that they eventually decided to take a nap on our dining room floor? And I’m sure the boys (eventually, J.D. had two brothers) will never forget the sound of the Christmas bells I’d furiously ring as I walked about up on the roof of the house after

time to turn the page

by judson d. hale, sr.

they’d been tucked into bed on Christmas Eve. For some reason I could never fully fathom, their visiting grandmother (my mother) found that particular annual ritual to be absolutely hilarious. Her lilting, soprano laughter would literally drown out the bells.

More serious gatherings have worked their way into our memory bank, too. I love picturing in my mind some of Yankee’s editors and writers sitting around the fire listening to Donald Hall reading his gorgeous poetry. There were evenings and oh so many gatherings with relatives and

lifestyle transitions:

friends, many of whom are now gone. Anyone recall the baked Alaska I inadvertently set on fire with a blowtorch?

Southgate is located in the historic town of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. A uniquely planned community, Southgate allows ready access to services, all under one roof. Enjoy a wealth of amenities, such as restaurant-style dining, indoor swimming, live theater, and candlepin bowling. Feel secure knowing there is a full continuum of care right on campus.

Culture is a Key Ingredient

Former Bon Appetit editor, Pat Brown discovered that living at Thornton Oaks affords plenty of cultural opportunities. “If you’re looking for interesting things to do, you don’t have to look very far,” Pat says. “Activities at Bowdoin College, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, museums and world class restaurants too.”

www.ThorntonOaks.com 800-729-8033 • thoaks@gwi.net

Of course, the boys eventually grew up and acquired homes of their own. We attended their weddings, often filling our house with friends and relatives, some of whom we never met. And holiday gatherings at our house continued for many years. I recall that when our eight grandchildren were fairly small, the first thing they’d do upon arriving was to gather up every pillow throughout the house, sofa pillows included, and use them to create a huge pillow city in our living room. Very cute. But to disrupt the entire house that way made me uncomfortable. I’m so glad I never uttered an objecting peep and now that it’s all just a memory, I can even laugh about it. (Thank goodness, however, they no longer do that.)

I’m not sure just when we began to suspect we couldn’t live in our beloved house forever. The stairs were becoming steep. I no longer plowed our long driveway with my trusty jeep but there was always work to do around the place. Work I enjoyed but began to find increasingly difficult. About this time we began burying friends, relatives—and our parents, too. The result was that we

slowly came to resolve not to ever burden our children and grandchildren with the same problems and uncertainties we all experienced during their last years.

Before she passed away at 105, we once asked Sally’s mother, then living in the same retirement community in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in which Sally and I now live, how she felt when she realized she’d have to leave her beautiful house in Boca Raton, Florida. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “it

you might ask, are we happy now that we’re finally established in our beautiful and comfortable retirement community? Well, I can say without hesitation, we are sublimely happy when we’re in the company of our three boys, their wives and our eight grown-up grandchildren. But are we happy when it’s just Sally and me? Just us? Surprisingly, thankfully… yes! “I feel so safe here,” Sally said to me recently and although I’d never exactly thought of it that way, I sort of understand.

So now Sally and I are well lives. We’ve turned many pages.

by judson d. hale, sr.

days, I look back into the glow of my memories that are now an integral part of my everyday life. Then, lo and behold, the misty-eyed feelings turn into laughter. For me, thank the Lord, there’s always the laughter. Always.

Culture of the Cold

text by Jaed Coffin

photographs by Joel l aino

In Maine’s far northeast corner, a farm outbuilding stands in stark relief against snowcovered fields. “The weather was frigid, but there was a perfect serenity to the landscape,” notes photographer Joel Laino.“With few people in the area, I experienced a feeling of connecting with nature.”

In Car I bou, Ma I ne, where so M e of the C oldest te M peratures I n n orth aM er IC a have been re C orded and where subzero te M peratures often l I nger for days, people have learned, “If you C an’t e M bra C e I t, you’re never gonna l I ke I t.”

Last January, about a week after the infamous subzero temperatures of the polar vortex burst the pipes of half a dozen homes in my neighborhood, I traveled almost 300 miles north, to the 8,000-person town of Caribou, Maine, to see if the cold temperatures in my home state could get any colder. Part of growing up on the coast is living with the strange knowledge that no matter how frigid it might seem in your town, there will be always be other towns, farther north, that experience a degree of coldness that you, in your mild state of southern luxury, will never know. For the previous few days, I’d been keeping an eye on the Caribou weather forecast, hoping for a cold snap—but I soon realized that it was either going to be sunny and cold or snowing and cold for days on end, and that if it was cold that I was looking for, it didn’t really matter when I went to Caribou.

I left Brunswick on a Tuesday morning, just before 8:00 a.m., when my car thermometer read a balmy 18 degrees. By noon, the sun high overhead, I got off I-95 in Houlton to stop for gas, and checked my car thermometer again: 3 degrees. I’d been in 3 degrees before— hundreds of times. Three degrees was nothing to be afraid of. As a boy, 3 degrees just meant that you walked to school instead of riding your bike.

But 3 degrees in Aroostook County just feels different. It was the wind. I was wearing a down jacket, a sweatshirt, and a hat and gloves, but the wind across the plains seemed to carry all that cold under those layers, to my skin, and hold it there, firmly. Before my tank was full, I had to shove my hand into my armpit and work the pump handle with the hand I’d been hiding in my pocket. When I got back in my car, I exhaled quickly and swore before continuing north along U.S. Route 1, through Mars Hill and Presque Isle.

Earlier that fall, I’d come to this part of Maine a few weeks before the annual potato harvest, to write about a farmer whose family had been cultivating the fertile acres of Aroostook County for six generations and counting. Then, the rolling fields of potatoes and barley were green and golden, and all but shimmered with the fertile, purple hues of the late-dusk light. Now those same fields were featureless, bright white, and empty, buried beneath a vast sheen of windblown ice.

As I drove along them for another 30 miles—one thing about Aroostook is that for a visitor, as soon as you feel you’ve come north, there’s always more north to go—there seemed nothing fertile about the landscape at all. And yet to say it looked dead isn’t right, either. The weathered barns and century-old farmhouses along Route 1 rose above those vaulting, frozen pastures with a kind of fragile solemnity—as if there were something stoic,

monastic even, about the barrenness they endured.

The road to Caribou doesn’t make for smooth driving: Now and then I was blown suddenly right by gusts ripping out of the west, and every hundred yards or so, I found my car plowing through foot-deep snowdrifts—and then jerking forward again across stretches of bare, windblown pavement on the other side.

Around 1:00 o’clock, I was driving along the Aroostook River, downtown Caribou to my left, headed for the National Weather Service station— where, I’d read, some of the coldest temperatures in America had been recorded. In the Skyway Plaza mall parking lot, I pulled over to ask a man for directions. “How’s it going?” I said to the man, who, his nose running, his cheeks bright red, dressed in a tan work jacket, was swapping out letters on a “Save a Lot” sign advertising that day’s specials in capital letters. He paused,

Caribou and the towns around it are a major hub of Aroostook County’s potato industry. opposite , clockwise from left : Potato farmer Carl Bondeson of Finn’s Organics at his storage barn in Woodland, Maine; a field irrigator; spuds in barrels. “He still uses the old methods,” Laino says. “The barrels and hand tools are extraordinary—old and hard to come by, made with hickory handles and strong strapping. It leaves you with a sense of quality and appreciation for what he does.” above : Bondeson’s hay barn in New Sweden.

CARIBOU

then smiled. “Oh, you know, a little bit chilly!” he said, gamely slapping his gloves together.

I told him where I was headed; he told me how to get there in that way that New England people prefer to give directions: as a series of vague landmark references, without street names or mileage, but that five minutes later turned out to be totally spot-on.

The weather station is on outer Main Street, near the compact Caribou airport. Inside, science and operations officer Todd Foisy—a self-described “weather nerd” who, despite growing up in Alabama, came to Maine from a job in Alaska—met me in his office and showed me a digital map of this region on a large computer monitor. Foisy referred to the dark, 70-plus-mile-long crooked finger running along the Canadian border from Houlton to Van Buren as “the Potato Belt”: a sparsely wooded region that, trimmed to the west by the millions of acres of North Woods, resembles a Midwestern plain. Here, the unobstructed westerly winds, without breaks or natural obstacles, transform the cold winter air into some of the most frigid temperatures in the nation.

“A lot of mornings,” Foisy said in an eager voice, “the wind chill will bring the temps down to minus 40 along the riverbeds. It’s just a shame I can’t be there to record it!” Caribou sits more than 400 miles north of Boston, a drive of about six and a half hours; Foisy said that Boston sees, on average, no more than a single morning of subzero temperatures per year. Caribou? “We get about 41,” Foisy said, proudly.

“A lot of mornings,” todd f oisy s A id in A n e A ger voice, “the wind chill will bring the temps down to minus 40 A long the riverbeds.

i t’s just A sh A me i c A n’t be there to record it!”

Colle C tions of Maine Histori C al s o C iety, 9445 ( H orse-drawn s CH ool bus)

A view of Caribou from the bridge along Fort Fairfield Road, spanning the Aroostook River south of the city. “The bridge is high,” Laino observes, “and you really get a sense of the power of this water and the size of the ice that totally packs it, thawing throughout the season.” inset, opposite : School buses at the turn of the 20th century were horse-drawn enclosures, each equipped with a woodstove.

top : Plow driver Paul McEwen in Caribou. “His schedule is nuts, and he just rolls with it, cracking jokes and drinking coffee,” Laino says. “Great guy, very gracious with his time. You can sense the feeling that everyone is in this together. All the folks I met were people of community and generous in many ways.” bottom : An Aroostook farm along a snowy back road between Caribou and Presque Isle, a larger city some 12 miles south.

With the temperature dancing around zero, I ducked into Sleeper’s Store on Lyndon Street. You can buy jumbo lobsters, cat litter, blueberry pies, seafood platters for Valentine’s Day, freshly baked breads, pork chops, and cleaning supplies here. But in winter, you can also buy snowmobile suits, wool socks, work boots, insulated coveralls, longjohns, and snowshoes. The store was founded in 1914 by Joseph Sleeper—a Lebanese man who immigrated to Maine through Ellis Island, after a tropical detour in Colombia. Sleeper began his retail career selling wares (sewing needles and thread, tools, fabric, pots and pans) to local farmers, year-round, from a horse-pulled cart. Today his flagship store is run by his grandsons.

“They must have darn near frozen to death,” David Sleeper said, when reflecting on the life of his hometown’s early residents. In his office, which overlooks his grandfather’s store, there hangs a portrait of Joseph and his wife, Alma, surrounded by pictures of all their descendants.

In recent years, Sleeper told me, “a lot of the big-box stores have moved into town. But we’ve been around for a while, so we kind of know the right jackets to buy.” When I asked him where I might be able to see other examples of how his community was carrying on the cold-weather heritage of his ancestor, he didn’t pause before telling me, “You gotta go see the highschool kids.”

That afternoon, as the light began to fade and the temperatures—irrespective of the wind chill—still hung out around zero, the 40 or so members of the Caribou High School Nordic ski team were gearing up for another day of practice inside their small—but very warm—building, located on a hill overlooking the football field. The ski center was built, in part, by New Sweden native Carl Soderberg’s construction company, which specializes in earthmoving and heavy equipment. Soderberg traced the passage of the Nordic course as it wove in front of the football field, through a grove of pine trees, and back up a hill past a lift-serviced alpine

skiing pitch, which Soderberg’s crew built from old dirt excavated from the soccer field.

“We wanted to build all of this,” Soderberg told me, “so that anyone who wants to ski can. It was all about access. I wanted it to be as easy for kids to get to ski practice as basketball practice.” In two weeks, Soderberg said, the local Olympic biathlete, Russell Currier, would be competing in Sochi. One legend of Currier’s success: As a young man, he used to ski to school every morning, on trails that local people groomed for him by snowmobile.

Before heading out for laps, Sirena Cyr, a senior at CHS, bundled up. She’s been skiing since age 6, when she entered a local Nordic program called “Lollipops.”

“If you can’t embrace it, you’re never gonna like it,” Cyr told me. “Just dress warmly. Wear layers. I mean, if you stay inside, of course you’re gonna get cabin fever!”

Cyr believes in growing where she was planted. Next year, she’ll head to UMaine, to study mechanical engineering; she hopes to come back home afterwards, to work for the city. “It’s just so pretty up here,” Cyr said, gathering her poles from the ski locker. “When I come up that hill every day and I see the sunset, I just think to myself, ‘I could never go south. No way.’” Then she pulled her neck warmer over her face, set her skis across her shoulder, and marched outside as a gust of wind ripped through the door behind her.

I looked at Soderberg, who shrugged slowly. “Sure, it’s pretty cold today, but

Before gas-engine plows came to Aroostook County, Caribou’s town commissioner, Will Frey, drove a horse-drawn wooden “roller” to pack down the snow along roads.

you know what?” he said. “They’re okay. None of these kids are dying, and not one of them said, ‘Aww, do we have to?’ You saw them. They were all set to go!”

Later that night, while I was eating dinner at Reno’s Restaurant, my waitress, 57-year-old Nicole Michaud, didn’t have anything bad to say about the winter either. “To get through it?” said Michaud, a part-time certified nurse’s aide who began her career at Reno’s as a dishwasher and who, to this day, snowblows her own driveway. “I just keep working! That’s what happens when you’re French,” she said. “You’re tough!”

I paid my bill, but before leaving spoke with Paul McEwen, a snowplow operator who had just finished dinner with his family. Eyes hooded with fatigue, face wind-burned, McEwen had begun that day’s shift at 4:00 a.m. and finished up around noon. A typical winter, he told me, demanded that he stick to this schedule for 16 weeks straight, even on days when it wasn’t snowing.

Today, McEwen was on a 2013 International snowplow doing routine road maintenance, what he called “scraping the yellow line.” And, in the same way that the winds of the potato belt influence so many aspects of life in this part of Maine, they’re also the force that can make McEwen’s work particularly difficult.

13190 (snow roller)

“The wind? I hate the wind,” he said, adding that it wasn’t uncommon for a three-inch snowstorm to turn into a four-foot drift that could, literally, stop a car in its tracks. McEwen’s solution: “Just pray there’s no one on the other side, and drive by the seat of your pants.”

That night, on my way out of Caribou, I watched as the car’s thermometer fell—from about zero to minus 7 or so— every time I crested a hill or descended into the vague valley of a riverbed. While driving, I searched for a final symbol of how the people here embrace, and have always embraced, this kind of cold. And then I found one: Just north of Presque Isle, I saw a family of snowmobilers refueling at a gas station along Route 1. I glanced at my dashboard; the thermometer read minus 2.

Several weeks later, while I was going back through all the notes I’d taken, I found myself flipping through a loosely bound book that a woman named Wendy Lombard Bossie had given me when I went into the public library to do “research,” but also just to warm up for a spell. Titled Caribou, Maine: 150 Stories for 150 Years, the book was put together in 2010 by Bossie and several other residents on the occasion of the town’s sesquicentennial celebration. At night, on the local radio station, each story was read by members of the community—many of whom, Bossie told me, had since passed away.

The stories in that book are endless. There’s the one about Caribou

native John Gagnon, who, in the early 20th century, was deemed the world’s strongest man after achieving a 4,000pound dead lift; of the 1969 basketball team, which won a state final on a 50-foot buzzer-beater, an event listed 9th in the Maine Sunday Telegram ’s 10 greatest moments of basketball history. Of course, the stories that most caught my attention were the ones about the winter and the intensity of the cold: the moose races at winter carnival; the ice harvests on the Aroostook River; the 20.7 inches of snow that fell in the winter of 1951–52. Many of those stories seemed not remnants of a bygone era but early chapters in a book that, based on the people I’d encountered in just a single day, was still being written.

The Caribou Nordic team, training in the 3-degree cold, was just another incarnation of the Caribou team of the 1930s, which won the Maine Interscholastic Winter Sports Meet —in skiing, snowshoeing, and skating—over much larger schools, two years in a row, coming home on the train from Rumford to drums and music and a parade on Water Street. Todd Foisy seemed not all that different from Milton Lufkin, who, in his book Henry, recalled “Cold Friday,” in February 1861, when the single thermometer in town, “which was

marked to register but 60 below anyway … froze up and busted.”

The four-month-old 2013 International snowplow that Paul McEwen proudly operated seemed just a newer version of the “town roller,” a horsedrawn wooden wheel; operated by town commissioner Will Frey, it packed the snow, rather than plow it, for horsedrawn sleighs.

The page I’d dogeared belonged to the story of a strong-looking woman who, dressed in a trim wool suit, held the reigns of a white horse while perched in the stern of a trotter carriage. Her name was Valeska Ward, and she was among those who raced horses at the old winter carnivals, on a track cleared atop the ice of the frozen Aroostook River. Beneath Ward’s photo (LEFT) the caption read: “Getting ready to race.”

It took me a minute to recall why I’d folded that page, and then I remembered: as Bossie showed me the book, she’d turned to Ward’s picture and said proudly, and with a little bit of longing, “She was my mother.”

Jaed Coffin lives in Brunswick, Maine. He’s the author of the memoir A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants and the forthcoming Roughhouse Friday. jaedcoffin.com

Five skiers from Aroostook County finished the 1936 Bangor-to-Caribou Marathon cross-county ski race, founded by Bob Johnson (second from right).

OF MAINE HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 20245 (SKI RACERS);

OF THE MAYNARD LOMBARD FAMILY (VALESKA WARD)

top : View from the ski hill at Caribou High School. “It was an amazing gift from Carl Soderberg and has impacted that community forever, promoting an active, healthy, outdoor lifestyle,” Laino says. bottom : The girls of the Caribou High Nordic ski team; left to right, Sirena Cyr, Madeline Gudde, and Elise Gudde. “All of the kids on the ski team were super positive,” Laino notes, “with great potential in life and in sports.”

Na NN y, Rose, a Nd I

by Naom I s

i had just finished my sophomore year of college and was in the final stages of a very bad relationship with my most serious boyfriend to date. Of course, I didn’t realize it was the end; I didn’t even fully realize how bad it was until much later. All I knew was that my declarations of love were met with unhappy, awkward silences. This guy was not one to maintain any illusions; he got a kick out of me, enjoyed sleeping with me, perhaps was even fond of me. But he would never pretend to love me.

Despite this, he liked the idea of moving to Boston with me for the summer—a city about three hours from our school in northern Vermont. It would be fun to spend time in an urban environment, we agreed. We found meaningless, temporary jobs. We sublet a tiny fourth-floor walkup in the Back Bay that smelled strongly of natural gas. Every crevice in the bathroom was lined with mold. It was a wretched apartment, but the bedroom had a bay window that overlooked the Fens, at the far end of which sat the Museum of Fine Arts, white and stately and vaguely Greek. We slept on a futon on the floor beneath that bay window; I would often creep out of bed in the middle of the night to sit on the

sill and look across the darkened green at the museum. I wished the situation were different; I didn’t know how to make it so. I suspected that things might get worse before they got better.

That summer was hot, and we had no air conditioning. The fourth floor was stifling. I was a Vermont girl—summers at home smelled like hay, like mown grass. Here, the overwhelming odor of rotting garbage rose up from the sidewalks. To my horror, rats—displaced by the Big Dig and emboldened by the abundant trash— skulked on every street corner. My mall job became a cool, climate-controlled refuge. Rather than get on the cramped Green Line, I walked 40 minutes home, making frequent air-conditioned pit stops along the way; my last stop would be the museum, sitting squarely in my path. I passed through the main rotunda, but didn’t have the money to pay the admission fee, and so I continued through to the other side, on my way to my temporary home with my temporary boyfriend.

It was because of these strolls through the museum entry that I learned that admission was free on the first Saturday morning of every month. I took advantage, walking silently past that summer’s big exhibit—something Japanese, I think—and heading deeper into the permanent collection. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Heavy, dark oils in gilt frames sat blankly on white walls; I practiced my good museum etiquette of shuffling from portrait to portrait, tilting my head, letting my eyes glaze.

And then I turned, and straight ahead were Nanny and Rose.

The painting portrays a young woman in a plaid bathrobe, sitting on a screened-in porch on a tree-lined street, the sun slanting in behind her, a golden retriever lying contentedly near her red stocking feet. A mug of tea rests on the table next to her, along with a jar of honey. The woman (was she Nanny or Rose? I didn’t know) looks you in the eye, a Mona Lisa-ish smile on her lips.

It wasn’t hot where she was; no stench, no rats roaming freely in the streets. Here in this painting it was cool, maybe a little breezy; that’s why she wore her robe. In a few minutes this woman would get up and take the mug to the kitchen and maybe leash up the dog for a walk. But right now time was holding steady. She looked so confident, so peaceful, so self-aware. She was living a charmed life, and I wanted it. She looked directly at the artist, and directly at me.

I was young, but I wasn’t blind. She was loved; I could tell. I covered my mouth with my hand.

The breakup wasn’t long after. I stopped eating and sleeping for a while. I dropped out of school, forgoing a scholarship year abroad, some-

ashowedpainting a youngwhatwoman love looked like. a nd then it came to life.

hulma N

thing I’d worked hard for. I moved back home, crawled into my childhood single bed, and wept for days. And then, after a while, life marched on, just the way everyone tells you it will; the tears dry up, you shake your shoulders, put on a jacket, head back out into the thick of things.

Two years later, I fell in love again. Chris made me laugh so hard I could hardly catch my breath. We talked till sunrise. I leaned my head on the pillow, kept thinking I would fall asleep, but interesting things kept needing to be said. He took me to breakfast at a diner, and when I tried to pay for myself, he refused to let me. “You get the next one,” he said. It was both the same and different—there was the same intensity of emotion, the same longing to be with him as much as possible, and yet there was a new calm. During one still moment, I thought to myself, with ringing clarity, I am happy.

I headed to graduate school, moving away; soon after, Chris moved to be near me. In the space of a couple of years, we married. We got

Nanny and Rose. In 1983, Scott Prior painted a scene near and dear to his heart, a moment of quiet companionship between his wife, artist Nanny Vonnegut (daughter of esteemed author Kurt Vonnegut), and their dog, Rose. The painting has been in the collection of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts since 1984. For more information about Prior and his work, visit: scottpriorart.com

jobs; we left them for new jobs. We moved again, and then again. We bought a house in Northampton, Massachusetts, a place filled with screened-in porches and tree-lined streets and dogs. And it was there, 10 years after I’d first encountered Nanny and Rose, that I ran into them again.

We were having dinner with new friends in our new town. It was the first time we’d been to their house, and they were giving us the tour. As we rounded a corner into the hallway, there she was—still smiling, looking me straight in the eye just as she had a decade before, the dog still nestled by her feet. It was a poster-sized print, cheaply framed. I stopped short.

“I love that painting,” our new friend said. “That’s Nanny and her dog, Rose. They live here in town.”

Our friends had met Nanny and her husband, the painter Scott Prior, and knew exactly where that porch was—which street, which house. It was all right here in our new hometown. Amazingly, we were in it. Somehow I had maneuvered my life right into that charmed painting. Driving home that evening to our new house, I rolled down the car window, inhaling the late-spring air. Our new home had a porch. Our puppy was waiting inside for us. Chris steered the car with one hand, his free hand holding mine.

Twelve years have passed, and the print now hangs on our bedroom wall. Most mornings when I wake up, I’m involved with the details of getting into our day—brewing tea for Chris and myself, waking our two daughters for school, mentally ticking off the list of tasks that await me. But occasionally, if I’m lying in bed for a few minutes longer than usual, if the sun hits the wall in just the right way, my eyes rest on Nanny and Rose. Nanny’s mug of tea is forever hot, Rose is forever a spry young dog. I’ve met the real Nanny now, in passing, but when I stop to look at that print, it’s not Nanny I see anymore. It is myself.

Writer and editor Naomi Shulman lives in western Massachusetts. This is her first appearance in Yankee

He is a farmer, a naturalist, and an artist— a writer and a roamer. l ike H is fat H er and H is fat H er’s fat H er before H im, H e calls t H is “wide glittering expanse” H is H ome.

The stories and essays of a forgotten Vermont farmer and writer deserve a new generation of readers.

by Leath t onino

Return to Silver Fields

a man walks through fields like silver oceans of snow, his boots crunching on a crust stronger than his weight, a full moon overhead. He has been watching the weather— the meltings and freezings—for days and weeks, anticipating these conditions. Alone, stopping now and then to listen for long minutes into the night’s vast quiet, he hears his own breath, an owl’s faraway hoot, a cold-cracked branch in the distance. The man knows these sounds as he knows the moonlit fields; he has lived with these sounds and fields, lived in them, for decades. He is a farmer, a naturalist, and an artist—a writer and a roamer. Like his father and his father’s father before him, he calls this “wide glittering expanse” his home.

One hundred thirty years pass, and another man, a younger man in a busier time, walks the same fields beneath the same moon, his boots crunching on a crust just as hard and smooth and bright. For him, too, these are the fields that call him again and again to wandering. He cuts a diagonal path across one field, pushes through a brushy shelterbelt, steps over train tracks, and enters a second field, at the center of which stands an ancient, leafless tree. He has photographed this tree in his mind’s eye 100 times on 100 winter tramps, shooting it at dawn and dusk and midnight, in

storms and calms and cold snaps and everything in between. Tonight, the branches are a blue lattice printed sharply on the snow. Blue ink. Shadows. He listens to the humming road a mile away and thinks of the man who walked here when the tree was new.

The first man, the remembered man, is Rowland Evans Robinson. He was born in Ferrisburgh, Vermont, in 1833 in a house called Rokeby, and died there in 1900. The house sits surrounded by walnut and locust trees on a slight rise just east of today’s U.S. Route 7, the Champlain Valley’s most heavily trafficked road. Fields out back ease into the low forested ridge of Shellhouse Mountain. Fields out front, west of the road, sweep down to Little Otter Creek, its tributary slangs, and a marshland near the mouth of Lewis Creek known by the Abenaki as Chegwalek —“at the place of the frog.”

Bought in 1793 by Robinson’s grandparents, Rokeby has over the centuries been and become many things, including a sheep farm, a dairy farm, an orchard, a stop on the Underground Railroad, and a museum commemorating the lives of four generations of Robinsons. Nowadays, visitors can tour the grounds, peer into crooked barns, or linger in that room where Rowland Robinson, blinded

photographs by Corey h endri C kson

opposite : Master pencil illustrator Rowland E. Robinson also sometimes worked in oils; this painting shows Camel’s Hump, one of Vermont’s iconic peaks.

by age, composed stories and essays with the aid of a writing board, which allowed him to follow his lines by touch. Gathered around the fireplace, his wife and children would read aloud what he’d written, jotting down corrections as he spoke them, preparing his manuscripts for magazines such as Scribner’s , Forest and Stream , and The Atlantic Monthly Rural life: That’s what Robinson knew and that’s what he wrote about.

In the Green Wood. Hunting Without a Gun. Uncle Lisha’s Outing. Sam Lovel’s Camps. A Hero of Ticonderoga. A Danvis Pioneer. Rowland’s 14 books range widely in style, from local history lessons to folktales with phonetically spelled dialects to exuberantly recounted nature yarns featuring animals that creep, swim, soar, and burrow. Silver Fields and Other Sketches of a Farmer-Sportsman , published posthumously in 1921, is a little-known classic, its title essay a paean to the beauty and power of New England’s coldest, sparest months. As with the fields and snow and moon it takes for subjects, it is a shining, timeless thing.

Which brings us to the second man, the man drifting in and out of blue branch-shadows, stamping his feet to keep warm, hooting responses to the owls of his own age even as he tunes his ears to the owls of the past. This man is me. I became this man 10 years ago. Or maybe I should say I became this man over the last 10 years.

When I was 18, my mother moved to a house a half-mile down the road from Rokeby. Though my childhood home was only one town north, and though I was soon to leave for college in Colorado anyway, I felt the move as an ache in my chest. I’d grown up more out-of-doors than in and was not yet ready to say goodbye to the particular pine stands, mucky gullies, and cornfields and hayfields that had literally and figuratively grounded my life. To make matters worse, my mother was moving to a neighborhood, albeit a small one. Having recently read Thoreau’s Walden for the first time, I was none too pleased by this turn toward civilization.

Home on holiday break that first December, snowshoeing beyond the last snug house with its twinkly window-framed Christmas tree, I discovered, to my surprise, the great spacious invitation of the fields—the long blank plains, the huge fresh sky. Barbed-wire fences sifted the wind. Peach-colored clouds went rosy with the sunset. Wild turkeys left angelic wing impressions where they had beaten upward into flight. I followed paths—hooks and swerves of nervous mice, a coyote’s steady plod—and made my own. I met the ancient tree that would become my friend, returning and returning and returning over the years.

In the fields I encountered a stillness that allowed, or drew forth, a corresponding stillness in myself—a profound peacefulness. I came to believe that this quality of land and

“when the full moon comes pulsing up behind the evergreen-crested hill,” r owland writes, “it is no time to bide within doors ... let us set our faces toward the moon and trail our shadows behind us.”

mind had been around forever, that in some mysterious way the fields and the walking of the fields existed, and would always exist, in a pocket outside of time.

And then, browsing a library bookshelf one afternoon, whom should I bump into but my old ghost-neighbor from up the way: Rowland Robinson, pipe in mouth, smoke curling between us. He reached out across the page to shake my hand, asking if I was ready to go.

Silver Fields begins with a meteorological report both lyrical and precise. Wind directions, specific qualities of rain and sleet and snow, temperatures rising and falling and holding steady—all are recorded with patience and attention to detail. “When the full moon comes pulsing up behind the evergreen-crested hill,” Robinson writes, “it is no time to bide within doors.” The fields crusted to perfection, we’re urged to accompany our narrator on his sojourn, to bundle up and brave the elements for the sake of exploration and wonder. It’s participatory, a shared outing: “Let us set our faces toward the moon and trail our shadows behind us.”

I recall a January night strolling with my sister and her dog, the moon a hole punched from the felty heavens, the snow soft underfoot. Absentminded, perhaps dazed by the “celestial light” flooding the fields, I made the mistake of

Courtesy of r okeby Museu M (robinson)

above : In the library, portraits by Rachael Robinson Elmer (Rowland and Ann Robinson’s daughter) depict, left to right, Rachel Byrd Stevens, Ann’s mother; Dr. Willard, a local physician; and Rowland Robinson. At far right is a portrait of William Robinson, Rowland’s great-uncle, by Ann Robinson. below : The East Room, where Rowland Robinson was born (1833) and died (1900). opposite : A photo of Rowland Robinson taken by his friend Frank LaManna as they were tramping through the woods; Robinson is drawing on a shelf fungus.

above : In this snowy scene by Rowland Robinson, the road is thought to be Route 7. “Winter was a time of some leisure on the farm,” notes Rokeby Museum director Jane Williamson, opposite , “and I think Rowland often spent it outside painting—oil paint wouldn’t freeze!” below, from left : A corner of the toolshed, where equipment was repaired and wood or metal items might be produced for sale; portrait by Rachael Robinson Elmer of her brother, Rowland T. Robinson, and his wife, Elizabeth, founders of Rokeby Museum.

letting the dog off his leash. He vanished. A white dog against a white backdrop, a shadow cast by nothing— a shadow running—and then not even that. When at last he turned up an hour later, panting and smiling, I almost stumbled on him. He was like a magic trick, like a rabbit pulled from a hat.

So it goes in Silver Fields. The writing is surreal, a mirror held to a dream. Robinson stalks a fox that turns out to be a stump. The tracks of weasels, skunks, and hares, expanded to five times their size by cycles of thaw and freeze, spark fantasies of giants. Images emerge and dissolve, thoughts and landmarks come and go. He takes us into the fields, then into the cattails by a pond that fractures and booms, then weaves us through a maze of trees “that show as plainly as in a summer day.” At the cliffy foot of Shellhouse Mountain he pauses in awe before an ice cascade: “Dull silver, burnished here and there with moon-glint.” Little happens on this slow, aimless meander, but much is experienced. A sense of place is enriched with a thousand noticed details. The toes get cold, and we float on home.

refills his pipe, settles deeper into his chair, and strikes a match.

“Silver fields is not a good enough name tonight for these shining farms,” my old ghost-neighbor writes in his essay’s last paragraph, the tone celebratory, the line twisting language’s failure into an ultimate gesture of praise. He knows the impossibility of his task; he knows that no words could ever sparkle as the land has and does and will. And yet he tries. For his effort I am grateful.

John Elder, a naturalist and author who operates a sugarbush a few towns east of Ferrisburgh, has written of reading landscapes and hiking through texts. This poetic notion—this blurring of boundaries between literature and elemental earth—has something to do with the way I’ve deepened my relationship with the Rokeby fields and their human and natural histories. How exactly it all works, though, is beyond my understanding. I only know for certain that as I’ve grown into adulthood, the act of reading and the act of walking have twined themselves together to form for me a life. It’s a life that has in turn been further twined with

I’ve made I t a trad I t I on to read silver fields at least once every w I nter … a s I mple pract I ce to draw me deeper I nto the mood of the season.

Since that fateful day in the local library, I’ve made it a habit—no, I’ve made it a tradition—to read Silver Fields at least once every winter. For me, returning to Silver Fields is like sharpening the ice skates or shoveling the walk after November’s first storm: It’s something to look forward to, a simple practice to draw me deeper into the mood of the season.

Kicking back by the fire, the book a blanket in my lap, I picture Robinson just up the road, sitting in that room where he was born and eventually died, a blind man gazing into the darkness of his mind and seeing there the brilliance of the “wide glittering expanse.” I picture his hands working over the writing board at some late hour, his family gone to bed, his own fire popping and snapping beside him. He’s walking those fields inside his memory, stopping now and then to lean and listen into the night’s vast quiet. He’s searching for the words that will help a reader 130 years hence feel what he has felt and is feeling now, again.

In my imagination, everything comes rushing back: the smell of spruce and woodsmoke, the faint jingle of sleigh bells, the boot-crunch, the breath-cloud, the stillness. For a moment, I’m bewildered, unsure who’s doing the remembering. We brace ourselves against a “cold that no armor of wool or fur can ward off.” We cast down “a newly minted coin” to “see how dull a dot it is on the surface.”

I set the book aside, finish my tea, look out the window at feathers of snow falling past the porch light. Robinson

Rowland Robinson’s life and the larger life of the fields. It’s a life that at its best moments is without margin or boundary, in many places and times at once.

A man steps over train tracks, cuts across crust, presses his hands to the crystal-frosted trunk of an ancient tree. A second man, an older man, approaches from a different direction. They gaze into the crown of twisted branches and down into the sharp blue net of shadows, then circle the tree—once, twice, three times—and walk off together. The humming road goes silent. An owl hoots, its call as full and round as the moon.

Rokeby Museum, filled with Robinson family artifacts and other exhibits, is open daily mid-May to late October. Jane Williamson, longtime director, says, “I want and hope that a new generation discovers the writings of Rowland Robinson.” A number of his books are available at the museum gift shop. 4334 U.S. Route 7, Ferrisburgh, VT. 802-877-3406; rokeby.org

Leath Tonino is a Vermont native and ardent outdoorsman. He has traversed the length of the Green Mountain State by foot, by bicycle, by cross-country ski, and by paddle, and has written about swimming the 120-mile length of Lake Champlain. This is his first story for Yankee

Come winter, snowmaker Doug Fichera stays on the slopes long after the skiers have gone home. “Most people have no idea of the money that goes into making snow,” he says, “or what percentage of the revenue it makes up.”

“You’re making your own little microclimate. It’s pretty awesome.”

We

ask snowmaker Doug Fichera

… what’s it like to make your own weather?

Doug Fichera has been in the snowmaking business for 15 years—which doesn’t sound all that impressive until you consider that he’s only 23. Fichera’s family owns black Mountain in Jackson, new hampshire, and at the age of 8 he began helping his dad run the small historic resort’s snowmaking machinery. For the past several seasons he’s been working in Vermont, first as a member of the snowmaking team at sugarbush Resort in Warren, and now as the assistant snowmaking manager at Mount snow in West Dover. We caught up with Fichera at the mountain one late afternoon, shortly before he started work.

learned most stuff because people just didn’t show up, and my dad needed help. Or on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s—the three hardest days of the year to get people to work. One of the first times I ever ran the system on Black was on a Thanksgiving. My dad and I had a quick turkey dinner and then came down and made snow. It got to be around 10:00 and my dad fell asleep; I was left in charge. So when I applied at Sugarbush when I was 18, I told them I had 10 years’ experience. They were like, ‘Get out of here, that’s not true.’ But I’ve earned my stripes. They just came at a different time.”

“My favorite thing ever is making snow on dirt. It’s a lot more satisfying than making snow on natural snow, because you get to see your reward a lot faster. I’ve got a lot of great pictures where there was all this brown grass and then these piles of snow that weren’t there before. You’re making your own weather. You’re making your own little microclimate. It’s pretty awesome.”

“Because I grew up working with my dad, I have a different perspective about what snowmaking costs. It requires a gazillion horsepower, and uses more electricity than the lifts do; it uses more than any of the buildings. It’s just a massive cost that every ski area needs to cover. I’ve heard people say, ‘It must be really cheap; it’s just water.’ I’m like, ‘Dude, water doesn’t go up 3,000 vertical feet on its own. You have to make it do that. That’s a lot of horsepower.’ If you’re making snow on a flat football field, yeah, it would be pretty cheap. But if you’re working with any kind of vertical drop, you’re fighting friction and gravity the whole way.”

“The work is a never-ending battle. You’re fighting the weather. You’re fighting the wind. You’re fighting the temperature. If the temperature goes up, your snow is going to be wetter. Then your guns are going to be wet, and you have to go through each one and dry them up so you’re not making slush. If they’re pointed down the trail and the wind changes up the trail, they’re all going to get buried.”

“It can also be dangerous work. Hoses blow up; things explode; things get slippery, icy, cold. Water sprays out and you get wet. You just have to stay smart and not do things when you shouldn’t be doing them. I’ve had some close calls. One time while working with another guy at Black, I was blowing ice out of the hose. I was at the hydrant, and the guy I was working with, the hose slipped out of his hand. It spun around and sprayed ice right in front of my face. If it had clocked me in the head I’d be dead. So I went out and bought a nice helmet after that.”

“Since I’ve been doing this work, the industry has changed a lot. People used to just expect uneven trails—rocks, hazards, whatever. Not anymore. A lot of that’s been created by corporate skiing companies who want this universal product. Fast lifts. Deep snow. Million-dollar bars and condos. So now, people who come to a small mountain like the one my family owns want that. We’re making more snow now. We’re grooming more.”

“People are always going to complain. If you make snow on busy days, a lot of times it pisses people off; it’s like a sandblast in the face. And then they complain when we’re not making enough of it. A lot of people ask why we leave the piles out for a couple of days instead of smoothing them out immediately. You need to let the water leach out. You’re dealing with a wet pile, and if you let it sit for a couple of days, you can smooth it out and it won’t turn to ice when it’s exposed to the air. You can see how warm those piles are at night. When you push them out, they’ll steam in the cold air.”

“At Black, every snowflake counts. But opening up trails, that’s a lot of fun and satisfying. Two summers ago, we got 15 big tower guns, and I put them up. It required getting posts in the ground, bringing in cement, backfilling, and then bringing the guns up on a four-wheeler. I made it home for Christmas and ran them all. I was standing at the top, watching them all go, and my dad patted me on the back, and said, ‘Wow, it looks really good.’”

Boom

Sugarfields Bust in the

ommy Branon and I rode out of Cold Hollow in the cab of a truck carrying more than 4,000 gallons of Vermont maple sap. The gravel road was soft; it had been a hard winter and a late spring, and the cold had driven frost deep into the ground. Now the frozen soil was slowly thawing, creating potholes filled with muddy water. The road’s shoulders looked fragile, as if yearning to slough into the ditch.

Tommy shifted down as the grade steepened. An instantread thermometer jiggled in his shirt pocket as the truck chugged under the load. He glanced at the side-view mirror, hoping to catch sight of his son, Evan, who sat behind the wheel of an even bigger truck, hauling an even bigger load of sap. With the weight of the sap and the truck combined, Evan had to be pushing 70,000 pounds, and Tommy didn’t want to spend the afternoon extricating 70,000 pounds of metal and maple water from a ditch. He’d done that before.

He had a rope in the truck expressly for that purpose. It was as big around as my wrist. Bigger, maybe.

Finally, we made the height of land just outside the small town of Bakersfield, Vermont. Evan was still behind us, and I could see Tommy relax a bit, though he still leaned forward in his seat. My impression was that he had spent most of his life leaning forward. From here, it was pretty much downhill to the paved road, and then an easy six or seven miles over blacktop before hanging a left onto the final stretch of dirt leading to the sugarhouse where Evan’s brother, Kyle, was making syrup at a furious pace. I’d met Kyle earlier in the day, standing next to an evaporator that looked to me like something out of a deep-sea science-fiction movie, all gleaming steel and hard angles and pipes and valves. Kyle looked tired; he had circles under his eyes, and the way the sap was running, they weren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

We made the left onto the farm road. Tommy was telling

Turning sugar-maple sap into world-class syrup has been part of the New England farming landscape for generations. Today, however, technology and big money may alter that forever.

or

me about the worst day of his life, which was May 17, 2004, the day he and his wife, Cecile, had sold the cows they’d milked for decades. This brought to mind the second-worst day of his life, which was the day he’d driven to the hospital for a hip replacement.

Selling the cows had worked out okay, though. Heck, maybe even better than okay, because now Tommy and Cecile Branon preside over one of the largest maple-sugaring operations in the state of Vermont. They didn’t have any cows, true, but they owned 66,000 taps spread across 2,000 acres. Over the past decade, they’d turned sugarmaking from a sideline business into their sole source of year-round income, becoming one of the first Vermont sugaring operations to do so. They worked 335 days each year preparing for the remaining 30 days, the scant month during which their financial fate would be determined.

Those 30 days might not be consecutive; some might come in February or even January, the sap running in response to a brief winter thaw. Some might come in late April, after the snow had melted and the sap gone “buddy,” producing commercial-grade flavoring syrup. Most of those 30 days would probably come in March, historically the month when the most highquality syrup is made. But no matter exactly when they came, in fits and starts or in long, idyllic stretches of sugarmakin’ weather, Tommy Branon knew he didn’t have much time. “Thirty days and thirty nights” was how he put it to me, because of course no one sleeps much when the sap’s running. One month: That was what it all boiled down to.

“Everybody thinks they can do it,” Tommy told me, as we pulled up to the sugarhouse with the load of sap, though I was a little dubious, if only because from what I’d seen so far that day, I was certain that I, at least, couldn’t do it. “But only the strong survive.” He grinned. His face was bruised and his nose made crooked by a recent fall while cleaning the inside of one of the farm’s giant stainlesssteel sap-collection tanks. He’d slipped and slammed against the tank’s side.

Tommy Branon opened the door and jumped out of the truck. Sure, his nose hurt like hell. But it would heal. More important, his hip didn’t bother him at all anymore.

Not very long ago, the notion that a family could earn a fulltime, year-round living making and selling maple syrup would have been dismissed as pure folly. Historically speaking, sugarmaking in Vermont and the rest of New England has been a sideline business, often a way for dairy farmers

inset, far left : Cecile and Tommy Branon, seventh-generation Vermont maple producers, with 66,000 taps over 2,000 acres. clockwise from top left : Tapping a tree in the Branon sugarbush, near an abandoned sugarhouse; a maze of modern tubing and pipeline; Cecile Branon checks her equipment. below : Tommy Branon (facing the camera) in his new state-of-the-art facility with its oil-fired evaporator.

to supplement their income. Indeed, that’s precisely how the Branons’ maple operation began: a team of horses, a few thousand taps, and a handful of sleepless nights every spring.

But over the past decade, and particularly in the past handful of years, the possibility of sugarmaking-as-career has taken root. This possibility is fueled by numerous factors, including evolving technologies that allow sugarmakers to prevail over sub-optimal weather conditions, expanding markets hungry for every drop of recent bumper crops, profitmaking wholesale prices, and a tumultuous economy that has entrepreneurs eyeing maple trees with new intent. The result? Over the decade spanning 2003 to 2013, the number of taps statewide has doubled, from 2,120,000 to 4,200,000, as established sugarmakers have expanded operations and new sugarmakers have entered the market, eager to cash in.

Of course, Vermont isn’t the only place maple syrup is made, but it’s fair to say that the connection between Vermont and maple syrup is as established as the link between Idaho and potatoes or Florida and oranges. The Green Mountain State generally accounts for about 40 percent of U.S. production and 5 to 8 percent of the global supply; in a good year, Vermont producers make more than $40 million worth of syrup. That’s still a fraction of the $560 million annual income attributed to the state’s dairy industry, but it’s nothing to sneeze at.

Taken at face value, Vermont’s rapidly expanding maple industry is nothing but good news, providing much-needed income in the aftermath of the Great Recession and supporting dairy farmers for whom the additional revenue is essential to maintaining farm operations. But dig a little deeper, and one begins to uncover the seeds of uncertainty. Uncertainty that such rapid expansion can continue. Uncertainty that it can even be sustained. Uncertainty, even, that some of the emerging technologies are good for the industry.

“Most people who think about it are a little spooked,” Matt Gordon told me. Gordon is the executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association. “It’s such a big change.” David Marvin, the man at the helm of Butternut Mountain Farm in Morrisville, one of the largest distributors of maple syrup in the world, and a sugarmaker in his own right, concurred. “We’re in a bubble,” he said forthrightly. “It’s not going to go ‘kapow’ and blow up the industry, but we’re in a bubble.”

Marvin knows a maple bubble when he sees one; he’s been in the industry for more than four decades and has lived through three boom-and-bust cycles. “They’re generally the result of overproduction, leading to a drop in prices,” he explained, recalling a period in the early 1980s when historically high prices were sent into a downward spiral by the bumper crop of ’81. The annual maple harvest remained strong for a few more years, before settling into a range more aligned with historical norms, as sugarmakers scaled back in the face of depressed prices.

All of which is enough to make you wonder: If previous booms have resulted in subsequent busts, what’s to keep the same thing from happening again?

If you imagine sugarmaking the way most New Englanders imagine sugarmaking—buckets hanging serenely from trees, draft horses standing patiently as the gathering tank is filled one sloshing bucket at a time, while in the distance woodsmoke steam rises from the sugarhouse chimney—well, you might want to stop reading now. As I learned on my visit with the Branons, the reality of modern sugarmaking on a commercial scale includes none of those images.

The morning of my ride with Tommy, I spent three hours with Cecile, bouncing through the woods in a high-tech offroad buggy worth at least 300 gallons of syrup at full retail price ($15,000, give or take). We buzzed a half-mile or so down the road before stopping at a booster station, a union of pipeline and valves that to my eyes looked impossibly complicated, but that to Cecile looked like a place where answers are found. One by one, she began cracking valves open, until we heard a whoosh of air. “Hear that?” she asked, triumphant. “That’s a problem.” We clambered back into the buggy, turned up a muddy trail, and began churning our way into the sugarbush.

As I was learning, the key to 21st-century sugarmaking is maintaining high vacuum via the use of pumps, creating an artificial disparity between the relative barometric pressures inside and outside the tree. Before vacuum technology came to the maple industry in the 1960s, sugarmakers relied on the weather to create that disparity; that’s why the spring freeze/thaw cycles are essential to the process. High vacuum doesn’t entirely usurp nature’s role, but it radically expands the margins, encouraging the sap to flow freely when it otherwise wouldn’t. Indeed, on the morning of my visit, the sap was running hard, despite the fact that temperatures had remained well above freezing the night before.

There’s another benefit to vacuum. By extracting air from the system, it keeps bacteria from entering the tap hole and causing an infection. This means that sugarmakers can leave their taps in longer, thus extending the season without threatening the health of the tree or its ability to produce. The result has been a doubling of the average yield per tap for those using vacuum: from one quart of finished syrup to a half-gallon.

Such yields create the unique “problem” of tremendous quantities of sap, which require equally tremendous inputs of fuel to process into finished syrup. As such, high vacuum is invariably utilized in conjunction with another technology that reached near-ubiquity in the later decades of the 20th century: reverse osmosis.

Reverse osmosis (or “R.O.,” as it has come to be known) refers to the process of forcing sap through membranes to extract water molecules, thus concentrating the sugar content. Unconcentrated sap generally contains somewhere between 2 and 3 percent sugar, hence the oft-repeated rule that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. But with an R.O. machine, sugarmakers can extract enough water to increase the sugar content to as much as 20 percent, drastically reducing the amount of concentrated sap needed to produce a gallon of syrup and thus the amount of fuel burned in the process. In the 1970s, during the advent of

reverse osmosis, finishing a gallon of syrup in an oil-fired evaporator required four-and-a half gallons of oil. Today, it takes two quarts. Without the combination of high vacuum and reverse osmosis, it’s unlikely that the maple-syrup industry would have evolved to its current state. Certainly, no maker who eschews these technologies can compete with those who embrace them, and no one knows that better than Tommy Branon. “Years ago, I said I was never going to get rid of buckets,” he told me, as we rode across the thawing Vermont landscape. “I said I’d never get rid of horses, I’d never use R.O., and I’d never make syrup with oil.” He gave a little sideways grin, a quiet acknowledgment of how circumstances often interfere with our most sincere intentions. “Well, guess what?”

Not long after my visit with Cecile and Tommy, I traveled to the Proctor Maple Research Center to see firsthand a change that could dwarf all those I’d witnessed at the Branons’.

The Proctor center is a research, demonstration, and educational facility run by the University of Vermont in Underhill, about 25 miles due south of the Branon operation. Proctor is one of the few places in the world where one can discuss things like the microbiology of maple sap, the chemistry of

syrup, and the abiotic stresses affecting sugar-maple trees and find plenty of willing ears.

But I hadn’t come to talk about any of those things. Instead, I’d come to see a technology that some people claim will revolutionize the industry faster and more profoundly than any that has come before. Known as the “plantation technique,” the practice involves removing the tops (known as “pollarding”) of young maple saplings, sealing the cutoff end in plastic, and installing a spout under high vacuum inside the plastic. It works because sap is actually produced in a tree’s roots, not in the crown, as many people assume. And it works because the young saplings can be planted extremely close together, allowing for plantation-style cultivation that could generate a tenfold increase in yield per acre. Too, because the small-diameter saplings require less dramatic freeze/thaw cycles to produce, the sapling technique could mitigate crop decline owing to climate change.

At the Proctor center, a research analyst named Mark Isselhardt led me to a small copse of pollarded saplings, planted orchard-like in neat rows, mere inches separating one tree from another. This close spacing explains why the plantation technique holds the potential to increase per-acre output by a factor of 10. Whereas a mature sugarbush generally produces 40 gallons of syrup per acre, early trials with the plantation technique have hinted at yields in the range of 400 gallons per acre.

By the time Isselhardt led me to the small stand of sheared saplings, it was clear that not all established sugarmakers were ready to embrace the technology. “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should,” David Marvin replied when I asked him about sapling plantations. His response was one of the most measured of those I gathered; some are unprintable in a family magazine.

Marvin’s concern, which is shared by others, is that plantationstyle sugarmaking could drastically expand the geographical domain of syrup production beyond historical norms, thus diminishing Vermont’s market share. That’s because the saplings could be cultivated in conditions that don’t support mature trees. I heard the word “China” more than once, spoken in an ominous tone. Furthermore, the technique removes the “wild-crafted” element from sugarmaking, even as it potentially increases supply, perhaps drastically. And as Marvin had already pointed out, drastic increases in supply tend to be followed by drastic decreases in price.

When I mentioned these concerns to Isselhardt, he was unperturbed. “To automatically cast it in a negative light is premature. We don’t really know how it’s going to play out,”

Not all sugarmakers are ready to embrace the technology. “Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should,” David Marvin replied when I asked him about the possibility of maple-sapling plantations.

Maple packager and distributor David Marvin of Butternut Mountain Farm at his warehouse; bulk syrup is stored in steel barrels.

he told me as we stood amid the shrub-like rows of pollarded saplings. Even as he spoke, a vacuum pump was sucking sap from the cut ends. “Yeah, it looks very different. But then, sugaring looks a lot different than it used to.”

I couldn’t argue Isselhardt’s point—sugaring does look a lot different than it used to—but I also couldn’t escape the nagging sense that the plantation method was potentially disruptive in a way that previous technologies hadn’t been. And it frankly seemed odd to me that Vermont’s namesake university was developing a technology that could dramatically expand the boundaries of sugarmaking, in the process decreasing my home state’s share of the maple pie.

I took my concerns to UVM’s dean of agriculture, Tom Vogelmann. “Whenever disruptive technology appears, it makes people uncomfortable,” he told me. “Look at when the maple industry transitioned to tubing. Some people thought those were end times, but the reality is that before we went to tubing, those quaint buckets were open to the environment and all sorts of things could drop in.”

In Vogelmann’s view, the plantation method—which in reality is probably still decades away from widespread adoption—holds the potential to greatly expand the maple-syrup market for everyone, including Vermont sugarmakers. “The season’s getting shorter; the climate’s changing,” he noted. “We need new technologies to keep the industry viable. Maple is a unique product worldwide, and to make more of it just isn’t a problem.”

Vermont sugarmakers need to hope that Vogelmann is right, because the truth is, there’s soon to be a lot more syrup on the global market even without the plantation method. Throughout my reporting, I kept hearing about a start-up sugaring operation in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom that, according to rumor, would comprise 500,000 taps. Everyone I spoke with seemed to have heard of it, but no one was entirely certain of the details, with the exception of that number: 500,000. Half a million. Nearly 900 percent more taps than Tom and Cecile Branon had. “All that syrup,” Cecile said to me, when the rumored sugarbush came up in conversation. “Where’s it gonna go?”

The rumor turned out to be true. I learned that from Eric Sorkin, owner of Thunder Basin Maple Works in Cambridge, Vermont. In addition to running a maple-syrup operation, Sorkin also installs pipeline for other sugarmakers, including Wood Creek Capital Management, a New Haven, Connecticut, investment firm that specializes in so-called “real assets,” including those of an agricultural bent.

The initial phase of the installation called for 50,000 taps, though when I visited the 44-year-old Sorkin in early July, the project was about a month behind schedule. “It’s getting tighter every day,” he told me. Still, whether the taps got in this year or next, the project would go forward, and the count would almost certainly rise toward the 500,000-tap potential, creating a sugarmaking entity that will dwarf the current kings of Vermont’s sugaring hill. It’s difficult not to draw parallels between the Wood Creek operation—which

will rely primarily on local labor—and the state’s dairy industry, which has evolved inexorably toward larger and larger operations, in the process creating efficiencies of scale that have made it increasingly difficult for smaller farms to remain competitive.

As I chatted with Eric Sorkin about the Wood Creek project, it soon became clear that Sorkin and his wife, Laura, are themselves emblematic of recent cultural shifts in sugarmaking. They purchased their Cambridge property in 2000, leaving behind the hurly burly of Washington, D.C., where Eric had worked in environmental law and Laura had worked as a biologist for the Wildlife Habitat Council. Initially, they’d established a small organic vegetable and flower farm, but soon realized that the financial recompense wasn’t commensurate with their investment in labor. Thus disillusioned, it wasn’t long before they turned their eyes upward, to the verdant canopy created by their 1,000 acres of sugar maples.

What followed was one of the most ambitious sugarmaking startups in the history of the craft. After Eric spent a single season working for a neighboring sugarmaker to get his feet wet, the Sorkins broke ground on their sugarhouse and began installing the first of their initial 28,000 taps at

the end of August 2008; they boiled their first batch of syrup only a few months later, in February. “At that time, people were totally stymied by the scale. I was too naïve to understand why, and by the time I did understand, I was too capitally committed to look back,” Sorkin told me, chuckling a bit at the audacity of it all.

The next year, they increased to 45,000 taps and have since grown to 67,000. The number of sugarmakers boiling more than 50,000 taps is still fairly small—by some estimates, fewer than a couple of dozen nationwide—but it’s a whole heck of a lot more than it was when the Sorkins drilled their first tap hole. “It’s very much a gold rush,” Eric told me. “It’s a no­brainer if you run the numbers. The math isn’t difficult at all.”

The math might be easy, but the risk is stomach­ churning. First, there are the inevitable anomalies of weather and climate, which seem to be trending toward increasingly extreme events. A windstorm can require weeks of cleanup to restore downed lines, and because of the nature of vacuum systems, a single leak can suppress production across hundreds if not thousands of taps. When you consider that a sugarmaker can realize 10 percent of his annual

opposite and this page , top : Dr. Abby van den Berg of the University of Vermont—co-discoverer of the sapling technique—checks the tubing at a maple plantation. above : Under the plastic covering, vacuum pressure draws sap up through the stump and into the tubing.

crop in a single 24-hour period, you begin to understand why sugarmakers are fanatical observers of weather. And why Eric Sorkin rarely sleeps more than two or three hours per night when the sap’s running.

But the hazards aren’t limited to local weather events. That’s because the majority of the global supply of maple syrup—approximately 77 percent—is produced in Quebec under the auspices of a “syrup cartel.” Much like other cartels (oil being the most obvious example), the Quebec syrup cartel manipulates the demand/supply ratio, first by imposing quotas on Quebecois producers and second by maintaining a strategic syrup reserve that can be tapped in the event of a shortage. The reserve’s capacity is nearly 2.5 million gallons, split among three warehouses in rural Quebec towns; in 2012, thieves reportedly stole 6 million pounds (approximately 550,000 gallons) of syrup from a warehouse northeast of Montreal, refilling many of the emptied barrels with water to escape detection. Ultimately, 23 people were arrested, though about one-third of the stolen syrup was never recovered.

As the Saudi Arabia of maple syrup, Quebec plays a major role in establishing wholesale price, which over the past six years has ranged widely, from about $2.25 to more than $4.25 per pound (a gallon of syrup weighs 11 pounds). American sugarmakers have a love/hate relationship with the syrup cartel: They hate the power the Canadians wield, and they have an entrepreneurial disdain for the quota system, which they suspect leads to lazy sugarmaking; conversely, they realize that in a bad season the maple reserve might be all that stands between themselves and a collapsed global market.

The Canadian stranglehold on the maple industry does something else, too: It exposes American sugarmakers to the whims of international currency exchanges. “When we could sell 80 percent of Vermont production in Vermont, it wasn’t a problem,” David Marvin told me. “But now I have to watch that dollar every day. If the Canadian dollar goes to $1.50 again, a lot of people are going to be out of business.” That’s because syrup is priced in Canadian currency; therefore, if the Canadian dollar were to strengthen against the American dollar by one-third, American producers would receive 33 percent less for their syrup.

But despite all this, the maple gold rush shows little sign of abating anytime soon. That’s in large part because maple syrup remains a bit player in the sweeteners aisle, fomenting the optimism that someday it won’t be such a bit player. Currently, a mere 6 percent of Americans consume syrup annually, for a per-capita annual consumption rate of 2.6 ounces,

an amount I can confirm hardly does justice to a stack of pancakes. By comparison, Americans eat 20.8 ounces of honey and 464 ounces of added sugar annually. But, although syrup consumption is a comparative dribble, it’s also on the rise: In 1975, Americans ate just 1.03 ounces each year. And many in the industry are encouraged by trends toward morenatural sweeteners.

“There are a lot of trends that play into maple,” Matt Gordon told me. “Sure, it’s sugar, but it’s all-natural. It’s wild. It’s got a better story to tell than other sugars.” What’s more, foreign consumption, while still a small piece of the puzzle, is rising fast, with Japan and Germany showing a particular fondness for maple.

Is it possible, then, that Vermont’s (and by extension, the rest of New England’s) maple industry can keep growing into the foreseeable future? Is it possible that Tommy and Cecile Branon and the Sorkins, each with their 60,000-plus tap operations, will no longer be viewed as anomalies, but as just the way things are? Is it possible, even, that the traditional sugarbush—a place of towering trees, soft breezes, and the unique peace of the wild—will soon be supplanted by cultivated rows of severed saplings?

“If plantation maple ultimately replaces wild-harvested maple syrup, it would be tremendously sad,” Sorkin said. “I have no philosophical or ethical position against it. In fact, I briefly considered positioning myself to take advantage of the new technique, but ultimately decided against it. It’s just not the same thing anymore, and, right or wrong, I’ve made the decision that I don’t want to do it.”

I thought back to my ride with Cecile Branon and how over the span of just a couple of hours, we’d churned past multiple relics of the Branon family’s sugaring history. Deep in the woods, we came across an old sugarhouse, its roof collapsed under a fallen tree. Stacks of long-abandoned sap buckets lay under the rotting rafters. Later, we buzzed across a field where one of the family’s retired draft horses nuzzled at winter-dead grass. The horse seemed hungry, and Cecile radioed for someone to bring a bale of hay.

I thought about those 500,000 taps, part of an investment firm’s “asset management” portfolio. I pictured rows and rows of young maple saplings sheared at chest height, tethered to one another by plastic tubing clamped over the wound where their maturing crown once grew. I’d heard these plantations compared to cultivated apple orchards, but from what I’d seen at the Proctor Maple Research Center, fields of corn seemed a better analogy. Could such a thing really come to pass? On the one hand, it seemed improbable, almost impossible to fathom. On the other hand, no one had predicted a half-million-tap sugarbush, either.

I remembered how, on that morning with Cecile, just after we’d crossed the horse pasture, I’d looked behind us, to where I could see the steam rising from the vented sugarhouse roof. It drifted into the air and then disappeared, unwanted water turned into nothing at all.

More photos at: YankeeMagazine.com/sugaring

Not very long ago, the notion that a family could make a full-time, year-round living making and selling maple syrup would have been dimissed as pure folly.

Laura and Eric Sorkin of Thunder Basin Maple Works in Cambridge, Vermont, manage 67,000 taps on 1,000 acres of sugar maples. “If plantation maple ultimately replaces wild-harvested maple, it would be tremendously sad,” notes Sorkin. “Right or wrong, I’ve made the decision that I don’t want to do it.”

Soaring above the landscape, the 306 ­foot­ high Bennington Battle Monument commemorates the 1777 Battle of Bennington, a turning point in the Revolutionary War. opposite : From atop the Bennington Monument, a vista of peaceful meadows spreads out below, with westward views of the battlefield six miles away.

Bennington

Robert Frost’s final resting place lies in a small Vermont town that loves artists.

By Annie Gr A ves

he plates are singing like magpies at the Blue Benn Diner, a shiny bullet-shaped time capsule in Bennington, Vermont, that’s been around since 1948. Awash in pancakes and nostalgia, we’re flipping through the booth’s mini-jukebox, two songs for a quarter. “It’s a 60-year-old machine, kinda picky,” our server warns. I slide in a coin. Press the buttons: G2 (“Woodstock”) and J7 (“Leaving on a Jet Plane”). Soft and tinny, Crosby Stills Nash & Young fills the booth. This diner is “the place where the farmers and the lawyers go, a community place,” we’ve been told. It’s homey, like visiting a great-aunt who can’t stop cooking. But New England’s always been great for stirring nostalgia—sink a shovel into the earth and you’ll turn over a chunk of history.

Some long-ago dweller walked this path, tilled this soil, moved that rock. We’re always stepping where someone stepped before.

In Bennington, the odds of that happening seem greater. Partly because it’s the largest town in southern Vermont: 42.5 square miles peppered with 15,700 folks. Partly because it’s rich in history: we’re on Ethan Allen and Green Mountain Boys turf, and lest we forget, the Bennington Battle Monument points a solemn finger skyward, marking Revolutionary War victory. It fits that the only museum dedicated to the preservation of covered bridges found a home at Bennington’s Center for the Arts. Artists have overrun this landscape, too, spilling out of Bennington College or following in the footsteps of local icons like Robert Frost. The nation’s crusty poet laureate

photographs B y julie B idwell

and four-time Pulitzer Prize winner is buried in the starkly beautiful cemetery behind Old First Church in Old Bennington. He shares a quiet spot with his wife and several of their children. The stone reads: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” And the Bennington woods beyond are lovely, dark, and deep.

The Setting

On the western edge of Green Mountain National Forest, a trio of Benningtons sit clustered near the New York border. Old, North, and just plain Bennington—their personalities are as different as any siblings’. And while outsiders may not distinguish, locals clearly do, says John Shannahan, director of Better Bennington, who “came for a weekend visit in 1982, and knew this is where I had to be.”

Downtown Bennington’s chunky Greek Revivals and jumble of artsy shops and cafés have a jittery Beatpoet buzz, spiced up with some highly regarded nearby museums, including the Bennington Museum, with its Grandma Moses collection. The town center is neatly quartered by Main (Route 9) and North streets (U.S. Route 7), leading to Old and North Bennington, respectively.

top : Established in 1932, Bennington College exerts a creative influence on the town. left : Turning out classic stoneware since 1948, Bennington Potters is a shopping mecca.

above : In North Bennington, Pangaea channels an upscale city-restaurant vibe. bottom : No poet has captured the rhythms of New England better than Robert Frost, buried in Old Bennington.

Old Bennington is an imposing enclave of Colonial homes, anchored by the 306-foot Bennington Battle Monument and Old First Church. If Bennington rubs against you like a raucous puppy, Old Bennington is the retired Pomeranian show dog. North Bennington draws artists and Bennington College professors, its hub dominated by Powers Market (since 1833) and Pangaea, a lovely rustic-chic eatery. “North Bennington is the conscience of Bennington,” sums up Joey Kulkin, the colorful manager of Fiddlehead at Four Corners art gallery in Bennington.

Social Scene

It’s a cinch to meet interesting people, but it’s probably easier with a paintbrush in hand. If you’re creative, Bennington is the place to be, says Jana Lillie, director of operations at the 20-year-old Bennington Center for the Arts. “It’s easier to survive here as an artist. No one asks, ‘Oh, what else do you do?’” The Vermont Arts Exchange even offers low-rent housing for artists, in repurposed spaces.

And if the arts aren’t your thing but community spirit is, consider the Penguin Plunge, the chilly centerpiece of North Bennington’s Winterfest. The

February dash into frigid Lake Paran benefits Special Olympics. “We cut the hole yesterday,” a volunteer tells me. “It’s probably 34 degrees,” he grins, as Team Lingerie pounds by, dressed in frilly pink. The burst of small-town spirit warms us all.

Shopping

Fiddlehead at Four Corners sits temptingly at the bull’s-eye center of Bennington. This elegant converted bank, reimagined by Joel and Nina Lentzner, who met at Bennington College, houses an insanely attractive fine-arts gallery, presided over by Joey Kulkin, whose wild hair and khaki shorts defy winter. Surrounded by proof, he declares: “This town is artistic—we have the college, theater, art, at the core of it all.”

Bennington Potters can deplete the remainder of your bank account, with loads of home furnishings besides its famous pottery, all tucked into an atmospheric old mill. And Jay’s Art Shop & Frame Gallery is the largest art-supply store in Vermont, presided

The burst of small-town spirit warms us all.

from top : Lovely Old First Church; the Bennington Center for the Arts houses exquisite sculptures and bird carvings, world-class paintings, and a Covered Bridge Museum; North Bennington’s Penguin Plunge is the crowning moment of the yearly Winterfest.

over by “the original Jay-Z,” says Jay Zwynenburg, 82, who bought the circa1865 former Drysdale department store building in 1987. He knows its history like an old friend: “The man who built it made his fortune during the Gold Rush. The counter is from the days when they were still cutting redwoods.”

Eating Out

For starters, Blue Benn for blueberry–almond pancakes and local cheer; South Street Café for a hot cappuccino, Sunday-brunch jazz, and mile-high steamy windows; and Rattlesnake Café for Mexican fire. For a slice of NYC, Pangaea, with its herb crusts, beurre blanc, and pan-seared anything. Plus two divine bakeries: Bakkerij Krijnen and Crazy Russian Girls (“Choc-o-late Heaven” and báhn mì sandwiches).

Real Estate

Size up the three personalities (Bennington, Old, and North) to see what appeals most. Prices swing wildly, from a charming 1930 updated bungalow in the heart of North Bennington Village, with separate studio/ workshop, for $167,500, to the elegant 1779 Captain Nodiah Swift House, a 15-room Colonial on the village green in Old Bennington, for $579,000. In downtown Bennington, you can move into an 18th-century three-bedroom home on Main Street for $169,000.

More on dining and lodging, attractions, events, and community services at: bennington.com . More photos at: YankeeMagazine.com/bennington

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The Mountain Retreat With an Alpine Glow

It’s on a high, open pasture just north of New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch. The view from up there is simply breathtaking …

hen we wake up in the early morning,” said owner Catherine Dowd to us during our recent visit with her and husband Jim Knee at their mountain home, “we’re always entranced by the lovely alpine glow that permeates everything around us here at that hour.” She added that they’re often aware of it again at sunset.

We were sitting at their kitchen table next to spacious windows overlooking open pastures with old stone walls heading here and there (there was once a farm here) and, of course, that wonderful panoramic view of Mount Garfield and Mount Lafayette. Their two horses, Pumpkin and King, were munching grass near their three-stall barn (with its own well, electricity, and security system; there’s also a separate three-car garage on this 16-acre property). We could also clearly see the slopes of Cannon Mountain, where Olympian Bode Miller learned to ski. (His mother would drop him off there many winter mornings—starting before he was old enough to go to school!) Catherine and Jim ski there, too, as well as at Bretton Woods, Wildcat, Loon, and other mountains nearby.

yankee

likes to mosey around and see, out of editorial curiosity, what you can turn up when you go house hunting. We have no stake in the sale whatsoever and would decline it if offered.

To visit with Catherine and Jim, we’d just come up through Franconia Notch, one of our favorite drives in all of New England. So spectacular. We even stopped where we always used to stop to view the Old Man of the Mountain. But he’s been gone since May 2003. We gazed up to where he used to be.

“When we had this house built [designed by well-known architect Robert Knight] back in 2001, we thought we were going to live here forever,” Catherine mused as we sipped coffee the morning we arrived. “But we’ve begun to realize that there are different stages of life, and, at our age now, we’ve come to feel we’re a bit isolated up here.” Their four boys (from previous marriages) are grown and on their own, and while Catherine has already retired as an R.N., Jim is becoming a bit weary of his 84-mile commute to his financial consulting business in Concord, New Hampshire. They already have a house there to which they’ll move (with Pumpkin and King, of course). So they’ve reluctantly decided to sell.

Price: $599,000.

When we’d first driven up the steep dirt road to this place, the house seemed small to us—probably due to the overpowering view. But it’s not. It has eight rooms on three floors,

rooms, a modern kitchen with beautiful soapstone counters, and a surprisingly lovely living area for guests or children on the lower floor, outside which are beautiful rock gardens. And everything was built to the highest quality. For instance, the decking on the front and screened-in side porches is mahogany. There are pine beadboard ceilings in the master-bedroom suite. The living-room fireplace is of Vermont marble. And all the interior doors came from the historic Mount Washington Hotel, made available during the recent renovation there.

dered over to the barn, built around the same time as the house and garage, so that we could pat Pumpkin and King and admire all the ribbons on the wall outside their stalls, which they’d won at the Vermont Classic Horse Show in Lyndonville during the past few years.

Oh, yes, there was one more thing we simply had to do: visit Polly’s Pancake Parlor over in nearby Sugar Hill. Can you believe that the same family has been flipping pancakes there since 1938? And they serve ’em (as well as other breakfast stuff) all day. Let’s just say we weren’t disappointed.

Next time we’re up there beyond the Notch in those gorgeous New Hampshire mountains, we’ll plan to stay long enough to experience Catherine’s “alpine glow.” Oh, sure, there are probably those who say there’s no such thing. But we believe.

For more information, contact Heidi Boedecker, Caldwell Banker Linwood Real Estate, 2019 Main St., Franconia, NH 03580. 603-823-8895 (office), 603-986-8389 (cell); heidi@lwre.com

Find classic HFS stories from our archives at: YankeeMagazine.com/house-for-sale

above and opposite : This White Mountains property features open land, old stone walls, and lovely views of Mount Lafayette. below : Owners Jim Knee and Catherine Dowd with Pumpkin and King.

CONNECTICUT

JAN. 10–25: NEW BRITAIN, Nor’easter: The 45th Annual Juried Members Exhibition. The New Britain Museum of American Art showcases the exceptional work of emerging artists in all media, aiming to expose contemporary visual arts to a wide audience. Juried by Sharon Butler, author of the influential art blog Two Coats of Paint 860-229-0257; nbmaa.org

JAN. 11: NORWALK, Wine & Food Tasting & NFL Playoffs. Stepping Stones Museum for Children hosts an adults-only event in support of its award-winning exhibits, educational programs, and outreach initiatives. Enjoy a fun evening of fine wines, stellar spirits, magnificent microbrews, fantastic flavors, music, and playoff football action, all amid the whimsical backdrop of the museum. Space is limited; reserve tickets early. 203899-0606; steppingstonesmuseum.org

JAN. 23–24: WATERBURY, “Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story.” The historic Palace Theater presents a rockin’ musical that follows the legendary performer through his short yet spectacular career, featuring such classic songs as “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh Boy,” Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace,” and many more. 203-3462000; palacetheaterct.org

FEB. 7: PORTLAND, Midwinter Chocolate Fest. Wintertime is chocolate time—indulge at the desserts café, or buy some goodies to take home, while entertaining the kids with hands-on crafts, as the Women’s Fellowship of First Congregational Church celebrates 18 years of chocolate. Rain date is February 8. 860-342-3244; portlandfirstchurch.org

FEB. 7–9: SALISBURY, Jumpfest. Kick off the weekend’s fun with Friday’s human dogsled race— yup, that’s teams of six people (five pulling and one in the sled) battling their way along a snowy course. For more refined entertainment, there’ll be art shows, ice sculpting, and so much

Calendar of events

Calendar of events

Well Worth the Drive

January 23–25

The Sun Winefest

Uncasville, Connecticut

it may be January, but there’s fun in the sun—Mohegan sun c asino, that is—hosts a lively weekend of activities featuring beer, wine, specialty spirits, and delectable dishes. wine and beer enthusiasts may choose from more than 1,000 brands, while foodies will enjoy sampling signature dishes prepared by the region’s best restaurants. the venue’s Main culinary stage is the backdrop for two days of celebrity-chef demonstrations, plus contests and more. book tickets early! mohegansun.com/sunwinefest

more, all culminating in the big event—the Eastern U.S. Ski Jumping Championships at Satre Hill. 860-850-0080; jumpfest.org

FEB. 8: TOLLAND, 49th Antiques Show. The Historical Society transforms Tolland Middle School into a distinguished showplace for this annual event. Enjoy discussions on a variety of topics, plus view 18th- and 19th-century furniture, accessories, folk art, rugs, early iron, and more. tollandhistorical.org

FEB. 14: PUTNAM, Fire & Ice Valentine’s Festival Here’s a sweet way to spend the day with someone special. Enjoy carriage rides, more than 25 unique ice sculptures, ice luminarias, ice-carving demonstrations, fantastic food and drink offerings, live entertainment, and more—all in the downtown area. facebook.com/Putnam FireIceFestival

FEB. 14: WILLIMANTIC, Romantic Willimantic Chocolate Festival. More than 30 downtownarea businesses will be serving up an assortment of treats, with an evening soirée and cabaret to cap off the experience. 860-4236389; romanticwillimantic.org

FEB. 19–22: HARTFORD, Flower & Garden Show. Get into the spirit of the forthcoming spring as you take in more than 300 booths overflowing with fresh flowers, plants, herbs, bulbs, seeds, and gardening books at the Convention Center. Beautiful landscape exhibits constructed throughout the center are sure to inspire; then meet Emmy-nominated television host and best-selling author Mar Jennings, headliner for this year’s seminar line-up, plus much more. 860-844-8461; ctflowershow.com

FEB. 28: MYSTIC, Cabin Fever Festival & Charity Chowder Cookoff. Stroll the grounds and get in a bit of shopping at Olde Mistick Village before sampling various tasty chowders prepared by chefs from across the region. A delicious way to spend a winter’s day. 860-5364941; oldemistickvillage.com

MAINE

JAN. 14: SOUTH BERWICK, “Material Memories: Jewelry from the Collection of Historic New England.” Jewelry can be far more than gems and gold, as associate curator Laura Johnson will explain at the lovely Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum & Visitor Center. Attend the lecture and discover how New Englanders have used personal adornment to tell the stories of their lives. Registration recommended. 207-384-2454; historicnew england.org

JAN. 17: RANGELEY, Family Fun Day. Saddleback Mountain presents a day filled with activities for children of all ages, aligned with the day’s theme of safety on the slopes. Contests, projects, and more reap prizes and rewards. Visit Snowflake Central in the lobby of the base lodge to participate. 207-8645671; saddlebackmaine.com

JAN. 20–FEB. 15: PORTLAND, “Our Man in Havana.” When a bumbling vacuum-cleaner salesman is recruited to be a spy, he readily accepts the mission. The only problem is, he doesn’t know anything—so he starts making up informants and intelligence. This lively, tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the classic thriller conjures 1950s Cuba at Portland Stage, as four actors change accents and costumes to play more than 30 eclectic characters. 207-774-0465; portlandstage.org

JAN. 25: ROCKLAND, 11th Annual Pies on Parade. The whole town’s getting a little pie-crazy, and you don’t want to miss out, so reserve tickets in advance to ensure a day of strolling and sampling. More than 45 different pies will be presented by area restaurants and inns; from fruit pies to meat pies, sweet to savory, it’s a delectable event. Book a room at a historic inn and make a weekend of it. 207-5966611; historicinnsofrockland.com

Well Worth the Drive

FEBRUARY 28–MARCH 1

Mardi Gras Celebration

Ogunquit, Maine

No need to head south to celebrate when the lovely seaside town of Ogunquit has its own twist on Carnival. From the costume contest, to the crowning of the Mardi Gras king and queen, to the parade along Main Street, you’ll find plenty of quirky entertainment, plus jazz, street performers, games, delicious food offerings, and more. Check the Web site for the day-to-day schedule. 207-646-2939; visitogunquit.org

JAN. 26–30: NEWRY, Go50 Week. Sunday River offers a midwinter celebration for skiers and riders ages 50 and over. Welcome reception, mountain tours, wine dinner, bingo and trivia nights, cooking classes, and more. 800-5432754; sundayriver.com

JAN. 30–APR. 26: PORTLAND, “The Coast & the Sea: Marine & Maritime Art in America.” With works dating from c. 1750 to 1904, this exhibit includes portraits of seafarers and vessels, seascapes and harbor views, naval battle scenes, and images of leisure and labor— some 50 paintings and 10 maritime artifacts in all. Each in its own way depicts the country’s early history and culture, and how it was inextricably bound to the sea. 207-775-6148; portlandmuseumofart.org

FEB. 1–28: KENNEBUNK/KENNEBUNKPORT, February Is for Lovers & Chocolate Extravaganza. Both seaside villages take on an air of romance with a mix of activities. Indulge in wine and chocolate tastings, enjoy a gallery stroll, discover special accommodation and dining packages for couples, and more. visit thekennebunks.com

Well Worth the Drive

JANUARY 18–SEPTEMBER 13

Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott

Boston, Massachusetts

The Museum of Fine Arts presents the work of one of the most celebrated American artists. In 1950, Parks returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, on assignment for Life magazine and in so doing revisited early memories from his youth, many involving racial discrimination, and reconnected with childhood friends. The result: groundbreaking photos that reveal a rarely seen view of everyday African American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement. 617-267-9300; mfa.org

FEB. 6–8: CAMDEN, U.S. National Toboggan Championships. Indeed, most of the 400 or so sledders are here to compete for the fastest time, but those teams outfitted in zany and creative costumes make watching the competition on the iced, wooden Jack Williams Toboggan Chute at Camden Snow Bowl all the more fun. camdensnowbowl.com

FEB. 7: GREENVILLE, Wilderness Sled Dog Race. The race begins and ends in town, so you can cheer on the competitors at the start and the finish of what is one of only three longdistance races in New England—a full 100 miles. 100milewildernessrace.org

FEB. 7–8: PORTLAND, Maine Home, Remodeling & Garden Show. Winter’s the perfect time to plan ahead for inspired home and garden projects. With seminars and more than 180 exhibitor booths, you’ll find great products and ideas at the Cumberland County Civic Center. newenglandexpos.com

FEB. 13–15: BRIDGTON, Winter Carnival. For a small fee, you can proudly don your Carnival pin, granting you access to the many activities on tap: horse-drawn sleigh rides to delight young and old, kids’ games, dogsled rides, ice fishing, contests, and more. 207-647-3472; mainelakesmushersbowl.com

FEB. 14: HALLOWELL, 13th Annual Mardi Gras. The Pine Tree state’s version of the Big Easy includes mask making, a parade, an art exhibition, a book sale, and the popular pub crawl. Visit the various venues participating across town. 207-620-7477; hallowell.org

MASSACHUSETTS

JAN. 2–4: NEW BEDFORD, Moby Dick Marathon. It’s a 25-hour nonstop reading of the Melville classic at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which also hosts a ticketed buffet dinner, a lecture, and a scholarly quiz game. 508-997-0046; whalingmuseum.org

JAN. 9–11: SPRINGFIELD, Boar’s Head Festival. Experience an ancient Epiphany processional celebration at Trinity United Methodist Church—complete with brass fanfare, live animals, performers of all ages, and elaborate costumes. Purchase tickets in advance. 413733-4759; trinityspringfield.org

JAN. 9–MAR. 27: BOSTON, 26th Annual Wine Festival. Th e nation’s most extensive wine and food pairing series continues its tradition of presenting exceptional wine dinners at the Boston Harbor Hotel. From January’s opening reception on through the winter, enjoy an all-star lineup of intimate winemaker-hosted dinners, seminars, receptions, and brunches. 617-330-9355; bostonwinefestival.net

JAN. 13: WORCESTER, St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra. Enjoy the ambience of historic Mechanics Hall, from the first virtuosic opening overture to the piano concerto to one of the most popular works in classical music by Rimsky-Korsakov, as the St. Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra, with acclaimed pianist Andrei Gavrilov, visits for a don’t-miss performance. 508-754-3231; musicworcester.org

JAN. 24–25: STURBRIDGE, Winter Work & Play. Old Sturbridge Village invites you to embrace the joys of an old-fashioned winter, complete with vintage 1830s sledding, horse-drawn sleigh rides, and ice harvesting. See a demonstration on Mill Pond (weather permitting) and try your hand at cutting ice using vintage tools. 508-347-0323; osv.org

JAN. 30–FEB. 1: GLOUCESTER, Birding Weekend. The Cape Ann area is known worldwide for its exciting concentrations of winter seabirds, so plan to enjoy a weekend of events geared toward all levels of birders. Tour birding hot spots, attend expert-led presentations, meet various exhibitors presenting their products, and talk with artists showcasing their works at the main venue, Elks at Bass Rocks, and additional locations in town. capeannchamber.com

JAN. 31–APR. 26: BROCKTON, “Legacy of Fire: Clay Dragon Studio Revisited.” A dynamic gallery in East Cambridge’s historic A. H. Davenport building came to be known as Clay Dragon Studios in the early 1980s, an influential foundation for numerous artists in contemporary ceramics. This retrospective exhibit at Fuller Craft Museum showcases the rich range of mature styles, diverse materials, and new developments of former Studio members. 508-588-6000; fullercraft.org

FEB. 6–8: GREENFIELD, Winter Carnival. A townwide tradition for more than 90 years; attend one or all of the pla nned events across

Well Worth the Drive

february 5–8

105th Dartmouth Winter Carnival Hanover, New Hampshire

Dartmouth college has embraced winter for more than a century with friendly, fun, and sometimes zany competitions during carnival week—from polar-bear swims to ice and snow sculpting to creative races (whether across snowy terrain on skis, or downhill in a canoe). community-wide events have become a regular feature, too, and include an ice-skating party, complete with live music, and horse-drawn sleigh rides. yes, the lovely town of hanover holds its own appeal, but throw in a rambunctious festival, replete with the antics of ivy leaguers, and who can resist? 603-646-3399; dartmouth.edu

downtown. Discover ice-sculpting contests, fireworks, performances, family activities, a sleigh-bell run, sledding, skating, and so much more. 413-772-1553; greenfieldrecreation.com

FEB. 6–8: HYANNIS, Boatbuilders Show on Cape Cod. “The best little boat show in the Northeast” returns to the Resort & Conference Center at Hyannis to give you a jump on the season. Peruse varied accessories and beautifully crafted pleasure boats, whether you’re shopping in earnest or just dreaming of summer. boatcapecod.org

FEB. 6–15: SALEM, Salem’s So Sweet Chocolate & Ice Sculpture Festival. A decadent tradition that combines delectable chocolate, sparkling ice sculptures, and Valentine’s Day shopping. Friday offers ticketed chocolate and winetasting festivities; reserve early. On Saturday visitors can view impressive sculptures, dine at restaurants featuring special chocolate

Well Worth the Drive

January 23–25

Providence Boat Show

Providence, Rhode Island

the ocean state loves its boating— but this show at the convention center offers more than pretty watercraft (though you’ll find them aplenty). attend expert-led seminars on navigation and seamanship; visit with a lineup of special guests; enjoy sea-to-table chef demonstrations; try your hand at fun, interactive exhibits that put your boat handling and surfing skills to the test; plus so much more. 401-396-9619; providenceboatshow.com

offerings (desserts, cocktails, and inventive sauces), and shop local retailers, many offering in-store promotions and innovative displays. 978-744-0004; salem-chamber.org

FEB. 13–15: BOSTON, Mozart & Beethoven. The Handel & Haydn Society delight audiences with their period-instrument orchestra and soloists, performing Mozart’s Waisenhaus , which he composed at the age of 13, in addition to Beethoven’s groundbreaking First Symphony, all at the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. 617-266-3605; handeland haydn.org

FEB. 14–22: CAMBRIDGE, 20th Annual Bugs Bunny Film Festival. The rascally rabbit has been delighting audiences of all ages since the 1940s. Enjoy a flick or two on the big screen at Brattle Theater with someone you love. 617876-6837; brattlefilm.org

FEB. 15: NORTH ADAMS, Winter Fest. Embrace the season with a family-friendly celebration sure to brighten a cold winter’s day. Enjoy the fun run/walk, ice sculpting, a chowder competition, horse-drawn wagon rides, marshmallow roast, community campfire, and more. 413-664-6180; explorenorthadams.com

FEB. 18, 21: HAVERHILL, Furniture & Conservation Specialty Tour. Historic New England boasts one of the largest collections of regional art and artifacts in the country; register for a tour of its Haverhill facility, as staffers provide an exclusive look at furniture storage and the conservation lab, highlighting some of their favorite pieces and discussing current treatment projects in the works. 617-9946678; historicnewengland.org

FEB. 20–22: BOSTON, New England Home Show. You’ll be delighted at the wide range of homeimprovement ideas on display at the Seaport World Trade Center. From lighting to flooring to siding, from techniques to tools, more than 500 experts are on hand to answer your burning DIY questions. Bring the kids and enjoy live cooking demonstrations, a furniture-building zone, and a craft and specialtyfood area. newenglandhomeshows.com

NEW HAMPSHIRE

JAN. 3: HOLDERNESS, Winter Bird Banding Open House. Discover why birds are banded and get an up-close look at common winter species at Squam Lake Natural Science Center. Register in advance. 603-968-7194; nhnature.org

JAN. 17: CONCORD, Mac & Cheese Bake-Off. This universal favorite comes in many forms; sample inspired variations of this oncehumble comfort food that’s found new fame as a culinary star. Held at the Courtyard Marriott and sponsored by the New Hampshire Dairy Association. 603-2713696; nhdairypromo.org

JAN. 23–25: JACKSON, NH Sanctioned & Jackson Invitational Snow Sculpting Competition. Sculptors create magical snow art at Black Mountain. Each team will be given a cylindrical block of snow, and imagination and sculpting talent do the rest. jacksonnh.com

JAN. 24–MAY 3: MANCHESTER, “Still Life: 1970s Photorealism.” The Currier Museum of Art presents an exhibit harking back to the 1970s, when a group of artists rejected prevailing styles of abstraction and instead re-created photos of common scenes in large paintings and sculptures. Discover these images of diners, muscle cars, street scenes, and more. 603-669-6144; currier.org

FEB. 1–8: NEWPORT, 99th Winter Carnival. Here’s a community that knows how to embrace winter for fun and activities. Various locales around town participate with games, skating and sledding, tempting food, and the ever-popular Queen’s Pageant. 603-8632412; newportwintercarnival.org

FEB. 6–7: MANCHESTER, New Hampshire Farm & Forest Exposition. One of the state’s best winter fairs is held at the Radisson Hotel/ Center of NH. Come discover the FARMO game, educational sessions and trade booths, animals, silent-auction items, demonstrations, fine food offerings, and more. 603-2311396; nhfarmandforestexpo.org

FEB. 7: KEENE, Ice & Snow Festival. Bring the entire family to see ice carvings and snow sculptures; enjoy children’s crafts, music, contests, and more—all in the downtown area. 603-352-1303; keenechamber.com

FEB. 7–8: MEREDITH, Great Meredith Rotary Fishing Derby. Enjoy the camaraderie of your fellow anglers as you vie to reel in the biggest catch—and win both bragging rights and cash prizes. Purchase your derby pass, and get out on the area lakes! 603-279-7600; meredith rotary.com

FEB. 13–15: NASHUA, Orchid Show & Sale. Stop by the Radisson Hotel to meet the state’s expert orchid growers, ask questions, and enjoy the sight of these uniquely beautiful plants in bloom. Consider buying some orchids to take home, too. nhorchids.org

FEB. 15: ALTON BAY, Winter Carnival. The town embraces the season with music, games, a bit of ice fishing, ice bowling, snowshoeing, and more—including the Great Alton Bay Bed Race. 603-875-0109; alton.nh.gov

FEB. 20: PORTSMOUTH, “Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy: Visions from Cape Breton & Beyond.” Enjoy an evening of dynamic Celtic music—fiddling, dancing, and singing. It’s sure to be a world-class performance at the Music Hall’s Historic Theater. 603-4362400; themusichall.org

FEB. 20–22: LACONIA, Sled Dog Derby. It’s game on as six-dog teams head out from the starting gate along Main Street, competing in one of the most exhilarating forms of over-snow travel. lrsdc.org

FEB. 22: MOUNT WASHINGTON VALLEY, Chocolate Festival. It’s the sweetest day on the trail, for sure. Secure your ticket and ski or snowshoe (or even drive) from inn to inn, enjoying spectacular scenery, local hospitality, and decadent treats at each stop. mwvskitouring.org

RHODE ISLAND

THROUGH FEB. 22: PROVIDENCE, Circus Exhibit. Center stage at the RISD Museum, catch a glimpse into the visual world of this phenomenon during the height of its popularity (1850 to 1960). Some 40 circus-themed paintings, drawings, prints, photos, and posters by artists such as Alexander Calder, Henri Matisse, and others delve into life under the big top and its wider connections to culture and society. 401-454-6500; risdmuseum.org

JAN. 1: NEWPORT, Polar Bear Plunge. Take a cold dip for charity at high noon. The Newport Polar Bears welcome your participation as they take a swim in the frosty Atlantic Ocean via Easton’s Beach. All proceeds from the swim and the after-swim party held at the Atlantic Beach Club will benefit A Wish Come True. 401-846-0028; discovernewport.org

JAN. 3: SMITHFIELD, Winter Big Day. How many species can you find? Register in advance for this popular program, starting at the Audubon Society’s Powder Mill Ledges Wildlife Refuge; then set out to discover winter birding hot spots on a daylong van trip in hopes of spying the likes of a Barrow’s goldeneye, Eurasion wigeon, short-eared owl, snow bunting, and more. Dress warmly; pack a lunch and optics. 401-949-5454; asri.org

JAN. 9–18: PAWTUCKET, “Sly Fox.” Enjoy a fun night at Jenks Auditorium as The Community Players present a hilarious comedy about greed, lust, and the art of the con. 401-7266860; thecommunityplayers.net

FEB. 6, 8, 12: WOONSOCKET, “Murder Mystery Dinner Series: Death by Valentine.” Stadium Theatre’s popular interactive experience returns with a brand-new plot. At this Valentine’s Day party, mysterious gifts arrive from a secret admirer, but who is it? A delicious dinner from River Falls Restaurant will accompany the show in the theatre’s beautiful Marquee Room. 401-762-4545; stadium theatre.com

FEB. 7: LINCOLN, Lincoln’s Birthday Celebration. Enjoy birthday cake and a slice of history at the Arnold House in honor of the country’s 16th president. Tour the museum, learn about Abe’s visits to the Ocean State, and how this town came to be named for him in 1871. 978-462-2634; historicnewengland.org

FEB. 7: WOONSOCKET, Mardi Gras Celebration. Honoring the area’s proud French Canadian heritage, the festivities at St. Ann Arts & Cultural Center include live music, a delicious Cajun-inspired dinner, and cash bar—plus costumed attendees, of course. nrica.org

FEB. 13–22: NEWPORT, Winter Festival. An annual extravaganza with activities at various locations across the city—more than 150 events in all, featuring a mix of nonstop food, music, and fun for all ages. 401-847-7666; newportwinterfestival.com

Enjoy great sailing by day and cozy anchorages at night. Your adventure includes delicious meals, shore trips, wildlife and spectacular scenery. Choose from 8 historic windjammers sailing from Camden and Rockland on 3- to 6-day cruises. Prices start at $400.

Well Worth the Drive

JanUary 17

Wildlife Celebration

Quechee, Vermont

Visit the Vermont institute of natural science (Vins), home to many winged ambassadors—from owls to eagles—on this day that’s all about family-fun activities in celebration of wildlife. Join expert educators to explore exhibits and trails, and enjoy outdoor and indoor games, crafts, and activities that challenge visitors of all ages and their winter-adaptation skills. then snuggle ’round a warm campfire for afternoon refreshments. snow or no, it’s sure to be a great way to discover the wonders of wildlife in winter. 802-359-5000; vinsweb.org

FEB. 19–22: PROVIDENCE, Spring Flower & Garden Show. Shake off the winter blues with a punch of color! Delight in beautiful, vibrant blooms and inventive garden displays at the Convention Center. Kids’ activities, demonstrations, and lectures, too. flowershow.com

FEB. 26–MAR. 29: PROVIDENCE, “The Glass Menagerie.” Trinity Repertory Company presents Tennessee Williams’s emotional masterpiece, featuring one of the most recognizable families in dramatic literature: histrionic mother Amanda, guilt-ridden son Tom, and fragile daughter Laura. Director Brian Mertes brings a rarely seen depth of storytelling to this production, engaging the audience in new and unexpected ways. 401-351-4242; trinityrep.com

VERMONT

JAN. 9–11: HYDE PARK, Jane Austen Weekend: Sense and Sensibility. Make reservations ahead at the town’s lovely Georgian mansion, Governor’s House, to enjoy literary-inspired diversions, including a dessert and talk on Austen’s England, an afternoon tea or Regency-style dinner party and book discussion, plus Sunday brunch, a quiz with prizes, and more. Come for an evening or stay for the weekend. 802888-6888; onehundredmain.com

JAN. 10: SMUGGLERS’ NOTCH, Winter Trails

Day. New to the sport of skiing or snowshoeing? Here’s the day to give it a try at Smugglers’ Nordic Ski & Snowshoe Adventure Center. Rentals and short instructional sessions are free to newbies, to help you enjoy the winter season. 802-419-4615; smuggs.com

JAN. 17–19: WOODSTOCK, Sleigh Ride Weekend. Enjoy the beautiful grounds of Billings Farm & Museum by horse-drawn sleigh, or delight in “jack jumper” sledding. Tour the farmhouse and dairy operation, and view a film presentation in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. 802-457-2355; billingsfarm.org

JAN. 17–25: STOWE, 41st Winter Carnival. The snow is here, so have some fun with it. Visit venues around town; kids of all ages are sure to enjoy zany sporting events (snow volley -

ball, anyone?), ice-carving competitions, movies, carnival activities, and more. 802777-5510; stowewintercarnival.com

JAN. 31: BENNINGTON, Winter Fest & Penguin Plunge. Take the plunge from the Lake Paran Boat Launch, and be rewarded with a mug of hot cocoa; then attend the “after-plunge” party. There’s ice sculpting to check out, and an indoor carnival at the grade school sure to delight the kids, plus additional activities around town. 802-447-3311; bennington.com

JAN. 31: CRAFTSBURY, Craftsbury Marathon. It takes heart and athleticism, but up to 1,000 competitors arrive at the Nordic Center to challenge themselves. Skiers of all ages follow either the 25k or 50k trail course while taking in some of the most scenic terrain in the region. 802-586-7767; craftsbury.com

FEB. 2: BURLINGTON, “Nice Work If You Can Get It.” Set in the Roaring 1920s, this Tony Award–winning musical at the Flynn Center depicts a cast of outrageous characters gathered in New York to celebrate a wealthy playboy’s wedding—but nothing goes as planned. Gershwin’s most beloved tunes are featured in a fresh song-and-dance spectacular. 802-8635966; flynntix.org

FEB. 7: BARRE, Shelby Lynne. The Barre Opera House presents the Grammy-winning performer in concert. Lynne’s albums have received critical and popular acclaim—a little country, a little rock, and a little soul make for an enjoyable evening. 802-476-8188; barre operahouse.org

FEB. 7: STRATTON, Taste of Vermont. A muchanticipated event at the mountain resort, and it’s no wonder: The area’s finest restaurants, professional chefs, and local best cooks serve up delicious dishes just for you to sample and savor. strattonfoundation.org

FEB. 7: WATERBURY CENTER, Green Mountain Club Snowshoe & Winter Trails Festival. Enjoy an invigorating day of free snowshoe demos, guided snowshoe tours to local peaks and trails, indoor and outdoor kids’ activities, educational workshops, nature walks and hikes, dogsledding, hot chocolate, and more at the club’s headquarters. 802-244-7037; greenmountainclub.org

FEB. 15: CHESTER, Winter Carnivale. Visit various locations about town for wintertime fun and festivities: scavenger hunt, ice skating, dogsled rides, bonfire, competitions, good food, and more. chestervermont.org

FEB. 21: QUECHEE, Owl Festival. Visit the folks at the Vermont Institute of Natural Science (VINS) to meet some of its owl ambassadors, and learn what it’s like to care for these mysterious and interesting creatures. 802-3595000; vinsweb.org

FEB. 22: STOWE, Stowe Derby. One of the oldest unique ski races in all of North America provides participants with the ultimate test of their abilities. The race begins atop Mount Mansfield and concludes in the historic village of Stowe—and just one set of skis is allowed. 802-253-7704 x 22; stowederby.com

FEB. 27–28: BURLINGTON, Magic Hat Mardi Gras Weekend. The music, mayhem, and more begin on Friday night at Higher Ground. On Saturday, downtown Burlington heats up with pre-parade musical performances, a costume contest, and other fun, family-friendly activities along Church Street. Don’t miss the parade—reach for the beads, moonpies, and Lake Champlain Chocolates tossed from the floats! 802-658-2739; magichat.net

Call ahead to confirm dates, times, and possible admission fees. To submit an event online, go to: YankeeMagazine.com/submitevent

To find more events in your area, visit: YankeeMagazine.com/events

Winter Reasoning

Falling coconuts can hurt you;

Breakfast grapefruits always squirt you.

Clog my pores with suntan slime?

I’ll take New England anytime. —D.A.W.

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REAL ESTATE cont.

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Established 1958

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Nicknamed the “Brockton Blockbuster,” Rocky Marciano remains the only heavyweight boxing champion to retire undefeated (49–0).

Rocco Francis Marchegiano was born to Italian immigrant parents in Brockton, Massachusetts, on September 1, 1923. In a bit of foreshadowing, his mother received a card from a friend that pictured little boxing gloves and read, “Welcome to another champion.”

Rocky’s mother didn’t approve of boxing, so during his early training runs, he’d carry a football and pretend he was training to be a running back.

A 10th-grade dropout, Rocky worked blue-collar jobs, including floor sweeper at the same shoe factory where his father worked. He also worked as a chute man on delivery trucks for the Brockton Ice & Coal Company (for which he earned $10 per week) and as a ditch digger.

On St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1947, Marciano fought his first professional fight, using the Irish-sounding pseudonym Rocky Mack. He won by knockout in the third round.

Rocky became “Marciano” because New England ring announcers couldn’t pronounce Marchegiano.

Marciano became heavyweight champion on September 23, 1952, when, behind on points, he knocked out 38-year-old Jersey Joe Walcott in the 13th round. In 2006, an ESPN

poll voted it the greatest knockout ever.

In the early 1950s, Sunnyhurst Dairy in Stoneham, Massachusetts, featured an image of Marciano on its milk bottles, with the slogan, “For Radiant Health, Rocky Marciano says ‘You Never Outgrow Your Need for Milk.’”

In 1954, Timex ran a series of ads featuring sports stars testing the durability of its watches. Marciano was featured in several, wearing a Timex while working out: “The Watch ‘The Rock’ Couldn’t Stop!”

Marciano’s last fight was on September 21, 1955, at Yankee Stadium. A closed-circuit television audience of more than 400,000 watched him knock out Archie Moore in the ninth round, and Marciano earned the largest payday of his career, $470,997. Seven months later, the 32-year-old boxer announced his retirement.

On August 31, 1969, the eve of his 46th birthday, Marciano was a passenger in a small private plane, headed from Chicago to Des Moines. In bad visibility conditions, the pilot clipped a tree two miles from the runway. Marciano, pilot Glenn Belz, and fellow passenger Frankie Farrell (son of mobster Louis Fratto) were killed.

Marciano was known to have distrusted banks and was rumored to have kept his money stashed in light fixtures and curtain rods and other locations in his homes. Despite extensive searching after his death, the fortune that many people presumed he’d stashed was never discovered.

A bronze statue of Marciano, sculpted by artist Mario Rendon, was unveiled on the grounds of Brockton High School on September 23, 2012, the 60th anniversary of Marciano’s first championship victory. There’s also a bronze statue of Marciano in Ripa Teatina, Italy, birthplace of Marciano’s father.

—compiled by Joe Bills

Go Downhill, Fast.

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