Yankee Magazine March/April 2020

POUR IT ON

OUR BEST MAPLE SYRUP RECIPES

ULTIMATE SUGAR SHACK TOURS

A MAPLE TASTE TEST LIKE NO OTHER

PLUS!

THE GARDEN SHOW WHERE THE PROS GO DEEP DIVING WITH THE SHARK DETECTIVE

WHY WE LOVE BOSTON’S SWAN BOATS

CRISP AND FLUFFY WAFFLES, p. 48

73

From

98

By Mel Allen

Photograph by Adam DeTour; food styling by Monica Mariano/Ennis Inc.; prop styling by Vincent Russo/Ennis Inc.

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home

28 /// Floral Support

From growers and merchants to artisans and authors, there’s a garden guru around every corner at Connecticut’s Trade Secrets. By Tovah Martin

34 /// Open Studio

Rhode Island’s Matt Cavallaro turns ancient know-how into strikingly modern cookware. By Annie Graves

37 /// House for Sale

An old-growth orchard symbolizes the sweet life that awaits at Vermont’s Apple Hill Farm. By Joe Bills

42 /// Good as Gold

Maple syrup stars in this collection of tried-and-true Yankee recipes. By Amy Traverso

50 /// Local Flavor

Harvard Square haunt Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage delivers classic eats and atmosphere. By Amy Traverso

54 /// In Season

With bright herbs and zesty radish slices, this easy chicken dish bids farewell to winter. By Amy Traverso

travel

58 /// Weekend Away

Madison, Connecticut: a seaside town where nature and culture live side by side. By Ian Aldrich

66 /// The Best 5

Embrace shoulder season with activities that wake up the mind and engage the senses. By Kim Knox Beckius

70 /// Out & About

From flower festivals to New England’s greatest race, these peak-spring events are worth the drive.

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

12

INSIDE YANKEE

14

FIRST PERSON

On watching a snapping turtle take a leap of faith. By Richard Adams Carey

16

FIRST LIGHT

For generations, spring begins in Boston when the Swan Boats set out across the Public Garden lagoon. By Julia Clancy

20

5 QUESTIONS WITH...

Humorist and Vacationland author John Hodgman, featured on the new season of Weekends with Yankee.

24

KNOWLEDGE & WISDOM

A quiz for folks who think they could be a Maine Guide, and wise words from a New Hampshire climbing pro.

26

UP CLOSE

Massachusetts-born Chuck Taylors still have plenty of spring in their step. By Joe Bills

128

LIFE IN THE KINGDOM

Getting water from a well without digging yourself into a hole. By Ben Hewitt

We wrapped up work, hit out-of-office, and hit the road. There was a cabin in the mountains waiting for us. But more than that, there were stories waiting for us. Long laughs around the fire waiting for us. New memories on old trails. When you’re lucky, it feels like the mountain might be the last reason you’re out there. It snowed the whole way up. This was it. This was our chance. This is me.

JOURNEY NO. 357 LAKES & MOUNTAINS REGION

EDITORIAL

Editor Mel Allen

Deputy Editor Ian Aldrich

Managing Editor Jenn Johnson

Senior Food Editor Amy Traverso

Home & Garden Editor Annie Graves

Associate Editor Joe Bills

Senior Digital Editor Aimee Tucker

Associate Digital Editor Katherine Keenan

Contributing Editors Kim Knox Beckius, Ben Hewitt, Rowan Jacobsen, Krissy O’Shea, Julia Shipley

ART

Art Director Lori Pedrick

Photo Editor Heather Marcus

Contributing Photographers Adam DeTour, Megan Haley, Corey Hendrickson, Little Outdoor Giants, Michael Piazza, Greta Rybus

PRODUCTION

Director David Ziarnowski

Manager Brian Johnson

Senior Artists Jennifer Freeman, Susan Shute

DIGITAL

Vice President Paul Belliveau Jr.

Designer Amy O’Brien

Marketing Specialist Holly Sanderson

CORPORATE STAFF

Maintenance Supervisor Mike Caron

Receptionist Linda Clukay

Facilities Attendant Paul Langille

Staff Accountant Nancy Pfuntner

Credit Manager Bill Price

Executive Assistant Christine Tourgee

YANKEE PUBLISHING INC.

ESTABLISHED 1935 | A N EMPLOYEE-OWNED COMPANY

President Jamie Trowbridge

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MISSISSIPPI RIVER CRUISES

This is an extraordinary adventure along one of America’s greatest rivers Explore historic treasures and cultural traditions aboard a brand new paddlewheeler or modern riverboat on a 5 to 22-day cruise along the grand Mississippi River. Small Ship Cruising Done Perfectly®

Travel: Revolutionary New England

We round up the must-see sites and events related to the War of Independence.

NEWENGLAND.COM/ REVOLUTIONARY-WAR

Festivals

Craving color? Check out these bloom-filled ways to welcome spring.

NEWENGLAND.COM/ SPRING-FLOWERS

Coastal Towns

Plan a perfect day-trip or weekend getaway at one of these 10 seaside spots.

NEWENGLAND.COM/ MAINE-COASTAL-TOWNS

Fiddleheads

Learn a deliciously simple way to prepare this classic spring vegetable.

NEWENGLAND.COM/ FIDDLEHEADS

It’s history with a bang at the American Independence Festival in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Photo: Dave Sarazen

Yankee | OUR READERS RESPOND

State of Happiness

IAN ALDRICH

In reporting his profile of marine biologist Greg Skomal [“The Shark Detective,” p. 88], Yankee ’s deputy editor spent a day on the boat with the famed researcher and his team as they searched for white sharks off Chatham, Massachusetts. “It was a look at the other Cape Cod—the wilder, naturalhabitat side,” Aldrich says. “It gave me a whole new perspective on how dynamic that region is.”

SOPHFRONIA SCOTT

After 15 years in New York as a magazine editor and writer, Scott moved to Newtown, Connecticut, in 2005—less than a decade before the school shooting that left survivors reeling, including her young son. She worked on “Hope on Any Given Day” [p. 94] for over a year before showing it to her son, who read it and cried. “I told him I was sorry it had upset him.... ‘No, Mama,’ he said. ‘These are tears of joy.’”

DANA SMITH

A Massachusetts­based photographer whose images have been published by the likes of Time and Le Monde, Smith says the hardest part of his assignment was just keeping up with his young subject [“The Unfinished Journey of João Victor,” p. 98]. “His level of energy, wonder, and amazement is something to be admired…. It was clearly Victor’s world, and I was simply there doing my best to try and capture it.”

WENJIA TANG

Having emigrated to the U.S. when she was 15, this native of southeast China is on a career fast track. 2017 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, she’s already worked with The Wall Street The Atlantic, and many more. For her Yankee assignment [“Eight Ways to Make the Most of Maple Season,” p. 73], she says she looked for ways to bring “a bit of sweetness” to illustrating maple culture.

ADAM DETOUR

A photographer whose work has been published The New York Times and Nature , among others, DeTour is responsible for the delectable images of our maple recipes [“Good as Gold,” p. 42]. “I enjoyed the challenge of capturing all the little drips and splashes of the syrup,” reports DeTour, who adds, “Waffle Sundays are a big deal in my house, so I look forward to trying that recipe at home.”

AMY TRAVERSO

Until meeting up with the famously quick­witted humorist John Hodgman [“5 Questions With...,” Yankee ’s senior food editor had never felt nervous interviewing someone for Weekends with , which she cohosts. “But once I stopped worrying about keeping up, I found that he’s disarmingly honest and terrifically funny,” she says. returns for its fourth season in April.

Howard Mansfield’s “Finding New Hampshire” [January/February] is a step forward for our state, to encourage folks to return and discover. Thank you for the clear portrayal of the place we live. It’s not just tourists who enjoy the foliage, beaches, and mountains; residents travel too, and in a unique way that’s another New Hampshire volunteer opportunity to support each other.

Yes, the first New England was a church and the second was a factory. I propose that the third New England is “the pursuit of happiness”—still.

Patty Smith Rye, New Hampshire

More Than a Pit Stop

I always look forward to curling up with Yankee and a cup of tea and diving deep into the articles, and it was with this same sense of anticipation that I looked at the cover of the January/February issue: “The Berkshires: An Insider’s Guide.” Having lived in Pittsfield and still visiting friends there often, I have a great affection for the area. I hoped this article would be different from many I’ve read, perhaps covering all of the Berkshires. Alas, it was not to be.

True to form, the article started in the north, with coverage of Williamstown, Mass MoCA, and the other arts institutions in the area, and then gave an extensive review of the sights of the south. The single mention of the heart of Berkshire County, Pittsfield, was the Lantern Bar & Grill.

Pittsfield is so much more than just a place to pass through on the way south. What about the Colonial Theatre, Barrington Stage Company, and Berkshire Museum? Independent shops like the Berkshire General Store, Dory & Ginger, and Miller Art Supply, among others? Dining institutions like Dottie’s, Patrick’s, and the Highland?

Although like any post­industrial city Pittsfield still has its challenges, it is a vibrant, hopeful city full of enough

DAFFODILS

April showers hang around

To see if they can drown the ground. Resourcefully, the garden copes

By raising yellow periscopes.

—D.A.W.

attractions to warrant more than the coverage it received in this article.

Kathleen Doherty Canterbury, New Hampshire

Second Sightings

I had a few chuckles reading “The Great Divide” [November/December]. As a town historian in upstate New York, I have heard similar stories of cougars in the woods. Just the other day, someone showed me a video of a “cougar” crossing a road near our town. It was a big animal, but there was only one thing missing—it had no tail!

The cougar roamed the hills of New York state into the late 1880s but had disappeared by 1900. Some thought perhaps a small population was still living in a remote area of New York, but nobody ever found them, and in 2018 the cougar was declared extinct in New York state.

Yet the stories continue, and I’ve learned to listen without comment and keep an open mind.

Peg Ross Greene, New York

Sweet Spots

his is how spring sneaks up on us in New England. The snow softens, and skiers discover March is the kindest month of all. The first songbirds land in our yards, and we think ... It’s coming. By early March, we see sap buckets fastened to maples, plastic tubing threading through the forests, smoke pouring from sugarhouses.

Here in New Hampshire, I need only to walk to the edge of Yankee ’s lawn and across the road to the campus of a small boarding school to know that a seasonal change is afoot. Dublin School enrolled its first students in 1935, the year Yankee published its first issue. At lunchtime, a few of us often stroll through its property, passing a long stand of trees that in maple season hold dozens of old-fashioned metal sap buckets, usually filled to overflowing. Deeper in the school’s woods, sap flows through tubing from hundreds more maples, eventually dripping thousands of gallons into collection tanks. The school maintains a sugarhouse where students, teachers, and even alums boil off the sap until what remains is nature’s great gift to waffles and pancakes.

It’s a scene repeated in hundreds of sugarhouses across New England, and if you’ve never stepped inside one to breathe in the sweet steam, you have missed one of our region’s signature experiences. Maple season is worth celebrating—so if you don’t happen to have a sugarhouse right next door, we have compiled a bucket list of beloved and unexpected ways to tap into this tasty tradition [“Eight Ways to Make the Most of Maple Season,” p. 73].

Inside these pages you will also find stories of New Englanders of all ages and backgrounds who have persisted in finding their singular sweet spot and, in doing so, enhance our lives.

Writer Julia Clancy remembers the childhood enchantment of riding in one of the Swan Boats in Boston’s Public Garden [“Back in the Paddle,” p. 16], an entertainment launched in 1877 by Irish immigrants Robert and Julia Paget. Since then, there has always been a Paget family member to watch over the smiles of the passengers, who—at least for 15 minutes or so— can leave the modern world in their wake.

Massachusetts researcher Greg Skomal has devoted his life to understanding great white sharks, using his dramatic fieldwork to shed light on ways to protect both sharks and swimmers, now and in the future [“The Shark Detective,” p. 88].

A teenager from Angola who moved to Maine in 2016, João Victor turned to poetry recitation as a way to express feelings that many of his fellow asylum seekers cannot voice. His quest to be a national champion in a language he did not speak or understand when he first arrived here is also the story of a bond between teacher and student, and it demonstrates what can be achieved in the face of seemingly impossible odds [“The Unfinished Journey of João Victor,” p. 98].

So come inside, where both springtime and inspiration await.

Bertha’s Journey

On watching a snapping turtle take a leap of faith.

ach winter we wonder about this creature entombed in the ice of our pond out back. Snapping turtles are cold-tolerant, and they don’t necessarily hibernate, but often they do, burrowing like clams into the bottom, only their beaked heads exposed, not breathing, per se, but somehow teasing oxygen from the water through the membranes of the mouth and throat.

We can’t imagine what Bertha would do otherwise in that little pond. We wonder how she endures such cold. We wonder what she thinks or dreams about in a twilight inaccessible to those who live strictly on either side of that border between sleep and wakefulness.

We call her Bertha because that’s what the previous owners of this home in Sandwich, New Hampshire, dubbed her. Not always, but often, once the ice has melted, we see some part of her overland journey from the back pond to the front yard, to Church Street, and then—where? It would be easy enough to find out. She can’t outrun us. Instead we leave her in peace after we halt traffic, if necessary, to see her safely across the road.

We know it’s Bertha each year thanks to a scar on her carapace that might be the result of an unchaperoned encounter with a car. We also have a theory about where she goes: to that bigger pond behind town hall, only a quarter mile distant. We presumed she was on her way to lay eggs near there, but eventually we remembered that midsummer is when snappers do that. Instead, in the spring, they go abroad to look for love, or to change their address, or maybe both.

We wonder if Bertha summers in that bigger pond. Perhaps she has a fond companion there, at least during breeding season. She might not even be a Bertha—more like a Bert. We just choose to imagine her as feminine, dressing her up in unwarranted maternity clothes as this lumbering, prehistoric beast reminds us each year (a little ahead of Mother’s Day) that this earth is deeper and older than we can imagine.

And stranger. We read in the literature that snapping turtles can journey up to 10 miles to find whatever it is they wish to find. Bertha may have only just begun by the time she crosses Church Street. Yet how do they find Zion, given that a turtle can hardly see over the next clump of grass? The earth’s magnetic field has something to do with it, but in its details this is a mystery to an errant species that has found its way to the moon and back but can also get lost in a mall.

My wife and I know that Bertha’s built-in GPS, however, lacks the alternate-route flexibility of Google Maps. We had always thought she went via the smooth lawn on the east side of the house to reach Church, but last spring Sue happened to witness this part of the journey from our back porch. She has the photos to prove that Bertha goes west—where a tumbledown stone wall intervenes.

You’d think you were safe from turtles, if nothing else, on the street side of this wall. But Sue watched in amazement as Bertha’s bearlike claws took her up the near-vertical face of one boulder, and then a second and a third. At the summit, after a good long rest, she dug all four feet simultaneously into granite and launched herself into space. Like an air-dropped shipping container, she fell clattering but upright to the gravel below. Then on to Church Street.

I might not have believed this if not for the photos. Incredulous herself, Sue went out front to direct traffic. One driver rolled down her window to ask, “Is that your pet turtle?”

But Bertha is nobody’s pet, and possibly nobody’s girl. For the latter, we only hope it’s so. If turtles, like dinosaurs, ever learn to fly, this is where it began.

First LIGHT

This year marks the 144th season for Boston’s Swan Boats, which have been gliding around in the Public Garden since Rutherford B. Hayes was in the White House. top right : An image from the boats’ early days, part of a c. 1889 stereograph.

Back in the Paddle

For generations of Bostonians, spring begins when the Swan Boats first set out across the Public Garden lagoon.

BY JULIA CLANCY

Dating back to 1837, Boston’s Public Garden is rooted on land once submerged in tidal marshes. Victorian cast-iron fencing skirts the 24-acre enclave that sits alongside Boston Common in the heart of downtown, surrounded by the historic neighborhoods of Back Bay and Beacon Hill and not far from the Financial District and the waterfront. Within the Public Garden is a six-acre pond, and it is here that the city’s famous Swan Boats make their nest. Ornamented with replicas of their graceful namesake, these 30-foot-long pontoon boats have endured the Depression, two world wars, East Coast weather, and the Internet age.

Knowingly or not, many Bostonians hold the Swan Boats as a serene constant in the city’s endless flux. I am one of them. I rode the boats as a child; so did my mother and her mother, and so did my father and his mother. To my 7-year-old self, the swan perched on the stern loomed tall, its neck curving like half a cartoon heart. The surface of the wide lagoon was flat except for the dappled path left by the boat’s paddle wheel. A 7-year-old and her three siblings might have wished they had rocks to toss into the water, making a kerplunk like the blueberries hitting a metal pail

PHOTOGRAPHS BY EMILY KAN

Sal. The same author wrote Make Way for Ducklings in 1941, which helped immortalize the Swan Boats and the Public Garden for generations of young readers.

Today, I have come back to the Swan Boats right at that annual moment when early May explodes into spring: sunlight, greenery, and pollen. It’s been two decades since my last loop on the Swans. I no longer thrill at the thought of falling in (the water is two feet deep), and what I recalled as a 40-minute jaunt around the pond actually lasts about 15. But the urge to sit on a swan on the water is there, a trinket of childhood that endures.

There are no phone calls allowed here. There are no waterfalls or statues to ogle.

nies winking beneath the silt. Under a stone footbridge near the water is a spill of yellow tulips like cracked egg yolks. A willow tree dangles long ropes of frondlike branches over benches and grass. The hum of Commonwealth Avenue is eclipsed, somehow, by quiet.

Weighing some 800 pounds apiece

the rudder. The 12 boats in the fleet are all painted, sanded, and revarnished seasonally, with workers taking care to maintain the two dozen or so parts custom-made for the Swans, the oldest of which is 109. Weather permitting, the Swan Boats operate daily from mid-April through Labor Day; an adult ticket costs less than a small latte at any of the nearby coffee shops.

Standing under the awning of the pontoon dock is owner Lyn Paget, the great-great-granddaughter of Roger Paget, the original proprietor. Her smile is like the mellow flicker of sun on the water, and despite her petite size there’s also something about Lyn that suggests she could hoist two adults from knee-deep water if she wanted to.

his boats from the German opera Lohengrin, in which the hero rides a swan-drawn boat across a river to save the princess. Today, Paget’s great-great-granddaughter Lyn ( INSET) runs the family business.

The Swan Boat family tree is as neatly vertical as a birch. Lyn’s father, Paul Paget, took the reins from his father, John Paget, who was 86 when he retired. John’s parents, Irish immigrants named Robert and Julia Paget, debuted the Swan Boats in 1877, seven years after getting a rowboat license from the city council. When Robert died the following year of tuberculosis, Julia, pregnant with her fourth child, took over as sole proprietor. Being a woman, she was required to collect signatures from fellow Back Bay business owners as proof that she had the ability to run the Swan Boats—which she went on to do for 36 years.

“Sitting here 143 years later,” Lyn tells me, “there’s no way this would have continued to exist without her.”

Visitors trickle toward the dock awning as lunchtime approaches. Sue Ferruggio, who has worked at the Swan Boats for 24 years, collects tickets from a father-daughter duo from Arlington, a family of six from Maine, travelers from China visiting relatives,

and a grandmother who once rode the boats as a girl with her grandmother.

I ask Lyn if she has any indelible memories from her life among the Swan Boats. I suppose I expected a family anecdote, or a nod to returning patrons for whom a boat ride is a decades-old tradition. But what she said was, “I feel so emotionally connected to what the boats mean for people. And that was especially apparent during the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013.”

Even from the lagoon, she remembers, they could hear it. A loud noise. Commotion. Sirens. That evening, the parks commissioner left it up to Lyn to decide whether to open the Swan Boats in the following days. She called every member of her close-knit little crew to see where their hearts and heads were. The consensus was unanimous: “One hundred percent of our team told me, ‘We’re in.’”

The Swan Boats reopened two days after the marathon bombings. Locals showed up. Folks who were stuck in town without a flight home showed

up. People still wearing running numbers and medals showed up. “It was amazing to see how many people flocked here,” Lyn says.

Not long after that, Lyn was making small talk with a woman whose son was on the dock, in a wheelchair, waiting for his boat ride. Their family had flown from California for the marathon, which the woman ran in. Her son had been at the finish line and was hit in the leg by shrapnel when the bombs went off. The boy spent a week recovering at Boston Children’s Hospital, and this was the first day since the bombings that he had medical permission to go outdoors. He asked for a Swan Boat ride.

Lyn pauses. We both nod in the silence, unintentionally mimicking the bobbing Swans behind us.

“It’s an incredible memory of human love and persistence,” she says. “A memory like that shows what these places in the middle of cities are to people. They mean something.”

A pause, and then: “They mean something.”

One of the premier summer music festivals in the world and summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra since 1937, Tanglewood is located in the beautiful Berkshire Hills, between Stockbridge and Lenox, Massachusetts.

John Hodgman

Catching up with the Vacationland author and Weekends with Yankee guest.

Though most widely known as the “PC” from those classic “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” ads, Massachusetts native John Hodgman has enjoyed fame on several fronts in short order. At age 48, he’s been a Daily Show regular, a comic bit player in movies and TV shows like Parks and Recreation and Baby Mama, and a New York Times Magazine advice expert (aka “Judge John Hodgman,” a persona that also stars in a long-running podcast of the same name). But it was as a humorist that Hodgman first broke through, starting with his 2005 almanac of fake facts, The Areas of My Expertise , and continuing with a string of best-selling books, including 2017’s Vacationland and last fall’s Medallion Status.

For season four of Weekends with Yankee (which premieres this April on public television stations around the country), I met up with Hodgman at a bookstore—one of his hometown hangouts, in fact, the Brookline Booksmith—where we talked about growing up, uncomfortable Maine beaches, and the indignities of middle age. —Amy Traverso

Q So, you’re back in your hometown. Do you feel you’ve reverted to your teenage self?

A It’s very hard to feel a difference between [now and] who I was when I was ages 17, 18, when I really spent a lot of time here. On the one hand, you feel this distinct continuity to who you were before. And then all of a sudden, you realize everything’s changed. I’m not 17, I’m 48. I feel like a ghost haunting this place—but a very happy and content ghost, because this is a nice place to live. And be undead in, I would suspect.

Q

Vacationland is about a lot of favorite haunts in Maine and Massachusetts. It made us in New England feel special, you know?

A I’m glad it made people in New England feel special, because people in New England have a moral difficulty with feeling good about themselves. …[I]t’s a region of the world in which the external loathing is made sweeter because you realize it’s all undercut by self-loathing. It was a strange thing moving to New York City and

In his 2017 memoir, Vacationland, humorist John Hodgman describes his adopted home of Maine as “a beautiful place that I paradoxically want to hoard to myself and share with everyone I meet.”

realizing what a friendly town it is. I show up and I’m like, “Why are people smiling at me? I’m not used to this at all. I’m from New England!”

But yes, Vacationland was … about growing up in Brookline, spending a lot of time as an adolescent and young grown-up in Western Massachusetts, and then transitioning more recently to coastal Maine, where my wife has family and where we’ve begun spending a good chunk of our year because she’s a high school teacher and I’m unemployed.

Q When did you realize you were well suited to Maine?

fortable, but then your body numbs and adjusts, and then it’s kind of a glorious, fun thing to do, and you’re better because you’ve gone through it.

Q Do you find that middle age brings with it a constant denial of reality?

should have left long ago. I’m a creepy old dude who doesn’t know when to leave.

Q That record-scratch moment of realizing you’re not one of them, right?

A And they all go, “What’s a ‘record scratch’? What are you talking about?”

At times you feel this complete connection to your younger self, and you cannot believe you are the person you see in the mirror. I want to say it takes your breath away, but not in a good way. In the panic-attack sort of way.

A

It’s interesting. I always considered myself part of Brookline. This truly was my world, and I did not need my world to be much larger than the Coolidge Corner area. Maybe a trip to the Nickelodeon in Kenmore Square. And what a world! You had one of the greatest bookstores in the world, one of the greatest video stores in the world. Those are the two things I cared about other than friends. So I did not expect myself to feel comfortable on the painful, rocky beaches of coastal Maine.

Actually, I can’t say that I’ve grown comfortable, because Maine resists comfort of all kinds. There are things constantly biting you and hurting your feet, and precipices for you to tumble off of. But I did find a perfect place to start feeling older, because going through the beginnings of middle age … is similar to swimming in Maine. It’s a very cold experience, it’s a very lonely experience, and you wish it were not happening to you. The difference between getting older and going swimming in Maine is that going swimming is a dumb choice you made; you didn’t have to do it. As with all new experiences, it’s really uncom-

A In Medallion Status , I talk about going back to Yale, which is where I went to school. That’s a fouryear accredited institution in southern Connecticut. I got a bachelor’s of arts degree in literary theory there. … I got invited back by [one of Yale’s secret societies] … and it was a remarkable, fun evening of hanging out with people who were much

younger than I, and I had some very good advice for them, like, Don’t get drunk and fall down the stairs like I did ... you’re not immortal, you just think you are ... and if someone invites you to do something interesting in life, even if it’s a little bit scary, you should say yes . Like, if someone invites you to have dinner in a secret society, you might be worried that you will become a blood sacrifice, but in fact, it’s just a nice time hanging out with younger people.

And boy, could I hang out with those younger people! They were happy to hang out with me, I was happy to hang out with them. And the night got very late and I thought, I could stay here forever. I’m young, too! And that’s when I realized, Oh, no, I

Just because I’ve been thinking so much about the trajectory of my life—a) because I’ve been writing this book, and b) because I’m an egotist—I woke up the other day and I had, for the first time in years and years, this very vivid memory of my first day in high school, which I had not remembered at all. Not only where I was sitting that day, but the feeling I was having at the time, long lost to time in my brain. But I think because my son just started high school, it came back up, and it truly was a not-comfortable experience to feel the breadth of time and have the breath taken from me in that moment.

But if you were to not have those uncomfortable moments of breaks with the past, you’d be a terrible person. You’d be Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused.

Season four of Weekends with Yankee , which features our interview with John Hodgman as well as conversations with other notable New Englanders, premieres April 18 on WGBH, WGBY, and New Hampshire PBS. To search your own local listings, go to newengland.com/ weekendswithyankee.

Beginning middle age is like swimming in Maine. It’s a very cold experience, it’s a very lonely experience, and you wish it were not happening to you.

Go Wild on This One

Peeking at a test for New England’s ultimate backcountry experts.

The coveted patch is simple enough—red and green with the emblem of a pine tree in its center—but it proclaims its wearers to be the stuff of legend: Registered Maine Guides. Years ago prospective guides just needed to prove outdoors expertise to a local game warden. Today they face a few more hurdles, including choosing a specialty (hunting, fishing, etc.), passing an oral exam, and scoring at least 70 percent on a written exam of about 200 questions. Think you’ve got what it takes? Try your hand at a few test questions from years past.

1. Manmade objects on a topographic map are shown in black. (A) true; (B) false

2. A bench mark tells the elevation of a location.

(A) true; (B) false

3. The back azimuth of 40° is:

(A) 200°; (B) 180°; (C) 120°; (D) 220°

4. An example of a rimfire cartridge is a:

(A) 30.06; (B) 12-gauge shotgun shell; (C) 22 cal.; (D) .357 cartridge

5. In order for a bow to be legal for archery hunting, it must be capable of shooting an arrow:

(A) 200 yards; (B) 150 yards;

(C) 100 yards; (D) 50 yards

6. Which of the following is a streamer fly?

(A) Montana; (B) Alexandra; (C) 9-3; (D) Muddler

7. It is most important in cold weather at high altitude to keep up your intake of: (A) protein; (B) water; (C) salt; (D) carbohydrates

8. Burn blisters indicate: (A) first-degree burn;

(B) second-degree burn; (C) third-degree burn;

(D) a burn that is not serious

9. On a day hike away from your campsite, a camper falls and injures his arm. You should:

(A) Assist him in walking back to camp, splint his arm there, and get him to medical aid;

(B) Carry him back to camp, splint his arm there, and get him to medical aid;

(C) Splint the arm before moving the camper, assist him in walking, and get him to medical aid;

(D) Do not move the camper; go get medical aid

—Adapted from “Could You Become a Maine Guide?”

March 1987

UNCOMMON SENSE

Mark Synnott (born December 11, 1969). This Jackson, New Hampshire–based climber and journalist notched a New York Times best-seller with the tale of his friend Honnold’s worldfamous feat, The Impossible Climb, out in paperback this March. Next up is a book about Synnott’s own 2019 Everest ascent, a challenge for which there’s no better training ground, he has said, than the peak in his backyard: Mount Washington, “Home of the World’s Worst Weather.”

“We all have our own El Capitan. If [Alex Honnold] can free-climb El Capitan, what could we accomplish, if we truly set our minds to it?”

“WINGS NECK LIGHTHOUSE”

At the Tip of Wing’s Neck, Pocasset

Forrest Pirovano’s painting “Wings Neck Lighthouse” portrays the beauty of this lighthouse

Built in 1849, Wings Neck Lighthouse helped with navigation in and out of Buzzard’s Bay. In 1914, when the Cape Cod Canal was opened and sea traffic increased, Wings Neck Lighthouse was seen as one of the most important lighthouses in the Atlantic. Newer technology was adopted and in 1943 Cleveland Ledge Light was built to replace Wings Neck. Sold by the government in 1947 and renovated in 2003, it is now available for rent. At the Wings Neck Lighthouse, you get a historic, charming, and unique environment with an amazing water view. This beautiful limited-edition print of an original oil painting, individually numbered and signed by the artist, shows the lighthouse and its keeper’s house in the afternoon sun.

This exquisite print is bordered by a museum-quality white-on-white double mat, measuring 11x14 inches. Framed in either a black or white 1 ½ inch deep wood frame, this limited edition print measures 12¼ X 15¼ inches and is priced at only $149. Matted but unframed the price for this print is $109. Prices include shipping and packaging.

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

FORREST PIROVANO, artist

P.O. Box 1011 • Mashpee, MA 02649

Visit our studio in Mashpee Commons, Cape Cod

All major credit cards are welcome. Please send card name, card number, expiration date, code number & billing ZIP code. Checks are also accepted.…Or you can call Forrest at 781-858-3691 …Or you can pay through our website www.forrestcapecodpaintings.com

Sole Survivors

More than a century on, Massachusetts-born Chuck Taylors still have plenty of spring in their step.

Before there were Jordans and LeBrons, there were Chucks.

As the most famous footwear to come out of Malden, Massachusetts, Chuck Taylor All Stars were the unrivaled king of athletic sneakers for half a century. The first U.S. Olympic basketball team played in special white Chucks with red and blue trim at the 1936 Games. Wilt Chamberlain was wearing his size 15½ Chucks when he scored 100 points during a game in 1962, but that was no surprise: Throughout the 1960s, pretty much every player in the NBA sported them.

Today a hipster fashion staple, Chucks have been worn by everyone from Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa to supermodel Gisele Bündchen. With their rubber sole and cotton canvas upper, they are inexpensive, practical, sturdy. But most of all, they are cool.

Their story begins in Malden in 1908, when a 47-year-old New Hampshire native named Marquis Mills Converse quit his job managing a shoe factory and launched his own business, the Converse Rubber Shoe Company. Its first athletic shoes, dubbed “Non-Skids,” debuted in 1915. The Converse All Star premiered two years later.

The “Chuck Taylor” moniker came along in the 1920s, after semipro basketball player Charles “Chuck” Taylor was hired on as a salesman. (As the legend goes, Taylor was offered the job after walking into a Converse sales office in Chicago to complain that the sneakers made his feet hurt.) Though the Indiana-born Taylor had had an undistinguished basketball career, marked by stints with the Columbus

Commercials and the Dayton Non-Skids, he was a great promoter. He traveled the country, hosting basketball clinics and touting Converse shoes everywhere he went, and soon became such a well-known brand ambassador that his signature was added to the All Star ankle patch.

Taylor’s death in 1969 came on the eve of the decadeslong “sneaker wars,” which saw companies like Adidas, Puma, and Nike battling for athletic-shoe dominance. As Converse’s hold on the sports market slipped, it relaunched Chucks as a casual brand, rolling out new colors and materials that made the shoe more a means of personal expression.

Despite that savvy pivot, Converse had to file for bankruptcy in 2001 and was purchased by Nike two years later. Yet the rebound that followed would make even Bill Russell proud: By 2015, the year the company moved into new headquarters in Boston (and released the Chuck Taylor II), Converse was once again a $2 billion brand. —Joe Bills

FLORAL SUPPORT

From growers and merchants to artisans and authors, there’s a garden guru around every corner at

T’S

LIKE THE STARTING BELL FOR SPRING.

IOther sales try to imitate it, other regions wish they’d hit on the idea first, but nothing compares to the frisson on the field at Trade Secrets in Sharon, Connecticut, where in-the-know folks like Martha Stewart hoof it between booths, scooping up rare plants and garden antiques. • A serious case of cabin fever was responsible for jump-starting Trade Secrets 20 years ago. Interior designer Bunny Williams was surveying her Litchfield County greenhouse, overflowing with too many seedlings and cuttings after a long winter, when inspiration struck. “Let’s have a sale!” she said to her gardener, Naomi Blumenthal. It just so happened that Naomi was a volunteer with Women’s Support Services, a local group combating domestic violence, which was delighted to be the beneficiary of the sale. Bunny invited a group of favorite growers and an equal number of garden antiques dealers to bring their wares for a mid-May event, and Trade Secrets was born. • Attendance has seen a steady uptick. Last year, the sale drew 1,500 attendees and 250 volunteers, the latter schlepping wagons of purchases to and fro, directing traffic, serving food. Originally held at Williams’s home in Falls Village, the event now takes place at LionRock Farm, a 600-acre estate and working farm in Sharon. It’s a far cry from aisles of booths lined up on a dusty field: Given the lavish displays and vendors spilling goodies among statuary, perennial beds, and a pool pavilion, the location is a jaw-dropper. • The sale is held rain or shine—or snow—on a Saturday in May (this year’s is May 16); on the following day, tours of a few stellar local gardens (including Williams’s own) make a full weekend out of the event. Here, we give you a sneak peek at some of the gurus you might run into at Trade Secrets this year.

BY TOVAH MARTIN • PHOTOGRAPHS BY KINDRA CLINEFF

Connecticut’s Trade Secrets.

Although general admission to the Trade Secrets garden show begins at 10 a.m., serious shoppers can opt to shell out extra for early-bird access and a continental breakfast to help fuel their browsing. As many as 60 vendors are expected at this year’s show; online ticket sales begin April 1.

ADAM WHEELER

BROKEN ARROW NURSERY Hamden, CT

SPECIALTY: Shrubs

For gardeners tired of the same old inventory of spireas at their local nursery, Broken Arrow Nursery’s display is a welcome sight. Sure, there are some intriguing spins on familiar shrubs here—but you might also meet that exotic heartthrob you never knew existed. Rumor has it that many of Broken Arrow’s most sensational specimens are hidden in the deep recesses of its nursery until being unveiled at the show.

NOTEWORTHY PLANT: Rosa glauca . An admitted “foliage kinda guy,” Adam Wheeler singles out this species rose as his favorite shrub. Flowers usually rule in the rose arena, but smoky purple leaves and a tidy 6-by-6-foot vase-shaped structure mean R. glauca is always well dressed (its dainty single pink flowers in late spring/early summer are almost an afterthought). Zone 3 hardiness doesn’t hurt either.

TRADE SECRET: Roses love to be pruned, and R. glauca is no exception. Because foliage is this rose’s strong suit, pruning is the secret to triggering more color-saturated stems as well as to achieving a graceful shape.

HELEN O’DONNELL

THE BUNKER FARM Dummerston, VT

SPECIALTY: Unusual annuals and perennials

In making her picks from the Bunker Farm’s 300 different varieties—all grown from seed—Helen O’Donnell doesn’t do the same old supertunias often associated with annuals. Instead she brings connoisseur collectibles like tall, single, remarkably patterned marigolds from Britain’s fabled Great Dixter. And if you draw a blank upon hearing “nemesia,” “mimulus,” “cuphea,” or “nolana,” swing by her booth to see them in full bloom. For O’Donnell, Trade Secrets offers the chance to meet all kinds of kindred spirits who are eager to try offbeat

ADAM WHEELER HELEN O’DONNELL

botanicals. “There’s such a high concentration of serious gardeners,” she marvels. “It’s like bumping into one plant genius after another.”

NOTEWORTHY PLANT: Nemesia cheiranthus ‘Masquerade’. This one tends to disappear into customers’ wagons in a flash. Envision a wiry plant crowned by a halo of lemon-yellow blossoms that look like fascinators. Unlike most nemesias, it endures months of heat before petering out.

TRADE SECRET: O’Donnell credits her impressive seedling success rate to repotting them three times. While it’s labor-intensive, the gradual progression from seed tray to plug to 4-inch pot makes for a more robust plant.

DENNIS MAREB

WINDY HILL FARM

Great Barrington, MA

SPECIALTY: Trees

An original Trade Secrets vendor, Dennis Mareb once took a hiatus from the event, thinking that his

nursery was so close by, his presence wasn’t necessary. (After all, lugging a forest of potted trees to a sale isn’t easy.) But in the end, he missed being there. “The energy is like nowhere else on earth,” he says, “plus there’s the goodwill of a great cause.” While Mareb wishes he could bring some of his nursery’s behemoths, he’s OK with showcasing smaller trees. “We’re not snobs,” he says, adding, “That beautiful-looking lilac will jump onto the truck as well.”

NOTEWORTHY PLANT: Acer x pseudosieboldianum ‘Ice Dragon’. An answered prayer for people in cold climates—aka New Englanders— who want to grow Japanese maples, this small-stature maple offers a cut leaf, impressive autumn color, and (most critically) the ability to stand up to a snow load and extremely cold temperatures.

TRADE SECRET: While maintaining that there’s no real secret to growing this plant, Mareb does offer this advice: “‘Ice Dragon’ has a nice form without special pruning. It grows in sun or partial shade, but wouldn’t be happy with wet roots.”

PETER JOPPE

HILLSIDE NURSERY

Shelburne Falls, MA

SPECIALTY: Woodland plants

“You’re not going to find these plants at your typical nursery,” says Peter Joppe, who—along with assistant manager Amy Murray—will be bringing about 1,000 woodland wildflowers to Trade Secrets from the mountains of Western Massachusetts. And that rarity isn’t lost on the crowd: At one show, when word got out that Hillside had pristine nurserypropagated lady’s slipper orchids, there was almost a stampede. Woodland peonies, trilliums, Solomon’s seal, hepatics, native pachysandras, and bellworts also go home with those who rise at dawn to jostle for position in the early-buyer line.

NOTEWORTHY PLANT: Cypripedium ‘Victoria’ x C. pubescens x C. fasciolatum. As a breeder, Joppe strives to build a better plant, and this lady’s slipper orchid is a sterling example of an easy-to-grow woodlander with stunning blooms.

PETER JOPPE & AMY MURRAY ED BOWEN DENNIS MAREB

For Now And Ever

TRADE SECRET: “A battle we’ve faced for years is the perception that lady’s slipper orchids are difficult to grow,” says Joppe. “Yes, Cypripedium acaule does require a special soil fungus to thrive, but other lady’s slippers are much easier. Give them shade and moist soil, but don’t overwater. Our secret: Put a few handfuls of pea gravel into the planting hole.”

ED BOWEN ISSIMA

Little Compton, RI

SPECIALTY: Unusual hardy perennials

Collectors make a beeline to Trade Secrets to purchase plants they never knew existed, which is exactly what Ed Bowen spends his time propagating and testing at the Rhode Island nursery he cofounded with Taylor Johnston. Although he doesn’t know what he’ll bring until the week of the show (“Really, I load up whatever looks good that week,” he admits), he’ll be pulling from a deep pool of cuttings and seedlings raised specifically to awe gardeners: hydrangeas grown primarily for their neon foliage, for example, or sanguisorbas with flowers like feather boas.

NOTEWORTHY PLANT: Podophyllum hybrid. With leaves that make you feel you’re about to be high-fived by a dinosaur, podophyllums have shock appeal even before they start budding up. The immense, colorful, succulent foliage of Bowen’s version is riveting—“like woodland sculpture”—and then the blood-red blossoms appear.

TRADE SECRET: Podophyllums are shade lovers that “prefer the humus-y duff that’s accumulated in the woods over millennia,” Bowen says.

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 handcut double mats of pewter and rust at $145*, or in the mats alone at $105*. Please add $18.95 for insured shipping. Returns/exchanges within 30 days.

My best wishes are with you.

Sextonart Inc. • P.O. Box 581 • Rutherford, CA 94573 (415) 989-1630

All major credit cards are welcomed. Please call between 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, 7 days a week.

Checks are also accepted. Please include a phone number.

*California residents please include 8.0% tax

Please visit our website at www.robertsexton.com

“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.”

SHARON MROZINSKI

MARSTON HOUSE

Vinalhaven, ME

SPECIALTY: Antiques and accessories

Decked out in vintage jodhpurs and a crisp linen shirt, Sharon Mrozinski is hard to miss. Her booth overflows with antique linens, shepherd’s smocks, baskets, and vintage old porcelain pitchers. Need a curtain for your cabana? How about drapes that come complete with a story of their provenance from a Paris butcher’s window? Mrozinski herself is as colorful as her wares and a wealth of information to boot.

TRADE SECRET: To remove stains from centuries-old linen (rust marks are particularly stubborn), Mrozinski suggests running the fabric through a cycle in the washing machine with a gentle non-bleaching soap and warm water, and then leaving it to soak. “Sometimes it will take days,” she says. Fortunately, gardeners are infinitely patient.

IZZY FITCH

BATTLE HILL FORGE

Millerton, NY

SPECIALTY: Hand-forged metal pieces

One of six artisans selling wares at Trade Secrets, Izzy Fitch was a natural pick given the presence of his creations in garden tours the day after the sale. The tuteurs, fences, and various plant supports that he fashions are really collaborations with clients—“That’s how you get innovation,” he says—and clearly, the smith listens and learns from seasoned gardeners. For example, he

can explain how clematis vines need a tower that broadens at the top to support their span, whereas tall vines such as morning glories might be best clambering up a 10-foot tower. His best-selling item? Embracers to support peonies and grasses.

TRADE SECRET: “When a support is being used to keep a plant from flopping, it should cinch the plant about halfway up,” Fitch advises. “Any higher, and it will end up looking unnatural—like a straitjacket.”

THE NOT-SO-SECRET DETAILS

WHAT: Trade Secrets, an annual weekend event featuring a rare plant and garden antiques sale and a garden tour

WHEN: Sale runs 8 a.m.–3 p.m. Saturday, May 16; garden tour runs 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Sunday, May 17

WHERE: LionRock Farm, Sharon, Connecticut

COST: Sale admission is $125 early/$50 regular/$25 late; garden tour is $50

BECAUSE: In addition to offering top-shelf garden inspiration, this weekend is the year’s main fund-raiser for Women’s Support Services, a nonprofit working to end domestic violence in northwest Connecticut and surrounding communities in New York and Massachusetts.

For more information or to purchase tickets, go to tradesecretsct.com.

SHARON MROZINSKI IZZY FITCH

Forging the Future

Rhode Island’s Matt Cavallaro turns ancient know-how into strikingly modern cookware.

BY ANNIE GRAVES

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAT PIASECKI

o cast iron, you need heat, sand, and metal. That’s it. Everything else is peripheral.

In a different setting and a different time, Matt Cavallaro might pass for a medieval craftsman—something about his close-cropped beard, his skill with the metal arts, the intensity of the way he handles the object at hand. Instead, we’re deep into the tangled innards of a squat brick industrial building in Providence, Rhode Island, and Cavallaro, 32, is sporting plastic safety glasses atop a black knit cap. In fact, he is a study in black, the black of well-worn cast iron, from jeans and hoodie to down vest and even his beard. His smile is open; his brown boots have scuffed around the block a few times.

“The cast iron process is thousands of years old,” he says, warming to his subject. “Other than pottery, it’s the most ancient production process. There are limits to it, but there is so much possibility and freedom. If you know the constraints, you can

work within them to really push the boundaries.”

We’ve just wandered through a forest of metal shelving, past rugged workbenches and heavy chains dangling from the ceiling, light filtering down through skylights. Fabricated metal shapes hang from the walls; an anvil looks on. Cavallaro shares this cavernous maker space with several design friends, but the boundaries seem fluid. It’s hard to tell where one workshop leaves off and another begins, except for this small pod of a room that Cavallaro carved into a corner to house the seasoning oven—a gray hulk that looks like an impregnable safe—and his shipping operation.

The prettiest thing in this very basic room is a little stack of burnished pots sitting on a metal stool. They glow like bronze, but they’re cast iron. Nearby are two small black skillets glistening with oil, their handles gnarled into the shape of branches. These are among the items Cavallaro used to launch Nest Homeware in 2013, with the help of Kickstarter, just three years after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design.

“I designed the original collection—egg pan, nine-inch skillet, three-and-a-half-quart Dutch oven— all at the same time, because I felt that there was a lot of strength in launching with more than one product,”

Metal artisan Matt Cavallaro with cast-iron pieces from his Nest Homeware line. The eye-catching bronze color comes from a double seasoning with organic flaxseed oil, which helps protect the metal against rust and provides a natural nonstick surface instead of a synthetic one.

RUE SAKAYAMA (COOKWARE)

Cavallaro explains. “You can try to make one thing that does it all, but it’s never going to do everything well.”

What Cavallaro himself does well, he freely admits, is relate to the process. “I fell in love with it, the pattern making,” he says. “From an early age I really was intrigued by mold making, and this process is entirely mold making and casting.” He shakes the pot lid he’s holding, for emphasis. “I think really well in a mold. And it tends to be how I move through a lot of projects.”

So Cavallaro talks me through this ancient process, first showing me the “positive,” a 3-D pattern that he sculpts by hand, and then the “parting line,” which is where he splits it. The two halves are mounted to two sides of a board; a box filled with hard-packed sand is lowered onto each half. When the pattern is removed, that imprint becomes the

mold to be filled with molten metal at the foundry.

He emphasizes the importance of that early hand-sculpting, though eventually he resorts to a computer program to build the pattern. “But it would be impossible, I think, to come up with a form this nuanced on a computer. It does what it wants, not necessarily what I want.” He hands me the skillet. “And it won’t know what feels good in your hands. These particular products—they need to start with the hand.”

They finish with the hand, too. Although he uses an out-of-state foundry, the seasoning and the shipping happen here, with Cavallaro and his partner, Rue Sakayama, handling every piece of cookware, seasoning it with flaxseed oil in the unassuminglooking oven. Over time, and with use, the color will darken, deepening to the rich black of antique cast iron.

Cavallaro grins and makes a comment about his great love of fantasy, sci-fi, and “medieval stuff.” He is pleased with how these iron pots have materialized into the world. The ancient remains relevant—and revelatory. “That experience of watching molten metal take shape, it does not lose its charm,” he says. “I don’t think it ever really will. It is magic, every single time.

“Previously I’d thought that product design was almost evil—kind of unnecessary and wasteful,” he continues, remembering his RISD days. “When I saw what was possible with an ancient material that’s truly recyclable, it was like—oh, if I work with this I can make something that’s going to last forever. And maybe that’s worthwhile.”

For more information about Cavallaro’s work, go to nesthomeware.com.

The Retirement of a Lifetime

Farmers, would-be innkeepers, and anyone who loves sweeping rural views might find their next dream home in Apple Hill Farm.

Core Value

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.

A hillside studded with old-growth apple trees hints at the sweet life that awaits at this handsome Vermont farm and former B&B.

BY JOE BILLS

f there were an encyclopedia entry for “idyllic New England,” the illustration might well show Apple Hill Farm. Nestled in the White River Valley, the farm is described in the National Register of Historic Places as a prime example of the self-sustaining hill farms that dotted Vermont’s landscape in the 19th century.

My visit to Apple Hill leads me through the village of Rochester to Route 73, which parallels the west branch of the White River and bisects the farm property less than two miles from town. Pulling into the drive, I imagine this is what entering a postcard would feel like. My gaze bounces from detail to detail: rebuilt stone walls, a 1920s milkhouse, a sugarhouse, scattered apple trees. Standing over it all is Apple Hill’s often-photographed 1875 “bank barn,” a structure most notable for the way it’s built into the landscape to allow “ground level” access to all three stories.

The main house, the barn, and the outbuildings are clustered to the north of the road, with Apple Hill rising behind. To the south, hayfields are sandwiched between road and river. To the west stands the Green Mountain National Forest.

it was their retirement property, chosen in part for its proximity to Janet’s family, Bob filled his days with one project after another, including preserving the historic bank barn. “I need to keep busy,” he told me in a phone interview before my visit. “Restoration was my hobby. It became my passion. ”

For my visit to the farm, my guide is the Avianos’ Realtor, Eric Johnson, who leads me from house to barn, down to swimming holes and up to pastures and fields, each with at least one story to be told.

the wonderful workshop and collection of old farm tools, the wood stanchions of a former milking parlor—but the detail that most captures my imagination is nearly invisible. Had Johnson not pointed it out, I would have missed the set of six evenly spaced holes drilled into the wall of the barn’s top level, each providing a view of the back door of the house. We spend a few laughing minutes in speculation about what might have been happening up here to necessitate the peepholes. A Prohibition-era still? Kids playing hooky? An illicit

a horse and buggy barn is now a garage and mudroom/ activity room. below : The farm’s one-acre pond, home to water lilies and native fish species. opposite : Apple Hill’s namesake cider, made from apples harvested right here.

card game? Hungry workers afraid of missing lunch?

The house itself, which dates to 1840, is a place that has been lived in and worked on, not treated as an artifact—it was extensively remodeled in the late 1890s and several times after that. The interior is simple and meticulously well kept, and it includes features from throughout its history. Three upstairs bathrooms call back to the house’s days as a B&B. The walls of the upper hall are curved (another mini mystery), and its pine floorboards appear to be original; downstairs, in the modern kitchen, a wide window looks out toward Apple Hill itself.

As my tour progresses, the history of the property comes into clearer focus via a series of farmers who left their names here. There was Haskell Hill, after settler David Haskell; then Austin Hill in the 1800s, when John Austin farmed here; and then, after

it changed hands in 1862, the Ezekiel Emerson Farm, which is the name under which it entered into the National Register of Historic Places.

Over the years, this property has served many purposes. Emerson’s farm produced corn, oats, potatoes, butter, hay, maple sugar, and apples from more than 100 trees. In the years after World War I, owner George Burditt was known for the excellent potatoes he grew on the hillside. Subsequent owners remodeled the house in the 1970s to provide lodging for skiers (both Killington and Sugarbush are less than half an hour away), and the property was renamed Apple Hill. In 1998, a couple named Ronald and Nancy Halter bought the property and founded the Apple Hill Farm Bed and Breakfast.

Today, the hillside hosts grazing pastures, growing fields, and a pond that’s been stocked with bass and bluegill—and of course there are those old-growth apple trees, which are kept tended thanks to Shacksbury Cider, which uses the fruit for its Apple Hill Farmhouse Cider. Partnerships like this keep the property active, from the farmer who hays the fields to the women whose horses graze in the upper pasture, seemingly nonplussed by the panoramic mountain view.

“It’s a property that is meant to be used,” Bob Aviano says, “but it’s time for the next owners to bring their own visi on for it. I’ve always seen myself as steward of the property. It is still like it was, and I hope it stays that way.”

Apple Hill Farm is listed at $779,000. For more information, go to applehillvt.com or contact Eric Johnston of Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty at 802-779-1903 or email eric.johnston@fourseasonssir.com.

BUILDING A BETTER BACKYARD

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CRISP AND FLUFFY WAFFLES, p. 48

GOLD GOOD AS

YANKEE ’S FAVORITE TRIED-AND-TRUE RECIPES

STARRING MAPLE SYRUP.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM DETOUR

To complement this issue’s celebration of all things maple [p. 73], we dove into our recipe archive to highlight the dishes that have stood the test of time, both with readers and in our own kitchens. From pecan pie–style chewy maple bars to addictive maple-glazed ribs made with just nine ingredients, these standbys will carry you through this sweet season. We also added one new recipe for crisp-tender waffles that are bound to become a regular part of your maple repertoire.

FOOD STYLING BY MONICA MARIANO / ENNIS INC. • PROP STYLING BY VINCENT RUSSO / ENNIS INC.

MAPLE DUMPLINGS ( GRANDPÈRES )

A dish that hails from the sugar shacks and logging camps of Quebec and Acadia, these tender dumplings are simmered in a mixture of maple syrup and water. As the starch from the dumplings is released during cooking, it thickens the liquid into a rich sauce. Topped with toasted nuts and whipped cream, this is a quick and comforting way to start (or end) your day.

FOR THE DUMPLINGS

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon table salt

4 ½ t ablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into small cubes

1 cup buttermilk

W hipped cream and toasted pecans, for garnish

food processor, and pulse. Sprinkle in the butter, and pulse 6 to 8 more times, until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Transfer to a medium bowl and stir in the buttermilk.

With a spoon, scoop up a walnutsize bit of dough. Drop it into the sauce, then repeat until the pot is two-thirds full (the dumplings expand). Cover the pot, reduce heat to low, and let the dumplings simmer until fluffy and cooked through, about 10 minutes. Transfer the finished dumplings to a large heatproof bowl and keep warm in the oven. Repeat with the remaining dough. If the sauce gets too thick, add a bit of water to thin it out. Serve the dumplings warm, topped with a drizzle of sauce, whipped cream, and toasted pecans. Yields 6 servings.

MAPLE BARBECUE RIBS

Originally credited to a New England cook named Anne Herrmann, this recipe has long been a reader favorite for its ease of preparation and its sweet-tangy flavor (it’s also a cinch to double for a crowd). A long, slow roast allows the ribs to melt into tenderness, while a final brush with a maple-sweetened sauce brings them to lacquered perfection. Here, we’ve updated the ingredients from the original, increasing the seasoning and reducing the amount of vinegar in the sauce.

2 pounds pork ribs

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

1 ½ teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

1 ½ teaspoons onion powder

2 t ablespoons maple syrup ( preferably grade A dark and robust)

2 t ablespoons Dijon mustard

2 t ablespoons ketchup

1 t ablespoon apple cider vinegar

¹⁄ 8 teaspoon cayenne pepper ( optional)

Cut ribs into 4-inch lengths. Sprinkle all over with salt, pepper, and onion powder. Let sit for 15 minutes while you heat the oven and prepare the sauce.

MAPLE DUMPLINGS ( GRANDPÈRES )

MAPLE BARBECUE RIBS

Heat the oven to 350° and set a rack to the middle position. In a small bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, mustard, vinegar, and ketchup. Add cayenne (optional). Set aside.

Line a rimmed baking sheet with aluminum foil. Set ribs on the baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes. Turn the ribs over and roast 30 minutes more. Pour off all fat, baste the ribs with the sauce, and transfer back to the oven. Roast, basting and turning every 8 minutes, until the ribs are tender and crisp at the edges, 30 to 40 minutes more. Remove from oven and rest for 5

MAPLE-WALNUT ICE CREAM

This delicious ice cream recipe gets its rich flavor from two simple steps: concentrating the maple syrup by simmering it for 10 minutes, and toasting the walnuts.

²⁄ 3 cup walnut halves

¾ cup maple syrup

1¾ cups heavy cream

1¼ cups whole milk

5 egg yolks

¼ teaspoon table salt

First, toast the nuts: Heat the oven to 325° and set a rack to the middle position. Arrange the walnuts on a rimmed baking sheet and toast until lightly

browned and fragrant, 10 to 12 minutes. Chop and set aside.

In a 3- or 4-quart saucepan, bring the maple syrup to a simmer over medium heat. Stay close by, as syrup can boil over (reduce heat as necessary). Simmer until syrup is reduced to ½ cup, 8 to 10 minutes. Add cream, then milk and salt; reduce heat to low.

Next, beat the egg yolks in a small bowl. Whisk in about a cup of the cream mixture in a thin stream. Add another cup, whisking constantly, then pour the egg mixture back into the pot with the rest of the cream.

Turn the heat to medium low and cook the custard, stirring continuously, until the mixture reaches 175° on an instant-read thermometer (this is the point at which it will thicken noticeably). Remove from heat and pour through a fine-mesh sieve into a medium bowl. Take a piece of plastic wrap and press it against the surface of the custard to prevent a skin from forming. Transfer the custard to the refrigerator and chill until the temperature reaches 35° to 40°, about 6 hours or up to overnight. (You can speed up this process by setting the bowl of custard into a larger bowl filled with ice water and stirring to cool it down.)

Pour the chilled custard into your ice cream maker, leaving ¾ inch at the top to allow for expansion. Prepare according to freezer instructions. Add walnuts during final 10 minutes of chilling. Yields about 1 quart.

CHEWY MAPLE NUT BARS

The combination of sweet brown sugar, crunchy pecans, and pure maple syrup in these chewy maple nut bars is tough to beat. Pecan pie lovers in particular will love this handheld variation of the popular dessert.

FOR THE CRUST

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

1¹⁄ 3 cups all-purpose flour

¹⁄ 3 cup ground pecans

MAPLEWALNUT ICE CREAM

¼ cup brown sugar

¼ teaspoon salt FOR THE TOPPING

½ cup maple syrup

¹⁄ 3 cup brown sugar

¼ cup (½ stick) salted butter

2 tablespoons heavy cream

1½ cups chopped pecans

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

½ cup whole pecans

Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease or line an 8-inch square baking pan with foil and set aside.

Put the crust ingredients into a bowl and use a handheld or standing mixer to

pan and bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown. Set aside to cool while you prepare the topping.

For the topping, combine the maple syrup, brown sugar, butter, and heavy cream in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, stirring constantly, until thickened and the mixture coats the back of a spoon, about 5 minutes.

Remove from heat and stir in the chopped pecans and vanilla. Pour over crust, then scatter the top with whole pecans, lightly pressing to set.

Bake for an additional 20 minutes, then transfer the pan to a wire rack to cool for 1 hour before cutting into

CRISP AND FLUFFY WAFFLES

I first learned the trick of adding cornstarch to waffle batter from the cookbook author Pam Anderson. Because cornstarch contains no gluten, it helps lighten the batter and ensures a crispier result. Using a mild olive oil instead of butter also improves the texture and actually enhances the flavor. And beating the egg whites separately, then folding them into the batter, produces the fluffiest of waffles.

1½ cups all-purpose flour

¹⁄ 3 cup cornstarch

2 tablespoons granulated sugar, divided

1½ teaspoons baking powder

¾ teaspoon kosher salt

2 large eggs, at room temperature, separated

1½ cups milk, at room temperature

5 tablespoons mild olive oil

Cooking spray (preferably coconut oil spray)

Maple syrup and salted butter

Preheat a waffle iron according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Preheat the oven to 180° and have a large sheet pan at the ready.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cornstarch, 1 tablespoon sugar, baking powder, and salt. In another bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the milk and olive oil. Add to the dry mixture and use a spatula to just combine. The mixture should be mostly smooth, but a few lumps are fine.

In a large bowl, using a handheld or standing mixer, whisk the egg whites with the remaining 1 tablespoon sugar to form soft peaks. Working in two batches, gently fold the whites into the batter with a spatula.

Spray your heated waffle iron with cooking spray and cook the waffles in batches according to the manufacturer’s instructions. At a setting of 375°, the waffles take about 5 minutes to cook. As the waffles are done, lay them on the sheet pan and keep warm in the oven. Serve with maple syrup and salted butter. Yields about 16 waffles.

CHEWY MAPLE NUT BARS

Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage

An iconic Harvard Square experience that delivers on classic eats and atmosphere.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

ambridge, Massachusetts, is the cradle of the state’s innovation economy, the place where the Internet, the spreadsheet, and Facebook were born. Some of the world’s great futurists, innovators, and self-described change agents stroll its brick-lined sidewalks. And yet the story of Cambridge, and of Harvard Square in particular, is also filled with the change-averse: the Loyalists who occupied Tory Row (now Brattle Street) shaking their fists at the rebels, the dapper dons of midcentury Harvard who decried the beatniks and hippies, and just about everyone who laments the death of the “real” Harvard Square, with its bookstores and cafés, with the arrival of chain stores and restaurants as far as the eye can see.

The latter upheaval, in turn, has bred new loyalists: consumers with long memories and deep attachments to the remaining stalwarts, joined by young newcomers who enjoy a kind of borrowed nostalgia alongside them. Which explains why Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage is about much more than burgers (though they are legendary and legion, all named in winking honor of sports figures, politicians, and scandals—“I’ll have the Kim Jong-Un, rare, and an Admissions Scandal, well done” ). The encroaching chains also explain why a burger here will cost you between $12.25 and $20.99: Someone’s got to pay the rent. But if you want a taste of the good-old-days Harvard Square, think of it as dinner and a show.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK FLEMING

Burgers with attitude reign at Mr. Bartley’s, including the MBTA (Most Broken Transit Authority), with blue cheese and pickled red onions, and the egg-topped Taxachu$ett$.

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You may have seen Bartley’s in Good Will Hunting or The Social Network . Then there are the celebrities—or, rather, there are signs hanging over chairs all around the room to let you know where Jackie O, Adam Sandler, Julian Edelman, Johnny Cash, Stephen King, and Mindy Kaling once sat. These are sprinkled in among the license plates, concert posters, sports memorabilia, and newspaper clippings that decorate the walls, evoking a dorm room circa anytime.

All this is by design, the work of founder Joe Bartley, who scraped together enough money in 1960 to buy the Harvard Spa, a convenience store and newsstand with a small grill. By 1962, he and his wife, Joan, realized that the grill was the core of the business and that burgers were their medium. From this perch, they raised

their five children and built Bartley’s into an institution.

Now as then, freshly ground chuck is formed into seven-ounce patties that star in such burgers as the Taxachu$ett$—Boston baked beans, sriracha, bacon, and a fried egg—and the cheddar-and-barbecue-saucecovered double-patty behemoth called the Trump Tower (New Russian Embassy). If we’re reading the menu correctly, this makes the burgers politically agnostic. Anything and everyone is fair game.

At any given time, there are about two dozen burgers in the lineup, and only a handful, such as the Joe Bartley and the Mrs. B, never leave. Sadly, Joe Bartley passed away in 2018, but Joan can still be found here some days, greeting customers and taking orders when the line snakes out the door.

Their son, Bill, now runs the place; he’s never worked anyplace else. He still makes the soups from scratch (the chicken noodle is particularly good), as well as the onion rings, the meatloaf, and the bread pudding.

Sit at the center table, where they seat the singles and where the best conversations happen. Eat some fried pickles. And think of all the poets, presidents, and pundits who were once just college kids grabbing a burger.

1246 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA. 617-354-6559; mrbartley.com

The burger joint founded by Joe Bartley and now run by the second generation, son Bill with wife Karen ( above ), has sated hungry locals and visitors alike (including the Man in Black himself, right) for six decades.

Volcanoes, Rainforests, Beaches

you are invited to Costa Rica on a fully guided tour with Caravan. Includes all hotels, all meals, and all activities. Pura Vida!

Day 1 San José, Costa Rica

Welcome to the “rich coast,” friendly land of democracy and natural beauty. Caravan provides airport transfers.

Day 2 Sarchi, Coffee Plantation

Visit the artisan village of Sarchi. Shop for colorful handicrafts and see traditional oxcart painting, considered the national symbol of Costa Rica. Then, tour a coffee plantation. Visit a butterfly garden.

Day 3 Wildlife Rescue, Fortuna

Visit a wildlife rescue center where injured animals are rehabilitated for release back into the wild.

Continue to Fortuna in the San Carlos Valley for a two night stay

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Cruise on the Rio Frio, gateway to the Caño Negro wildlife refuge. Watch for water-walking lizards, caimans, and howler monkeys. Then, soak in volcanic hot springs.

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Visit Leatherback Turtle National Park. These marine reptiles are the largest in the world, weighing over 1,500 pounds. Free time at the J. W. Marriott Resort and Spa.

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Day 8 Manuel Antonio

Visit Manuel Antonio National Park, a natural habitat for the three-toed sloth and capuchin monkey. Hike through the rainforest and along beach coves. Look for toucans and parrots. Farewell dinner tonight.

Day 9 San José Tour ends after breakfast. Caravan provides airport transfers. Thanks for vacationing with Caravan!

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Spring Chicken

With bright herbs and zesty radish, this easy weeknight recipe bids farewell to winter.

BY AMY TRAVERSO

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

re you craving fresh produce and a bit of color? Good news: you’re right on schedule. The first tender greens and radishes are coming to market in the next few weeks as winter winds down.

This recipe began with its name, a bit of fun wordplay, and turned into a new weeknight favorite. Roast chicken with potatoes is a timeless dish, endlessly adaptable to whatever’s on hand. I thought fresh green herbs and sweet, crunchy, peppery radishes would taste terrific and bring some welcome color to the table (they did). You can use any tender herbs that you like here, but I settled on a mix of parsley, chives, and marjoram, and I recommend using at least two different herbs to bring the most flavor. Parsley and scallions (technically a vegetable, not an herb) would be a good, economical choice.

By roasting the chicken on a bed of fingerling potatoes, lemon, and garlic, you can produce a full dinner, with sauce, in just one pan. As the chicken and the lemon roast, their juices baste the potatoes and create a savory vinaigrette that’s richly perfumed with roasted garlic. Meanwhile, you chop up the herbs and slice the radishes, and those get tossed in just before serving.

Cooking the bird at a relatively high heat speeds up cooking and crisps the skin—making it fast enough for a weeknight but good

STYLED AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY LIZ NEILY

SPRING CHICKEN

enough for company. For extra-extracrisp skin, salt the chicken the night before you plan to make it, set it in a baking dish, then let it sit, uncovered, in your refrigerator.

SPRING CHICKEN

1½ pounds small fingerling potatoes

1 large head garlic, halved crosswise

1 lemon, halved crosswise

1 3- or 4-pound chicken, giblets removed, skin patted dry

2½ teaspoons kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

¹⁄ 3 cup olive oil

½ cup chopped fresh herbs (for example: parsley, chives, and marjoram)

¼ cup thinly sliced radishes

Preheat the oven to 450° and set a rack to the lower third position. Arrange potatoes in a large ovenproof skillet, then tuck the garlic and lemon halves among the potatoes.

Use a sharp knife to cut between each of the chicken’s thighs (the spot where the leg meets the body). Splay the legs open so that the thighs lie flat. Sprinkle the chicken all over with kosher salt and black pepper. Arrange the chicken atop the potatoes, then drizzle everything with olive oil, lightly rubbing the oil into the chicken’s skin.

Roast the bird for 40 minutes, then baste with the pan juices. Continue roasting until the skin is crisp and browned, the juices run clear, and a thermometer inserted into the thigh reads 165°, 8 to 12 minutes longer. Use tongs to remove the chicken and set it on a cutting board to rest for about 15 minutes.

Let the potatoes rest for 5 minutes, then sprinkle with all but a handful of the herbs and all of the radish slices. Stir to coat. Return the chicken to the skillet and sprinkle with the remaining herbs. Serve warm. Yields 4 servings.

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MADISON, CONNECTICUT

WARM UP TO SPRING IN A SEASIDE TOWN WHERE NATURE AND CULTURE LIVE SIDE BY SIDE.

BY IAN ALDRICH • PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL D. WILSON

OPPOSITE : Highlights from a Madison weekend include ocean views, fine dining (Bar Bouchée, TOP RIGHT), scrumptious snacks (Ashley’s Ice Cream, BOTTOM MIDDLE ), and a visit to one of the best bookstores around (R.J. Julia, BOTTOM LEFT, with owner Roxanne Coady).

THIS PAGE : Madison is home to a portion of the scenic Shoreline Greenway Trail, which eventually will run all the way to New Haven.

MADISON

In early spring, when much of northern New England remains snowbound, Madison, Connecticut, feels like a gift from the future. Crocuses have emerged, trees have budded out, and lawns are being mowed. Time it right, and it’s sitting-outside-drinkingiced-coffee weather.

The weekend lure of this abashedly wealthy community on Long Island Sound, of course, is the ocean. There are three town public beaches, and in its eastern reaches, Hammonasset Beach State Park, whose nearly 1,000 protected acres encompass woods, marshes, a river, and a two-mile-long stretch of sand.

But here’s the thing about Madison: It’s an ocean town without being a beach resort. This is not a place filled with kitsch and fried food. The main drag is lined with local businesses that play to tourists and residents alike: an art-house movie theater, a cheese shop made for nibbling, a cozy French bistro, and one of the best bookshops in New England. The Atlantic may be what pulls people to Madison, but it’s far from the only thing that keeps them there.

FRIDAY

Establish a beachhead. Madison has good lodging options to choose from, including the Scranton Seahorse Inn , where owner and pastry chef Michael Hafford will have you gleefully tabling that no-carb diet. But for the full ocean experience, check into the Madison Beach Hotel , which sits on a curve of the coastline where Long Island Sound is at its widest. A decade ago the original 19th-century building was razed, and in its place rose

below : The Madison Beach Hotel not only pampers guests but also makes their fourlegged friends feel welcome—which is why Yankee recently named it the state’s best dog-friendly hotel. right : A view of pictureperfect downtown Madison.

a light-drenched boutique hotel with larger rooms, a spa and fitness center, a honeymoon suite, and an expansive version of the wraparound porch that defined its predecessor. Everything about this 32-room hotel orients to the sea, most notably the guest suites, all of which have water views.

Then, follow your appetite. Among the options for dinner, of course, is to simply kick back on the porch at the Madison Beach Hotel and feasting on hearty seafood specialties from the on-site restaurant The Wharf. But if you’re up for getting a taste of the local scene, you’ll find polished ItalianMediterranean cuisine at Café Allegre , hip cocktails and American pub food at Moxie , and an upscale seafood-centric menu at Sea House.

SATURDAY

Go bowling for breakfast.

The day begins with some healthful fortification at downtown smoothie

shop

Bone and Justin McLaughlin are 30-something Madison natives who opened the place in early 2019 after four years of churning up fruity concoctions in a pair of food trucks. The standouts here are the açai bowls: little works of art topped with chia seeds, fruit, homemade granola, peanut butter, and cacao nibs, among other things. (You’ll be forgiven if you end up photographing yours before digging in.)

Check out a shore bet. Grab a caffeine boost at Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea just across the street, then hit the road for the 10-minute drive to Hammonasset Beach State Park . Each year the park draws roughly a million visitors—more than some national parks receive—but in spring it’s largely

empty, plus there’s no entrance fee. It’s a haven both for birdwatchers on the lookout for avocets, rails, and loons and for hardy beachgoers. You might spy a few brave souls decked out in bathing suits, or overhear a visitor sigh while looking out to sea and nursing an ice cream bar: “This is the kind of day you need to take a picture of, just so you can remember it.”

A visit to Hammonasset should also include a swing through the Meigs Point Nature Center, which debuted its current $4 million home in 2016. Bone up on the history of the landscape and then see (and in some cases, hold) some of the vital wildlife that resides in it, from snakes to turtles to crabs.

Is it OK to go from a place celebrating sea life to one that serves it? Of course! For lunch, head just a few miles northeast to Lenny & Joe’s Fish Tale ,

a down-home seafood eatery that’s been serving whopping mounds of fried things (scallops, clams, fish) since 1979. Its biggest seller is the lobster roll—and, this being Connecticut, you should forget about the mayo. Lenny & Joe’s serves only meat on a hot buttered bun.

See what’s in stores.

Next you’re off for a retail stroll through Madison’s town center, which boasts a 6,000-square-foot locally owned bookstore as its anchor. R.J. Julia Booksellers got its start 30 years ago, when corporate tax accountant Roxanne Coady decided to reboot

from left : Giant seashell sculptures mark the entrance of all-ages favorite Meigs Point Nature Center; plates of rib-sticking seafood are the lure at Lenny & Joe’s Fish Tale.

her life and, together with her husband, left New York City to come to the shoreline. Back then, downtown Madison wasn’t an obvious spot to launch a new business: Main Street was checkered with shuttered spaces, including the one Coady settled on, an early 1900s storefront most recently used as a dive bar. In the years since, she’s transformed it into a book lover’s haven, with restored tin ceilings, a welcoming café, and custom mahogany shelves filled with the latest and greatest fiction and nonfiction. Even better, R.J. Julia has become a favorite stop on A-list book tours, with recent guests including President Jimmy Carter, John Grisham, Anna Quindlen, and Neil Patrick Harris.

Elsewhere, there’s art and treasure to be had at Junk-2-Junque , a vintage furniture and home furnishings store, and Neighborhood Vintage , which combines California cool with New England tradition in its array of old-school clothing, art, and decor. Meanwhile, the Audubon Shop promises to lure avian enthusiasts with its wealth of birdhouses, books, and birding supplies.

On the snacking front, you can find superior scoops at Ashley’s Ice Cream , part of a mini chain founded in 1979 in New Haven. And don’t miss Madison Cheese , whose selection of up to 95 different cheeses might just awaken your appetite again. (If so, the Mousetrap grilled sandwich, filled with a secret sevencheese mix, is a recommended starting point.) Otherwise, simply make note of the ample picnic provisions— meats, breads, crackers, olives—for your next trip to the beach.

Do dinner and a movie.

For dinner you’ll want to reserve a table at Bar Bouchée , the creation of celebrated chef Jean Pierre Vuillermet, who also heads New Haven’s Union League Café. This Parisianstyle bistro invites you to linger over

top : Antique pencil sharpeners double as wall art at Neighborhood Vintage. below : Scenes from Madison Cheese, where the locals go to load up on fromage from around the world.

such elegantly simple French cuisine as pan-roasted half chicken, braised lamb shank, and steak tartare. The main dining room seats just 20, which means that reservations are essential—but also that you’re in for a joyfully communal night with your fellow guests. Start with the charcuterie board or the duck leg confit, and let the evening unfold.

Close the night with an art-house flick at Madison Art Cinemas and the opportunity to pair your popcorn with quite possibly the best cappuccino on the Connecticut coast.

SUNDAY

Dig into a stack of flapjacks.

A final trip to the sea is in order. But first, hang a left out of the hotel parking lot and walk two blocks to Cristy’s Madison for breakfast. Although you can opt to fill up on omelets or chicken and waffles, the real stars here are the pancakes, which are not only huge but also available in 40-plus varieties (macadamia nut chocolate chip, pumpkin apple, and raspberry oatmeal crunch, to name a few).

Cycle into springtime.

Next it’s back to Hammonasset to pick up the Madison section of the Shoreline Greenway Trail . This is just one stretch of a work-in-progress walking/ cycling route that eventually will be a 25-mile coastal corridor from New Haven to Madison. The local section features a mile of pathway that cuts through forests and along the water and links up with existing roads to connect the state park and downtown.

Finally, because you’re already in the neighborhood, pay a visit to nearby Guilford , home to one of the prettiest town greens in all of New England. Ringed by the shops of the village center, this 12-acre parcel feels almost like a Hollywood set. There are the big maples. There’s the white steepled church. And there’s all that early spring green—a most welcome sign of the summer to come.

Peak Springtime Experiences

Make the most of shoulder season with activities that wake up your mind and engage your senses.

BY KIM KNOX BECKIUS

h spring, New England’s most fickle season. It teases us with warm sunbeams and then dumps frozen precipitation on our dreams of wearing shorts. But staying homebound until May is not an option. As the landscape awakens, you should too—not only to preempt summer’s crowds and to save a few dollars with shoulder-season hotel rates, but also to stretch your mind and body and to rediscover a sense of wonder.

Work Your Muscles in the White Mountains

A multisport spring getaway in New Hampshire’s White Mountains isn’t just for extreme athletes, so pack your ski jacket and a golf polo and go. In the Mount Washington Valley, entrepreneurial locals stand ready to help visitors experience action-packed days on both backcountry slopes and thawing fairways. You don’t have to be a Tuckerman Ravine daredevil to ski after chairlifts stop spinning: Ski the Whites’ Andrew Drummond equips competent skiers with the gear, knowledge, and inspiration to venture off-piste, where pristine terrain remains skiable as late as mid-June. Meanwhile, several golf courses scramble to open early, including Indian Mound Golf Club, which sends plows out to clear greens even as snow lingers in the bunkers. At the on-course tavern, the homemade corned beef is a well-earned reward for refusing to couch-potato your way through shoulder season. 603-356-5701; mtwashingtonvalley.org

Shed some layers and soak up the sun when you venture to the White Mountains in shoulder season—like the skiers above, who found their sweet spot (Maple Villa Glade) in mid-April with help from outfitter Ski the Whites.

Go Fish in Manchester, VT

To the uninitiated, crushing the Hendrickson hatch sounds like something you might do on a snowboard. But as April arrives, it’s not the shredding of powder but the hatching of mayflies that has outdoors lovers in a fervor. Home to the American Museum of Fly Fishing and an Orvis fly fishing school, Manchester is the ultimate place to experience the thrill of fooling trout with feathery flies crafted to mimic these aquatic insects. Whether you dabble in a free Fly Fishing 101 course at Orvis, invest in a one- or two-day school, or learn the nuances of the sport with a private guide, spring is the ideal time to take up this new hobby and bond with others who long to stand meditatively in the stream of life. 802-362-3750; orvis.com

Marvel at Spring Miracles in Hartland, VT

When the alarm sounds before 7:30 a.m., it may be your strong inclina tion to stay tucked into your comfy, fully equipped cabin, one of five built in 2017 for farm-stay vacationers, at Fat Sheep Farm. But if you layer up and head out to help with chores, as guests are invited to do daily, you may be treated to more than fresh eggs and soul-stirring mountain views. Spring is lambing season, and each sunrise brings the possibility of witnessing a tiny fluffball taking its first wobbly steps, bleating sweetly, and bonding with mama. And by late June, rich, sweet sheep’s milk will feed the farm’s newest offering: cheese-making classes. 802-4364696; fatsheepfarmvermont.com

Get Growing in Stonington, CT

While northern New England farms are still socked in with snow, the coastal Connecticut landscape

is showing signs of life. Actually, the growing never stops at Stone Acres Farm, where high-tunnel greenhouses sustain crops year-round. Be one of the spring early birds to visit, and you can come away with fresh-laid eggs and hearty starter plants to populate your own garden. Jane Meiser, whose family has cultivated these 63 acres for 10 generations, and her restaurateur husband, Dan, have tantalizing plans for the property and its Yellow Farmhouse Education Center, where the lineup of culinary classes picks up later in the spring. Your purchases help ensure Stone Acres’ future at the heart of a dynamic food community that has already captured elite chefs’ attention. 860-245-4414; stoneacresfarm.com

Feed Your Brain in Cambridge, MA

Although the trees are bare when the

Cambridge Science Festival’s street banners go up a few weeks before opening night, by the end of this annual festival’s April 17–26 run, leaf buds and blossoms will have appeared. Even more exciting: Approximately 250 events—some family-friendly, others designed for adults—will have made the STEAM fields unexpectedly entertaining. The MIT Museum is at the heart of this rite of spring, which began in 2007 as the first of its kind in the United States. Attendees can build their own itinerary of behind-the-scenes lab tours, ecology outings, astronomy observations, and more. Don’t miss April 18’s Science Carnival & Robot Zoo, where 150 interactive booths offer hands-on activities such as making nitrogen ice cream and feeding microorganisms with an eyedropper. 617-253-5927; cambridgesciencefestival.org

BEST OF NEW ENGLAND

BEST INN WITH A VIEW LAND’S END INN PROVINCETOWN, MA

Situated at the very tip of Cape Cod, Land’s End Inn is a unique boutique hotel offering some of the most stunning sea views and a luxury experience. Mention Yankee Magazine when you book and receive two complimentary Land’s End Inn mugs.

508-487-0706

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BEST GIFT STORE GALLERY GIFTS AT 136 DAMARISCOTTA, ME

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

BEST ADVENTURE LODGING BERKSHIRE EAST RESORT CHARLEMONT, MA

The Warfield House Inn is a fantastic retreat in the Berkshire Mountains. This lovely location hosts a stunning wedding venue, breathtaking views, and an expansive list of outdoor activities such as white-water rafting, a worldclass zipline tour, a mountain roller coaster, and the best mountain bike park on the East Coast.

413-339-6617

BerkshireEast.com

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, and Plimoth Grist Mill. The Mayflower returns in May!

508-746-1622

Plimoth.org

BEST RUSTIC RETREAT STERLING RIDGE RESORT

JEFFERSONVILLE, VT

Sterling Ridge Resort is close to scenic Smugglers’ Notch, and offers private log cabins and homes. A perfect year-round getaway. Close to Wedding Barns, hiking, snow sports and more. Mention Yankee Magazine when you book to receive a sweet treat!

802-644-8265

SterlingRidgeResort.com

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THE STEAMBOAT INN MYSTIC, CT

BEST ART-FILLED HOUSE

HILL-STEAD MUSEUM

FARMINGTON, CT

BEST DESIGNER ROOM THE HARRASEEKET INN FREEPORT, ME

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. Explore the heart of Vermont!

802-767-3926

LibertyHillFarm.com

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! Enjoy a sunset cruise on the schooner Argia, sailing daily from our wharf.

860-536-8300

SteamboatInnMystic.com

Built in 1901 and filled with the Pope family’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces, including four Monet paintings, this house museum overlooks 152 acres of farmland and trails. The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival and Spring sheep celebrations delight returning visitors.

860-677-4787

HillStead.org

A family-owned hotel featuring two restaurants, fireplaces, indoor pool, and select pet-friendly rooms. Book direct and get free breakfast and tea. Complimentary transportation from Amtrak Downeaster station. Two blocks to L.L. Bean. Best shopping in New England.

800-342-6423

HarraseeketInn.com

KATEEMERY.COM

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

BEST LAKEFRONT CABINS

AMES FARM INN

GILFORD, NH

Enjoy a quarter mile of sandy beach and docks on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. Lakeside cottages, apartments, and rooms available. Great location for fishing, hiking, kayaking, boating, and more. Family owned and operated since 1890.

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!

603-293-4321

AmesFarmInn.com

603-878-1151

PickityPlace.com

BEST FAMILY RETREAT BY A POND

LOCH LYME LODGE LYME, NH

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

800-423-2141

LochLymeLodge.com

CASTLE IN THE CLOUDS

MOULTONBOROUGH, NH

Experience this stunning historic estate with unmatched views of Lake Winnipesaukee and the surrounding mountains. Tour the 1914 Arts and Crafts–style mansion, dine on the lake-view terrace,

BEST OCEAN VIEW BAR HARBOR INN BAR HARBOR, ME

Steps from downtown Bar Harbor, along majestic Frenchman Bay, this iconic property has been welcoming guests since 1887 with genuine hospitality, signature service, and timeless charm. Enjoy the area’s finest waterfront dining, accommodations, and spa services on this stunning eight-acre property.

844-249-3584

BarHarborInn.com

BEST COLLEGE-TOWN LODGING

THE 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

207-729-4914

TheBrunswickInn.com

BEST ROAD CLIMB MT. WASHINGTON AUTO

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GORHAM, NH

Climb this historic 7.6-mile road to the summit of the Northeast’s highest peak— drive yourself, or take a guided tour. This must-do drive is America’s oldest manmade attraction. During the winter, take a tour on the Mt. Washington SnowCoach.

603-466-3988

MtWashingtonAutoRoad.com

Relax in the White Mountains at the majestic Red Jacket Mountain View Resort with spacious accommodations, excellent on-site dining, an indoor water park, and friendly, attentive service. Prefer an oceanfront getaway? Visit Red Jacket Resort’s five properties on Cape Cod.

800-752-2538

RedJacketMountainView.com

Out About

Rain can’t dampen the elation as runners stride toward the finish line of the 2018 Boston Marathon, cheered on by a crowd of thousands along Boylston Street.

Yankee editors’ favorite picks for springtime events

CONNECTICUT

CHERRY BLOSSOM FESTIVAL

APR. 19

Revel in the sight and fragrance of more than 70 Yoshino Japanese cherry trees in bloom around New Haven’s Wooster Square, where a full lineup of music, exhibits and demonstrations, kids’ activities, and local food vendors gives you plenty of additional reasons to linger. New Haven, CT. historicwoostersquare.org

MAINE

EAST COAST

POND SKIMMING CHAMPIONSHIP

APR. 18

It’s man versus pond as Sugarloaf presents this quirky competition for skiers and snowboarders—a sure sign of the impending snow melt. Contestants attempt to hydroplane their way to the finish line, and prizes are awarded for best style, costume, and overall performance. Carrabassett Valley, ME. 866-8650946; sugarloaf.com

MASSACHUSETTS

BOSTON MARATHON

APR. 20

Come by to cheer on the participants in the world’s oldest annual marathon as they push themselves along the route, up Heartbreak Hill, and across the finish line in Copley Square. Also on tap: a fan fest with live music, a training clinic, and appearances by returning champions. Boston, MA. 617-236-1652; baa.org

NEW HAMPSHIRE

FIVE COLLEGES BOOK SALE

APR. 18–19

Need to restock your reading shelf? How about hitting up one of the largest used and antiquarian book sales in New England? This springtime tradition (since 1962) is held at the Lebanon High School Gym, where book aficionados will find as many as 40,000 titles on all topics, plus maps, prints, ephemera, DVDs, and more. Lebanon, NH. five-collegesbooksale.org

RHODE

ISLAND PAWCATUCK RIVER DUCK RACE

APR. 25

The fun kicks off with the unforgettable sight of some 20,000 rubber ducks pouring en masse into the Pawcatuck River. Children’s games, rides, food, and other activities round out the event, whose proceeds go to more than 40 local charities. Westerly, RI. 401-596-7761; oceanchamber.org

VERMONT

BABY FARM ANIMAL CELEBRATION

APR. 10–11

Visit Billings Farm this weekend and you may want to take a wagon ride, learn about heirloom seeds, and tour the 1890 farmhouse—but be sure to save plenty of time for the lambs, chicks, and calves, who are the real stars of the farm’s most popular event. Woodstock, VT. 802-457-2355; billingsfarm.org

For more best bets around New England, see p. 108

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8 Ways to Make the Most of

IF AUTUMN IS NEW ENGLAND’S MARDI GRAS, MAPLE SEASON IS OUR OKTOBERFEST, A DELICIOUS CELEBRATION OF REGIONAL HERITAGE IN LIQUID FORM. AND AS OUR TASTY TO-DO LIST SHOWS, SYRUP LOVERS FROM CONNECTICUT TO QUEBEC HAVE PLENTY OF INSPIRED WAYS TO DRINK IT ALL IN.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY WENJIA TANG

Visit a Surfeit of Sugarhouses

Iwas sure we’d had our fill of maple. Then again, maybe not.

It was late morning on a Saturday in mid-March, and we were two-wheeling it up River Street, a winding dirt lane that dead-ends atop a hill in Poultney, Vermont, at a little sugar farm called Marshall Maples. It was Maple Open House Weekend, an annual event during which sugarhouses throughout the state are open to the public and small towns show off their maple bona fides. In Poultney, early risers had gathered at a church-hosted pancake breakfast, Governor Phil Scott had overseen a tree-tapping contest, and the town’s Maple Prince and Maple Princess had been crowned. The day would also include horse-drawn wagon rides, a sap bucket art exhibit, and a craft fair at the high school.

Only a few miles from downtown, a dozen of us were pedaling along both paved and dirt roads on a bike tour of local sugar shacks. “The goal is to get people on bikes but also integrate them with the outdoors and the local community,” explained the event’s 24-year-old organizer, Ryan Carr.

Although Carr is an intense cyclist—he doesn’t own a car, instead making his daily 20-mile commute year-round by bike—what he’d assembled today was a decidedly casual affair. Participants’ ages and bikes spanned the decades; newer mountain bikes rode alongside old cruisers, which coasted beside makeshift hybrids. At the front of the pack, bike shop owners James Johnson and Candice Passehl (whose Analog Cycles is actually housed in a converted sugarhouse) powered forward on a yellow tandem.

The plan was simple: Bike, sample maple, and bike again. But this being early spring, and this being New England, the terrain didn’t always cooperate. On River Street, six inches of fresh snow from the night before had converged with thawing mud to create a heck of a slog. A quarter of the way up, a few riders hopped off their bikes to hoof it. My 8-year-old son, Calvin, followed. Then it was my turn.

“We ate too much maple!” Calvin reasoned, recalling the samples we’d scarfed at our previous stop. Rookie mistake.

But once inside the next sugarhouse, we again willingly held out our hands—this time for fried dough topped with cream— all the while admiring the big evaporator at work. Were there more hot goodies to try?

Of course, there are easier ways to tour a region’s sugarhouses. But being on a bike, even with layers of warm clothes on, felt like a rebuke to whatever remained of winter. Around us was an awakening landscape, as pastures and orchards reemerged. Back on River Street, we easily pedaled through the soup we’d recently struggled with, and at the bottom of the hill we looked as though we’d been in a mud fight. Yet I don’t think I’ve had a better two minutes on a bike in my life.

We were still looking mud-caked when we landed across town at Green’s Sugar House, where owner Richard Green greeted us at the door. “You guys biked all the way here?” asked Green, whose family has farmed in the area since 1774. “That’s impressive.”

Inside the sugarhouse and tasting room, maple mania was working up a full head of steam. A group from New York City took no notice of our muddy clothes as we gathered around the maple cotton candy or went for another try of the maple vinaigrette. After Calvin and I finished a wad of spun maple, I looked at him. “I think I’m done,” I said.

We still had a few miles left to ride back to our car, and there were no more sugarhouses left to visit. I really meant it this time. —Ian Aldrich

This year’s Poultney Maplefest Bike Tour will be held March 21. For more information, go to slatevalleytrails.org.

MAPLE’S MARCH MADNESS

New England maple celebrations abound in March, concentrated around statewide open houses. Check websites for participating shacks near you.

CONNECTICUT (3/21–3/22): Get a taste of the Nutmeg State’s small but scrappy maple industry at its first-ever open house weekend. ctmaple.org

MAINE (3/22): New England’s oldest statewide maple party showcases 80-plus locations. mainemapleproducers.com

MASSACHUSETTS (3/21–3/22): Visit the website to find out which sugarhouse is hosting this year’s kickoff, where state officials will tap a ceremonial first tree. massmaple.org

NEW HAMPSHIRE (3/21–3/22): More than 100 Granite State sugarhouses open their doors; the Canterbury Maple Festival and the Kearsage Maple Festival are also on tap this weekend. nhmapleproducers.com

VERMONT (3/21–3/22): The top maple-producing state welcomes some 40,000 visitors to 130-plus sugarhouses. vermontmaple.org

PHOTOGRAPHS BY OLIVER PARINI

Get to Know a Local Maple Producer

April Lemay never set out to be a sugar maker. In fact, less than a decade ago the Vermont native was working in Boston as a partner at an international accounting firm. But then 813 acres of family land in Lemay’s hometown of Canaan went up for sale, including a large sugarbush; Lemay, who’d been looking for an investment opportunity, bought it. She erected a sugarhouse, set out 9,000 taps, began coming home on the weekends to help her parents boil sap—and April’s Maple was born. In 2014, Lemay returned full-time to the Northeast Kingdom to run her business, which had grown to include a café serving breakfast and lunch. “People kept saying it was such a brave move, but it never felt that way to me,” she says. “It just felt like the next opportunity.” We recently caught up with the 45-year-old Lemay during a morning shift in the café kitchen. —Ian Aldrich

“My grandfather owned the land I have now, and he had carefully logged it to preserve the sugarbush. He had a small sugarhouse, and we’d head up there on Easter. He’d hang a ham over the evaporator. The steam would cook the ham, and the drippings would keep a check on the foam from the boiling sap. [Laughs.] Everybody got something out of it. There was ham and maple syrup, and we got to eat both!”

“For me, it was easy to come home. Many of the families I knew as a kid were still here. I didn’t have a problem reintegrating into the community. The things I miss are easy things, like a good Indian restaurant or good Thai food. But these are trivial things—they’re not essential to life.”

“I see my family all the time. I work with my husband. Both my parents still work for me, my Aunt Bonnie cooks in the kitchen, my Aunt Fran has her art on the walls, and my Aunt Hylie makes the bread I sell. There is no

struggle to find a worklife balance like I had in the corporate world. It’s ingrained in everyday living.”

“I’m not afraid to answer my phone anymore. I don’t feel like I have to take a phone call in the middle

of dinner. I’m not a doctor, I’m not saving lives up here. If your problem can’t wait until after dinner, I’ve done something wrong.”

“I love it when I know I’m going to work outside and spend a day in the sugarbush. The

smells, what I’m seeing, working the land—it’s hard not to appreciate what I’m doing.”

“There’s this thing that maple represents to people. We’re working the land. That’s part of it, and it’s an easy thing to romanticize. But

SCOTT

VIA GETTY IMAGES (LEMAY); COURTESY OF RUNAMOK MAPLE (BOTTLE)

April Lemay checks on the vacuum tubing system that carries maple sap from trees to her sugarhouse.

as sugarers, we’re also dealing with a product Mother Nature has basically already made. All we do is collect sap and remove the water to turn it into something that makes people feel good. I think people find that kind of thing magical.”

“I know I’m not what people expect. For starters, I’m a female and younger than what most people imagine a sugarer being like. … People sometimes come in here and see my parents and just think they own the place. No, there’s actually an April at April’s Maple. But the sugaring community is

incredibly welcoming. If you’re new to the business they’ll talk to you about what they do. They probably won’t share their family secrets, but it’s not a community that shuts the door on other sugar makers.”

“I’m so lucky to be in such a happy business. People who come in here generally have a smile on their face. They’re not looking to fight about anything.

… It’s a great place to be. As we say, have a sweet day. And we really do.”

6507 Route 114, Canaan, VT. 802-266-9624; aprilsmaple.com

STICKY BUSINESSES

Syrupy-sweet neighbors are a good thing … if you’re talking about New England sugarhouses that are open year-round. Below are a few of our tried-and-true favorites; for more options, check the websites of state maple producers.

MORSE FARM MAPLE SUGARWORKS: You might be lucky enough to bump into seventh-generation maple sugar farmer Burr Morse on the job, but if not, look for his folksy memoirs in the gift shop. Do not leave without trying a maple creemee. Montpelier, VT. morsefarm.com

BEN’S SUGAR SHACK: Just a bucket’s toss from Yankee’s offices (about a dozen miles) is this classic country shack founded by maple prodigy Ben Fisk, who was winning awards for his syrup when he was a teenager. Temple, NH. benssugarshack.com

NORTH HADLEY SUGAR SHACK: Launched in 1996 by Joe and Shelly Boisvert on family land, this sweet outpost now includes a farm stand, deli, and bakery. Look for its “sugarin’ breakfasts” during the holidays and in maple season. Hadley, MA northhadleysugarshack.com

LAMOTHE’S SUGAR HOUSE: From just seven taps in the 1970s, the Lamothe family has built the state’s largest maple syrup producer. Yet theirs is still the kind of place where you can see three generations bustling to and fro, learn a little syrup-making lore, and meet a friendly golden retriever or two. Burlington, CT. lamothesugarhouse.com

Grab a Blue-Ribbon Bottle 3

While about 40 gallons of sap are needed to make a gallon of maple syrup, it takes a little something extra to make an award winner. Exactly what that something is, who can say—but try a maple syrup that’s brought home the gold, and you’ll get it.

Here are some other New England champs to look for:

FADDEN’S SUGAR HOUSE: The seventh generation of Faddens claimed the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s trophy for the best maple syrup in the state last year—an award the family has already won seven times. North Woodstock, NH. nhmaplesyrup.com

GIRARD’S SUGARHOUSE: The golden syrup crafted by Mike Girard, whose ancestors once sugared in Quebec, beat out an international field for a blue ribbon at the 2019 North American Maple Syrup Council competition. Heath, MA. Facebook

BRAGG FARM: This aptly named eighth-generation producer took 2019 Best in Show honors with its golden syrup at that venerable sugaring showdown in St. Albans, the Vermont Maple Festival. East Montpelier, VT. braggfarm.com

that

Over the past decade, Vermont’s RUNAMOK MAPLE has raked in the accolades for its elevated organic syrups, including a 2018 SOFI Award (aka “the Oscars of specialty foods”) for its ginger root–infused maple syrup, which bested more than 2,650 product entries in its category. Here at Yankee, it was Runamok’s cardamom-infused syrup that won over our taste buds and earned a 2018 Editors’ Choice Food Award. (Oh, and Oprah loves them, too.) Cambridge, VT. runamokmaple.com

SPRING BREAK: Still a relative newcomer, Spring Break marked its 20th anniversary with three first-place syrup wins and a Best in Show at the 2018 Maple Mania contest—then notched two more blue ribbons the following year. Smyrna, ME. mainemapleandhoney.com

POUR IT ON AT A REAL-DEAL PANCAKE HOUSE

Parker’s Maple Barn in Mason, New Hampshire, isn’t the kind of place you stumble across. One back road leads to another, then another, before this country campus of restaurant, store, and sugarhouse emerges from the woods just north of the Massachusetts border. You have to make it your destination.

There are easier-to-find places to get a flapjacks fix, but at Parker’s and other old-school pancake houses— including Polly’s in Sugar Hill and Intervale Farm in Henniker—the allure isn’t just the meal. It’s immersing yourself in the sweetest kind of nostalgia.

Born from a homegrown sugaring operation, Parker’s opened in 1969 and was run by its namesake family until Ron and Sandy Roberts bought it in the ’80s; today, their son and his wife, Ron Jr. and Tanya, are the ones serving up the memories. The property spreads across 19 acres and includes the Corn Crib, a gift shop with old-timey candies and maple gift baskets; a sugarhouse and wood-fired evaporator that cranks away tirelessly during maple season; and even a replica covered bridge.

Amid all this Instagrammable quaintness is the restaurant itself, where big beams and a pair of stoves keep the old building feeling cozy. The decor runs to handmade tables and farm antiques; the food, meanwhile, borders on the overwhelming. You can indulge in sugary pastries both baked and deep-fried (blueberry bites, doughnut holes, cinnamon buns) and choose dishes and sides that celebrate the season (maple ribs, maple cream, maple baked beans). Naturally, there are all kinds of pancakes and waffles for sopping up the house-made syrup. And did we mention the perfectlyjustifiable-at-any-hour maple frappe?

Despite its tucked-away location, Parker’s is no local secret—and on weekends in March, when maple season is at its peak, more than a thousand eager customers stream into the restaurant. Time your visit wrong, and the wait for a table could be a good two hours. But trust us: It’s worth it.

Ian Aldrich

1316 Brookline Road, Mason, NH. 603-878-2308; parkersmaplebarn.com

5 Ski Through the Sugarbush

John Ripley wants to show us how maple trees heal. We are bounding along on cross-country skis at Maple Corner Farm in Granville, Massachusetts, touring a sugarbush of hundreds of acres of mature maple trees. John, whose family has been farming these woods and fields since 1812, moves as if he had been born on skis, and no wonder: The farm opened a skiing center 36 years ago, when he was just a boy, to diversify its operations in winter.

We pull up to look at a four-foot cross-section of a recently felled maple. Midway through its annual rings was evidence: a small dark scab the size of a coffee bean, a pock on otherwise perfectly concentric circles. This grownover spot is where the tree healed after being tapped about 30 years ago, says John. “We use only the most compassionate, least invasive taps,” he explains. “It’s a light compression system, to help everything flow downhill.”

To ski through the Ripleys’ sugarbush is to follow the path of the sweet stuff, to race the sap to the bottom of the hill. Aptly named trails like Old Sugar House and Bucket Path traverse a forest of maple trees of every age, from spindly teenagers reaching for the sun to wide-bottomed elders, some 200 years old, that anchor whole slopes. Brookside Trail meanders alongside a burbling stream, and we come upon a beech tree with an apron of fresh woodchips around its base, a woodpecker’s morning shift. John shows us an offshoot trail that leads to a sparkling half-frozen waterfall, fed by the nearby Cobble Mountain Reservoir.

Sap pipeline and some 4,500 taps connect the trees, just as relics stitch together the Ripley family history. We come upon a foundation wall where John’s great-great-grandfather sugared using an iron kettle and a flat pan, which visitors can see and touch for themselves in one corner of the sugar barn. There’s also a photo of John’s dad, Leon, as a little boy in 1956, helping boil the sap with his father.

The Ripleys curate their past and at the same time are bent on the future. Parents Leon and Joyce run the farm while all three grown sons and their families help out, including operating a sugarhouse built in 2018 and outfitted with gleaming high-tech equipment and touchscreen controls. When the sap is flowing, they can collect up to 5,000 gallons a day, 70,000 gallons in a season. From grandparents to grandkids, all hands are on deck to process that into maple candies, creams, and sugars; to rent skis and snowshoes; and, on weekends during sugaring season, to make and serve a sweet breakfast for hungry skiers and nonskiers alike. —

Carole Connare

794 Beech Hill Road, Granville, MA. 413-357-8829; maplecornerfarm.com

Drink In All That Mapley Goodness

MORE ONLINE!

From condiments to fashion accessories, there’s a wonderful world of mapleinspired goodies out there: newengland.com/ maple-products

PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM DETOUR

Iappreciate a good grade A amber as much as the next guy, but in truth, I rarely partake. Born without a morning sweet tooth, I tend to evaluate a brunch menu mostly by counting the number of not-pancakes. I’m not saying the 12.7-ouncer of organic maple syrup in my fridge door doesn’t have a figgy nose and a gentle, buoyant viscosity that belies the butterscotch intensity of its finish. I’m just saying it might be a lifetime supply.

Leave it to savvy marketers to find ways to coax French-toast agnostics like me into the liquid-gold fold. Emboldened by a rising interest in naturally sweetened beverages, the maple syrup industry is giving coconut water a run for its money, developing tree-tapped variants to wet the whistles of the discerning watering-hole crowd. To separate the sippable sap from the worthless, well, stuff, I gathered a sampling of New England libations to see what they were made of. —Jolyon

1. T REE TAPPER

MAPLE CIDER

Citizen Cider, Burlington, VT

Do you taste it? I taste it! I mean, I think I taste something vaguely mapley, when I press my tongue into the roof of my mouth, exhale through my nose, and stand in the parking lot of a busy pancake house. Jokes aside, Citizen makes an impressive line of hard ciders, and this variant sweetened with syrup from Runamok Maple is no exception—though you may be hard-pressed to guess its treetapped provenance from taste alone. citizencider.com HHHH

2. M APLE WHISKEY

Cabin Fever, Chester, NH

Aged for three years in a noncharred barrel, then infused with grade B Vermont dark maple syrup, this flavored Canadian whiskey probably has too much burnt sugar, vanilla, and butterscotch on the nose and the finish for serious whiskey fans. But it’s probably just what the doctor ordered for a hot toddy or high-octane eggnog. cabinfeverspirits.com HH

3. V ERMONT ICE

MAPLE CR ÈME

Boyden Valley Winery & Spirits, Cambridge, VT

This balanced mix of French oak–

Helterman

aged apple ice cider, apple brandy, fresh cream, and organic maple syrup made on-premises is a cut above other cream liqueurs I’ve tried, with enough layers of complexity to serve neat or chilled. Or poured over vanilla ice cream. Or coffee ice cream. Or, like, a banana split–style sundae with both flavors, and ... and, anyway. You get the gist. boydenvalley.com HHHH

Boston Harbor

Distillery, Boston, MA

Rum cream, the Caribbean answer to Baileys, typically gets its sugary richness from sweetened condensed milk. This New England spin instead leaves the dessert-ing to Vermont syrup, blending it with rumspiked Wisconsin cream at just the right strength to transform a hot mug of coffee into an après-ski (or après-breakfast) pick-me-up. For a straight-up sipper, though, the flavor profile is a tad too two-dimensional. bostonharbordistillery.com HHH

For fans—or for parents of fans—this naturally sweetened beverage (80 calories per can) forges a path of moderation between full-sugar A&W (170 calories) and the aspartamebolstered scaries of the “diet” stuff. sapvt.com HH

6. SWITCHEL

Vermont Switchel Co., Cabot, VT

The original switchel—diluted apple cider vinegar sweetened with maple syrup—was the energy drink of choice for discerning 19th-century New England hay farmers, and this mostly organic rendition has such a lively mix of acid, sweettart fruit and tongue-wicking astringency that it drinks like a wine. Specifically, a wine that drinks like a mulled Arnold Palmer finished with figgy lemon prune juice, melted apple Jolly Ranchers, and that “Russian tea” thing people used to make in the ’70s with Lipton, cloves, and powdered Tang. Refreshing stuff. vtswitchel.com

HHHH

Cream soda isn’t for everyone, and your opinion of the genre is probably an accurate predictor of how much you’ll like this maple-flavored soft drink.

7. F OREST GOLD MAPLE WINE

Aaronap Cellars, Westford, MA

Imagine a cartoon chase sequence involving, I dunno, Bugs Bunny frantically feeding

pineapple upside-down cakes into the hopper end of a lurching contraption that, for whatever reason, distills all that butter-caramel-edged, dry-heat-burnished tropicalfruit intensity and juiciness into something way more delicate: perchance, a bead of clovekissed nectar daubed from a honeysuckle’s swollen stigma (but you know, enough for a 375 mL bottle). Wine maker Noel Powell coaxes as much nuance from Berkshire maples as some zillion-dollar French dessert wines get from pedigreed lateharvest grapes, and the result is especially good with aged cheddar. aaronapcellars.com

HHHHH

8. M APLE WATER

Drink Simple, St. Alban’s, VT Maple water reputedly has more manganese per serving than a cup of kale, and after trying the stuff, I can’t think of a single reason to doubt it. Barely sweetened, it has about half the sugar of coconut water—in theory a perk, but in practice this robs maple water of the silky mouthfeel that makes its archrival so hangover-morninggentle. It’s the oaky chardonnay of bottled water, so if that sounds like your jam, give it a whirl. drinksimple.com H

4. M APLE CREAM LIQUEUR

5. M APLE SODA Sap!, Middlebury, VT

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HORNICK/RIVLIN

7 Step Back in Time

At Old Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts, spring is ushered in not only by the first tree buds and bird songs but also by the enticing smell of woodsmoke. That’s because March brings the return of Maple Days, when this living history museum adds a maple sugar camp to its hamlet of 40-plus antique structures that conjure up New England in the 1830s.

Early European settlers in New England were introduced to maple sugaring by the region’s indigenous people, who sliced notches into maple trees to release the sap, which they collected in bark containers and concentrated either by freezing the sap and skimming off the ice or by heating the sap to evaporate the water.

At Maple Days, reenactors demonstrate a slightly more evolved process that was practiced at early American sugar camps: Drill holes into the trees at a slight downward angle, insert wooden taps, collect the sap in a hollowed-out log or wooden bucket, and boil it down.

It’s a fascinating process for visitors to watch, but not a speedy one. The first boil happens on-site at the sugar camp, where it takes more than 24 hours of boiling to reduce 20 gallons of sap to roughly two gallons. This is then toted indoors for “sugaring off,” a closely watched final cook that can yield either maple syrup (sap reduced to about 1/35th of its original volume) or maple sugar (all liquid has evaporated).

Historic note: Although cane sugar was the dominant sweetener by the 1830s, many advocated for a return to maple as an alternative to this slave-produced import. —Joe Bills

Rather than lug gallons and gallons of raw sap out of the woods, early New Englanders set up sugar camps so they could cook it down to a manageable volume before transporting it. Here, Old Sturbridge Village reenactor Dave Hruska tends the boiling sap.

opposite : Visitors to Old Sturbridge Village can see how the historical roles of various workers and crafters intertwined in village life. In the case of maple sugaring, that could include making ceramic pots to hold the finished product, demonstrated by OSV programming director Rhys Simmons ( top left), and grating solid maple sugar for use in cooking, as shown by OSV foodways director Victoria Haynes ( bottom right).

above : Maple may be the main event at Old Sturbridge Village when March rolls around, but there are plenty of other signs of spring to be found across the property’s 200-plus acres. Here, baby lambs lead the way during the afternoon “running of the sheep,” as the flock returns to the barn after a day in the pasture.

HISTORY ON TAP

OLD STURBRIDGE VILLAGE: From tapping trees to “sugaring off,” Maple Days shows how maple syrup was made in rural 19th-century America at New England’s largest living history museum. Weekends in March. Sturbridge, MA. osv.org

INSTITUTE FOR AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES: Discover how Native Americans processed sap with stone and wooden tools, learn maple syrup’s role in their culture, and sit down to a pancake breakfast with fellow history buffs. 3/14. Washington, CT. iaismuseum.org

REMICK COUNTRY DOCTOR FARM & MUSEUM: The demonstrations at this rural farmstead span the centuries, from Abenaki sap boiling techniques to a modern evaporator. 3/21–3/22 (outdoor demos Saturday only). Tamworth, NH. remickmuseum.org

Make a Sweet Excursion to Quebec

In early April in the more northerly latitudes, you have to look up to find spring. Start at three feet, the recommended height for a maple tree tap. The sap has been flowing for a few weeks now, mostly into vacuum tubing—but buckets still dot the trees here and there, and these markers are among the happiest harbingers of spring. Now look up, way up, and notice how the sun lingers above the horizon well into the dinner hour and makes all good things feel possible one again.

T his is the golden light I’m soaking up as I make my way through the still-snowy forests of Rigaud, Quebec, a hilly semirural district near the Ontario border. I’ve driven nearly six hours from Boston, lured by a knowledge that both delights and confounds: For all our pride in New England’s maple culture, with its maple candy, sugarhouse tours, and pancake breakfasts, Quebec has an exponentially more vibrant one. Not only does our northern neighbor produce more syrup (72 percent of the world’s supply), it has a true maple scene , one centered on sugar shacks called cabanes a sucre, where people gather for elaborate meals that typically feature live music, generous pours of wine, and equal parts merriment and relief at having survived another winter.

Cabanes a sucre range from tiny family-run shacks, places with just a door separating the dining room from the evaporator, and upscale destinations such as Montreal celebrity chef Martin Picard’s twin eateries in St-Benoît-de-Mirabel (plan early, as reservations open December 1 and sell out in a few days). Everywhere, though, the aesthetic is reliably cabin-chic, rooted in Quebecois vernacular. People eat at large communal tables, ceilings are beamed, stone fireplaces roar, fiddles loop and twang.

A t Sucrerie de la Montagne, a woodland complex of traditional Quebecois log cabins about 50 minutes west of Montreal, the vibe is part country food hall, part living history museum, with a central wood-fired bakery, sugarhouse, general store, and log cabins for overnight stays. Owner Pierre Faucher and his son, Stefan, are warm and jovial ambassadors of traditional French-Canadian culture. With his white beard and stout middle, Pierre could find side work as a department store Santa, but there’s no need: The sucrerie

hosts a steady stream of tourists, young Montrealers, school groups, and families all year round. “I do this to keep the tradition alive,” he says. “The industrial way of producing syrup is drowning our traditions. This is springtime as my people used to do.”

Here, a horse-drawn sleigh takes you and your fellow visitors from the parking lot to a central green, where you linger around a roaring outdoor fire before heading into one of several food halls. The menu here, as in all cabanes, relies on the staple foods of late winter: pork, beans, flour, and lots and lots of syrup. It’s the kind of fare that farmers would serve their workers during sugar season, and while offerings vary slightly from place to place, the meal always begins with smoky pea soup and bread, assorted pickles, pork rinds, and a rustic pork pâté called cretons. There’s a baked omelet, as well as maple baked beans and mashed potatoes. Then there are the meats: ham, sausage, bacon, and the French-Canadian pork pie called a tourtière. You can pour maple syrup over anything and everything except the clovescented meatballs, which come with their own gravy. If you are still sentient, finish with some combination of maple sugar pie, pancakes, maple dumplings, pouding chômeurs (a maple upside-down cake), and sugar-on-snow, a maple taffy that’s made and served outside.

Then go back to your little cabin and stoke the fire, which is the only source of heat but well able to ward off the chill. In the morning, you’ll wake to the smell of woodsmoke and bacon cooking, and know that something wonderful is waiting for you just around the corner. —Amy Traverso

CABANE FEVER

SUCRERIE DE LA MONTAGNE: Part sugar shack, part living history museum (think Old Sturbridge Village with tourtière and pancakes), this is the immersive cabane a sucre experience. sucreriedelamontagne.com

CABANE DU PIC BOIS: Run by the Cardin-Pollender family for four generations, this little shack has a more intimate feel. Be sure to pick up a bottle of their signature maple vinegar. cabanedupicbois.com/en

ÉRABLIÈRE HILLTOP: A midsize operation just 15 minutes from the Vermont border, this shack offers sweeping views and terrific maple dumplings. erablierehilltop.com

As his team’s boat circles a shark off Longnook Beach in Truro, Massachusetts, marine biologist Greg Skomal prepares to tag the animal with a tracking device in this 2018 file photo.

THE SHARK DETECTIVE

GREG SKOMAL HAS BEEN TAILING GREAT WHITES FOR MORE THAN A DECADE TO UNRAVEL THE MANY MYSTERIES THEY RAISE— INCLUDING HOW TO DEAL WITH THEIR GROWING NUMBERS OFF THE CAPE.

BY IAN ALDRICH

Skomal turned from the water. “This isn’t normal,” he said.

For the 58-year-old Skomal, a senior biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, a normal day means unrelenting action. Davis might radio in as many as 25 white shark sightings as the research boat runs up and down the Outer Cape for seven hours at a stretch. During much of that time, Skomal mans the bow pulpit, trying to catch video of a shark or stick a tracking tag on it. His first chance to eat often comes at the end of the day, when King starts motoring back to the harbor.

Over the past few years there have been many such days for Skomal, who predicted the return of white sharks to New England and pioneered much of the early research on their presence. In 2009, he was the first to tag a white in the North Atlantic, and as that population has surged—making the Cape a global hot spot for white shark activity—Skomal’s body of work has grown too. So has his profile: He’s appeared in numerous shark-related films and documentaries, including for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and ESPN. Last summer he led a 60 Minutes team on a tagging expedition for a segment to launch the program’s season opener.

Widespread fascination with white sharks drives some of this attention. But a pair of high-profile attacks off Cape Cod in 2018, including the first shark-related fatality in Massachusetts waters in 82 years, have also cast the subject in a differ-

TUESDAY in mid-October, Greg Skomal, one of the world’s foremost experts on white sharks, hung over the bow of his research boat as it idled just offshore from Chatham, Massachusetts, and stared down at the water, seemingly trying to will it to cooperate. Thanks to several rounds of rain and wind, it had been two weeks since he’d last been on the water. All that rough weather had churned up the shallows so that now, even on a clear day, visibility was only a few feet. • “This is challenging,” he said to no one and everyone, a group that included the boat’s owner and pilot, John King, a retired biotech executive who’s worked with Skomal since 2014, and Megan Winton, a staff scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Circling in the sky above them was spotter pilot Wayne Davis.

ent, more dangerous light. Last summer, Cape lifeguards temporarily closed beaches or suspended swimming 63 times due to shark sightings near shore; at just a few outer beaches alone, more than 50 sightings were reported. At a moment when the legacy of public beaches on the Cape is clashing with a new reality on access to those waters, Skomal’s work may be the most important asset that local and state officials have in trying to both protect the Cape’s billion-dollar tourist economy and maintain its conservationist heritage.

Last year Skomal and Winton, his counterpart at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, put public safety at the center of their work. Skomal met with Outer Cape lifeguards at the start of summer to devise a plan to keep swimmers on sandbars in water no deeper than their waist. More significant, his department at the Division of Marine Fisheries launched a five-year study on shark behavior, moving Skomal away from traditional population work—the who and where—and toward a better understanding of the conditions that precipitate a shark attack.

“We need to drill deeper,” he told me in an interview early last fall. “I’ve been thinking too much about what these sharks do every month or every year, but I need to think about what they do every minute, every second— what’s happening right now, and five minutes from now. If we can predict patterns, then we can forecast. And if we can do that, we can advise the

public that a certain area at a certain time of day is a high-risk zone.”

But studying fish means seeing fish. And back on the research boat, after a good hour on the water with no luck, King turned to ritual as a way of changing the trip’s fortunes. Out came a bag of pretzel rods. What had started years before as a way to help visitors adjust to the sea was now seen as a good-luck charm. “Everyone has to have one,” King said, passing the bag around. Skomal, who has a full head of gray hair that hangs over his ears and a toothy smile that signals his unsuppressed sense of humor, plucked a rod and stuck it in his mouth, clenching it between his teeth like a cigar. “Come on, Wayne,” he said in a playful growl. “Stop fooling around and find us a fish.”

And then, he did. About 30 minutes after the pretzels appeared, Davis radioed in a sighting half a mile north. King wheeled the boat around. “Hold tight,” he yelled, gunning the engine. The boat rocked and water sprayed over its sides as it crashed through the waves, but Skomal moved with an easy steadiness, grabbing his GoPro camera, which was attached to the end of a fiberglass pole, and heading to the pulpit. When King got within the shark’s vicinity, Skomal jammed the camera into the water and directed him to the target as if helping him back up a trailer. A little to the right. OK, now to your left.

Through a haze of blue and aqua green, the shark finally came into focus—sort of. The animal looked

less like a fish and more like a shapeless dark mass as it slowly but purposefully moved through the water. With Skomal running his camera, the shark cruised by the boat’s port side before passing beneath the vessel and slipping away into deeper waters.

As the day wore on, Skomal and Winton used the slack time to check

some of the 45 acoustic receivers that they’ve stationed off the Cape, each topped by a long yellow buoy. These devices log the presence of a tagged shark whenever it passes within a few hundred feet of them. After heaving one onto the boat, Skomal inserted a magnet into the receiver to activate it and send packets of info winging

over to Winton’s tablet via Bluetooth.

“You know who was here the other day?” Winton said at one point, scanning the data. “Jamison!”

Skomal would never say he develops a relationship with the sharks he studies, but there is an inevitable familiarity. He chronicles their growth, documents new scars, and knows intimately which areas of the North Atlantic they frequent. In 2015 he led an effort to save a juvenile shark that had been beached in Chatham. As locals threw water on it, Skomal took blood samples and tagged the fish, which he named Jamison, before helping haul it back out to sea.

“Jamison!” Skomal exclaimed, sounding as though an old friend had just reappeared.

Winton stared at her screen and smiled. “Oh, that little peanut.”

By early afternoon, King had moved the boat south, to just off Monomoy Island. On shore, several hundred seals—whose expanding population is closely linked to the presence of white sharks near the Cape—clung to the beach. Talk of calling it a day had already started when Davis called in a sighting a little farther south.

As King maneuvered near the shark, Skomal, who was again perched on the pulpit, became exuberant. “Big fish!” he shouted. “He’s long! I think he’s got length.” He circled the camera around in the water. “Boy, that’s a nice dorsal.”

Skomal was standing right over the shark, which recalled an incident from the summer in which a shark had burst out of the water and snapped its jaws just inches beneath his feet. In a video of the moment, Skomal can be seen nervously hopping up and down, which he later jokingly called his “shark two-step.” On this day, Skomal playfully reprised the move. “This is where I get nervous,” he said, grinning.

“WHEN WE LOOK AT THE OCEAN, ALL WE SEE IS THE SURFACE. BUT WHAT IS ACTUALLY DOWN THERE IS A WHOLE OTHER WORLD THAT’S NOT ONLY MYSTERIOUS BUT ALSO GENERATES FEAR. AND I WAS DRAWN TO THAT.”

RYAN/THE BOSTON GLOBE VIA GETTY IMAGES (PREVIOUS SPREAD); DANA SMITH (PORTRAIT)

At 58, New England native Greg Skomal has become the world’s leading authority on white sharks in the Atlantic.

But soon, like the one before it, the fish slipped under the boat and disappeared. Skomal scanned the sea: It was gone.

“He’s got a cloaking device!” he exclaimed. “What’s next? Wings?”

Skomal took a seat and leaned back. “We can’t see a thing,” he said, clearly frustrated. “But there are sharks there. We know they’re out there.”

SKOMAL’S OBSESSION WITH OCEAN

life started early and never relented. The fourth of seven kids, he was raised in Fairfield, Connecticut, in a home that prized individuality. At the age of 20, his father, Bernie, who loved photography, had bolted from the confines of a midwestern life in Omaha, Nebraska, to pursue big dreams in New York City. Even after he married Skomal’s mother, Irene, and the demands of their expanding family made him pivot toward owning an insurance agency, Bernie never let go of his camera or the idea that it was important to stay close to what you loved most in life. For his secondoldest son, that meant the sea.

“I just thought fish were really cool creatures,” Skomal told me from his office in New Bedford. The thirdfloor space is located in a building the state shares with the University of Massachusetts, where he serves as an adjunct professor. “We’re terrestrial animals, and when we look at the ocean all we see is the surface. But what is actually down there is a whole other world that’s not only mysterious but also generates fear. And I was drawn to that.”

Skomal was a child of the early ’70s, which saw an explosion in underwater photography and the rise of the scuba diving scene. He feasted on Jacques Cousteau films (for a time, he even wore a red knit cap like his hero) and built aquariums with his buddies. On family Christmas trips to St. Croix, where the Skomals owned a condo just steps from the water, young Greg got to see for himself some of the marine life he had watched on TV. He taught himself to snorkel and skin dive, and later he earned his scuba certification.

But it was a Hollywood blockbuster that changed everything for Skomal. In July 1975, Jaws smashed onto the summer scene and into the country’s imagination. Skomal, then 14, was gripped not just by the story of a monster shark terrorizing a tourist town but also by the nerdy but adventurous scientist, Matt Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss. A new world opened up to Skomal, as he realized the opportunity to make a life studying the ocean extended far beyond a select few Cousteau types.

In the fall of 1979 Skomal enrolled at the University of Rhode Island, where he majored in zoology and biology. While his studies didn’t exactly get him out on the water,

shark artwork, and they were doing real research and publishing their papers. And I got to work with really cool mentors, guys who were giants in the field.”

Following a five-year stint with the Narragansett lab, Skomal took a job in 1987 with the state of Massachusetts, which had just used a round of federal funding to create four new positions in its fisheries division: two on the Cape, one in Boston, and one on Martha’s Vineyard. Skomal elected to take the location nobody else wanted— the Vineyard—and that summer the 26-year-old scientist moved into a makeshift office in a former lobster hatchery in Oak Bluffs, where he was charged with developing the state’s nascent shark program.

the Narragansett National Marine Fisheries Laboratory, which made its home at URI, did. Under longtime director Jack Casey, the lab had pioneered much of the early shark research. Its staffers tagged fish, collected samples at different fishing tournaments on the East Coast, and picked the brains of fishermen about what they were seeing and dealing with. Skomal landed a job with the lab the summer before his senior year and immersed himself in all of it.

“It was a lot of blood—‘nuts-andguts work,’ as we liked to call it,” he said. “Being there was like a dream. You’d walk into the office and there were books about sharks, shark jaws,

For Skomal, it was a dream scenario. He was young and single and living on the very island where Jaws was filmed, and he had a huge appetite for the work. “He was inexhaustible. He had that natural interest that was just there all the time,” Brad Chase told me. After working with Skomal at the Narragansett lab, Chase had moved with him to Massachusetts, where he is now a senior biologist. “We were kids and viewed as these cowboys who didn’t really fit in. We had come to a state facility where there was this older generation of guys who’d gotten their jobs because they hunted or fished with somebody who worked here. It doesn’t mean there weren’t some great scientists here then, but there was this general culture of taking it easy, and so Greg was constantly being told to slow down. That’s not his style.”

Working in waters off the Cape put Skomal in the perfect place at the perfect time. The appearance of white sharks in the North Atlantic in the 2000s was precipitated by two important government actions. The first was the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, which made it illegal to kill gray seals, an animal that had been hunted to near-extinction. As a result of this protection, today some 50,000 gray seals live on the Cape, and an estimated half million are scattered between Maine and

IN CONTRAST TO RESEARCHERS WHO HOARD THEIR INFORMATION WITH AN EYE ON THEIR NEXT “[GREG]GRANT,SHARES EVERYTHING,” KING SAYS. “HE JUST WANTS TO LEARN, AND THAT MAKES IT SO YOU WANT TO HELP HIM.”

Massachusetts. The second key move came in 1997, when the U.S. enforced a ban on hunting white sharks following a report that their stocks had plummeted by three-quarters since the early 1960s.

By the mid-2000s, as the gray seal population in Massachusetts began to significantly rebound in places like Monomoy and Muskeget islands, Skomal started receiving what he believed were credible reports of white shark sightings from fishermen. He began pushing the idea not only that a small number of Atlantic whites had made it as far north as New England, but also that these deepwater fish may have a reason to come close to shore— namely, lots of food.

A ratcheting-up of reports from around Massachusetts pointed the way. There was the sighting by a couple of Chatham beachgoers of a shark cutting a seal in half with a single bite in 2006; two gutted seals on a beach in Chatham in 2007; and a small white shark that washed up dead on Nantucket in 2008. Most dramatic, a 14-foot female white shark

had been trapped in a saltwater pond and caught live on Naushon Island, off Woods Hole, in 2004. Yet even with this mounting evidence, Skomal remained a lone voice.

“I’d go to these seal meetings and I’d put forth a model that showed that ... we will likely see white sharks feeding on seals in greater numbers,”

Skomal said. “Marine mammal people are very passionate about their work, and I was probably seen as the guy who studies the animals that eat their animals. I never got much feedback. I was typically drinking my beer alone afterward. But I remember

(Continued on p. 112)

top: In 2004 Skomal led the effort to return this shark—which had become trapped in an island lagoon—to the open ocean. It was the first white shark he encountered in Massachusetts waters. above: As a grad student in the early 1980s, Skomal (far left) cut his teeth in field research working for the Narragansett National Marine Fisheries Laboratory.

ILLUSTRATION

BY ALESSANDRO GOTTARDO

Twenty children lost their lives at a Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school in 2012. As the country moved on to mourn other mass shootings, survivors were left with their private wounds and memories.

BY SOPHFRONIA SCOTT

hat breaks my heart now about Sandy Hook is looking at pictures of my son, Tain, from that time and realizing how young he was when the mass shooting at his school occurred. It’s an odd trick of the mind, created by the fact that how he and I talk about the death of his friend Ben, one of the first graders killed that morning, is not so different from how we talked about it when Tain was 8.

Then: I feel like I’m going to see Ben again. He’s going to come down from heaven and he’s going to be here with all of us.

Now: When you think about it, Mama, we have more of Ben now than ever before. He is everywhere.

I’ll come across photographs and expect to see something of this maturity and wisdom represented, but instead I find an image of a boy with tired eyes at Ben’s funeral, clutching a stuffed puppy sent by friends; attached to his vest are the photos he asked for of him and Ben playing in leaves.

“How is Tain doing?”

This question sometimes pertains to the present, but it depends on who is doing the asking. A close friend

may be referring to Tain’s transition into an arts high school, where he majors in theater, or to how he’s doing preparing for a musical. Others are talking about Sandy Hook, and I can only reply “Fine,” because I can’t address the myriad ideas of what they assume he might be.

He is all of those things. He is also none of them.

Tain whistles everywhere. The notes flutter from his breath and leave high-pitched streaks of joy across my heart like a jet streaming its white contrail across the blue, blue sky. At other times, like when he’s getting dressed for school, I can hear him singing—sometimes a silly song from one of his favorite cartoons, sometimes a tune from a musical he’s been in. One summer he was the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz . In a photo from that show, he’s leaning on one elbow, the other arm perched on his bended knee. He’s just finishing “If I Only Had a Brain.”

I used to think that one day Tain might stop whistling and singing. I’d have to wonder what it meant, whether the silence of being a teenager had closed over him.

But he is not silent.

He cries when he needs to cry. He questions when he needs to question. He speaks out when he wants to speak.

After the 2018 shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Tain’s middle school wouldn’t allow the students who wanted to protest gun violence to do so visibly. Their walkout took place behind a wall and out of public view.

Tain came home and complained. Although I have a sense of hopelessness about the gun issue, I told him there would be a march in Hartford, and he could protest there if he wanted. I have a photo of Tain at our dining room table, making his sign, a red octagon with black letters spelling out “STOP GUN VIOLENCE NOW,” and I have a photo of Tain and his friends from the next day, bundled up against the cold, holding their signs and standing on top of a wall so they could be seen.

Tain is 15 now. Recently, the mother of one of his friends sent me an email warning me that a Boy Scout merit badge project on researching our community might be emotionally difficult. She wrote, I just wanted to give you a headsup in case Tain is sensitive about that .

I responded with:

He’ll be OK with the presentation. The tragedy is a part of the tapestry of his life, and from the very beginning he surprised me by how willing he has always been to speak of it and engage with whatever goes on around it. I’m grateful for it.

I’m not sure if this was the right answer. I thought about not responding at all. It’s not that Tain isn’t sensitive. How do I explain the complex alchemy he generates that makes him able to hold the darkness and the light within him and carry on with living joy? How

do I describe the way his big brown eyes look at the world and, miraculously, continue to perceive hope?

In her book Gravity and Grace, the mystic Simone Weil wrote, “Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.” Tain gets this.

There’s a photograph of Tain and me sitting in front of an audience at a bookstore in Manhattan. We’re being interviewed by Andrew McCarron, head of the religious studies department at Trinity School, about our book, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World , the story of our family’s faith journey that began when we joined the Episcopal Church when Tain was 6.

Andrew read a portion from the end of our book in which I talk about my hope for Tain’s future faith. Then he asked Tain what his hopes were for my faith. After thinking about it for a bit, Tain said he hoped his faith would continue to inspire mine.

Tain spoke of the film Finding Neverland and how for the premiere of his play Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie had children from an orphanage brought in and seated them throughout the theater, because he knew the adults wouldn’t get the play unless they saw it through the eyes of children.

“It’s like that,” Tain said. “Young people are just more open. We look at things more positively. I hope I can always do that for her.”

I have learned a lot from Tain, but this in particular is a lesson I need the most. In fact, I think we all need it. As I get older, I feel deeply how the losses are mounting. Friends, family, classmates have died. I’ve attended more than half a dozen funerals and memorial services in less than two years, and I know this is only the beginning. What Tain offers is the alternative to living in a constant state of grief. There is something of the divine in how he moves through these hard times. This has happened , he seems to be saying. What can we make of it now?

He has lost family and friends so close they were like family. When my friend Katy, whom Tain always knew as Aunt Katy, was declining rapidly after a long battle with cancer, I made plans to rush to her bedside in New York City and almost didn’t take Tain. My grief was already consuming me. But then I realized he would never forgive me if I deprived him of the chance to say good-bye. He loved her too. The tears he got to cry were so important. To be able to say to her, “I’m going to miss you”—that was everything. In the weeks after the shooting she had taken him to the Big Apple Circus, and I have a photo of them wearing red clown balls on their noses, Katy’s blue eyes wide and goofy, Tain’s laughing.

A cousin, after an Ancestry.com experience, obtained photos from the early 1900s of my great-grandfather and his children, my grandfather

THERE IS NO REMEMBERING, BECAUSE THERE IS NO FORGETTING.... WE WALK INTO THE CURRENT AGAIN AND AGAIN. TAIN IS NOW LEARNING HOW TO SWIM, BUT IN THESE PARTICULAR WATERS HE IS EXPERT.

included. From his birth date and the southern location it’s obvious his parents would have been slaves. I showed this to Tain on Juneteenth, when my eyes and ears were filled with social media men tions of generational trauma in one’s DNA and angry discussions of reparations. I wasn’t sure if I was handing Tain a time bomb. I showed him the picture, talked about our family’s connection to slavery. He looked at me and smiled quietly

“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?” he said.

I hadn’t even thought to think of it that way. I smiled in return and answered, “Yes.”

When I speak of Tain’s positivity, a friend says it’s obvious he gets it from me. And I have written about what it’s like to be a mother holding a space for a child, a space in which he can believe in life even after death has entered. But sometimes I feel my arms are too full of grief.

Now, it seems, Tain holds the space for me. He reminds me to trust.

There’s a photo of Tain sitting in front of a podium in a packed room in a church in Atlanta and showing no fear as he reads from a blog post he’s written. He’s wearing a jacket— green, white, and brown, modeled after a character in the video game The Legend of Zelda . The hood comes down to a long thin point on his back; the sleeves have laces on the shoulders and arms. He read, “I can always trust God to watch over my friends and family because I know he will always find a way to make things better.”

Tain likes public speaking, especially when he gets to talk to children. He enjoys signing books and traveling and meeting new people. He’s been to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He knows he’s been able to do things other kids his age cannot. He also acknowledges the sad paradox of being grateful for these opportunities and yet:

“I’d rather have Ben back,” he says.

But that choice isn’t within reach; only the grief is. So we continue to craft a life from what is. There is no remembering, because there is no forgetting. There’s no reason to be concerned when the tears come, because that would be like denying the river running beneath our skin. And this is OK. We walk into the current again and again. Tain is now learning how to swim, but in these particular waters he is expert.

People who have read my work or heard me reference Sandy Hook still ask me where I live. They assume we’ve moved away. They were not there to see Tain’s tears when a panoramic shot of the Newtown skyline, with the Stars and Stripes billowing on the flagpole in the middle of Route 25,

came onscreen during a documentary film, or to hear him say he was crying “because our town looks so beautiful.”

My husband and I are both from Ohio. Our parents never moved, so we know what it is to have a place in your veins, the same dirt always under your feet, streets that seem to need no names because you have walked, biked, driven them so often you knew where they led. It is a singular gift. I realized that Newtown is like that for Tain. This is his home. He knows no other. We would never willingly take it from him. Newtown is, for him, the Firehouse chicken sandwich from Misty Vale Deli, the eggs over easy from the Sandy Hook Diner, his favorite Japanese soda always stocked at Caraluzzi’s Market, the C.H. Booth Library across the street from our church, Trinity. It’s the $3 movies at Edmond Town Hall, the woods behind our house, the bike path around Fairfield Hills.

And it’s Ben’s grave.

This summer, the mother of one of Tain’s friends died, a woman well known in our church and with whom I’d taught Sunday school. In the cemetery, at the end of her service, Tain asked, “Can we visit Ben’s grave?”

We went with another one of Tain’s friends, along with the friend’s mother, and it took a few moments to get our bearings. We were coming at it backward, from the other end of the cemetery, but we found it. Tain’s lanky teen-boy shape folded up as he sank to his knees in the grass before the stone and cried. The tears ran down in thin sheets, like rain buffeting a window in a long-awaited storm. He clasped his hands, his head bowed low. His lips moved silently, quickly, with urgency. The friend stood near him and waited. The friend’s mother and I waited. I looked away, because the moment felt too intimate and because I knew this is where important work is done. I was aware of not disrupting it.

Tain’s friend hugged him when he finally rose.

After leaving Ben’s grave, I remind Tain he can return as often as he wants. Something tells me knowing that is enough for him. I’m curious how long it will be before he goes back. As he has said, Ben is everywhere.

I think of another photo. In this one, Tain is walking down the street after marching with his theater group in Newtown’s Labor Day parade. He’s holding the hand of a small boy who was also in the group. In a strange yet miraculous and beautiful way, this image represents a huge part of who Tain is and will continue to be: a person growing older, but always accompanied by a 6-year-old who will never age another year.

For the author, this image of her son with a younger boy evokes his late friend in a “strange yet miraculous and beautiful way.”

reciting some of its best-loved poems with award-winning flair.

João Rodrigues Victor at Lewiston High School, where as a newcomer from Angola he leapfrogged from learning the English language to

LIVES ARE CHANGED WHEN A YOUNG ASYLUM SEEKER

The Unfinished Journey of João Victor

IN MAINE ASKS A TEACHER TO HELP HIM WIN A NATIONAL POETRY RECITATION.

By Mel Allen

Photographs by Dana Smith

n the evening of May 1, 2019, João Rodrigues Victor emerges onstage and strides to the microphone , ready to recite a poem that will take about three minutes but which he feels could impact his life for years to come. Later he will say that when he was waiting in the darkness of the wings, “my heart was beating so fast, I thought I was going to scream. I was overwhelmed sitting there waiting. I asked myself, Am I good enough? ” ¶ He is 18 years old, a high school senior in Lewiston, Maine. In January 2016 he arrived in Maine from Angola with his father and two younger siblings seeking asylum. At the time, he spoke Portuguese and Lingala, a Bantu language, but no English. His father, an outspoken opponent of Angola’s ruling political party, had been imprisoned and beaten. A friend and neighbor who also opposed the government had been dragged from his house by authorities and was never seen again; his father felt that he would be next. He was able to obtain only four visas, so he fled Angola with his three youngest children, leaving behind his wife and three daughters. But the audience filling the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University for the Poetry Out Loud national finals, as well as the thousands watching across the country on a live stream from the National Endowment for the Arts—they know none of this.

do know: Months ear lier, about 275,000 high school students had mem orized and recited a poem in their English class, and from that starting line, schools in every state plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands had cho sen a champion. What followed was a steady winnowing of competi tors, from state regionals to state finals. Now, each state winner has come to Washington, D.C. To the outside world they are all but unknown, but here they are celebrated. They have worked to perfect the art of bringing a poet’s words to life with their own voice—something one contestant has described as “crawling inside the poem.” The day before, 53 champions recited three poems before a panel of judges; only nine were chosen to perform on this night. The winner will receive $20,000, and two runners-up will get $10,000 and $5,000.

Here is something else the audience does not know: A week earlier, when I first met João Rodrigues Victor, he said, “With poetry I can express how I feel. If a day went bad, I recite poems.” As a young man who does not know when, if ever, he will reunite with his mother and sisters, who does not know whether he and his family will be denied asylum and sent back to Angola, he sees many bad days. Asylum seekers cannot apply for federal financial aid for college. He works washing dishes at a hospital every day after school and often does double

shifts on weekends, but that money is needed for his family here as well as back in Africa. Though he has been accepted at a small college in western Maine, he does not have the $200 needed for registration. The college told him the cost for his first year would be $20,000.

Onstage in D.C., he wears a raspberry suit coat with black lapels, a red bow tie, and a black shirt, gifted from a J.C. Penney near Lewiston. He has already recited his first poem of the night, Vijay Seshadri’s “Bright Copper Kettles,” which imagines the dead coming to life not as threats but as comforts. His face is intense, his eyes darting left and right. His hands clasp and unclasp. He takes a deep breath.

“‘A History Without Suffering,’ by E.A. Markham,” he announces in his lilting accent. He begins: “In this poem there is no suffering. / It spans hundreds of years

left : Victor onstage at the 2019 Poetry Out Loud national finals in Washington, D.C., performing as the Maine state champion. right : Victor in Lewiston, Maine, with his siblings Josue Luis and Mariana Luis; in the middle is their father, Rodrigues. Their mother and other siblings are still living in Angola while the family works to be granted asylum in the U.S.

JAMES KEGLEY

and records / no deaths, connecting when it can, / those moments where people are healthy / and happy, content to be alive....”

The audience leans in, listening to his voice. After he ends, the ovation is loud and long.

He seems confident and composed, but when emcee Elizabeth Acevedo, the poet and National Book Award–winning novelist, approaches him as she does with each of the finalists after their second performance, he becomes shy, a bit awkward and self-conscious, responding to her comments with “Yes, miss.” She asks about his early memories of books. He smiles, says he comes from Angola, and he did not have books but remembers singing songs. He tells her he discovered poetry only this year. He waves to the cameras and gives a shoutout to Lewiston and to his brother and his sister, who are watching. He thanks the high school teacher who helped him believe he could do this. Acevedo asks him to pronounce his first name, and when he does it sounds like Shu-oun. He knows how strange it seems to American ears, which is why he tells everyone to call him Victor.

Journalists are not supposed to become invested in the lives of the people we write about. But as I watch this, I want Acevedo to ask different questions. I want her to ask how he came to recite intricate poems in a language he had only recently learned, and in a way that makes those who hear him feel he is talking just to them. I want her to ask about the first time he met James Siragusa, his teacher, or the last time he saw his mother. If those had been the questions, he would have started his story in a sweltering airplane terminal at 4 a.m. in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And then it would have become clear why he has wrapped his arms around poems as if they were hope itself.

When Victor tells me the story of coming to Maine, it starts like this: “The last time I saw my mom, it was a January night. We had escaped to Congo in a bus. She was sitting with me at the airport. I was looking at her, and she was making sure my tie was OK. She said, ‘You must find your way to succeed. You have to take it.’”

The next days are a blur. There’s a f light to Morocco, another to New York, then a bus to Boston, a bus to Maine. Along the way, there are brief stays with those who have already made the journey. One of them advises going to Lewiston, where many African immigrants have settled. Once in Lewiston, Victor’s father fills out an asylum petition. They need to wait six months before he can work, which means they must rely on charities and community programs. Victor remembers dragging his luggage against pavement and the bitter cold—“I couldn’t feel my hands,” he says. “I couldn’t talk.” Mostly, though, he remembers feeling confused and lonely.

Lewiston High School, with nearly 1,500 students, is the largest in Maine.

It is also one of the most diverse in New England: Nearly one in four students in the Lewiston school system is enrolled in the English Language Learner program. Victor enters ninth grade, taking beginner English classes, all the while trying to navigate a school and a social landscape unlike any he has known. He finds if he translates all assignments into Portuguese and back into English, he can understand what needs to be done. Slowly, the new language begins to make sense. He grows less shy about asking teachers to repeat their instructions.

In the spring of his junior year, Victor is watching TV when he sees a Maine teenager named Allan Monga reciting Lord Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty.” He learns that Monga, a high school junior in Portland, is also an asylum seeker, from Zambia. Monga is in the news because he had won the state Poetry Out Loud competition but was being denied the chance to go to nationals because of his immigration status. Only when his high school and the city of Portland made a legal challenge to the contest’s permanentresident requirement was he allowed his opportunity. Victor hears the passion in Monga’s voice. “When I saw him,” Victor recalls, “I said, ‘How can I do this? How can a teacher help me?’”

James Siragusa began teaching English at Lewiston High School in 1984, and in 2019 he was set to retire after 35 years. He is soft-spoken, tall and lean, bald, bespectacled. He is one of eight children; his mother, 96, still lives at the family compound by Lake Annabessacook, 20 miles north of Lewiston.

Siragusa has been involved with Poetry Out Loud since it began in

The success of Zambian native Allan Monga ( above ) in Poetry Out Loud helped inspire Victor to try his hand at the competition, which he did after entreating English teacher James Siragusa ( right) to be his coach.

Recalling his first meeting with Victor, James Siragusa says, “No one had ever done this. No one had ever come in and said, ‘Teach me. Show me how.’”

2005, and though he has seen hundreds of his students recite poems, he will always remember the early morning in September 2018 when he was getting his classroom ready for the day and a young man ran in straight from the school bus.

“He said, ‘My name is João Rodrigues Victor, but it’s easier to just call me Victor. Are you Mr. Siragusa? Can you help me do Poetry Out Loud?’” Siragusa tells me. “No one had ever done this. No one had ever come in and said, ‘Teach me. Show me how.’ Victor was so excited, so enthusiastic. I haven’t even heard him yet, but I think, He can do this.”

They begin by choosing poems together. There are more than 900 poems on the Poetry Out Loud website for students to select. “I’d never spent so much time reading the poems,” Siragusa says. “I’d never spent hours. But when I heard Victor read the first time, I knew we had to find poems with pathos and emotional range. He was a natural. You can’t teach expression. He just had it. I wanted to find poems that made you feel.”

Siragusa tells Victor not to memorize any poem until he knows its meaning. It wasn’t just saying words, it was saying words how the poet intended; you had to know it not just by heart but with your heart.

Victor is drawn to the Longfellow poem “The Light of Stars,” and when we meet shortly before he leaves for nationals, I ask him why. “Longfellow had a good life, and suddenly tragedy happens to him and he loses everything,” he says. “His house burns. He loses his wife and he is badly burned. That showed me I have to stay close to my family. When I talk to my mom I am sad. I say ‘I love you’ and I had never said that before.” And then, as casually as humming a tune, he recites: “O fear not in a world like this, / And thou shalt know erelong, / Know how sublime a thing it is / To suffer and be strong.”

Every morning Victor sprints from the bus to Siragusa’s room to practice before the first bell. He is almost always late to class. He returns every afternoon for a half hour more. He keeps asking, “What can I do to

improve?” He finds YouTube videos of Allan Monga reciting, and he watches them over and over. He washes dishes at a local hospital for four hours every evening, and when track practice ends he runs the two miles to that job, reciting along the way. After his shift ends at 9:45, he runs the mile to his house. He finishes schoolwork at midnight. He hears his poems in his sleep.

Siragusa solicits coaching advice from poets and people who know theater and voice. When Victor selects “Bright Copper Kettles” to perform in competition, Siragusa makes a video of Victor and sends it to the poem’s author, Vijay Seshadri, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College. (Seshadri emails back, “[P]lease convey my gratitude to João. I’m a very lucky poet to have found such a connection to my world.”) Mentor and student sometimes meet on Saturdays, Siragusa sitting, Victor standing, as if they are in a room with judges and an audience watching.

And then they are. Victor becomes his high school’s champion, then wins the southern Maine regionals in February. At the state finals in March he finds himself seated next to Monga, who is vying for his second state crown and a chance to return to nationals. “I thought, Oh my God, I’m competing against my hero ,” Victor says. “He is the one who led me to discover poetry. I couldn’t believe it. But I wanted to win. And only one of us can go to Washington.”

At the end they stand side by side, the two finalists. Before the winner is announced, they embrace, seemingly reluctant to let go; it’s a bond between two young men who understand each other. Without Allan Monga, there would be no João Rodrigues Victor onstage. When the emcee announces, “First runner-up, Allan Monga,” the stage erupts with Victor’s exuberance, and Monga bows deeply to the new poetry king of Maine.

In one month, Siragusa and Victor will fly to Washington, D.C., for nationals. Siragusa has waited his entire career to find a student with Victor’s passion. “I thought, God gave me a gift,” Siragusa says. “A parting gift.”

On April 22, 2019, Victor and James Siragusa meet early in the morning to drive to the Maine State House. Victor wears a suit and a bow tie that Siragusa loosens “so it doesn’t constrict his voice,” he tells me. It is a week before nationals, and Victor has been asked to recite at the first Maine Arts and Culture Day. Governor Janet Mills will be there, as well as Maine’s poet laureate, Stuart Kestenbaum. When Charles Stanhope from the Maine Arts Commission introduces Victor, he says, “We are all following his journey.”

Victor recites in the Hall of Flags, a room of marble floors and high ceilings, and when he finishes, everyone stands, applauding. Victor seeks out Kestenbaum and asks if he has any advice. “You’re already incredible,” Kestenbaum says. “You’re not up there showing off. You’re respecting the poem.” A woman from a dance troupe at Bates College approaches Victor and asks where he will attend college. “I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t apply for financial aid.”

Siragusa is introduced to Con Fullam, director of the Pihcintu Multicultural Chorus in Portland. Everyone in the chorus is an immigrant, and they have just returned from singing at the United Nations. When Fullam learns about Victor’s plight, he is blunt with Siragusa. “[Victor] must get legal representation,” he says. “Those who are represented are the ones who get listened to. If you don’t, you are just dust in the wind.”

Afterward, Siragusa wants Victor to see the lakeside compound that’s been in his family since the 1930s, so we drive about 12 miles west. Siragusa’s mother, Helen, is there making lunch for everyone. Victor can barely contain his excitement at the lake, shards of ice rimming the shallows, ospreys overhead, and the absolute quiet of the land. He asks if he can bring a girlfriend in the summer, especially if he finds one.

Inside, the walls are covered with family photos. “This is a house of pictures,” Helen says, and as I watch Victor walking through the rooms, I

(Continued on p. 120)

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MY New England

WOMEN & WINE DINNER AT OCEAN HOUSE

In November, Yankee senior food editor and Weekends with Yankee cohost Amy Traverso traveled to Ocean House in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, to host a Farm & Vine Dinner as part of the hotel’s Women & Wine Series. Accompanied by Lindy Novak, marketing ambassador and co-owner of featured winery Spottswoode Estate, Amy joined guests for a reception at the Center for Wine & Culinary Arts and dinner at the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant, Coast.

Be gin a tradition in the heart of Ogunquit .

CONNECTICUT

MAR. 8: CHESHIRE, Train Show. Go loco for locomotives at Cheshire High School’s biannual showcase of model train equipment, accessories, and memorabilia, plus a number of large model train layouts. 203-265-7527; ramband.com

MAR. 15: NEW HAVEN, Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. This 1½-mile parade has been a New Haven tradition since 1842, making it one of the nation’s oldest celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s also billed as the state’s largest single-day spectator event, so come ready to join a lively crowd. stpatricksdayparade.org

MAR. 21–22: HEBRON, Hebron Maple Festival. Learn how maple syrup is produced during sugarhouse tours and demonstrations, and then savor the goodness with an abundance of mapley treats. Children’s activities, a craft fair, and other activities round out the weekend. 860-423-6389; hebronmaplefest.com

MAR. 27–29: OLD GREENWICH, Ephemera Society of America Conference and Fair. More than 80 specialists in ephemera—political posters, postcards, stamps, etc.—will set up at the Hyatt Regency for a weekend of deals, discussions, presentations, and auctions. 315655-9139; ephemerasociety.org

MAR. 28–29: SOUTHBURY, Spring Shower of Quilts. The Connecticut Piecemakers Quilt Guild sets up at the Wyndham Hotel with appraisals, demonstrations, exhibits, a raffle, and more. ctpiecemakers.org

APR. 18–19: BRISTOL, Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society Show and Sale. This is the largest event of its kind in New England, with 100 judged categories and more than a dozen vendors descending on the Bristol Senior Center to sell plants, pots, soils, and books. ctcactussociety.org

APR. 25: NORTH HAVEN, Sheep, Wool, and Fiber Festival. Shearing demonstrations, knitting instruction, and sheepdog trials are all part of the fun as farmers and vendors congregate at the North Haven Fairgrounds for an agricultural celebration that dates back more than a century. ctsheep.org

APR. 25–26: MERIDEN, Daffodil Festival

Come stroll through a carpet of gold as more than half a million of springtime’s cheeriest ambassadors pop their heads up at Meriden’s Hubbard Park. And if that doesn’t shake you out of any lingering winter stupor, the parade, the fireworks show, carnival rides, and three stages of live entertainment definitely will. 203-238-1315; daffodilfest.com

MAINE

MAR. 20–22: PORTLAND, Maine Boatbuilders Show. At the Portland Sports Complex you’ll find a gathering of the East Coast’s finest custom-boat builders, as well as manufacturers of boating equipment, all ready to discuss and sell their work. 207-774-1067; portlandcompany.com

(Continued from p. 71)

MAR. 21–22: LEWISTON, Maine Home Show

The Androscoggin Bank Colisée hosts 100plus booths of home-related products and services, from lawn care equipment and landscape design to windows and doors, kitchens and baths, insulation, and weatherization. mainehomeshow.com

MAR. 26–29: PORTLAND, Maine Flower Show. Nearly 20,000 plant lovers are expected to converge on Thompson’s Point as the state’s largest gardening and horticulture show returns. Come learn about native species, talk one-on-one with experts, and find inspiration for your outdoor projects. maineflowershow.com

APR. 3–5: NEWRY, Spring Fest Weekend. Head over to White Cap at Sunday River for some memorable springtime revelry: Hit the slopes, cheer on the competitors in the “slip ’n’ flip” relay, and enjoy a lineup of live bands. 800543-2754; sundayriver.com

APR. 17–19: OGUNQUIT, Patriots’ Day Celebration. Historical characters offer insights into the past with reenactments throughout the weekend, which bustles with all-ages activities such as concerts, hay rides, and a rubber duck race. 207-646-2939; chamber.ogunquit.org

APR. 18: DENMARK, Sheepfest. From humble beginnings in 1995, the sheepshearing festival at the Denmark Arts Center has grown into a much-anticipated community event that spotlights the art of sheepshearing and turn-

ing wool into all manner of beautiful and useful products. denmarksheepfest.com

APR. 18: PENOBSCOT COUNTY, Kenduskeag Stream Canoe Race. Going strong for more than half a century, the largest paddling event in New England follows a 16½-mile course from Kenduskeag to Bangor. Firsttime spectators should join the crowds near the rapids of Six Mile Falls for all the “thrill of victory and agony of defeat” moments. kenduskeagstreamcanoerace.com

APR. 24–26: BANGOR, Bangor Flower & Garden Show. The Cross Insurance Center is transformed into a gardener’s dream as more than 100 landscapers, horticulturists, and garden clubs present beautiful floral and garden displays, bulbs, herbs, greenhouses, sheds, and more. 800-237-6024; homeshows.com

MASSACHUSETTS

MAR. 7: YARMOUTH, Cape Cod Saint Patrick’s Parade. Get the Saint Paddy’s Day festivities started early with this annual two-mile parade featuring bands, dancers, and vintage cars. With about 400 people marching and another 40,000 or so lining the route, this parade has become one of the biggest and best around. 508-240-7347; capecodstpatricksparade.com

MAR. 7–22: NORTHAMPTON, Spring Bulb Show. A spectacular array of more than 5,000 blooms, from crocuses to hyacinths to irises,

provides a glimpse of spring during this longstanding tradition at Smith College’s Lyman Conservatory. 413-585-2740; smith.edu

MAR. 11–15: BOSTON, Flower and Garden Show. Savor the promise of spring as you collect expert gardening advice, meet retail vendors, and check out floral competitions and more than 20 professionally designed gardens, all at the Seaport World Trade Center. bostonflowershow.com

MAR. 21: WATERTOWN, Revels’ Spring Sing. Belmont-Watertown UMC hosts this joyful family celebration of the vernal equinox, with plenty of singing, refreshments, and entertainment by the children who participated in the Revels’ spring workshop. 617-972-8300; revels.org

MAR. 28–29: DUXBURY, Spring Antique Show More than 50 vendors from across New England gather at Duxbury High School, offering a wide variety of vintage American and European items for sale. duxburyboosters.org

APR. 2: BOSTON, Opening Day at Fenway Park. Join in the excitement as the Sox kick off their Fenway schedule against the Chicago White Sox. mlb.com/redsox

APR. 18–20: LEXINGTON AND CONCORD, Patriots’ Day Weekend. Minute Man National Historic Park pays tribute to the opening battle of the American Revolutionary War with parades, reenactments, and commemorative

ceremonies, culminating in the Lexington Patriots’ Day parade. nps.gov/mima

APR. 24–26: ACTON, New England Folk Festival. Hosted by Acton Boxborough Regional High School, this long-running annual event offers plenty of music, dance (both participatory and performed), and crafts, plus food, kids’ activities, and more. neffa.org

APR. 24–26: NANTUCKET, Daffodil Festival

The island’s annual celebration of all things daffodil includes art shows, tours, an antique car parade, tailgate picnic, window decorating contest, and the annual Nantucket Daffodil Flower Show. daffodilfestival.com

APR. 25–MAY 1: WALTHAM, Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. Spotlighting nationally acclaimed artists and performers alongside emerging talents, it’s a feast of dance, music, film, theater, and visual arts. brandeis.edu

NEW HAMPSHIRE

MAR. 14: NORTH CONWAY, Hannes Schneider Meister Cup. Combining the thrill of modern skiing with the nostalgia of yesteryear, this Cranmore Mountain Resort event honors the father of ski instruction. Proceeds go to the New England Ski Museum. 603-356-5543; newenglandskimuseum.org

MAR. 14–APR. 4: BETHLEHEM, Maple Experience at the Rocks. During the last three week-

ends of March and the first weekend of April, participate in tapping trees and making syrup, and enjoy horse-drawn wagon rides through this scenic 1,400-acre property. Reservations recommended. 603-444-6228; therocks.org

MAR. 21: PORTSMOUTH, The Moth Mainstage. An evening of true stories, told live at the Music Hall. The Moth features a mix of national storytellers and local voices, including luminaries in the arts and sciences, everyday heroes, and even a reformed villain or two. 603-436-2400; themusichall.org

MAR. 28–29: DURHAM, Seacoast Home Show

Head to UNH’s Whittemore Center Arena to check out the latest in home and garden products and services. There’s a full lineup of related seminars and clinics, plus a cooking series featuring some of the Seacoast’s top culinary talent. seacoast.newenglandexpos.com

APR. 15–18: MANCHESTER, MQX Quilt Festival New England. If you love quilts and quilting, you won’t want to miss this show and conference at the DoubleTree Hotel & Convention Center. There will be a roster of classes, and quilters from near and far will showcase their work, some of which is available to buy. mqxshow.com

APR. 24–26: KEENE AND PETERBOROUGH, Monadnock International Film Festival Known for rural beauty and small-town character, the southwest corner of the Granite

State shows surprising Cannes-do spirit with this annual cavalcade of independent feature films, documentaries, and shorts, plus parties and meet-and-greet events. 603-522-7190; moniff.org

RHODE ISLAND

MAR. 14: NEWPORT, Saint Patrick’s Parade & Family Celebration. The biggest Saint Patrick’s Day parade in the state steps off at 11 a.m. from City Hall, followed by a family-style, alcohol-free party with bagpipers, Irish step dancers, contests, food and refreshments, and more. 401-846-5081; newportirish.com

EARLY APRIL: BRISTOL, Blithewold: The Gateway to Spring. Each April, when its more than 50,000 daffodils burst into bloom, the seaside estate of Blithewold is a spring spectacle to behold. Mother Nature has some say in the scheduling, however, so check the website for exact dates. 401-253-2707; blithewold.org

APR. 2–5: PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island Home Show. The biggest home show in southern New England returns with its signature interior design showcase and walkable landscapes, as well as hundreds of contractors and product exhibits, seminars, and cooking demonstrations. ribahomeshow.com

APR. 9: PAWTUCKET, PawSox Home Opener The Red Sox Triple-A affiliate may be relo-

Photo: Katie Pritchard

cating to Massachusetts in 2021, but for now they’re still the beloved home team of Pawtucket baseball fans. Come out to historic McCoy Stadium to see them take on the Syracuse Mets. milb.com/pawtucket

APR. 11–MAY 10: NEWPORT, Daffodil Days Festival. This townwide celebration of spring invites you to participate in workshops, take a cliff walk, tour gardens and houses, admire vintage cars, and enjoy music, a parade, and more. 401-849-8048; newportdaffydays.com

APR. 24–25: NEWPORT, Newport Craft Beer Festival. The Great Friends Meeting House hosts this annual celebration of Newport’s long and rich brewing history, highlighted by opportunities to sample craft beers and meet the folks who make them. newportcraftbeer.com

VERMONT

MAR. 1: WEST DOVER, Jack Jump World Championships. If you’ve never witnessed the homegrown Vermont sport known as jack jumping, head over to the Mount Snow ski resort to see a lot of great racing (and some spectacular wipeouts) in an annual competition that goes back nearly 40 years. 800-2457669; mountsnow.com

MAR. 7–8: BRATTLEBORO, Circus Spectacular. Step right up for this high-flying gala hosted by the New England Center for Circus Arts at the historic Latchis Theatre, featuring students from the local program performing alongside guest artists from circuses around the world. 802-254-9780; necenterforcircusarts.org

MAR. 20–25: MONTPELIER, Green Mountain Film Festival. Whether you’re a film buff or a casual moviegoer, you’re sure to find something appealing among these feature films, documentaries, shorts, and animated tales from all over the world, screened at multiple venues around town. gmffestival.org

MAR. 21–22: STRATTON MOUNTAIN, 24 Hours of Stratton. The ski lifts operate all night as hundreds of skiers and riders work in teams to rack up runs in this fund-raiser for the Stratton Foundation, supporting programs providing food, housing, and heat to those in need. 800-787-2886; stratton.com

MAR. 28–29: RUTLAND, Festival of Quilts

Maple Leaf Quilters brings its biennial show to the College of St. Joe’s, with antique quilts, recent creations, demonstrations, vendors, a raffle, and more. mapleleafquilters.org

APR. 4: WARREN, Pond Skim at Lincoln Peak. Break out your best costumes and take a plunge across a 120-foot pond at the base of Lincoln Peak—or just come and watch the fun—at one of the oldest pond-skimming events in the nation. sugarbush.com

APR. 4–5: ESSEX JUNCTION, Vermont Home & Garden Expo. If you’re considering building or remodeling, landscaping or gardening, come to Champlain Valley Expo and seek advice from the experts, while discovering all of the latest and greatest innovations in products and services. 802876-6200; vthomeandgardenshow.com

This family-owned, 93-room luxury inn features two great restaurants, 23 replaces, an indoor heated pool and is fully handicapped accessible. Select pet-friendly rooms available. Walk to the best shopping on the Maine coast and the Amtrak Downeaster train station. Ask about our

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A unique place in the history of American art, bringing alive the work of American Impressionists where they lived and painted. Galleries, gardens, and a seasonal café! On view through May 24: Nothing

More American: Immigration, Sanctuary, and Community, an exhibition by Matthew Leifheit.

More at FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org

The Shark Detective

(Continued from p. 93)

going to [a meeting] as late as 2009— and wouldn’t you know it? Within a month we started tagging our first white sharks.”

ONE EVENING IN LATE SEPTEMBER last year, Skomal sat in a back room of the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, sifting through his mental notes for a talk he was about to give to a crowd of 100 or so. As the attendees nibbled cheeses, sipped wine, and had their photos taken in a shark cage that the museum had set up in a main hall, Skomal tried to catch his breath. Since 2010, he has lived on the mainland and worked out of the New Bedford office, but it wasn’t just a full day of meetings and paperwork and the mad dash to Brewster that had worn him down. The summer had been especially busy, and over the past few weeks in particular, the weather had cooperated. There had been a lot of time on the water, including a long stretch of filming with the Discovery Channel team.

“I’m at that point of the season where I’m starting to reach the saturation point,” he confessed. “Media burnout, fieldwork burnout, shark work burnout. It’s just nonstop.”

There had been some breaks, though—the most important of which was when Skomal and his wife, Kimberly, and their kids, Will, 12, and Eve, 9, left their home on the South Shore to visit family in Killington, Vermont, over Labor Day weekend. “[It’s] a chance for me to just get

away from the salt water,” he said, and laughed. “We hike in the woods, we go in freshwater lakes, we kayak. We get to smell fresh dirt. I come back feeling refreshed.”

A few minutes later, Skomal— wearing khakis and a blue short-sleeve button-down that he left untucked— took the stage looking and sounding as though he’d just emerged from those Vermont woods. He flashed a big grin and moved with an energetic step. “Who has seen me speak here before?” he asked. About the half the room raised their hands. He laughed. “Well, you can go home now.”

Over the next hour, Skomal walked the audience through his early career, his memories of the very first whites he’d tagged, and his current work. Skomal spoke without notes, his ease born of years spent doing these kinds of events; he was lively and fun. After showing some especially close underwater footage of a shark, he said, “We’re really happy to have GoPros now—we used to have to use graduate students to get this kind of video.”

Afterward, a good third of the crowd lined up to shake Skomal’s hand, have him sign a copy of his 2008 book, The Shark Handbook , and grab a selfie. One of them, a man in his 40s in a Red Sox ball cap, had driven all the way from Burlington, Vermont, to attend the talk; he planned to turn right around and head home. “I really wanted to see this,” he said to an amazed Skomal.

All this speaks to just how far Skomal’s work has come over the past decade and a half. Even after tagging those first whites in September 2009, he didn’t have an established budget to keep the work going. So he improvised, snagging dollars from other projects to fund his research while applying for grants and making appeals to donors. Money was needed for the boat time, the airplane spotter, and the satellite tags, which run $4,000 a pop.

Everything changed in 2013 with the founding of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy. Launched to help support the state’s research program

AFTER THE FATAL ATTACK IN WELLFLEET, “I KNEW IMMEDIATELY A SWITCH HAD BEEN FLIPPED,” SKOMAL SAID. “I KNEW THERE WOULD BE A PUBLIC OUTCRY, THE CALL FOR WHITE SHARK MEASURES TO BE PUT IN PLACE.”

Warning signs stand sentry at Chatham Lighthouse Beach in September 2018, a year after a shark-related fatality at a Wellfleet beach about 20 miles north.

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and to increase public safety outreach, the nonprofit got off the ground thanks to three Massachusetts residents: John King, the retired biotech entrepreneur; Cynthia Wigren, a former vice president for a large energy trader; and Cynthia’s husband, Ben, a finance executive. The three shared an obsession with white sharks and weren’t averse to flying halfway across the world to photograph and dive with them.

Since being established, the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy has opened the doors to an education center in North Chatham, started a summer program for kids, launched a podcast, and rolled out a mobile app that alerts users to shark sightings in Massachusetts. And all in all, it’s contributed more than a million dollars toward Skomal’s research.

“He’s credible, articulate, and available,” says King. “And he’s very comfortable at communicating at all different levels. In the science world, so much of it these days is guys hoarding their information because knowledge is power and what only they know is key for their getting the next grant. He isn’t like that at all. He shares everything. He just wants to learn, and that makes it so you want to help him.”

ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER

15, 2018, Skomal was leading one of the conservancy’s shark viewing tours out of Plymouth when his phone started to blow up with news alerts and text messages about a shark attack off Newcomb Hollow Beach in Wellfleet. What Skomal and the rest of the world soon learned is that Arthur Medici, a 26-year-old Revere native and parttime engineering student, had been boogie boarding with a friend about 40 yards offshore when a white shark bit both of his legs. Medici died at Cape Cod Hospital later that day.

As the news continued to pour in, Skomal’s heart sank. Continuing to lead the tour, he found himself bouncing between worlds: keeping up his role as guide but also wrestling with questions from attendees who were learning about the attack. He also had to think about what might

come next. In the past couple of years there had been a few nonfatal shark encounters in Massachusetts, including one in Truro a month earlier, but this was the state’s first shark-related fatality since 1936.

“I knew immediately a switch had been flipped,” Skomal told me. “The game had changed to some extent. I knew there would be a public outcry, the call for some mediation, for white shark measures to be put in place.”

Over the next month he was deluged with press interviews. National and local media, London tabloids, and network television all came calling. Headlines like “Right Out of Jaws ” fueled the mania, as did a demand for answers that no scientist could

viewed with something like reverence. When that white shark got trapped in a pond on Naushon Island in 2004, Skomal found himself a target of Cape Cod residents who were concerned about her safety. “I was getting threats if I didn’t save the shark,” he said.

But later, as warning signs, 911 call boxes, and trauma kits were installed at beaches along the Outer Cape, that reverence began to compete with a different sentiment, the feeling that the Cape should revert back to an era when swimmers and surfers didn’t have to think about sharks. In the past two years especially, there’s been increased talk of culling the seal population, killing the whites, and exploring other measures to protect beachgoers. For instance, last May the town of Chatham considered funding a feasibility study and construction of a shark barrier or detection system at a popular family beach. (The ballot measure ultimately failed.)

Sometimes public ire is directly focused on Skomal, who is derided by critics as a “shark hugger.” This highlights the difficult line he must walk as a level-headed scientist who has to make sure the debate around sharks and humans doesn’t go off the rails.

THE RAILS.

provide. Why did the shark attack? Would it attack again? Can sharks develop a taste for human flesh?

“These are tough questions,” Skomal told me. “And deep down, you know it. One of these sharks killed a person.”

He paused. “It killed a person. That’s pretty profound.”

He paused again, then added, “I would be lying if I said I didn’t fear them to some extent.”

The fatal attack also put a spotlight on the public’s changing relationship with white sharks. After the 1997 hunting ban took hold and the sharks’ numbers rebounded, their occasional appearances in Cape waters were

“If someone says, ‘Let’s kill all the seals,’ I say, ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it,’” Skomal said. “I want them to walk me through the mechanics of it. What would it mean to cull the seal population? Will you bring your kid on the boat with you when you shoot the seals? And once you’ve shot a seal, what do you with the body?

“And the bigger question is how many, because if you want to go back to how many we had in 1965, you’re going to have to kill 20,000,” he continued. “Now we get into the logistics of killing that many seals. ‘Well, we’ll just hire guys to kill them,’ they say. Well, those seals will pile up on the beach. And what will you do, use a machine gun on a [Cape Cod] National Seashore beach?

“This is the road I go down with people. At some point they either get frustrated and say that part is easy to sort out, or they say I’m crazy and walk away.”

DERIDED BY SOME CRITICS AS A “SHARK HUGGER,” SKOMAL MUST WALK A DIFFICULT LINE AS A LEVELHEADED SCIENTIST WHO HAS TO MAKE SURE THE DEBATE AROUND SHARKS AND HUMANS DOESN’T GO OFF

I PAID A VISIT TO SKOMAL’S OFFICE in New Bedford in mid-November. A long spell of mild, dry weather had extended the tagging season deep into autumn, allowing him to work on the water a mere two days before we talked. This final stretch had been especially fruitful: 12 newly tagged sharks, including a record of five on one day in late October. In all, Skomal and his team had tagged 50 fish since June, a number he couldn’t have dreamed of in 2009, when his tally was just five.

“That’s a big-time record for us,” he said. “It’s unheard of.” He looked out the window at the ocean, whose choppy waters signaled the end of the season. “I’d keep going right until [the sharks migrate south], but I know that’s not going to happen.”

Like the generation of men he learned from—and it was mostly men back then—Skomal is more at home on a boat than at a desk. But the science he’s doing is much different from his predecessors’. Fifty years ago, Skomal’s old boss at the Narragansett lab, Jack Casey, relied on analog tags in

his research. He’d catch a fish, attach a small capsule at the base of the dorsal fin, and insert a rolled-up piece of vinyl printed with the current size of the shark and where it had been caught. Later, if fishermen caught that same shark, and if they felt compelled to cooperate, they’d update the information and mail the sheet to Casey’s lab.

Today, the tech Skomal uses to study white sharks is beyond anything he could have imagined deploying even just two decades ago. There are video tags that show exactly what a shark sees, even at night, and satellite tags that can push live data about individual fish to mobile devices. Last summer Skomal experimented with a tracking device called an accelerometer that can document multiple body movements every second, indicating when a fish is resting, when it’s feeding, and when it’s hunting for prey— basically creating a detailed portrait of a shark in three-dimensional space. That kind of stuff excites Skomal not only because it speaks to his own wonky obsession but also because it

may point the way toward how people and sharks can better coexist.

“I’m hoping we can produce information that will lead to predictability,” he said. “Ultimately our goal is to find patterns with these animals—then we can forecast where a white shark is likely to be hunting any given day or hour.”

Skomal doesn’t plan to retire anytime soon. He’s eager to see the results of the next phase of his research, and he’s invested in helping the next generation of biologists carry on the work he started.

During my visit in November, Skomal was preparing for a trip to St. Croix, where he planned to lead a graduate student and two faculty from the University of Massachusetts on a week of tiger shark tagging in the Caribbean. He would be hosting them at the condo his parents bought nearly half a century ago and working the same waters that inspired him when he was a kid.

“A lot of my love of this work started down there, and now we’re going back there to tag sharks,” he said, and smiled at the thought. “It’s come full circle.”

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The Unfinished Journey of João Victor

(Continued from p. 104)

wonder what he is thinking. For several hours he talks about carrying jugs of water from distant rivers, and meals of bread and sugar water, and how he felt rich when his parents were able to afford tea. He tells of being beaten in school for talking so much, because he always liked the sound of his voice. He talks quickly, as if a timekeeper will cut him off. He says he learned to speak with feeling from listening to pastors in Angola. “If you are passionate, people will feel it,” he says, “and people will want to stand with you.”

Looking on, Siragusa says quietly, “I am learning things about him I never knew.”

In Washington, Victor meets with Maine’s Congressional delegation and recites “The Light of Stars” for Senator Angus King—who then recites a poem back. Victor also meets other young people from across the country, surprising them when he is able to comment on their performances, which he has watched so often he’s memorized their poems. When he sees Janae Claxton, last year’s national champion, he asks Siragusa, “How do you say a female hero?” “Heroine,” Siragusa replies. And this is how Victor greets her.

After Victor is named one of the finalists on Tuesday, he and Siragusa return to the hotel room. “Do you think I have a chance?” Victor asks.

“There are only nine,” Siragusa says. “Everyone has a chance.”

The next evening, May 1, before they leave for the auditorium Victor asks Siragusa to pray for him. “There was an awkward pause,” Siragusa remembers, “and Victor giggled. I realized he meant out loud. I said, ‘Lord, please help Victor to shine his light on his audience tonight. Give him the strength and confidence to express himself from the depths of his soul and to enjoy this moment forever.’”

Then, shortly after 8 p.m., Victor is onstage after his second poem,

and Acevedo is asking about his early memories, and soon all nine finalists are standing side by side waiting to hear who will be asked to recite one more poem, which will decide the winner.

Here is where I want to write that, thanks to all his hard work and passion, Victor becomes the Poetry Out Loud champion, is awarded $20,000, and will attend the college that he feels will open yet another new world to him. But sometimes journeys, like stories, take their own path.

“Everywhere I have gone, every competition,” Victor recalls, “I hear João Victor, João Victor. Now, for the first time, I did not hear my name.” He will tell Siragusa, “I let Maine down.”

“Usually when a student is so disappointed, they can hide it,” Siragusa tells me. “Not Victor. I told him he had done so well. ‘What are we going to do now?’ he asked me.”

Late that night, Victor’s phone rings. It is Monga, who tells him how proud he is, that Victor has achieved so much, the first from Maine to be a finalist.

Despite his deep disappointment, when Victor returns to Lewiston he finds he is something of a celebrity. The city names him its first youth poet laureate, and he gives a workshop on recitation at the local library. At Lewiston High School’s awards night, Victor once more recites “The Light of Stars,” and though he cannot see them, tears flow down the faces of many in the audience. A man hands him an envelope; inside it is $2,500, a start toward his hoped-for college life. Bates College honors Siragusa for his teaching career, and Siragusa invites his wife, his mother, and Victor to attend.

Just before he left for the nationals, I had asked Victor what he would do with his drive to excel once he no longer had to pour his life into reciting poetry. “I won’t stop,” he says. “One day I will say to my kids, ‘If you put in the work, you have a chance to dream.’ I am an Angolan man, and look where I am. I won’t stop doing this. I will start writing my own poetry.”

Victor begins performing his own poems on stages ranging from community churches to the Waterville Opera House. But more than anything, he

uses his poems to help him face life.

In fall 2019, Victor’s mother contracts malaria, and her sister dies in a bus accident in Congo. “That was the hardest time,” Victor tells me. “I couldn’t do anything. So I went and wrote a poem so I could keep myself calm.”

Right before the school year ends, Siragusa posts a Facebook plea for a lawyer to take on the asylum case for Victor’s family even though they have little money. The mayor also gets involved in the search, which ultimately leads to one of Lewiston-Auburn’s best-known attorneys, Michael Malloy, agreeing to represent the family pro bono. “When someone calls and says, ‘Will you help this amazing person?’ you say yes,” he explains. Before the end of the year, he files the official application for an asylum hearing. He says the family has a compelling case, but with hundreds of new asylum seekers from Angola and Congo continuing to arrive in Portland throughout the summer and fall, it might take two years, or even longer, for the case to be heard.

Victor enrolls in the local community college, but without the discipline that bonded teacher, student, and poetry, he struggles with his business and math courses while washing dishes 40 hours a week. He says he may wait to go back to school, just working to earn money for the family in the meantime. He knows there are colleges where students study drama and poetry and speech, but he doesn’t know how to go from here to there.

Siragusa keeps in close contact with Victor, doing what he has done since they first met: believing in his rare talent and charisma, refusing to let his flame be extinguished. When Victor tells him he thinks performing arts is where his heart will ultimately take him, Siragusa begins writing to people who work in the field of drama— another way of praying, he figures.

This is a journey they are now on together, one with a still-undetermined end. Except now Victor belongs to two families, one uprooted and one with generational roots, and that just may be enough for him to find his own way. “I’m still learning,” Victor says. “I will use my words to get back.”

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No problem, I thought. Surely my local Goulds dealer would have the part in stock or, worst-case scenario, be able to order directly from Goulds. Either way we’d be up and running in no time. In fact, the part was not in stock, and an order was placed with a promise of three-day delivery. This was fine with me, as Paul was not available to help until the following week anyway. No harm, no foul, and the part was inexpensive enough that I could still feel pretty savvy about the whole deal.

The day before Paul was due to arrive, the part came in. But after driving over the mountain to collect it, I found that the new motor lead didn’t fit—and the correct part was backordered for six weeks. Suddenly, my savvy purchase was beginning to look like yet another in a long line of wellintentioned but ultimately counterproductive attempts to save money.

“You know,” said the fellow who was helping me try to track down the correct part, “you should stop at the well-drilling place in town. They might have something lying around.” It was a bit of a Hail Mary, he and I agreed. For one, it was nearly 5 p.m. and thus, quitting time. For another, he was talking about the shop out of which the driller operated; the chances of someone even being around were slim. Finally, could they possibly have the correct motor lead on hand and, if so, be willing to take the time to dig it out for a hapless homeowner such as myself? They were in the business of drilling wells and dropping pumps, not supplying parts to people so they could do the work themselves. But really, what else was I going to do?

I pulled into the driller’s yard at nearly half past 5 and was pleased to see that the shop’s bay door was open.

I could see two men inside; they were leaning on a workbench, though I couldn’t tell if they were actually working on something or simply using the bench to take a load off after a long day of toil. By the time I’d disembarked from my truck and made my way to the maw of the doorway, I could see the beer cans clutched in their hands. There was a 12-pack—or what remained of it, anyway—atop the workbench. Coors Light.

I explained my predicament, and the men asked to see the pump. Then they led me behind the shop to what they called “the graveyard.” There, half-hidden in the weeds, lay an impressive pile of burned-out or simply deemed-unfit-for-service well pumps. I’d say there were three dozen, but that’s really just a guess. It could have been half that many; it could have been twice that many.

While I’ve never worked in a shop or a garage, I’ve spent enough time in them to know the comfort of those smells, which to me are the smells of things getting fixed.

It took us less than two minutes to locate a pump with the correct motor lead, and maybe another three or four to carry it into the shop, lay it on the workbench next to the 12-pack, and remove the lead. Perhaps it would have gone even quicker if there weren’t so many empty beer cans lying about, but I was in no position to complain, and besides, it might be argued that my unlikely saviors’ semi-inebriated state is precisely what had disposed them toward being so helpful. We put the new-used lead on my pump, where it fit perfectly, as if it’d never been missing at all.

With my pump complete, I had no reason to stay, but the men and I had gotten to talking—about drilling wells, about building houses, about growing up in Vermont—and despite having a long list of chores that needed completion before my day was done, I lingered. The interior of the shop was shaded and cool and smelled of all things a shop should smell of, which is to say it smelled of grease, metal, and rubber. While I’ve never worked in a shop or a garage, I’ve spent enough time in them to know the comfort of those smells, which to me are the smells of things getting fixed. Of course, they’re also the smells of things that can’t be fixed, but on this afternoon, I had my newly repaired pump in hand, and on the eve of my date with Paul, no less, and it hadn’t cost me a thing (the men had refused payment), and I was back to being a savvy consumer. All of this imbued me with a profound sense of optimism, possibility, and gratitude.

Eventually, I thanked the men once again, bade them farewell, climbed into my truck, and headed for home. The next day, if all went according to plan, I’d take my first drink from the new well, of cool water drawn from deep underground, pushed upward by the very implement that now lay across the passenger seat. It seemed to me a little miraculous that this humble pump could make it all possible. But it could. And it did. And the water is delicious.

The Fix

On getting water from a well without digging too deep into one’s pockets.

f the myriad tasks needing completion before the rental house we built is suitable for occupancy, none has provoked quite so much anxiety as drilling the well. I was keen to get it done, if for no other reason that I’d finally be able to stop obsessing over how deep we’ll need to drill.

This, of course, correlated directly with how much we would need to spend. I had budgeted $8,000, but truthfully that’s just an extrapolation of the lowest realistic estimate I could justify, which was $5,000. My logic went something like this: If I added 60 percent to the most optimistic but still-realistic scenario (i.e., anything less than $5,000, while theoretically possible, is pretty much pie-in-the-sky thinking when it comes to the well-drilling game), I left the door open to good fortune without tempting fate with unrealistic expectations.

To make budget, I decided to purchase a used submersible well pump. Since a highquality pump can run upward of $1,000 new, I was particularly pleased with myself when I found a little-used 1-horsepower Goulds (an industry standard-bearer) on Craigslist for $140. I drove an hour and a half to South Royalton, where I met a man named Justin in the dooryard of the small lumberyard he owned and operated. “If it doesn’t work for ya, I’ll give ya yer money back,” he told me, as I counted twenties into his outstretched hand. Though I generally subscribe to “buyer beware” when purchasing used items for a

(Continued on p. 126)

ILLUSTRATION BY BENOIT TARDIF

Defy conventional wisdom... Read by candlelight.

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