Yankee Magazine July/August 2017

N E W E N G L A N D ’ S M AG A Z I N E N E W E N G L A N D.C O M ///

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July/August 2017

CONTENTS features 78 /// Lobsterpalooza Food editor Amy Traverso undertakes an epic road trip to discover the best lobster roll in Maine (i.e., the world).

Plus: Tips, tales, and trivia starring our favorite crustacean.

100 /// Twilight in Dinosaur Land A Massachusetts family business founded on dinosaur tracks is now in the hands of its sole heir and proprietor. Could this be the end of an era? By Justin Shatwell

108 Small but telling moments in the day-to-day life of a New England community are at the heart of photographer Barbara Peacock’s new book, Hometown, including this image titled Three Generations, 1983.

108 /// Hometown For years Barbara Peacock has been photographing life in a small New England town that’s as ordinary as can be. What she captured, though, is anything but.

122 /// ‘Ain’t Doing Right’ After you’ve lost a beloved companion, you might be reluctant to look toward the future again—until you see what’s patiently waiting there for you.

By LeeLee Goodson 126 /// The Education of Raj Bhakta Becoming a Vermonter is much like the process of making good whiskey: It takes time and perseverance. And there’s no guarantee it will work.

By Wayne Curtis

Photo illustration and type design

by Jeff Rogers; photograph by Mark Fleming; styling by Catrine Kelty

Yankee (ISSN 0044-0191). Bimonthly, Vol. 81 No. 4. Publication Office, Dublin, NH 03444-0520. Periodicals postage paid at Dublin, NH, and additional offices. Copyright 2017 by Yankee Publishing Incorporated; all rights reserved. Postmaster: Send address changes to Yankee, P.O. Box 422446, Palm Coast, FL 32142-2446.

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BARBAR A PEACOCK

ON THE COVER

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departments

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CONTENTS

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

10 INSIDE YANKEE

home

12 MARY’S FARM When the police chief comes around, people try to be on their best behavior. But little dogs can’t be bothered.

By Edie Clark

28 /// The Prettiest Vegetable Garden in New England At designer Linda Allard’s Connecticut home, backyard crops have been transformed into a feast for the eyes. By Tovah Martin

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36 /// Open Studio Collagraph artist Kathleen Buchanan gets back to nature with Maine-inspired prints. By Annie Graves

28

40 /// House for Sale As if the Bridge of Flowers weren’t reason enough to move to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts...

By the Yankee Moseyer

18 FIRST LIGHT Remembering Andrew Wyeth as a friend, mentor, and force to be reckoned with. By Peter Ralston

food

24

44 /// Fields of Gold In the Berkshires and beyond, sweet corn harvest is a reason to celebrate. By Jane Walsh

54 /// New Vintage Cooking Rethinking the good old American hamburger from the inside out. By Amy Traverso

travel 56 /// Could You Live Here?

Discover the Rhode Island town that will make a beach lover out of anyone. By Annie Graves 66 /// The Best 5 These retro summer-fun spots keep the generations coming back. By Kim Knox Beckius 70 /// Out & About From hot air balloons to cool jazz tunes, we round up summer events that are worth the drive.

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KNOWLEDGE & WISDOM Paddling like a Maine Guide, Lake Compounce by the numbers, and sage words from one of Bowdoin’s best.

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UP CLOSE A New England pen maker’s signature achievement.

144 TIMELESS NEW ENGLAND Before Amelia Earhart was a legend, she was a Bostonian.

ADVERTISING RESOURCES

Yankee Around Town ...... 49 Best of New England...... 62 Mad River Valley ............ 68 Things to Do Around New England ............ 134 Marketplace .................. 138 Home & Garden........... 143

FROM TOP: KINDR A CLINEFF; ADAM DETOUR; ALE X GAGNE

50 /// Local Flavor The greatest tuna melt in lunch counter history helps fuel a Maine mill town’s revival. By Amy Traverso

LIFE IN THE KINGDOM Uprooting a homestead brings the challenges of planting in new soil.

By Ben Hewitt

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:00 AM

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Cross Jewelers 570 Congress Street Upstairs Downtown Portland

www.CrossJewelers.com • 1-800-433-2988

5/11/17 2:25 PM

1121 Main St., P.O. Box 520, Dublin, NH 03444. 603-563-8111; editor@yankeemagazine.com EDITORIAL EDITOR ART DIREC TOR DEPUT Y EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR SENIOR EDITOR/FOOD PHOTO EDITOR SENIOR PHOTOGR APHER DIGITAL EDITOR DIGITAL ASSISTANT EDITOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR HOME & GARDEN EDITOR CONTRIBUTING EDITORS CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Mel Allen Lori Pedrick Ian Aldrich Jenn Johnson Amy Traverso Heather Marcus Mark Fleming Aimee Tucker Cathryn McCann Joe Bills Annie Graves Kim Knox Beckius, Edie Clark, Ben Hewitt, Julia Shipley Julie Bidwell, Kindra Clineff, Sara Gray, Corey Hendrickson, Joe Keller, Joel Laino, Jarrod McCabe, Michael Piazza, Heath Robbins, Carl Tremblay

PRODUCTION PRODUC TION DIREC TORS SENIOR PRODUC TION ARTISTS

David Ziarnowski, Susan Gross Jennifer Freeman, Rachel Kipka

DIGITAL VP NEW MEDIA & PRODUC TION DIGITAL MARKETING MANAGER

Paul Belliveau Jr. Amy O’Brien

PUBLISHER

Brook Holmberg

ADVERTISING: PRINT/DIGITAL VICE PRESIDENT/SALES

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SALES IN NEW ENGLAND

Kelly Moores KellyM@yankeepub.com TR AVEL, SOUTH Dean DeLuca (NH South, CT, RI, MA) DeanD@yankeepub.com TR AVEL, WEST David Honeywell (N Y, VT) Dave_golfhouse@madriver.com DIREC T RESPONSE Steven Hall SteveH@yankeepub.com TR AVEL, NORTH

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PUBLIC RELATIONS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF VICE PRESIDENTS

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:12 AM

BE YOND T HE PR IN T ED PAGE

| Connect with New England

NewEngland.com Provincetown, Massachusetts

Travel: Prettiest Coastal Towns in New England

Events: Summer Seafood Festivals

Recipes: Blueberry Recipes

Find your perfect day trip or weekend escape at any of these 10 seaside spots.

Enjoy lobster, chowder, and more at New England’s top 10 celebrations.

We put a spotlight on our favorite ways to enjoy the sweetness of wild Maine blueberries.

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Travel: Favorite Summer Road Trips From Connecticut’s “Quiet Corner” to the coast of Maine, these scenic drives beckon.

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JOIN THE NEWENGLAND.COM COMMUNITY!

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Want more of the best of New England food, living, travel, and seasons? Visit NewEngland.com to download free guides and get our favorite recipes, day-trip ideas, gardening advice, Yankee magazine features, and many other great resources.

NewEngland.com/today Social Media: Facebook.com/yankeemagazine, Twitter.com/yankeemagazine, Instagram.com/yankeemagazine, Pinterest.com/yankeemagazine

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Dear Yankee | O U R R E A D E R S R E S P O N D No Baggage, Please LEELEE GOODSON “ ‘Ain’t Doing Right’ ” [p. 122] is just one of the many true stories LeeLee Goodson has encountered in the years that she and her husband have spent running a veterinary practice out of their Vermont farmhouse.

Though the setup doesn’t allow them much privacy, she says, “we’ve gained something of far greater value: sharing intimate moments of humor, pain, joy, and grief with our clients and friends, and their animals.”

JEFF ROGERS Lending visual flair to our cover and “Lobsterpalooza” package [p. 78] is Jeff Rogers, a New York– based graphic designer and illustrator whose clients have included the likes of Google and MasterCard.

Based on the intense lobster roll cravings that he experienced during this assignment, he recommends that you grab some lobster to eat while reading this issue—“otherwise you may feel a little bit tortured!”

BARBARA PEACOCK In tracing the roots of her decades-long “Hometown” photography project [p. 108], Barbara Peacock finds an early inspiration in “The Family of Man,” a groundbreaking 1955 collection of more than 500 images from 68 countries. “[After seeing it] I knew I wanted to be a photographer to reveal the life and times of everyday man,” she says. “I believed I could show the universal humanity within one small town.”

JOE BILLS Whether it’s the world of professional boxing or the cult of James Dean, associate editor Joe Bills has long been drawn to interesting subcultures—which made him the obvious pick to cover the phenomenon of competitive eating [“Feeding Frenzy,” p. 94].

After completing his assignment, he reported that “watching someone scarf down dozens of lobster rolls in 10 minutes might just be the best diet plan ever.”

T O VA H M A R T I N Growing up, Tovah Martin was a self-described nature kid: As her peers filled their dresser drawers with sweaters, she stuffed hers full of marigold seeds. Today, she’s the author of more than a dozen gardening books, including Tasha Tudor’s Garden, and in this issue she pays a visit to designer Linda Allard’s estate to discover “The Prettiest Vegetable Garden in New England” [p. 28].

PETER RALSTON Acclaimed Maine photographer Peter Ralston gladly accepted our invitation to write about his longtime friendship with Andrew and Betsy Wyeth [“ ‘Wyeth World,’ ” p. 18]. With this July marking the centennial of Andrew Wyeth’s birth, he says, “it’s been a joy to pause and think back and, once again, reconsider the power of love and generosity and encouragement. Man, did we all have some fun!”

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I love Yankee, and I have been reading it since I was a teenager. I love it because it gives me a sense of home, of my culture and that of others. It shows me places that I have been and places I dream of going to. It has given me some of my best recipes and some of my favorite restaurants. It makes me proud to live in New England and proud of the people who surround me.

What Yankee is not, though, is a political forum. Your editor’s letter [“A Traveler’s Best Friend,” May/June] became a political statement that rained down on an issue that should be left lighthearted. Travel is fun—at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Needless to say, the last thing I’m going to be doing on my vacation is reading The Boston Globe or the Herald. I’m going to be relaxing while I play with my kids at Mayflower Beach or hike up Arethusa Falls. I hope next year’s travel issue is happy again.

Shaunna Covell Lai Newton, Massachusetts

Trailblazer’s Legacy I’m one of the 80,000 Student Conservation Association volunteers who can thank Liz Putnam for the outsize impact she’s had on our lives, and also one of the millions who can thank her for conserving our public lands [“The Audacity of Liz Putnam,” May/June].

Her spirit is generous; her convictions about young people’s potential and the value of nature are true. Read this article if you want more hope and inspiration in your life.

Craig Dicht Cleveland Heights, Ohio

‘Marginal’ Note As a longtime visitor to southern coastal Maine, I read with interest your article about the Marginal Way in Ogunquit [“Walks Worth Their Salt,” March/April]. My mother-inlaw walked it daily during the last 10

TERRI HARPER (R ALSTON); INDIAN HILL PRESS (“SUMMER ENTREPRENEURS”)

CONTRIBUTORS

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/18/17 2:16 PM

TERRI HARPER (R ALSTON); INDIAN HILL PRESS (“SUMMER ENTREPRENEURS”)

SUMMER ENTREPRENEURS Future businessmen and -women Trade a day of play or swimmin’ In exchange for fortunes made Selling lukewarm lemonade.

—D.A.W. summers of her life, getting so nutbrown from the sea and salt air that when we plucked her from the bus back in New Jersey at the end of each sojourn, we hardly recognized her.

There was just one omission in your piece. There was not a single mention of the famous poem “On the Marginal Way” by national poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur. His poem puts the famous walkway in the realm of the sublime and the eternal.

Margo L. MacArthur Andover, New Jersey Clarification The first detailed, comprehensive maps of New Hampshire’s geology date to 1878 and were created by a team led by state geologist Charles H. Hitchcock [“A ‘Very Impressive Rock,’’’ May/June]. However, a tip of the hat is also due to Charles Jackson, New Hampshire’s very first state geologist, and the maps he published more than 30 years earlier.

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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5/11/17 10:23 AM

Inside Yankee | M E L A L L E N

Summer Quests

Mel Allen editor@yankeemagazine.com 10 |

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JARROD McCABE

he name of one of the bravest, most curious humans ever to live—or perhaps one of the most desperately hungry—is forever lost in time. Imagine being the first person to hold a lobster in your hand. Contemplate those crushing claws, that imposing hard ribbed shell. Those beady eyes, the twitching antennae. When, exactly, do you conclude: Hmm, this might be tasty. Where’s the melted butter?

Whoever that seafood hunter was, he or she would be astonished at how this— let’s be honest here—unpretty creature has become the most sought-after signature taste of New England. And especially of Maine, where the deep, cold sea delivers the freshest, sweetest crustaceans in the land. This issue celebrates our love affair with lobster, especially in Yankee food editor Amy Traverso’s tale of “The Great Lobster Roll Adventure” (p. 78). With husband, child, and new puppy in tow, Amy (who has definite opinions on what ingredients should and should not grace one’s lobster roll) embarked on a weeklong trek in an RV up the Maine coast to find the best lobster roll in the state, and therefore the world. Her chosen winner will no doubt start one of those spirited debates that all magazines enjoy, so be sure to weigh in.

Amy’s quest is not the only one we feature in this issue. In fact, as I read over the pages this week, I see that nearly every story speaks to the human need to quest, to discover, to learn what is possible. Take photographer Barbara Peacock, for instance (“Hometown,” p. 108). For more than three decades she has dedicated herself to documenting the everyday comings and goings in a Massachusetts town of about 20,000, a town not much different from so many others except for one thing: It has Peacock and her watchful eye and camera.

In South Hadley, Massachusetts, Kornell Nash digs down through thousands of years at his family property to unearth one of the richest troves of dinosaur tracks anywhere (“Twilight in Dinosaur Land,” p. 100). He is keeping alive an idiosyncratic business founded by his father, Carlton, which through the decades has given countless visitors the chance to take home an artifact that carries echoes of an unimaginable New England landscape.

There is no more poignant quest than to find a companion, someone to care for. “‘Ain’t Doing Right’” (p. 122) is a story to share with someone close—and you may need a tissue in hand when you read it, even as you smile.

Here in our Dublin office, we have a simple goal: to give you an issue you’ll want to take with you wherever you go, whether it’s a lake, or the ocean, or a woodsy cabin, or just a porch where you can rest and watch the summer sky. That’s as good as the best lobster roll in the world for us.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:30 AM

For Now And Ever A Most Unusual Gift of Love

THE POEM READS:

“There is no moment of my life when you are not a part of me; you hold my heart; you guard my soul; you guide my dreams so tenderly.

And if my will might be done, and all I long for could come true, with perfect joy I would choose to share eternity with you.”

Dear Reader, The drawing you see above is called For Now and Ever. It is completely composed of dots of ink. After writing the poem, I worked with a quill pen and placed thousands of these dots, one at a time, to create this gift in honor of the the love of two of my dearest friends.

Now, I have decided to offer For Now and Ever to those who have known and value its sentiment as well. Each litho is numbered and signed by hand and precisely captures the detail of the drawing. As an anniversary, wedding, or Valentine’s gift for your husband or wife, or for a special couple within your circle of friends, I believe you will find it most appropriate.

Measuring 14" by 16", it is available either fully-framed in a subtle copper tone with hand-cut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at $105*. Please add $16.95 for insured shipping and packaging. Your satisfaction is completely guaranteed.

My best wishes are with you.

The Art of Robert Sexton • P.O. Box 581 • Rutherford, CA 94573 All major credit cards are welcomed through our website. Visa or Mastercard for phone orders.

Phone (415) 989-1630 between 10 a.m.-6 P.M. PST, Monday through Saturday. Checks are welcomed; please include the title of the piece and a contact phone number on check. Or fax your order to 707-968-9000.

Please allow up to 5 to 10 business days for delivery. *California residents- please include 8.0% tax.

Please visit my Web site at

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5/11/17 11:17 AM

Mary’s Farm | E D I E C L A R K

Cruising on a Sunday Afternoon ne recent Sunday after church was what we all think of as the perfect summer’s day: blue sky with puffy white clouds edging the horizon; dry, breezy, and just enough heat. One of my friends from church, a consultant who travels across the country, was giving a ladies luncheon. This was not the sort of thing she would usually do—or ever has done—she told us, but she loves to cook and wanted to take advantage of a lull in her schedule, so she invited some of the choir for lunch.

We sat for a while in the sun and worshipped the mountain from her patio, then went inside to the cool of the house, fragrant with the winter’s wood smoke. She made lobster burgers, which she served over a colorful salad—bright green Bibb lettuce from the garden, red and yellow peppers cut up into matchsticks. It was very satisfying, and we all fell into needed conversation about matters of the town. We sipped our iced tea, and suddenly we realized it was past 3 o’clock!

Knowing that poor Harriet, my dog, had been inside for a long time, I hastened my departure, albeit reluctantly. When I got home, she really needed to go out, so I didn’t pay much attention when she didn’t come back right away.

I’m having repairs made to my drainage system, and I went back to talk with my handyman, Brian, about this big dig. And while we were standing there, the Harrisville police cruiser drove up.

The town just recently bought this sparkling-new SUV (as yet unmarked), and since crime around here is infrequent, we sometimes think the police simply like to drive it around to see what they can scare up. We have only two policemen in town, and this was Buddy, our chief, whose name never fails to make me smile—it’s as if it had been scripted by Norman Rockwell. But he has his eye on things, always. If we’re digging, are we doing something without a permit? The guys who were digging grew nervous at the sight of the police car jouncing into the driveway, and then they started joshing me about what crime I might have committed. I wondered, too.

Buddy got out of the cruiser. He’s about my age and has been our chief for a long time. He has a signature swagger and is heavyset—and he’s more or less outgrown his uniform over the years.

The wraparound sunglasses complete a fierce picture. Even knowing Buddy as well as I do, I tend to feel a little trembly when he’s near. “Have I done something?” I asked.

“No,” he replied with a big smile, “but I’ve got Harriet in custody. Found her over on Willard Hill.” That’s not very far, just the next road. I looked into the back seat and there she was, wiggling at the sight of me. I wasn’t so surprised, but he called her an “outlaw.” I think she’s nothing short of an angel and wish I’d had my camera to record her in custody in the back of the police car.

She didn’t even look contrite, her happy terrier face sticking over the bulletproof window.

I think it’s possible Buddy was looking for an excuse to come by and see what and why we were digging. But maybe not. It was a lovely summer’s day and the ladies were lunching, and I think maybe Buddy wanted to try out his new cruiser, and when he saw Harriet in the road, he just wanted to bring her home safe. That’s all.

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I L LUS T R AT I O N BY C L A R E O W E N / i 2i A R T

In a country hamlet, everyone notices when the police chief is driving around.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:33 AM

CELEBRATING the PEOPLE

At New England’s largest living history museum, meet the families, farmers and artisans who lived and worked in rural New England in the formative, first decades of our new nation.

Experience the triumphs, trials and textures of everyday life in the 1830s – a period driven by agriculture, industry, family and the seasons. Find relevance from their stories, put your hands on history and be inspired.

Old Sturbridge Village… More than a museum.

BIG RIVER: Live Outdoor Musical | June 14 - July 9 INDEPENDENCE: 4th of July | July 1 - 4 CRAFT BEER & ROOTS MUSIC FESTIVAL | July 23 REDCOATS AND REBELS | August 5 & 6

Kids Free in July*

Old Sturbridge Inn and Reeder Family Lodges Historic Setting. Modern Amenities. New England Hospitality.

Call 508-347-5056 for a Yankee Magazine subscriber discount. * In July up to three kids free with each adult, full-priced admission.

No other discounts apply. Blackout date: Sunday, July 23.

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5/17/17 3:44 PM

Life in the Kingdom | B E N H E W I T T

First Harvest Moving a homestead also means planting in new soil.

PHOTOGR APH BY

PENNY HEWITT

ear the end of August, the mornings having already gone cool with whispers of what approaches, my son Fin and I drive to the Champlain Valley Fair in Essex Junction, Vermont. The fair is in full swing, the night sky lit a thousand and one colors from the midway lights, the parking lot crammed with vehicles of every shape and style: jacked-up Ford pickups with chromed exhaust stacks protruding from the bed, rusted-out Honda Civics, an ’80s-era limousine with a Harley-Davidson sticker across the rear window. “Whoa,” says Fin. “That’s cool.” He’s right: It is kind of cool.

We’re not at the fair for the rides, although the Tilt-a-Whirl gyrating in the distance proves a brief temptation. Rather, we’ve come to see the hard-rock band ZZ Top, best known for the classic hit “Cheap Sunglasses” (When you get up in the morning and the light it hurts your head / The first thing you do when you get up out of bed / Is hit that street a-runnin’ and try to beat the masses / And go get yourself some cheap sunglasses ... and then the requisite oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah).

Let me be honest: I never was much of a ZZ Top fan, and the prospect of spending an hour and a half watching a trio of geriatric rockers churn through their catalog of greatest hits does not fill me with unbridled enthusiasm. But Fin is 14 and an avid bluesrock guitar player; furthermore, he’s aff licted with the entirely rational fear that all the classic rock bands will have died off before he’s had an opportunity to see them. So I agreed to take him. Besides, it’s healthy to get off the homestead every once in a while, if only to see what’s happening in the world beyond.

On the Hewitt farm, the garden haul does double duty: filling the summer table and stocking the winter pantry.

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/19/17 11:02 AM

There is something about a modern fair that feels a little desperate to me. As we stroll through the midway before the concert, the air is pungent with the smell of cigarette smoke and fried dough, punctuated every so often by a whiff of cheap perfume.

We enter the concert venue, and for a while we just stand and watch. In the background, behind the nosebleed bleacher seats (we sprang for slightly better f loor seating), the rides continue whirling unabated.

A dozen or so feet to our right, a middle-aged couple is making out

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with unrestrained fervor. On our left, a 20-something fellow is smoking. I catch a glimpse of his T-shirt: Camping without beer is just sitting in the woods.

Truthfully, I’m caught off guard by the cheapness and excess of it all.

So many lights f lashing, so much noise. So many people. And ZZ Top themselves: such a strange— and strangely compelling—band.

Billy and Dusty, the guitarist and the bassist, respectively, wear long, impeccably groomed beards, matching fedora-style hats, and, naturally, dark sunglasses. Frank the drummer is barely visible behind his gargantuan set of drums. In addition to sunglasses, they sing of Cadillac cars, the female anatomy, and the female anatomy in Cadillac cars, all laid over a raunchy and infectious blues shuff le. It is music that asks little of its listeners but for them to shake their butts and sing along.

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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BEN HEWIT T

But then, I suppose that’s part of the appeal.

It’s a fairly short set, and who can blame them? The band got together in 1969; they’ve been at it since before I was born. They are old, and presumably rich, and I can only guess how many of these shows they’ve played, how many adoring crowds they’ve seen, buzzed on overpriced beer and menthol cigarettes. As we watch and listen, I imagine them gazing out over this crowd from behind their shaded lenses. What are they thinking of ?

The end of the show. Sleep. The ache in their hips. Home. Or maybe they’re just wondering how much longer their ride can possibly last.

B

ack home, the garden is coming on strong after a spring and summer of near-ideal weather. While southern New England has suffered from drought, we’ve received rain at precisely the right intervals, in precisely the right quantities. Still, since it’s our first year growing in this soil, we harbor minimal expectations. We trucked in load after load of compost from our previous homestead, but there’s really no way of knowing how things will turn out.

Fortunately, the early report seems to be “pretty darn good.” We snatch early potatoes, cube and steam them, then drown them in fresh-churned butter. Every day there are bountiful salads, composed of greens harvested only minutes before consumption.

Thanks to a dozen or so mature blueberry bushes that were planted by the previous owner of this land, we even have fresh blueberries. The carrots are looking good, and the tomatoes carry the early blush of ripening. And then there are the green beans. It’s overwhelming, really, how quickly they grow. On hot, sunny days following rain, we pick every day, filling basket after basket after basket.

It is strange, during the height of summer, to f ind my mind turning

toward winter. I should be accustomed to it by now: Living seasonally in a four-season climate means living with one foot in the present and the other in the season to come, and maybe even the season after that. While we eat plenty of veggies straight from the garden, the majority of the harvest will be preserved for the winter months. And though I’m loath to admit it in such a public space as this, there is still firewood to split

Living seasonally in a four-season climate means living with one foot in the present and the other in the season to come, and maybe even the season after that. and stack. This is not good. Nothing short of using a kiln will transform green wood to dry in two months, never mind that at this time of year, drying conditions deteriorate with every passing day. We’ll be burning greenish wood over the coming winter, and I’m not sure which is worse: the prospect of sputtering fires or the hit to my pride.

As the harvest continues, I watch the pantry shelves fill. It’s a comforting sight, diminished only slightly by the fact that the shelves are actually bowing a bit in their middles. Crud.

I’ll have to add some supports before we get too much further into the preserving season. Another task to add to the list. In many ways, the pantry is the most important room in our home: It harbors the distilled efforts of the growing season, and by the time the first snow falls, those newly NEWENGLAND.COM

5/15/17 4:47 PM

TREES vs.

TOWERS Which do you prefer?

reinforced shelves will hold literally thousands of dollars’ worth of food, Northern Pass would replace the beauty of New Hampshire the nourishment our family will rely on for the next six months, until the sun returns, the snow melts, and it starts all over again.

In the weeks immediately following my journey to the fair with my son, every so often—usually at the most incongruous times, as when I’m splitting wood, or picking still more green beans—I think back to that evening. I’m not sorry to have gone, in part because I cannot resist an outwith unwanted, unneeded, and unseemly transmission towers. ing with one or both of my children, but also in part because it served as an Time is running short - the time to act is NOW! unlikely reminder of the unadorned beauty that quietly inhabits my dayFIND OUT WHAT YOU CAN DO TO DEFEND THE GRANITE STATE: to-day life.

NoToNorthernPass.com W hen this happens, I realize ResearchProd0107 11/15/06 1:41 PM Page /NoToNorthernPass 1 I have become jaded. Not exactly @NOTONP blind to this quiet beauty, but not fully present to it either, not always mindful enough to appreciate it in full: those ripening tomatoes, pale red against the dark garden soil. The sweet scent of a fresh-split round of ® sugar maple, subtle enough that I almost doubt it even exists, which IMPLY THE EST in a strange way makes it even more electric alluring. The sound of the maul fallincinerating ing against the wood, and even, if toilets I really pay attention, the sound it makes moving through the air.

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5/11/17 10:39 AM

First

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5/11/17 10:44 AM

‘Wyeth World’ On the centennial of the birth of Andrew Wyeth, a fellow artist and lifelong friend offers this one-of-a-kind remembrance.

STORY AND PHOTOGR APHS

BY PETER R ALSTON

n 1957 my parents bought a house in thenunfashionable Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and Andrew and Betsy Wyeth bought the rest of that old Quaker mill property the next year. As a little boy I had free run of their place and the islands they owned in the Brandywine River, but it was the slow accretion of the many, many lessons and kindnesses they bestowed upon me over the years that shaped my life’s trajectory. Even when I was a child, they exposed me to the creative life in a way that was to fully inform my own.

I recall the day my education began. I was 11, and Andy and Betsy were in their great room. Andy told me to “have a good look” at the paintings hung there. Then he sprang The Game on me for the first time.

“Peter, the house is on fire … you can only save one painting on the way out. Which one?”

I was surprised, but thought it fun and quickly pointed to a work titled Young Bull.

“Good,” said Andy. “Now tell me why you chose that one.”

God knows exactly what I said, probably something vague about liking it the most of all the paintings in the room.

A detail of Peter Ralston’s 1981 portrait Battleground shows Andrew Wyeth in his Chadds Ford studio with his just-finished painting of the same name.

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“OK,” said Andy, “but tell me why you like it.”

I ventured something to the effect of liking how the young bull’s coat and the wall and the hill beyond all seemed kind of the same.

Andy’s eyes narrowed until he was squinting, almost glaring, at me. He was standing close to me and he suddenly looked very fierce.

“Peter,” he said, “that’s good, but I mean I want you to really tell me

WH Y you like this one.” There were only three of us in the room plus their dog, Rattler. The f ire in the hearth was lit, but I f lushed from something besides the heat.

He pressed for “ deeper”—and I cannot at all remember what else I had to say. This went on for what in my recollection seems an eternity, although I’m sure that it could not have lasted more than a minute or two, if that.

Andy was pushing me hard and he wouldn’t let up. I had no clue what was really going on, yet I felt dizzy and excited all at the same time.

Then, it was over, and I recollect nothing else from the day. That was when I first had my awareness deliberately challenged to go beneath the obvious surface.

By the late ’60s the Wyeths would see me respond to the heady call of that era, traveling around the country with my camera and my curiosity.

When, after a few photojournalistic years, I decided to base my work out of Chadds Ford, Andy and Betsy took me in hand again, and my education resumed at an even deeper level, although I was not always fully aware of the depth of their extraordinary mentoring.

Andy asked me to photograph his paintings with a big-view camera—yet another gift, one designed to instill in me a more ref lective way of looking at the world. Perhaps the greatest encouragement that the Wyeths gave me was the idea that you could succeed in life by being curious and expressive. They also taught me about being disciplined in the business side of things. I will never forget the moment in my early t wenties when A ndy snapped at me, his eyes f laming, “Fuck being a starving artist.”

They brought me as a young adult much more deeply into their wondrous strange world—and what a unique world it was. Andy’s stories told of a fantastical childhood as the youngest and most precocious of N.C. Wyeth’s f ive children. His youth was a mélange of boundless

Recognizing the iconic power of Peter Ralston’s 1980 photograph Pentecost, friend and mentor Andrew Wyeth once compared it to his own Christina’s World.

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:46 AM

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5/11/17 2:28 PM

First

LIGHT

| ‘ W YETH WORLD’

fantasy and strict technical training. From within the firm grip of his father’s tutelage and inf luence, Andy learned that he could create and control his own reality, and that early independence played a huge role in how he would live the rest of his life.

The Wyeth household was awash in imagination: the swashbuckling tales that N.C. illustrated, the lead soldiers that Andy constantly directed in epic struggles, the elaborately costumed scenes that Andy and his playmates would enact, the heady swirl of famous actors and writers who came to visit.

With his prodigal talent and early commitment as an artist, Andy was able to fashion a life that was entirely of his own creation. And he was blessed to meet and marry Betsy, a woman who could more than hold her own with him.

Thus, “Wyeth World” was, to all of us who orbited around its gravitational pull, wholly unlike conventional society. In fact, among insiders it has often been compared to life in a European court, a life unto itself, with a sense that the “real” world was generally to be kept at bay.

I had my own world, with all of its predictable ups and downs, but whenever I reentered the raref ied atmosphere of Wyeth World, everything felt and looked different. Inside that world we were all the “toy soldiers,” or characters in a lifelong play concocted, choreographed, and directed by the couple on the throne. Life there was layered, with every detail precisely considered and wrought, very much like one of Andy’s great, meticulously controlled temperas.

There was frequent drama, but the center always held.

T hough t hei r encou ragement a nd generosit y were a ltoget her intentional, Andy and Betsy were also tough. The family has a history of being unsparing with candor and criticism, and I learned even as 22 |

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I witnessed it directed at all of us.

They did not suffer fools lightly, but as instinctive mentors they made sure that no lessons were lost on me or on others for whom they cared.

They knew full well that you have to care about someone to be honest enough to hurt them—that which hurts, instructs.

Wyeth World was high Shakespearean, inked in nothing less than bril liance and steely determination to create and achieve strictly by

The Wyeths forever changed my life with Maine, as they absolutely knew would happen.

Andy and Betsy’s own court rules.

Banishment was not unknown, and I have seen people of considerable power reduced to tears by suddenly f inding themselves on the outside.

Life inside, however, was exhilarating and challenging, fun and edgy, loving but demanding, and it held me in full sway, providing a remarkable alternative perspective—or lens— through which I will always behold the larger world.

In 1978, the Wyeths invited me to spend the summer in Maine with them. Driving around with Andy and boating with Betsy, I was meeting the people and seeing the places I had vicariously known for years through his paintings. They gave me Maine, the gift of my lifetime, and it was here that I settled for good. They forever changed my life with Maine, as they absolutely knew would happen.

In 1983, a few friends and I conceived of an organization we would call the Island Institute, and we went to the Wyeths with our draft business plan. They reviewed it, and in

response to the part in which we outlined the need to publish something about our intended work and programs, their emphatic advice was: “Do not just offer mimeographed self-congratulatory crap like everybody else does ! Go for real excellence, make it the best possible piece ever published about the islands and their people. Make it beautiful, combine stories and art and science, and make people yearn to get the next copy.” Thus was born Island Journal, the Island Institute’s award-winning annual publication, somewhere in format between a coffee table book and a magazine.

Encouraged by their advice, we bet t wo-thirds of our f irst year’s operating budget on production of the Journal. It was an immediate hit as well as a considerable factor in the rapid success of the institute. We had taken a chance, pursued excellence, gone far beyond what other organizations were doing, and it was a triumph—all a direct result of the Wyeth modus operandi. I dedicated much of the next 30 years of my life to the institute … seldom far from the Wyeths and their Maine islands.

Andy and Betsy’s lifetime of lessons for me was all about maintaining one’s own high standards and never compromising. They never, ever said as much, but they lived their lives passionately, and by osmosis that informs my life—and the lives of all those they touched—to this day.

And I now play The Game with my family and with special friends.

“Which of my photographs would you grab on the way out my door? ” I ask. And when they reply and think they have played it well, I come back: “Why?” The major retrospective “Andrew Wyeth at 100” is on display at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME, through December. For more information, go to farnsworthmuseum.org.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:48 AM

THE UN-SNEAKER

Ah, the comfort of a sneaker and the style of … not-a-sneaker.

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First

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| KNOWLEDGE & WISDOM

USEFUL STUFF FROM 81 YEARS OF YANKEE

ith each passing year, the list of things that I wish I had learned and done earlier than I did grows. Why, for example, did I have to hit 50 before I ever learned the North Woods stroke for canoe-paddling?

The secret of this stroke is that the lower hand on the paddle shaft functions as a nearly stationary fulcrum, while the power is supplied at the top grip by pushing forward with the whole weight of the body. With the North Woods stroke you gain the mechanical advantage of an oar-andoarlock arrangement, but, because the paddle shaft is not attached to the gunwale, you also retain the versatility of the paddle: When f lat water turns into white water, your paddle is ready as ever to perform the pries, draws, and braces you need in the foamy stuff.

If you don’t know anyone who can teach you the North Woods stroke, find somebody. It’s not just an improvement, not just a little bit better, not just another quaint little gimmick to add to your paddling repertoire. It’s more like the invention of the wheel. It is to traditional “arm paddling” what Einstein is to Newton.

—Adapted from “A Stroke of Genius,”

by Robert Kimber, July 1991

WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG

“A great and free country is not merely defense and protection.

For every earnest spirit, it is opportunity and inspiration.”

—Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (1828–1914). As a Bowdoin College professor who volunteered for the Union Army, Chamberlain earned the Medal of Honor for defending Little Round Top at Gettysburg in July 1863. During his military service he was shot six times and had six horses shot out from under him, and—despite later serving as Maine governor and Bowdoin president—he ultimately died of his wounds at age 85, becoming the Civil War’s final casualty.

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TA LYA B A L D W I N ( I L L U S T R AT I O N ) ; L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S , P R I N T S & P H O TO G R A P H S D I V I S I O N ( C H A M B E R L A I N )

A Canoeist’s Eureka Moment

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 10:54 AM

TA LYA B A L D W I N ( I L L U S T R AT I O N ) ; L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S S , P R I N T S & P H O TO G R A P H S D I V I S I O N ( C H A M B E R L A I N )

NEW ENGLAND BY THE NUMBERS

LAKE COMPOUNCE Compiled by Julia Shipley

1684 332

Year that Tunxis tribe members sold the future amusement park land to settlers

TWO

Number of towns that the park spans (Bristol and Southington, CT)

$18M Amount of state loan approved in 1994 to upgrade the park

TWENTY Height in feet of the park’s first ride, the c. 1850 Pleasure Wheel (eight seats, cranked by hand)

Number of acres that make up the park today

171

Number of years the park has operated continuously, making it the nation’s oldest

44

Current number of rides (including fi ve roller coasters)

185 Height in feet of the Down Time drop tower, opened in 2004

65 2,746

Maximum speed in mph of the newest roller coaster, Phobia Phear, opened in 2016

Length in feet of the Wildcat, one of the world’s oldest roller coasters, installed in 1927

ONE

Number of weekends that Lake Compounce was open in 1992 and 1993—which was enough to save its title as the oldest continuously operating U.S. amusement park

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Saturday, September 16 Strawbery Banke Museum Portsmouth, NH

Craft Beer & Food Pairing Tour in Historic Portsmouth!

Supported by

VIP & Main Event tickets are limited!

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5/16/17 4:16 PM

First

LIGHT

| UP CLOSE

The Write Stuff

JESSE BURKE

here are office supplies, and then there are Oval Office supplies—and when the commander in chief needs something to scribble his name with, the call goes out to America’s oldest manufacturer of fine writing instruments, Rhode Island–based A.T. Cross. Founded in Providence in 1846, the company has a long history of putting customized pens into the hands of executives at major companies such as RCA, Ford, and GM, so it’s little surprise the nation’s own CEO would wield a Cross.

The firm has been supplying the official White House pen since the Clinton era, with the model and design elements tailored for each administration: For Trump, it’s a Century II in black lacquer with his signature rendered in, naturally, 23-karat gold. “Luckily we haven’t had too many issues yet fitting [the presidents’] signatures onto the pens,” says Andy Boss, North America sales manager for Cross (though Boss added that Obama did request his John Hancock be placed on the barrel of the pen, “which is not something we normally do”).

Boss, whose family roots at Cross go back to 1910, has long grown accustomed to spotting the company’s pens out in the world. “One of my earliest memories of seeing them in the movies is of a young Val Kilmer spinning one in his hand in Top Gun,” says Boss, who also couldn’t help but notice that Hannibal Lecter used a Cross pen to escape his cell in The Silence of the Lambs. But being able to turn on the news and see U.S. presidents sign legislation with Cross pens is a special point of pride—and an experience that Boss expects to keep enjoying for the foreseeable future. “On Inauguration Day, President Trump was heard saying about our product, ‘We’re gonna need some more pens.’

That’s music to my ears!”

—Jenn Johnson

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/18/17 3:42 PM

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5/9/17 5/4/17 11:41 9:29 AM

Though she once dreaded the thought of tending a garden, Linda Allard today embraces working the soil at Highmeadows, her home in Connecticut’s Litchfield hills. Even the interior of her custom-built villa ( OPPOSITE ) reflects her green thumb tendencies.

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5/11/17 11:16 AM

P R I VAT E TO U R

| Home

The Prettiest

V E GE TA BL E GA R DEN I N

N E W

E NGL A N D

W H E N FA SH ION DE SIGN E R L I N DA A L L A R D M OV E D T O L I T C H F I E L D C O U N T Y, EV ERYONE FIGU R ED THER E ’D BE A GORGEOUS GA R DEN IN HER FU T UR E . THEY DIDN ’ T SUSPEC T V E G E T A B L E S , T H O U G H ...

BY

T OVA H

M A RT I N

PHOTOGR A PHS BY K INDR A CLINEFF

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Home | P R I V A T E T O U R

Amid beds of flowers, herbs, and vegetables, an allée flanked by crab apple trees leads to a pair of outbuildings that may look ornamental but are in fact fully equipped toolsheds.

There’s a garden overlooking the rolling hills of Litchfield County, Connecticut, that is literally scrumptious. At the estate called Highmeadows, rows of plantings spill over with succulent Fiero radicchio, Gigante degli Ortolani escarole, Diablo Brussels sprouts, and dozens of other vegetables planted to form a deep tapestry of color and texture. Purple basil f lanks tomatoes, sage pops up between interwoven boxwood, scarlet runner beans climb tepees, and rose arbors drip with aromatic petals. Leave it to Linda Allard to show us that vegetable gardens can be absolutely fabulous while still working hard.

Non-fashionistas might not recognize the name. Credited with spearheading the trend to dress women for success in corporate America, Allard was the chief designer for Ellen Tracy from 1964 until 2003, when she retired to Highmeadows. On the home front, she’s applied all her design sensibilities to the garden. But she’s also introduced literal taste into her patterns—who would have even guessed that underneath that wonderful wardrobe lurked a foodie?

It all started with 4-H. Growing up in Doylestown, Ohio, Allard and her five brothers and sisters lived in an old farmhouse, which had a huge garden to feed the family. “We canned, froze, and made jam,” she recalls. In addition, her mother led the local 4-H, so the whole family—including Allard’s brothers—learned to cook and sew. Exhibiting pies and canned goods in the county fair was a highlight of Allard’s summers. Weeding the garden was not.

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PERFECT PAIRS Not surprisingly, designer Linda Allard is all about pairings.

She loves to accessorize vegetables with compatriots or herbs.

Usually it’s about marriages that are mutually beneficial, but sometimes she just likes the look.

Here are some favorite matchups: CARROTS AND ONIONS These two root crops grow well in unison, and the onions inhibit disease in the carrot roots.

POLE BEANS AND CORIANDER As soon as pole beans get a leg up on their support, Allard sows coriander, which eventually forms a froth of white flowers at the beans’ ankles.

T O M AT O E S AND BASIL She eats them together, so why not plant this combo side by side? Plus, they make good neighbors.

LETTUCE AND MARIGOLDS Using a dwarf marigold, Allard combines the two hardworking plants, leaving the flowers in place while the lettuce successions are planted.

BRUSSELS SPROUTS AND L AV EN DE R A long-season vegetable, Brussels sprouts take the entire season to produce their crop. In the meantime, lavender can bloom alongside.

Needless to say, Allard harvests and bundles the flowers for linen fresheners.

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T H E V I L L A’ S M A S SI V E WO ODE N GAT E S GI V E NO T H I NG AWAY. YOU ’ D N E V E R GU E S S T H AT S OM E T H I NG S O U N E X PE C T E D AWA I T S W I T H I N U N T I L YOU S T E P I NSI DE T H E WA L L E D GA R DE N.

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P R I VAT E TO U R

“I swore I would never, ever have a garden,” she says.

When Allard won an art scholarship to Kent State, it seemed as though she had safely sidestepped gardening.

A year after she graduated, her parents put her on a bus for New York City with $200 to start a career. Within three weeks, she’d begun her ascension from assistant to sample maker to, eventually, Ellen Tracy’s lead designer.

By the time she started work on Highmeadows’ garden, though, Allard had accumulated a worldly knowledge of homes and their surroundings. “Whenever I had a free day while traveling, I went to see gardens,” she says. Plus, she’d done a f lip-f lop on her antigardening stance. In fact, after buying her 75-acre Connecticut property in 1989, she chose to build her home on a high, exposed site specifically because it basks in full sun—and that’s what edibles crave. From her trips to Europe, she saw how beautifully it could be laid out. And that’s when she asked her brother David Allard, an architect, to design her villa, with a vegetable garden being intrinsic to the picture.

From the exterior, David’s house design bears a pinch-me resemblance to a Venetian villa. But he also took New England’s sun exposure and brutal winters into account. Since the villa runs along the crest of the hill, each room gathers light as the sun moves across the sky: It rises over Allard’s bedroom, which overlooks the garden, and it sets over the conservatory room.

The configuration is a testimony to Allard’s current priorities. In the west-facing conservatory room, all the furniture is periodically removed to make way for collapsible tables, where hundreds of seedlings get a head start for the garden in late winter and early spring. Under it all is a basement where root crops are stored, harvest is brought JULY | AUGUST 2017

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in, and muddy clogs are kicked off before Allard comes upstairs to the rest of the house. And muddy clogs have become a major part of her life.

What would a villa be without its corresponding gardens? For Allard’s purposes, edibles seemed the appropriate way to go, but on a practical level, protecting a vegetable garden from animal pests was a concern. That’s when her brother came up with the tall stone wall that creates the medieval mood. To underline the ambience, he had all the hinges and lighting fixtures

Allard’s backyard orchard mixes heirloom varieties such as Winesap, Gravenstein, and Cortland with a few modern hybrids.

hand-forged at a nearby abbey. From there, the two siblings got out the rototiller and began to plan the layout.

Fashion design had taught Allard to start with a pattern template. Rather than install umpteen boxwoods right off the bat, for instance, she planted bush beans to visualize the hedge design. Then she planted morning glories on what would be rose trellises and sat back to see if the dimensions worked. They didn’t. “The arbor wasn’t spacious enough; the boxwoods were too close together,” she says. “It was such a valuable exercise.” So she reconfigured before installing the permanent boxwood parterre with lavender, thyme, sage, and other herbs growing between the evergreen edgings.

| Home

Across the aisle, the vegetable rotation changes every year. But even so, the spacing required tweaking before it was able to host several successions of beans, root crops, tomatoes, and all the other goodies that feed Allard’s table and her penchant for throwing parties.

To soften the wall and harness the heat it gathers, as well as to make the best use of space, she planted espaliered apple trees along the perimeter. But there’s also a full orchard on the hillside below the house, bearing her father’s favorite apples—Northern Spy, Winesap, and Ida Red—among other heirloom and modern varieties. The trees f lank the wings of the house, with a huge meadow in the middle to lure pollinators.

Highmeadows’ massive burnished wooden gates give nothing away.

Similarly, the high walls are alluringly secretive. You’d never guess that something so unexpected awaits within until you step inside the walled garden. Once you do, chances are you’ll find Allard herself, bent over the beds in her sun-faded denim work clothes, planting seeds or tying tomatoes onto their supports. She spends winters immersed in seed catalogs; in early spring she shares her living quarters (and sends her sofa to the basement) for the benefit of seedlings.

Yes, the colors are all coordinated.

Of course, it’s absolutely gorgeous. But this garden is also hardworking. And when it’s all ripe, Allard cooks and cans up a storm, sharing excess from the orchard with local charities. More than just being a strong candidate for the most beautiful garden in New England, and beyond feeding the soul, this garden nurtures inside and out.

Do you know a house with an irresistible story? Contact Yankee home and garden editor Annie Graves, with photos, at annieg5355@yahoo.com. | 33

5/11/17 11:24 AM

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OPEN STUDIO

| Home

Dreamscapes of Maine

Kathleen Buchanan’s handmade prints reveal a misty world of islands, seabirds, and coastal sheep.

BY ANNIE GR AVES

eep inside, many of us harbor a secret vision of coastal Maine. A place where waterways drift off toward the horizon, edged with pointed firs, and bulging rocks drape down toward the sea. Where wind, water, and weather collude to create a setting that lives between drama and dream.

That vision stares out from the black faces of sheep, clustered in a foggy landscape. Tranquil seabirds contemplate a flat sea. A dark scrim of evergreens shields the shimmering water beyond. This is that Maine, captured in the collagraphs that hang in printmaker Kathleen Buchanan’s Rockport studio.

In fact, the studio itself is a little like a dream. Just off the entryway to her home, it occupies the space that was formerly a dining room, in full view of everything. The large, contemporary house, open and airy, gleaming with wood, swirls around a central staircase—in effect, feeling like a modern-day Swiss Family Robinson tree house.

“It’s worked better than anticipated,” Buchanan says with a quiet smile. “This room’s pretty front and center.”

T h e h o u s e i s s i l e n t f o r t h e other plates flesh out the image. Then, moment. Her sons, Dec lan, 12, inking each plate, she prints progresand Teague, 9, are in school. Per- sively, working from light to dark, on fect conditions for artistic contem- Italian printmaking paper. plation and firing up the massive To demonstrate, Buchanan lays printing press that dominates the a plate on the press, dampens the former eating area. “‘Collagraph’ paper, places a felt blanket on top of comes from ‘collage,’” Buchanan the paper, and presses it through. explains. “The quick version is that I The effect as she peels away the felt start with a backing panel of Masonite, is instantaneous. Sheep stare up from build a collage with shapes of paper to the paper. “It’s magical,” she nods. delineate the design, and then paint “When you run an image through the press, suddenly it over it with acrylics to Kathleen Buchanan ( RIGHT) has weight and gravitas. add texture and detail.” says her training as a It’s authoritative.”

For images with mulbiologist helps her as an These quiet, contemtiple colors, Buchanan artist. “Both disciplines require skill at observing plative images spring will make a plate for each the environment ... not only from a combination of hue. The “key” plate conlooking but seeing what is photos, f ield sketches, tains the main elements; going on around you.”

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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PHOTOGR APHS BY

MARK FLEMING

and “a healthy dose of imagination.”

She credits her undergraduate education at Tufts and subsequent work as a biologist for helping cultivate the skills of observation, although all along she’d taken studio art classes. “I knew that art felt necessary on some level,” she says. “I always identified myself as a creative person, but I saw myself becoming a biologist.”

That changed when the Springfield, Massachusetts, native was completing her graduate degree in wildlife | 37

5/19/17 11:00 AM

Home | O P E N S T U D I O biology at the University of Alaska. “I got to the place where students often get—I started bogging down. My advisor told me to de-stress, and pick something I’d enjoy. I signed up for printmaking. And realized, Uh-oh, I think this is what I want to be doing.”

When her husband, Lance, got that most-Maine-of-all jobs—as a boatbuilder at Lyman-Morse Boatbuilding—the New England native finally came home. She bought a press and set it up in Boothbay Harbor, then moved it to Thomaston when the couple settled there. For a brief time, she even relocated the press outside the house, seeking serenity. “I found a little studio—I was there six months,” she says ruefully. “But I missed everyone.” When the family moved into their Rockport home in 2016, the 400-pound press came home, too.

And stayed. “My husband says I’ve officially used up the press moves!”

Back in the rhythm of family life, Buchanan escapes to “Studio B,” a small room at the back of the house, when she needs to. There she dreams up images inspired by the beauty and serenity of coastal Maine. “There’s so much to play with—strong vertical trees, the horizon, rocks—it’s a wonderland for f inding interesting images,” she says. “And this medium lets me express what I want to express.

I love the process of building the plates—there’s so much subtlety and texture and softness to the images.”

It’s all a beautiful contrast to the lively home-work center, a life in balance. In the end, she says, “Hanging out and printing in the hubbub of life feels best to me.”

The black-and-white patterns of murres, razorbills, and guillemots lend themselves to these striking collagraphs—which, like much of Buchanan’s artwork, were done in limited editions of 20 to 30 prints.

Handmade prints: $200–$1,000 (unframed); $300–$1,300 (framed).

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Home | H O U S E F O R S A L E

The Pride of Shelburne Falls

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.

e’ve been moseying around New England for many years. So, naturally, we have developed a particular liking for certain towns. No, we won’t name them all (our readers would give us the dickens for not including their favorites), but we will say that Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, is high on our list. Whenever we’re heading over to the Berkshires on Route 2 (i.e., the Mohawk Trail), we invariably pull off onto old Route 2A and mosey through the Shelburne Falls downtown and on over the Iron Bridge, as it’s called, crossing the Deerfield River. If nobody honks at us, we stop halfway across and look to our right at what was once a bridge for trolleys, now the nationally famous Bridge of Flowers. Farther down the river to our left are the picturesque dam and the old round holes they call “glacial potholes,” formed in the river eons ago.

But when we visited Shelburne Falls a few months ago—a bit before the Bridge of Flowers began to truly bloom—our destination was what was described to us by several people who know the area as “the most admired home in the village of Shelburne Falls.” The owners are Harriet Paine, who has a portrait photography business in town, and her husband, Alan Dargis, whom Harriet, when she was single, had hired to do some painting after she’d purchased the place in 1982. “And,” she added with a smile, as we eventually found ourselves sitting around the table in their spacious kitchen, “he simply never left.”

We’d had no trouble locating the place. Before the turn onto Bridge Street leading down to the river, there it was: a magnificent Gothic Revival gingerbread house surrounded by two beautifully landscaped acres, a pond, and even a miniature version of the main house that serves as a toolhouse. It was totally different from anything we’d ever seen before. Unusual. Handsome. Intriguing.

To continue our kitchen conversation with Harriet and Alan (along with their 17-year-old cat, Whisper, When Harriet Paine needed a house painter back in the early 1990s, she turned to Alan Dargis; today, he’s her husband. who contributed an occasional meow): Harriet said that 40 |

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C O U R T E S Y O F C O H N & C O M PA N Y R E A L E S TAT E ( H O USE )

This village in the Berkshire foothills has lots to be proud of— the famous Bridge of Flowers, for instance. But we recently discovered something else very special there.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 11:34 AM

FROM TOP : The home’s ornate Victorian details

C O U R T E S Y O F C O H N & C O M PA N Y R E A L E S TAT E ( H O USE )

are picked out in five different trim colors; a view of the lovingly restored dining room.

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Home | H O U S E F O R S A L E since she and Alan were “creeping up” in years, they felt—reluctantly— it was time to downsize. As usual Arthritis and COPD sufferers in such circumstances, which we’ve Those with mobility issues encountered so many times in our moseying, it’s sad. They’ve spent years Anyone who struggles on the stairs restoring and improving the place to the point where it’s in pristine condiACCREDITED BUSINESS tion, and now it’s time to part with it.

They’re asking $649,000.

So it seems someone else will have * to participate in the long life of this SAVE $250 AND unusual place.

The next people will be RECEIVE YOUR FREE the eighth owners of the house, which INFORMATION KIT was built by a local dentist in 1868 and WITH DVD! sold shortly afterward to Linus Yale, founder of the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company. The third owners, Harriet continued, were Henry and *Not valid on previous purchases. Not valid with any other offers or discounts. Not Jenny Patch, who operated a portrait valid on refurbished models. Only valid towards purchase of a NEW Acorn Stairlift directly from the manufacturer. $250 discount will be applied to new orders. Please photography business here in Shelmention this ad when calling. AZ ROC 278722, CA 942619, MN LC670698, OK 50110, OR CCB 198506, RI 88, WA ACORNSI894OB, WV WV049654, MA burne Falls—just as Harriet has been HIC169936, NJ 13VH07752300, PA PA101967, CT ELV 0425003-R5. doing. It’s only a coincidence, she said, adding, “They even specialized in animal portraits, just like I do. Odd.” Next were three owners who were 2017_02_Yankee_ThirdPage_JulAug.indd 1 5/8/17 11:11 AM Patch descendants, and then came Harriet and Alan, the seventh owners.

Eventually it was time for us to walk with Harriet through all 12 lovely rooms, including the five bedrooms with their stunning wooden floors and arched windows. The room on the second f loor of the attached barn (which is almost as big as a gymnasium) is where Harriet poses many of her customers for portraits. In back is a door leading to a large deck overlooking a lawn and the woods; the pond is visible, too, off to one side.

After saying our good-byes to Discover an authentic community imagined by the Shakers.

Harriet, Alan, and Whisper (who meowed a farewell), we drove down to Heirloom gardens • Historic buildings • Farm animals the river as we’ve done so many times Hiking trails • Artisanal festivals • Contemporary art before. Yes, Shelburne Falls is surely Farm-to-table dining • Concerts in the hayloft one of our favorite towns in New EngCome explore. Come shake it up. land. Maybe we’ll reveal our other favorites in an upcoming issue. Can 1843 West Housatonic St. you wait?

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42 |

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Contact Mary Cohn, Cohn & Company Real Estate, at 413-772-9274 or mary@cohnandcompany.com.

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5/23/17 5:35 PM

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JULY | AUGUST 2017

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| 43

5/9/17 11:30 AM

OPPOSITE : Dan Tawczynski

surveys the crop at his farm in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

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SEASONS

| Food

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B E R K S H I R E S

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W A L S H

PHOTOGR A PHS BY A DA M DE TOUR F O OD A N D PROP S T Y L I NG BY C AT R I N E K E LT Y

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Food | S E A S O N S an Tawczynski loves to tell the story of the day his corn hitched a ride on the Concorde. It was more than 20 years ago—the early 1990s—when one of his regular customers asked to pick some corn to send to England. “No way,” Tawczynski told him. “You can’t ship corn to England from Great Barrington!” But the customer persisted, insisting that he had to pick it himself. Tawczynski relented, and the gentleman drove to Tawczynski’s Taft Farms at dawn a few days later and filled a small cooler with 18 ears of Kiss ’N Tell, a white and yellow, or “sugar and butter,” variety.

A limousine arrived, the cooler was loaded into the back, and off the corn went to JFK Airport, where it was packed onto the Concorde. It arrived in London in time to be served for dinner. Tawczynski can’t say exactly who ordered it, but he thinks it was intended for a posh dinner party attended by Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.

Back then, common wisdom still held that corn should be picked “only when the water begins to boil,” lest its precious sugars be allowed to convert to starch before dinner was served. But the great irony of Tawczynski’s story is that the flight of the Concorde was not only excessive but also unnecessary. By the late 1980s, breeders had already begun releasing new, sugar-enhanced varieties that stay sweet for several days after picking—and Kiss ’N Tell was one such variety. It could have f lown coach, with connections, and still arrived in London crisp and sweet-tasting.

Tawczynski’s farming career began back in the 1960s, long before the debut of these sugar-enhanced varieties, let alone the subsequent generation of supersweet hybrids such as Jubilee (deep yellow and richly f lavored) and 274A (bicolor and extra tender) that are three times as sweet as the Silver Queen of distant memory (though less creamy and with a tougher skin).

He remembers planting seeds into mounded rows as a child and talks passionately about his favorite crop— from the rich soil of the Housatonic River Valley, to the warm days and cool Berkshire nights that bring the corn to its peak ripeness, to the challenge of climate change affecting hardiness zones. Corn is just one of dozens of crops that he and his family grow on these 200 acres, but he allocates a quarter of the land to it. He understands that summer wouldn’t be summer without it, and you never know when the world will come calling.

After my own visit to Tawczynski’s farm, I went home to make the following recipes, which celebrate corn season in preparations both savory and sweet—from a hearty summer chowder to sweet corn ice cream for dessert.

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SUMMER CORN CHOWDER TOTAL TIME : 1 HOUR H ANDS-ON TIME : 30 MINUTES

Corn and bacon are a familiar duo, but you can find similar harmony pairing corn and smoked mussels in a chowder filled with summer vegetables such as tomatoes, zucchini, and chilies. Smoked shellfish are a specialty of Maine, so look for brands that hail from that state, including Ducktrap River and Grindstone Neck.

3 tablespoons salted butter 1 medium onion, diced 1 medium or 2 small firm zucchini, cut into matchsticks 1 small jalapeño pepper, seeded and minced ¼ cup all-purpose flour ½ cup dry white wine, such as pinot grigio 4 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth 1 can (28 ounces) chopped tomatoes 8 ounces smoked mussels in oil, drained Kernels from 4 medium ears of sweet corn 2 cups coarsely chopped baby spinach 1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme leaves

Salt and pepper to taste Fresh thyme sprigs, for garnish

In a 5- to 7-quart heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat, melt butter. Add onion and cook, stirring often, until pale gold in color, about 8 minutes.

Add zucchini and jalapeño and cook, stirring, for 4 more minutes.

With wine and broth handy, stir the flour into the vegetables for about a minute, then add the wine and whisk until smooth. Whisk in the broth, then stir in the tomatoes with their juices and simmer for about 10 minutes. Stir in mussels and corn, and cook 5 minutes. Then add spinach, thyme, and salt and pepper; simmer for 5 more minutes. Serve hot, garnished with fresh thyme. Yields 6 servings.

GRILLED CORN WITH HERBED BACON BUTTER TOTAL TIME : 30 MINUTES H ANDS-ON TIME : 25 MINUTES

½ cup (1 stick) salted butter 1 small shallot, peeled ½ cup packed fresh herbs (basil, thyme, oregano, savory, chives, and/or cilantro) NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 11:45 AM

GRILLED CORN WITH HERBED BACON BUT TER

SUMMER CORN CHOWDER

The ceramic dishware on this page was made by Somerville, MA, artist Michelle Barrett. michellebarrett ceramics.com

SWEET CORN AND MAPLE ICE CREAM

SAVORY CORN, LEEK , A N D PA N C E T TA TA R T

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Food | S E A S O N S 4 strips cooked crisp bacon, crushed to fine crumbs Salt and pepper to taste 10 ears corn, any size, shucked ½ cup grated Parmesan

In a food processor or blender, pulse the butter and shallot until smooth.

Add herbs and process until well incorporated but not puréed (you want to see little f lecks of green). Add bacon crumbs and pulse to mix. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Prepare grill for medium-high direct heat (you should be able to hold your hand a few inches above the grate for 3 to 5 seconds), then place corn on grill and cover. Cook, turning regularly, until corn is tender and charred in spots, about 10 minutes. Serve slathered with butter and sprinkled with Parmesan. Yields 10 servings.

SWEET CORN AND MAPLE ICE CREAM TOTAL TIME : 55 MINUTES, PLUS AT LEAST 4 HOURS CHILLING TIME H ANDS-ON TIME : 30 MINUTES

2 medium ears sweet corn 1 cup whole milk 1 cup heavy cream 1 large egg plus 2 egg yolks ¾ cup maple syrup ¼ teaspoon table salt ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Holding a coarse cheese grater over a mixing bowl, grate the corn kernels off the cob. Break or cut the cobs in half, and put them, along with the grated corn, into a heavy-bottomed 3- or 4-quart pot. Add the milk and cream, and set over medium-low heat, stirring often, until the mixture bubbles at the edges, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat and let the mixture steep until the cobs are cool enough to handle. Scrape their juices into the pot one more time with the sharp side of a table knife.

Discard cobs.

Return the pot to medium-low and bring the mixture back to a simmer.

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In a medium bowl, whisk together egg, yolks, maple syrup, and salt. Carefully whisk about ½ cup of the hot milk mixture into the egg mixture until blended. Repeat this process twice more to slowly raise the temperature of the eggs. Pour the egg mixture back into the pot, whisking continuously over medium-low, until the mixture reaches 175° on an instant-read thermometer. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Pour the custard into a shallow container and cover with plastic film pressed onto the surface. Chill until very cold, 4 to 12 hours (you can speed the cooling by setting the container on ice and stirring).

Once chilled, it should register between 35° and 40° on an instant-read thermometer. Pour into an ice cream maker, leaving 1 inch at top; prepare according to freezer instructions. Yields 6 servings.

SAVORY CORN, LEEK, AND PANCETTA TART TOTAL TIME : 2 HOURS, 45 MINUTES H ANDS-ON TIME : 45 MINUTES

In texture, this delicious tart falls somewhere between a quiche and a savory pie as it adds classic French flavors—leeks, Gruyère, bacon—to a rich corn custard.

FOR THE CRUST

½ cup unsalted butter, cold, cut into small pieces 1½ cups all-purpose flour ½ teaspoon table salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ½ cup cold water 1 teaspoon Dijon mustard ½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce FOR THE FILLING

8 ounces pancetta or bacon, diced 2 tablespoons salted butter 3 medium leeks, white part only, rinsed and thinly sliced crosswise 1½ cups fresh corn kernels 2 large eggs ½ cup heavy cream

½ teaspoon table salt ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper ¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg ¾ cup plus ¼ cup grated Gruyère

Make crust: Put butter, f lour, salt, and pepper in the bowl of a food processor and pulse until the mixture has the texture of coarse meal. Add water, mustard, and Worcestershire and pulse just until dough begins to form a ball.

Turn dough out onto a floured counter and form it into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour and up to two days.

Preheat oven to 400°. Set a 10- or 11-inch tart pan with a removable bottom on a baking sheet. On a f loured counter, roll the dough out into a 12-inch circle (for 10-inch pan) or a 13-inch circle (for 11-inch pan).

Transfer the dough into the pan and press it into the corners. Run a rolling pin over the edges of the pan to neatly trim the dough. Line the inside of the crust with parchment paper or aluminum foil, and fill with dry beans or pie weights. Bake until golden, 10 to 15 minutes. Set aside to cool while you prepare the filling.

In a large skillet over medium heat, cook pancetta until browned and crisp, about 5 minutes per side. Remove from skillet with a slotted spoon, reserving fat, and drain on paper towels. Add butter to pan and sauté leeks until soft and slightly golden, about 10 minutes.

Add the corn and stir for 1 minute, then remove pan from heat.

Heat oven to 375°. In a medium bowl, whisk together eggs, cream, salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Add ¾ cup cheese, then stir in leek mixture and pancetta.

Pour the filling into the prebaked pie shell and sprinkle the remaining ¼ cup cheese on top. Bake until puffed and golden, about 40 minutes. Serve warm.

Yields 8 servings.

For additional recipes, including one for gougères with sweet corn, cheddar, and chives, go to newengland.com/sweetcorn.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 11:50 AM

He saw the moon as just the beginning.

VISIONARIES NEVER GO OUT OF STYLE We’re marking the 100th anniversary of JFK’s birth with a new exhibit, JFK 100: Milestones and Mementos, opening May 26. Visit to experience the man behind the vision.

JFK1538Mv1P_ Yankee Magazine_MOON_x1a.indd 1 049_YK0717_JKF_Library.indd 49

JFK Presidential Library and Museum Columbia Point, Boston, MA

JFKLibrary.org

5/11/17 2:14 AM 5/12/17 12:23 PM

Food | L O C A L F L A V O R

Palace Diner With the greatest tuna melt in lunch counter history, a 15-seat dining car becomes an anchor for a Maine mill town’s revival.

BY A MY TR AVER SO PHOTOGR APHS BY

MARK FLEMING

t is the hope of every down-at-the-heels New England mill town that its boom-and-bust story will see a second boom, or at the very least a boomlet. City planners dream of mill buildings blinking back to life with tech companies, manufacturers, artist lofts, and cafés, and begetting condo developers, Thai takeout, and a new wave of families. They look to Manchester, New Hampshire’s tech economy and to Lowell, Massachusetts’s arts district. And, now, to Biddeford, Maine, where the last textile mill closed in 2009 but where a group of food entrepreneurs, brewers, and designers has put down stakes and where the former Pepperell Mill complex is home to Banded Horn Brewing Co. and Sweetcream Dairy and more than 100 other businesses in all.

Greg Mitchell and Chad Conley had heard rumors of a revival in Biddeford before they drove to town on a whim in 2013. The two friends, who met working at an organic farm in Maine and had cooked in professional kitchens in Maine and New York, had been working on a concept in Portland—a dive bar with great food—but couldn’t get any traction. “We started to feel like Portland was a difficult climate,” Conley says (he has since decided to open a deli and bagel shop in Portland called Rose Foods). In Biddeford, they stopped at Elements, a coffee shop/bookstore/bar, and almost immediately began meeting people who knew other people who would ultimately convince them they had found their spot. “Within an hour, we had made more progress than we had in months in Portland,” Conley says. Three blocks away, they peeked in the window of the Palace Diner, a 15-seat 1927 Pollard dining car, and saw that it was up for lease. “The light bulb turned on,” Conley says. “A month later we had signed a lease, and we started working on developing our concept.”

In his book The Table Comes First, Adam Gopnik identifies all the necessary ingredients in the creation of a proper The Palace owners Greg “scene”—that self-sustaining culMitchell, far left, and ture that turns towns and cities Chad Conley specialize into magnets, whether for food, in fresh takes on diner classics, including a tuna sports, or cinema. It requires, he melt ( OPPOSITE ) that Bon writes, “a crowd of critics, comAppétit has hailed as the mentators, loyal fans. There can best it’s ever tried.

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Food | L O C A L F L A V O R

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be good basketball players in a city and no basketball ‘culture,’ no scene.”

When it comes to food, Biddeford now has the fans and the critics. The commentary f lows on social media. And the Palace’s concept—diner classics, perfectly prepared—is fine-tuned to both locals and out-of-towners. Each dish is reworked until it achieves the Platonic ideal of, say, the tuna melt or the buttermilk pancake. Because the kitchen is tiny (just a few feet across), the menu is built around its architecture like a jacket on a suit form. Nothing extraneous to slow things down or hinder quality.

“Everything comes down to me and Greg looking at every element and saying, OK, what is it doing for the dish?” Conley says. So the fried egg in the Deluxe sandwich is 3⁄8 -inch thick because that played best against the sliced cheddar, bacon, and jalapeños.

The iceburg lettuce in the tuna melt is cut crosswise into a ¾-inch-thick slab to balance the buttery griddled challah bread and rich tuna salad (the pickles are house-made). And those aforementioned pancakes get their tang from not just buttermilk but also lemon juice and zest (they’re served with real maple syrup, too).

On the diner’s facade, an old handlettered sign reads “Ladies Invited,” a reminder that these eateries once drew a heavily male clientele of factory workers. Pay a visit in the offseason, and you should be able to walk past the sign with a little chuckle and settle onto a stool at a counter that ripples with elbow grooves worn down by generations of regulars. Come on a summer weekend, though, and expect to contemplate those words at length—the national press has long since discovered the Palace and sung its praises. But come anyway, even in June. You can put your name on the list and wander around downtown for a bit. There is so much to see.

18 Franklin St., Biddeford, ME. 207-284-0015; palacedinerme.com NEWENGLAND.COM

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JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Food | N E W V I N T A G E C O O K I N G

Outside-In Burgers Reviving a family recipe with a tip for anyone seeking perfection.

BY A MY TR AVER SO

PHOTOGR APH BY

MARK FLEMING FOOD AND PROP ST YLING BY

C AT R I N E K E LT Y

f all the foods to serve at a backyard barbecue, perhaps the least surprising is the classic American hamburger.

Yet a t r u ly good ha mburger—one that’s moist inside and evenly cooked, with a nicely caramelized crust—is not the easiest thing to make. It’s technique dependent, requiring the dexterity to form the burger properly without overworking the ground mixture or packing it too tightly. And the shape really is crucial, as anyone whose grilled burgers end up looking like UFOs with dried-out edges and still-raw centers can attest. The nature of convection heat is such that it causes the edges of the burger to contract while the center puffs up. To counteract this, in-the-know grillers make a small divot in the center of each raw patty, so that it looks something like a bialy. This yields a flat, evenly cooked burger in the end.

If I’m making all this sound too difficult, it’s because I want to offer an alternative to the pure ground beef burger (not that we’d ever reject that entirely). It’s a recipe my mother has been making since the 1970s, back when we called it Surprise Burgers—which, in retrospect, sounds a bit too much like Mystery Meat to sell to any cook who attended public school. But these burgers aren’t mysterious at all, just patties enriched with some bread crumbs (a mere 1⁄3 cup per pound of beef) and seasoned with all the things you’d normally put on the burger: onion, ketchup, relish, Worcestershire, and mustard.

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 12:00 PM

As w ith meat loa f, the bread crumbs here absorb liquid and bind the mixture, making the burgers moister and more tender. And the seasonings simply taste great. In fact, I was recently reminded that as a child I kept requesting this dish by saying, “Please make the special burgers.” Today I’d argue that I was just recognizing a good thing when I saw it.

2 teaspoons yellow mustard ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1/3 cup bread crumbs 1 pound ground beef 1½ teaspoons table salt Oil for the grill grate Potato buns Toppings of your choice: lettuce, tomato, onion, cheese, mustard, ketchup, etc.

OUTSIDE-IN BURGERS

In a medium bowl, stir together the ketchup, water, onion, relish, Worcestershire sauce, mustard, and pepper.

Add the bread crumbs and stir. Add the ground beef and gently mix it in with your hands. Don’t pack the mixture together; instead, break up the meat into small pieces and toss them with the seasonings (there’s no need to get this perfect—just try to use a light hand).

Form the meat mixture into six equal patties, then use the tips of your fingers to create a shallow divot in the center of each patty. Sprinkle the patties all over with the salt.

TOTAL TIME : 40 MINUTES H ANDS-ON TIME : 40 MINUTES

Even though condiments are incorporated into the patties, don’t hesitate to top these burgers with the usual fixings.

You’ ll enjoy an even richer flavor. And feel free to double or triple the recipe for a crowd—it’s quite flexible. ¼ cup ketchup 2 tablespoons cold water 2 tablespoons finely minced onion 2 tablespoons sweet relish 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Prepare a grill for two-zone grilling. If using charcoal, put a small pile of unlit charcoal on one side of the grill. Fill a chimney starter with charcoal and use newspaper to start the f ire; when that charcoal is lit, pour it over the unlit pile. One side of the grill should have an active fire going, and the other side should have no charcoal at all. Cover the grill and leave the lid vents open all the way. If using a gas grill, simply turn the burners on one side to medium-high and leave the other side off. Let the cooking grate heat up for about 5 minutes, then clean and lightly oil the surface (a paper towel held with tongs and dipped in oil works best).

Grill the burgers over the hot side of the grill until they develop a crust, about 2 minutes per side. Move the burgers to the cooler side of the grill to finish cooking to your desired doneness (cut to test). Set the burgers aside to cool brief ly while you quickly toast the buns on the cooler side of the grill.

Serve the burgers with the toppings of your choice. Yields 6 servings.

OCTOBER 1-8, 2017 CELEBRATING OUR 50TH ANNUAL WOODSMEN’S FIELD DAY! MONDAY, OCTOBER 2 www.fryeburgfair.org

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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5/11/17 12:02 PM

Travel | C O U L D Y O U L I V E H E R E ?

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT : Surfing instructor Abby Ellis; a perfect beachside bite from Crazy Burger; Jim Crothers, head of the South County Museum (and an expert blacksmith to boot); the view looking south along Ocean Road and the always-popular walkway by the sea wall.

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5/11/17 12:04 PM

COULD YOU LIVE HERE ?

| Travel

Narragansett, Rhode Island In this town, a mile-long beach is the local playground.

B Y A N N I E G R AV E S PHOTOGR APHS BY

ALEX GAGNE

n summer, the sun casts a beach-town shimmer over Narragansett. Caught between the Atlantic and Narragansett Bay (not a bad place to get hung up), the town’s beating heart is the mile-long stretch of Narragansett Town Beach, flecked with tropical umbrellas. Here, toddlers explore the gritty taste of sand, teens skim by on boogie boards, and grown-ups pretend they’re helping, even long after the kids have abandoned their sand castles. Surfers bob in clusters, waiting like porpoises to catch the next wave.

A steady stream of swimmers, surfers, and loungers pours down to the beach, following the sea wall that snakes past the Towers, a fairy-tale remnant of the Narragansett Pier Casino, built in 1883 and designed by fabled architects McKim, Mead & White. Just a few blocks back, stately old homes on Central, Caswell, and Rockland streets affirm the town’s Gilded Age grandeur. But that’s not all: The South County Museum, a five-minute walk from the beach, delivers a fascinating crash course in the farm life that once permeated this area. A stroll on Boon Street brings off beat restaurants and random galleries.

From the town center, there’s easy access to the other villages of Narragansett, such as Point Judith and Galilee, plus more of the state’s most beautiful beaches.

It’s all a mix of elegance, surfer culture, history, galleries, and funky shops, with unexpected foodie delights tucked Narragansett into side streets. A bit of Key West, a bit of Wild West; restless as water, unpredictable as a curling wave. | 57

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Travel | C O U L D Y O U L I V E H E R E ?

Both expert and novice surfers love the long, rolling waves of Narragansett Town Beach, considered by many to be a mecca of New England surfing.

The Setting

The Social Scene

The population of Narragansett (roughly 15,800) doubles in summer, including surfers f locking to some of the best waves in New England. Popular beaches such as Scarborough unfurl south along the sprawling length of the town, all the way to Point Judith, then hooking around to Galilee. Narragansett is a town made up of villages—an arrangement that’s clear to Rhode Islanders but a bit confusing if you’re new. From Narragansett’s downtown proper, it’s just a quick drive down elegant Ocean Road to land’s end at Point Judith, about 5½ miles away, where an 1857 lighthouse looms over “the graveyard of the Atlantic.” Nearby, a breakwater at the Camp Cronin fishing area entices swimmers, surfers, kayakers, and anglers with sweeping views of Block Island Sound.

Take a tango lesson at the Towers— or learn to surf. “I love it when someone gets up on their board for the first time,” says Abby Ellis, an instructor at Warm Winds Surf Shop. (You can rent a surf board or sign up for lessons with any of the various surf-shop vans you’ll f ind parked beachside.)

At the South Count y Museum, a living history farm on the Canonchet estate, volunteers help garden, set up exhibits, and serve as docents.

“Our museum is by the people, for the people,” says executive director Jim Crothers. “It’s a gathering place.”

The museum also hosts a yearly quilt show, blacksmithing and letterpress workshops, and a Fourth of July chick hatch of heritage Rhode Island Reds.

If your toes must tap, see what’s happening back in town at the Towers—

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it might be a dance class or a Cajun music jam.

And then there’s the sea wall, with its grand parade of babies, dogs, and people toting beach gear. It’s practically guaranteed that someone here will strike up a conversation with you.

Artist Nancy Saccoccio, who sells sea glass jewelry, says it’s one of her favorite things to do in summer: “Sitting on the ocean wall, around 7 p.m. It’s 10 degrees cooler over there.”

Eating Out No burger is too crazy—even ostrich or buffalo, sometimes—at Crazy Burger, a rollicking little place that a lso offers smoothies and vegan dishes. A local treasure since 1995, it’s absurdly but justif iably popular, so expect a wait (and BYOB). Around the corner, the Bike Stop Café serves NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 12:07 PM

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MASSACHUSETTS Russell Orchards Farm & Winery Ipswich, MA Family-owned farm and unique store featuring their own produce, local goodies and ice cream. Animal barnyard, u-pick fruits in season. Specializing in award-winning fruit wines, with wine tastings Friday-Sunday. From-scratch bakery serving cider donuts and fruit pies. A beloved tradition for families and a must-see destination.

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5/18/17 11:42 AM

Travel | C O U L D Y O U L I V E H E R E ?

Elegant and sturdy, the Towers has survived two fires and three hurricanes to become Narragansett’s most iconic structure.

up wood-fired pizzas and makes fresh tuna or salmon tacos so juicy they’ll overwhelm your napkin; order takeout, and eat in owner Casey Montanari’s shaded garden. But for the best view in town, head to the 1880s Coast Guard House Restaurant: It puts the ocean at your feet and makes the world your oyster, thanks to its deck, fresh raw bar, and seafoodcentric menu.

Shopping On Boon Street, Silver Tides stocks locally handcrafted jewelry, while OneWay Gallery highlights emerging and established contemporary artists.

Not far from the town beach, Narragansett Pier Marketplace offers more concentrated shopping, with a cluster of retailers and eateries that includes the indispensable Nana’s Ice Cream & Gelato. Surf shops such as Narragansett Surf & Skate sell clothes and gear for newbies and experts.

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Real Estate At the time of this visit, a cute twobedroom “rustic” shingled cottage from the ’60s on Great Island in Point Judith Pond, with gorgeous views, was selling for $379,000. An airy threebedroom beach house near the sea wall listed at $559,000, and a Gibson Court two-bedroom condo in a shingled turn-of-the-century-style mansion, also within walking distance of the sea wall, listed at $399,900. But there were bargains to be found, too, such as a new two-bedroom cottage across from Scarborough State Beach for $159,500.

Resident Perks A day at Narragansett Town Beach costs $ 8, but if you’re a local you can buy a season pass for $25 (nonresidents pay $50). You also can put your name on the beach cabana list (a 10-to-15-year wait). And you’re never

far from other popular state beaches, suc h as Sca rborough (moderate surf, pavilions, picnic tables), Roger Wheeler, and Salty Brine.

Fun Fact Raised in Rhode Island, Peter and Bobby Farrelly—better known as the Farrelly brothers—set much of their 2000 film Me, Myself & Irene, starring Jim Carrey and Renée Zellweger, in Narragansett.

Getting Your Bearings Lots of large beachy hotels are stacked up near Narragansett Town Beach, but you also can f ind some genuine Victorian charmers within walking distance of the ocean, including the Tower House B&B. 46 Earles Ct. 401783-3787; towerhousebandb.com To see more photographs from our visit, go to newengland.com/narragansett.

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 12:07 PM

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S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E CT I O N

EDITORS’ CHOICE

BEST of NEW ENGLAND

BEST ISLAND BARGAIN THE BARNACLE INN NANTUCKET, MA

Experience classic Nantucket. Charm and comfort in quiet garden surroundings conveniently located two blocks from cobblestone Main Street.

Ideal for weddings and family gatherings. Our signature continental breakfast is served personally to you. A gem in hospitality, location, and value.

508-228-0332 thebarnacleinn.com

BEST LUXURY INN BEDFORD VILLAGE INN BEDFORD, NH

The Grand at the Bedford Village Inn embraces what’s new and next for boutique hotels. Four restaurants, year-round outdoor heated saltwater pool and spa, fitness facility, lobby bar, and event space. Lovely gardens on 10 acres. Sixty-four elegant rooms with marble baths and separate rain shower heads.

Most with soaking tubs, some with fireplaces.

800-852-1166 bedfordvillageinn.com

BES LOD BER CHA

The at V fant upsc loca wed view of o gues Cha

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ME | NH | VT | MA | CT | RI Each year, the editors of Yankee Magazine scour our region’s six states to find the best attractions, dining, lodging, and shopping for inclusion in our “Best of New England” awards.

Enjoy this collection of current and past winners.

ONLINE EXTRA! See our editors’ picks for each state at newengland.com/travel-directory

BEST COLLEGE ART MUSEUM COLBY COLLEGE MUSEUM OF ART WATERVILLE, ME

Considered one of the best academic museums in the country, the Colby Museum offers a vibrant exhibition program. It serves as a cultural resource to the Waterville community and visitors to the state. Always free and open to the public!

BEST BEACH TOWN HAMPTON BEACH VILLAGE DISTRICT HAMPTON, NH

BES THE FRE

Rediscover Hampton Beach, rated #1 in the United States for water quality. FREE activities include fireworks, nightly entertainment, talent and volleyball competitions, and Children’s Week.

603-926-8717 hamptonbeach.org

207-859-5600 colby.edu/museum

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P H O T O G R A P H B Y N AT R E A

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Reconnect with past Editors’ Choice winners and learn for yourself why they received Yankee Magazine’s highest accolade.

BEST ADVENTURE LODGING BERKSHIRE EAST RESORT CHARLEMONT, MA

The Warfield House Inn at Valley View Farm is a fantastic retreat with an upscale inn. This lovely location hosts a stunning wedding venue, breathtaking views, and an expansive list of outdoor adventures for our guests to explore beautiful Charlemont.

BEST RENOVATION BERNERHOF INN GLEN, NH

The Bernerhof Inn Bed & Breakfast is the perfect White Mountain romantic getaway. Feel the stress melt away as you walk in the door and start your vacation at our historic inn.

603-383-4200 bernerhofinn.com

413-339-6617 berkshireeast.com

BEST DESIGNER ROOM THE HARRASEEKET INN FREEPORT, ME

A family-owned, AAA Four Diamond hotel featuring two restaurants, fireplaces, indoor pool, select petfriendly rooms. Book direct and get free breakfast and tea. Complimentary transportation from Amtrak Downeaster station. Two blocks to L.L. Bean. Best shopping in NE. 800-342-6423 harraseeketinn.com

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BEST COLLEGE-TOWN LODGING BRUNSWICK INN BRUNSWICK, ME

Authentic charm and elegance in the heart of Brunswick. Sixteen beautiful guest rooms offer modern amenities with the personal service only a small inn can provide. Complimentary fresh breakfast made with local ingredients served by a roaring fire. Full bar.

800-299-4914 brunswickbnb.com

BEST INN FOR FOODIES HARTSTONE INN AND HIDEAWAY CAMDEN, ME

Two-night packages starting at $360. Steps from Camden Harbor, minutes from lighthouses, wineries, beaches, kayaking, hiking and biking. Enjoy the outdoor fun, have a relaxing massage or become Chef for a Day. Pamper yourself …

Sophisticated getaway with memorable cuisine!

207-236-4259 hartstoneinn.com

BEST CITY HOTEL HOTEL VERMONT BURLINGTON, VT

Burlington’s only independent hotel in the heart of downtown showcasing the best of Vermont. Steeped in local heritage, the design is modern yet rustic and features bright, modern accommodations offering an on-site season activities program, a resident Beer Concierge and a restaurant and bar inspired by locally sourced ingredients.

855-650-0080 hotelvt.com

BEST HISTORIC B&B CANDLEBERRY INN ON CAPE COD BREWSTER, MA

Stroll through the historic district and you’ll find this Georgian-style sea captain’s home, where guest rooms feature Winslow Homer prints, poster beds, fireplaces, and 200-year-old pine floors.

Loved for its superb breakfasts in the 1790s dining room, it’s an ideal spot from which to explore the Cape.

508-896-3300 candleberryinn.com

BEST VERANDA INN ON NEWFOUND LAKE BRIDGEWATER, NH

The perfect destination for your wedding or romantic getaway. Open year-round on one of the cleanest lakes in the country. Featuring 29 guest rooms, historic reception barn, private dock and beach, and the award-winning Pasquaney Restaurant and the Wild Hare Tavern.

603-744-9111 newfoundlake.com

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S P E C I A L A D V E R T I S I N G S E CT I O N

EDITORS’ CHOICE

BEST of NEW ENGLAND BEST ART-FILLED HOUSE HILL-STEAD MUSEUM FARMINGTON, CT

Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, CT, is a 1901 Colonial Revival mansion filled with Impressionist masterpieces by Monet, Degas, Manet, Whistler, and Cassatt. Situated on 152 acres of meadows, trails and gardens, it is home to the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

860-677-4787 hillstead.org

BEST FISHING LODGE LEGENDS ON THE FARMINGTON BARKHAMSTED, CT

An upscale B&B lodge nestled on the banks of the Farmington River, Legends has something for everyone.

Fly fishing, hiking, road/ mountain biking, kayaking, and skiing. From your room you can watch trout rise, then walk out and catch them. Guides and rentals available.

BEST CANDLE COMPANY EXPERIENCE KRINGLE CANDLE CO. BERNARDSTON, MA

This premier shopping destination offers Kringle’s handcrafted candles and more. At its store and Country Barn, find home décor, specialty foods, chocolates, gifts, toys, a Gentlemen’s Shop, Ladies’ Boutique and holiday treasures. Enjoy exquisite indoor or outdoor dining at The Farm Table. Open daily 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

BEST INSIDER TOUR MAINE MARITIME MUSEUM / BATH, ME

Home to the only surviving shipyard where wooden sailing ships were built, the Boatshop keeps traditional boatbuilding alive. Explore our 20-acre waterfront campus, and view some of Maine’s most charming lighthouses from the water on one of the daily cruises.

207-443-1316 mainemaritimemuseum.com

BEST PET-FRIENDLY OVERNIGHT MILL FALLS AT THE LAKE MEREDITH, NH

Nestled on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee are four charming inns linked together by a waterfront boardwalk. Walk to our five restaurants, the Cascade Spa and 11 shops that are adjacent to a vibrant Main Street community. Life is better at the lake!

603-279-7006 millfalls.com

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413-648-3077 kringlecandle.com

203-650-8767 legendsbnb.com

BEST FARM STAY LIBERTY HILL FARM INN ROCHESTER, VT

Experience life on a Vermont dairy farm! Country lodging and farm-fresh meals served family style. Swimming, hiking, then home to feed the calves and milk the cows!

Reunions, family, and friends welcome!

802-767-3926 libertyhillfarm.com

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BEST PORCH RED LION INN STOCKBRIDGE, MA

This historic inn where a Norman Rockwell painting comes to life offers 125 unique guest rooms, elegant and casual dining, live entertainment nightly and an outdoor heated pool.

Just down the road from Tanglewood, The Mount and numerous other Berkshire cultural attractions.

413-298-5545 redlioninn.com

BEST COUNTRY B&B SEVEN SOUTH STREET INN B&B / ROCKPORT, MA

Awake each morning to the tantalizing aromas of our four-course gourmet breakfast being prepared.

Meticulously decorated and appointed smoke-free accommodations with private baths, flat-screen TVs, Bose Wave radios and Wi-Fi. Let us be part of your holiday plans.

888-284-2830 sevensouthstreetinn.com

BEST SPECIALITY COLLECTION SPRINGFIELD MUSEUMS SPRINGFIELD, MA

The Amazing World of Dr. Seuss Museum is an interactive, bilingual experience that explores the childhood and stories of Springfield, MA, native Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.

Join us as we celebrate the opening of our fifth museum with a summer packed with family fun!

800-625-7738 springfieldmuseums.org

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Reconnect with past Editors’ Choice winners and learn for yourself why they received Yankee Magazine’s highest accolade.

BEST LAKE CRUISE MOUNT WASHINGTON CRUISES WEIRS BEACH, NH

The M/S Mount Washington is a 230-foot excursion cruise ship on beautiful Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. It offers scenic daytime, Sunday brunch and evening sunset dinner dance cruises from May through October. From Weirs Beach and other ports. GPS coordinates: N43° 36.445' W71° 27.549'

BEST FAMILY INN THE NONANTUM RESORT KENNEBUNKPORT, ME

Traditions begin here. Enjoy the seasonal family activities program, kayak and bike rentals, outdoor heated pool, magical fairy garden, scenic lobster boat cruises, and trolley tours! Close to the beaches and Dock Square shops. TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence winner.

888-205-1555 nonantumresort.com

603-366-5531 cruiseNH.com

BEST LUXURY INN THE STEAMBOAT INN MYSTIC, CT

Stay in historic downtown Mystic in luxurious accommodations directly on the river. Many fine restaurants and shops are just steps away. Ideal for a romantic getaway. New this year is the schooner Argia sailing daily from our wharf.

860-536-8300 steamboatinnmystic.com

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BEST FAMILY RETREAT WATERVILLE VALLEY RESORT WATERVILLE VALLEY, NH

“NH’s Family Resort.”

Find out why families have called Waterville Valley their home away from home for over 100 years. Play in our mountains or relax and reconnect. Recreation is included with our Freedom Pass. There’s something for the whole family.

1-800-GO-Valley visitwatervillevalley.com

BEST FAIRYTALE LUNCH PICKITY PLACE MASON, NH

Experience the enchanting cottage that inspired Elizabeth Orton Jones’s Little Golden Books version of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Untouched by time, this is a mecca for gardeners, epicureans and anyone looking for inspiration and relaxation. Have a Pickity day!

603-878-1151 pickityplace.com

BEST FARM-TO-TABLE DINING WOODS HILL TABLE CONCORD, MA

Named Massachusetts’s most sustainable restaurant by the SRA, Woods Hill Table reflects operating owner Kristin Canty and Chef Charlie Foster’s passions for food, family farms, and sustainable sourcing. We focus on organic produce and grass-fed livestock from The Farm at Woods Hill in Bath, NH. 978-254-1435 woodshilltable.com

BEST LIVING HISTORY EXPERIENCE PLIMOTH PLANTATION PLYMOUTH, MA

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

Visit the 17th-Century English Village, Wampanoag Homesite, Plimoth Grist Mill, Craft Center, and Plimoth Bread Co. 508-746-1622 plimoth.org

BEST FAMILY-STYLE CHICKEN WRIGHT'S FARM RESTAURANT HARRISVILLE, RI

Wright’s Farm Restaurant serves family-style chicken dinners. Spend quality time with the ones you love, dining, shopping, walking the grounds or relaxing in the lounge. There’s something for everyone in the family to enjoy.

401-769-2856 wrightsfarm.com

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Travel | T H E B E S T 5

Retro Summer-Fun Spots Where a vintage vibe and timeless appeal keep the generations coming back.

BY KIM KNOX BECKIUS

t’s summer, daddy-o! And if you’re searching for seasonal pleasures, you’ll have it made in the shade when you steer that newfangled hot rod of yours toward these forever-retro New England destinations. With the swiftness of a time machine, they’ll whisk you back to summers of innocence and exuberance, when a star-filled night of chasing fireflies was sheer bliss.

Cape Cod Melody Tent Twenty-two rows, 50 feet—that’s the farthest you can possibly be from the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, Grammy and CMA Award winners, and other headliners who take the revolving stage inside the oldest continuously operated tent theater in the round. Broadway musicals under a big top were the latest craze in 1950, when the venue originally dubbed the Cape Cod Music Circus opened. Lighting, sound, seating, the tent, and the summer lineup have evolved for a new generation. But a space this tiny and quirky, where artists can make eye contact with every fan as the stage slowly rotates almost 360 degrees, would never be built today. The intimacy fuels electric performances. Hyannis, MA. 508-775-5630; melodytent.org 66 |

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THE BEST 5

C O U R T E S Y O F S A N TA’ S V I L L AG E (C OA S T E R ) ; BENJAMIN WILLIAMSON (RESORT); COURTESY OF SEBASCO HARBOR RESORT (BOWLING)

Quarterdeck Recreation Center A lmost ever y summer morning, S eba sco Ha rbor R esor t ’s longserving maintenance man, John Totman, makes the Quarterdeck his first stop. Totman was born in 1937; the resort’s wood-beamed rec center in 1938. Keeping four vintage Bowl-Mor pin-setting machines operational is tricky but necessary: Candlepin bowling is the star attraction when the Quarterdeck opens for guests each evening at 7. You’ll love the time-warp fun of sending spindly pins flying with grapefruit-size balls and of squaring off against your family at table tennis, air hockey, pinball, tabletop shuffleboard, and other old-timey games while the jukebox plays nothing more contemporary than Journey tunes. Sebasco Estates, ME. 207-389-1161; sebasco.com Santa’s Village An evergreen forest with a brook coursing through. Fallow deer impersonating Rudolph and company. A guy in a red suit. In 1953—two years before Disneyland ’s debut—those were the only required ingredients for North Pole–themed magic. These days, kids have Wikipedia. So … the reindeer are real. The rides (including two roller coasters) are exhilarating.

The Ho Ho H2O Water Park is cool for all ages. Yet Santa’s Village, now in its third generation of family ownership, retains its back-in-time appeal.

Santa’s helpers are constantly sprucing the place up, and they treat every guest like a top name on the “nice” list.

Admission includes everything except the reasonably priced food. And face time with Santa is still little ones’ biggest thrill. Jefferson, NH. 603-5864445; santasvillage.com Spring Lake Beach and Arcade Where else can you spend an entire day—and thoroughly exhaust your offspring—for just $5 admission per person over 5, plus every spare penny, nickel, dime, and quarter extricated JULY | AUGUST 2017

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| Travel

ABOVE AND LEFT : Maine’s

Sebasco Harbor Resort offers candlepin bowling and other vintage games at its 1938 rec center, the Quarterdeck.

OPPOSITE : Having a jolly

good time on Rudy’s Rapid Transit Coaster at Santa’s Village in New Hampshire.

still cost a single cent. Glendale, RI. 401-568-8288; springlakearcade.com

from your couch and car? Freshwater fans have found their way to this swimming hole since the days when it touted “horse keeping” among its amenities. Today, the clean sand, kiddie slides, table tennis on the beach, and $2 boat rentals are what beckon. The raddest blast is the world’s oldest penny arcade—a fixture since 1931—with nearly a century of gaming innovation to test your dexterity. Some antique games, like the W heels of Love,

Starlight Inn and Sunset Drive-In There’s a “red carpet” outside your door, and if you’ve chosen the Elvis Presley room, you’ll have (of course) a king bed. Determined not to let the sun set on the drive-in his parents founded in 1948, Peter Handy doubled down on nostalgia: The old-school yet hightech motel he built in 2014 has movie memorabilia on the walls of each starthemed room. You can sit right outside with the FM radio tuned to what’s playing on four gigantic screens next door. But since drive-in admission is free for your whole carload when you stay overnight, go ahead and get closer to the action … and the concession’s famous hand-cut fries. Colchester, VT. 802-652-2000; starlightinnvt.com | 67

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I L L U S T R ATO R : RYA N O ’ R O U R K E

The much-lauded original American Flatbread (two other locations exist) satisfies the appetite with its signature thin-crusted pizza baked in a woodfired oven, made from locally sourced ingredients.

Its idyllic 1790s farmstead setting is shared by Inn at Lareau Farm, a B&B offering country hospitality and summer art shows in the Big Red Barn. 802-496-8856 AmericanFlatbread.com/restaurants/waitsfield-vt

With a two-screen movie theater, a playground for the kids, and a calendar chock-full of events, from live music to art exhibits, The Big Picture Theater & Café is the ultimate local hangout.

Enjoy delicious meals all day with farm-to-table dining—say “yes” to house-made desserts and maple-glazed donuts!—or sip a cocktail in the cool retro lounge.

802-496-8994 • BigPictureTheater.info

Take in Green Mountain air year-round at the modern White Horse Inn, a 26-room B&B located by the entrance to Sugarbush Mt. Ellen. Indulge in Chef Allen’s full breakfast at daybreak and spend evenings with friends in the beautiful common rooms while enjoying Vermont-made beer and wine. Groups, tours, meetings, corporate retreats, and weddings are welcomed.

802-496-9448 • WhiteHorseInn-Vermont.com

At The Inn at Round Barn Farm some 245 acres of rolling fields mix with flowering meadows, ponds, and organic gardens to create a stunning backdrop for weekend getaways or special events. Modern amenities meld perfectly with the inn’s historic character, evoking a warm atmosphere in which guests can indulge in the best of Vermont’s artisan foods and libations.

802-496-2276 • TheRoundBarn.com

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Step into the classic 1824 farmstead known as The Hyde Away Inn, and you’re in for a taste of true Vermont character. Savor the warm ambiance and delectable cuisine, with dinner served nightly and brunch on Sunday.

Opt for a seat on the patio or by the pond while enjoying craft beers and refreshing cocktails.

802-496-2322 • HydeAwayInn.com

Relaxation and recreation are always in season at West Hill House B&B, a Select Registry property and Green Hotel (free EV charging for guests) set in proximity to all the Valley offers. After a day of fun, retreat to the quiet garden setting, enjoying warm hospitality and great food and drink before settling into your comfortable bed. 802-496-7162 • WestHillBB.com .

At the familyfriendly Tucker Hill Inn you can relax by the outdoor pool in the summer, or cozy up by the fireplace in winter.

Awake to on-site breakfast, set off for a day of recreation, then settle in for a dinner of exceptional cuisine in the dining room or in the casual pub (open to the public WednesdaySaturday). 802-496-3983 • TuckerHill.com

Make a stop at the “Almost World Famous” Warren Store, where the deli creates legendary sandwiches from local ingredients and the bakery draws raves. See why Yankee Magazine named it “Best One-Stop Shopping” as you peruse the fine collection of craft beer and wine, and hunt for unique treasures, jewelry, artisan fashions, and more upstairs.

802-496-3864 • WarrenStore.com • Privacy and comfort join forces at Eagles Resort, where your Swedish-designed fully equipped vacation home awaits. Take a swim in the heated pool, or volley with your partner on the tennis court. Make use of the gym and game room before heading outdoors—ski, hike, bike, or just explore the postcard village of Waitsfield. 802-496-5700 • EaglesResortVT.com •

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¬

When You Go When an architect sets out to pay homage to clever design in manufacturing, the result is the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design, a collection of quality stuff, beautifully made—from toys to kitchen tools, autos to tricycles, and more, all displayed within a rambling antique house near Waitsfield’s Village Bridge.

802-496-6611 • Madsonian.org

PACK YOUR BAGS • Mad River Valley

Discover a diverse collection of shops at Bridge Street Marketplace, where art galleries, restaurants, boutiques, sweet treats, and a quirky museum draw you in for an afternoon of leisurely exploration. Pop in for Wednesday night “RoundUp,” where live music and food trucks add to the fun, or visit during the annual Great Vermont Plein Air Paint-Out weekend.

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Out

About

VERMONT

STOWEFLAKE HOT AIR BALLOON FESTIVAL JULY 7–9

For more than 30 years, the flight of dozens of hot air balloons over Stoweflake Mountain Resort and Spa has been an annual tradition.

Whether you take to the skies for a sunrise or sunset launch or stick to the ground and enjoy the scene, you’ll have a memorable day, thanks to good food, live music, a program of activities for the kids, and a beer and wine garden for the grown-ups. Stowe, VT. 802-253-7355; stoweflake.com

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OUT & ABOUT

| Travel

Yankee’s favorite events this season CONNECTICUT

LITCHFIELD JAZZ FESTIVAL AUG. 5–6

Come rain or shine, you’ll be swaying to the music as top-notch jazz acts hit the Goshen Fairgrounds stage.

Between shows—which include the John Pizzarelli Quartet’s tribute to Frank Sinatra and Antônio Carlos Jobim—you can grab a snack from the array of food vendors or peruse the wares of more than two dozen artisans. Goshen, CT. 860-361-6285; litchfieldjazzfest.com MAINE

MOXIE FESTIVAL JULY 7–9

Three full days can barely contain the “wicked cool” Moxie-fueled fun as Maine celebrates its unique soft drink.

There’ll be plenty of Moxie available, of course, which you can sip as you listen to a concert in the park, stroll through a car show, or watch a parade.

Look for recipe contests, a 5K race, a petting zoo, fireworks, and a Moxie chugging contest, too. Lisbon Falls, ME. 207-522-8697; moxiefestival.com MASSACHUSET TS

MARSHFIELD FAIR AUG. 18–27

BOB INNELLA

The first Marshfield Fair was held in 1867. That same year, Nebraska became the 37th state, the United States purchased the Alaska territory, and Harvard established the first dental school in the country. A lot has changed since 1867, but the fair remains largely the same, offering up a full slate of agricultural and

horticultural demonstrations, crafts, rides, games, livestock contests, and a demolition derby at the Marshfield Fairgrounds. Marshfield, MA. 781-834-6629; marshfieldfair.org NEW HAMPSHIRE

PEMI VALLEY BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL AUG. 2–5

Music rings from the mountains as a bevy of performers takes the stage at the Sugar Shack Campground.

The award-winning Gibson Brothers are always a top attraction, and this year they’ll be joined by the Del McCoury Band, the Lonely Heartstring Band, Newfound Grass, and more. Workshops for both kids and adults are offered throughout.

Thornton, NH. 603-239-2238; pemivalleybluegrass.com RHODE ISLAND

RHODE ISLAND INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL AUG. 8–13

Held at locations throughout Newport and Providence, RIIFF showcases independent films with a week of gala celebrations, premieres, VIP guests, industry seminars, educational programs, and award ceremonies, making it the largest film festival in New England (and the only one in the region that qualifies films for Academy Award consideration).

Providence and Newport, RI. 401-861-4445; film-festival.org —Compiled by Joe Bills

For more best bets around New England, see p. 72

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Travel | O U T & A B O U T CONNECTICUT

AUG. 10–13: NORWICH, Podunk Music Festival.

JULY 4: MYSTIC, Independence Day Celebration.

The day kicks off with boat races on the river and military exercises by the 26th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry on the village green.

The midday parade is followed by a concert, a spelling bee, games, theatrical performances, and more. 860-572-0711; mysticseaport.org JULY 7–9 : NEW LONDON, Sailfest. Attracting more than 300,000 people each year, Sailfest is one of the state’s premier summer events, complete with rides, fireworks, artisans, vendors, and a varied entertainment lineup, all of which play second fiddle to the stars of the show: tall ships. 860-444-1879; sailfest.org JULY 15: EAST LYME, Celebrate East Lyme Street Festival. A mile of Niantic’s Main Street will be closed off to auto traffic to make way for this celebration by the sea, featuring food, fun, an eclectic mix of vendors, live music and performances, and a spectacular f ireworks show over Niantic Bay. 860-739-6931; celebrateeastlyme.com J U LY 15 –16 : W EST P O R T, Fine Arts Festival.

Downtown along the Saugatuck River you’ll find paintings, jewelry, fiber arts, photography, and so on by more than 150 juried artists and artisans. Live music and street performances keep things lively. 203-505-8716; westportfineartsfestival.com

Dodd Stadium plays host to some of the world’s finest bluegrass musicians, a group that this year includes the Gibson Brothers, Rhonda Vincent and the Rage, and the Boxcars. Free workshops throughout the weekend, jam sessions, and open stage time between acts guarantee at least a few surprises. 860-987-7744; podunkbluegrass.net AUG. 11–13: LEBANON, Lebanon Country Fair.

Now in its 58th year, this old-style community event returns to the fairgrounds on Mack Road with music, exhibitions, games, and kids’ activities, all sponsored by the local Lions Club. 860-642-6012; lebanoncountryfair.org AUG. 19 : HARTFORD, Riverfront Dragon Boat and Asian Festival. The Hartford riverfront is widely recognized as one of the premier dragon boat venues in the country, with more than 80 teams expected to compete this year amid two full days of authentic Asian entertainment. dragonboathartford.com AUG. 19: MILFORD, Milford Oyster Festival. Celebrate the town’s seafood legacy with a variety of oysters being served and sold, a shucking contest, and live music on the Fowler Park stage. Headliners have included Blue Oyster Cult, Kansas, and the Marshall Tucker Band.

203-878-5363; milfordoysterfestival.com AUG . 24 –27: BROOKLYN , Brooklyn Fair. The food, the animals, the midway, the entertain-

ment, the crafts, the contests—it’s all here at the area’s oldest agricultural festival, so bring the family. 860-779-0012; brooklynfair.org

MAINE JULY 9 : PORTLAND, Hidden Gardens of Munjoy

Hill. Unusual little gardens are the stars of this walking tour of the Munjoy Hill section of Portland, but plan to set aside time to stroll the Olmsted-designed gardens of Eastern Promenade Park, too. easternpromenade.org JULY 14–16: BELFAST, Maine Celtic Celebration.

Scottish bagpipes, Highland games, a Celtic dog show, a road race, and a wacky “cheese rolling” contest are just a few of the highlights of this family-friendly festival on the waterfront. mainecelticcelebration.com J U LY 14 –23 : WAT E R V I L L E , Maine International Film Festival. Representing the best of independent and international cinema, this 10-day festival showcases nearly 100 films by innovative filmmakers from New England and beyond. 207-861-8138; miff.org JULY 21–23: YARMOUTH, Yarmouth Clam Festival. Now in its 52nd year and still going strong, this weekend of fun includes a parade, fireworks, arts and crafts, road races, competitions, raffles, and plenty of clams and other great food, with proceeds going to local nonprofits. 207-846-3984; clamfestival.com

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110 DANIEL WEBSTER HWY • RTE 3, LINCOLN, NH • (603) 745-8913 • www.clarkstradingpost.com

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OUT & ABOUT

JULY 27–29: AUGUSTA, Maine Quilts. More than

500 contemporary and antique quilts will be on display, with competitions, lectures, demonstrations, and more scheduled throughout the weekend. 207-216-7358; mainequilts.org JULY 28–29 : R ANGELEY, Logging Festival and Parade. Sit down to an authentic Maine bean-hole dinner, cheer a parade down Main Street, view logging horse demonstrations, tour logging exhibits, and marvel at the skills on display at the Maine Forestry Museum Fairgrounds. 207-864-3939; rlrlm.org JULY 28–AUG. 6 : BANGOR , Bangor State Fair.

Bass Park plays host to one of the state’s largest fairs, featuring agricultural competitions, a dog show, livestock shows, and horse judging, as well as midway rides and games, crafts, and a flower show. bangorstatefair.com AUG. 2–6 : ROCKLAND, Maine Lobster Festival.

Harbor Park is the headquarters for five days of feasting and fun. More than 20,000 pounds of lobster will be consumed, so come ready to do your part. In between feasts, there’s a “sea goddess” coronation, a parade, and live entertainment, along with Navy ship tours, cooking contests, and a craft show. 800-576-7512; mainelobsterfestival.com AUG. 4–6: UNION, Maine Antiques Festival. The state’s largest antiques festival, featuring more than 200 dealers at Union Fairgrounds, is the place to discover jewelry, maps, folk art, fur-

OUTLETS

nishings, ceramics, paintings, and more. 207221-3108; maineantiquesfestival.com AUG. 11–13: ROCKLAND, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors Show. Head on down to Harbor Park and Buoy Park to see the work of some of the state’s finest artists, architects, boatbuilders, crafters, designers, furniture makers, and marine gear vendors, as well as 70-plus boats in the water. Also on tap: live music, kids’ events, fine food, and the running of the World Championship Boatyard Dog Trials. maineboats.com AUG. 18–20 : LEWISTON/AUBURN, Great Falls Balloon Festival. Since 1992, this split-campus fund-raising event (at Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston and Festival Plaza in Auburn) has created opportunities for visitors to enjoy amusement rides and games and then support good causes while taking to the skies in one of several dozen hot air balloons. 207240-5931; greatfallsballoonfestival.org

MASSACHUSETTS JUNE 27–AUG. 20 : WILLIAMSTOWN, William-

stown Theatre Festival. Enjoy Tony-winning productions in a beautiful small-town setting.

This season’s lineup includes The Roommate, The Clean House, A Legendary Romance, The Model American, and Where Storms Are Born.

413-458-3200; wtfestival.org

OUTDOOR CAFES

RESTAURANTS

| Travel

JUNE 30 –JULY 4 : BOSTON, Boston Harborfest.

Highlighting Boston’s role in our nation’s founding, this is America’s biggest birthday bash. Events on the waterfront and downtown include a concert series and chowder festival, children’s activities, walking tours, lectures, reenactments, and a dazzling fireworks show.

617-439-7700; bostonharborfest.com JULY 3–4: LENOX, James Taylor. The beloved and influential songwriter and his All-Star Band take to the stage at Tanglewood for the 25th time, with a two-night serving of favorite songs. The July 4 show will be followed by a fireworks display. 617-266-1492; bso.org J U LY 11–16 : B R I M F I E L D, Brimfield Antique Show. The largest outdoor antiques show in the Northeast attracts more than 6,000 dealers selling their wares on a mile-long stretch of Route 20. brimfieldshow.com JULY 14–16: GREENFIELD, Green River Festival.

This three-day musical event at Greenfield Community College features the Mavericks, Pokey LaFarge, Chicano Batman, and more. Top it off with local food, beer and wine, a craft fair, and hot air balloons, and lots of games and activities, and you have the makings of a great weekend. 413-341-5995; greenriverfestival.com J U LY 29 –AUG . 5 : WOODS HOLE , Woods Hole Film Festival. This eight-day showcase of independent film features daily screenings,

EVENTS

COUPON BOOK

All the brands you love and more coming Settlers Green is growing— We’re expanding! Fall 2017, Settlers Green Streetside opens with more brands, more events, more food and entertainment! Mountain views, public art displays, and gardens. Great shopping at more than 75 outlet brands in the White Mountains!

N O RT H C O N WAY , N H

settlersgreen.com | 888-667-9636

The official Grand Opening event at Settlers Green Streetside is October 10-15, 2017. The signature event takes place on Friday the 13th, with an American Bandstand-style community dance party, featuring local and professional dancers, street food and music from all the decades.

W H I T E M O U N TA I N H W Y, N O R T H C O N WAY, N E W H A M P S H I R E

JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Travel | O U T & A B O U T TRUE MAINE: Delight in briny bits and savory bites. Where “local” has always been the way of life. Brightly-scented brews resonate with a hint of a deep sea and rocky coastline. “That place” you can only get to by boat.

Bayside Chocolates, Lubec

The DownEast Acadia region embodies those edible experiences that define TRUE MAINE.

workshops, panel discussions, staged readings, and special events. 508-495-3456; woodsholefilmfestival.org AUG. 3–6 : NEW BEDFORD, Feast of the Blessed Sacrament. Billed as the world’s largest Portuguese feast, this celebration at Madeira Field serves up Portuguese and American fare, live music and entertainment, games, carnival rides, and the largest parade in New Bedford. 508-992-6911; portuguesefeast.com AU G . 24 –27 : B OST O N , St. Anthony’s Feast.

Stroll the colorfully decorated streets of the North End while sampling the wares of nearly 100 pushcart vendors. Italian-style sausage (with peppers and onions), quahogs, calamari, pizza, pasta, zeppole, cannoli, and gelato will be among the offerings, with parades, strolling singers, live entertainment, and contests thrown in to aid your digestion. 617-723-8669; stanthonysfeast.com AUG. 26–27: SALEM, Antique and Classic Boat Festival. Vintage motor yachts and sailboats go on display at Brewer Hawthorne Cove Marina. Tour the vessels, meet the crews, and spend time browsing the crafts market or enjoying the live music—and don’t miss the boat parade on Sunday. 617-666-8530; boatfestival.org

NEW HAMPSHIRE JULY 6–9 : HILLSBOROUGH, Hillsborough Bal-

Art on your brain.

Beauty in your soul.

This year’s special exhibit:

Trees overhead.

Grass underfoot.

Day off the grid.

Smile on your face.

HeritageMuseums.org 508.888.3300 • Sandwich, MA

Lead Sponsor:

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loon Festival and Fair. In the mood for a high-f lying adventure? Take to the skies over Grimes Field, or enjoy the craft show, parade, and fireworks from ground level. balloonfestival.org JULY 15: EXETER, American Independence Festival. View a rare original printing of the Declaration of Independence, listen to a dramatic reading at the American Independence Museum, then step to the beat of fife and drum while enjoying an arts and crafts sale, kids’ activities, fine food, and more.

603-772-2622; independencemuseum.org J U LY 2 0 –2 3 : S T R AT H A M , Stratham Fair.

Stratham Hill Park provides the setting for this long-running county fair. Among the attractions are live entertainment, 4-H exhibits and competitions, midway rides, and the crowning of Miss Stratham Fair.

603-772-4977; strathamfair.com JULY 21–23: FRANCONIA, The Frost Place Anniversary Weekend. Poetry lovers everywhere are invited to come help this museum and arts center, created from the home where Robert Frost lived and worked 100 years ago, mark its 40th anniversary with free readings by poets Charles Simic and Nikky Finney, a performance by Gordon Clapp (N YPD Blue), and a Frost read-a-thon. frostplace.org AUG. 5–13: NEWBURY, League of NH Craftsmen’s Fair. Mount Sunapee Resort hosts the works of juried artists at more than 200 exhibit booths, as well as demonstrations, interactive activities, music, and a variety of food vendors. 603-224-3375; nhcrafts.org AUG. 10 –12 : MANCHESTER , New Hampshire Antiques Show. Explore the finds of more

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 12:32 PM

JULY 8–9 : WICKFORD, Wickford Art Festival.

The tree-lined streets of the downtown area are filled with 200 fine artisans exhibiting their work during this annual event.

401-294-6840; wickfordart.org J U LY 21–23 : K I N GSTO N , South County Hot Air Balloon Fest. More than a dozen hot air balloons at the University of Rhode Island athletic f ields will take to the sky at this community gathering, which also has food, live entertainment, and kids’ activities. southcountyballoonfest.com JULY 23: LINCOLN, Hearthside House Celebrates the 1904 World’s Fair. Enjoy a Hearthside House tour presented by guides in period costume, an exhibit of images of the 1904 fair (including the Rhode Island building, which was modeled after Hearthside), and food and music authentic to the time of the fair. 401-726-0597; hearthsidehouse.org JULY 26 –AUG. 13: WESTERLY, Shakespeare in the Park. The Bard’s comedic Twelfth Night is sure to provide an evening of laughs in lovely Wilcox Park. Bring a blanket and settle in under the stars for this free event.

401-596-7909; thecolonialtheater.org AUG. 5: WESTERLY/PAWCATUCK, River Glow.

Take part in hayrides through downtown and enjoy live music in three locations as 37 floating bonfires illuminate the Pawcatuck River. 401-596-7761; westerlychamber.org AUG. 16–20 : RICHMOND, Washington County Fair. The state’s largest agricultural fair presents concerts, a giant midway, horse and tractor pulls, arts and crafts displays, and a farm museum at the county fairgrounds.

401-539-7042; washingtoncountyfair-ri.com AUG . 18 –20 : PAW TUCKET, Grecian Festival.

From the Greek Pride dancers and the Greek agora (marketplace) to the traditional pastries and kafenio (café), this celebration of all things Greek at the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church is still getting better, nearly a century on. assumptionri.org/GreekFestRI/index.htm

VERMONT

Old Fashioned Country Fun at

Red Apple Farm Phillipston, MA

Free Admission!

Fiddlers. Food. Festivals. Harvest season is a fabulous time to visit Johnny Appleseed Country. Celebrate the season in Johnny’s backyard!

Appleseed.org

INVENTING ROCKWELL & WARHOL A MERICA:

© 1960, SEPS. Norman Rockwell Museum Collections. (detail)

RHODE ISLAND

Sept 2 • 10-6pm Sept 3 • 10-5pm Sept 4 • 10-4pm

© 2017, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

than 60 dealers, displayed in “rooms” at the Radisson Hotel’s exhibition space. Expect country and formal furniture, clocks, folk art, paintings and prints, textiles, glassware, ceramics, and more. nhada.org AUG. 13: PETERBOROUGH, MacDowell Colony Medal Day. The nation’s oldest artists’ colony opens to the public for just one day each year. Tour studios and meet artists in residence, picnic on the grounds, and celebrate the work of filmmaker David Lynch, this year’s recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal for achievement in the arts. 603-9243886; macdowellcolony.org

June 10 - October 29

Generously sponsored by The Hayseed Hill Foundation, Inc. and The Red Lion Inn.

JULY 4 : WOODSTOCK, Old Vermont 4th. Cel-

ebrate our nation’s day of independence at Billings Farm and Museum, where the patriotic fun will include the reading of the

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NRM.org • Stockbridge, MA • #intheBerkshires • open daily • 413.298.4100

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Be gininathetradition heart of Ogunquit.

Experience the heart of Ogunquit at your door every season of the year—lobsters and lighthouses, sandy beaches and sunsets, world class dining and relaxation.

Let us help you begin a Maine tradition today.

Ogunquit, Maine I 800-633-8718 I reservations at: meadowmere.com

Travel | O U T & A B O U T

New Harbor, Maine 04554

Declaration of Independence, reenactments of historic debates, wagon rides, 1890-style flag making, spelling bees, and an egg toss.

802-457-2355; billingsfarm.org JULY 6–9: BRANDON, Basin Bluegrass Festival.

Bluegrass pickin’ and the rolling green hills At the just harbor entrance of Vermont go together.

Secure a day or weekend207-677-3727 ticket, bring the family, and www.gosnold.com immerse yourself in music on Basin Road. basinbluegrassfestival.com JULY 8 : CR AF TSBURY, Antiques and Uniques Festival. More than 100 vendors take to the town common as music plays, antique cars cruise by, specialty foods are served, and roaming buskers add to the ambience. townofcraftsbury.com/antiques-uniques JULY 16 : SHELBURNE, Vermont04554 Cheesemakers New Harbor, Maine Festival. With more cheesemakers per capita than any other state, Vermont knows good fromage. That accumulated expertise makes this one of the season’s can’t-miss events.

Sample local cheeses and meet their makers at Shelburne Farms, on the shores of Lake Champlain. 866-261-8595; vtcheesefest.com JULY 27–30 : BURLINGTON, Lake Champlain Maritime Festival. Live music, paddleboard rides, antique boat show, a 5K run/walk, Atan the harbor entrance a craft sale,207-677-3727 international food offerings, and kids’ exhibits all combine to make the Lake www.gosnold.com Champlain waterfront the place to be during this annual salute to summer. 802-4823313; lcmfestival.com

WILD SPACES, OPEN SEASONS

New Harbor, Maine 04554

Hunting and Fishing in American Art

JUNE 3–AUGUST 27

At the harbor entrance 207-677-3727 www.gosnold.com

lly Fly a bi rd!

Actua

Photo: Keith Ellenbogen

An Unforge ttab le and

NHSchoolofFalconry.com Actually Fly a bird!

at N H School o

MAKES A GREAT GIFT!

shelburnemuseum.org This exhibition has been organized by Shelburne Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, and Joslyn Art Museum, and is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Winslow Homer, A Huntsman and Dogs (detail), 1891. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The William L. Elkins Collection, 1924.

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Call Nancy Cowan 603-464-6213 Email: falconers@comcast.net NEWENGLAND.COM

5/12/17 3:13 PM

f Fa l

JULY 28 –30 : WOODSTOCK , Bookstock. Meet

established and emerging writers as they present their work in intimate venues throughout the village center, then load up at the used and vintage book sale, enjoy some good food, and listen to live music on the town green. bookstockvt.org JULY 28 –AUG . 6 : DEERFIELD VALLEY, Blueberry Festival. The days are filled with all manner of blueberry-inspired activities at this annual fest, including block parties, a blue-eyes contest, blueberry foods, blueberry bingo, a pajama party in the blueberry field, the Blueberry Ball, and a pie eating contest, held at venues throughout the valley. 802464-8092; vermontblueberry.com AUG. 4–6: BENNINGTON, Southern Vermont Art and Craft Festival. Part of Bennington’s Arts Weekend, this is a veritable feast of handmade crafts, original art, live music, and gourmet food offerings, plus a wine and craft beer tent, all at Camelot Village. 802-4253399; craftproducers.com AUG . 25 –SE P. 3 : ESSE X J U NC T ION , Champlain Valley Fair. Celebrate agriculture and much, much more at the Champlain Valley Exposition fairgrounds. Highlights include circus acts, vendor booths, gardening exhibits, great food, blue-ribbon competitions, livestock shows, and concerts (this year’s headliners are John Mellencamp and TLC).

802-878-5545; cvexpo.org

Prince Edward Island CANADA

VERMONT

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828-273-0915

princeedwardislandhome.com

Lee Founders Weekend September 15-17, 2017 Lee, Massachusetts

Taste of Lee •5K Road Race Fireworks Show •Hometown Parade Food, Music, Clowns, Magic, History, and Fireworks!

www.leechamber.org/festivals JULY | AUGUST 2017

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

WALK FROM INN-TO-INN AND SEE VERMONT AT 10 MILES A DAY PART 1: (9.1 miles)

PART 2: (10.7 miles)

PART 3: (8.8 miles)

INN VICTORIA TO

OLD TOWN FARM INN TO

GOLDEN STAGE INN TO

Chester, VT 802-875-4288 InnVictoria.com

Chester, VT 802-875-2346 Otfi.com

Proctorsville, VT 802-226-7744 GoldenStageInn.com

PART 4: (11.2 miles) THE COLONIAL HOUSE INN Weston, VT 802-824-6286 CoHoInn.com

www.VermontInntoInnWalking.com • 802-875-4288 | 77

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5/12/17 10:37 AM

I

am standing in the lot of an RV dealership outside Worcester, Massachusetts, on a sunny summer day, sweating and scribbling instructions as our rental agent races through a systems rundown for the Gulf Stream Mini Cruiser she’s about to hand over.

She’s rushing—two other customers are in the queue—and I’m struggling to keep up. I page back through my notes, which have all the clarity of a drunken brainstorm on a bar napkin.

Plugging or unplugging or unplugging, I read. Kick 4 rear tours. What? Holding tanks empty diesel fill. Dear God. The idea, if my family and I can ever get off the lot, is to make this rig our temporary home as we travel up the Maine coast—from Kittery to the Canadian border—searching for the best lobster roll in the state, which, accounting for geography and the fact that these are the freshest, sweetest lobsters you’ll find, makes it reasonable to then declare it the best in New England, and thus in the country. I’ll be eating two to five rolls a day—maybe

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not the whole roll but, out of fairness, at least half. A modest RV just big enough for my three-person family seems like a smart way to cover the 600-mile round trip without all the repacking. But my history with RVs is complicated, which is why my note-taking assumes an ever-greater sense of urgency. Our only previous experience began with the rear end of our factory-new 33-footer perched on a boulder and ended with us accidentally driving up Maine’s Cadillac Mountain Summit Road.

But this model is several years old, just 25 feet long, and narrower by a third. And it’s been more than a decade since our disaster. We have more wisdom and better insurance. We also have an 8-year-old son and a new puppy, a Chihuahua-spaniel-poodle mix freshly rescued from a kill shelter in Georgia.

It’s been only a week and he barely recognizes us, but we had little control over the timing—a reality underscored by the fact that the adoption agency was named Divine Intervention. To err is human, to save a dog....

Training “completed,” we pack up our things and head north. Already the drive feels easier. In our previous model, the cab was so wide that if my husband and I stretched our arms toward each other, our fingertips didn’t touch. This time we’re in something more like a large van, only with a queen-size bed, sofa, kitchenette, and proper shower. Nevertheless, we’re spending our first night with our friends Tim and Lisa in Scarborough.

We’ll ease into this one, thanks. With the sun setting, we snake up a long, wooded driveway, hearing the pine branches softly brush the side panels, before we find their rambling house and barn aglow with warm light.

“We’re here, Louie!” I tell the puppy.

He has spent most of the drive huddled in my lap, more skittish than cozy. I wonder aloud if taking a rescue dog— recently trucked hundreds of miles in a van full of apprehensive canines—on a road trip might, in his mind, read less as “family getaway” and more as another abandonment. My theory is confirmed

C A R L T R E M B L AY (M c LO O NS) . P R E V I O US SP R E A D : P H OTO GR A P H BY M A R K F L E M I N G ; F O O D A N D P R O P S T Y L I N G B Y C AT R I N E K E LT Y ( LO B S T E R R O L L)

McLoons Lobster Shack, South Thomaston

NEWENGLAND.COM

5/12/17 10:46 AM

C A R L T R E M B L AY (M c LO O NS) . P R E V I O US SP R E A D : P H OTO GR A P H BY M A R K F L E M I N G ; F O O D A N D P R O P S T Y L I N G B Y C AT R I N E K E LT Y ( LO B S T E R R O L L)

The GREAT LOBSTER ROLL ADVENTURE as he promptly unloads said anxiety on the kitchen floor, couch, and doormat.

I chase him around with paper towels, babbling apologies. “No worries,” Tim says repeatedly as he hoses off the mess.

“This isn’t that unusual on a farm.”

In bed that night, I take stock of my challenge: to make a series of comparisons among dishes tasted only hours or days apart, and determine one single winner. A set of criteria is needed, as well as a searching and fearless written inventory of my own lobster roll biases.

I take out my notepad: 1. The beauty of the Maine lobster roll is its simplicity, a perfect marriage of lean, sweet meat with a buttery bun and rich sauces (mayo or butter). Therefore, lettuce, with its bitter, vegetal flavors and tendency to wilt and turn slimy when exposed to heat or mayonnaise, has no place in any lobster roll, ever. Celery, shallots, lemon zest, lobster roe, chives—all may be considered on a case-by-case basis, but tradition runs deep here.

2. On the matter of sauces, mayonnaise should be tossed with the meat just before serving or served on the side. Lobster left to sit in mayo absorbs its flavor and turns flabby. And while butter may be better (or not—I’m neutral on this), it should be poured over warm meat, lest it congeal.

3. The roll must be split-top, buttered, and toasted on a griddle.

4. The whole shebang should fit into an average-size mouth, so that each bite is a medley of sweet (not oversalted) meat, buttery bun, and sauce.

5. In the end, don’t we all just want a great roll and a view?

I also establish a set of categories by which each roll will be rated on a 10-point scale: portion size, meat texture and sweetness, saucing, bun, extraneous additions (e.g., the dreaded lettuce), and ambience. As I’ve learned, there can be tremendous variation among these categories, even for such a simple dish. Some shacks oversalt the cooking water, others overcook the meat, and buttering the roll is an art in itself. One contender, the diminutive roll at Eventide Oyster Co., is so atypical, with its Chinese-style steamed bun and brown butter sauce, that it really needs its own taxonomy. But it’s too good to be ignored, so I add it to the list.

Prejudices accounted for, I consult my roster of destinations, compiled over several weeks of talking with local food experts and a source list from 15 years writing about New England food. For ease of navigation, I’ve Google-mapped the contestants and color-coded them by day to optimize the ratio of miles driven to lobsters consumed.

[Ed. note: What follows is the saga of Amy’s road trip, which highlights some of her most memorable lobster roll stops. But if you can’t wait to see the full list, ranked, go ahead and take a peek at p. 89.]

YARMOUTH TO ROCKPORT

I arrive at our f irst stop with a full appetite and fresh confidence. We’ve all slept well, and as we pull into Day’s Crabmeat and Lobster Pound in Yar-

HIGH-WATER MARKS A selective timeline of lobsterrelated events.

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mouth, we’re thankful that the RV fits easily into a spot along the shoulder.

From the road (and there are six lanes of it between Route 1 and I-295), Day’s doesn’t look promising, but behind the 1943 building is a surprising idyll: a cluster of picnic tables on a shaded bank of the Cousins River. We split a very respectable lobster roll; however, I’m more drawn to the crab roll, filled with shreds of peekytoe crab extracted by skilled pickers who can strip a crab in about two minutes. It’s a dying art, so the shacks that still offer crab tend to sell out quickly. The roll is seasoned with celery salt and served with sweet coleslaw, nicely dressed. But what am I saying? We’re here for lobster. The story of the Maine crab roll will wait for another trip.

DAY ’S CR A BME AT A ND L OBS T ER P OUND

Portion: 6 Texture: 6 Sweetness: 7 Saucing: 5

Bun: 8 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 6

~2.6 MILLION YEARS AGO

~3,500 YEARS AGO

The Pleistocene era, during which the American lobster is thought to have first emerged, gets under way.

Earliest known depiction of a lobster (spiny) is carved on a temple wall in Deir el-Bahari, Egypt.

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Our next stop is just six minutes away, in South Freeport. “Anyone hungry?” I ask. Crickets. We drive through piney dales, then past rambling farmhouses in the old village where Middle Street meets Main Street, which deadends at Harraseeket Lunch & Lobster Company. A sign at the entrance reads “Congested Area,” and we brace ourselves. But the Brewer South marina is right next door. “See?” I say to my husband, Scott, who’s driving. “Trucks come here.” “But they’re better drivers than I am,” he says, dejectedly. Still, he maneuvers the rig into the only available parking spot, at the edge of the lot, and I dash in for another round.

This is a lovely place, with plenty of water views and red-striped petunias in planters. Three generations of women—grandmother, daughter, young granddaughter—step up to the window in their kayaking gear while a man across the deck coaches his baff led companions in the art of eating steamers. “Look,” he says, “this is the neck. Pull here….”

When I f inally reach the order window, I’m startled out of my reverie by the sight of some green leaf lettuce at the prep station. Surely that’s not intended for ... it can’t ... wait, is she…? Now imagine me shouting a slow-motion Nooooooooooooooo! as I fly through the order window, pulling the prep cook down in a tuck-and-roll away from the lettuce.

In the real world, though, I take a few halfhearted bites and head back to the RV. You might wonder, Why didn’t you just ask to hold the lettuce? And I will, next time. But the test here is on the default roll, which, sans lettuce, would be a decent treat (albeit too heavy on the mayo) after a day of outlet shopping.

H A RR ASEEK E T L UNCH & L OBS T ER COMPA N Y

Portion: 8 Texture: 7 Sweetness: 8 Saucing: 5

We see apple trees loaded with stillsmall fruit and marshy rivers ref lecting a glossy jade green. There are farm stands and f ields of Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod and loosestrife.

Our high hopes for Harpswell’s Estes Lobster House—quirky and beachy— are dashed when we find the meat in the roll has been marinating in mayo to the point of indistinguishability. But Louie enjoys the adjacent dog park, and I appreciate that the lettuce is served on the side. We listen to the gentle lapping of water against the pebbly, seaweedpiled beach until it’s time to put some miles on our rig and head to our first campground, in Rockport.

ESTES LOBSTER HOUSE

Bun: 8 Extraneous additions: 3 Ambience: 9

Back in the RV, we ride on through archetypal coastal villages, past the famous Red’s Eats in Wiscasset (which we’ll get to a little later), and down the Harpswell Peninsula. Though this is the southernmost of the beloved Maine peninsulas and closer to population centers, it hasn’t lost its agrarian feel.

Portion: 8 Texture: 3 Sweetness: 3 Saucing: 3

Bun: 8 Extraneous additions: 9 Ambience: 9

4TH CENT URY

1605

1620

1800s

1810

Ancient Rome’s De re coquinaria—today the oldest cookbook in the world— includes several lobster recipes, among them boiled lobster with cumin sauce and lobster with wine.

The first recorded lobster catch in the New World is made by English sailors off today’s Maine coast: “…we drew with a small net of twenty fathoms very nigh the shore; we got about thirty very good and great lobsters.”

English physician Tobias Venner touts lobster as an aphrodisiac in his treatise on healthy living, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam.

The first New England “smack boats” appear, allowing fishermen to transport live catch via holding tanks with circulating seawater.

The wooden lath trap—that most iconic of lobstering gear—is said to originate on Cape Cod, MA.

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NEWENGLAND.COM

5/18/17 2:38 PM

The GREAT LOBSTER ROLL ADVENTURE I’ve booked a spot for tonight at the Megunticook Campground on the basis of its in-ground pool, but at first glance the worn clubhouse, weedy playground, sagging porches, and peeling paint speak of rough Maine winters and a too-short summer season. The lounge, with its sparse furniture, seems designed for neither lounging nor lingering.

I step outside and see a pickup truck with a Confederate f lag in the window and what appears to be a squirrel skin tacked over the glove compartment. A bumper sticker on the back reads: Redneck born, redneck bred, redneck till the day I’m dead. Spine prickling, I immediately turn and head back to the RV. What have I gotten us into?

As I hightail it down the dirt road to our site, however, I notice happy families setting up campfires near a row of rustic cabins. They wave and smile. And most of the sites are filled.

What am I missing?

The next morning, I discover the answer. Before packing up for the day’s adventure, my son and I walk the dog away from the gloomy clubhouse, through wooded camping sites, and down toward a glimpse of blue through the trees. At the base of the hill, we stumble across the campground’s real attraction: a wonderfully clear view of West Penobscot Bay, with blue sky, glimmering water, and Indian Island to the left. So this is what all those happy campers knew.

This spot is heaven.

ROCKPORT TO EASTPORT

I am surrounded by lobster wimps.

I’m informed that I can drop the rest of my family off in Camden and do my tasting alone. Leaving them at the bookstore, I turn off Route 1 onto Mountain Street and hear a sound that brings some very bad 12-yearold memories back to vivid life: the grindy-screechy sound of metal on metal. A dozen wincing tourists turn to see where the noise is coming from and f ind me wide-eyed behind the wheel. What is it? What IS it?

“You’ve hit the street sign.”

I glance to my right. A friendlylooking couple are pointing up toward the roof above the passenger’s seat.

“What? Where?”

“It’s right at your roof level,” the man says. “Just turn your wheel to the left and you’ll get out from under it.”

I do, and ... I do. Later, I scramble up to check the roof and see that there’s barely a mark. My RV luck has finally turned around.

My first stop is McLoons Lobster Shack in South Thomaston, which puts the morning’s drama far out of mind. Imagine the lobster shack of your dreams: a tiny red hut perched over the water with a tented patio and picnic tables. Across a small cove, another red building serves as the drop-off point for day boats like the Four Winds, whose crew is unloading lobster crates while the Edith C.

idles behind, waiting for the berth.

And one family does it all, the catching and the cooking. There’s homemade peach pie and coleslaw and the freshest lobster. And here’s the genius part: Not only can you get a half-andhalf roll (one side butter, one side mayonnaise, sliced crosswise), but also they put the mayo in the bottom of the bun. Like a condiment! Which is what it is! The lobster tastes like lobster, the bun tastes like butter, and the sauces enrich the lean meat. One thing is certain: This will be hard to beat. But I have many more rolls to go before I sleep....

McLOONS LOBSTER SHACK

Portion: 10 Texture: 10 Sweetness: 8 Saucing: 10

Bun: 10 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 10

Just up the road, Waterman’s Beach Lobster knocks me out with a perfect roll served on a griddled hamburger

1817

1837

1842

1850s

1872

1874

The American lobster is described as a distinct species

by Philadelphia naturalist Thomas Say.

The American lobster gets its current scientific name, Homarus americanus, courtesy of French zoologist Henri Milne-Edwards.

The nation’s first lobster cannery is established in Eastport, ME; the industry spreads rapidly over the next 30-odd years.

Wooden lath traps become the dominant gear, replacing hoop nets.

Maine becomes the first U.S. state to ban the taking of eggbearing female lobsters.

Maine becomes the first U.S. state to set a minimum legal size for caught or harvested lobsters.

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bun that’s so good I soften my stance on split-tops. But right as I pull out my notebook to rave about this roll and today’s most excellent itinerary, I notice a small whiteboard perched between two Adirondack chairs. It says: Just want to let all our excellent customers know … closing for the season September 4th. We have been here for 30 years and have decided that this is our final season. Thank you! A hastily scribbled heart and smiley face do little to cushion the blow.

If you managed to go to Waterman’s in the past 30 years, lucky you.

If not, I wish I could’ve sent you there.

— For Vacationland newbies, Bar Harbor is often the end of the road. But we’re headed more than 100 miles north, a stone’s throw from the Canadian border. Eastport, Maine, America’s easternmost city, is home to three destinations of note: Raye’s Mustard; the Old Sow, the largest tidal whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere (the name

derives from sough, an Old English– derived word for drain); and Quoddy Bay Lobster, which I have been assured by people I trust is really, no, really and truly worth the drive.

It’s dark as we pull into our campground, and Quoddy’s is closed, which means that today was only a two-roll day. “I want to find that Old Sow thing tomorrow,” I say before climbing up to our bed above the driver’s seat. The air smells salty. It’s quiet. I sleep the sleep of the just.

1875

1885

1 8 9 0 –1 8 9 5

1895

1918

The first North American lobster pound opens on the Maine island of Vinalhaven.

North American lobster landings soar to 130 million pounds. Live lobster is in demand as a delicacy; in New York, late-night restaurants called “lobster palaces” cater to the rich and famous.

Vermont-born biologist Francis Hobart Herrick writes (and beautifully illustrates) a definitive monograph called The American Lobster: A Study of Its Habits and Developments.

Maine’s lobster canning industry largely comes to a close, after years of decline brought on by new regulations and increased competition from Canada.

The lobster craze of the late 19th century takes its toll: With North American stocks depleted, only 33 million pounds are landed, a decline of 75 percent since 1885.

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Quoddy Bay Lobster, Eastport

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AMY TR AVERSO

The GREAT LOBSTER ROLL ADVENTURE EASTPORT TO BAR HARBOR

The next morning I wake to the sound of a foghorn, the patter of rain on the roof, and the drip-drip-drip of water hitting linoleum. Stumbling into the bathroom, I f ind a growing puddle and look up to see that the ceiling vent is leaking. We place a few pots on the f loor and dial the dealership. “Aw, really?” our rental agent says. “It hasn’t rained much this summer, so nobody complained.”

“Well, what are we supposed to do with a leaky roof?”

“Just drive,” she says. “The water streams off instead of coming in.”

“But what are you going to do about this?” I’m beginning to feel real indignation about the whole thing. I read somewhere that when you’re in a difficult negotiation, silence is your best tool. Your opponent will often say what you want to hear just to fill the awkward vacuum. So I wait.

“I’m not giving you a discount, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says.

I picture us driving in circles for hours, just trying to keep dry. Fortunately, the rain turns to a light mist, so I leash the dog and step out for an overdue walk. Heading down to the shore, I notice that the water appears to be moving not toward the land but rather in a clockwise fashion. This is it! The Old Sow! I call my family out to see.

What the whirlpool lacks in speed, it makes up for in size. We watch

seabirds land in a cluster in one spot and, despite their effortful paddling, slowly fan apart. Looking across the bay toward Deer Island, New Brunswick, we spot some f lotsam at a distance that appears to define the outer edge—at its maximum diameter, the Old Sow measures about 250 feet.

Curiosity satisf ied, we pack up and head into Eastport, ready for Quoddy Bay Lobster.

Quoddy’s roll is as good as promised. The view is less overtly picturesque, the smell more pungent from

It’s a cliché to talk about unspoiled towns that reflect “the way [blank] used to be,” but it’s tough to resist this thought in Eastport. the fish salting operation next door; however, the meat is the sweetest we’ve had so far and the kitchen garnishes each roll with two prettily preserved claws. We split a homemade whoopie pie for dessert, but I notice cannoli on the menu.

“Cannoli?” I ask the woman at the counter. “Is that a thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“At a lobster shack? Are there a lot of Italians in Eastport?”

“No,” she says, and seems disinclined to elaborate.

It will have to remain a mystery.

Q U O D D Y B AY LOBSTER

Portion: 10 Texture: 9 Sweetness: 10 Saucing: 9

Bun: 10 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 8

There’s something refreshing about a town that doesn’t kowtow to tourists. This small city of 1,300 lost its booming sardine industry but remains a place unto itself, with a deep-water harbor, salmon farms, and promising bets on hydroelectricity and other new industry. And yes, there are some galleries and cafés for us visitors. It’s a travel writer’s cliché to talk about unspoiled towns that ref lect “the way [blank] used to be,” but it’s tough to resist the thought here, particularly as we head back south to Bar Harbor along the Bold Coast Scenic Byway, where the piney forests are interrupted only by stark blueberry barrens, and a sharp curve in the road may lead you to another cove of that pure jade water and a view of islands in the distance.

1 9 2 0 s –1 9 3 0 s

1929

1930s

1933

1942

1947

A “lobster bust” sets in as landings plummet.

In 1936, Maine records a low of 5.1 million pounds, down from an all-time high of 24.4 million in 1889.

The first lobster roll reputedly is served at Perry’s in Milford, CT.

Wooden “parlor” lobster traps, the forerunners of modern wire traps, are developed.

Maine becomes the first and only U.S. state to institute a maximum legal size for caught lobsters.

The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is formed to promote and protect America’s East Coast fisheries.

The Maine Lobster Festival debuts in Camden, ME; the next year it moves to Rockland, where it’s been held ever since.

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Compared with so much untouched wildness, Mount Desert Island has the feel of a vacation theme park when we first arrive, an impression strengthened by the fact that we’re staying at a KOA, ahem, kampground. This is an extrovert’s paradise, with RVs and campers parked cheek-by-jowl and the general sense that every night is a party.

Folks string up lights, stoke campfires, invite each other over. It’s charming in its way, but a culture shock after

Eastport. And I have places to be, specif ically Thurston’s Lobster Pound, about 25 minutes away at the base of the island. Once again my trusty companions opt out, so I leave them at our site with a bag of firewood and s’mores fixings and set off down Route 102. Five minutes in, it begins to rain.

I picture my husband and son shivering and huddled under a picnic table as their fire sputters, but I press on. So many lobster rolls, so few days. I bet on

the likelihood that someone within a 10-foot radius will take them in.

Perched above Bass Harbor on a misty early evening, Thurston’s is easily one of the prettiest shacks I’ve seen. I snap a photo of its signature wall of lobster buoys, the Motif Number 1 of MDI. Although there’s a long line out the door, someone alerts me that the adjoining bar, which is nearly empty, also serves lobster rolls, so I grab a seat on the deck. Again, I find

1947

19 4 8

1967

1970s

1975

1987

The first fishermen’s co-op in Maine—and reportedly in the nation—is founded at Pemaquid Harbor.

Maine passes the “V-notch law,” protecting female lobsters that have been marked as breeding stock via a notch cut in the tail.

In 1995, V-notch protection would be extended from Maine to Cape Cod, MA.

One of the oldest American lobster fossils, a claw, is found at Sankaty Head on Nantucket.

Wire-mesh lobster traps begin to replace the traditional wooden ones.

Lobster prices soar, hitting nearly $7.50 per pound wholesale (adjusted for inflation).

Dedicated to research and education, the Lobster Institute is founded at the University of Maine.

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Thurston’s Lobster Pound, Mount Desert Island

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AMY TR AVERSO

The GREAT LOBSTER ROLL ADVENTURE some sad lettuce in my bun. But the meat is wonderfully plump and tender, and it’s worth having to pick some limp leaves from the bun to be in such a beautiful spot.

BAGADUCE LUNCH

THURSTON’S LOBSTER POUND

Portion: 8 Texture: 5 Sweetness: 5 Saucing: 2 Portion: 8 Texture: 10 Sweetness: 7 Saucing: 7

Bun: 7 Extraneous additions: 3 Ambience: 10

After executing a masterful fivepoint turn to extract the RV from a tight spot, I feel as if I can take on the world. When I get back to our campsite, I find the fire going and s’mores at the ready. It never rained, they said.

BAR HARBOR TO BOOTHBAY

From a lobster perspective, the next day is something of a letdown. In Penobscot, Bagaduce Lunch offers

little plastic cups, the butter congeals as soon as it touches the cold meat.

And these rolls are huge, much too big to get a single bite of bun and meat unless you remove half the contents.

This drives the price up to a whopping $24, and Red’s takes only cash, so any visit requires a quick trip to the ATM parked conveniently on-site. If you want pounds of lobster and money’s no object, this is the roll for you.

Bun: 8 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 8

noteworthy seafood and shady places to sit along the rushing Bagaduce River, but the lobster roll is much too heavy on the mayo.

And then there’s Red’s Eats, the famous red lobster shack of Wiscasset. Nine years earlier, I embarked on a similar lobster odyssey up the coast, going as far as Castine, and Red’s was a clear winner. And surely those traff ic-jamming lines are a testament to its quality, or its crowdpleasing charm, or at least the power of a crowd to attract a bigger crowd.

Nevertheless, I find that I now have two problems with the lobster roll at this Maine mainstay: While the sauces are served blessedly on the side, and the butter is poured from an old-fashioned enamel kettle into

R E D ’ S E AT S

Portion: 4 Texture: 10 Sweetness: 8 Saucing: 5

Bun: 10 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 5

Checking my email as I pick at the roll, I f ind that a colleague has forwarded a tip about an “amazing” lobster roll on Vinalhaven, produced out of a food truck called Greet’s Eats, where Greta McCarthy, a seventhgeneration islander from a lobstering family, prepares her lobster rolls,

1990

1993

2012

2015

2016

2016

Maine lobster landings reach 28 million pounds, topping their historic peak of 24.4 million, set back in 1889.

McDonald’s debuts the first national fast-food lobster roll, dubbed the McLobster (largely a flop, though it earns some diehard fans in Canada and even New England).

U.S. lobster landings hit a record 150 million pounds; at the same time, prices nose-dive to less than $3 a pound.

The U.S. Senate unanimously approves a resolution designating September 25 as National Lobster Day.

Thieves pull off a million-dollar lobster heist at a New Brunswick seafood company. (Four men have been charged and are awaiting trial.)

Maine’s lobster industry sets records for both its landings (130 million pounds) and catch value ($533 million).

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burgers, fries, and the like. I try to rework my itinerary to get out there, but the ferry ride is 75 minutes and that means losing half a day to one roll. I can’t make it work.

Still, the thought of Greta out there on her island haunts me as we head south toward Boothbay and Georgetown, where I f ind plenty of beautiful scenery but where the rolls don’t reach the greatness of Quoddy or McLoons. All these miles, and the trip might be incomplete.

THE LOBSTER SHACK AT T W O L I G H T S

Portion: 10 Texture: 9 Sweetness: 8 Saucing: 10

BOOTHBAY TO THE BORDER

We spot our f irst big box store in days when we reach the outskirts of Brunswick. “ We could be anywhere in America,” I remark sadly.

At sunset, we make it to the Lobster Shack at Two Lights in Cape Elizabeth, where the 180-degree view of the rocky shore is as impressive as the roll, which, bless them, is served with a dollop of mayo on top (or butter on the side). Just the right size, excellent bun. Another winner.

Bun: 10 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 10

Likew ise, in Kennebunkpor t, where I meet a friend the next day, we f ind hot buttered excellence at the Clam Shack, despite the touristclogged environs of Dock Square. Big chunks of meat, claws, and tail are served on a f luffy, buttery hamburger bun. It may not be doctrine, but it’s one very good and very accessible roll for (comparative) southerners.

THE CLAM SHACK

Portion: 7 Texture: 10 Sweetness: 10 Saucing: 10

Bun: 10 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 6

Although there are other stops, the Clam Shack is the last great find. We drive the rest of the way back, knowing we’ll miss our portable little home, with its stripped-down simplicity, and most of all the full immersion in Maine.

And yet I can’t shake my regret at not visiting Greet’s. So a few weeks later, I rise at dawn and drive to Rockland, buzzing through Wiscasset as the

S U S A N C O L E K E L LY

The Lobster Shack at Two Lights, Cape Elizabeth

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BUN

EXTRANEOUS ADDITIONS

AMBIENCE

AV E R A G E

Bun: 8 Extraneous additions: 10 Ambience: 9

SAUCING

Portion: 10 Texture: 6 Sweetness: 8 Saucing: 6

SWEETNESS

G R E E T ’ S E AT S

ROLL CALL TEXTURE

still-closed windows of Red’s seem to wink: Not yet. I make the Vinalhaven ferry with 10 minutes to spare. After 45 minutes at sea, we begin threading our way through the channel between Pole and Cedar islands, two fragments of the archipelago that rings Vinalhaven. They are low to the sea, small, and dense with pines. The sun sparkles off the waves, and the islands’ smooth granite ledges look warmed and inviting, making me want to shed all caution and dive in. Now a few houses dot the shore, and commercial lobster boats are heading out to sea.

The Greet’s Eats truck is a fourminute walk from the ferry and just 20 steps from the fishermen’s co-op. The roll is more finely chopped than many, which makes for easier eating, but I find I miss the chew and tear of larger chunks. And there’s about 10 percent more mayonnaise than I’d like. It’s a very good roll, but not my favorite.

That honor goes to McLoons, which I find myself dreaming of as summer turns to fall and the first snows fall.

Still, I’m so glad to have answered the question and to be here, immersed one more time in this land of lobster and exquisite beauty.

PORTION

S U S A N C O L E K E L LY

The GREAT LOBSTER ROLL ADVENTURE

#1 - McLoons Lobster Shack

10

10

8

10

10

10

10

9.71

The Lobster Shack at Two Lights

10

9

8

10

10

10

10

9.57

Quoddy Bay Lobster

10

9

10

9

10

10

8

9.43

The Clam Shack

7

10

10

10

10

10

6

9

Waterman’s Beach Lobster (R.I.P.)

7

9

10

10

8

10

9

9

Greet’s Eats

10

6

8

6

8

10

9

8.14

Boothbay Lobster Wharf

10

8

8

7

3

10

9

7.86

Five Islands Lobster Co.

8

8

8

8

3

10

10

7.86

Bite into Maine

8

9

6

9

6

8

8

7.71

Muscongus Bay Lobster

8

9

6

9

6

8

8

7.71

Red’s Eats

4

10

8

5

10

10

5

7.43

Thurston’s Lobster Pound

8

10

7

7

7

3

10

7.43

Gurnet Trading Co.

10

8

7

4

7

10

4

7.14

Bob’s Clam Hut

8

6

7

7

10

10

2

7.14

Day’s Crabmeat and Lobster Pound

6

6

7

5

8

10

6

6.86

Harraseeket Lunch & Lobster Company

8

7

8

5

8

3

9

6.86

Bagaduce Lunch

8

5

5

2

8

10

8

6.57

East Boothbay General Store

9

8

6

9

5

5

3

6.43

Estes Lobster House

8

3

3

3

8

9

9

6.14

Eventide Oyster Co.

While I’m a big fan of Eventide’s lobster roll, it’s so substantially different from the others that I couldn’t make a fair comparison. But in its own category of brown butter-sauced lobster served on a Chinese-style steamed bun, I’d give it a 9.5. —A.T.

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HOW TO MAKE THE WINNING LOBSTER ROLL B Y A M Y T R AV E R S O

P HOTOGR A P HS BY M ARK FL EMING • FOOD A ND P ROP ST Y L ING BY CAT RINE K ELT Y

lobster roll is a simple construction. Take some meat, a little mayo or melted butter, and a split-top bun, buttered and griddled. But as our exhaustive search for the best roll proved, good technique and quality ingredients can make the difference between a stellar roll and a mediocre one.

For the ultimate recipe, I went straight to our winning lobster shack, McLoons, in South Thomaston, Maine. Bree Douty is the general manager of this family business, which

includes the lobster shack, the wharf next door (one of the oldest working buying stations in Maine), and a wholesale business out of Portland. “The secret to the quality of the meat is cooking the lobsters in small-enough batches that the meat can be cooked, immediately iced (so it doesn’t overcook), and picked, all in a short time frame,” Douty says.

“Keeping the meat iced ensures that it stays fresh and juicy.

And in summer, we cook mostly soft-shell lobsters. They’re much sweeter and more tender than hard-shell.”

McLOONS LOBSTER ROLL TOTAL TIME: 15 MINUTES; HANDS-ON TIME: 15 MINUTES While this recipe produces a classic cold lobster roll with mayo, McLoons is happy to serve your roll with hot butter or, as we prefer, half butter and half mayo (a handy trick achieved by simply cutting the roll in two). If you do opt for a buttered roll, take Bree Douty’s advice: “It’s easy to overcook lobster when you reheat it for a hot buttered roll, so keep the butter very hot right up until you begin serving. Also, while it’s important to keep the meat cold when you store it, be sure to let it sit at room temperature long enough to take the chill off before using it in a roll.”

If you choose to buy precooked lobster meat, caveat emptor. “Many markets sell only knuckle and claw meat,” Douty says. “Visit your local seafood market and ask for tail meat too. If it’s not available, you can always buy live lobsters and pick the meat yourself, which will ensure the freshest experience.”

1 pound fresh lobster tail, knuckle, and claw meat (see “How to Cook a Lobster the McLoons Way,” p. 93) 4 New England–style split-top hot dog rolls 1 stick salted butter, softened Mayonnaise (preferably Hellman’s)

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Break the lobster meat into large chunks, splitting the tails in half but leaving smaller claws whole. Set aside. Heat a pan or griddle to medium heat. Spread a thin, even layer of the softened butter onto each side of the hot dog rolls. Place rolls in pan and toast on each side until golden. Swipe a thin layer of mayonnaise inside each roll and fill with lobster meat, making sure each roll gets an even amount of tail, claw, and knuckle meat. If desired, melt remaining butter and drizzle over the top. Best enjoyed outdoors, on the ocean, with a few lobster boats in sight!

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HOW TO COOK A LOBSTER THE McLOONS WAY 1. You’ll need about 5 pounds of whole lobster to yield a pound of picked meat.

“Any size of lobster will work, but I recommend buying four 1¼-pounders, so you get a good variety of tail, knuckle, and claw meat in each roll,” says McLoons general manager Bree Douty. “Keep in mind that soft-shell lobsters contain much less meat

than hard-shells. The soft-shell meat is very delicate and sweet— perfect for rolls—but you may have to purchase an additional lobster to yield enough meat.”

2. Fill a large rimmed pan, such as a roasting pan, with ice.

3. Fill a large stockpot with an inch of seawater or

generously salted tap water. Insert steamer basket. Heat to boiling.

6. Carefully remove lobsters from pot and set in the ice to stop cooking. Let cool.

4. Remove bands from lobster claws and quickly place lobsters into pot.

7. Pick lobster meat from the shells (see below) and chill until ready to serve.

Lobster meat can stay fresh for several days if properly stored. McLoons recommends sealing it in a plastic bag and covering it in ice in the refrigerator.

5. Cover pot and cook until lobsters are bright red and the antennae easily detach from the body, about 10 to 15 minutes.

Do not overcook!

HOW TO PICK A WHOLE LOBSTER

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y TA LYA B A L D W I N

N O T E : While there is meat in the legs and the body cavity, it’s not typically used in lobster rolls. You can dig for it if you prefer, but we’ll move on to the main parts: claw, knuckle, and tail.

1

When the lobster is cool enough to handle, pick up the body with one hand. Remove the tail by grabbing it with your other hand and giving it a good twist.

2

To remove the tail meat, you can lay the tail on its side on a cutting board and press down firmly until the shell cracks down the center, then pull it open at the break. Alternatively, you can twist off the flippers at the bottom of the shell, which will create a small hole. Insert your thumb into this hole and push the meat up and out of the top. For lobster rolls, cut the tail meat crosswise into ½-inch-thick slices, then chop these slices into bite-size morsels.

3

Remove the knuckles (“forearms”) and claws from the body by holding the lobster body in one hand and using the other to twist off the knuckles. Use your hands to separate each knuckle from the claw at the joint.

4

Use lobster crackers to break the shell on the knuckles in two places. Fish out the meat with a seafood pick, small fork, or toothpick. If needed, cut the knuckle meat into bite-size pieces.

5

To get clean pieces of claw meat, break open the claw near the base using a cracker or the back of a chef’s knife (give it a firm whack). Pull out the claw meat in one piece. For a pretty presentation, lay the claw meat on top of the roll.

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FEEDING FRENZY

WHEN COMPETITIVE EATERS TACKLE LOBSTER ROLLS, YOU MIGHT WANT TO AVERT YOUR EYES. WE COULDN’T.

BY JOE BILLS IL LUST R AT IONS BY JOHN HENDRIX

is opponents vanquished, the champion drapes his newly won title belt over his broad shoulders and raises his arms, basking in the cheers of the small but enthusiastic crowd.

At a little over 6 feet tall and hovering around 300 pounds, this powerfully built man, who turned 47 just a week earlier, could pass for a professional wrestler. Instead of a crowded arena, however, we are gathered on a beautiful beach on a somewhat overcast day. And the champ has won without laying a hand on his opponents—although a mountain of lobster rolls clearly has had a very rough day.

— Fifteen minutes earlier, this is the scene: Eleven contestants gather on the Hampton Beach Seashell Stage, having earned their right to gorge on lobster rolls thanks to a qualifying competition (hot dog eating) held the previous month. James Burgess, who last year vanquished 12 lobster rolls in 10 minutes, is back. A petite blond woman named Cassie stands out among the otherwise all-male lineup; she is there representing the bank she works for, which is also the event’s primary sponsor. A local competitor named Mike has the most enthusiastic cheering section, and they hoot and 94 |

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holler, holding up signs that say “Rock That Lobsta” and “Mike’s Crew: This Is How We Roll.”

At the left side of the stage and largely ignored by the crowd, two competitors are carefully arranging their places at the long table, checking their water cups, and pushing extra chairs out of their way.

The first trays of 3 ½ -ounce lobster rolls are brought out.

The off icial counters take their places, standing on chairs behind each contestant.

The crowd counts down to the starting signal, and they’re off. Within 30 seconds, though, everyone’s eyes are drawn toward the left side of the stage.

— The eating contest has a long history at county fairs, where local legends have been born during pie eating competitions that inevitably ended in laughter. But competitive eating took on the weight of an actual sport in the early 1970s, when a stroke of PR genius led to the inaugural Nathan’s Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island. Thirty years later, a phenom from Japan named Takeru Kobayashi took the world of competitive eating by storm.

A few years after that, a young American named Joey Chestnut knocked

Kobayashi off his perch, launching a rivalry that made the hot dog eating contest a top attraction on ESPN and spawned a bevy of imitators.

Today, there are two major leagues of competitive eating, each with its own guidelines. At All Pro Eating events, “picnic style” rules mandate that the food be eaten whole—no dunking in water. The organization touts this as paying “respect” to the food and maintaining the food’s “integrity,” “dignity,” and “public reputation.” The rival International Federation of Competitive Eating, however, allows eaters to disassemble and dunk, within certain limits. Depending on the event, food that is “chipmunked” (stuffed into the mouth but not yet swallowed) may or may not count toward the final tally.

Excessive food debris left on the table typically counts against a competitor.

And, well, “losing” it all, either during or after the competition, is grounds for disqualification.

— “Gentleman” Joe Menchetti, a ticket broker from Connecticut, has more than 100 wins on his résumé. He eats fast. In previous events, he stuffed down 70 dumplings in two minutes and devoured 5½ pounds of macaroni and cheese in six minutes. Forty-two cupcakes? Eight minutes. TwentyNEWENGLAND.COM

5/12/17 11:40 AM

eight tacos? Five minutes. Twenty-six clam cakes? 10 minutes. Seventyseven pieces of sushi? Five minutes.

Seventy-f ive chicken wings? Eight minutes. The list goes on.

But on this day, Menchetti has a serious challenger. Beside him on the Seashell Stage is Teddy Delacruz, who has traveled from Illinois with an appetite for lobster rolls. Lots of lobster rolls.

Falling into a stuff-chew-swallowdrink rhythm, Menchetti takes an early lead. Delacruz keeps pace just behind him. The others fall further and further behind, a situation exacerbated by their own growing interest in the spectacle unfolding at stage right.

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right behind him, seemingly drafting like a NASCAR driver, aiming for a finish-line sprint.

Then, controversy: Menchetti f inishes his 22nd roll and motions for more; Delacruz is gesturing, too.

Where are the rolls? Confused, event organizers scurry to conf irm that, yes, the impossible has happened.

The gluttonous field has so outpaced the totals from previous years that the entire supply is gone.

Usually the crowd counts down the last seconds as competitors swallow urgently. But here, it all ends with good-natured shrugs. With 22 rolls downed in slightly less than 10 minutes, Menchetti takes top honors and $600. (Impressed? A decade

ago, Kobayashi set a world record in Boston by ingesting 41 lobster rolls in about the same amount of time.)

Delacruz, stalled at 21, must settle for second place and $250. In third place is Burgess, who will take home $150 for eating 12.

As Menchetti slowly and deliberately walks off the stage, I ask him how he feels.

He pauses for just a moment, as if still swallowing, then answers with a single word.

“Full.”

This year’s Hampton Beach Seafood Festival will be held September 8–10.

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TALES & TRIVIA WHEREIN WE CONSIDER THE LOBSTER, A CREATURE AS FASCINATING AS IT IS DELICIOUS.

SHELL SHOCKERS STRAN G E- BUT-TRU E LOBSTER FACTS

■ A lobster’s brain is located in its throat, its nervous system in its abdomen, its heart on its back, its teeth in its stomach, and its kidneys in its head.

■ Lobster blood is rich in copper, but it’s colorless until it is exposed to oxygen—at which point it turns blue. (And when cooked, it turns white.)

■ The best way to tell the age of a lobster is to dissect it and count the rings in the eyestalk or the gastric mill (part of the stomach), much as you’d count rings in a tree stump.

■ Lobsters are capable of reflex amputation, meaning that they can discard a limb to escape. They also can grow back their legs, claws, and antennae.

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■ Of the 10,000 or so eggs a female may release at a time, only .01 percent will survive past four weeks of life.

TO M E K D76 / I S TO C K ( B LU E LO B S T E R ) ; N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C S TO C K : V I N TAG E C O L L . / GR ANGER , NYC , NE W YORK (FEMALE LOBSTER)

■ Though most lobsters are either blue-black or greenishbrown, genetic and environmental factors can create some showstopping variations. These include: blue (1 in 2 million lobsters); bright red (1 in 10 million); yellow (1 in 30 million); two-colored (1 in 50 million); and albino, aka “crystal lobsters” (1 in 100 million).

■ A lobster typically molts, or sheds its shell, about 25 times in the first five years. After that, molting occurs annually, then once every few years, then gradually less frequently.

■ Each time a lobster molts, it increases its size by about 15 percent to 20 percent.

■ Lobsters often devour their own shells after they molt, which replenishes calcium and speeds the hardening of the new shell.

■ A just-molted lobster is so delicate that if you lifted it from the water, its claws would likely fall off.

■ Covered from head to tail with chemical receptors, lobsters can smell and/or taste across virtually every portion of their bodies.

■ Lobsters pee out of their faces—specifically, from glands located right under their eyes. Squirting urine at each other is part of both lobster combat and courtship.

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LOBSTER 411 A n s w e rs t o fre q u e n tl y a s k e d q u e s ti o n s

WHY ARE LOBSTERS CALLED “BUGS”?

They look like them, for one, but they also have a number of creepy-crawly close relatives: Lobsters belong to the phylum Arthropoda, which includes insects, spiders, scorpions, and centipedes.

HOW MANY KINDS OF LOBSTERS ARE THERE? Though a number of crustaceans have “lobster” in their name, the term usually refers to the two types of clawed lobsters: Europe’s Homarus gammarus and North America’s Homarus americanus (aka American lobster, Maine lobster, Canadian lobster, northern lobster, true lobster).

WHY DO COOKED LOBSTERS TURN RED? That’s due to the pigment astaxanthin, the same thing that makes flamingo feathers pink and salmon flesh rosy. Lobsters ingest astaxanthin while munching on things like algae, seaweed, and shrimp, but because it binds to a protein in their shells called crustacyanin, they end up looking muddy brown or blue-black instead of red. When heated during the cooking process, though, the protein breaks down and the astaxanthin shows through.

HOW DO YOU TELL A MALE LOBSTER FROM A FEMALE LOBSTER? Females tend to have wider tails (the better for carrying all those eggs), while males tend to have larger claws.

Another clue: the feathery appendages under the tail, called swimmerets. On a female, the first pair of swimmerets are small and soft; on a male, hard and bony.

WHY IS ONE CLAW BIGGER THAN THE OTHER? The lobster has not just two sizes of claws but also two kinds. The smaller, “fast” claw is designed to quickly seize and/or rip into something, thanks to incisor-like spikes on the claw’s inside edges combined with fast-twitch muscle tissue. The larger, “crusher” claw has molarlike bumps that help it grip, and slow-twitch muscle tissue that helps it crush anything hard (clams, mussels, another lobster’s claws).

CAN LOBSTERS FEEL PAIN? While no one knows exactly how lobsters process sensory information like temperature and touch, most scientists say the lack of a central nervous system means they probably don’t feel pain. And they certainly don’t “scream” when boiled (that’s just the sound of steam escaping from the shell).

HENS, PISTOLS, AND SHEDDERS A BASIC LOBSTER LEXICON BERRIES Lobster eggs. A berried lobster is a female that is carrying fertilized eggs on the underside of her tail.

BUGS Lobster larvae. Also used more broadly to mean any lobsters.

CHICKEN A 1-pound lobster.

COCK A male lobster.

CULL A lobster with only one claw.

EGGER A berried female lobster.

HEN A female lobster.

KEEPERS Lobsters of legal size, which is gauged by measuring the distance between the eye socket and the base of the tail. (In Maine, any lobster shorter than 3¼ inches or longer than 5 inches goes back into the water.)

KITCHEN The outer, baited chamber of a lobster trap.

PARLOR The inner chamber of a lobster trap (and where the lobster is most likely to get stuck).

PISTOL A lobster without claws.

SHEDDER A newly molted lobster.

Also called a rubber lobster or Jell-o lobster.

SHORTS Lobsters below the legal size.

Also called snappers.

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A SALUTE TO SOME COLOSSAL CRUSTACEANS 40 INCHES Length of the largest lobster caught in Maine, a 27-pounder nicknamed “Rocky” said to have a crusher claw strong enough to break a man’s arm. Trapped in a shrimp net near Cushing in February 2012, he was donated to the Maine State Aquarium and set free.

41 I N C H E S Length of the largest lobster ever recorded. Caught off Nova Scotia in 1977, it weighed a whopping 44 pounds, 6 ounces, and was estimated to be more than 100 years old.

7½ FE E T Length of the milk chocolate lobster created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Haven’s Candies in Westbrook, Maine, in 2015. At 418 pounds, “Shelby” weighed the equivalent of a small upright piano.

11 F E E T Length of “Wilbur,” the fiberglass lobster that has been welcoming diners to Ruth and Wimpy’s Kitchen in Hancock, Maine, since 1991. Among Wilbur’s fans: the actress Kirstie Alley, who the restaurant owners say tried unsuccessfully to buy him.

16 F E E T Length of the fiberglass crustacean that cruises atop the Lobstermobile, a red 2000 Volkswagen Beetle donated to the Maine Maritime Museum in 2015 by a Florida seafood distributor. Museum staffers reportedly love to drive it for special events (although parallel-parking this beast is out of the question).

35 FEET Length of the so-called “World’s Largest Lobster,” a lifelike concrete-and-reinforced-steel sculpture in the New Brunswick fishing town of Shediac. Commissioned by the local Rotary club and unveiled in 1990, the 55-ton crustacean (which sits on a 35-ton pedestal) draws half a million visitors a year—and has even been featured on a Canadian postage stamp.

62 FEET Length of the world’s largest crustacean sculpture, unveiled in June 2015 in Qianjiang, China. Note: Though the 100-ton statue is billed as a lobster on the Guinness World Records website, there’s debate over exactly what kind of crustacean it most resembles.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT Fi v e ta s t y tri v i a ti d b i ts

■

Back in colonial America, lobster was seen by many as a trash food. It was fed to livestock, used as fertilizer, and served to the likes of servants, soldiers, and prisoners.

■

Before it gets drowned in, say, butter or mayonnaise, lobster is actually good for you. It has less saturated fat and cholesterol than lean beef or even roasted skinless chicken breast. One cup of lobster contains only 129 calories and is a significant source of protein, at 28 grams.

■

In 2016, more than 400 people chowed down on the longest lobster roll ever made. Made for the Prince Edward Island International Shellfish Festival, it took 120 pounds of meat, 30 pounds of dough, 30 pounds of celery, 15 pounds of red pepper, and 5 gallons of mayonnaise—and at 120 feet, it was longer than a basketball court.

■

First came lobster ice cream (Ben and Bill’s Chocolate Emporium, Bar Harbor, c. 1990), then lobster doughnuts (the Holy Donut, Portland, c. 2013). Now there’s a seasonally available lobster-infused beer, which debuted in 2015 courtesy of the folks at Portland’s Oxbow Brewing—who also enjoy the perk of eating the lobsters cooked during the beer-making process.

■

A wine specifically made to go with lobster? Yep, it exists. Big Claw Wine is a white blend created in 2010 by a pair of Mainers in the wine business; every bottle sold benefits the Lobster Institute at the University of Maine.

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5/18/17 3:09 PM

R U S S E L L F R E N C H / B I G C L A W W I N E ( W I N E ) ; R O L L I N S / J O F F E E P R O D U C T I O N S / R O N A L D G R A N T A R C H I V E / A L A M Y S T O C K P H O T O ( A N N I E H A L L) ; L O B S T E R T E L E P H O N E (19 3 6 ) B Y S A LV A D O R D A L I / P R I V AT E C O L L E C T I O N / B R I D G E M A N I M A G E S

TIPPING THE SCALES

‘SHE’S YOUR LOBSTER’ R U S S E L L F R E N C H / B I G C L A W W I N E ( W I N E ) ; R O L L I N S / J O F F E E P R O D U C T I O N S / R O N A L D G R A N T A R C H I V E / A L A M Y S T O C K P H O T O ( A N N I E H A L L) ; L O B S T E R T E L E P H O N E (19 3 6 ) B Y S A LV A D O R D A L I / P R I V AT E C O L L E C T I O N / B R I D G E M A N I M A G E S

M E M O R A B LE M O M E N T S I N P O P C U LT U R E FRIENDS

band the B-52s, who hit the big time in the ’80s with “Love Shack” and “Roam.”

“THE LOBSTER”

LOBSTER TELEPHONE At the Galerie des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1938, Salvador Dalí exhibits this work featuring an actual dead lobster (his other versions used fake ones). The surrealist artist once mused, “I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone.”

ANNIE HALL One of the best-loved scenes from this 1977 classic Woody Allen film revolves around lobsters running amok as the two main characters try to cook them (“Talk to him. You speak shellfish!”).

“ROCK LOBSTER” This quirky 1979 beach-party anthem would become a signature song for new-wave

In the 1986 folio The Scottish Bestiary, poet George Mackay Brown offers an ode to this “samurai” of crustaceans: “There you clank, in dark blue armour / Along the ocean floor … Nothing stands in your way, swashbuckler.”

THE SIMPSONS Lobsters can in fact be kept as pets, as Homer learns in a 1998 episode of the longrunning Fox series. Just don’t give them hot baths.

ANNIE HALL

In a 1996 episode of the NBC sitcom, Phoebe declares that lobsters fall in love and mate for life (sadly untrue), and she tries to convince Ross not to give up on his feelings for Rachel by assuring him, “She’s your lobster.”

THE LOBSTER CHRONICLES Three years after her bestselling debut, The Hungry Ocean, Linda Greenlaw pens this 2002 memoir about lobstering off Isle au Haut: “I loved the sound of the lobsters’ shells’ muffled applause as they clapped

against themselves...

A full trap sounded like a standing ovation.”

“CONSIDER THE LOBSTER” David Foster Wallace ponders the ethics of cooking and eating lobster in this landmark essay, published in the August 2004 Gourmet.

THE MAINE RED CLAWS Portland’s minor league basketball team gets its moniker in a 2009 namethe-team contest. Other suggestions included “Crushers” and “Traps.”

THE LOBSTER Nominated for a 2017 Oscar for best original screenplay, this dark comedy/romance imagines a future in which people must find romantic partners or be turned into animals. One character says he’d like to be a lobster because “[they] live for over 100 years, are blue-blooded like aristocrats, and stay fertile all their lives.”

—Text by Jenn Johnson; additional research by Heather Tourgee

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Kornell Nash sorts through fossils at Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop. Now 62, he first started working here—as his mother remembered it—as soon as he was tall enough to see over the shop’s counter.

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C O U R T E S Y O F B E N E S K I M U S E U M O F N AT U R A L H I S TO R Y, A M H E R S T C O L L E G E ( T R A C K S) .

PRE V IOUS PAGE: M AP F ROM THE NE W YORK PUBLIC LIBR ARY

t’s funny. When your parents die, you have all these one-time things you have to do.” Kornell Nash reclines in a weathered chair in his cramped office. A space heater in the corner keeps the late spring chill at bay.

Beside the 15-year-old computer on his desk, a handful of fossils lie in an awkward pile.

Nash has spent the past few days sorting through his mother’s boxes.

The dust and mold have brought on an unexpected case of asthma. “I haven’t had an attack since I was a child,” he says. It’s one more delay.

One more thing to set right.

We won’t be digging today.

Beyond his office door, the shelves of the one-room store his father built here in South Hadley, Massachusetts, are sparingly stocked. There are plenty of plastic dinosaurs and semiprecious stones, but the one item that puts Nash’s business on the map—the one thing he alone sells—is in short supply.

Behind the store, Nash’s quarry stretches along the side of a small hill.

It’s tiny, about the size of three tennis courts side by side. At one edge, six large footprints mark a curving path.

They’re set deep into the shale. Looking at them, you can sense the weight of the beast that made them, see the pur pose in its movements. Nash leaves them undisturbed—a surefire showstopper for the customers who visit him here.

Beyond the tracks, the quarry floor drops several inches. This is where Nash digs, when he can, carefully chipping away each pancaked layer of stone.

Inch by inch he unveils more tracks— dagger-toed prints laid down as early as 200 million years ago. With a diamond saw, he carefully cuts them out, then cleans them up and places them on the shelves of his store, where they’re sold to anyone curious enough to buy one.

Nash learned his trade from his father. Seventy-eight years ago, Carlton Nash began mining this slab of shale; he built the family home and the store just yards away. Young Kornell grew up with an active dinosaur quarry in his backyard. Asked whether he remembered the first time his father let him dig out a track, Nash seems puzzled for a moment, as though he’d never considered it. “To be honest with you, I kind of grew up around it, and it was just JULY | AUGUST 2017

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before him is not set in stone. The purpose of his movements, unbound.

Unearthed in South Hadley in 1802 by a young boy named Pliny Moody, the first known specimen of dinosaur tracks is now a star attraction at Amherst College’s Beneski Museum of Natural History.

kind of commonplace,” he says. To him, it was simply another household chore.

As a young man, Nash left home, never intending to take over the family business. But his father grew ill, and at 31 he found himself working here. At 42, he inherited it. Now, at 62, with his final parent having passed away, he’s left to wonder what’s next. The path

arlton Nash knew exactly what he’d found when he found it. He’d been dreaming of it since he was a child. His father would bring him to the small natural history museum at Amherst College, where he’d listen raptly to stories about the school’s dinosaur-hunting professors plucking massive skeletons from dusty fields out west.

The bones always came from somewhere else. In the century and a half that people have been looking, fewer than a dozen dinosaur skeletons have been found in the Connecticut River Valley. During the Jurassic era, this area was a bleak landscape of mud flats and lakes. The wet soil consumed bones, but proved ideal for preserving footprints.

The f irst recorded discovery of a dinosaur track occurred in South Hadley in 1802, just miles from Carlton’s home. A young boy named Pliny Moody turned it up while plowing his father’s field. The story has inspired generations of dinosaur-crazed little boys and girls to launch mini expeditions into the forests of Western Massachusetts. But, for whatever reason, Carlton didn’t abandon the hunt as he grew older. He kept looking until, in 1933, he found it. | 103

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kind of like being a small businessman, but at the same time, this wouldn’t have been my choice.”

Nash’s voice isn’t mournful or resigned, just matter-of-fact. He’s reached a contemplative point in his life. He isn’t cursing where he is; he’s simply working through how he got here.

It’s midsummer now, and Nash’s life is returning to normal. Several new tracks stand on the shelves of his store, each about the size of the framed 104 |

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Part of a recently installed mural of prehistoric life at the Botanic Garden of Smith College, this scene depicts plants and animals from 250 million to 130 million years ago—roughly the time that the tracks Nash sells were being laid down.

photos in his office. A thin coat of varnish highlights the footprints, making them pop from the surrounding stone.

When Carlton Nash opened his store, he called it Dinosaurland. This was during the heyday of roadside attractions, and if he was going to reel in tourists off Route 116, he needed a name with some pizzazz. Today the tourists stick mostly to the interstate, and much of Kornell Nash’s business is done online. People still visit, but few enough that he doesn’t think twice about stepping away from the store.

Nash is out back in the quarry, carefully prying up a layer of shale about half an inch thick. He works from the edge, pounding a line of butter knives into the side of the stone, one every few inches. It’s a crude tool, but he’s never found anything that works better. He trolls tag sales and buys them in bulk when he can, leaving behind orphaned forks and spoons. He works slowly, one strike of the mallet at a time. As he senses resistance, he stops. “I might be coming up against a track,” he says.

Shale is composed of thin layers of petrified mud, one stacked upon the other. Dinosaur tracks exist as imperfections within this stone. Millions of years ago, the original print was a depression in the mud. Left undisturbed, it was slowly filled in by a new layer of dirt. When both layers hardened, the print was preserved within the rock where one layer dipped down to fill the gap in another. Nash’s job is to seek out these ripples and split off the layer that bore the print from those that filled it in. It requires patience and a gentle touch. “You start going fast, you start breaking stuff,” he says.

He gently applies pressure, and the shale lifts and shatters. He immediately begins to sweep away the dust. If each inch of shale represents some 10,000 years of geological time, Nash and his collection of improvised tools have taken an 8-square-foot section of the slab five millennia back in time in less than half an hour.

“There’s a really good one,” he says, running his f ingers over the freshly exposed rock. “Center toe, left toe, right toe.” The track is only a few inches long—nothing a museum would put on display, but the kind of print that a curiosity-seeker might drop a few hundred dollars on. It’s hard to tell which dinosaur made it.

C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B OTA N I C G A R D E N O F S M I T H C O L L E G E ( M U R A L) ; C O U R T E S Y O F KO R N E L L N A SH (S TO R E )

Carlton’s stone was something of a f luke. You can search acres of shale and find only a print or two, but here they were almost stacked upon each other. Millions of years ago, this spot was at the edge of a lake where dinosaurs would come to drink. It was a high-traffic area—a veritable dinosaur Grand Central Station. What’s more, Carlton’s stone was just sitting there.

Shale is usually buried under several feet of sediment, but this piece had jutted up through the surface. It was a treasure in plain sight, needing only someone to recognize it.

It took Carlton six years to convince the man who owned the land to sell it to him. Though Kornell Nash would not be born for another 15 years, the most momentous event in his life had already occurred.

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C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B OTA N I C G A R D E N O F S M I T H C O L L E G E ( M U R A L) ; C O U R T E S Y O F KO R N E L L N A SH (S TO R E )

Scientists can’t identify a species from a track; the best they can do is narrow it down to a family. Most of what Nash finds were made by some kind of theropod, a type of generally carnivorous two-legged dinosaur. The example Nash likes to give is the dilophosaurus, which Jurassic Park imagined as a frilled, venom-spitting beast.

As far as Nash can tell, he’s the only person who does this for a living. “If there were two of us doing this fulltime, we’d both be out of business,” he says. The demand for dinosaur footprints just isn’t that large. Fortunately, neither is the supply.

He says he extracts around 300 to 500 tracks a year. They sell for anywhere from $50 for a damaged partial print to several thousand for a museum-quality one. For more than seven decades, the quarry has been like a money tree in the Nashes’ backyard.

Every year they’ve dug here, and every year the shale has given them all the tracks they could sell. It’s never been enough to make them rich, but it’s kept them comfortable. Still, Nash reiterates, this wasn’t his first choice.

Nash sees himself not as a paleontologist but as a small businessman. It’s a point he brings up often. He looks the part: His hair is gray and trim, and he keeps a neat mustache. He wears

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a powder-blue polo shirt even as he’s prying up shale in his quarry. He looks more like an accountant than a dinosaur hunter, and that’s exactly how he likes to think of himself. “Yeah, dinosaurs are interesting, but they’re more [my father’s] passion than mine,” he says.

In college, Nash studied business, not geology. But just as his life was getting started, the wind went out of his sails. Two weeks after his 21st birthday, he was overcome by a lethargy he couldn’t shake; he was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “My friends were getting married, going out and getting careers, and I was taking a lot of naps,” he recalls. “It was kind of odd. I’m more energetic now than I was when I was 25 years old.”

By his late twenties he was sticking close to home, which meant that when his father fell ill, he was there. He took up the family business and supported his father, who was struggling with chronic shingles, as best he could.

His two brothers had no interest in the business, so when his father succumbed to a stroke in 1997, Nash inherited it, as he puts it, “by default.”

Nash’s father, Carlton, shown in the 1950s outside the business he founded as Dinosaurland. In its early days the shop boasted of selling to Dale Carnegie and the family of General George S. Patton.

“After Dad died, I said, ‘Mom, if I’m not married and you don’t have health problems, why don’t you just stay with me?’” he recalls. Like Nash, his mother had no passion for paleontology. She was a nurse in Illinois during World War II when she met her future husband. She had no sense that this is what her life would be. But she made the most of it, taking joy in meeting the people who visited the store. “Everyone found her what I call ‘Midwest friendly,’” Nash says. “Dad was a little bit more of the cranky Yankee.”

Nash’s mother used to tell him that as soon as he was old enough to see over the counter she put him to work in the store. He returned the favor by keeping the shop going so she could chat with customers well into her nineties.

“For about 30 years, I did get a lot of satisfaction helping my parents out,” Nash says. “It is kind of odd now. It’s kind of like I’m getting back to normal.

I can do what I want with my life.”

Nash hasn’t decided what his next step will be. What do you do with the family business when the rest of your family has passed on? He never married and has no children, so there’s no pressure for him to preserve the business—now called the Nash Dinosaur Track Site and Rock Shop—for the next generation. The quarry is entirely his now; he’s just not entirely sure he wants it anymore.

He has no immediate plans to sell, but he fantasizes about what his life would be like if he never had to dig again. It’s always been his least favorite part of the business. “I find it very tiring,” he says. Asked what his dream job would be, he replies without hesitation, “I could see myself as the comptroller of some small company.”

Nash is aware of how crazy that sounds. All around the world, people toiling in cubicles are dreaming about adventures like digging up dinosaurs, while he stands ankle-deep in fossils and pines for spreadsheets. But the irony goes deeper than that. By his estimate, he’s extracted more than 9,000 footprints—far more than your average paleontologist. Though untrained, he very well may have more practical skill in excavating dinosaur tracks than | 105

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ut of nowhere, there’s this loud crack of thunder and the skies just open up.” It’s not raining—not now, any way. The storm Fred Venne is describing took place millions of years ago. It’s all here, captured in the shale.

Venne holds his face so close to the stone his cheek almost brushes the surface. He picks the hidden story from the slab like a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. The raindrops came down hard and fast that day, he says. The marblesize craters they left behind bulge slightly to one side, indicating that the wind was blowing. Thin lines crossing the rock are the trails of bugs caught in the downpour. Small footprints divided by a solid line were made by a lizard dragging its tail. Perhaps it was racing for shelter, or maybe it emerged afterward to bask in the scorching sun that quickly dried the rain, baking this scene into the mud like a kiln.

This pockmarked stone is the fossil of an event—“literally a moment that lasted, I would say here, two to five minutes,” Venne says. It’s one of dozens of prehistoric tracks on display at the Beneski Museum of Natural History at Amherst College, where Venne is the education director. The tracks are mounted on the wall in a basement gallery like works of art. None are labeled, save one: the first one, the stone that young Pliny Moody dug from his father’s field.

In 1839, the Moody track came into the possession of Edward Hitchcock, a geology professor at Amherst College who dedicated his career to collecting and studying petrified tracks.

His research gave birth to ichnology, the study of animal tracks and traces.

Amherst College remains a leader in this niche science. For more than a century, researchers have come here to pore over the specimens Hitchcock collected, and each generation has teased some new discovery from the pale brown stones. Ichnology is a slow, methodical science and its practitioners are few. Venne says you can count the 106 |

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major players in the field on two hands, and everyone knows one another.

Kornell Nash stands on the periphery of this world, and his role is somewhat controversial. While his business is entirely legal (a fossil found on your land is your property), private sales are taboo in academia. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology explicitly bans selling fossils because, it says, private ownership “deprives both the public and professionals of important specimens, which are part of our national heritage.” Others argue that private sales encourage the looting of protected sites.

Looking back on Pliny Moody, Nash says, “Who knows what I’d be doing if it wasn’t for him and my father?”

Those who know Nash, like Venne, tend to give him a pass. Amid shrugged shoulders and comments about the situation not being ideal, most say he does more good than harm.

“It’s better to have interactions with people who run these businesses than to say, ‘I’ll have nothing to do with them,’” says Patrick Getty, a professor and ichnologist at the University of Connecticut. He’s one of a handful of scientists who have studied the tracks in Nash’s quarry, and he’s come to consider him a friend. He often sends students to do research there, and in return he answers any questions Nash has about paleontology. He’s even picked up a few tips from Nash. “In terms of excavating dinosaur tracks, he has a heck of a lot more experience than I do.” Now when he digs, Getty keeps a stack of butter knives in his field bag.

Get t y says he k nows pa leontologists who would never set foot in Nash’s quarry. While he understands their objections, he thinks they’re shortsighted. Most paleontologists spend more time in the classroom than in the field, but private diggers serve

just one master. They turn up fossils that would have otherwise stayed in the ground. “There are a lot of scientific discoveries that would have gone completely unnoticed if these people weren’t collecting,” Getty says. Still, he hopes that if Nash ever quits, no one will ever dig at that site again. “The ideal scenario would be if the town acquired it and made it a park.”

Nash has heard these arguments his entire life. “No matter what career you’re in, you’re going to have someone criticizing you,” he says. “I have no problem with what I do.” For him, it’s a question of abundance: Museum storehouses are filled with thousands of tracks identical to his, and he has untold thousands more in his backyard. “Academics have been studying them for a couple hundred years, and they have more than enough to study,” he argues.

His defiance goes beyond that of a self-interested businessman or even a son defending his father’s legacy. Nash believes he plays an important role.

He takes paleontology out of the ivory tower and brings it to the people. There are only a handful of ichnologists in the world, but there are millions of untrained enthusiasts for whom owning a fossil is a life-changing event.

He claims parents routinely thank him because the print that they bought helped get their kids excited about science. “None of them ever become paleontologists. They’re usually engineers,” he jokes, but he feels pride in it all the same.

“A m her s t I c a l l t he of f ic i a l museum. Things are behind barriers, ‘do not touch,’” Nash says. “I’m more like a nature center. Kids can come and touch things and experience it. And if they break something, it’s not the end of the world.”

He always has more out back. ash drives his van to the top of the highest hill in the cemetery. It’s a f ine spot. Before the trees grew up, you probably could see the South Hadley green from here. The grave he’s visiting is taller than he is—a dark, somber obelisk inscribed with the name “Moody.”

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COURT ES Y OF KOR NELL N A SH

anyone else alive, and yet it’s the part of the job he’d most like to stop doing.

Some wish he would.

COURT ES Y OF KOR NELL N A SH

genealogy dating all the way back to 1633, when the f irst Moody moved here from England. Over the past 10 years, Nash has studied this grave so closely he’s found at least one typo in the chronology.

Nash’s obsession started after his father died. A family legend held that Carlton had grown up in the same house as Pliny Moody. Nash began to question whether that was true (it wasn’t). As he embarked on his research, he started to wonder what had happened to the fateful plowboy.

After the discovery of that first dinosaur track, Pliny disappears from the annals of ichnology. Nash decided to go looking for him. What he found echoed his own life.

Pliny received a degree from Middlebur y College before returning home to take over his father’s farm.

Later in life, he heard about Hitchcock ’s studies and that the college was collecting tracks. He figured if he found one, he could find more. And so he started digging. He’s known to have sold several to Hitchcock.

Pliny also had a son named Plinius, who, like Nash, never married and got sucked into the family business.

“Maybe I did with my father what he did with his father,” Nash muses. “We were both born into dinosaur tracks whether we liked it or not.”

Pliny outlived his son, however, leaving him with no heirs. After he died, his widow sold the farm to one of his brothers, who lived in Troy, New York. The brother’s descendants still live there, so Nash tracked them down and asked if they’d like to come for a visit.

By chance, the Moodys arrived on the morning after Nash’s mother had died. Around 6:45 a.m., Nash got the call from the nursing home where she’d spent the last few months of her life.

He went in, saw the body, and gathered some of her things. Then he met the Moodys at 9 a.m.

He showed them Pliny Moody’s grave before driving them up to the Beneski. Venne gave them a tour, and recalls that they were struck by a case of “edifice complex”: the awe of seeing one’s family name on so many plaques.

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Carlton Nash with a young Kornell in the family backyard c. 1958. Though Kornell has two brothers, neither was interested in taking over the dinosaur track business when their father passed away at age 82.

They hadn’t k now n about Pliny Moody. They didn’t know that their ancestor was a folk hero to a tight-knit group of scientists. They didn’t know what he meant to people like Nash.

After the tour, Nash sent them on their way. He was eager to get back to his store. Never once did he mention his mother to them. “It was a special day for them,” he explains. He didn’t want to burden them. Besides, in a way it was as if he were spending the day with family.

Nash sometimes refers to Pliny Moody as a surrogate grandfather.

Pliny certainly helped shape his life.

Nash can plainly trace the chain of events: Pliny discovers the first track, the story inspires his father to open the quarry, then he himself continues the legacy today. “Who knows what I’d be doing if it wasn’t for Pliny Moody and my father?” he says.

Looking back on that day, Nash has no regrets. “It was an emotional day, but yet … my mother was 94. She lived a long and good life. We were very proud of her. It was just kind of time,” he says. “I wasn’t in a lot of emotional

turmoil. But sometimes it takes some time for that to hit you.” he sun is beginning to set over the quarry as Nash gathers his tools. The fading light casts long shadows over the shale. Nash pauses to inspect one of his new tracks.

It’s a lousy specimen—only a partial print and not very appealing. It’s destined for his bargain bin. “I’ll sell it for $50 and make some kid happy,” he says.

Nash doesn’t know how much longer he’ll dig. “I could do it another 10 years, probably,” he says. “At the same time, I feel like I’m in the spot where if the right person comes along, I’d pass it on.”

He ruminates on the future of his quarry. He could chop up the property and sell it as housing lots. He could keep it together and try to sell it as a park. Maybe he’ll find someone who wants to keep digging. Maybe he’ll just keep it himself. He doesn’t know.

Should he continue in the life his parents gave him, or strike out on his own? It’s a tough question and one he’ll undoubtedly struggle with. But someday he’ll have to answer it. It’s one more chore, one more thing for him to set right. When your parents die, you have a lot of one-time things you have to do. | 107

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PA R E N T ’ S M A R K E T, 19 8 2 “One day I saw five kids hanging out on the stoop of a local market…. They seemed bored to death, yet savoring their daily ritual,” photographer Barbara Peacock recalls. “At that moment, I was aware of the impermanence of the present and how this daily ritual would ultimately be replaced by memory, childhood by adulthood, and perhaps even the store may disappear.”

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P H O T O G R A P H S B Y B A R B A R A P E A C O C K

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A At the age of 3, Barbara Pallian moved with her parents and siblings into a turn-of-the-century fixer-upper on five acres in the center of Westford, Massachusetts. This was the 1960s, when the town about 35 miles northwest of Boston had fewer than 9,000 souls. She grew up in a household that honored reading, the arts, and country life, and fell in love with photography in her early teens—walking everywhere, just looking, snapping images.

She went on to attend art school in Boston, where what would become a decades-long project began with a simple assignment: “Photograph something of importance.” Seeing a group of kids hanging out at a local market in Westford one day, “I took out the school’s 4-by-5 camera and took the shot,” she recalls. “When I showed it to my professor, he said, ‘Well, you see you can travel the world looking for interesting places and people, but in fact you can find them right in your backyard.’”

That image, Parent’s Market, 1982 [previous spread], marked the start of her passion for documentary photography, which she pursued even as she launched a career as a professional wedding and commercial photographer. She got married, becoming Barbara Peacock, and raised a family in Westford, all the while collecting thousands of images of her hometown. She found day-today moments that would resonate with 110 |

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BINGO, 2005 As a photographer, Peacock would “try very hard to be unseen,” as she puts it. “I would just go to all these town events and just be a fly on the wall.”

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M AT C H I N G , 19 8 3 “On a good day, I might shoot 400 images,” says Peacock, who was struck by the postures and outfits of these two local women at a fireman’s muster. “If you ask for permission to take the photo, the moment is gone. I always ask afterward.”

people anywhere who felt the power of roots and place.

Whether she was using a large-format camera, 35mm color or black-and-white film, a digital camera, a mirrorless camera, or even her iPhone, what made the difference was her eye, and her feeling for her neighbors.

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a book to document her town’s transition from country to more urban: With a major highway cutting nearby, Westford’s population nearly tripled over time, apple orchards became houses, and memories of a quieter time grew even more precious. Yet the resulting compilation of her favorite images from the past 33 years, titled Hometown, focuses less on what has changed and more on deeper truths—the NEWENGLAND.COM

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S N O W C O N E S , 19 8 3 “I love how carefree [these kids] look. Even the boy in the back seems bored but he is still observing. Today those kids would be lost in their cellphones. I always think that people back then did a lot more daydreaming.”

bonds between people, the annual events that have always connected generations.

Last summer, with their three sons having left the nest, Barbara Peacock and her husband, Tom, moved to Portland, Maine, a city they had always loved. Plus, her mother, now in her late nineties, lives in southern Maine, as does a sister. But when Peacock drove away from JULY | AUGUST 2017

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Westford, a town that had become her extended family through her photographs, she felt not the call of a new place so much as the bittersweet taste of good-bye. “We all had a little cry,” she says. —Mel Allen

1983

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FIRST COMMUNION, 2004 When a friend’s daughter was having her First Communion, Peacock was there to capture it. “Time changes physical things,” she says, “but the quintessential us—our community, togetherness, and kinship— remains, especially when we are bound by our hometown.”

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S C H O O L P L AY, 19 8 4 Peacock says this photograph was taken at her son’s class play when he was 6 or 7. Her mentor, the photographer and teacher Ernesto Bazan, says of Hometown, “‘Intimacy’ is the only word that would do justice to this body of work.”

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B U N N Y ’ S W E D D I N G , 19 8 2 “I was the wedding photographer this day. I was in art school, and nobody wants to say you are shooting weddings. But when you’re at a wedding you can shoot anything!” The photograph recently won an award in a portraiture show in London.

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A P P L E B L O S S O M PA R A D E , 2 015 For this annual parade, “everyone marches through the center of town, past the common, just filled with people on all sides.

My whole life I’ve tried not to shoot the parade, not the ceremonial part, but what’s all around it.”

M E M O R I A L PA R A D E , 2 0 0 9 Peacock says of her relationship to Westford, “The very essence of this town has penetrated my soul through the soles of my feet. The town has almost tripled in size, yet in 33 years our community connectedness remains little changed.”

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PRESTI’S PIZZA, 2008 As Peacock looked around Westford for images representing universal experiences in small towns, her own family members sometimes made it into the frame. Here her son, Connor, finds a unique resting spot for onion rings.

4 - H P I E E AT I N G C O N T E S T, 2 015 When taking photographs, “I basically have blinders on— like a horse,” Peacock says. For this image from a whipped cream pie eating contest at the summer fair, she arrived out of breath from running to catch the moment.

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Q U E E N S & M I N U T E M E N , 2 010 Westford’s Apple Blossom Festival has long been one of Peacock’s favorite subjects, since she went every year as a young girl. “At the end of the parade, everyone gathers at the top of the football field, where the Apple Blossom Queen will be crowned…. I saw the juxtaposition [between the minutemen and the girls] and positioned myself so each group had its own identity.

I waited for the gunfire, and thought it was funny how most of the girls just carried on in conversation.”

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‘Ain’t Doing Right’ NO M AT T ER YOU R AGE , BEING OPEN T O N E W L O V E I S N E V E R E A S Y.

BY LEELEE GOODSON Illustration by SH A R I F TA R A BAY PAGE 1 2 2

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etirement should have been an easy time for Gaylord Gale.

A man who had served his country in World War II and then worked for years as the postmaster general of Stowe, Vermont, he had a tidy, modest house just down the road from our veterinary clinic in Stowe, the town in which he was born and raised, and in which his ancestors had settled more than 200 years earlier. He had his woodworking hobby and a prolific vegetable garden to tend; the problem was he didn’t have much free time to enjoy them. His wife, Thelma, suffered from end-stage emphysema, and Gaylord cared for her at home. He quietly went about performing the numerous necessary and personal tasks for her without complaint. ¶ Next to his wife and their children and grandchildren, Gaylord was devoted to his dog, Valentine, a longcoated golden retriever–black Lab mix. Gaylord and Valentine were inseparable. She knew his routine intimately and accompanied him through each of his daily chores.

In the morning, while Gaylord cared for Thelma, Valentine lay nearby, watching him intently. At midday, she followed at his heels as he made his way across his lawn to pick up his mail. She would wait patiently on the edge of the grass while he went to the mailbox, then fall in behind him again as he walked back to the house. In the afternoon, when Gaylord was tending his vegetable garden, Valentine would rest her graying head on her paws, her liquid brown eyes f i xed on Gaylord’s stooped back as he tidied his bush beans. In the evening, she lay next to his recliner as he watched TV with Thelma after he had fixed them a modest supper. Gaylord moved through his days at a measured pace, which suited old Valentine perfectly.

They were a good match, each quietly capable of great love.

W hen Thelma died, Gaylord ’s family and neighbors rallied around him as he gradually adjusted to the gaping hole in his life. His next-door neighbor, a single mother struggling 124 |

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to put two boys through college, asked Gaylord for handyman advice, which he seemed happy to give. She invited him for dinner and to neighborhood cookouts. I baked a pie every so often and dropped it off for him. He’d accept it in a slightly embarrassed way, but two days later the empty, clean pie plate would show up at the door of our clinic. Gaylord’s daughter and grandchildren, who lived out of town, would come for visits, too.

This attention from family and friends, however, couldn’t match the continuous and comforting presence of Valentine, who kept Gaylord company as he slowly resumed his woodworking and gardening. But she was getting old and was suffering from epilepsy, for which my husband, Gregg, had been treating her for years.

One afternoon, Gaylord called our clinic.

“This is Gaylord Gale,” he said in his characteristically polite, almost formal way, as though we might not recognize our neighbor’s quiet voice and local pronunciation. Gregg asked how he and Valentine were doing.

“Well,” Gaylord said, “I just don’t think she’s acting quite right.” He didn’t suppose it was her epilepsy; instead he explained that she’d been slowing down and staggering, and lost her appetite. Gregg told Gaylord to bring her in. In his appointment book Gregg scribbled: 10:30: Valentine. ADR. ADR is a veterinarian’s shorthand for “ain’t doing right.” An expression taught in veterinary school, it means an animal has a health problem that the owner doesn’t know how to accurately describe. In human terms, it’s analogous to the medical expression “failure to thrive.” The phrase simply conveys a descriptive starting point.

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Gaylord looked deeply uncomfortable when he brought Valentine, then 13 years old, into the exam room. I guessed it might have brought back memories of Thelma and her medical care. He was a practical man, however.

After Gregg examined Valentine, took x-rays, did blood work, and finally told him Valentine had cancer, Gaylord accepted the news stoically.

Sad ly, Va lent ine deter iorated quickly. A week later, around midDecember, Gregg was called to Gaylord’s house to put her to sleep.

We worried about Gaylord being alone, so when a golden retriever rescue group brought a sweet 9-yearold named Amber into the clinic for an exam, Gregg got an idea. Amber had been orphaned when her elderly owner died. She might be an ideal match for Gaylord, Gregg thought.

The problem was how to approach

Gaylord without seeming to meddle or invade his privacy.

In February, Gregg gave it a shot.

“Well, I don’t know,” Gaylord said when Gregg called him. He sounded reluctant. Gregg didn’t want to push, but he believed Gaylord and Amber might be perfect for each other.

“How about if I just bring her over for you to meet for a few minutes? ” Gregg said. “If you don’t think you’re ready, you can just say no, and I’ll understand.”

There was a long pause on the line.

Finally Gaylord said, “All right, I guess I could meet her.”

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Not long afterward, Gregg and Amber were climbing the steps to Gaylord’s sliding glass door. From his recliner in front of the TV, Gaylord motioned Gregg to come inside.

“This is Amber,” Gregg said. He dropped the leash and Amber, tail wagging, walked immediately to Gaylord and rested her head on his knee.

Instinctively, he began to gently stroke her head.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly, after a few minutes. “I guess she can stay for a while to see how it works.”

For the next t wo years, Amber followed Gaylord devotedly. She lay

subsequent x-ray confirmed the worst: aggressive osteosarcoma.

In Amber’s case, amputation and chemotherapy were not viable options.

Gaylord silently took her home to nurture her and keep her comfortable; a month later, Gregg had to go to Gaylord’s place to euthanize her.

Adopting an older dog always involves the risk of health problems.

We knew this, and Gaylord knew it.

Still, he had been through so much with Thelma and then Valentine that we felt awful for having set him up with Amber only to have him experience heartbreak and loss yet again.

“Well, I don’t know,” he said slowly, stroking Amber’s head.

“I guess she can stay for a while to see how it works.”

at his feet as he watched TV, strolled with him across the lawn to check his mail, accompanied him while he tended his garden, and came with him to the neighborhood cookouts.

Gaylord brought A mber into the clinic regularly for her baths and yearly physical exams. The last time he brought her in, however, he was concerned that she was having trouble walking. “She’s just not herself,” he had said when he called for the appointment. Gregg wrote in the appointment book: Amber Gale.

ADR. His examination revea led that Amber’s foot was swollen, and a

A year or so passed in which we saw only Gaylord, alone, walking to his mailbox or working in his garden.

Then Gregg got a call.

“Hello, Gregg, this is Gaylord Gale,” the familiar voice said. “I was wondering if you might keep your eyes open for another dog.” It couldn’t be just any dog, he said, and Gregg knew exactly what he meant. Gaylord needed a sweet, peaceful companion; the dog had to need Gaylord in return.

Gregg called the local dog rescue and explained what he was looking for, and a few weeks later they brought over a 9-year-old red and white collie mix, slightly pudgy, affectionate and gentle.

Her name was Pixie.

Once again, Gregg found himself knocking on Gaylord’s sliding glass door. From his recliner, Gaylord motioned for Gregg and Pixie to come in. Gregg dropped the leash and Pixie walked over to Gaylord.

He thoughtfully stroked her head, his expression impossible for Gregg to read.

“Well, I don’t know,” he f inally said, as much to himself as to Gregg.

“I guess she can stay for a while to see how it works.” He continued stroking Pixie, who sighed contentedly, then settled at his feet. | 125

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BECOMING A VERMONTER IS AKIN TO MAKING GOOD WHISKEY: IT TAKES

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TIM

KES

TIME AND PATIENCE. AND THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES IT WILL WORK.

Raj Bhakta

THE EDUCATION OF

BY WAYNE CURTIS

After trying his hand at investment banking, the hotel business, politics, and The Apprentice, Raj Bhakta found his passion in the form of an old dairy farm in Vermont, now the center of his quest for the nation’s first farm-to-bottle rye whiskey.

ere, take some firewood,” says Raj Bhakta as he offers me a chunk of maple. I tell him, thanks, no, I’ve got plenty at home. He stares at me for an incredulous moment, then says, “No, take it” (the stupid is silent).

“We’re going to the top of the hill.”

So I grab the log plus a few more pieces from the woodpile behind his Shoreham, Vermont, barn and distillery, and we set off at a brisk pace upward through a mature forest on a narrow trail. I’m following Bhakta and one of his employees, a young salesman named Larry Swanson, who is also bearing wood. After several hundred yards we arrive at the hill’s crest, where there’s a clearing amid white pines; in the center is a pine needle– filled fire pit f lanked by a pair of Adirondack chairs. A ravine falls off to the southwest.

Bhakta is wearing a pink polo shirt, cuffed gray tweed pants, and smart brown leather shoes with laces as thin as capellini. He gathers some twigs and needles and piles them up. He lights the pile, it smolders, and he piles on more needles.

More smoldering ensues. I think: This is not going to amount to anything. This is how city people build fires. Swanson helps by occasionally gathering more pine needles and dumping them onto the f ire, then blowing on them. Between exhalations he says he was once an Eagle Scout, which seems suspect. While we stand watching the small f lames grow almost imperceptibly larger, Bhakta tells me that fire-building is part of the application process for those hoping to work at WhistlePig, the whiskey distillery he started at the farm in 2010. Aspirants also must write an essay. Swanson says his assigned topic was how he would survive a post-nuclear-war era if he were the last human standing.

Remarkably, the fire catches after about 10 minutes, and more twigs are consigned to the f lames. Then the logs. All of them. Eventually, we have to step back from the heat and sparks.

At which point Bhakta appears to lose interest in our campfire and suggests we take a hike, pointing to a trail along the edge of the ravine. We set off, leaving the fire to grow ever higher, untended, surrounded by acres of fresh pine duff. I turn around for a last glimpse at the flames, now about

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BHAKTA’S INSTINCTS TOLD HIM RYE WHISKEY WAS RIPE FOR A COMEBACK.

“I

6 feet high and growing, and think: Well, it’s not my property.

But then it strikes me that I may have just witnessed the essence of entrepreneurship—you get something going, you fan it until it’s redhot, and then you move on to the next thing, leaving others to deal with what you started.

What I just witnessed, it turns out, is how an entrepreneur builds a fire.

R

aj Bhakta was not the most obvious candidate to buy a dairy farm in rural Vermont and convert it into a whiskey distillery. He’s the son of a Hindu Indian immigrant

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father, who arrived in America in 1969 with $68 in his pocket. After a stint at an auto dealership, the senior Bhakta, who had married a young Irish woman, launched a thriving business buying and operating hotels.

The younger Bhakta was raised in the aff luent suburbs of Philadelphia, studied finance and economics at Boston College, then briefly worked for an investment bank in New York before joining his father’s hotel business. He spearheaded the buying and rebranding of a down-at-the-heels resort in Vail, Colorado. But then the great recession of 2008 hit, and Bhakta, in his early thirties and feeling hemmed in by the

family business, decided to move on to the next chapter, even though it was unclear what that chapter might be.

That’s when a friend he’d known at boarding school and college suggested he apply to appear on The Apprentice, a new reality TV show hosted by Donald Trump. Bhakta thought, Why not?

He was accepted as one of 18 contestants on season two. He lasted until the ninth week. His downfall: overseeing a bungled renovation of a small house.

“I think you made a lot of mistakes,” Trump told Bhakta. “Raj, you’re fired.”

Still, in those nine weeks he made an impression on a national audience, although not always a favorable one.

He came off as brash and a bit of a cad.

(He tried to hustle a date with Trump’s receptionist after he was fired.) His dapper gentlemen’s wear also attracted comment, as it included bow ties and pants worn high on the waist in the manner of a bank clerk c. 1925. “The pants are where they feel right on me,” Bhakta told TV Guide.

After being fired, he chose to parlay his modest slice of fame into a campaign for Congress, running as a conservative Republican in a reliably liberal Democratic district outside Philadelphia. He lost by a two-to-one margin.

“I was a Republican reality-TV-show guy running for Congress in a liberal media environment,” Bhakta says with a small shrug.

The same classmate who had suggested he apply to The Apprentice then told him about a dairy farm for sale on 467 acres of rolling hills near his own house in west-central Vermont. Bhakta drove up and took a look and, impulsively, bought it. His plan? Well… he NEWENGLAND.COM

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HENRY HARGRE AVES/ WHISTLEPIG

Bhakta with wife Danhee Kim at WhistlePig Farm in Shoreham, Vermont. Much of the 1,200-plus acres that Bhakta owns here is planted with rye, which is destined to be distilled and then aged in barrels made from oak harvested from the property.

“I WAS GOING TO LITERALLY BET THE FARM AND MY FUTURE,” HE SAYS.

HENRY HARGRE AVES/ WHISTLEPIG

CK.

didn’t have a plan. He just assumed he’d figure something out. He usually did.

His father visited soon after, and looked around dejectedly. “Raj,” he said, “we left a broken-down farm in India to make our fortune in America.

And what do you do? You buy a brokendown farm.”

Bhakta thought about brewing beer out of the grain he would grow.

But he concluded that the craft beer market had peaked, especially in Vermont, which already had more craft breweries per capita than any other state. He considered making vodka from grain, but he thought that market was also oversaturated.

Then he thought: whiskey. Scotch was Bhakta’s preferred liquor, and he contemplated growing barley and distilling that, as they do in Scotland. But he learned that international protocols prevent labeling something as scotch unless it’s actually made in Scotland.

He would have to call it “barley whiskey” or the like, making it sound like an also-ran. Bhakta doesn’t do also-rans.

So it occurred to him to pursue another style of whiskey: rye.

Rye whiskey was one of the foundational spirits of the early republic, and it had a long and honorable run. As recently as the 1960s, New York commuters were knocking back tumblers of the stuff before dashing off to catch the 5:20 to Scarsdale. Rye was the spicier, more voluble cousin to bourbon. But then it suddenly fell out of fashion and grew silent. By the 1970s, rye was consigned to cameo appearances in short stories by John Cheever.

Bhakta’s instincts told him rye was ripe for a comeback. And the more he looked into it, the more he believed an assertive and talented marketer could move quickly, essentially cornering the premium rye market. Further consideration found no reason that this person shouldn’t be him.

“I was going to literally bet the farm and my future,” recalls Bhakta, now 41.

“I would do a rye whiskey.”

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S

horeham was founded around 1790 where the Green Mountains f lutter down and unravel along southeastern Lake Champlain. Settlers were attracted to its supremely fertile soils, and the region thrived for decades. Hundreds of small farms grew apples and made dairy products, which were sent first by boat and wagon and then by train and truck to the outside world.

But the economics of farming shifted, and not in Shoreham’s favor.

Sue MacIntire, the town historian, moved here 40 years ago. At the time, quite a few dairy farms were turning a decent profit with just 60 cows or so.

“But that kind of a farm won’t support a family anymore,” she said. The smaller farms and orchards started slipping and either were bought up by larger operations or went out of business.

In 2010 a community economic development study singled out agriculture as still offering a promising route to a prosperous future, although in a somewhat different form. The study called for the creation of a “food incubator,” where “food entrepreneurs could

start new food enterprises, from cheeses to applesauce, to advance the next generation of the agricultural economy in Shoreham.” Since then, a cidery and a winery have opened up, adding value to local commodity crops.

So it seemed Bhakta was in the right place at the right time—arriving with an idea of taking everyday straw and converting it to gold in a bottle.

But building a business in smalltow n Vermont has trad itiona l ly required a special set of skills—just being a talented entrepreneur isn’t sufficient. You also need to have the right personality and follow some basic directives. You keep a low profile and let your deeds speak for themselves.

You make nice with the neighbors. You play by the rules.

Bhakta, it turned out, chose to work off a different playbook.

P

erhaps the hardest part was for Bhakta to keep a low profile and blend in. It’s simply not in the man’s genetics.

C on sid e r : W hen he r a n for Congress in 2006, his platform included a call to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border—foreshadowing the man who’d fired him on The Apprentice. But rather than hold a long-winded press conference, he flew to Texas, hired a circus elephant and a six-piece mariachi band, and set out to cross the Rio Grande undetected by the border patrol. “If I can get an elephant led by a mariachi band into this country, I think Osama bin Laden could get across with all the weapons of mass destruction he could get into this country,” he told reporters at the time.

The stunt quickly veered toward disaster. A farmhand had assured him the river was only a few feet deep, but when the elephant stepped into it, the beast and its handler instantly sank, disappearing from view into the muddy waters. The animal eventually bobbed back up, but now in a state of understandable agitation, and had to | 129

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ONE OF THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF VERMONT RESIDENCY IS THAT YOU DON’T be coaxed back ashore. While Bhakta failed to cross the river, he did manage to mount the elephant riverside and, wearing an American-f lag bow tie, speechify about shoddy border protections, a moment that was enshrined on YouTube. (The border patrol eventually did take notice; the elephant was detained briefly and sprayed for fleas.)

Bhakta and I recently had dinner at the historic Shoreham Inn with his wife, Danhee Kim; his young daughter, Hannah; and a prospective employee.

Aside from the gas station and convenience store up the road, it’s about the only place to gather in public in Shoreham. A dozen or so people were sitting at tables scattered around the room.

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“What do you think of fracking?”

Bhakta asked me in a stage whisper.

“That’s how we could fire the stills.”

When Bhakta brought up fracking, I detected a sudden, pronounced lull in the conversations around us. Danhee leaned forward and said quietly, “That always happens.”

Bhakta doesn’t exactly blend into small-town Vermont. Tonight he’s wearing pale pink pants, a whitecollared shirt, and well-kept brown oxfords. He’s half Indian and half Irish, and his wife’s family is Korean. “We’re creating the first Korean-Indian-Irish Vermonters,” Bhakta said loudly.

We actually weren’t talking about fracking at all, but rather about small-

town life and how rumors start and propagate. When he acquired his farm at the edge of town in 2010, the local rumor mill cranked up pretty quickly.

He was laundering money for a friend, whose family is from Colombia, on a nearby farm, people said. Others told neighbors that he’d been kidnapped.

“The rumors that got going were something truly spectacular,” he said. I detected a bit of pride in his comment.

Bhakta’s M.O. is not to blend in but to stand out. He’s virtually a walking billboard for Brand Bhakta. He always looks as if he’s just exited the stage of a play set in an Edwardian drawing room, wearing tailored jackets and nice shoes even when, say, hiking a hill or building a campfire. People remember him and talk about him. When developing his Vail hotel, he not only wore bow ties but also strolled about with a walking cane.

People remember that, too.

“Look, I’m a salesman with a bit of P.T. Barnum in me,” he once explained to whiskey writer Davin de Kergommeaux, “and I like that.”

Bhakta also has a surfeit of what people sometimes refer to as “boyish charm.” This overlooks the fact that boys are not always charming. Last fall, we were walking down the dirt road near the barn that houses his distillery, talking about the business, when a neighbor slowly drove by. Bhakta offered a small smile and a nod of the head, the classic New England greeting for someone known but not well. But then I looked down and noticed he had one hand cupped and he’d extended the middle finger of the other behind it. He muttered a curse after the car passed.

Bhakta’s plans and enthusiasms have led to some drawn-out spats with neighbors. George Gross and his wife, Barbara Wilson, bought a farm near WhistlePig at about the same time Bhakta arrived, with the notion of growing berries commercially. They’d heard about a fungus that thrives in ethanol vapors exhaled by whiskey barrels during the aging process (this NEWENGLAND.COM

5/11/17 1:13 PM

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’T

PARACHUTE INTO VERMONT AND IMMEDIATELY PRETEND YOU ARE A NATIVE. Bhakta strolls the WhistlePig property with his dog, Jezebel, in March, the same month that WhistlePig released the first whiskey made with its own rye, water, and wood.

OPPOSITE : WhistlePig’s copper still, named the Mortimer (after its late porcine mascot).

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accounts for the sooty black growth that’s commonly seen near whiskey warehouses in Scotland and Kentucky) and were worried that it would impact their crops. So before Bhakta started building out his distillery, they invoked Vermont’s Act 250, which allows community members considerable say in development decisions. Since farming operations are generally exempt from Act 250 oversight, Bhakta had ignored the paperwork. The state investigated; the dispute devolved into arcane arguments over whether the water used in making whiskey is actually an agricultural product, and so forth.

The state eventually agreed with Gross and Wilson that Bhakta was not exempt from Act 250. But it also gave Bhakta the go-ahead to build the distillery in his former dairy barn, and he was permitted to age up to 5,900 barrels on the existing property along with another 800 acres he had purchased nearby. (He’s now looking at land across the lake, in New York state, to build additional aging facilities.)

Gross told the Addison Independent he thought that “the outcome is just and it brings some closure.”

But when reached by phone earlier this year, Gross refused to comment further, adding that he couldn’t be certain I wasn’t a paid spy for Bhakta.

This suggested that the closure is not fully closed.

Another neighbor, whose land sits directly across a dirt road from the distillery’s back door, took Bhakta to court after he’d cut some trees on the neighbor’s property. (Bhakta says it was inadvertent and claims he apologized and offered a settlement, which was turned down.) The case is still pending; the landowner posted a large hand-painted sign clearly visible from the distillery that reads, “For Sale $1,000,000 or Keep Out.” Few in the area were willing to comment on Bhakta for this story. “His personality gets in the way,” said one Shoreham resident. I asked another Vermonter who has been tracking Bhakta’s trajectory and didn’t want to be named whether it was Bhakta’s politics, personality, or ambition that got in the way. “All of the above,” he said.

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“Yeah, there have been some problems,” agreed Sue MacIntire, the town historian. “I think it’s mostly personality. I don’t think he means it, but he just irritates people around here, especially the neighbors. Raj is kind of abrasive.

He’s kind of an overgrown kid.”

P

laying by the rules has also been an issue on the national level.

The economics of whiskey are vexing. Investors spend a pile of money to make it, and then it has to sit in a barrel for years as it ages. It’s all outflow and no inflow at the start.

Bhakta f igured there had to be a way to generate some cash and build a market while waiting for his whiskey to age. He didn’t have to look far.

He had brought on Dave Pickerell, the former master distiller at Maker’s Mark and now a consultant, to help him design a distillery. Pickerell told him about some surpassingly f ine 10-year-old Canadian rye whiskey he’d tasted at a distillery in Alberta. It had “a finish that’s so long it needs its own zip code,” Pickerell once told me.

It had been distilled to add body and f lavor to Canadian whiskey, which is typically a blend of rye whiskey and more neutral-tasting spirits made from various other grains.

Pickerell knew this batch was special and wanted to import and sell it, but he couldn’t find a partner. In part that was because Canadian whiskey has long had the reputation of being inferior to American whiskey. Charging a premium for it seemed a plan that would never turn a profit.

But Bhakta thought otherwise. He saw it as a marketing problem that a clever person, such as himself, could solve. And getting WhistlePig on the shelves quickly would give him a head start in cornering that premium rye market. So he and Pickerell bought about 5,000 gallons, hauled it down from Canada, and bottled it in an old milking barn. (Bhakta says his f irst bottling line involved two picnic tables, an 84-year-old farmer who liked whiskey, and four Middlebury students who liked weed.)

Soon after, WhistlePig Rye Whiskey started appearing on store shelves

at $80 a bottle ($70 in Vermont). It drew considerable attention, mostly favorable. It earned 96 points from Wine Enthusiast—the highest rating the magazine had ever awarded a rye— and The Wall Street Journal named it one of the top five whiskeys of the year.

However, not everybody thought it was special. One of the unwritten rules of Vermont residency is that you don’t parachute into Vermont and immediately pretend to be a Vermonter. That’s doubly true for any products you make. WhistlePig was widely accused of claiming false residency, since the label prominently noted it was “hand-bottled at WhistlePig Farm, Shoreham, Vermont.”

There was no mention of Canada.

That started WhistlePig off on the wrong foot for some Vermonters.

“I’m very conf licted to say anything,” a former Shoreham resident told me.

“From what I know, he’s really not making whiskey.” He believed the farm was simply an elaborate front for imported whiskey.

In 2015 WhistlePig was sued by a Chicago-area resident who felt grievously defrauded by claims on the label and the website, which the plaintiff alleged created the “illusion of a small farm-based operation” to justify the price. (The same plaintiff sued several other distilleries—Templeton Rye and Tito’s Vodka among them—on similar grounds, which suggests his grief may not be very profound.) Bhakta’s defense was that his label had been approved by the federal government and he was playing by the rules—after all, it was bottled at the farm.

Bhakta decided to clear the air in an interview in Whiskey Advocate, in which he spelled out in detail the story of his whiskey’s origins, talking about how much of it was barrel-aged and bottled on the Vermont farm. And he laid out his long-term strategy to make his own rye—which included using barrels from oak trees on his land.

F

ollowing our dinner at the Shoreham Inn, Bhakta and I drove up into the hilly farmland to his distillery on Quiet Valley Road.

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caused by the wrangling over Act 250, an impressive copper still had been delivered and installed in the restored dairy barn in the fall of 2015. The still has been producing rye whiskey steadily ever since.

It was near sunset, and an employee was filling barrels stamped “Vermont estate oak” with freshly distilled rye.

Full barrels sat near the door, awaiting transfer to the aging warehouses.

Bhakta looked out the door and saw the sun was spilling gold across the landscape. “Come on,” he said.

“Let’s go up the hill.”

We hopped into a four-wheeler and tore off along the dirt road at what some, including the passengers, might consider a reckless speed. Then he cut off and headed up between fields of rye and hay. Near the top, we talked a bit about his next battle, which is shaping up to be his most challenging.

In early 2016, two of the investors Bhakta brought on to help fund his rapid expansion suddenly sought to force him off the board. They cited mismanagement of the company, self-dealing, and “repeated unethical and unlawful behavior.”

The courts issued a status quo order to keep Bhakta as CEO while the dispute wended its way through the legal process.

When we reached the top of the f ields, Bhakta stopped. We looked across a valley with folds like discarded drapes burnished by the sun, and he said more quietly now that his recent troubles with his investors had forced him to refocus on what’s important: keeping the distiller y going, making it a success. He said he wants this to be a model for modern agriculture—not just for the region, but nationally. I believed him.

We started back down the hill, moving from sun to shade. “I won’t let those guys take this away from me,” he muttered.

Whether it was because he loves the land and his new community, or he loves a battle and the attention it brings, I still wasn’t exactly sure. But one other thing struck me: He was sure starting to sound like a cranky old Vermonter.

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Timeless New England | C L A S S I C I M A G E S O F O U R R E G I O N

The Yankee Flier Amelia Earhart belonged to the nation and even the world.

But she first made her name as a New Englander.

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n April 1928, a phone call came into the Denison Settlement House, a neighborhood resource center in Boston’s Chinatown. The caller was looking for a 30-year-old staffer named Amelia Earhart, who at first begged off, saying she was busy.

But after being told it was important, she picked up the phone. And what she heard was: “How would you like to be the first woman to fly the Atlantic?”

Earhart’s reputation as an aviator was mainly regional then, centered on the small airport in Squantum that she’d helped launch the year before. Her profile was raised by coverage in the Boston papers as she worked to promote both women in aviation and f lying in general (she once complained to the Boston Chamber of Commerce about the lack of publicity for aviation, and proposed having Will Rogers play Symphony Hall to raise money for an ad campaign).

Compared with Earhart’s later feats, the 1928 Atlantic crossing seems undramatic: As arranged by the flight’s organizers in New York, she joined the crew of the seaplane Friendship only as an observer (in her words, “a sack of potatoes”). Yet it made her an international celebrity, one who would continue making headlines up to—and beyond—her disappearance over the Pacific 80 years ago this July.

The 1928 trip also stands as testament to the Kansas native’s New England ties. After the Friendship took off from East Boston, it hooked south to Quincy and dipped its wing in a salute to Earhart’s friends at the Squantum airport.

The airport is long gone today, but at the small state park that stands in its place, you can find an answering salute: a stone marker engraved with Earhart’s portrait and her quote that reads, in part, “I cannot claim to be a feminist but do rather enjoy seeing women tackling all kinds of new problems.” —Jenn Johnson

C O U R T E S Y O F T H E B O S TO N P U B L I C L I B R A R Y, L E S L I E J O N E S C O L L E C T I O N

This portrait of Amelia Earhart was taken in 1928—the year she became a household name—by Boston news photographer Leslie Jones. It’s among nearly 40,000 of his images from the first half of the 20th century now archived at the Boston Public Library.

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YANKEE’S DIGITAL EDITION

highlights  /// The Best of Late Summer The season isn’t over—not just yet! From a Connecticut corn maze to fresh Massachusetts pick-your-own peaches to a beloved Rhode Island drive-in, take advantage of all that summer still has to offer.  /// Cooking with Yankee This step-by-step video walks you through how to make a refreshing August treat: sweet corn and maple ice cream.  /// Perfect Weekend: Mystic Pay a visit to this well-known Connecticut shoreline stop, where fine restaurants, antiques shops, and one amazing museum are all on the itinerary.

 /// Where to Eat in Newport, Rhode Island Yankee’s food editor, Amy Traverso, serves up her favorite places to eat at one of New England’s most cherished summer destinations.  /// Hog Wild Smoked beef brisket? Yes, please. Baby back ribs? Oh, you bet.

Barbecued chicken? Of course. You won’t want to miss this delicious roundup of New England’s best barbecue joints.

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