by Matt Weiland
In the White Mountains, however, he found himself bothered by the “sallow, saturnine” locals, driving carts and teams. They dressed poorly, they spoke badly. In The American Scene, an impressionistic to the point of vaporish record of his travels, James recounts the visit of a local North Country rustic to the front door of a summer person. The nineteenth century marked the advent of the summer person in New Hampshire. He “makes it a condition of any intercourse that he be received at the front door,” James writes of the local. When the lady of the house appears, the local asks, “Are you the woman of the house?” He has a message, he tells her, from “the washer-lady.”
James ascribes great importance to this, detecting a breach of etiquette suggestive of a general loss of “forms” in America. I admire James’s writing—he is the master of the endless parenthetical and his syntax snakes around itself like the endless ruminations of the terminally stoned. (I like this.) And The American Scene is a great repository of place-spirit. But his distaste for this New Hampshire man at the front door makes my democratic, Scotch-Irish heart rise in revolt. That errand-man is one of my people. My people turn wry, then truculent in the face of authority. We presume ourselves at least your equal. And we resent the implication that you might think otherwise.
How does this go on century after century? Can such predilections really be in the genes? Even when it comes to architecture … in Portsmouth, for example, I am surrounded by handsome Anglican structures made of brick. Elegant, enduring. And there’s new high-tech industry down here in the southern part of the state, spreading out from Boston and surroundings. Lots of glass, unorthodox designs. But I couldn’t wait to get out into the back country, to the rustic, the austere, the unvarnished. Laconic, democratic buildings, wooden planks, hewed beams, sagging barns. The plain style of those making do.
In my glancing encounters with the people of New Hampshire, I am reminded of the inhabitants of my native North Carolina. They evince that same paradoxical pride in one’s modesty, the vanity scraped away like snow from the roads. This can result in an amusing contest in which everyone tries to outdo each other in not being too big for their britches. At worst, such humility becomes its opposite—a perverse and monstrous vainglory.
Where in the South we had the disaster of slavery to darken our souls to this day, New Hampshire has its winters—icy breeding grounds for cabin fevers of paranoia and meanness, for gloom and self-accusation. Lay the long nights and frigid days atop the Puritan conviction that men and women are worthless sinners in the eyes of an angry God, mix in poverty, and you have a recipe for the making of complicated worms.
New Hampshire reminds me of North Carolina in another way—that of a place that derives its identity at least in part by its opposition to another place. This the South continues to do with the North. (Nearly a century and a half after the Civil War, “Yankee” is still a derisory term in the former Confederacy, while for the rest of the country it hardly exists, unless we are talking about baseball, in which it is once again naturally a term of derision, and in New England most especially.) What the North is to the South, Massachusetts is to New Hampshire. A theocracy—once of Puritanism, now of right-thinking (Puritanism 2.0)—versus a land of secessionists. These days, we might throw in Vermont as well, that northern suburb of New York City, with its twee self-righteousness and propensity for expensive whole-grain breads. In that sense, New Hampshire is surrounded by pointy-heads who can’t fix a furnace or grow a cabbage.
But historically, it was Massachusetts that exerted a near tyrannical sway in the region. New Hampshire was the wilderness next door, to which the rebels against Puritan authoritarians (ironically, themselves rebels against English oppression) could light out for territory. And New Hampshire’s wilderness was genuine—not a pond, for God’s sake, a few miles from town. Thoreau, bless his transcendental heart, only went so far into the wild as to be able to return for supper in Concord at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house. A railroad passed by mere yards from his cabin.
The real wilderness swallows a man’s shouts. The silence of isolation vibrates in the heart like an arrow shot from the dark woods. Leaves a man talking to himself, to the trees and the rocks. Which is about the time that the landscape starts talking back.
It talks to me tonight as I cross the state, heading west. The roads are empty, the summer people long gone, back to Boston, Providence, New York. Snow swirls in the headlights. Everybody left is a native now.
A waiter I met at the Grover Cleveland Dinner told me that he had 200 years worth of relatives buried in the local graveyard. He just wanted to make enough money to keep living in this place. These days, such a stubborn attachment to home seems downright oppositional.
A New England graveyard had to be moved. One of the occupants had been buried for seventy years. His grand-nephews, themselves ancient, had been asked for permission to move the coffin. One refused for a long time before consenting but declined to attend the exhumation. The other brother attended. Afterwards, they spoke about it.
“Did they?”
“Yep.”
“Were you thar?”
“Yep.”
“How was the box?”
“Purty nigh gone.”
“Coffin?”
“Sorta mouldy.”
“D’ja look in?”
“Yep.”
“How was Uncle John?”
“Kinda poorly.”
When I stop at a gas station to ask if I am on the right road to Meriden, the attendant actually says, “Yep.” In that moment, I know how a biologist feels, rediscovering a species long thought extinct. I had encounted a native “Yep” still surviving in the wild as civilization encroached on all sides.
One of the shocking things about going to a new place renowned for certain qualities is to discover that the new place really does possess those qualities. That in New Hampshire, for instance, people in conversation really do tend toward the dry and laconic. It’s not just like some Bob Newhart TV show set in a New England inn where the locals dole out sly commentary on the goofy things outsiders do. TV actually got this from New England. What New England does when it gets this back from TV, I don’t know, though I wonder if watching such images of yourself results in a tendency to exaggerate your regional characteristics in the interest of higher visibility. New York, for instance, is a great place for Southerners to really pour on the Southernness, to drawl as if they’d been aged in a barrel of bourbon.
In rural New Hampshire, there is a tendency to use words sparingly, as if the supply might run out by spring. This laconicism is sometimes caricatured as countryspeak, the inarticulate parsimony of rubes and rednecks. It strikes me instead as part of a culture of conservation, of saving. A poor person in the sticks never knows when he might need a part from that rusting car in his front yard. Words in New Hampshire are car parts. Words are tools, worn by usage, carefully maintained, stored nightly in barns and sheds. Words are not for show (an excess of self-display is contrary to the spirit of farming and Puritan effacement); they’re for milking, cutting firewood, digging (how else would one get down to understatement?). Words are vegetables from the garden, canned and put up in root cellars and kitchen cabinets, to be rationed out over the course of a long winter. Words should approach as closely as possible the condition of silence, honesty being nearly mute.
Yep.
How happy Chris, the Mazda man on Route 4 who sells me a new tire, is to present me with a bill that is even less than originally estimated! He appreciates unexpected economies. He recommends certain brands of tires. We talk passionately about the tires. I had never had such a feeling about tires.
And such a cheap tire! Only $99! He had thought it was going to cost me $125. The soul delights in thrift. Especially when it comes to replacing a flat tire. Is this a New Hampshire thing? Or is it just Chris, the cheerful Mazda man?
The rhapsodists of the American road strike me as a little long in the tooth these days, all those superannuated Kerouac
s hung up on that endless spool of a book. Fortunately for Neal Cassady and company, they never had to drive across the country via the Interstate. On the Interstate just doesn’t have the same ring.
And yet, how restorative to my love of the open road have been the back highways of New Hampshire! I could be driving through 1948. Those old-fashioned, curving blue ribbons wrapping the landscape like a Christmas gift. Buckled and potholed from winter, they’re still beautiful, these roads, tended with alacrity by local crews. Donald Hall has written that “social welfare is magnanimous in New Hampshire only when you are a road.”
In New Hampshire, local road signs warn of “frost heaves.” These befuddled me the first time I saw them. They appear written in a runic tongue, Old English or Norse. There are so many ways to interpret these signs (such a New Hampshire thing—the wry joke that comes gradually at the outlier’s expense, but only after the outlier has moved on). Did they mean that frost will heave—a simple declaration of fact? If so, I appreciate being told this. Are they historical markers for a person named Frost Heaves? Unlikely, though I would like to have met the man so named. Or are they simply bumps in the road, caused by the expanding and contracting of winter highways? After wattling over a corrugation of frost heaves on my way up to Canterbury, I can tell you that frost heaves in New Hampshire = the average unmarked road in New York City. And given the choice, my car and I would rather trundle over frost heaves.
At the old Shaker settlement outside of Canterbury, it becomes apparent that there are at least forty varieties of silence. The snowbanks glisten in the declining light. The wind sweeps across the hill. The ear strains to catch something inaudible. A door bangs as one of the staff leaves for the day. There are no Shakers left here or anywhere. Only curators of Shakerdom.
The last Shaker at Canterbury died in the 1990s, the curator tells me. “Sister Something or Other, I can’t quite recall her name. She was in her nineties. We’re moving the administrative offices across the road,” he says, eager to be on his way.
They let me stay to wander the farm.
I peer into windows, the old glass wavery as a mirage. Antique machines, belts, workbenches, all askew, as if the Shakers hadn’t died off but left in a hurry, migrating to some other, more rectilinear universe. I had expected everything to be tidier, more Shaker.
In Concord, I had come across the diaries of Irving Elmer Greenwood, a former member of this village. He arrived from Providence, Rhode Island, in the care of his grandmother on September 18, 1886, nearly ten years old. His mother had died of consumption four years earlier, his father hadn’t wanted him. After his grandmother dropped him off, she returned to Providence.
The Shakers took him in. Their motto was “We make you kindly welcome.” They’d lived on and farmed this land since the 1780s, when a local farmer had converted to the religion and donated this hilltop property. In those early days, the Shakers had practiced prayer, marching, and vigorous movement—hence their name.
But by the time that Greenwood was deposited at Canterbury, the marching and vigorous movement had given way to just prayer and singing. And as always, work. At fifteen, Greenwood began to work full-time, tending cows, cutting firewood, tilling the soil. He drove horse teams and learned how to run the saw mill. He loved mechanical things, how to operate and fix them. Another Shaker slogan: “Hands to work, hearts to God.”
In 1895, another Canterbury Village boy’s father gave him a bicycle, and he allowed Greenwood to ride it among the buildings in the early evening before supper. Irving was nineteen years old. Two years later, at twenty-one, he signed a covenant with the Shakers to become a Brother in the community.
Chastity was required of the Shakers, and if his diaries are any indication, this did not seem an untenable proposition for Greenwood. He did love plays and musicals, however, and avidly took them in on occasional business trips to cities such as Boston. He was not unworldly.
He lived a quiet, good life, and helped bring electricity, telephones, and cars to the Shakers at Canterbury. A typical entry, this of January 16, 1911, reads: “Put in a light at the Office & wire a rheostat at Office & put in a plug for a machine at Sisters’ Shop.” Greenwood’s illuminations would appear to have been of this world, and yet, how they pleased him.
On February 25, 1922, he set up in the Brethren’s Shop a Westinghouse Radiophone, as it was called, along with a Magnavox speaker that looked like a horn of plenty. The radio cost $232. He and his friend Arthur were able to tune in to a concert. A couple of days later, five Shaker Sisters were invited to listen to the new radio but with the “weather inclement, results [were] slight.”
He died on June 19, 1939, sixty-two years old, leaving the plain notations of his diaries as a more than forty-year record of weather and work, of ice and snow and sweet summers, of planting and harvesting. The Shakers wanted to build a Heaven on Earth. Gentle utopians living on top of a hill. All gone now.
Here on this ancient hillside, I think: Maybe they got out just in time. They were interested in building barns, not reputations. Even if Brother Irving Elmer Greenwood had 363 friends, he would not have advertised this peculiar fact. I doubt he would have counted his friends at all. He counted chickens, cows, snowstorms, vegetables.
Dusk is fast approaching. The wind swirls. Snow crowds the Dwelling House in gust-sculpted waves. The rooms darken and the window glass reflects my face, angular and haunted. The old world—the Shakers’ world—is invisible.
But in the bluing light, I detect emanations, faint as ancient radio signals from Brother Irving Elmer Greenwood’s Westinghouse with the Magnavox trumpet. I don’t know where they’re coming from—inside the house, inside me? Or what they are. Or whether they will last. But they are coming.
I feel for a moment, in spite of everything, delivered. Here in this old place, I strain to listen.
NEW JERSEY
CAPITAL Trenton
ENTERED UNION 1787 (3rd)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the Channel Isle of Jersey
MOTTO “Liberty and prosperity”
NICKNAME Garden State
RESIDENTS New Jerseyite or New Jerseyan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 13
STATE BIRD eastern goldfinch
STATE FLOWER purpleviolet
STATE TREE red oak
STATE SONG no official song
LAND AREA 7,417sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Mercer Co., 5 mi. SE of Trenton
POPULATION 8,717,925
WHITE 72.6%
BLACK 13.6%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.2%
ASIAN 5.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 13.3%
UNDER 18 24.8%
65 AND OVER 13.2%
MEDIAN AGE 36.7
NEW JERSEY
Anthony Bourdain
Some New Jersey residents enthusiastically—if briefly—tried, a few years back, to get Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” named as the official state song. A choice both appropriate and wildly, hilariously inappropriate had it come to pass. Sure, Bruce was, and likely remains, New Jersey’s most famous product, our proudest citizen, our bard, our voice—the one guy big enough to say he was from Jersey and even tell you what exit and stand tall while doing it. But the song was about getting the fuck out of Jersey. While it might have been really cool to hear the lines “It’s a death trap, a suicide rap” sung by thousands of people at Giants Stadium, I don’t know what kind of message that would send. Or, actually, I do know. It would suggest that we’re rooting for the wrong team. That we kind of suck—and that, regardless, we celebrate that state.
Even the existence of our version of Bigfoot, our very own legendary state monster, the “Jersey Devil,” must be tempered by the knowledge that it was described in the 1946 WPA Guide to New Jersey as being “cloven hooved, long-tailed, with the head of a collie dog, the face of a horse, the body of a kangaroo, the wings of a bat and the disposition of a lamb.” Which makes it sound no more threatening than a kind of flying Lassie.
&nbs
p; Even Frank Sinatra, another native Jerseyite, was scarier than that.
New Jersey, even now when the whole country looks like Jersey, is still, anachronistically, a punchline.
But then—within the imposed borders of childhood—it was a little green world. Tree-lined streets, and eccentric backyards—each one different. Some had flagstone paths that led in mysterious patterns toward hidden gardens, stagnant carp ponds, rotting tree houses, the occasional creek. There seemed always to be a lawn mower going somewhere in the distance and someone coughing in the next house over. It smelled, in summertime, like cut grass—and coffee, from the Savarin Coffee factory, roasting beans in the next town. Once in a while there were other smells, of fermenting things in the marshes and land fills of what we called “the swamps” (actually the northern reaches of the more fragrant-sounding Meadowlands)—and even more sinister odors from the refineries along the Turnpike. Sometimes, the smells were just awful. A sulfurous, rotten egg odor that made the jokes we made about Bayonne and the “Garbage State Parkway” and all those people who lived closer to the factories not so funny anymore. In fact, I wonder if the inferiority complex that Jerseyites famously acquire when meeting New Yorkers has its roots in a vestigial awareness that we come from a state that smells.
Leonia, New Jersey, was a middle-class bedroom community about ten minutes from “the Bridge”—the bridge being the George Washington. That proximity to midtown Manhattan, a trip of about twenty minutes under optimal driving conditions, shaped all of us who lived in New York City’s shadow. It defined us, from birth, as the “others.” The “bridge and tunnel” crowd, yet without the bragging rights of, say, Brooklyn, or even Queens. We were always close but not ever, ever, “there.”
It was the suburbs, but not quite John Cheever territory. Though, for a while, my parents and their friends would get together on summer nights and play croquet—before adjourning to sip martinis and smoke filtered cigarettes. I think that was because they read John Cheever. But all our backyards were too sloped, lumpy, and untended for croquet. As far as I was aware, no one in our world had a tennis court, much less a pool, or had affairs with each other, or committed suicide. That kind of ennui was beyond our means. My father commuted by bus. When I was a small child he was a salesman in the audio department of Willoughby’s Camera store in mid-town during the days. At night, he was a floor manager at Sam Goody’s in the Garden State Plaza.