83 /// A Guide to Winter Comforts
Shake off the chill with the coziest inn in the world (we built it!), the best comfort foods around, and warm and welcoming New England pubs.
96 /// The Last of the Hill Farms
In his new book, Vermont photographer Richard W. Brown pays tribute to the vanished landscape he once roamed and to its people, his friends.
108 /// The Big Question: Polly Mahoney
We ask a veteran Maine musher: What makes a top dog?
110 /// Called to the Wild
For Lucas St. Clair, winning support for Maine’s newest national park monument meant contending with the
backlash against its benefactor—who happens to be his mother. By Ian Aldrich
116 /// Looking Back on Our Town
Eighty years on, Thornton Wilder’s classic play still echoes in the New Hampshire village that’s said to have inspired it. By Annie Graves
118 /// The Artist in Winter
Growing up Finnish-American taught Eric Aho to meet the extremes of winter with extremes of imagination.
By Kristen Laine124 /// Leaving Mary’s Farm
How Yankee ’s Edie Clark found “the best, most rewarding kind of love” in her little home on the hill. By Mel Allen
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30 /// Imagination Houses
In an artist’s living space, the spirit of creativity is always in residence. By Annie Graves
40 /// Open Studio
Ocean life meets clay in the work of Cape Cod potter Tessa Morgan. By Annie Graves
44 /// House for Sale
The only thing as grand as this renovated Maine gem is the view from its porch. By the Yankee Moseyer
48 /// Bean to Bar
An emerging batch of premium-chocolate makers is hitting the sweet spot here in New England. Story and photographs by Krissy O’Shea
56 /// Local Flavor
Libby’s Bistro and Saalt Pub bring a taste of the world to the North Country. By Amy Traverso
62 /// Could You Live Here?
When temperatures dip into the single digits, Northampton, Massachusetts, turns up the heat. By Annie Graves
70 /// The Best 5
Feel the love at these New England landmarks with a romantic history. By Kim Knox Beckius
72 /// Local Treasure
Adventurous alums make Bowdoin College’s Arctic museum well worth exploring. By Joe Bills
76 /// Out & About
From hair-raising toboggan runs to jaw-dropping ice sculptures, we round up winter’s best events.
departments
10
DEAR YANKEE, CONTRIBUTORS & POETRY BY D.A.W.
12
INSIDE YANKEE
14
MARY’S FARM
To illuminate what’s truly important, sometimes all you need is starlight. By
Edie Clark16
LIFE IN THE KINGDOM
30
How empty promises left rural Vermonters with what they’ve always relied on: themselves. By Ben Hewitt
20
FIRST LIGHT
Discovering Nordic-style thrills on the longest ice skating trail in the country. By
Rowan Jacobsen24
KNOWLEDGE & WISDOM
A surprising new use for old furniture, remembering the Blizzard of ’78, and Louisa May Alcott’s advice for choosing books, and friends, worth treasuring.
26
UP CLOSE
How to dress for the world’s worst weather.
62
140
TIMELESS NEW ENGLAND
Meet the granddaddy of today’s snowmobiles: a Model T on skis.
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Enjoy Small Ship Cruising Done Perfectly®
1121 Main St., P.O. Box 520, Dublin, NH 03444. 603-563-8111; editor@yankeemagazine.com
EDITORIAL
EDITOR Mel Allen
ART DIRECTOR Lori Pedrick
DEPUTY EDITOR Ian Aldrich
MANAGING EDITOR Jenn Johnson
SENIOR EDITOR/FOOD Amy Traverso
HOME & GARDEN EDITOR Annie Graves
PHOTO EDITOR Heather Marcus
SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER Mark Fleming
DIGITAL EDITOR Aimee Tucker
DIGITAL ASSISTANT EDITOR Cathryn McCann
ASSOCIATE EDITOR Joe Bills
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Kim Knox Beckius, Edie Clark, Ben Hewitt, Krissy O’Shea, Julia Shipley
CONTRIBUTING
PHOTOGRAPHERS Julie Bidwell, Kindra Clineff, Sara Gray, Corey Hendrickson, Joe Keller, Joel Laino, Jarrod McCabe, Michael Piazza, Heath Robbins, Carl Tremblay
PRODUCTION
PRODUCTION DIRECTORS David Ziarnowski, Susan Gross
SENIOR PRODUCTION ARTISTS Jennifer Freeman, Rachel Kipka
DIGITAL
VP NEW MEDIA & PRODUCTION Paul Belliveau Jr.
DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER Amy O’Brien
YANKEE PUBLISHING INC.
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New York: 45 Knollwood Rd, Ste 103, Elmsford NY 10523
Waves foam against the snowy shore at Cape Cod’s Nobska Light.
Travel: Winter Ocean Weekends
We round up the top five coastal spots for a snowy seaside getaway.
NEWENGLAND.COM/ WINTER-OCEAN-WEEKENDS
Recipes: Favorite New England Comfort Foods
Warm up with such cozy dishes as firehouse chili and lobster mac and cheese.
NEWENGLAND.COM/ COMFORT-FOOD
Travel: Best Cross-Country Ski Trails
Cure that cabin fever by hitting one of our region’s top cross-country trails.
NEWENGLAND.COM/ CROSS-COUNTRY-TRAILS
Food: Where to Get a Lobster Roll in Winter
Missing the taste of summer? Check out these 10 terrific lobster rolls, available now.
NEWENGLAND.COM/ WINTER-LOBSTER-ROLLS
These gems are pure magic, old New England winter scenes. Here captured in a field of white are frozen ponds and streams, snow hills and valleys, and snow-covered open fields. They are winterwhite-perfect, over the river and through the woods, trees in black lace silhouetted against a winter-gray sky. Think ice-covered grasses, Queen Anne’s Lace, black crows on the wing, twilight winter’s sleep, and stars in the sky.
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Remember going to sleep on the night of a Nor’easter and waking to a pure white world?
It snowed all night. Listening to the radio, waiting for your town. Breakfast and out the door. A free day. Sound of chains and spinning tires. Snowplows piling high. Sledding on snow-packed streets. Toboggans on the hills. Forts with tunnels. Snowballs. Snowmen. Icicles dripping in the afternoon sun. Pink cheeks, red nose, wet mittens, damp hair, hand-knitted wool hats drying on the radiator. The smell. The warmth of the kitchen. It was a good day.
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Researching the sorts of warm touches that make New England inns feel like home away from home [“The Coziest Inn in the World,” p. 84] found Beckius in her comfort zone—literally. A Yankee contributing editor and the author of six travel books, she lives in an 1880 Connecticut farmhouse with a cozy hearth, and in her office next door, “I write beside a wood-burning stove all winter long!”
KRISSY O’SHEA
Though taste-testing was part of the allure of writing about chocolate [“Bean to Bar,” p. 48], O’Shea also learned a lot between nibbles. “I was surprised to discover just how nuanced bean-to-bar chocolate is—on par with wine and coffee,” says O’Shea, a contributing editor for Yankee who also works as a freelance photographer and stylist. You can see more of her work and words on her blog, Cottage Farm.
RICHARD W. BROWN
Since Yankee was one of the first magazines to publish his photographs, back in the early 1970s, Brown finds it “very fitting” that it presents images from The Last of the Hill Farms [p. 96], a project he’s dreamed about almost from the start of his career. “It’s probably good I waited this long to do the book,” says Brown, today one of the foremost photographers of the New England landscape. “More time, more patience.”
ANNIE GRAVES
After starting her journalism career at a small American newspaper in Rome, Graves has covered everything from food and health to travel for a variety of publications, including Coastal Living and Yankee. But writing about a long-ago stint as an acting ingénue [“Looking Back on Our Town,” p. 116] left her feeling “deeply nostalgic,” she says, then adds: “Is it too late to set my sights on Broadway?”
In profiling the painter Eric Aho [“The Artist in Winter,” p. 118], Laine felt a personal connection: Like him, she is third-generation Finnish-American, and their families shared many of the same traditions. Her father even built her a sauna as a wedding present —a structure that today sits on a New Hampshire pond as it brings the Finnish saunapäivä tradition to her own children, Ursula and Virgil.
VICTORIA MAXFIELD
A graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Maxfield couldn’t believe it when she was asked to illustrate “The Coziest Inn in the World” [p. 84]. “I grew up in New England and worked at a bed-and-breakfast for three years, so it sounded like the ideal illustration job!” says Maxfield, whose work has been honored by American Illustration and the Society of Illustrators, among others.
Jonathan Meath [“Ask the Expert,” November/December] definitely knows about being Santa Claus. In 2015, I volunteered to be Sinterklaas (an earlier version of Santa). As a park ranger, I interact with children every day. However, after meeting 400 kids that first night, and feeling that love, I was hooked. I learned great tips from Mr. Meath—and am trying to get my ho-ho-ho! -ing just right for this year!
Kevin Hanley Brooklyn, New YorkThough I was saddened when I read your editorial about Edie Clark [“Homes for the Holidays,” November/December], I appreciated the loving, gracious way you softly gave us the news that Edie will not be able to write for Yankee anymore. Thank goodness we have her past writings to get us through this. Her essays brought me and many others so much joy, and all I can do is be so grateful that Yankee was the place where I could always find her.
Pam Newsome Park City, UtahEditor’s note: For our tribute to Edie and the historic homestead that inspired so many of her columns, look for “Leaving Mary’s Farm,” on p. 124 in this issue.
I read with great emotion your story concerning Boston’s very special Christmas tree and, more important, the tragedy behind its annual presentation by the people of Nova Scotia [“How Boston Got Its Christmas Tree,” November/December].
I have been a Yankee subscriber for years and do not doubt its vast and dedicated readership. However, in light of our current “me first” political stance, I’d like to suggest that the story of how caring individuals united to deliver—
Nothing raises human hopes
Like cupid-covered envelopes.
It’s probably good news, we think—
Electric bills are not this pink.
—D.A.W.quite literally—the means of survival is one that everyone should read and understand. Nova Scotia’s century of grateful remembrance is not something one sees every day and is certainly not anything we now aspire to.
Thank you for helping us see how tragedies may be handled in our global neighborhood.
Janice R. English Oxford, ConnecticutThank you for your coverage of members of the LGBTQ community in your September/October issue. Reading about Jamie and Paula Eisenberg’s pies [“Local Flavor”] and seeing Gigi Gill’s photo in your Salem story [“Could You Live Here?”] warmed my heart. Many of the people I love are members of the LGBTQ community, and I’m so glad that you’re representing them as the great New Englanders that they are.
Kate Roy Wilbraham, Massachusetts
ears ago, when I taught fourth grade in Maine, I welcomed the cold, brittle days of winter. When recess ended, the children scrambled back into the classroom, their cheeks red with windburn, and after they’d flung hats and coats into lockers they settled at their desks, and I’d read to them while they quieted, like embers. It was as though they had entered a cozy cocoon. I think many of us were once those children—playing outside at a fever pitch, not caring what the thermometer said, and then coming inside hours later to thaw by the fire or with a mug of steaming chocolate.
In planning this issue, we wanted to bring to its pages the dueling elements of winter: the exhilaration of bundling up to play outdoors and also the satisfying warmth that greets you when you step back inside. Rowan Jacobsen feels like Hans Brinker, for instance, as he glides down the longest ice skating trail in the country [“‘Wild Skating’ on Lake Morey,” p. 20]. And few New Englanders know more about trekking into the snow-covered wilderness than Maine dogsled pro Polly Mahoney [“The Big Question,” p. 108].
But maybe we are growing a tad softer with age, because we kept coming back to the notion of comfort. And, of course, we began with food. In “The Best Comfort Foods in New England” [p. 88], Yankee food editor Amy Traverso reveals her favorite cold-weather treats, including the chocolate sea salt doughnut on our cover that may well set the standard for all future doughnuts in your life. “The Coziest Inn in the World” [p. 84] lets us indulge in a little true-life whimsy: Guided by Kim Knox Beckius’s deep knowledge of New England inns and B&Bs, we design our dream getaway, from fireplaced parlor to gourmet breakfast served on a quilt-covered bed. And when you rouse yourself to leave this inn of all inns, “Bars Worth Toasting” [p. 92] offers some suggestions for warm-ups of a different sort.
I have no doubt that when you pore over “The Last of the Hill Farms” [p. 96], you’ll see how a photographer’s art has bestowed a certain immortality on the Vermonters who opened their lives to his camera. These are the same kinds of country people, as it happens, who came alive in Edie Clark’s writings over the years. As I mentioned in this space last issue, health problems have made it impossible for Edie to continue her column at Yankee “Leaving Mary’s Farm” [p. 124] invites her loyal readers to share in a poignant farewell.
I wish we had space to excerpt all the hundreds of notes and cards (many handmade) that have arrived at our office for Edie, who lights up when she reads them. Here is one: “What she has shared with readers has mattered deeply and has touched our hearts by their simple truths. Her writing warmed us on the coldest day—even here in Florida, where the coldness felt in one’s heart and soul may have had nothing to do with weather at all.... Edie and her homestead will remain lovingly and enduringly tucked away in our hearts. She is a New England treasure.”
And one more: “Dear Edie, I have been amazed at your spunk and can-do attitude. And when I encounter a task that I think I won’t be able to handle, I always think, ‘Is this how Edie would handle this?’ You are a wonder and an inspiration.”
I cannot imagine a warmer readership anywhere. Thanks for that, from all of us.
Mel Allen editor@yankeemagazine.com
he view of the night sky up here on the hill is so spectacular that two of my neighbors have taken note of it in naming their places. One is called Skyfield, the other Sky Hill. It took living here to understand the effect that a clear night sky can have.
An old friend came to visit me soon after I had moved here. He is a seer, a practicing reader of the stars, and he was eager to see this wide view of the heavens that I had told him about. His visit fell on the night of the new moon, the darkest night of the month, the brightest night for the stars. When darkness had fallen completely, we walked out to the rise in the hill, the highest point here, and stood in the black stillness. As our eyes adjusted, we heard only the quiet of the night, a quiet so complete that it seemed to reverberate around us. Overhead arched the great sparkling dome of the universe. Philip knew all the celestial configurations, and he patiently pointed out each one. Even though I could not always follow the careful lines his finger drew, he slowly located each member of our night family. Orion. Perseus. Venus. After he had found all his old friends, we stood in silence for a long time, heads thrown back, oblivious to the cold. We had begun to travel into that timeless and mysterious place beyond our immediate world, that place that leaves us slightly in awe of our smallness.
In his letters written home during World War II, my father used the night sky as a touchstone, the one thing he kept in common with the woman he hoped to marry. In the night sky, my father found a place that banished climate and seasons, language and time zones, war and hate. Looking up from his tent pitched on a dark hill in North Africa, he watched the stars and the moon, and then, the next morning, he wrote to my mother, half a world away, “I saw our moon last night and knew that you would soon see it, too. I feel closer to you, for that moon.”
The night sky, with all its sparkling constellations, is indeed the one unchanging aspect of our planet, the only territory we share with other nations. I remember the first time I discovered the beauty of the night sky on this hill, the first time I realized why my neighbors had named their places with reverence to the sky. When I first moved here, there was an unending array of problems to be dealt with: broken pipes, a faltering foundation, insufficient heat, an overwhelming amount of debris from a devastating ice storm, a barn that had begun to collapse. The list was long, my resources were short. I lay awake many nights.
One night these difficulties pressed in to an almost unbearable degree. It was a very dark night in January, and I was very cold, staying deep under the covers. I turned this way and that, but sleep would not come. At last I got up and walked down the hall. One of the windows in the bathroom had a broken pane. I went over to it and, with a towel, tried to stem the flow of cold air. But my attention was instead drawn outside, way outside, up into the darkness where the stars virtually burned toward earth. The beauty was so startling, I remember saying, “Oh!” out loud, into the silence of that difficult night. The stars shimmered in their places, each one distinct, each one representing an eternity of its own. I knew at once why I was here.
Whether from a tent in Africa during a world war or from a cold farmhouse on a New Hampshire hill at the teetering end of the 20th century, we need these celestial guides to keep us from despair. The stars tell us other things, too, but maybe the most important thing that they tell us is how close we really are to each other.
A slightly longer version of this essay was first published in Yankee’s January 2000 issue. Edie Clark’s books are available at edieclark.com.
At times, starlight can illuminate what is truly important.
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hen my family and I moved a dozen miles north of our previous home, which was in Cabot, we officially became residents of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. The Kingdom (no one from here bothers with “Northeast”; there’s only one Kingdom ’round these parts, and we know exactly where it is) comprises three counties—Caledonia, Essex, and Orleans— and at last count boasted a population of 64,764, which means it is home to roughly 10 percent of Vermont residents.
The town we live in is called Stannard. There are no paved roads in Stannard, which holds the distinction of being the place where Bernie Sanders settled for a brief period in the late ’60s, when he first moved to Vermont. It also holds the distinction of being one of only three towns in Caledonia County that have seen population growth over the past decade, though this may have something to do with my family moving here two years ago. Stannard’s population is barely over 200, so we were good for a 2 percent bump.
In Vermont: A Guide to the Green Mountain State, published in 1937, Stannard is described like this:
In this scattered rural settlement buried in a mountain wilderness farmers struggle to wrest a living from agricultural pursuits under adverse conditions. A white schoolhouse, and the tan and red Methodist Church and a farmstead are all that mark the center of this farming community. The region is wild and primitive in the extreme, vast forested uplands stretching away on all sides. Many
of the farmhouses are unacquainted with electric lights and other conveniences, and life here is in a crude stage.
It’s tempting to say that things haven’t changed much since then, and in some regards that’s true. The tan and red church remains (I can see it from the small knoll that rises behind our barn); it’s mostly unused, though on or near every winter solstice, the community gathers for an open mic–style holiday celebration of songs and stories. There are still forested uplands stretching away on all sides, in part because the town borders a conserved 10,826-acre state wildlife management area. On the other hand, electric lights are no longer a novelty, and while cell service is spotty at best (if I stand on the highest rail of the cows’ winter paddock, I generally can get two bars’ worth), we enjoy all the benefits of high-speed Internet. It seems to me a fine balance of past and present, though were someone to open a small brewpub in town, I wouldn’t find reason to complain.
A lot of people will tell you that the Northeast Kingdom (aka NEK) is the most unspoiled and beautiful part of Vermont, and I don’t tend to argue—not so much because I agree, but because such things are forever in the eye of the beholder. In truth, there aren’t many parts of Vermont that aren’t capable of catching in my chest, of making me wonder what it’d be like to live right here, what sort of cabin I’d build at the crest of that grass-covered knoll, or tucked into that cool, quiet copse of balsam fir, or along the bank of the stream I watch tumble and churn as I pass in my car. Always wanting to stop, and always in too much of a hurry to get where I’m going to actually do so.
So perhaps the NEK is the most unspoiled and beautiful part of Vermont, and perhaps it isn’t. And perhaps it doesn’t matter anyway, except to those who’d choose to waste their precious breath arguing something so subjective. But one thing that’s
not up for debate is that the Kingdom is one of the most economically challenged regions of the state. Like most rural areas in the United States, the Kingdom is grappling with an increasingly globalized and urbanized economy that seems not to value the land-based skills and resources that proliferate here.
The Kingdom’s economic challenges were supposed to have eased by now. In the January/February 2014 issue of Yankee, I wrote an article titled “Change Coming to the Kingdom.” It was about a massive influx of planned development that promised to infuse more than $600 million into the region. “The money will be splashed across a multitude of enterprises,” I wrote, “including (but not limited to) a biomedical facility and ‘research park,’ ... a waterfront marina and conference center, a reconstructed city block with retail and office space and short- to medium-term rentals, and an expanded ski resort. In total, the initiative is expected to create approximately 10,000 jobs in a region where the labor force is estimated at 30,750 people.”
The plan did not, in fact, unfold as predicted. Not even close. The reasons for this are complex in detail but simple in concept: The whole thing was a boondoggle, authorities say. A sham. Through a national program that promises green cards to foreign investors who commit at least $500,000 and create at least 10 jobs, the orchestrators of the Northeast Kingdom Economic Development Initiative allegedly misused more than $200 million of investor funds in a manner the Securities and Exchange Commission has described as “Ponzi-like.”
I enjoyed reporting “Change Coming to the Kingdom.” I wasn’t yet an official Kingdom resident, but I grew up in blue-collar rural Vermont, and the people I met felt comfortingly
familiar to me. They were direct and unpretentious, whether expressing unreserved enthusiasm, resignation, or unreserved skepticism for the proposed development. “Yes, there’s going to be money,” Brenda Lepage had told me when I stopped by her namesake restaurant, Brenda’s Homestyle Cookin’, in Newport. “But for whom?”
Not long ago, I returned to Newport to see how the town had changed since the alleged fraud was uncovered. Naturally, my first stop was at Brenda’s; I’d hoped to find her at the grill,
writing. “Newport is on the move. Keep positive,” read one. “Hope. Gratitude. Tenacity,” read another. Just beyond the fence, a set of concrete steps led to nowhere; weeds grew tall through cracks in the concrete, and I thought about something Pat Sagui had told me when I called her in the aftermath of the initiative’s collapse. A Kingdom resident, Sagui was one of the few people I’d contacted for the original story who had been willing to speak against the project. “How do our communities function under somewhat challenging, limited resources?” She’d paused a moment before answering herself. “Through goodwill, trust, volunteerism. Now, that’s been violated, and I suspect the next time someone comes along with a big idea, people might respond a little differently.”
but she’d retired nearly three years earlier. So I was satisfied to sit and eat my blue cheese burger special (“The blue cheese is real!” my server told me) as I observed an older couple slowly making their way through their meal. The man wore a pair of work boots and a shirt embroidered with what I assumed to be his name: “Romeo.” After every two or three bites, they dabbed neatly at their mouths with napkins, often in tandem.
After my burger, I walked half a block up Main Street, to the chain link fence surrounding the cellar hole that was supposed to have been one of the cornerstone sites of the Northeast Kingdom Economic Development Initiative. An entire city block had been razed to make way for a new hotel, boutique retail space, and longer-term residential units, displacing a handful of small local businesses in the process. Yet the money to rebuild had gone missing, and now the chain link fence was decorated with multicolor ribbons, some with
I drove a meandering route out of Newport, eventually passing the small airport and the now-shuttered pizza joint I’d written about four years earlier. Pavement gave way to dirt, and at intersections I turned according to whim, content to watch through the windshield as the Kingdom slowly unfurled, a patchwork of field and forest, of trailer homes wrapped in deteriorating plastic, remnants of last winter’s windbreak, and listing farmhouses with flaking paint. Everywhere, it seemed, herds of cattle were grazing the late summer grass— Holsteins, mostly, but also Jerseys and Brown Swiss.
I stopped at a yard sale, parking next to an ’80s-era Ford pickup with a “REDNEK” bumper sticker, and for a quarter I bought a pair of Levi’s jeans in just my size. They weren’t perfect: There were some holes in the cuffs and scuff marks at the knees. Whoever had owned them before had worn them hard. But sometimes, it’s the rough edges that give a thing its character.
Like most rural areas, the Kingdom is grappling with an increasingly globalized economy that seems not to value the land-based skills and resources that proliferate here.
BY ROWAN JACOBSEN
t took me just five minutes on the ice at Lake Morey, a two-mile jewel set in a ring of Vermont hills near the New Hampshire border, to realize I’d been using the wrong skates all my life. I flew across the black surface of the lake, shuttered summer camps whipping past onshore, and felt a childlike giddiness bubbling up. I’d rented a pair of Nordic skates from the skate shack at Lake Morey Resort, and right from the start I could feel that this was the fairy tale I’d always chased unsuccessfully in my old hockey skates.
Nordic skates, which are still uncommon in the United States, are long, rugged blades designed for distance over less-than-perfect ice. The blades are topped with cross-country ski bindings that snap right into regular cross-country boots, and their curved tips and wide cut allow them to navigate bumps and cracks without catching a tip. A national obsession in Sweden, they’re finally catching on over here.
My first 90 seconds were shaky, I admit. I sat on a wooden bench on the resort’s shoreline and attached my blades, then threaded wobblylegged through a forest of pleasure skaters and pickup hockey games, my arms out for balance. It was weird to look down and see little spears protruding from my boots, Bond villain–style, and weirder still to kick and feel my free heel lifting away from the blade, as if I were wearing tiny cross-country skis.
“Longer strokes,” advised Lisa Avery, the resort’s co-owner, following behind on a kick sled. “This isn’t hockey.” The Averys, who have owned Lake Morey Resort for three generations, have made this place into New England’s skating mecca. People come for the pond hockey tournament, which draws about 100 teams from all over New England, and especially for the Nordic skating. The resort is one of the few places that rent Nordic skates, and the 4½-mile groomed trail, which it has maintained since 2006, is the longest in the country.
When I first visited, Mother Nature’s Zamboni had just swept through, showering the lake with a January rainstorm that froze into black glass from end to end, so I didn’t even need the trail. As soon as I cleared the scrum of people
and settled into a rhythm of long, slow kicks, channeling my inner Olympic speed skater, the revelations began.
One, I was going somewhere . The shoreline whistled past, a bracing wind
toes into hard, cold skates all my life? My boots were cozy and warm. And no more changing into frozen skates on the rink: You just walk down to the ice and snap on your blades. Parents of
Three, good God was I going fast. The wider blades glide on top of the ice instead of digging a channel as figure skates do, so you get twice the glide per kick. On a large lake, you don’t realize how much speed you’ve built up ... until
you try to turn. If hockey skates are the sports cars of the ice, Nordic skates are the SUVs. They’ll barrel over all sorts of debris, but they don’t cut. If I veered too sharply, I suddenly found myself fishtailing like a stunt driver. I wiped out a few times, yet even that was fun: skittering over the ice like a puck, not really caring how long it took to stop.
I reached the far end of the lake— two miles in just a few minutes—and turned and looked back. Dozens of figures in bright clothing were darting across the surface like reef fish. The pale winter sun hung low over the spruce-capped hills, bouncing off the ice. Satisfied that I wasn’t going to kill myself, Avery detoured on her kick sled to catch up with some ice fishermen. An eagle watched from a bare tree, hoping for scraps.
I zipped back across the lake, concentrating on long, powerful kicks, chasing the sun’s reflection. There was white ice, milky ice, and crystal-clear “black ice” with thousands of bubbles frozen in time, all of it streaming like a film reel beneath my feet. I sashayed through a field of wooden tip-ups, hugged the shore for a peek at some intriguing summer camps, and cruised over a two-inch chasm that would have laid out a figure skater. Crows shadowed me. The ice groaned. I felt as though I were flying through a winterscape. I felt like a Norse god.
Nordic skating has its roots in the centuries-old Scandinavian tradition of strapping bone blades to your boots to cross the ice while hunting and fishing. Eventually steel blades replaced the bone, and then somebody had the bright idea to bond the blades to ski bindings, and a real sport was born. In Sweden, thousands of people traverse the frozen lakes every winter and compete in the Vikingarännet, a 50-mile race from Uppsala to Stockholm. The Dutch used to host a 200-kilometer race (roughly 125 miles) along their network of canals, but it’s been 20 years since they had enough ice to hold it.
Until New Hampshire’s Jamie Hess fell in love with Nordic skating—or “wild skating,” as he calls it— in Sweden in 1999, it was unknown in the United States, for reasons my feet and I cannot fathom. Hess began importing the equipment and spreading the gospel through races, guided tours, and unrelenting enthusiasm. The Norwich shop he founded, Nordic Skater, became the North American center of the sport (now located in Newbury, New Hampshire, it’s still going strong under the ownership of his son-in-law, Ben Prime). Hess leads tours on Lake Sunapee, Lake Champlain, and Lake Memphremagog, and last year he returned to Sweden for the first time in 18 years.
After two hours on Lake Morey, I was already fantasizing about doing my first. I could have kept going, but the sun was down and the skate shack was closing. I could just make out the last skaters gliding toward the inn. I got halfway back, then thought better of it and turned again, heading out for one more run as the world bent toward infinity, the sky gray, the shore fading, the only sound the shick, shick of my blades on the black lake.
Lake Morey Resort: The skate shack is open weekends January through March, ice permitting. Nordic skate rentals
$30. The skating trail is always free to use. 1 Clubhouse Road, Fairlee, VT. 800-423-1211; lakemoreyresort.com
Nordic Skater: Full selection of Nordic skates, skating boots, and safety gear. See website for showroom hours; appointments recommended. 4 Rte. 103A, Newbury, NH. 603-7632727; nordicskaters.com
Edie Clark has been a writer and editor of books and magazines for the past 40 years. She has written extensively about New England in award-winning feature stories for Yankee magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Her books are collections of her writings over the years: essays from her Yankee columns about Chesham Depot and Mary’s Farm; memoirs of her personal love and loss and her parents’ story of love and war; and poetry of Mount Monadnock. All available by mail order and online at EDIECLARK.COM
ESSAY COLLECTIONS
The View from Mary’s Farm
A collection of more than fifty short essays.
190 pages $14.95
Saturday Beans & Sunday Suppers
Kitchen Stories from Mary’s Farm. 224 pages $14.95
States of Grace
Encounters with Real Yankees. 320 pages $19.95
As Simple as That More essays from Mary’s Farm 320 pages $19.95
MEMOIRS
The Place He Made
A personal memoir of love and loss.
302 pages $18.95
What There Was Not to Tell
A Story of Love and War. 250 pages $19.95
POETRY
Monadnock Tales
Narrative poem that reflects a love of Mount Monadnock. $9.95
RECORDING
Night Sky – CD
Selected essays from The View from Mary’s Farm, read aloud by Edie Clark. $15.00
Add $4 per book for shipping and handling.
ll the wood heat literature emphasizes that dry wood burns better than wet, which leaves you with two choices: Either get some green wood and put it under cover for a year or so, or burn wood that is already good and dry, wood that you already have, wood that you can identify without special training. You need only look around you.
■ Rocking chairs: Any rocking chair that creaks is prime firewood. That creak means dry. It also means it will probably fall apart anyway, so you might as well get it first.
■ Louis Quatorze furniture: Wonderful stuff. Old enough to be very dry, big, heavy, with goodburning woods.
■ Queen Anne: Very high rating. About the only remaining dependable source of good walnut firewood.
■ Hepplewhite: Not recommended. Hepplewhite chairs look all right, but there just isn’t that much wood to them. You’ll burn through a set of six before midnight.
■ Shutters: Depends whether it’s a shutter that shuts. If it does, it could help you keep what heat you get. If it bangs, burn it.
■ Bamboo porch shades: You need the shades only in the summer, and you use the stove only in the winter. A real hand-in-glove arrangement.
■ Pianos: Pianos contain a great deal of champion firewood. Many people will hesitate, but if you can’t find middle C and haven’t had it tuned in more than five years, well.…
—Adapted from “The Very Last Word on Wood Heat” by Frank Heath, November 1978
—Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888). Though she wrote hundreds of plays, novels, stories, and poems during her lifetime, this Massachusetts author is best known for Little Women. That novel, which turns 150 this year, definitely qualifies as one of the “more select” in U.S. literature: A recent Harris poll of Americans’ favorite books put Little Women at No. 8, right after The Catcher in the Rye and just ahead of The Grapes of Wrath.
“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”
Historic
2/6/78
Date that the blizzard began in the Northeast
33
Number of hours of snowfall that followed
10 a.m.
Time that light snow began falling in Boston
Ninety-two Wind speed in mph of the storm’s highest onshore gust (recorded in Chatham, MA)
40+
Number of inches of snow that fell on New England’s hardest-hit areas
3,500 Estimated number of motorists left stranded on Route 128
2,100
Number of coastal homes destroyed in New England
Sixty-one Estimated percentage of destroyed homes that were on the South Shore
Number of times before the blizzard that The Boston Globe had failed to distribute an edition
54
Number of New Englanders killed in the storm (29 in MA alone)
FIVE
Number of crew on the pilot boat Can Do, which was lost while rescuing a Coast Guard boat
$1 billion
Estimated cost of storm cleanup across New England
400
Number of volunteers who helped shovel out the MBTA’s tracks
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om Padham suiting up for his job in winter is a little like a firefighter donning turnout gear. Both must protect themselves from head to toe against an extreme environment, which for Padham is the Northeast’s highest summit (where last January saw 127 mph gusts and a wind chill of -65). True, Padham can take his time getting dressed, since he’s a meteorologist and not a first responder. On the other hand, he and his coworkers at New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory have to do this every hour round the clock in order to make their weather observations and de-ice the instruments.
“We’re not outside very long, but it’s in conditions worse than what most people experience in their lifetime,” says Padham (shown at right), now in his fifth year on the summit. “It gets cold enough to cause frostbite in under two minutes.”
That said, here’s Padham’s typical bundlingup checklist: thick socks, insulated boots with microspikes, long underwear, fleece pants, ski pants, one or more polypropylene shirts, fleece top, down jacket, water-resistant parka, face mask, balaclava, beanie, glove liners, gloves or mittens, and goggles. Oh, and a headlamp comes in handy, too.
Even for a small staff (just six work at the summit in winter), that’s a lot of gear. Luckily for the nonprofit observatory, founded in 1932, many outfitters are glad to supply products in exchange for world’s-worst-weather bragging rights: Julbo, Kahtoola, Princeton Tec, and especially New Hampshire–based Eastern Mountain Sports, which provides most of the outdoor clothing. In the spirit of inclusiveness, EMS even made a snowsuit for the observatory’s resident Maine coon cat, Marty—but we hear no one dares make him wear it. —Jenn
Johnsonyour floor plan, make a list of what you need, what you need to buy new (toaster oven upgrade), and what you are going to take with you.
clutter. “If you don’t need it and you don’t love it, it’s clutter. Don’t move the clutter. Get rid of the clutter. Keep the best of what you have,” says Xhazzie. “Make your good china your everyday china. Make your good silver your everyday silver.”
The things that cannot be sold or donated—paperwork, broken things, anything that doesn’t have a use for anyone else—needs
Born in London, Xhazzie Kindle has worked as a nanny, a housesitter, and a house cleaner—jobs that allowed her to see how people live. “I really got a sense of how much stuff people have and how they think their stuff gives them roots. In reality, it ties them down.” Combining this insight with her interest in interior design, she became a professional organizer and now operates New England Organizing. Xhazzie’s favorite clients are downsizers because it’s a finite project. “When people have made the choice to downsize, the hardest part is choosing what to take with them. And the second hardest part is what to do with the stuff that you have to leave behind.” Here are some tips to get started.
floor plan. It helps to know where you are going to determine what you will need and how much space you’ll have. A floor plan will allow you to map everything out. If you don’t have a floor plan for where you are moving, Xhazzie recommends buying a designer’s kit online. Based on
Once you decide what you don’t need, there are three options: sell, donate, or trash. “You’ll be surprised how much stuff can be sold or donated. And, if you have something that you are going to give to a relative, do it now while you can see them enjoying it.
sell. “Dealers, people on Craigslist, book collectors… there is an amazing number of
When Baby Boomers or retirees move to a smaller home, they need to clear the clutter and decide what to sell, donate, and throw away.
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people who will buy the most obscure things,” says Xhazzie. “Not everything can be sold. Just because it isn’t trash doesn’t mean that it has value.”
donate. Xhazzie recommends making donations to nationally known non-profi ts like the Salvation Army or Big Brothers/ Big Sisters. Local organizations such as halfway houses or group homes also accept donations. Some organizations will make pick-ups and deliver a tax receipt. The free section on Craigslist. org, and Freecycle.org, are also good ways to fi nd a new home for your things.
trash. “It’s very difficult for people to wrap their heads around the idea that something that could still be used is going in a landfill, but unfortunately that is what it comes down to,” says Xhazzie. “Anything that cannot be sold or cannot be donated has to be let go.”
parting advice. Retirement is a huge milestone. Downsizing to a smaller living space and getting rid of clutter can seem overwhelming, but is ultimately a wise decision. To maximize your new space, Xhazzie suggests using furniture that can do more than one thing like an ottoman that opens to be a blanket chest and also can be used as a coffee table. Shelving can be mounted under stairs or even above doors and windows if the ceilings are high enough. To stop procrastinating, book a mover so you have a deadline date. And through this journey, remember that your goal is to make things simple so you can retire to the good life. You deserve it.
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monthly fee.
In an artist’s living space, creativity is always in residence.
By ANNIE GRAVES
n the depths of winter, Imagination settles in. It curls around the embers of a wood fire, peers through lidded windows. And sometimes it bursts its boundaries, in homes designed and built by artists—the one inspiring the other.
Less than 20 miles apart, two very different houses in New Hampshire keenly reflect the wildly divergent artistic sensibilities of their creators. Imagination, writ large.
grew up in a house with eagles and otters, and roadkill in the fridge,” says Lita Judge, as we settle around the antique French farm table that serves as an island in her buttery-yellow kitchen. It’s a provocative sentence, but even so, I’m distracted by the deep serenity of this room, the somehow familiar look of the raised breakfast nook with its bank of windows facing Pack Monadnock.
The familiarity is quickly explained: The scene bears an uncanny resemblance to the cover of Carl Larsson’s Home , a book I studied obsessively when it came out years ago. Lita, a writer and artist with more than 20 children’s
books to her credit, often cites the 19th-century illustrator’s impact on her life. In fact, before she and her husband, Dave, began building here, they visited Larsson’s house in Sundborn several times—open to the public, it’s frequently called “Sweden’s most famous home”—pacing out its rooms and then running outside to record the measurements (no indoor photography permitted).
There are other head-snapping influences here, too— like the 65-million-year-old fish fossil inlaid over the stove, a reminder of a long-held interest. “When I was 15, I wrote to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology [in Alberta, Canada] and asked to volunteer on a dinosaur dig,” Lita says. They accepted her; years later, she became a geologist and a paleontologist.
opposite : “My husband and I looked at old houses and loved the sense of history,” says Lita Judge. “But I also wanted to build something personal to my story.” above : The airy kitchen at the couple’s custom-designed home.
The brilliant parrot squawking nearby? Also perfectly in keeping. Born on a Tlingit Indian reservation in Ketchikan, Alaska, and raised
by ornithologists, Lita grew up surrounded by wild creatures. It also was her back door into eventually becoming an illustrator. “I was always observing and drawing. I didn’t think of it as ‘art.’ Growing up, I was just supposed to take notes about what I saw.”
For their first Christmas together after meeting at Oregon State University, Dave brought Lita east, and they went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “It was my first art museum,” she says. “The art was incredible. I burst into tears. I realized I was doing the wrong thing.”
Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to the dining room, a delicious replica of Larsson’s in yellow, green, and chili red. The walls are lined with paintings: Paris, Venice, Saint Petersburg. “I felt like I was too old to go to art school,” Lita says. “So we came up with a plan. We went to Europe, and I learned by copying paintings. We went three or four times a year, and used everything we earned from selling those paintings to go back. But we always saved one. This room is a gallery of our memories.”
The move east was a fluke. In 2002, Dave’s work as an engineer brought the West Coast couple to Boston, where “we jumped in the car to find Abbott Thayer’s studio [in Dublin]. We liked it in New Hampshire. That night, we decided to move.”
And a year later, they decided to build. Although Lita had sketchbooks filled with artists’ homes and studios, in the end they used a modified version of Larsson’s floor plan. “I had 98 pages of detailed drawings,” she says. “But we had to economize: his 16 rooms to our seven.”
Choosing a builder, though, was easy. “All of the builders kept looking at Dave when we were interviewing them,” she says. Grinning, Dave adds,
“The builder we chose knew not to look to me. This was Lita’s house.”
The dining room looks exactly like Larsson’s. So does the “memory hall”—a skinny corridor that leads to the studio and is lined with illustrations from Lita’s children’s books. A moose careens down a snowy hillside under
a studio,” Lita says, pausing on the threshold. The feeling of cathedral space and uplift is anchored, at the far end of the room, by a huge Gothic window. “And I felt that when I built it, I’d do my mature work. I didn’t want to have any regrets.”
When they started building in 2003, she’d been painting for 10 years. “I was happy, but my secret wish all along was to write and illustrate books for kids.” The studio wasn’t even completed when Lita sat under that domed ceiling and wrote her first children’s book. It was rejected, but she got an agent. And when she wrote her second book, it was not only accepted but also critically praised: One Thousand Tracings: Healing the Wounds of World War II
Today, the studio walls are filled with arresting ink drawings, punctuated by massive storyboards. She’s making final tweaks to an illustrated novel that will be released this February: Mary’s Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein . A bank of north-facing windows lights the work desk, like a romantic stage set from La Bohème. Still, the eye-catcher is that imposing Gothic window, from a convent in northern Maine—a detail Lita had drawn into the plans before they even found it.
a full moon in Red Sled . A wide-eyed baby giraffe from Born in the Wild stares out from the wall. A page from Good Morning to ME! shows their real-life parrot, Beatrix, suffering an embrace from their Persian, Luna.
The buildup is like a visual drum roll. “I always knew someday I’d have
Below sits a 1774 wing chair that is said to have been a wedding gift to Lita’s great-great-great-great-greataunt, who married John Adams’s son. It’s been passed down among the women in her family. She calls it her thinking chair. “So much of our house is about honoring the past,” she says. And it does. But the house also achieves exactly what Lita set out to do: create something uniquely personal.
“You build the space that speaks to your heart, and then the work starts bubbling up.”
half hour, 18 miles, and worlds away from that Scandinavian retreat, I stumble into the land of Jon Brooks. The first hint that I’m getting close: a pair of brightly trimmed studios. A bit farther on, a lineup of twisted sculptures rises out of the landscape.
Suddenly, there it is. A mischievous little home. If it could gambol, it would. As it is, it unfurls from the snow like an Alice in Wonderland caterpillar wrapped in aging wooden shingles. A giant peace sign hovers near the entrance. The round, mosaictiled chimney looks like a crazy oversize stamen rendered by Gaudi. Altogether, it feels assertive and, well … extremely contented.
“I didn’t want to live in a box,” Jon says as he greets me, his head snugged into a patterned cap, hands shoved into his pockets.
If there’s one thing this home isn’t, it’s a box. But if there’s one thing Jon gets, it’s wood. Also whimsy. (You’ll know this if you’ve seen his teetering chair sculptures or a chunk of polished furniture he carved from a massive tree trunk.) Both wood and whimsy are here, in abundance. Climb the vertiginous floating stairs, and the living space opens into a yawning cavern that serves as kitchen, dining, living, and music room. Inside what feels like the body of a whale, we see its rib cage, all exposed structure and curving lines. Walls swoop upward, books stuffed into shelves created in the spaces between supports. A knobby ascension of hand-carved stairs ends in a sleeping loft set to one side of the kitchen. Tables and chairs for woodland creatures—all from the hands of Jon— define a dining room, a sitting area. Everything curves.
“I think of a right angle as a missed opportunity,” he says drolly.
A New Hampshire native, this internationally recognized sculptor and furniture maker who marries sinuous shapes with the grain of the
TABLES AND CHAIRS FOR WOODLAND CREATURES—ALL FROM THE HANDS OF JON BROOKS—DEFINE A DINING ROOM, A SITTING AREA. EVERYTHING CURVES.
wood started his art appreciation in second grade, with classes at the Currier Museum of Art, in Manchester. After graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he moved to San Francisco in 1967. “I was there for the whole nine yards,” he says with a grin. “But I saw a lot of interesting architecture in Sausalito, back-to-theland and creative.”
He also saw a lot of wood, especially when he moved to Muir Beach. Being, as he says, “strongly attracted to landscape and natural forms,” he
began creating heavy carved pieces using natural tree sections, getting wood for free in the forest.
When he and his first wife returned east in 1970, he was ready to put down roots. Land adjacent to his parents’ summer place in New Boston, New Hampshire, became available. Before long, Jon, and anybody who stopped by, could be found knee-deep
in a hole, digging a round foundation. “People would come over, we’d hand them a shovel!”
They scavenged wood and lived in a shed while they were building. “We did what we could as we could afford it,” he says. “I had time but no money, and I wasn’t going anywhere near a bank.” Meanwhile, he was also making art and furniture, doing work for galleries and commissions.
The house grew like a living thing. Salvaged storefront windows were pressed into service for the long, narrow window slices that look out to the far fields, offering slivers of solar gain. He bartered with mosaic mural artist Isaiah Zagar, who did the tile work inside the entry and on the chimney. The Western cedar shingles on the exterior came from broken bundles. “This guy in Manchester said, ‘Make me an offer.’ We shingled the whole house for about $100.”
Always, however, there was the complicated matter of a roof. How do you cover something that swoops and banks and angles like a skateboarder? Jon bought time—first with doublecoverage roll roofing and then, when that gave out, with plastic roofing cement and gravel. “In 1992, shortly after my [second] wife, Jami, moved in, it began to leak.” He grimaces. “It all went at once.”
Today, tough rubber roofing material covers the surface. He and Jami finished adding a pretty sunporch in 2015. Jon recently installed solar panels in his field, and he’s proud of the progression, over the years, from outhouse to indoor composting toilet to septic system and a real bathroom.
He readily acknowledges that there’s a certain vulnerability to his home because of its shape. And that he’s bucking historical tradition, which dictates that everything be built square. But then, with a dry twinkle, he waxes poetic: “It’s the serpentine wall and hyperbolic parameter that made it come alive.” Then he points to his head. “Not a lot of right angles in here, either.”
BY ANNIE GRAVES
otters’ arms are like works of art. Ropey and strong, they reflect years of pulling pots out of thick lumps of earth, their muscles habituated to lifting up and pressing down, shaping and flattening.
Below ground, where clay has its origins, seems like the perfect place for a potter’s studio. For Tessa Morgan, a cool work space in a former cellar doubles as her studio and retail shop for Flying Pig Pottery in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Slender and wiry, she hovers over her wheel at the far end of the room, all concentrated energy, blond hair caught back in a variety of clips. Today she’s a study in nautical blue and white stripes that hint at the ocean all around this Cape Cod town. Best known for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (locals call it WHOI, pronounced “hoo-ee”), this is Ocean Central. Out here, the sea is everything.
It certainly figures in Morgan’s work. Lining the walls where visitors enter are display shelves weighted down with strongly graphic decorated pieces—platters, lamps, mugs—all steeped in the ocean essence of Woods Hole, whose downtown is only two minutes away. Here, in the studio, black-and-white fish encircle the rim of a bowl, squid drift over a sea-blue plate, mermaids ease across platters, and turtles float around a lamp base.
The decorative technique she uses is called sgraffito, from the Italian graffito, meaning “to scratch.” “It’s like doing a linoleum cut, taking away the negative space,” she explains.
In other words, throwing the pot is just the beginning. With unfired, leather-hard pot in hand, Morgan paints a coat of “slip” (a mix of water and clay from the wheel, plus metal oxide) where the design is going to be. Once the slip dries, she draws the design, leaving a border to define where to glaze, then cuts away the space around the illustration and does the bisque fire. Finally, she glazes the pot, fires the piece again, and waits for the magic, the unveiling of color and image.
But hers was an unlikely road to potterdom, and, as so often happens, serendipity played a role. Morgan was 15 when her family moved from Washington, D.C., to a Maryland farm that was, she recalls, “in the middle of nowhere.”
Her mother tried to find something that would appeal to the self-described “grumpy, artistic teen”—and pottery did. The seed was further nurtured at Connecticut College, where she kept changing majors and ended up in ceramics. After three years, she moved to Woods Hole with a group of friends.
“It was a crazy scene here in the 1980s,” she says with a grin. “Very appealing.”
Years of experience as an illustrator also served her well, giving her a steady hand with pottery. “Drawing was always my first love,” says Morgan, whose portfolio is filled with beautiful watercolors from her book projects with marine biologists. Check out the details (and veracity) in her illustrations for Beachcomber’s Companion and the children’s series that includes Do Sharks Ever…? “The illustration work really helped,” she acknowledges. “You cannot correct a mistake [in sgraffito], so you have to be really confident.”
Each pottery illustration is handdrawn, and “I literally have no idea what I’m going to do,” she says, although whales are her most popular design. “I like mermaids, too, because they can be doing something. Crows are relatively new, but they’ve been one of my most successful designs. Like mermaids, they’re very expressive.”
There is, of course, the matter of her studio’s namesake. “When I’m doing a show, if I don’t have any flying pigs, people always ask for them.” This naming, too, was a matter of serendipity.
“I was sitting around with my girlfriends, drinking a glass of wine. They were saying, ‘What are we going to call Tessa’s pottery?’ At the time, I put a lot of flying pigs on my pottery—things that made me laugh. It seemed perfect.”
For more information, call 508-5487482 or go to flyingpigpottery.biz.
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.
icture yourself relaxing in a rocking chair as you gaze out across an immense elevated fieldstone patio with sunken hot tub and fire pit, a pond beyond (one of two on this property), and on out to acres of meadows and pastures. In the far distance, near a line of trees, you can make out more than 30 grazing cows; in another direction, you see sheep. A flock of geese have landed nearby, some in the pond. Over there, near another tree line, are a dozen turkeys. Sound like a nice place to be?
It was a little chilly the day we moseyed on up to Brunswick, Maine, to visit with Scott and Susan Schafer at their gorgeous home in the historic Pennellville neighborhood. So we admired that view through the windows of their dining room and kitchen as we enjoyed a hot cup of tea. Scott, a cardiologist at the local hospital, occasionally spoke into an electronic gizmo on his belt. Obviously, although visiting with us, he was also on duty.
The Schafers have been living in this house, known in the town histories as the Knox Farmstead, for the past 18 years, being the fifth owners since 1887 (or maybe earlier—the records are a bit unclear). During that time, they renovated every room and created a gorgeous series of gardens around the house, barn, garage, and ponds. They also raised their now-grown sons, Colin and Dillon, who were planning to be back with them for the holidays this year. No doubt the boys continued a family tradition, too: surfing with Dad out at nearby Scarborough Beach or Higgins Beach, as Scott has been an enthusiastic surfer and swimmer, summer or winter, all his life. He and the boys, along with friends, also likely will play hockey this winter on one of the ponds next to the house. We expect, too, that they’ll drag their canoes and kayaks (on wheels) down to Middle Bay, which is just a few minutes’ walk from the house.
However, with the boys now living on their own, it’s time to plan “a new adventure,” as Susan put it—thus the Schafers’ recent decision to sell and settle elsewhere in something a little smaller. In other words, they’re ready for the usual empty-nester transition that
Next to the old Pennellville shipyard, where dozens of oceangoing ships were once built, the recently renovated Knox Farmstead is now ready for new owners.Saying they’re looking forward to “a new adventure,” Susan and Scott Schafer are bidding farewell to their home of nearly two decades. PETER G. MORNEAU (HOUSE PHOTOS)
Among the highlights of the Schafers’ property are ( clockwise from top ): six-plus acres with a pair of ponds; a two-story barn; and a well-appointed modern kitchen that’s a home chef’s dream.
so many couples their age eventually face. (“But we’ll still be in Maine!” Susan emphasized to us.) So, with 6.6 acres, a two-story barn, two garages, and the completely renovated fourplus-bedroom house (with three and a half bathrooms and several handsome stone fireplaces), they’re asking $1,375,000. In our opinion, the property is certainly worth it—especially considering the abutting 130 acres of conservation land. Those surrounding pastures will never give way to a housing development, ever!
After a second cup of tea, we toured the property with Scott and Susan. Every room is practically a showpiece. We loved the library, with its period fieldstone fireplace and mahogany bookcases. And the kitchen is gorgeous—it includes stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, a huge center island, and, well, it’s the nuts. We were particularly fascinated with the framed family photos along one of the upstairs walls. They show all of the Schafers skiing, surfing, mountain climbing, scuba diving, and so forth; we spotted a few taken in Spain, a few others in Africa.
At one point, Susan opened a door at the far end of the second floor, and we walked out onto a balcony overlooking the cavernous interior of the barn. It was quite a sight, with massive old wooden beams seemingly everywhere at different angles and heights. To us it looked a bit like a gigantic modern painting. As to the size of the floor space, let’s just say the boys and their friends played basketball here.
Before taking our leave, we simply had to—despite the cold air that day—drink in the beautiful view again, but this time from one of those rocking chairs on the porch. And you know what? We discovered we probably would have been happy sitting out there until … well, maybe until those distant cows came home.
For more details, contact Ed Gardner of Ocean Gate Realty at 207-773-1919.
BY KRISSY O’SHEA
here’s a sweet, hoppy scent wafting through the halls of 14 Tyler Street today. The former headquarters of the Ames Safety Envelope Company, this massive space in Somerville, Massachusetts, has been converted into a multiuse complex anchored by Aeronaut Brewing, maker of IPAs, pilsners, and ales and producer of hoppy aromas. But the alluring sweetness in the air can be traced to a much smaller operation: a commercial kitchen in the back of the building, where Eric Parkes is moving deftly between a pair of conching machines (in layman’s terms, chocolate mixers). They look like supersized potter’s wheels, and their spinning action blends and emulsifies chocolate liquor and cocoa butter together with sugar to produce the Somerville Chocolate bars that Parkes makes in small batches, beginning with beans sourced from equatorial regions such as Ghana, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Haiti.
Parkes turns to an array of metal racks and, bending down to the lower shelves, pulls out a few carefully wrapped bags of not-quite-perfect bars that won’t make it to market. “Here,” he says, breaking off a corner of a dark bar. “What do you taste?”
The flavor is completely unexpected. There’s not a trace of the waxy, saccharine Halloween chocolate of childhood. Instead, there are exuberant tannins and rich sundried-fruit flavors. Parkes brings out more samples: one earthy and nearly austere; another lush and velvety, heavy with flavors of honey and tropical flowers (the beans were grown in Hawaii). With each new sample,
Parkes expounds on how cacao varies in flavor depending on where it’s grown and how this flavor can be manipulated at every stage of the process: roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching, tempering, and molding.
Parkes is one of New England’s growing number of so-called “bean to bar” chocolate producers. While most confectioners buy premade chocolate and turn it into truffles, bonbons, and other sweets, bean-to-bar makers begin with raw ingredients and produce, as the name implies, mostly bar chocolate. And they approach their craft with the kind of fastidiousness and knowledge of varietals and provenance that one would expect from the head vintner at a grand cru winery.
In this group you’ll find Katherine Reed and Josiah Mayo, who turn out silky bars sprinkled with sea salt or studded with ginger and dried blueberries at Chequessett Chocolate on Cape Cod. There’s also the granddaddy of New England bean-to-bar makers, Somerville’s Taza Chocolate, with its line of Mexican-inspired stone-ground chocolates, and Rogue Chocolatier in central Massachusetts, maker of one of the country’s top chocolate bars in any category.
These producers are rooted in New England, but their beans most definitely aren’t. Theobroma cacao, the cacao tree, is native to the deep tropical regions of Central and South America, and the best makers develop long-term, fair-trade relationships with individual farms there to ensure a steady supply of quality beans. Tom and Monica Rogan of Goodnow Farms, who make chocolate in their smartly converted 225-year-old barn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, travel frequently to farms in Mexico, Central America, and South
America. “Our connection to the farmers is very important,” says Tom. “We work with them to select the most flavorful beans and to ensure that our relationship is equitable.”
This hands-on approach recalls the work of New England’s first chocolate producers, who were importing beans as far back as the mid-17th century. In 1670, Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard were granted a license to open a public house in Boston serving coffee and chocolate—the earliest such permit on record. Back then, chocolate was consumed as a beverage: Roasted crushed beans (called cacao nibs) were ground by hand on warm stones to melt them, then blended with sugar and spices and whisked with hot water in special chocolate pots. You can learn about colonial chocolate at Boston’s Old North Church campus, where Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop—named after an 18th-century chocolate merchant who attended the church—occupies a permanent exhibit space in the Clough House. There, costumed interpreters walk visitors through the process and offer samples of drinking chocolate based on a historic recipe.
Yet even if the current bean-to-bar generation is reviving an old craft, they’re doing it in a more interconnected world. Whereas Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard likely never visited the Jamaican cacao farms supplying their operation, Tom and Monica Rogan are representative of today’s highly mobile, socially conscious producers. When farmers in the village of San Juan Chivite, Guatemala, needed a new fermentation and drying area, the Rogans funded its construction. After all, they know that their customers want more than the chocolate itself:
This subsidiary of Burlington, Vermont’s Lake Champlain Chocolates produces meticulously sourced and crafted singleorigin dark chocolate bars developed by Eric Lampman, son of Lake Champlain founder Jim Lampman. recommended: Madagascar 82% Wild Pepper bar. lakechamplainchocolates.com
This café-workshop in North Truro on Cape Cod makes delicious chocolates, mostly dark, with some milk chocolate and single-origin bars in the mix, as well as confections like barks, brittles, and toffees. recommended: Wellfleet Sea Salt bar. chequessettchocolate.com
Enna Grazier produces exquisite singleorigin chocolates out of her small “factory” in Epping, New Hampshire, and her tasting notes (“toasted sweet biscuits, tobacco, milk, and a tantalizingly subtle tannin”) read like a chocophile’s dream. recommended: Madagascar 70% bar. ennachocolate.com
At their headquarters in Sudbury, Massachusetts, Tom and Monica Rogan make dark chocolate bars, some blended with local maple syrup or ground almonds, as well as hot cocoa mixes, from beans sourced from individual fair-trade farms. recommended: Asochivite bar with maple syrup. goodnowfarms.com
Located in Three Rivers, Massachusetts, 10-year-old Rogue remains a tiny operation, but founder Colin Gasko has earned enough national attention for the intensity of his single-origin bars that customers now preorder each batch.
It’s worth the trouble. recommended: Whatever you can get your hands on. roguechocolatier.com
In addition to selling his small-batch bars to the general public, owner Eric Parkes runs a chocolate CSA, whose members pay in advance for a delivery of multiple bars, mostly dark but also some tasty blends, such as white chocolate with chilies and chai-spiced cacao nibs. recommended: Dark chocolate bar with orange peel and cardamom. somervillechocolate.com
Known for its gritty stone-ground style, Taza produces a vast line of bars, Mexican-style hot chocolate disks, barks, and chocolate-covered nuts at its Somerville, Massachusetts, factory. recommended: Chocolate-covered hazelnuts. tazachocolate.com
Founded in Peterborough, New Hampshire, by Neely Cohen, winner of the Food Network’s Sweet Genius baking competition, Vicuña makes richly flavored organic bars under the guidance of Cohen’s successors, Nate Morison and Casey Goodrich. recommended: Bolivia bar. vicunachocolate.com
Bob and Paige Leavitt began their first chocolate company in 1984, then returned to the business 10 years ago to produce both exotic blends (Chili Crunch, English Garden) and bean-to-bar, single-origin dark chocolate at their Boston facility. recommended: Dominican Republic Oko Caribe bar. vivrachocolate.com
* Yankee Editors’ Choice Food Award winner
SALTED CHOCOLATE PUDDING CAKE (recipe, p. 54)
SMOKY CHOCOLATE LENTIL-STUFFED ACORN SQUASH
They want the story behind the goods. It’s a sweet extension of the farm-totable movement—albeit more global than local—and Monica Rogan sees it as a valuable teaching opportunity. “Chocolate has the ability to make a meaningful difference,” she says. “It can raise our awareness of where our food comes from, who grows it, and how to produce it sustainably.”
The following are recipes both sweet and savory that showcase chocolate in all its glory.
To Tal T ime : 45 minu T es
H ands- on T ime : 15 minu T es
Perfect for snow days, this oatmeal cooks up much faster and even creamier if you soak the oats in cold water overnight.
1 cup steel-cut oats
4 cups plus ¼ cup whole milk
½ cup water
1 cinnamon stick
3 t ablespoons dark brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ teaspoon table salt
2 ½ ounces dark chocolate, f inely chopped
Toppings (toasted coconut flakes, toasted pumpkin seeds, chopped toasted hazelnuts, etc.)
Rinse the oats under cold water or, preferably, soak them overnight. Set a medium saucepan over high heat and add oats, 4 cups milk, water, and cinnamon. Stir, then bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to a low simmer. Cook oats, uncovered, until tender, about 40 minutes (or 10 minutes, if you soaked them overnight), stirring frequently. Remove from heat and discard cinnamon stick. Add brown sugar, vanilla, and salt, then add chocolate and stir until melted.
Divide among four bowls and finish with a bit of warm milk and toppings, if desired. Yields 4 servings.
To Tal T ime : 1 Hour , 15 minu T es
H ands- on T ime : 40 minu T es
This vegetarian main dish combines chocolate with tomatoes, peppers, onions, and spices in a way that brings to mind a Oaxacan mole sauce, only streamlined for everyday eating.
1 cup small green lentils
4 acorn squash, halved lengthwise
2 t ablespoons plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
S alt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 large yellow onion, diced
1 t ablespoon smoked paprika
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 medium carrots, diced
1 medium red pepper, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 cups water
14 ounces crushed tomatoes
5 ounces dark chocolate (preferably infused with chilies)
Greek yogurt and chopped fresh cilantro, for garnish
Preheat oven to 400° and set a rack to the middle position. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. Rinse the lentils and pick through for any stones. Set aside.
Scoop the seeds out of the squash halves, then cut a thin slice off the bottom of each so that they lie flat on the baking sheet. Drizzle each with a teaspoon of olive oil, then sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Transfer squash to oven and roast until tender, 35 to 40 minutes. Meanwhile, prepare the filling: Add remaining 3 tablespoons oil to a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring, until translucent, about 6 minutes. Push the onion to the sides of the pan, clearing a space at the center. Add paprika and cumin to the center of the pan and lightly toast until just fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the diced carrots and red pepper and cook, stirring, until carrots have begun to soften, about 7 minutes (add a bit of water to the pan if things begin to brown too quickly). Add the garlic and cook for a minute, then add the
lentils and stir to coat. Add the 3 cups water and tomatoes and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and gently simmer, covered, until lentils are tender, about 40 minutes. Most of the liquid should be absorbed but lentils should not be dry (add a few tablespoons of water if this is the case).
Break up the chocolate into small pieces and stir into the lentils until all pieces have melted. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Fill the squash halves with the lentil mixture. Drizzle each lightly with olive oil and return to oven for 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from oven and garnish with a dollop of yogurt and some chopped fresh cilantro if desired. Yields 8 servings.
To Tal T ime : 50 minu T es
H ands- on T ime : 25 minu T es
Minced fresh rosemary gives these classic cookies a grown-up twist.
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, at room temperature
¼ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup plus 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
1 large egg, at room temperature
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1¾ cups all-purpose flour
2½ teaspoons fresh rosemary, minced
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon kosher salt
6 ounces semisweet or dark chocolate chips (we like Blue Bandana
75% dark) or chopped-up bar
¼ cup chopped walnuts
Line two cookie sheets with parchment paper (or grease with butter) and set aside.
In a medium bowl, cream together the butter and sugars with an electric mixer on medium speed until light in color and texture, about 5 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula at least once during
ing by hand with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, adding the chocolate chips and walnuts, until everything just comes together. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 20 minutes and up to 24 hours.
Preheat oven to 350° and set a rack to the middle position. Scoop golf ball–size balls of dough and arrange them in rows down the baking sheets. Flatten each ball slightly just before baking. Bake until the cookies are lightly golden brown on the outside edges but still soft and gooey in the center, about 10 minutes. Let the cookies cool on the baking sheets for at least 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to finish cooling. Yields 18 to 24 cookies.
Chocolate, whiskey, salt, and a hint of smoke come together in perfect harmony. These sophisticated cakes have a liquid
tures—especially when served with the optional whiskey cream.
FOR THE CAKES
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature, plus more for greasing ramekins
3½ ounces dark chocolate
¼ cup whiskey
¼ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 medium eggs, at room temperature
2 medium yolks, at room temperature
¾ cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt or sea salt (preferably smoked)
FOR THE WHISKEY CREAM (OPTIONAL)
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 tablespoons confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons Irish whiskey
Pinch of salt
Grease four small (4-ounce) ramekins generously with butter, then set on a tray in the refrigerator while making the cakes.
In a double boiler, melt the chocolate with 6 tablespoons butter over a pan of barely simmering water, stirring often. Stir in the whiskey, then set aside to cool.
Using an electric or stand mixer, beat the sugars, eggs, and yolks together in a large bowl until the mixture is quite thick, 5 to 7 minutes. Sift the flour very gently into the egg mixture, then carefully fold it in with a spatula. Once the flour is just incorporated, gradually fold in the chocolate mixture to form a slack batter.
Remove ramekins from the refrigerator and divide the batter equally among them. Fill ramekins about two-thirds full, but stop at the halfway point to sprinkle a layer of salt in each before filling with remaining batter. Return the ramekins to the refrigerator for 30 more minutes (at this stage, you can also place them in the freezer, then bake them when ready, adding 5 minutes to the total cooking time). Preheat oven to 400°.
Remove ramekins from the refrigerator and transfer immediately to the oven. Bake until the cakes form a crust on top and pull away from the edges just a little, about 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, then invert each ramekin onto a serving plate. The cakes should drop out. If they don’t drop after a few minutes, carefully run a butter knife along the edges.
To make the (optional) whiskey cream: In a large bowl, beat the cream until very soft peaks form, then add the confectioners’ sugar, whiskey, and salt. Beat again until medium peaks form. Serve the cakes immediately with a dollop of whiskey cream. Yields 4 servings.
orham, New Hampshire, sits on the border between the White Mountain National Forest and the vast expanse of the Great North Woods. To hikers, it is the northern terminus of the Presidential Range. To residents, it is a place of soaring beauty, where rock climbers coexist with ATVers and the last surviving paper mill in the North Country is still turning out paper towels and tissue long after industry watchers predicted its demise. Locals track the mill’s fortunes with no small concern—Berlin, just 15 minutes north, hasn’t fully recovered from the loss of its own mill—and for some, those ATVs represent their best hope for a future rooted in adventure tourism.
When Liz Jackson moved back home to Gorham 20 years ago with her husband, Steve, the region’s only culinary claim to fame was a Berlin schoolteacher named Elmire Jolicoeur who purported to have invented the casserole in 1866 (though food historians contend that casseroles date back centuries earlier). Liz had grown up at her grandmother’s Main Street restaurant, Welsh’s, and studied business at UNH and then cooking at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and alongside Julia Child as an assistant on her TV series. She had traveled the world. And she wanted to open the kind of destination restaurant she’d seen in France, where the rural setting is part of the draw.
In Gorham, she had the mountains, a community, and her parents next door to help with the kids. But fine dining? Gorham is only 30 minutes from North Conway’s cafés and shops, but “it’s not North Conway or Jackson—not even close,” Liz says. “We thought,
of the world
Are we crazy ? But Steve said, ‘We’ll just look at it as a test run.’”
On the night that Libby’s Bistro opened, they booked 24 tables, and Liz, seven months pregnant with their third child, had her first inkling that the test run might actually stick. “People were coming up and hugging me,” she said. “They felt like the community had turned a corner.” Within weeks, calls started coming in from towns 30 minutes away. Then an hour away. Then from New York and Montreal. Diners came for Liz’s signature nut-crusted chicken—still a hit after all these years—and global accents like tzatziki and Bolognese and local veggies fried up, pakora style, in chickpea batter.
The restaurant thrived for more than 10 years. Then the recession hit. Feeling the pinch, the Jacksons opened a more casual pub in the same building and named it Saalt, with each letter representing a member of the family: Steve and Liz and their three kids, Ari, Ava, and Teo. Now, Libby’s and Saalt oper-
ate side by side (“Same menu, different vibe,” Liz says). Plus, at the front of the Libby’s space, there’s a little overflow room—they call it the Coop—where an old cooler rescued from the Berlin IGA holds jars of Mediterraneaninspired spreads and dips: caponata, whipped feta with red peppers, chervil pesto. In season, Liz serves these with homemade focaccia, local goat cheese, and “Mr. Tassy’s tomatoes.” (She fears this might be the last year of farming for Steve Tassy, now entering his nineties—“but if I need something, I’ll still give him a call,” she says. “And we’ll go down and help pick.”)
On most nights at Saalt, Liz toggles between the kitchen and the dining room, where she greets everyone so she’ll remember them when they come back. Steve mans the bar, where a vintage sign above his head reads, “Rural New Hampshire.” Around it, they’ve hung their collection of photos by Guy Shorey, a Gorham native whose early 20th-century portraits of the White
Mountains established him as a hometown Ansel Adams. At one end of the bar, a couple of farmers are grabbing dinner; at the other, two women are Googling the nearest Unitarian church. A cake stand near the beer taps holds a batch of fresh cookies. It all feels like the cozy dining room of some well-traveled aunt who decided to decamp to the country. A little bit urban, a little bit global, but enthusiastically New Hampshire.
111 Main St. (Route 16), Gorham, NH. 603-466-5330; libbysbistro.org
Follow Amy Traverso’s culinary adventures on our public television series, airing nationwide and online at weekendswithyankee.com
That’s the number of towns and cities that are in Vermont. No two are the same, and every single one is worth a visit.
A spectacular 4-season resort, & acclaimed destination wedding venue, in Central Vermont. With luxurious lodge rooms, cabins & guest houses, artfully crafted cuisine, spa, nordic center, equestrian center, lake, private beach & so much more... you may come for the view, but you’ll stay for the experience!
Liberty Hill Farm libertyhillfarm.com
Mountain Top Inn & Resort mountaintopinn.com
Stoweflake Mountain Resort and Spa, in the heart of Stowe, Vermont -- where over 30 shops and restaurants await -- invites families and friends to relax and reconnect while enjoying all the year-round resort and Stowe have to offer including treatments and services at the Spa at Stoweflake or the award-winning wine list at Charlie B’s Pub & Restaurant.
n the coldest day of the winter, which is soon to lead into the coldest night, we head south from New Hampshire in search of personal climate change. Seventy miles later, we check into the Hotel Northampton, climb the hill that rises toward Smith College, and spiral up an icy-cold staircase to heaven. Or, more specifically, East Heaven. As in, Hot Tubs.
Up here in the clouds (actually, the rooftop), steam billows from a bubbling wooden cauldron that sits high over Northampton. Vapor curls into the dark, frigid air. Snow is falling, the temps hovering around 8 degrees. A pale, misty moon is barely visible above the private enclosure that surrounds our percolating pool. My hair stiffens and freezes, and I couldn’t be happier … or warmer. The air feels sharp enough to shatter— and I don’t care . Which is probably what any number of East Heaven customers have felt since 1981, when Ken Shapiro and Scott Nickerson opened this Japanese-style bathhouse. “I took more hot tubs than showers growing up,” quips Shapiro’s son, Logan, who now helps run the business: four indoor tubs and four outdoor ones, plus a spa.
Oddly, the thermostat seems to be rising all over town—cranking up even to, one might say, a tropical intensity. Blocks away from East Heaven’s 104-degree tubs, in the heart of the Smith College campus, a Victorian confection
When temperatures dip into the single digits, this college town turns up the heat.
swirling snow: It’s the 19th-century Lyman Plant House and Conservatory, shaking off winter with a humid canopy of cacao, banana, and rubber trees in its kid-magnet Palm House, nicknamed “the Jungle Room.” Close by, the transcendent Hungry Ghost Bread, effectively a bakery sauna, emits clouds of yeasty moisture whenever a customer steps inside. Cozy bookstores meld heat, escapism, and—in the case of Raven Used
Books—classical music to conjure a mini vacation from the chill. And we’re just warming up.
This vibrant Western Massachusetts town is planted in the fertile Pioneer Valley, bordered by farmland, traversed by the Connecticut River, and surrounded by a constellation of top-notch schools— specifically, the famed Five College
Consortium (Smith, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, Hampshire, and UMass Amherst). Anchoring and overlooking Northampton is Smith College, founded in 1871, its pretty campus well within walking distance of a downtown brimming with shops and cafés, many decades old. Smith alums who wandered these streets include Gloria Steinem, Sylvia Plath, and Julia Child. Calvin Coolidge was mayor here, from 1910 to 1911, before becoming our 30th president in 1923. One local writer observes: “We’re in the country, but it’s cultured. We’ve got fantastic libraries and a great book culture, but you can also have a yard and be near a forest.”
The café life is exactly what you’d imagine in an energized college town, with a robust mix of students and professor types taking their MacBooks out for a spin and cozying up to lattes. But art lovers can also find inspiration: The Smith College Museum of Art’s impressive collection includes Monet, Picasso, Rodin, Degas, and Cézanne, and a year’s membership brings unlimited admission to high-quality escapism. Locals can volunteer to lead tours at the Lyman Plant House after intensive training in basic botany and the history of the garden, according to a volunteer. Moms and dads troop through the greenhouses with children eager to visit their favorite rooms. “This is mine,” says Langston, a lively 3½-year-old who’s engulfed by giant foliage in the Palm House (although he’s partial to the cacti in the Succulent House, too). “We come here once a month, and he runs through the
: Opened on Market Street in 2011, the Roost caters to a variety of appetites with everything from breakfast sandwiches to milkshakes to wine and beer. opposite : Owner Betsy Frederick at Raven Used Books, a haven for local academics and bibliophiles.
clockwise from top left : Comfy digs in the Hotel Northampton’s newer Gothic Garden building; one-of-a-kind lighting fixtures at custom furniture shop Sticks & Bricks; the atrium at the Hotel Northampton, whose guests have included David Bowie and the Dalai Lama; an artful latte alongside Kahlúa fallen chocolate soufflé at the Roost.
rain forest,” says his mother, Sally. “I know other people like to come here and be contemplative….”
Snow is still pelting down as we slip into the Roost, where steamy windows and wood-plank rusticity meet “Rooster Rolls” stuffed with egg, bacon, avocado, or possibly whipped gorgonzola (making the Food Network very happy and earning its props for “best breakfast between bread”). At Haymarket Café, midway up Main Street, contented vegetarians are still squeezing around the postage stamp–size tables (as they have since 1991), surrounded by eccentric wall art, the air alive with
the hiss of espresso in the making. Casual ethnic eateries abound— including Amanouz Café, serving bursts of Moroccan flavor. A sprint through town reveals further options of Indian, Greek, French, Japanese, Thai, Mexican, Italian, and Vietnamese cuisines. But if fresh bread is your holy grail, Hungry Ghost Bread is the destination. “Artisanal” and “woodfired” are weak words for conveying the crack of this crust, the moist cushion within, and the otherworldliness of a cranberry-maple turnover that somehow fell into our bag.
We found plenty of excuses to duck indoors, such as Sticks & Bricks, with its artwork, jewelry, and sleek furniture made from reclaimed materials, and Pinch, offering unusual wall art, ceramics, curated clothing, and airy home decor.
“We’re in the country,” says one Northamptonite, “but it’s cultured.”
Thornes Marketplace packs dozens of stores and eateries under one roof, including Paul and Elizabeth’s, a vegetarian mainstay since 1978. Scattered around Northampton is enough reading material to get anyone through winter—Broadside Bookshop, for instance, lines its walls with quality reads plus smart political stickers—but for hours of browsing, nothing beats descending into the cozy den of Raven Used Books. Abundance spills out of the shelves and onto the floor; “Middle English Texts” sits next to “Arrrrgh!” (pirates). It’s an oasis of calm, and an exploration set to the soundtrack of Handel’s Water Music.
At the time of our visit, a stylish twobedroom townhouse-style condo in a c. 1900 building once known as the Union Street Jailhouse, offering
exposed brick walls and a short walk to downtown, listed at $246,888. A breezy four-bedroom renovated 1950s colonial, with granite kitchen counters and proximity to Childs Park, was selling for $399,000. And a two-bedroom eco-friendly contemporary condo with a rooftop deck, less than a mile from the Smith campus, also listed at $399,000.
Apart from being able to luxuriate at East Heaven (and take a free halfhour tub on your birthday), we barely scratched the surface of Northampton’s local perks. Every type of music and performance venue is represented here, from intimate institutions like the Iron Horse Music Hall to the venerable Academy of Music, the oldest municipally owned theater in the country (c. 1891), which showcases talent ranging from Irish song-
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bird Mary Black to the witty David Sedaris. As for the visual arts scene, it explodes at the twice-yearly Paradise City Arts Festival, an extravaganza of 200-plus top-notch craftspeople and fine artists that’s been dazzling shoppers since 1995.
Just off Main Street, in the center of town, the elegant Hotel Northampton—a member of Historic Hotels of America—is ideally situated for sampling every tropical diversion. And for depths of coziness on a winter’s night, descend into Wiggins Tavern, the hotel’s 1786 tavern (moved from its original site in Hopkinton, New Hampshire), for an incomparably warming Indian pudding.
For more photographs of our visit to Northampton, Massachusetts, go to newengland.com/northampton-2018.
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f Einstein was right, and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, it’s not a leap to believe that love—one of the most energetic of human emotions— still pulses in places where romantic events once transpired. So if you find yourself longing to connect with this eternal force, step into these New England settings where hope, passion, and devotion remain mysteriously, movingly present.
Adams National Historical Park Stand in the spaces they shared, see the trappings of their everyday lives, and hear words penned during their long separations, and you’ll grasp the depth of John and Abigail Adams’s passionate partnership. On the tours of his Massachusetts birthplace and the homes they shared at both the beginning and end of their marriage, park interpreters tap into the early American power couple’s 1,100letter exchange to bring their relationship to life. The most heart-tugging
scene might be their canopied bed at Peacefield: Upon Abigail’s death there in 1818, our second president reportedly said, “I wish I could lay down beside her and die, too.” Before leaving Quincy, pay your respects at First Parish Church, where John and Abigail rest side by side. Quincy, MA. 617-7701175; nps.gov/adam
Stephen Hopkins Smith poured a $40,000 lottery windfall and four years of painstaking effort into constructing a fieldstone mansion worthy of the city girl who’d captured his heart. But on a fateful buggy ride after the c. 1810 home was completed, she took one look and pronounced its rural setting intolerable. Step through the door of Rhode Island’s “house that love built,” and you’ll wish this mystery woman had given poor Smith— who never married—a chance. So much romance lingers in the building’s thoughtful details that Hearthside has attracted a devoted cadre of supporters, who don period costumes for an ever-changing lineup of living history tours and events. Two volunteers who met here were married last fall. Love has triumphed, at last, within these walls. Lincoln, RI. 401-726-0597; hearthsidehouse.org
If only Connecticut’s own Romeo and Juliet had been able to text or call. Though the exact details of this oft-embellished 17th-century legend are lost to time, it’s said that Lillinonah, the fetching daughter of Chief Waramaug, fell in love with an Englishman only to grow sick with grief during a prolonged separation. To see where their story would have its tragic ending, stroll across the lacy ironwork bridge built in 1895 over the Housatonic River Gorge and hike to the clifftop nearby. It was here that Lillinonah’s beloved—who returned just after the nick of time—plunged to his death in a futile effort to rescue
the maiden, who disappeared in her despair-driven canoe over a nowunderwater waterfall. New Milford, CT. 203-312-5023; ct.gov/deep
The Old Manse
It was no ordinary house that welcomed Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne on their wedding night in 1842. The clapboard parsonage that the couple was renting had already witnessed the first battle of the American Revolution and the birth of a literary movement, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature in the room that Nathaniel would use as his study. The Hawthornes, too, would leave their mark on the building that Nathaniel nicknamed “the Old Manse”—albeit by using her diamond ring to etch poetic phrases in the window glass. Sit in a replica of Emerson’s bright green writing-arm Windsor chair, peer through Nathaniel and Sophia’s immortal graffiti, and, if you’re lucky, you may perceive the same “gold light” that enchanted the couple so many years ago. Concord, MA. 978-369-3909; thetrustees.org
On September 12, 1953, a grand 19thcentury church in Newport hosted
the closest thing to a royal wedding New England had ever seen, as a floppy-haired freshman senator from Massachusetts married a debutante photojournalist. Today that historic event—the wedding of John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier—is recreated each Tuesday, July through late October, inside the church where it happened. Music director Cody Mead plays selections from the ceremony on the restored 30,000-part pipe organ, and Father Kris von Maluski pauses a montage of interviews, stills, and intimate footage to interject tales of wedding-dress drama and a sanctuary swarmed by locals after the nuptials. Pew 10 was routinely occupied by JFK and Jackie even after he became president, but it isn’t where you’ll feel the strongest connection to them: Step up to the padded kneeler where the couple knelt, and an obliging von Maluski will snap a cellphone photo. Newport, RI. 401-847-0475; returntocamelot.org
BY JOE BILLS
onsistently impressive—and free of charge—the Bowdoin College Museum of Art was an obvious stop on our recent visit to Brunswick, Maine. Afterward, we took advantage of the unseasonably warm day to stroll the history-steeped campus, thinking of how Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had once walked these grounds, as did his classmate Nathaniel Hawthorne. By the entrance to Hubbard Hall, though, we paused at a small wooden sign reading simply: “Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum.” Intrigued, we opened the door—and stepped into the frigid world of Robert Peary (Class of 1877) and Donald MacMillan (Class of 1898), two of the explorers most responsible for opening the Arctic to the world.
Right there in the entryway, we were greeted by the sight of a large wooden sledge, one of five used during Peary’s final Arctic expedition, in 1909. A Maine native who studied civil engineering at Bowdoin, Peary first crossed a section of the Greenland ice cap in 1886. During later trips he learned from the indigenous Inuit people how to make clothing from animal skins, build igloos for shelter, and use dog sleds like this one for transportation.
Since a major challenge of early Arctic exploration was the small window of time during which the days were long enough and the ice was strong enough for safe traveling, it took several trips for Peary to establish a vital string of igloo camps, each fully stocked. Finally, on Peary’s eighth and final Arctic voyage, he—along with his aide, Matthew Henson, and four Inuit guides—reputedly reached the North Pole on April 6, 1909.
MacMillan had also signed on for Peary’s last expedition. A Massachusetts native who studied geology at Bowdoin, he first came to Peary’s attention when, in two separate incidents, he rescued capsized boaters in Casco Bay. Impressed by his courage, Peary invited him to join his crew. MacMillan missed the push to the North Pole, however, because he had frostbite and had to turn back.
Peary’s Arctic mission ended after that 1909 trip, but MacMillan’s was just beginning. He would return
nearly 30 more times—making his last trip at age 82—absorbing knowledge from the Inuits while studying the Arctic environment. He established a school in Labrador and compiled a dictionary of the Inuktitut language.
Stepping into the core of the museum, we were drawn immediately to a taxidermied polar bear atop a display case. There also were walruses and puffins and … was that a musk ox? A narwhal ?! Our inner children eventually settled down, though, and we were able to turn our focus to the display cases beneath.
The museum opened in 1967 with a collection of objects and photographs donated mainly by MacMillan; his wife, Miriam; and the Peary family. Included here are weather and environmental measurement tools, mapmaking equipment, and even a tiny portable stove, built to boil ice for tea using just a smidge of alcohol for fuel.
The museum not only celebrates the explorers but also continues their work. There are rotating exhibits on the past and present cultures of Labrador, Baffin Island, Ellesmere Island, Greenland, and Alaska. Home movies filmed by MacMillan in the 1920s document Inuit life and skills. There’s a collection of wildlife art by Alaskan carvers, an incredible blanket made of the skin and feathers of eider ducks, a waterproof parka crafted from seal intestines, and moisture-wicking socks woven from grass, all accompanied by explanations of how and why they were made.
But the most captivating object just might be a tiny sealed envelope that was delivered anonymously to MacMillan in 1913, as he was preparing for a voyage. A note on the envelope says it should be opened only if things go “dead wrong.” MacMillan carried it with him for years but never opened it. Its contents, it seems, will forever remain a mystery.
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME. 207725-3416; bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum
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Emmy Award winner Richard Wiese has spent his life traveling the world in search of adventure, but New England is his home—and in the upcoming second season of Weekends with Yankee, which he cohosts with Yankee food editor Amy Traverso, he discovered even more of the region to love. Here, he shares some of his favorite finds from the new season.
“You get on the ferry, and you feel as though you’ve been transported to a different time, back to another era of vacationing,” Wiese says of this popular Casco Bay destination near Portland. “It’s this small, intimate place. No traffic. Kids riding their bikes across lawns, playing Frisbee, catching fireflies. And then there’s this grand inn with sweeping views of the water. It’s really the Maine island of your imagination.”
In visiting the Appalachian Mountain Club huts and hiking with the staffers who run them, Wiese, whose previous explorations took him to Everest and Kilimanjaro, returned to the mountains of his childhood. “It was my training school, my outdoor school,” he says. “You meet so many interesting people there. Hikers doing the Appalachian Trail, folks up there just for the day—all these people from different backgrounds drawn to this very special place.”
Wiese calls this segment, in which he looked for great whites off the coast of Chatham, Massachusetts, with Greg Skomal of the state Division of Marine Fisheries, his biggest “eye-opener” of the season. “We have this idea of these sharks as these maniacal creatures, but they are truly magnificent,” he says. “And to be out there with Dr. Skomal, who is such an expert on them and has so many good stories to share about his work, made it an incredible trip.”
“I was blown away at the opportunity to ride without the traffic,” says Wiese, an avid road cyclist who rides frequently around his hometown of Westport, Connecticut. “Just to be out in the open, along dirt roads and beautifully maintained trails, through fields and meadows, beside stone walls—it was the full Vermont experience.”
At the home of the Connecticut Tigers, a Single-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, Weise discovered a slice of Americana. “I felt as if I’d walked onto the set of Bull Durham,” he says. “These games become popular family outings. It’s affordable and kid-friendly, and you get this chance to see some players who one day may become big-league players. You can’t beat it.”
Started as a front-yard project in Utah, Ice Castles has grown into a company that builds frozen art installations/tourist attractions across North America—but New Hampshire’s Hobo Railroad in Lincoln remains its only site east of Minnesota. Since the caverns and slides and other fun formations are all carved from approximately 25,000 pounds of ice, the weather dictates the start and end of each display (recent seasons have run from midDecember until early March). Lincoln, NH. icecastles.com/lincoln
CONNECTICUT
FEBRUARY 10
At the largest single-block ice carving competition in the U.S., artists transform 300-pound chunks of frozen water into sparkling masterpieces. Factor in live carving demonstrations, fire dancers, carriage rides, and chocolate sculptures, and you have a community celebration that’s too cool to pass up. discoverputnam.com/fire-and-ice
JANUARY 1
Get the new year started with a chill and a thrill—and be warmed by the knowledge that you’re helping a great cause, too. One of the top fundraisers for Maine Special Olympics, the annual Lobster Dip sees throngs of altruistic (if slightly nutty) folks gathering at the Brunswick before taking a quick plunge into the icy Atlantic at noon.
ME. 207-879-0489; somaine.org
MASSACHUSETTS
JANUARY 11–15
The premier showcase of newest-model vehicles, both foreign and domestic, returns to the Boston Convention Center. Test drives will be offered, and factory and dealer reps will be on hand to answer questions. Car lovers shouldn’t miss this opportunity to check out some hot wheels without having to trek to the showroom. Boston, MA. 781-343-1661; bostonautoshow.com
FEBRUARY 2–4
Explore the latest in boats and gear, pick up tips from fishing and boating
VERMONT
JANUARY 27
Skiers from near and far will gather at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center to pit themselves against courses ranging from 12½K to 50K during the Craftsbury Marathon and U.S. Ski and Snowboard SuperTour Festival. The largest ski marathon in the eastern U.S. just keeps getting better, so take up a place along the route and cheer on your favorites. Craftsbury, VT. craftsbury.com/marathon
—Compiled by Joe Bills For more best bets around New England, see p. 78
THROUGH JAN. 28: OLD LYME, “World War I and the Lyme Art Colony.” The Florence Griswold Museum hosts an exhibit highlighting the role of Connecticut artists in the war, from mobilizing public support to creating new camouflage patterns. 860-434-5542; florencegriswoldmuseum.org
JAN. 17–FEB. 11: NEW HAVEN, “Office Hour.” Long Wharf Theatre presents awardwinning playwright Julia Cho’s roller-coaster ride through the psyches of a troubled college student and the writing professor who’s the only one willing to get close and try to understand him. 203-787-4282; longwharf.org
JAN. 26–28: UNCASVILLE, Sun Wine and Food Fest. Mohegan Sun pulls out all the stops for a weekend of wine and beer tastings, competitions, seminars, celebrity chef demonstrations, and a grand tasting with more than 1,000 selections. mohegansun.com/sunwinefest
FEB. 9–11: SALISBURY, Jumpfest . For nearly a century, the Salisbury Winter Sports Association has been holding this annual ski jumping competition on Satre Hill, drawing competitors from far and wide and crowds to cheer them on. 860-850-0080; jumpfest.org
FEB. 16–18: CHESTER, Winter Carnivale. Bundle up for a seasonal celebration that includes an ice carving competition and a tractor parade, then warm up with the delicious results of the chili cook-off before rounding off the day by visiting gallery openings and shops. 860-5260013; visit-chester.com
FEB. 22–25: HARTFORD, Flower and Garden Show. As it has for nearly four decades, spring makes one of its first appearances at the Connecticut Convention Center, which will be teeming with some 300 colorful booths and exhibits. 860-844-8461; ctflowershow.com
JAN. 7: BATH, Bath Antique Show. Bath Middle School hosts 50-plus antiques dealers from all over New England at this venerable show, still going strong more than three decades on. From toys and furniture to paintings and collectibles, you never know what you’ll find. 207-832-7798; bathantiquesshows.com
JAN. 22–26: NEWRY, Go50 Week. Sunday River celebrates the over-50 crowd with five days of ski parties, dinners, and other activities geared to the “experienced” (but still young at heart) set. 207-824-3000; sundayriver.com
JAN. 28: ROCKLAND, Pies on Parade . Find out why Rockland has been dubbed “Pie Town U.S.A.” by the Food Network during this day of strolling and sampling more than 45 different pies from area restaurants and inns. historicinnsofrockland.com
FEB. 1–28: BRUNSWICK, Longfellow Days . To honor the life and works of this famed poet and former Bowdoin College student, the Brunswick community hosts a month of readings, lectures, tours, dining, and film events at a variety of venues around town. 207-7294439; brunswickdowntown.org
FEB. 9–11: CAMDEN, U.S. National Toboggan Championships. Some 400 sledders take to the historic Jack Williams Toboggan Chute at the Camden Snow Bowl to compete for the fastest time—and to sport zany and creative costumes. camdensnowbowl.com
FEB. 18: SOUTH BRISTOL, Ice Harvest. Visit the Thompson Ice House to see how ice was harvested in the 19th and early 20th centuries. After watching the cutting and lending a hand with the transportation of the ice blocks, you’ll still have plenty of time for skating, horse-drawn wagon rides, and a visit to the museum. thompsonicehouse.com
JAN. 5–7: NEW BEDFORD, Moby-Dick Marathon. Join in the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s annual read-a-thon of one of America’s most enduring novels, Moby-Dick 508-997-0046; whalingmuseum.org
JAN. 13–14: WILMINGTON, Boston Antiques and Design Show and Sale. More than 150 vendors offer up their wares—jewelry, silver, fine furniture, artwork and more—at Shriner’s Auditorium. 781-862-4039; neantiqueshows.com
JAN. 18–20: CAMBRIDGE, Boston’s Celtic Music Festival. Soak up the sounds of more than 100 Celtic-inspired musicians, singers, and dancers at this event, which is now in its 15th year, at the venerable Club Passim. 617-492-7679; passim.org/bcmfest
FEB. 2–4: HYANNIS, Boatbuilders Show on Cape Cod . “The best little boat show in the Northeast” returns to the Resort and Conference Center at Hyannis to give you a jump on the season, with plenty of accessories and beautifully crafted pleasure boats to draw the eye of both serious shoppers and those simply dreaming of summer. boatcapecod.org
FEB. 9–11: SALEM, So Sweet Chocolate and Ice Festival. This decadent annual tradition brings ice sculptures, wine tastings, deals on Valentine’s Day gifts, and plenty of chocolate, chocolate, chocolate to downtown Salem. 978-744-0004; salemmainstreets.org
FEB. 18: ROCKPORT, J.D. Souther. The name may not be immediately familiar, but you certainly know Souther’s music, which includes hits by the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Bonnie Raitt. Souther makes his first appearance at the Shalin Liu Performance Center. 978546-7391; rockportmusic.org
FEB. 23–25: BOSTON, New England Home Show From lighting to flooring to siding, look for a wide range of home improvement ideas, tools, and techniques at the Seaport World Trade Center. Plus: cooking demonstrations, crafts, a furniture building zone, and specialty foods. newenglandhomeshows.com
JAN. 26–28: JACKSON, New Hampshire Sanctioned and Jackson Invitational Snow Sculpting Competition . The most talented snow sculptors from across the region converge for a weekend of creating. Spectators are welcome
throughout the process, but most pieces are not finished until Sunday. Nighttime illumination makes an after-dark stroll a must. 603383-9356; jacksonnh.com
JAN. 26–FEB. 25: NEW CASTLE, Winter Wine Festival . Pairing fine wines with great food and the hospitality of a grand hotel, this monthlong festival at Wentworth by the Sea offers everything from jazz brunches to oyster parties. 603-422-7322; winterwinefestival.com
FEB. 2–3: MANCHESTER, New Hampshire Farm and Forest Expo. Billing itself as the state’s “greatest winter fair,” the Farm and Forest Expo promises a top-notch lineup of exhibits, demonstrations, and games at the Radisson Hotel nhfarmandforestexpo.org
FEB. 3: PORTSMOUTH, “Capitol Steps: Orange Is the New Barack ” A troupe of former congressional staffers turned musical comedians, the Capitol Steps returns to the Music Hall for a concert to support affordable housing development. 603-436-2400; themusichall.org
FEB. 8–11: NEWPORT, Winter Carnival. Still going strong after more than 100 years, this townwide tradition includes dinners, pancake breakfasts, a pig roast, pickleball and table tennis tournaments, ice skating, hockey, parades and pageants, and horse-drawn wagon rides. newportwintercarnival.org
FEB. 9–11: NASHUA, Orchid Show and Sale Head to the Courtyard Marriott to meet expert orchid growers, marvel at the beauty of their blooms, and perhaps pick up a few plants to bring home. nhorchids.org
FEB. 25: MOUNT WASHINGTON VALLEY, Chocolate Festival. Whether you choose to travel by car, ski, or snowshoe, this inn-to-inn tour through the Mount Washington Valley will keep you fueled with decadent goodies to sample along the way. 603-356-9920; mwvskitouring.org
THROUGH FEB. 25: PROVIDENCE, “Ariel Jackson: The Origin of the Blues .” In this show at the RISD Museum, multidisciplinary artist Ariel Jackson combines elements of science fiction and fantasy with her own experience to explore the issues of living as a minority in the United States. 401-454-6500; risdmuseum.org
JAN. 4: EXETER, Winter Big Day . How many species will you find? Perhaps a Eurasian wigeon? Maybe a Barrow’s goldeneye? Register in advance for a day that starts at the Audubon Society’s Fisherville Brook Wildlife Refuge and explores several winter birding hot spots. 401-949-5454; asri.org
FEB. 3: WOONSOCKET, Rhode Island Music Legends Concert. Three of the Ocean State’s best-loved musical acts take to the Stadium Theatre stage. Rock to John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, swing to Roomful of Blues, and groove to Steve Smith and the Nakeds. 401-762-4545; stadiumtheatre.com
FEB. 10: LINCOLN, Lincoln’s Birthday Celebration. Have a slice of cake in honor of Honest Abe’s 209th birthday (a few days early) as you tour the Arnold House museum. Learn about
the 16th president’s visits to Rhode Island, and how this town came to be named for him in 1871, just six years after his assassination. 401-728-9696; historicnewengland.org
FEB. 16–25: NEWPORT, Winter Festival . This annual extravaganza includes activities throughout the city (more than 160 events total) that collectively offer fine food, music, and entertainment for the whole family. 401847-7666; newportwinterfestival.com
FEB. 16 –25: PROVIDENCE, Children’s Film Festival. A variety of downtown venues will screen independent films that are geared toward ages 3–18 but certain to appeal to all ages. Postfilm discussions, workshops for kids, and a young filmmakers showcase round out the fun. 401209-7585; providencechildrensfilmfestival.org
JAN. 13: BARRE, Neko Case . A former punk rocker who pushed through the alt-country label into what’s been dubbed “country noir,” Case blends a lifetime of disparate influences into powerful storytelling. 802-476-8188; barreoperahouse.org
JAN. 18–20: RUTLAND, “Zig-Zag Woman” and “The Wasp. ” Actors’ Rep Theatre presents a pair of short plays by comedian Steve Martin at the Paramount Theatre. In one, a lonely waitress magically separates herself into three parts to facilitate her quest for a man. In the other, a white Protestant family in suburban 1950s America exists in a limbo of expectation, routine, insincerity, and fear. 802-7750903; paramountvt.org
JAN. 27: BRATTLEBORO, Northern Roots Traditional Music Festival. This daylong celebration brings together local and regional musicians representing the best northern musical traditions for a day of workshops, panels, and mini concerts at New England Youth Theater and McNeill’s Brewery, with everything culminating in a special evening performance. 802257-4523; bmcvt.org
JAN. 30 – FEB. 1: ESSEX JUNCTION, Vermont Farm Show The Champlain Valley Expo Center plays host to this annual tradition, which will feature more than 250 booths— showcasing everything from beekeeping to sugar making to dairy farming—that offer local products and the chance to meet the vendors. 802-461-8774; vtfarmshow.com
FEB. 11: STOWE, Stowe Derby. One of the most unusual ski races in 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 per competitor. 802-253-9216; stowederby.com
FEB. 16–25: BRATTLEBORO, Winter Carnival At this 10-day townwide extravaganza, you can see a movie, a puppet show, a concert, or a variety show; hit the ice rink or the dance floor; and still find time for cook-offs and pancake breakfasts, sleigh and snowmobile rides, and games. Just make sure not to miss the signature ski jumping competition on Harris Hill. brattleborowintercarnival.org
Great ships. Great food. Great fun.
3- to 6-day adventures
8 Historic Windjammers departing from Camden & Rockland. Prices start at $595.
1-800-807-WIND
www.sailmainecoast.com
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Yankee Magazine hosted a contemporary take on a New England Thanksgiving featuring the iconic spice blend Bell’s Seasoning and related products at the Inn at Hastings Park in Lexington, MA.
This Thanksgiving among friends celebrated 150 years of Bell’s Seasoning as an iconic, locally made ingredient that is just as at home in your kitchen as it was in your mother’s and grandmother’s before you.
Follow along @YANKEEMAGAZINE #MYNEWENGLAND
A welcome reception featuring seasonal cocktails and small bites was followed by a tour of the historic property and a Thanksgiving table styling session with Krissy O’Shea of Cottage Farm. Guests enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner in the library of the inn featuring Bell’s products and seasonal desserts. The meal was prepared by Stacy Cogswell, executive chef of the award-winning Artistry on the Green at the Inn at Hastings Park, in collaboration with Amy Traverso, senior food editor of Yankee Magazine. The event and dinner were styled by Krissy O’Shea using a mix of organic, seasonal materials; the paper elements were designed by Sara Fitz Studio of York Harbor, ME; and linens and tableware were provided by Peak Event Services.
For recipes and styling tips inspired by the dinner, go to: NewEngland.com/MyNewEnglandThanksgiving
Celebrating the people, destinations, and experiences that make the region and Yankee Magazine so unique.Photographs by Mark Fleming
Last winter there was such a hubbub over hygge— that catchy Danish word for a feeling of warmth and wellbeing—you’d think our Nordic friends had just invented coziness. But here in New England, where winter winds barrel through our mountains and whistle down our coast, folks have long known how to stoke those inner fires: Sleep well, eat well, and be of good cheer. In the following pages, you’ll find some of our favorite variations on these core winter comforts— so come on in and get warm.
THE COZIEST INN IN THE WORLD, P. 84
THE BEST COMFORT FOODS IN NEW ENGLAND, P. 88
BARS WORTH TOASTING, P. 92
What if you took the warmest, most inviting features from great New England lodgings and put them under a single roof—what would that look like?
We’re thinking: heaven.
BY KIM KNOX BECKIUSRabbit Hill Inn
Lower Waterford, VT
Who wouldn’t love being greeted by this most endearing of innkeepers? Reese (named for her peanut-butter-cup-colored coat and sweet disposition) has easily fallen into the rhythms of Rabbit Hill Inn ever since showing up at the kitchen door eight years ago. When she turns her emerald gaze your way, she’s looking for an invitation to curl up beside you in a fireside armchair, to supervise as you work a Stave jigsaw puzzle, or perhaps even to sneak back to your room with you for a catnap. But come 5:30 p.m. she’ll leap onto her stool behind the bar, where her admirers wait—after all, posing for
photos is a small sacrifice to make for a steady stream of fan mail and gourmet treats. 802-748-5168; rabbithillinn.com
The Notchland Inn
Hart’s Location, NH
Before dinner at this White Mountains retreat, you can gather in a space that transforms strangers into friends. With its dark wood paneling, iron chandelier, and cushioned inglenook beside the imposing “Sheriff of Nottingham” fireplace, this comfy parlor still bears the Arts and Crafts handprint of its designer, Gustav Stickley, aka the Ralph Lauren of the turn of the 20th century. New England craft beer, wine, or
a favorite cocktail? Order up and sip away, as tunes from yesteryear play softly in the background. Say “photo op,” and Gypsy, one of the two supremely gentle Bernese mountain dogs in residence, just might join you for a fireside portrait. 603-3746131; notchland.com
Made Inn Vermont
Burlington, VT
With big windows, gleaming wood floors, and art books and albums galore, the whimsically hip library at Made Inn Vermont is more than just a place for borrowing reading material or a ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s record to play on your inroom turntable. Settle in, pop open a can of Vermont’s coveted Heady Topper, and rediscover the tactile pleasure of flipping pages, the friendly-but-fierce fun of competition over a vintage board game, or the rewards of conversing with all types of people, like-minded or not. 802-399-2788; madeinnvermont.com
The Pitcher Inn
Warren, VT
The crackling of a woodburning fire entrances and soothes on such a primal level, there’s a very real risk you’ll never leave your room once the logs are blazing. Still, we can’t wait for you to see your wow-factor fireplace at the famed Pitcher Inn. Built of earthy elements—brick, fieldstone,
slate, tree trunks—it’s not merely functional, but rather a one-of-a-kind spectacle designed to be the focal point of your snug and sumptuous nest. 802-4966350; pitcherinn.com
Spicer Mansion
Mystic, CT
Don’t count on waking up at your usual hour after drifting off on a king-size Dux bed from Swedish company Duxiana, with its mattress contoured for wonderfully deep sleep. The historic Spicer Mansion further ups the ante with snowwhite, 600-thread-count sheets from Massachusetts’s own luxury-bedding specialist, Matouk, and a lambswool-angora blanket that’s as snuggly-soft as cashmere. 860-245-4621; spicermansion.com
Waldo Emerson Inn
Kennebunk, ME
Before you pull back the quilt on your bed here, take a moment to appreciate its hand-stitched artistry, courtesy of Pennsylvania Mennonite quilter Mary Nolt. And should its mesmerizing patterns and craftsmanship inspire you to pick up a needle and fabric, just walk outside: There’s a quilting shop—Mainely Quilts—in the property’s carriage house, where you’ll find new and heirloom finished quilts and every supply for cozying up with a project of your own. 207-985-4250; waldoemerson.com
The Wentworth Jackson, NH
At the touch of a button, a hot tub becomes a swirling cauldron for soothing sore muscles and fostering a better night’s sleep. Add the words “private” and “outdoor,” and the experience turns downright heavenly. At the Wentworth, each of these tubs is unique: Yours might have LED lights that make the frothy water glow, or a wall-mounted TV that ensures you won’t miss the game or a favorite show. Pull the shades if you crave privacy; leave them open for views of the storybook village of Jackson or the mountains. You’ll feel tucked inside your own romantic snow globe if powdery flurries start to fall. 603-383-9700; thewentworth.com
Wolf Cove Inn
Poland, ME
Breakfast arrives just as early light casts a shimmer across frozen Tripp Lake, a scene perfectly framed by the picture windows in your room. Pour yourself a mug of coffee made with beans slowbatch-roasted in the shadow of Sugarloaf Mountain, and let your head fall back against the super-cuddly Comphy-brand pillowcases. Did you order the sweet entrée or the savory one? Bananas Foster French toast drizzled with syrup from Sawyer’s Maple Farm, or basted eggs over mushroom
hash with maple sausage from A Wee Bit Farm? Each day, the local-ingredientfocused choices are just that difficult. So here’s a little secret: You’re allowed to request both. 207-998-4976; wolfcoveinn.com
Blantyre
Lenox, MA
French Valrhona semisweet and Belgian Callebaut white chocolate, bittersweet South American cocoa beans, hazelnutty Italian Gianduja: The culinary wizards at this luxury hotel blend fine ingredients from afar into half a dozen tempting selections. Served with or without the amped-up warmth of a liqueur, these interactive mugfuls invite you to swirl in fresh whipped cream and torch-toasted house-made marshmallows. If you venture out for frosty adventures, on returning you can vanquish the chill with a sip. 413-637-3556; blantyre.com
The White Hart
Salisbury, CT
English-born chef Annie Wayte showcases local ingredients year-round, and in deep winter she relies on the Hudson Valley’s indoor growers for her bright, bold flavors. Dinner in the dining room is a Friday-andSaturday-only treat, but complimentary continental breakfast and two additional on-site eateries ensure that you could be snowed in for a week and never eat the
same thing twice. Cheery, communal White Hart Provisions serves coffee concoctions and quirky café fare, while the pubby Tap Room offers a comfort-food cavalcade of soups, fish and chips, burgers, and steaks. And the bar’s six taps dispense only beers that meet Wayte’s lofty standards. 860-435-0030; whitehartinn.com
Christopher Dodge House
Providence, RI
We bet quite a few guests have been tempted to smuggle the cookie jar from the foyer back to their room. But why, really, when just-baked goodies are constantly restocked in this mansion’s country-cozy common room? Perhaps there’ll be walnut cake when you pour yourself a cup of tea and sit by the petite gas stove in the afternoon … cinnamon-streusel coffee cake when the midnight munchies strike … warm muffins when you wake at sunrise. The gifted bakers here love to experiment with King Arthur extracts and seasonal fruit, so you never know what you’ll find. The only thing that’s certain: They can’t refill the cookie jar if it’s not where it belongs. 401-351-6111; providence-hotel.com
Castle Hill Inn
Newport, RI
Two mansion rooms and a small hall have been
thoughtfully transformed into the Retreat by Farmaesthetics, an intimate spa whose name reflects its collaboration with Rhode Island’s own pioneering all-natural skin-care line. Farmaesthetics’s hands-on
founder and formulator
Brenda Brock has created facial, massage, and saltwater-soak experiences that soothe body and spirit with farm-grown herbs, flowers, grains, and aromatic oils. By the light
of toasty gas fireplaces in the waiting and treatment rooms—and with a storm-churned ocean in view—your only job here is to melt into a state of utter relaxation. 401-849-3800; castlehillinn.com
RIB-STICKING CLASSICS MEET GLOBAL FLAVORS IN THESE ULTIMATE COZY-DINING DISHES.
BY AMY TRAVERSO PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK FLEMING
(1) PAD KEMAO AT LONG GRAIN (2) CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AT THE GRAZING ROOM IN THE COLBY HILL INN
(3) THE HOLY DONUT
(4) MISO RAMEN AT GANKO ITTETSU RAMEN
(5) IRISH SODA BREAD FRENCH TOAST AT O’ROURKE’S DINER
(6) THE WHITE HORSE TAVERN
(7) POUTINE AT WORTHY KITCHEN
O’Rourke’s Diner Middletown, CT
To make his signature French toast, Brian O’Rourke begins by baking the bread—specifically, fragrant Irish soda bread studded with raisins and toasted caraway seeds. After being soaked in custard, griddled, and served with homemade jam and clotted cream, these slices are a multinational delight. 860-346-6101; orourkesmiddletown.com
Metro Bis Simsbury, CT
If any cut of meat qualifies as comfort food, it’s the humble short rib. Rich and meaty, it cooks down to melting tenderness after a long braise or lowtemperature roast. Pair it
with a tangy braising sauce and you have, well, a ribsticker. In the hands of chefowner Chris Prosperi, the ribs—and the mushroomrich risotto with which they’re served—achieve perfect texture and intensity, the stuff of next-day nostalgia. 860-651-1908; metrobis.com
Ganko Ittetsu Ramen Brookline, MA
The cure for whatever ails us can be found in this bowl of long-simmered broth, braised pork belly, minced pork, and noodles with a lashing of miso and a softcooked egg. There are layers on layers of flavor here, with garnishes of sesame, scallion, and sweet corn. No wonder the line snakes out the door on weekends (plus, the space itself is small— only 10 tables). If you can, arrive on a weekday before the doors open at 11:30. But even if there’s a line,
you’ll be sheltered from the cold inside Brookline’s old Arcade Building. And it’s always worth the wait. 617730-8100; gankoramen.com
MAC AND CHEESE
The White Horse Tavern
Newport, RI
Here at America’s oldest restaurant (c. 1673), the lobster mac comes in a little cast-iron pot and bears a crown of crunchy, buttery bread crumbs. But its real glory lies in the sauce, which is made with two New England cheeses (Great Hill Blue and sharp Vermont cheddar) and a generous portion of chopped lobster meat—a humble meal made princely. 401-849-3600; whitehorsenewport.com
PAD KEMAO
Long Grain
Camden, ME
At this tiny rustic eatery (there’s just six tables),
Bangkok-born chef Ravin Nakjaroen cooks vividly flavored Thai-inspired dishes that feel entirely local, given his sourcing of fresh, seasonal ingredients. Pad kemao features wok-charred house-made noodles with Thai basil, organic greens, wild mushrooms, and your choice of meat (we recommend the chicken or pork belly), an irresistibly cozy combination. 207-2369001; longgraincamden.com
B.T.’s Smokehouse
Sturbridge, MA
What began as a roadside trailer at the Brimfield Antique Show has become a destination restaurant, thanks to chef-owner Brian Treitman’s sixth sense for smoke. Everything here, from the ribs to the pulled pork to the mac and cheese, is so rich and tasty you could go into hibernation after downing a platter. But it’s the brisket Reuben—an inspired marriage of two nostalgic classics—that wins the prize. 508-3473188; btsmokehouse.com
Rasoi
Pawtucket, RI
Why is so much comfort food on the cheesy-starchy side when there’s a world of warming spices to take the chill away? This IndoChinese dish traditionally pairs crispy cauliflower florets with a moderately spicy curry sauce, but at Rasoi there’s an added hint of sweetness. It’s the kind of dish that you taste once, and
seek out endlessly. 401-7285500; rasoirestaurant.com
Brgr Bar
Portsmouth, NH
Chasing the success of the Shake Shack juggernaut, upscale burger joints have begun doling out gussied-up fries and fancy milkshakes at premium prices. But Brgr Bar—now with a location in Portland, Maine, too— breaks free from the pack with thoughtful sourcing (the beef comes from Maine family farms) and seriously creative combos (e.g., a mango salsa/pulled pork/smoked gouda/ avocado-topped burger). Our favorite combines a beef patty with gorgonzola, onion rings, and onionbacon jam, all in perfect harmony. 603-294-0902; brgr-bar.com
Worthy Kitchen
Woodstock, VT
A Quebecois invention, traditional poutine is a gut-busting dish of french fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. It’s a winter warmer, a spirits-soakerupper. But at Worthy Kitchen it’s a worth-thetrip wonder: excellent fries topped with duck fat gravy, pork confit, smoked cheddar (a Vermonty touch), fresh herbs, and pickled shallots. Salt, fat, acid, smoke … a flawless coldweather quartet. 802-4577281; worthyvermont.com
Chez Henri
Sugarbush, VT
Generations of downhillers have made an après-ski habit of stopping by Henri Borel’s iconic bistro in Sugarbush Village. There’s
plenty of comfort to be found here (onion soup, fondue, filet with bérnaise), but in our view the raclette— melty alpine cheese served simply with potatoes, pickles, and charcuterie—is the best way to end the day. Borel celebrated the restaurant’s 50th anniversary in 2014, and this youthful nonagenarian still runs the place from his perch behind the marble bar. How does he do it? Maybe it’s the French paradox. 802-583-2600; chezhenrisugarbush.com
The Grazing Room in the Colby Hill Inn Henniker, NH
Before taking over Colby Hill, chef-owner Bruce Barnes cooked in New York and Washington, D.C., two towns known for their excellent variations on this soul food classic. He sidesteps a common pitfall—dry,
overdone meat—by cooking the chicken sous vide before flash-frying it, then pairing the burnished bird with a seasonal waffle (sweet potato or pumpkin in fall, zucchini in summer). 603428-3281; colbyhillinn.com
The Holy Donut
Portland, ME
It’s long been a tradition in Maine potato country to add mashed spuds to doughnut batter, which provides a fluffier, moister texture. So when Leigh Kellis decided to open a doughnut shop in Portland in 2012, it was only natural to make her rounds with potatoes. We especially love the chocolate glazed doughnut finished with a sprinkling of sea salt, the ideal foil to all that sweet goodness. Locations in Portland and Scarborough. theholydonut.com
A schoolhouse built in 1735 found a lively second calling when it was relocated to Connecticut’s historic Griswold Inn and remade into the spacious Tap Room.
@ the Red Lion Inn
Stockbridge, MA
In this 80-year-old pub a half-flight underground, servers have to maneuver a bit to deliver rounds of beer and chicken potpies, and cellphones rarely catch a signal. But the brick-red tin ceiling, lace curtains, and rosy lighting combine to shut out whatever weather’s howling outside, and live music is a 365-day-a-year promise—which means you can always get those tingling toes a-tapping. 413298-5545; redlioninn.com
@ the Library Restaurant
Portsmouth, NH
Part of a swanky steakhouse situated in a 1785 brick mansion and boasting French mirrors lined with silver and hand-carved mahogany paneling, this English-style pub is equally lavish—from its vodkas (touted as the largest selection north of Boston) to its martinis (96 in all). Plant yourself at the marble bar or claim a leather chair by the fire, then find a good read among the hundreds of books lining the walls. You’re going to want to be here for a while. 603-4315202; libraryrestaurant.com
Hartland Four Corners, VT
This Vermont country outpost could double as the template for the perfect small-town New England tavern. Housed in one of
the village’s oldest buildings, it has a solid restaurant upstairs—but if it’s cozy you seek, hit the downstairs pub, where rough-hewn ceiling beams are strung with lights and the fireplace radiates a mellow glow. Order yourself a local brew and (if you’ve planned your visit wisely) heat up with some live jazz. 802-4362139; skunkhollowtavern.com
BALDWIN & SONS
TRADING CO.
Woburn, MA
The locale is a bit unlikely (upstairs in a Sichuan restaurant deep in the ’burbs) and access is limited (open Thursday–Saturday), but we’d still trek through a snowstorm for Ran Duan’s virtuosic cocktails. The vibe is luxe library—deep leather couches, paneled walls, crystal—and a reservationsrecommended policy means you’ll have room to sit back, sip, and savor. 781-9358488; thebaldwinbar.com
@ the Griswold Inn
Essex, CT
In winter, the Tap Room is warmed by an old stone fireplace, the glow of a vintage popcorn machine, and a twinkling year-round Christmas tree. But on Mondays, when patrons join the Jovial Crew band in rounds of sea chanteys, this historic barroom fills with the warmest kind of cheer. In honor of the Griswold’s 1776 founding, order the inn’s own Revolutionary Ale, or opt for something even stronger: George
Washington might not have slept here, but he did run one of the largest whiskey distilleries of his time. 860767-1776; griswoldinn.com
@ the Harraseeket Inn
Freeport, ME
Here’s a recipe for a toasty tavern that feels custommade for a rustic Maine sporting lodge, even though it sits just two blocks from Freeport’s shopping district: Take a roaring fireplace, forest-green walls, a woodfired oven turning out hearty pub fare, and decor that includes vintage snowshoes and a moose head. Add six beer taps, specialty cocktails, and a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence, and stir. 207-8659377; harraseeketinn.com
Providence, RI
We love the Avery’s dimly lit Art Deco interior, with its hand-carved plaster walls and cushy banquettes—and we’re not the only ones, as the word is out on this once-“secret” little bar. Yet even when it’s packed, the Avery still feels like the handsomest hiding place we know, utterly sheltered from daily cares and dismal weather. And it still has that insider vibe, thanks in part to a hidden whiskey cabinet stocked with gems like 20-year Pappy Van Winkle and 30-year Laphroaig, poured only for patrons who know to ask for them. 401-751-5920; averyprovidence.com
@ the Omni Mount Washington Resort
Bretton Woods, NH
Compared with today’s crop of hipster speakeasies, the Cave stands out because, well, it really was a Prohibition-era watering hole. Located deep in the bowels of a grand hotel, this den of granite and brick was once an illicit saloon on a bootlegging route that stretched from Canada to Boston. Of the hotel’s A-list guests of yore—including Winston Churchill and Babe Ruth—surely a few ducked in here, drawn by a secretive, subterranean allure that remains just as strong today. 800-2580330; omnihotels.com
@ the Farmhouse Tap & Grill
Burlington, VT
Winter brings out another side to beer: darker, spicier, almost primal. ’Tis the season of porters and stouts and barrel aging, and it’s all ideally showcased here. The fireplace, barn-board farm table, game collection, and eclectic seating (leather booths, old church pews) will appeal to all, but beer geeks may never want to leave. Thirty taps dispense the likes of Hill Farmstead and Lawson’s Finest Liquids; there are at least 100 bottles, too. Plus, the Farmhouse regularly hosts beer-centric events—and we hear the industry pros like to mingle in the Parlor afterward. 802-859-0888; farmhousetg.com
hen I was in my twenties, I spent the better part of my leisure time at a certain bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, situated in a basement-level space on that somewhat charmless stretch of Mass. Ave. between Harvard and Central squares. It was called the Cellar, and it possessed all the elements of a good coldweather New England bar: subterranean feel, brick walls, brass bar, gold light, and a cranky, quick-witted owner with an inexhaustible supply of hilarious stories.
And it had another advantage, too: The stairs leading down to it were open to the elements. On snowy nights, that meant being very careful descending to the bar, and being even more careful toddling back up them hours later. But it also meant sitting inside this warm bunker of a bar, with its big glass wall facing the stairs, and watching the snow eddy and fall just feet from you. You’d get a gust of wind when the door opened—a little reminder of what you’re missing, a light dusting of snow on the floor— and then the door would close, the snow would melt, and warmth would prevail.
BY JOE KEOHANE
down the back of your shirt; you can hear the wind without having it cut you to ribbons. They’re like aquariums, these bars, only reversed. From your dry, comfortable little enclosure, you can watch nature’s full fury, diminished and defanged and safely contained behind a thick sheet of glass. Meanwhile, you sit, coat off, drink in hand, unclenched, protected and cozy.
The Cellar has since enclosed that stairwell—wisely, as a particularly cherished pastime of my crew there was
They’re like aquariums, these bars, only reversed. From your dry, comfortable little enclosure, you can watch nature’s full fury, safely contained behind a thick sheet of glass.
Herman Melville wrote, “[T]o enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.” That pretty much sums up how I feel about drinking in bars in New England in the wintertime. It’s the contrast that makes the experience: wet and dry, cold and warm, solitary and in good company, grimly sober and happily inebriated.
The key—the genius, in fact—of great New England winter bars is that they manage to constantly remind you of all the unpleasantness of the season while also keeping it safely at bay. You can see the snow without having it go
sipping beer while watching friends try not to fall down the stairs. But I found myself thinking back on those days during a recent visit to another fine establishment: the Cape Arundel Inn, in Kennebunkport, Maine. There’s a bar area on the first floor where you can sit in a plush chair by a big picture window and stare out at the ocean, cocktail in hand, your back warmed by the fireplace. When I was there, a storm was raging, and the wind was howling in off the sea with such force that it pelted the window with seawater, crusting it with salt. Wave after wave of it came like that, with the sky turning the same color as the raging gray sea. And yet there I was, sinking deeper into my chair, ordering another drink, my sense of calm accentuated by the bedlam playing out on the other side of the glass.
It’s temporary, of course. You know you can’t win. You can’t stop it. You eventually will have to go back out into the elements, and when you do, they will have their revenge. This is New England, after all. But for the time being you sit, staring out that window, warm and happy and impervious. Try all you want, you think. You’ll never get me in here.
Vermont photographer Richard W. Brown pays tribute to the vanished landscape he once roamed and to its people, his friends.
Early April, West Barnet, 1973. “One early morning I climbed up on a hill to take a picture of this farm, and [the owner, John Somers] comes out the back door,” Brown recalls. “I thought for sure he was going to tell me to leave, but instead he said, ‘When you’re all done, come on in and have some breakfast with us.’ That’s how they were.”
Somers’ Hill Road, West Barnet, 1972. John and Gladys Somers’s farmhouse sits on a hill in the distance; their son Hezzie’s house is in the foreground. “There were always grandchildren around John and Gladys’s home,” Brown says. “It was just a very welcoming place.”
Gladys and John Somers, West Barnet, 1971. “John was missing a few fingers from different farming accidents,” Brown recalls. “He would always hold his hands up to show you, like he was kind of proud of it. It didn’t slow him down much.”
heron Boyd was the kind of Vermonter that Richard Brown appreciated. An aging farmer with a few heifers and a cornfield he still harvested every autumn, Boyd lived alone in the same Quechee house where he was born in 1901. When Brown, then a struggling young photographer, met Boyd in the mid-1970s, he found a man leading a life more in tune with the 19th century than the 20th. Boyd didn’t own a car; his home had no electricity or running water.
“Everything about him was from a different time period— even the way he talked,” says Brown. “He’d be telling me how he had to get the corn in before it snowed, and he would say, ‘The snow hinders.’ Nobody talks like that. I’d get in my car in Peacham and it was 1978; when I got out at his place, it was 1878. I was enthralled.”
The Northeast Kingdom that Brown, a Massachusetts native, found when he moved there in 1971 was still a patchwork of small farms where men and women worked the land much as their ancestors had. They milked maybe 20 cows, not 200. They preferred animal power over machinery. But it was obvious to Brown—and probably the farmers, too—that this way of life was coming to a close. So, over the next decade and a half, he made documenting it the focus of his work.
“I looked for markers for the right farm,” he says. “If there was smoke coming out of the chimney in the middle of summer, you knew they cooked with wood. Or you’d see the draft horses around the farm buildings. Those are the places I searched out. And a lot of those people became my friends.”
Brown later found work that would take him around the world, shooting elaborate gardens for lavish coffee table books. Yet it’s still those thousands of black-and-white photos he made in his adopted state, often with his bulky 8-by-10 camera, that he’s most proud of. And this past December, with the help of his wife, Susan McClellan, a graphic designer, he finally realized his dream of compiling them into a book, titled The Last of the Hill Farms: Echoes of Vermont’s Past (David R. Godine, Publisher).
“I hope readers will see I had such high regard for the people I photographed,” says Brown, now 72. “I really liked them and felt that what they were doing was a beautiful thing, even though I don’t think they thought of it that way. I miss that period and the people back then who were a part of my life.” —Ian
Aldrich
above : Filtering Syrup, Barnet, 1977. When Brown saw Katherine Roy filtering maple syrup at her farm, “all I could think of was Vermeer and his paintings, because of the light,” he says. “It was so beautiful.”
right : Light Brahmas, Peacham, 1975. This was Brown’s re-creation of a 19th-century image he’d seen years before, of a deceased great blue heron pinned to the side of a barn. Brown butchered the chickens himself and notes, “They eventually got eaten.”
Coffee with Grandmother, Quechee, 1977. Theron Boyd with a portrait of his grandmother, Mary Cowdray, who raised him and left him the c. 1786 homestead in her will. Though Boyd rebuffed offers from developers, at the end of his life he turned his property over to preservationists; it’s now a state historic site.
Stablemates, Quechee, 1978. “I’d taken Theron to the grocery store that day. He always wore his fancy hat when he went into town,” says Brown. “SpaghettiO’s—he’d buy probably 20 cans of those. It’s what he loved to eat.”
To see more of Brown’s work, go to newengland.com/hill-farms or visit his website, rwbrownphotography.com.
Housekeeper, Kirby, 1973.
“People think these images just happen,” says Brown. “Not at all. For this one I asked the housekeeper to come out and pose for me. I figured out where I wanted her to stand, but then the sheep, being curious, wanted in the scene. I wanted them in the background. So I got some grain and poured it out, then ran back, vaulted a fence, and clicked the shutter. I had to move fast because the sheep ate fast. It took a few times.”
Mahoosuc Guide Service’s Polly Mahoney with one of her Yukon huskies, Myrtle. The pack’s largest female, she was named for Mahoney’s great-aunt.
“When you tie the dogs up, they’re jumping and barking. But as you take off, it becomes totally silent. All you hear is their breathing and their feet on the snow.”
If it were up to Polly Mahoney, she’d work for the rest of her life. “A lot of people count the days until they retire,” says the 58-year-old Maine native, who began dogsledding in northern British Columbia in 1979. “I’m counting the days I can keep doing this.” With her partner, Maine Guide Kevin Slater, Mahoney runs Mahoosuc Guide Service, which leads dogsled trips in the winter and canoe trips from spring to fall. We recently caught up with Mahoney at her home, which she shares with Slater and 36 Yukon huskies, in Newry, Maine.
came from a family that loved the outdoors—it was just a part of our lives. I’d go out into the woods by myself, on my horse, and I’d find peace out there. Being close to nature, not being around any kind of clutter, having a connection to something bigger than myself. That’s still the case. I don’t go to church; I go outdoors.”
“As soon as I graduated from high school, I headed west. I wanted to be outside and I wanted adventure. I worked as a ski bum in Wyoming and guided trail rides at Point Reyes National Seashore in California. I eventually ended up in Alaska, where I met my first husband, who introduced me to mushing. We later settled in British Columbia. I worked as a cook and guide at a big-game hunting camp. But after six or seven years the isolation got to me. I wanted to be around more people, to share my experience working with dogs.
“Then an old high school friend told me about this Maine Guide, Kevin Slater, who mushed. He was trying to scrape together enough money to start a dogsledding school and needed a helper. I applied, and he hired me. I decided to come back to Maine for just one winter to work with him and see my family. That was 1990. I never left.”
“These dogs are like my family. It’s a labor of love, but they’re great company and I love the connection I make with them. They have this intuition that’s really amazing. Some can read my mind even before I’ve issued a command. They know where to go. Sometimes in the morning, I’ll be lying in bed, and they’ll just start howling. I haven’t made a noise—I’ve only opened my eyes—but they somehow know I’m awake.”
“The dogs have an incredible enthusiasm to pull. It’s in their breeding. When you tie them up, they’re jumping and barking. But as you take off, it becomes totally silent. That’s an incredible thing to experience. All you hear is their breathing and their feet on the snow. That’s why I always tell people not to talk on the sleds: First, it’s distracting to the dogs, but I also don’t want them to miss this very primitive feeling.”
INTERVIEW BY IAN ALDRICH PORTRAIT BY SARA GRAY“You’re never certain what kind of dog you have until they’re in harness, but you can tell early on who might be a good leader. When they’re puppies, we’ll start taking them out for walks in the woods. If we get to a log they can’t climb over, the smart ones will immediately go around it rather than sit and whimper. When they’re older and we’re running them through the woods, the ones who have the will to keep up— that’s another sign. I’ve got a pup now who is only 3 months old but already reminds me of Amber, one of our main lead dogs, who has a lot of drive and is smart and devoted. That’s the thing about our dogs: Their bloodlines go back to the old Yukon dogs. They’re big, hardworking, and long-legged, but steady, calm, and very friendly.”
“When you’re out there, you don’t think about home, you don’t think about bills. You’re exactly where you are. You’re on the sled. You’re mushing across a lake. You’re at camp. You’re chopping a hole in the ice to get water. You’re collecting firewood to be warm that night. There’s a simplicity to it all. When I do get stressed, I try to go back to that mode. Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I warm? The basics.”
“The No. 1 lesson is to not let go of the reins, or else the dogs will keep going. Years ago we had two women, both lawyers, whom we took out on Richardson Lake. It was cold and icy and they fell off their sled. These two sophisticated women from the city were dragged across that lake on their bellies. Talk about a raw experience! But they never let go, and they were so proud of that. I bet they still talk about it.”
For more information about Mahoosuc Guide Service or to book a trip, go to mahoosuc.com.
LUCAS ST. CLAIR’S MISSION WAS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE:
TO WIN SUPPORT FOR MAINE’S BIGGEST SWATH OF NATIONAL PARK LAND DESPITE CONTROVERSY AROUND ITS BENEFACTOR— WHO ALSO HAPPENS TO BE HIS MOTHER.
BY IAN ALDRICH
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LITTLE OUTDOOR GIANTS
The 87,500-acre Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument stands in part as a testament to the doggedness of Lucas St. Clair, shown below at an old hunting camp on the park property.
IT’S THE MORNING OF AUGUST 24, 2016, AND LUCAS ST. CLAIR IS ANXIOUSLY PACING HIS SECOND-FLOOR DOWNTOWN OFFICE IN PORTLAND, MAINE, AN IPHONE PRESSED TIGHTLY AGAINST HIS EAR. BOTH EXHAUSTED AND ENERGIZED, ST. CLAIR, PRESIDENT OF THE PRIVATE LAND-CONSERVATION GROUP ELLIOTSVILLE PLANTATION, HAS CALLS TO MAKE. PEOPLE TO THANK. CONGRATULATIONS TO ACCEPT. AS HE PACES, HE NEVER STRAYS FAR FROM “MISSION CONTROL”: A LONG CONFERENCE TABLE BLANKETED WITH LAPTOPS, CELLPHONES, AND A SCATTERING OF WATER BOTTLES AND COFFEE CUPS. AS ST. CLAIR CHATS, THE OTHERS IN THE ROOM— HIS WIFE, YEMAYA; HIS ADVISER, DAVID FARMER; AND TWO OUTSIDE CONSULTANTS, BARRETT KAISER AND MARIA WEEG—ARE HAMMERING THE REFRESH BUTTON ON THEIR BROWSERS, WHICH ARE LOCKED IN ON THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS RELEASE WEBSITE.
Over the past five years, St. Clair has poured his life into getting 87,500 acres of his family’s property in northern Maine, just east of Mount Katahdin, named a national park monument. He’s made hundreds of trips to the region for coffees, meetings, and press tours; in the past two years alone he racked up 60,000 miles on his Jeep Cherokee. In between were frequent flights to Washington, D.C., to talk with legislators, cabinet members, and department heads about the merits of the monument designation.
In the northern Maine community of Millinocket and the small towns that surround it, some have seen St. Clair as a savior to a region reeling from the demise of the paper industry. To others, he’s a rich interloper hell-bent on
upending a way of life and inserting the federal government into hard-core mountain and forest towns, places where local control is a prized commodity. There have been handshakes and hugs, insults and death threats.
St. Clair picked up the cause where his mother, Roxanne Quimby, had left off. Beginning around 2000, she began directing part of the fortune she’d made from selling Burt’s Bees, the personalcare products company she’d cofounded nearly 20 years before, toward buying swaths of abandoned timberland from northern Maine’s struggling paper companies. To Quimby, it was a chance to protect what didn’t always get protected—the woods and waters—and perhaps reinvigorate the local economy. But a decade of opposition to both
Quimby and her idea for a national park wore her down, and in late 2011 she tapped her son to lead the effort.
Slowly, St. Clair found success where his mother had not. Local businesses and the regional chamber of commerce backed the park idea. Two of the state’s largest newspapers, the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News , voiced their support. But the clearest sign—to the public, anyway— that St. Clair had triumphed came on the day when he and others gathered in his office as the Quimby land was turned over to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The next morning, as St. Clair works his phone, the announcement by President Barack Obama of the new National Park Service monument will be simply a formality.
Still, the 39-year-old St. Clair, a tall man with a thatch of dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard that allows him to fit in with both woodsmen and Beltway insiders, remains anxious. He arrived at his office shortly after 8 and, as he often does, slipped off his shoes. The office, housed in an old brick building, reflects his personality with decor that favors landscape paintings, maps, old snowshoes, fishing poles, and books on brook trout, filmmaker Wes Anderson, and national park lodges.
For much of the next hour and a half, St. Clair, dressed in black jeans and a light-blue patterned buttondown shirt, stays on his feet, circling the conference table to throw glances at the computer screens. Finally, at around 9:30, the White House website flashes a video from President Obama introducing the Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument. St. Clair shoots his hands up into the air, a measure of both his relief and awe that this moment had actually arrived. The others erupt into cheers. Yemaya gives her husband a teary hug.
Then the room quiets, and St. Clair picks up the phone. There are supporters to call; almost immediately the media requests begin flooding in, too. When one conversation or interview ends, a new phone is handed to St. Clair—Boston outlets, NPR, reporters from everywhere seeking a quote. The reprieve is over, and
St. Clair, who is maybe the only person who could have resuscitated his mother’s idea, does what he’s been doing virtually nonstop for the past several years. He gets back to work.
An understated resilience defines Lucas St. Clair’s personality. Its roots can be traced to his early childhood. His parents, George St. Clair and Roxanne Quimby, both native East Coasters, arrived in Maine via San Francisco in 1974—another pair in a wave of young baby boomers seeking a simpler life in the woods of northern New England. They had $3,000 saved up, which they used to buy 30 acres in Guilford, a mill town 50 miles north of Bangor. They cleared the land with a bow saw and built a small saltbox home on a ridge overlooking a creek. It was a handmade life: no running water, no electricity. The property was alive with gardens and honeybees. Kerosene lanterns lit the home, while a dug well supplied the water. What little money Roxanne and George needed they earned through part-time work, she as a waitress and he as a radio deejay.
In June 1978, the couple welcomed their twins, Lucas and Hannah. As the children grew, the woods became their playground. They built forts, dammed the creek, and wandered the forest. Their father led them on treks around the property, pointing out the different plants and animals. Later, there were adventures up Mount Katahdin and fishing on Maine’s rivers.
“There were times when it was uncomfortable,” says Hannah. “We’d come home at night in winter and the house was freezing cold, but I think living that way helped us both become adaptable to different environments. There were no creature comforts. And the ability to have unstructured play and the freedom to explore made us both curious and interested in adventure and travel.”
It was a secluded life, but not a solitary one. And, as he would continue to do throughout his life, young Lucas enjoyed being around people.
“We’d go to these gatherings at the grange, where all these people were,” George says. “As soon as the car was parked, he’d open the door and zoom right into the room. He wanted to be where the action was.”
In 1983, George and Roxanne divorced. She found some land and eventually built a home in nearby Parkman; he got an apartment just minutes away. This new life brought them out of the deep woods but didn’t disconnect their children from the outdoors. Lucas and Hannah crosscountry skied in the field near their mother’s house and rode their bikes deep into the summer night. On fishing trips with his father, Lucas learned how to read the waters and look for the cold, dark pools where the trout lurked. George, whom friends teased for cutting off his fly hooks so he wouldn’t hurt the fish, instilled in his son not just a love of nature but also a respect for it, a kind of tender appreciation of its beauty.
At age 10, the twins followed their father up Katahdin for the first time. “We got to the table lands and it was just socked in with fog. There were people coming down saying they didn’t see a thing from the top,” St. Clair says. “But we were like, We’ve made it this far, let’s go. And when we got to the peak, the wind was blowing and the mist and fog parted. These huge views of the valley came into focus, and I was blown away that we had climbed so high. Then I saw the sign with the mile markers to different places along the [Appalachian Trail]. I was just floored that anyone could walk that far. From that moment, I knew I wanted to do the AT.” And nearly a decade later, as his high school classmates prepared for college, he would do exactly that.
School wasn’t always easy for the young St. Clair. Struggling to find his footing in the classroom, he gravitated toward hands-on activities such as painting and blacksmithing. During his sophomore year in high school, he grew seven inches and gained 60 pounds. “It was awful,” he recalls. “It was the worst year. I felt like my body abandoned me. Sorry, buddy, I’m doing my own thing this year.” The wilderness became his outlet, a place that gave him confidence.
“My junior year at Gould [Academy, in Bethel, Maine], we went on an eight-day winter camping trip,” he says. “There were students who were really anxious about it. It wasn’t anything they’d done before. And for the first time I was like, I know this stuff—I can teach others about it. It dawned on me that I did have a skill set. That who I was was not defined by the classroom.”
OF THE PARK THAT SHE ENVISIONED, QUIMBY HAS SAID, “I FEEL LIKE MY REASON FOR BEING PUT ON THIS EARTH WILL HAVE BEEN FULFILLED, BECAUSE THIS WILL LIVE ON AFTER ME.”
After high school and his AT hike, St. Clair traveled to Patagonia and then backpacked around Europe. He remained in London that fall to attend culinary school and eventually trained to be a pastry chef. Back in the U.S., he worked in restaurants in New York City before, at age 21, returning to Maine and opening a restaurant in Winter Harbor with a girlfriend. The business was a modest success, but the experience of running it wasn’t.
“Were I to do it all over again, I would have gone to refrigerator repair school, because what I mainly found myself doing was wrenching on compressors and trying to get plumbing working,” St. Clair says. “It was all about fixing stuff.”
In 2005, with the restaurant and the girlfriend behind him, St. Clair rode his motorcycle across the country. He wound up settling in Seattle, where he reconnected with Yemaya, whom he’d met during his postgrad year in South America. In this new life, St. Clair
worked as a fishing guide, served as a sommelier for a group of restaurants, and sometimes modeled for the clothing company Eddie Bauer. By early 2011 he was married and a new father, enjoying a comfortable city existence. Yet the dream of returning to Maine was never far. Neither was a familiar restlessness that he had felt at different periods in his life.
And then he got a call from his mother.
When Roxanne Quimby moved to Maine, the state’s northern region was in transition. In 1976 the final log drive tumbled down the Kennebec River; a decade later, Great Northern Paper had its first largescale layoffs. A way of life—one that had earned Millinocket the nickname “Magic City” for the speed at which it had been built a century before— unraveled. By 2014 the population of Millinocket had plunged by nearly 42
percent and a fifth of all working-age residents were jobless. Houses here could be had for less than $30,000.
As the forest products industry stumbled, though, Quimby wound up on a path to prosperity. In 1984 she met Burt Shavitz, who was selling his own honey from a truck on the side of the road. She offered to help and eventually began making boot and furniture polish from the excess beeswax, processing the stuff, with the twins’ help, on a wood cookstove. Later she hit upon a recipe for lip balm, and after that had started to sell, she converted a defunct schoolhouse in Guilford into a manufacturing center for the small company. By the late 1990s, Burt’s Bees had a new home base in North Carolina and a sales volume that made Quimby worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Her foray into land preservation came as a result of her son’s Appalachian Trail hike. Upon his return, St. Clair had remarked to her that the final
stretch of the trail in northern Maine, the Hundred-Mile Wilderness, hadn’t felt like much of a wilderness at all— what with the sound of cars buzzing along nearby roads and the clanging of neighboring logging operations. Motivated to help create more of a buffer along the trail, Quimby bought 40,000 acres near Monson. By 2007 she had spent $39 million to purchase a total of 80,000 acres of wilderness and was hosting public meetings on the idea of creating a national park.
“I feel like my reason for being put on this earth will have been fulfilled, because this will live on after me,” Quimby told this magazine in 2008. “A park is a demonstration that there is something in America that I can love. It’s very democratic: A Mexican immigrant or a millionaire, for 10 bucks they both get the same experience.”
But some of the qualities that had made Quimby such a successful businesswoman would hurt her push to sell the park idea. She was headstrong and
uncompromising, according to critics, and she had little appetite for the politicking that a project like this required.
“She didn’t couch a lot of things in the way people wanted to hear,” says Nick Sambides, a longtime Bangor Daily News reporter. “She had no real structure set up…. She organized it like she was organizing a flower festival. She had a very grassroots, low-key, hey-wouldn’t-this-bewonderful approach. She thought everybody would line up behind it and that it wasn’t a terribly political thing— when it’s nothing but politics.”
Quimby also represented a stark departure from the past in a region where what has come before is revered in almost a religious sense. She was a woman, and more significantly a rich woman who packed a strength of will that had been imparted by her own mother, who’d escaped Lenin’s Russia as a young girl. To Quimby, embracing the woods, her woods, meant reimagining what might come next, even if
opposite : Though its vistas may be less dramatic than those of national parks out west, Katahdin Woods and Waters is impressive for being an uninterrupted stretch of wilderness in the heavily land-fractured eastern U.S.
above : St. Clair at Orin Falls on the Wassataquoik Stream, one of his favorite spots to visit when he’s on the park land.
that would upend generational traditions. On her newly acquired land she banned snowmobiling and hunting. She evicted people from camps they built on property they’d leased from the mills, then she had the cabins burned to return the land to wilderness.
The battle over Quimby’s park, then, was about more than just the land. It was a battle over the future— who should decide it, and perhaps even what those deciders should look like.
(continued on p. 128)
EIGHTY YEARS AFTER THORNTON WILDER WROTE HIS CLASSIC, THE PLAY STILL LIVES.
By Annie Graves
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX WILLIAMSON
ur Town is a pretty big deal in our town. The fictional Grover’s Corners in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play detailing the unexpected power of ordinary small-town life is supposedly based, however loosely, on my own hometown. In Peterborough, New Hampshire, we even like to uppercase the O and T in Our Town’s literature, just to make sure the casual observer knows there’s something more, something else going on beneath the surface. More recently, the street signs at the corner of Main and Grove have been augmented with “at Grover’s Corners.”
Wilder wrote at least part of his Pulitzer Prize winner right here, too, during a stay at the MacDowell Colony, the oldest arts colony in the country, located a couple of miles from downtown. In 2011, when playwright Edward Albee was awarded the MacDowell Medal, given each year to an icon in the arts, he described visiting the colony when he was 23 and bumping into Wilder there. At the time, Albee was trying to be a poet. “My name is Edward Albee, I’m a poet, read these,” he had said to Wilder, thrusting a bundle of poems at him. Wilder read them, took Albee out and got him drunk, and “said a sentence that changed my life,” Albee recalled. Wilder: “Albee, I have read these poems. [Long pause.] Have you ever thought about writing plays?”
Thornton Wilder changed lives. In 1976, I finished my junior year at college, where I was still teetering on the brink of majoring in theater, and arrived home to face a summer of mixing paint at Derby’s Hardware. One day at work, I had just cut a key when the phone rang. The Peterborough Players—our local professional summer theater—was holding auditions for Our Town to replace its lead actress, who’d taken ill. Would I like to try out for the role of Emily? No promises?
I remember being more relaxed at that audition than I’d ever been, for the simple reason that I didn’t think it was the real one. (It was a pre -audition?!) Afterward, I realized it was for real—then I got nervous. I also got the part.
In the days before “meta,” my casting was supremely so: a small-town girl playing a small-town girl in the small town. On top of that, there was the theatricality of it all. Dialogue to memorize, stage directions and blocking, and daily notes—alongside prickly personalities and backstage romances—all packed into a few weeks of intense rehearsal.
On opening night, I was terrified. We performed in the round, and as my feet hit the slender boardwalk that led to the center of the old barn theater, I left my body, looking down on the scene in a moment that was straight out of Our Town. And then I remembered who I was: Emily. I lived in Grover’s Corners. This was My Town.
Eighty years ago, Our Town made its groundbreaking premiere at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, on January 22; three days later, it moved to the Wilbur Theatre in Boston. The play used few props, and broke the fourth wall when the character of the Stage Manager spoke directly to the audience (in our production, he addressed my parents on
opening night: Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. Graves). In three acts, we met George Gibbs and Emily Webb as children; then as young adults on their wedding day; and finally, nine years later, at Emily’s funeral. And here, Wilder opened us wide. Devastated by her own death and the pain she is causing George, Emily begs the Stage Manager to let her relive just one day.
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
I spoke her lines every night. Every night, they broke me in two. We were a hit, adding extra performances and even capturing the attention of a German film crew that was filming a documentary about theater in America. At the time, it felt as though nothing could be more American than this deep, true play that got something so basic so right. Life and death in three acts, in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners, captured with spare beauty by its tender Stage Manager and bright young leads, George and Emily.
Nostalgia can do you in. I know that, more now than I did then, and more still as the years go by. Wilder’s play still winds itself around my heart and brings a lump to my throat, both for the beauty of his words and for their meaning in my life. I remember bits and pieces, on afternoons when I walk down the street where I live to the old, pretty cemetery that “may have been” Wilder’s inspiration. The monuments are a mix of slate, granite, and some kind of pink stone that blooms with lichens, like old-age spots.
People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill….
It is a graceful landscape, one that I’ve explored for years, and the vista from the high hills behind it is as familiar to me as any city of the living. Here is Tryphena T., flanked by her two husbands. Charlie and Ella, seven months and three months when they slipped away. And their mother, Mary Sophia, just 32 when “drowned by the sinking of the Steamer West Point, August 13, 1862.” Mysteries wrapped in mute heartbreak.
Yes, they stay here while the earth-part of ’em burns away, burns out, and all that time they slowly get indifferent to what’s goin’ on in Grover’s Corners. They’re waitin’. They’re waitin’ for something they feel is comin’. Something important and great. Aren’t they waitin’ for the eternal part in them to come out—clear?
From the back of the cemetery, I look down over the quiet green grass, the rising stones, the river beyond, and the town beyond that. And I hear the lines.
Emily: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No—the saints and poets maybe—they do some.
And I want to add: playwrights, too. Sometimes the playwrights help us remember.
I was a small-town girl playing a small-town girl in the small town.PETERBOROUGH PLAYERS (ARCHIVAL PHOTOS) opposite , from top : A double-exposure image from the 1976 production of Our Town in which Annie Graves (in wedding veil) portrayed Emily; Thornton Wilder (far left) at the Peterborough Players c. 1940.
Painter Eric Aho at work, framed by the doorway of his hand-built sauna in Walpole, New Hampshire.
GROWING UP FINNISH-AMERICAN
TAUGHT ERIC AHO TO MEET THE EXTREMES OF WINTER WITH EXTREMES OF IMAGINATION.
by Kristen Laine
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RACHEL
PORTESION A BRIGHT SUNDAY MORNING IN JANUARY, artist Eric Aho drives down from his home in Saxtons River, Vermont, crosses the Connecticut River to Walpole, New Hampshire, and heads uphill to a pond at the edge of an apple orchard.
He parks his van by a small log building. Pulling out long steel chisels and an ice saw, he sets them on the deep porch by the building’s front door. He walks back for a telescoping easel; a paint-splattered canvas bag heavy with jars of linseed oil, tubes of oil paint, and brushes; and a bin stuffed with towels, a wooden bucket, soap, and rubber slip-on shoes.
Aho has just returned from New York City, where a show of his work recently opened at the DC Moore Gallery. The show follows two acclaimed exhibits in New England in 2016, at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut and at the Hood Museum in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The attention is not new. His paintings hang in major art museums in the United States and around the world. Some collectors are 20 pieces deep into his oeuvre. He is becoming known for a series of monumental works that have drawn comparisons to European and American masters of landscape painting and modernism. The paintings— luminous landscapes of ice—explore the boundaries of realism and abstraction, presence and absence. They have established the 51-year-old Aho as New England’s preeminent artist of winter, at a moment when the future of winter itself is uncertain.
He walks onto the pond and bounces on his feet a couple of times. Even in a season of little snow, with midday temperatures spiking into the mid-50s, winter is holding firm in at least one respect. Overnight lows have dropped far enough that all around the valley, ponds are frozen solid. The ice is thick enough to hold.
Layers of meaning and loss lie below the surface.
I’m a third-generation FinnishAmerican,” Aho says. For an artist of winter, it helps to have a heritage from a northern land, even if the heritage is hyphenated.
Aho’s grandparents emigrated to the United States from rural Finland in the early 20th century. They left a homeland where polar night blankets the land for almost two months in the third of the country above the Arctic Circle. Finns have learned to endure the cold by meeting its extremes with their own. In sauna , a custom that reaches back into prehistory, Finns bathe together in small buildings heated by a wood-fired stove. When they can no longer stand the heat, they immerse themselves in a “plunge pool”—avanto, in Finnish— cut into the ice. Over millennia, the tradition has created a culture with an intimate connection to, even an affinity with, winter.
Still, Aho’s grandparents knew well that cold kills. A famine in the mid19th century touched off what Finns would later call the Great Migration. Matti Aho, Eric’s grandfather, was born in the years immediately following the famine. He came to the United States at the height of Finnish flight, hoping for a better life in a new country.
Matti and Amanda Aho settled in Townsend, Massachusetts, one of the small, heavily Finnish communities radiating out from the industrial city of Fitchburg. The area’s forests, glacierscoured granite, and deep ponds—and climate—reminded the immigrants of the land they’d left behind. The Ahos shopped at a Finnish Union Cooperative in Fitchburg, banked at a Finnishrun bank, and read a Finnish-language newspaper published in Fitchburg. Their youngest son, David, along with many of his classmates, spoke only
Finnish until he started school. He would later tell his son Eric, “I grew up in Finland in America.”
Eric Aho, though, grew up feeling more shame than pride in his heritage. In 1974, when he was 8 years old, his family moved to Hudson, New Hampshire, just beyond “Finland in America.” The move came at a difficult time for Eric’s family and for the country: Nixon was about to resign, the war in Vietnam was coming to its divisive end. Local kids, thinking Aho was an Asian name, taunted Eric and his younger brothers and smashed the family’s mailbox. David Aho had worked for Boston & Maine Railroad since returning from World War II; increasingly, his work was interrupted by labor disputes between his union and the railway.
Eric and his father regularly visited aging members of the FinnishAmerican community. They’d bump along back roads past tree farms, fields grown up in sumac, barns falling in on themselves, while David Aho told stories from his childhood. They’d turn off a dirt road and roll up to a farmhouse and sit at a kitchen table. The adults would pour strong black coffee into saucers to cool it, and hold sugar cubes between their front teeth to drink it. Eric ate thick, warm slices of cardamom-spiced coffee bread. Small talk, usually in Finnish, broke long silences.
Eric knew enough of the language to sense from those spare conversations that the move to America had been hard, and perhaps regretted.
Around the kitchen tables, he would hear the old-timers say, “Finns are buried in the back of the cemetery,” a statement that seemed to distill both the pain of the outsider and the suspicion with which the outsider was viewed.
In those conversations, his grandfather was said to “sleep behind the woodstove,” and Eric guessed that Matti Aho had been a heavy drinker. The phrase suggested why many of his father’s favorite memories revolved around a teetotaler neighbor, an easyhumored farmer who brought young David along on winter ice harvests and helped him find his way around machines and tools.
David Aho, in turn, taught his son the value of tools. Eric learned to handle axes, pikes, and come-alongs. He went with his father on small logging jobs, sharing labor and few words. “Aho men work with their hands,” his father would say, and Eric could hear the pride in his voice.
All the same, Eric got the impression that his father hoped his son would make his living in other ways. As a kid, Eric drew detailed pictures of motorcycles, snowmobiles, Great Danes—things he desired but could possess only through his drawings. His parents supported his decision to attend Massachusetts College of Art, where, he quips, “working-class kids like me go to learn graphic design.”
He studied printmaking, which can be both trade and art. He also became a student of art history. He thought that he might make his living using the tools of art.
“I didn’t realize it was OK to be Finnish,” Aho says, “until the Putney School.” After graduate studies, he took a job teaching art at the southern Vermont boarding school. He picked up the fundamentals of oil painting alongside his students. He painted his first winter scene outside, en plein air, like Monet, working to capture light and weather directly as he observed it.
That Aho would explore winter in his art struck his colleagues as entirely
counterclockwise from top : Eric Aho makes the final cut for his avanto, a Finnish “plunge pool,” with a c. 1900 ice saw from his cache of antique ice harvesting tools; clearing ice with vintage tongs capable of holding two-foot-wide blocks; the avanto as it nears completion.
natural, given his heritage. They knew about saunas and assumed he was an expert Nordic skier. It was the first time someone outside the Finnish community had shown an interest in his background. He rather liked being an “ambassador” of Nordic culture.
At age 25, Aho received a Fulbright fellowship and traveled to Finland for the first time. He painted, met his father’s cousins, and made friends who invited him to saunapäivä , or “sauna day.” He learned about the place of saunas in Finnish culture, their design, even that Finns were often born and prepared for burial in saunas. He left the country more keenly aware of the tradition’s intimate connection to the cycle of seasons and human life.
Eric Aho was still at Putney when his father was diagnosed with cancer, in 1995. During his final months, David Aho visited antiques stores, seeking out tools he’d used over a lifetime. Eric sometimes went with him. The trips took them back in time and memory, to those backroad drives when Eric was a boy and his father told stories from when he
was the same age as his son, especially about joining his neighbor in the ice harvests on Lake Potanipo. Decades later, his descriptions retained a child’s sensory vividness.
He remembered the steel chisels and jagged saws the Finnish farmers used to cut the blocks of ice, the piercing whistle of a steam locomotive, fingers numbed by the cold, the salty taste of fish bones in black Finnish coffee; himself as a wide-eyed child nestling into the tangy warmth of draft horses; as a boy edging in from the margins, finding a way to be useful by sharpening saws; as a broadshouldered young man holding his own with the older workers and putting money in his pockets. “That was a good day,” his father would say.
Eric helped care for his father during the last weeks of his life. In the hours before he died, David Aho
labored to tell his ice harvesting stories one last time: the comforting smell of horses, men speaking Finnish, train whistles, the saws in constant need of sharpening. It occurred to Eric that his father was seeing a world in full, one that Eric could not join.
He felt cheated, and hurt. This was what his father, in his final moments, had chosen to give him? These wornout stories? This was his inheritance?
Aho was 30 years old when his father died. Two years later, a pair of New York City collectors bought several of his paintings. Their checks totaled more than Aho’s annual salary as a teacher. He thought of the risk his grandfather had taken in coming to a new world, and decided to gamble himself: to leave teaching and make a living by his paintbrushes.
He was also starting a family of his own. Friends encouraged him to build
a sauna at the edge of their orchard in Walpole for saunapäivä . Finnish acquaintances traveled to New Hampshire to help him raise it in a rough, “farm” style. His grandfather could have stepped inside and believed he was back home.
The first time Aho cut an avanto outside his sauna, he found himself unexpectedly plunged into the world his father had described on his deathbed. He was pulled in by the weight of the tools, the action of cutting through the ice, the shape of the hole. It was an unanticipated connection—the
avanto had nothing to do with harvesting ice—but once made, it drew him deeper. He had questions about his father’s experiences on the ice, but his father was not there to answer them.
He turned instead to research, and discovered deep connections between his father’s threads of stories and New England’s winter history.
A century before Matti Aho sought a new life in America, Frederic Tudor had gambled on frozen water. Around 1804, the young Bostonian had the fantastical notion that fortunes could be made by cutting ice from ponds near Boston and shipping it as a luxury item to residents of the colonial West Indies. For two decades, Tudor lost money on the “frozen-water trade.” His cargo melted. His ships sank. He was jailed for debt. But in 1825, he hired Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth to manage his ice harvesting operation on Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tudor’s ship came in.
While Tudor focused on selling ice to wealthy colonials in the tropics, Wyeth set about improving every tool and systematizing every process in the ice industry. Wyeth’s first invention was the “ice-plow,” which combined the farmer’s horse-drawn plow and the carpenter’s plow plane, and allowed ice harvesters to mark out any body of frozen water and extract uniformly shaped blocks of ice. Wyeth devised pulleys and platforms to raise ice blocks out of Fresh Pond, designed better icehouses to store them in, and invented a horse-driven conveyor belt to put them there.
Tudor, the visionary, and Wyeth, the modernizer, together transformed a seasonal task, done routinely but according to individual inclinations, into a highly efficient, mechanized commercial industry. They turned something ephemeral into a product.
Aho discovered that the Fresh Pond Ice Company left its namesake pond in 1890 after the citizens of Cambridge became concerned that commercial ice operations were contaminating their water supply. Under new owners, the company moved to Lake Muscatanapus in Brookline, New Hampshire. Muscatanapus was
said to be a Native American word for “great mirror.” The lake was also known by another name: Potanipo.
The ice harvesting that David Aho joined as a young boy had changed little from the days of Nathaniel Wyeth—horse teams still pulled iceplows, men chiseled and sawed the ice into blocks—but on Potanipo it operated at its zenith. A dozen icehouses six stories high under a single roof ran 1,000 feet along the lakeshore. Hundreds of men worked the harvest. “Endless chains” drew 800-pound slabs of ice out of the water, ice planers cut them to a standard depth, and stevedores slid the finished cakes into compartments within the icehouses. Articles about the operation invariably mentioned its hypnotic motion and its fascinating geometric patterns. By sheer happenstance, David Aho participated in the greatest ice harvesting operation the world has ever seen.
Wyeth and Tudor had succeeded beyond their dreams in estab lishing a national desire for winter’s ice year-round. The U.S. had become the first country in history to enjoy ice “not as a lux ury for the rich,” notes British historian Gavin Weightman, “but as an everyday necessity.” Within a short time, however, the very defi nition of year-round ice changed. Like pond ice at the end of winter, the natural-ice trade thinned, became full of holes, and then simply disappeared.
By the 1930s, consumers considered manmade ice more reliable and safer than natural ice, and each year they bought more of the new electric refrigerators. Toward the end of David Aho’s time harvesting ice on Lake Potanipo, its famous icehouses emptied and then sat unused, as the ice was by then being loaded directly onto trucks. In 1935, the icehouses burned
to the ground. Two years later, David Aho helped with the lake’s final harvest. He had also witnessed the industry’s demise.
On the orchard pond, Eric Aho gently lifts the saw out of its wood-andleather cover. He found it in a barn in New Hampshire, in perfect condition, the same vintage as the tools his father had used. He carries the saw and one of the chisels onto the ice and places them on a towel next to the ghost of a previous avanto
He etches a rectangle into the ice with the chisel’s square, beveled blade and extends the lines past the corners. He chips out one line at a corner, widening it, then carefully inserts the blade of the long saw through the ice. Rocking slightly forward and back, he draws the saw toward him.
Ten years after his father’s death, Eric Aho was sitting on the sauna porch on a sunny winter day not unlike this one. In the years after leaving Putney, he’d become known for his sweeping landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley. He and his family had moved up the road to Saxtons River; he’d rented studio space there in the gym of a former orphanage, the
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Edie Clark, whose writings about her life on a rural New Hampshire hillside have delighted countless Yankee readers, recently said good-bye to the historic homestead she has loved for two decades.
By Mel Allen
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK FLEMING
“It might have been the beauty of this land and its dramatic sky that brought me here, but the house, its history, its voices, the thought of the many feet that have touched its floors, this is what is so meaningful to me now. I’m only here to make it better, to make it last.”
On the first Saturday of this past autumn, Edie Clark came home. A van from the nursing home and rehabilitation facility where she had been recuperating for weeks brought her back on a sun-splashed, blue-sky day, with cars lining the narrow country road as far as the eye could see. It was just before noon, and Edie, in a wheelchair, rolled carefully down the ramp, and family and friends were smiling at her, holding out their arms. And Edie smiled back, and everyone was happy to see that.
Only five years earlier, Edie had thrown a late-summer gala here to celebrate the 250th birthday of this homestead, which Benjamin Mason built in 1762 to shelter his family
and raise his livestock. The party had been a joyous occasion, marred only by a thunderstorm that sent everyone scattering but which gave Edie, as always, fodder for her column: “In so many ways, we had summoned Ben Mason into our present, into our 21st-century reality. Maybe he was answering back—maybe throwing a lightning bolt down into the trees to give us the fireworks we lacked—maybe doing some handstands up in heaven.”
For the next few hours, the house and its yard filled with a steady tide of well-wishers. A table set up by a tall shade tree held Edie’s books, which spanned 35 years of her stories about New England places and people and, most memorable of all, her columns. In the latter, she wrote about her life in two houses: one a few miles from here, a place readers knew as the Garden at Chesham Depot, and now this breathtakingly lovely homestead, Mary’s Farm, named for Mary Walker, who had lived here for many years.
In the dining room, the table filled with platters, which was fitting because nobody ever left Edie’s house with an empty belly. She sat in her chair on the lawn, looking out
opposite : The Harrisville, New Hamsphire, home that Edie Clark bought in 1997 and immortalized in Yankee as “Mary’s Farm.” below : One of Edie’s favorite writing spots: the sunny kitchen table with its views of meadow and mountain.
to the broad meadow and the stone walls and the mountain. Visitors gathered around her, sharing small talk and memories, and a few children romped in the fields. Her neighbor Anne came by, and seeing her face you knew she was also losing something precious. When the sun softened and a breeze came through, Edie asked to go inside, to see the kitchen where she had sat for so many hours facing the meadow and the mountain, writing of the moments that make up a country life: “If you could look out my front window, you would see a broad, humped hay field. Beyond it is a stretch of forest, mostly tall oak trees and some pine. And then rising above both is the mountain, Mount Monadnock, a long stretch of rock much wider than it is high, its rocky peak exposed like the blade of an old knife.”
We all knew that Edie had been falling, that ordinary things had become more difficult for her. Her legs and back pained her, and she’d been hoping for surgery to bring relief. For several months her neighbor Joan had visited often to tidy up, to shop for necessities, to keep Edie going. We thought Edie was battling another flare-up of the Lyme disease that had laid her low many times in the past. We knew she had blood pressure issues, too, that could cause steady legs to wobble. What we did not know was that, in fact, it was
stealthy strokes that had caused her to fall. She would call friends, afraid, abashed to be asking for help, and they always responded, getting her back on her feet, into a chair or bed, and they would entreat her to go to the hospital. She always said she’d be OK. But maybe she knew that wasn’t so—much as her dogs always seemed to know, she’d once written, when things would not be OK. Maybe she sensed that if she went to the hospital, she would not return.
“I never thought Mary’s Farm would become mine, and to be here is like the best, most rewarding kind of love.”
Before Edie moved to Mary’s Farm, she had written about her gardens and the seasons and neighbors and smalltown rituals while living in a house across the street from an old railroad depot in Chesham. She had bought the house with her second husband, Paul Bolton, a master builder, almost as a declaration of faith in their future: He had spent three years fighting cancer and was then in remission. But just a few months after they moved in, the cancer took Paul at age 39. She grieved deeply, finding relief only when she went on the road to search out the little-known people and places whose stories she told.
from top : Edie in her dining room in 2009; the vintage enamel Glenwood stove that, with its warmth and hearty meals, could “provide a good ending to all kinds of cold nights.”
opposite , from top : The door leading out to the front yard, with its enormous sugar maple; Edie walking the fields by her house.
“I sometimes feel like a sentinel,” she wrote, “here to guard the past and guide the future of its open land.”
Edie had arrived at Yankee in 1978; I came a year after. We often walked the country roads that run by these offices. It was 1990, a year after Paul’s death, when I suggested she write a column about country life. As she later described it, “I didn’t want to pass myself off as an expert gardener, so I hoped my readers would accept me simply as a lover of the miracles of the earth and a teller of stories.” With each column, her followers grew. Many times I heard people say the first page they turned to was Edie’s. When Edie left Chesham for Mary’s Farm, her readers followed the bumps along the way: frozen pipes,
snowdrifts so deep the plows broke trying to free her road, snapping turtles laying eggs in the garden, the trials and heartbreak of loving and losing a dog. And they also shared in the burst of beauty that Edie found in every season. Who could ever see frost on a window the same way again after reading this passage: “I would lie there, still snug in bed, and watch the light of the sun bring the night’s frost painting alive. I thought of this window as my winter garden, where blooms came faster and more dramatically than any flower ever could.”
Edie’s columns, each about 650 words in length, revealed a life in miniature. Readers understood how deeply one can live alone, especially when one paid attention to life. She once wrote, “I find that writing the next essay is my best day.” I think that was because each time she sat down to write, it affirmed that her farm was “my sanctuary from a world that sometimes changes too fast for me.”
I know that if Edie could, she would also write about this day, and what she saw and felt when the van returned in the afternoon, the light fading a bit across the meadow. Those who had remained gathered around her, pressing tightly, cameras clicking. And for one final moment, Edie smiled back.
As I write this, Mary’s Farm does not yet have a new owner. The family is hoping to find a buyer soon—someone to drink in its views, to tend its buildings and gardens, and ultimately to become part of its long history. As for Edie, her voice is strong and steady, and the other day she said she yearned to write again. There is always uncertainty with such sudden and radical change, but of one thing I am sure: Whenever people pass by this house and this land in years to come, they will say, “Oh yes, Mary’s Farm—the place where Edie Clark wrote.”
If you are interested in purchasing Mary’s Farm, which is listed at $550,000, please contact Linda Rosenthall of Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty at 603-413-7604.
To watch Yankee’s 2015 video tour of Mary’s Farm and hear Edie Clark talk about her life as a writer, go to newengland.com/marys-farm-video.
(continued from p. 115)
It takes an act of Congress to create a national park. By the late 2000s, after years of meetings and publicity, Quimby hadn’t gained the backing of Maine’s congressional delegation. “Ban Roxanne” signs were in storefronts and on truck bumpers and front lawns throughout the Millinocket region. Then, in a fateful 2011 Forbes interview, Quimby offered her unfiltered thoughts on her adopted state.
“We have the most aged population in the country,” she said. “I believe we have one of the highest adult obesity rates in New England. We have … oxycontin abuse … [and] Maine is the largest net receiver of federal funds, even though we supposedly hate the feds … it’s a welfare state.”
Cue the backlash. “Roxanne Quimby Calls Maine a Welfare State” declared the front page of the Bangor Daily News . To many unemployed Mainers, her words overshadowed the millions of dollars that her Quimby Family Foundation had donated to nonprofits across the state. And it became apparent that if Quimby’s national park was going to happen, she could no longer be the person to lead the fight.
At the time, St. Clair was still living out west. “ I just thought [the Forbes article] was another story, but it didn’t go away, and people kept talking about it,” he says. “Look, I’m used to my mom saying exactly what she thinks. And often she’s right. She’s incredibly intuitive and super-bright, so I was like, Those are the problems with where I grew up. Wouldn’t it be great to have a national park and bring new jobs and opportunities? But that’s not at all how it played out in the press.
“I hear a lot of people talk about her legacy and the fact that she wants this as part of her legacy,” he continues. “She lives this lifestyle that’s so close to the land and is really introverted. She doesn’t think about her legacy. She thinks about the trees and the rivers and the moose. Those are things that
really move her. If she could have done this anonymously, she would have.”
The story of the creation of Katahdin Woods and Waters is not a new one. The hurdles and struggles, the fears about government intrusion, are threaded through the early histories of national parks such as Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, and Kenai Fjords. Former Maine governor Percival Baxter fought similar battles to create the 200,000-acre-plus Baxter State Park, a property just west of the Quimby land that includes Mount Katahdin and is New England’s largest wilderness area.
It’s also a story that finds a striking parallel in the founding of Maine’s Acadia National Park more than a century ago. George Dorr, heir to a banking and textile fortune, had grown alarmed over the rapid development of Mount Desert Island, and in 1901 he spearheaded the creation of a trust that would acquire land to restrain further construction and maintain public access to the island’s coastline. A decade later he fended off an attempt by Maine legislators to disband the trust; then he turned to the federal government for protection in the form of a national park designation.
Over the next several years Dorr traveled frequently between D.C. and Maine. At a time when the National Park Service did not yet exist and when all the national parks lay west of the Mississippi, Dorr’s vision sounded preposterous. Maybe even impossible.
“A congressman asked Dorr why would anyone want to give something to the federal government,” says Ronald Epp, author of Creating Acadia National Park, a biography of Dorr. “People don’t do that who are sane, he was told. He was thought to be naive for thinking the federal government was in the business of accepting public philanthropy. All these parks west of Mississippi were made from lands the federal government already owned. Now we had citizens coming forward saying, ‘Here, this is for free. You just have to take care of it and protect it in perpetuity.’ It sounded insane. I guess it still sounds like that to people today.”
Dorr finally realized his dream, as Acadia was named a national monument in 1916 and a national park three years later. However, it did not come without a price. Dorr spent down his family fortune—by the end of his life, friends were paying his mortgage—and drove himself to exhaustion.
The threat of rain hangs overhead as St. Clair pilots his SUV along a series of gravel roads and then grassy ones that grow increasingly worse. It’s late June, two months before this land will be designated a national monument, and St. Clair is attacking the ever-dicier route with a gleeful aggression. “The one thing I won’t be able to do when this becomes a national park is blindly take the turns,” he says with a laugh. In the back, a cooler of beer rattles around. “That may be off the list, too,” he adds.
Stopping on an old logging road, he unfolds his six-foot-five frame from the car and throws his arms into the air for a stretch. Then he points to a band of forest, from which are heard the faint sounds of the Wassataquoik Stream. “We’re going that way,” he says. He looks up at the sky. “It’s going to pour.” Then, as he is prone to do when happy, St. Clair, who begins to gather his fishing equipment, starts to sing. “It’s going to rain, rain, rain, rain.”
Several minutes later St. Clair is standing on the riverbank. The water churns gently past, curling around chunks of granite that slid off the back of Mount Katahdin during the last ice age. This area, Orin Falls, is a sacred spot for St. Clair—maybe his favorite on the land. It’s where he brings firsttime visitors who want a sense of what the park is all about. It’s remote even by northern-Maine standards, but it’s accessible, with a gorgeous river framed by boulders and tall pines. This same waterway is the one that a skinny Harvard student named Teddy Roosevelt crossed more than a century ago when he made his first ascent of Katahdin.
“I love fishing this stream because it’s so small you can walk all over,” St. Clair says. “It looks like a powerful force was involved in making this at one point. It’s intimate and still
feels wild. And the fish here are really pretty. If you can catch them.” He moves with ease into the water. In part, that’s his natural way of navigating the world. He projects a comfort with himself, and that, combined with his ability to make those around him laugh, softens the sheer physical advantage he has over most people. He is tall but not imposing.
On this day St. Clair is quiet and contemplative. He makes his way along the uneven riverbed with the kind of assurance that comes from knowing an area so intimately. The water is warm and the trout are hard to find. So St. Clair keeps moving, picking his spots to fish as he ventures upstream.
Orin Falls is a snapshot of what Katahdin Woods and Waters offers. This is not a land of eye-popping visuals like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. Sure, there are some big views of the surrounding valleys and a deadon shot of the east side of Katahdin, but its appeal and, some have argued, its importance is that it is an uninterrupted stretch of wilderness, spanning thousands of acres of trees and rivers. In the heavily populated, heavily landfractured eastern United States, that is no small thing.
When St. Clair moved with his wife and young daughter to Maine in early 2012, he set out to change the debate about the proposed park so that it was less a referendum on his mother and more a discussion about the land. He put a bed in the back of his Volkswagen van and canvassed northern Maine. He searched through Facebook to see what people were saying about the proposal, then set up meetings with the commentators for faceto-face talks. On the weekends, he sat behind a card table at the local transfer station to answer questions and hand out information sheets. He made it a morning ritual to visit a former Buick dealership in downtown Millinocket where a group of retired mill workers gather regularly to drink coffee and talk about the old days.
St. Clair’s ability to connect with others helped set him apart, says
Dan O’Leary, retired director of the Portland Museum of Art and former CEO of Quimby’s three philanthropic organizations, including Elliotsville Plantation. “I was a museum director for many years, and my job was to work with people, often powerful and wealthy, to get them to work as a team,” O’Leary says. “But I have 25 percent of the skills that Lucas has in that way. I’ve never known a person who is better at channeling and moving the feelings and the beliefs of people forward.”
There were more formal meetings, too, in which St. Clair weathered personal attacks from park opponents who savaged the project and his mother. “He was treated as miserably as anyone I’ve seen in public life, outside of
“Roxanne is a purist—she didn’t want snowmobiles, she didn’t want hunting,” says an associate familiar with the project. “She liked the idea of helping the economy, but she wasn’t willing to compromise on any of her very pure motives on protecting the environment. Lucas is more pragmatic. Lucas was willing to sit down with snowmobilers, the off-terrain folks, and hunters. It was Lucas who worked out the plan to allow hunting east of the East Branch, and it’s because of Lucas that the snowmobile trail heading out of Millinocket found a way to go through their property.”
There’s a story that St. Clair likes to tell from his childhood, a story that defines something about him. When he was 6 or 7, a young family moved next door to his father’s place in DoverFoxcroft. Every day his new neighbors would go on a bike ride, and St. Clair, who desperately wanted to make friends, would trail after them.
getting arrested for a heinous crime,” says Sambides, the Bangor Daily News reporter. “They didn’t want him there. They called him a liar to his face. But he’d deflect with humor and earnestness and patience. A lot of patience.”
It was a reset in both tone and style. It didn’t hurt that St. Clair looked like and had many of the same interests as the people he was trying to win over. And where he could, St. Clair moved away from the project’s earlier iteration. He hired a high-end consulting firm out of Montana to help him navigate Washington, D.C. He reopened a portion of the land to hunting and snowmobiling. Then, in late 2015, he made his biggest pivot: choosing to pursue national monument designation, which requires only a declaration from the president, rather than full national park status.
“Day after day I did this, and eventually they were like, Do you want to come with us?” St. Clair says. “Oh, I thought you’d never ask —that’s definitely my personality. I’ll just keep showing up. Oh yeah, Lucas is here again. With something like the park, that’s what it’s taken. There are some folks who I doubt will ever support this, but it’s at least important we get to know each other.”
The park’s opponents include Governor Paul LePage, a man who has a seeming allergic reaction to anything with even a whiff of federal government control. LePage spent his early career working in the forest products industry and has been one of the monument’s most outspoken critics. He’s questioned the land’s visitor appeal, deriding it as “the mosquito area,” and, following the election of Donald Trump in 2016, he lobbied for a reversal of the monument designation.
About an hour after St. Clair leaves Orin Falls, he comes face-to-face with what he believes is a product of the governor’s opposition. Within the Quimby land is a 1,200-acre parcel owned by the state; access to it includes
“THIS WAS THE FIRST PROJECT IN MY LIFE WHERE I SAID, I’M GOING TO DEVOTE EVERYTHING TO IT TO SEE HOW FAR I CAN GET WITH IT,” ST. CLAIR SAYS. “I DIDN’T HAVE THAT KIND OF DRIVE WITH ANYTHING ELSE.”
a right-of-way over the future monument property. The previous winter, the state Bureau of Public Lands set about reconstructing the road in order to log the parcel. The project has included helicoptering in a temporary steel bridge, cutting back trees, and digging gullies. Alongside stretches of the gravel pathway are collections of concrete abutments and Jersey barriers. At the road’s gate, St. Clair steps out into the rain to take a look at what’s ahead. “It was this tiny, snaking trail,” he says. “Now it’s just wide and muddy. They’ve got a legal right to do it, but it’s just upsetting to see.
“It’s going to cost a lot to get up there,” he adds, his voice sounding tight and annoyed. “And they’re doing it at the total bottom of the market. Just from a business perspective, it’s dumb.”
He pauses for a moment. “It’s just really disappointing,” he says, in a near-whisper to himself.
With the gates pushed open, St. Clair gets back into the car and drives on. He’s quiet as he scans the scene. Ahead is the spike of South Turner Mountain and a mix of pine, spruce, and hardwoods that the state is targeting. After several miles, the road concludes at a scabby turnaround just south of where the cutting will begin.
“Oh, what a bummer,” says St. Clair, driving back. “This was such an incredible moose and bear habitat. Our governor has felt like a victim and felt powerless in this. This is his way of saying, ‘Don’t forget about me.’”
Three months after the monument’s declaration, a stillexhausted St. Clair and his wife, Yemaya, loaded up an RV in the driveway of their Portland home, and with their two children, Ella, 5, and Whalen, 2, they set out on a four-week journey down and back up the East Coast. They would cover nearly 4,200 miles, visiting friends and national parks along the way, and for the first time since they’d arrived in Maine, they would spend a prolonged stretch alone as a family. St. Clair welcomed the chance to travel, to be with his wife and kids,
and to start thinking about an important question he has to answer.
What’s next?
It comes up frequently for him. From others. From himself, too. The truth is, he has anxiety—mild, maybe, but it’s there just the same. He wonders if bringing the monument across the finish line will be the biggest thing he’ll ever do with his life.
“It’s been hard, complex work, and what I’m most nervous about is that I won’t have a hard, complex problem to work on now,” St. Clair says. “The anxiety I feel more than anything is waking up in the morning and wondering what I’m supposed to do.”
He’s reminded a bit of what it was like after he finished hiking the Appalachian Trail. For the first two weeks, he slept in his tent in his mother’s backyard. Even after such an intense, grueling journey, he wasn’t ready to let it end. He’d grown accustomed to the challenge, and he nearly turned around and hiked back to Georgia.
“Every day I put on my hiking boots, put on my backpack, and hiked,” he says. “I’d do the same thing day in and day out. And then I finished, and the next day I was like, What am I supposed to do now? I remember feeling really lost. There’s a part of me that wonders if I might feel that way again because there’s been an intensity to [the park process]. I get up super-early; I drive long distances or fly to Washington. It’s fast and furious, with a lot of meetings. And if I don’t have that stuff anymore, will I feel like something is missing?”
What’s clear is that this effort has allowed St. Clair to find his voice and stick with something in a way he hadn’t done before. “The work was so diverse,” he says. “I wasn’t just doing the same thing over and over again. That’s why I stopped cooking—you’re basically cooking the same four dishes, and that’s what your day is like. This was the first project in my life where I said, I’m going to devote everything to it to see how far I can get with it. I didn’t have that kind of drive with anything else in my life.”
He thinks about staying involved in land conservation work. Maine’s econ-
omy and the issues around its rural poverty intrigue him. Even before the national monument declaration came through, speculation swirled that St. Clair’s future lay in politics. He never ruled it out, and in early October, at the Appalachian Trail Café in Millinocket, he announced his candidacy for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Running as a Democrat, St. Clair faces a crowded primary, the winner of which will face the incumbent, Republican Bruce Poliquin, in November 2018.
It could be a long shot. It may be that St. Clair is just testing the waters. Or it might be the first step in a political career that will see St. Clair knocking on the door of other offices.
Still, regardless of what happens this year, the work on behalf of the Katahdin land continues. In April, President Trump ordered a review of all national monuments created since 1996, especially those named by President Obama. That list, of course, included Katahdin Woods and Waters. In May, St. Clair testified before the U.S. Senate on the value of the monument. The following month, he returned north to welcome Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for a tour of the land. Zinke was impressed and even suggested that perhaps it deserved to become a national park. “It was an amazing trip,” St. Clair says.
On August 24, 2017, a year to the day that Katahdin Woods and Waters was created, Zinke—spurred no doubt by the area’s increasing property values, the bubbling up of new businesses, and the growing acceptance of the park by former opponents—declared that the land would remain a part of the National Park Service.
For St. Clair, the final hurdle in a near-two-decade-long quest has finally been cleared. As he plots his future, he will keep visiting the Katahdin region. He’ll fish Orin Falls, maybe follow a trail up the east side of Katahdin he’s always wanted to try, and ski the trails that the Park Service continues to blaze throughout the property. Just another visitor to the national park property he brought into existence.
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(continued from p. 123)
Kurn Hattin School for Girls. Occasionally he packed paints and canvas along with the sauna tools on saunapäivä and set up facing west, painting the view across the river. More often he sat on the sauna porch, cooling down, and simply looked out over the pond.
That day, however, his gaze rested on the hole he’d cut in the ice. He noticed, for the first time with a painter’s eye, the extreme contrasts of light and dark in the watery rectangle surrounded by ice. In the water itself, he saw intense greens, yellows, turquoise—a kaleidoscope of colors. He thought, This might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Back in his studio, Aho worked from memory, reframing the scene as if he stood on the far side of the plunge pool, the broad river valley dropping away beyond the snowcovered pond, winter clouds massing overhead; the avanto , a dark rectangle, anchoring the painting’s bottom edge. The landscape revealed a personal commentary on loss and disappearance. He drew on his father’s ice harvesting stories, his father’s death, the ineffable connections he felt to his father when he cut through the ice. He called the painting Ice Cutter.
When Aho returned to the sauna the next winter, he looked more closely at his avanto. He studied where he had scored the ice, marking the intersections of lines at the corners of the trapezoid. In the studio, he moved in closer to the hole as well. The view across the valley disappeared, along with any hint of horizon, the pond now merely implied. He enlarged the black hole to the size of the actual avanto and tilted it upright. The black shape dominated the canvas.
The avanto in Aho’s new painting was still discernible as a hole in the ice, but what had been part of a scene became an independent shape, separate from landscape. He called it Ice Cut and immediately started another.
Aho realized that he had embarked on a series. He’d been thinking about decades: how turning 40 marked 10 years since his father’s death; how his father’s years at the ice harvest coincided with the Depression. He made a plan to paint an Ice Cut each year for a decade.
He decided to give each painting two dates: one for the year he painted it, and the other, in parentheses, from one of his father’s seasons on the ice, a date that also gave Aho multilayered sources of inspiration. He drew from his father’s fragmented stories and also from what was happening in the world, and in modern art, during that parenthetical year. He imagined his father and remembered himself at the same age. As his son entered the same season of life, Aho thought of him, too.
With each new Ice Cut , Aho felt his art become more personal and layered with meaning, but also—for a working artist—more risky. He watched people respond very differently, often viscerally, to the paintings, even before they knew what they were looking at. A big, black rectangular hole. Some recoiled, as if from the void: death, loss, emptiness. A question hangs over this saunapäivä —whether any of the Ice Cut s in the New York show will actually sell.
Among the critics, there is no question about Aho’s achievement. Christopher Volpe, writing for Art New England , said of the show at the Hood Museum, “[T]he series offers a rich, sustained meditation.” For The Boston Globe ’s Sebastian Smee, it was “a major accomplishment.”
Most years, Aho has made not one but three or four Ice Cut paintings, living with winter throughout the year. At some point, looking at Monet’s snow scenes, he was struck by the thought that the great artist had painted winter as a tourist.
In his most recent works, growing bolder, Aho has experimented with color, refracting through memory the kaleidoscopic hues he saw the first time he looked at the avanto as an artist. He’s painted it in the yellows of an arctic summer, in tropical turquoise and aquamarine, in sizes even larger
than life. He is not ready to stop. “I feel like I’m just now scratching the surface,” he says.
He comes to it, again, on this January afternoon. He sits as long as he can in the 200-degree sauna. Walking out into the sharp winter air, he steps out of his sauna shoes and onto the towel at the edge of the avanto. Steam rises from his skin. He lowers himself to the edge, swings his legs into the freezing water.
The questions he had asked himself after his father’s death would remain unanswered, but he was coming to a clearer understanding of what he had inherited.
He had been given a distinctly northern sensibility and a vantage on two cultures half a world apart. His father’s stories had animated a deeply personal and creative exploration. Through the tools of his art, he had met the extremes of winter with extremes of imagination and created a lasting legacy.
Aho will end up selling a dozen pieces as a result of the New York show: one to a museum, the others to private collectors. Ice cut from New Hampshire, once more a luxury, will again bring winter into distant homes.
But it wasn’t ice that Aho was harvesting: It was ice’s absence, the void left when ice is no longer there. The loss is not an abstraction. A century ago, ice removed from Lake Potanipo was routinely two feet thick; in the past few years, locals say, it’s been only half that.
Other questions hang over saunapäivä . As the earth continues to warm, what will it mean to be northern? What will it mean when natural ice is no longer a common, everyday part of the landscape for our grandchildren? What tools—what extremes of imagination—will be needed to color that future inheritance?
Aho pauses almost imperceptibly. The black hole represents what is lost, the past, the gap between what is real and what cannot be known. It represents the path and the leap.
He puts his palms flat against the ice, pushes off, and takes the plunge.
Many noteworthy displays were featured in 2017.
Cosmetic surgeons John Layke and Payman Danielpour (of the Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery Group) have come up with a revolutionary at-home technique to help fight the appearance of crepey skin.
The doctors have shown, in user groups, that this new technique improved the appearance of skin around the arms, neck, chest, legs, and other areas.
According to their research, loose skin adds significantly more years to a person’s perceived age than wrinkles, fine lines, or pigment changes—which is why they trained their focus on this particular situation.
And when the doctors demonstrated just how quickly and effectively it worked, it became clear that their discovery is nothing short of groundbreaking.
Many users have achieved outstanding improvement in their appearance using this simple process, which can be selfadministered.
But the latest development in this story came when the video version of the presentation was made available to the public online.
As of this writing, the video has garnered over four million views and is quickly becoming a social media phenomenon.
Watch their shocking presentation at www.BHMD113.com
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EnergAire continuously puri es up to 4,000 cubic feet (a large room) of air and makes it breathable and invigorating. Restores natural ion balance to unhealthy environments caused by industrial pollution, automobile exhaust, central airconditioning, and heating, smoke, dust, pollen, animal fur. . . removes microscopic pollution particles not removed by any other method of air puri cation. EnergAire was rated Number One for speed of removal of cigarette smoke by the leading U.S. consumer protection magazine. It has no noisy fan, no costly lter, and requires no maintenance. Uses less than 2 watts. 9" high. 3" diameter. Weighs less than 1 pound. $69.95
RODAR is the super-powerful professional ultrasonic pest repeller with up to 60 or more times the power of other devices — and power is what makes RODAR so e ective. RODAR ultrasound equals a jet engine — noise unbearable to pests but at frequencies humans and pets cannot hear. RODAR units are completely safe. RODAR drives pests out and keeps them from getting in. Handsome simulated walnut cabinet 5-5/8" high. Weight 1-1/2 pounds. Uses less than 5 watts. $99.95
90-day money-back guarantee — 12-month warranty.To order: Send cost for unit(s) plus $10.00 each for shipping and handling (in Mass. add 6.25% tax) by check, money order, MasterCard, Visa, or Discover number and expiration date to Micron Corp.
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hough the novelty of “horseless carriages” had largely worn off by 1914, the sight of Virgil White motoring through Newport, New Hampshire, that February caught the attention of the media. Under a published photo of White’s unusual conveyance, parked on a snowy roadway and filled with bundled-up passengers, was this wry description: “It appears to be of Ford descent, with a tractor and a pair of skis among its ancestors. Breeders, take notice.”
At a time when horse-drawn sleighs were still the top winter transport, White had found a way to make autos competitive. An Ossipee Ford dealer whose knack for tinkering belied his eighth-grade education, he swapped out the wheels on Ford’s ubiquitous Model T in favor of five-foot skis in front and caterpillar-style tracks in the back. He patented his design in 1917 as—what else?—the “Snowmobile.”
First marketed in 1922, the Snowmobile sold as a conversion kit for about $400 or as a complete vehicle for $750— which was a bit steep considering that Model T’s themselves
cost less than $300. But this “Ford on snowshoes,” supposedly able to cruise through 30 inches of fresh snow at 18 mph, found early adopters among folks whose jobs regularly took them out into the worst weather: postal carriers, undertakers, firefighters, country doctors, and so on.
By the mid-1920s the company that White cofounded was making between 2,500 and 3,300 units annually at its West Ossipee plant. A Snowmobile led the 1926 funeral procession for Calvin Coolidge’s father in Vermont; another went to subarctic Canada with explorer Donald MacMillan in 1927.
All too soon, the Snowmobile Company’s fortunes would be buried by the rise of snowplows, with the West Ossipee plant closing in 1929. But Virgil White’s creations survive to this day, as seen when collectors give them a little exercise at the Model T Ford Snowmobile Club’s annual meet, usually held in New England. There, the vintage machines still sputter and clank across the winter landscape, as headturning now as they were a century ago. —Jenn Johnson
The Pelatiah Leete House is one of the earliest surviving dwellings built in Guilford, CT in the early 18th century, by Pelatiah Leete, the grandson of Guilford founder, and Connecticut governor, William Leete. It is one of only a handful of properties in Guilford that is included on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1781, during the American Revolution, the Battle of Leetes Island was fought across the road from the house and its surviving 1705 barn, and Simeon Leete, who lived in the house at that time with his wife and three small children, was mortally wounded near the conclusion of the battle. He was brought back to the house, where he died, at age 28, the following day. His gravestone is around the corner from the house, on land owned by the Leete family since 1661, and an annual celebration of his life is held every June on the Sunday nearest June 19, the anniversary of his death date. The Sixth Connecticut Regiment of the Continental Line performs musket drills and live firing at the event, which draws numerous neighbors and townspeople.
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