A Lap Around America

by Shawn Inmon

  Two minutes later, he was back, shaking his head. “He won’t be here at all today. Maybe Saturday.” As in, three days away. Hanover was a nice little town, but I didn’t see staying there three days just so we could gawk at an old light-up map of the Gettysburg battlefield.

  I thanked the man for his time, and we headed back for Highway 30. Important safety tip: If you want to see the Gettysburg Electric Map, you would be wise to call ahead.

  We finally figured out what made the small towns feel so different to us as we drove Highway 30: the houses that sit smack up against the road wherever the highway cuts through town. If one wanted to, one could spit on a porch while driving by. We don’t see that in Washington, where there’s always a distance between the front door and the highway. That’s probably a legacy of the time lag between town and highway construction in Pennsylvania, but it made everything feel strangely intimate as we puttered through one small town after another. Time and again, we pulled off the road to look at an ancient barn or house.

  There’s something about this barn…

  After a few hours, we crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. Neither of us had been to New Jersey before, so we didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know much about the state, aside from its proximity to New York City. Today, I learned that western New Jersey is filled with small farm towns, rolling hills, and lots of trees, and is perfectly lovely. Not at all what you would associate with something like The Sopranos. I was also pretty pumped that we managed to drive quite a distance through New Jersey without having to pay a single toll.

  As we drove down one winding road, autumn leaves already beginning to shake loose and fall, we saw a small stand next to a house with a simple sign that read: Pickles. Who can resist that? Not us. We stopped and knocked at the door, but no one answered. The stand had two jars of pickles for five dollars apiece. I stuck a ten-dollar bill under a rock and happily added the pickles to The Magical Mystery Bag. Life is always better with pickles.

  We drove through New Jersey and, just before dark stopped for the night in the hamlet of Central Valley, New York.

  Day Thirty-Eight

  As we drove northeast out of Central Valley, we were forced onto the freeway for a while. We hit several toll booths in short order, and we learned something: Tolls were more expensive in Florida, but the toll takers there were human beings and occasionally smiled. I’m almost sure there was no human DNA in the toll takers in New York who grunted and growled at us today as we went through. Welcome to New York!

  As we reached western Connecticut, the scenery was lovely. The leaves were starting to turn and we saw color everywhere. We began to hope for great leaf-peeping ahead in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont.

  By late morning, we made it to Hartford, Connecticut, which we learned was the wealthiest city of America at one point in the late 19th century. It’s not any more, but it is still a well-laid-out, gorgeous city, with a plethora of historic buildings. We were there to see just one, though: the Mark Twain House. Or the Samuel Clemens residence, I suppose, if you want to be really accurate.

  So far, we’ve seen Hemingway’s house, which was impressive, the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, which was pretty good, and now we’ve added Mark Twain’s house. While I like Hemingway and Poe’s writing, Mark Twain was my earliest favorite author. I’ve always loved his short works best—“The Stranger,” “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The Million Pound Bank Note,” and so on. I think I’ve read everything he’s ever written, including his travelogues. In addition, he spoke out in favor of equal rights for all, which wasn’t a popular position in the late 19th century.

  It’s easy to think how Mark Twain became wealthy. After all, he was among the most popular authors of his time, known worldwide. It wasn’t writing that paid for the magnificent house, though, as he’d published only one minor book when it was built. He managed that by marrying well. His wife, Olivia, was an heiress, and they used her inheritance to build the massive, 11,000-square-foot home. Many a parent has told his son, “It is just as easy to marry a rich girl as a poor one.” Apparently, Samuel Clemens paid attention.

  The Mark Twain House

  The house was built in American High Gothic style. I’m no architectural expert, but I can tell you one thing that means: It was dark. Inside, it took my eyes several minutes to adjust to the darkness caused by curtained windows, dark wood, and limited lighting.

  One thing I’d noticed about many of the older houses we toured on this trip was that they are made up of lots of small rooms. I’m sure this had something to do with keeping them warm. In the Mark Twain house, there were lots of large rooms—it really is an elegant house. But it wasn’t merely a showplace; it had obviously been lived in and used by a family.

  The house is laid out as much as possible as it was when Clemens, his wife, and children lived there. It’s easy to see that he doted on his children. The great sadness of his life was that he outlived three of the four, as well as his wife.

  On just about any other day, the Mark Twain House would be the fanciest place we would see, but today it wasn’t even close. That’s because we next drove to Newport, Rhode Island, where the uber-wealthy of the nineteenth century built their summer cottages. And by “cottages,” I mean huge, sprawling mansions on immaculate grounds, many of which face the Atlantic Ocean.

  I thought I would show Dawn how we would live if I ever became a bestselling author, so we visited The Breakers. Okay, that’s not quite true. We did visit The Breakers, but neither Dawn nor I would ever have any interest in living in anything remotely like that.

  The Breakers is impressive beyond words: massive, ornate, and like walking through a museum. Who would want to live like that? The answer, of course, is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who used The Breakers as a little summer getaway.

  Yes, this is our little summer getaway

  The Breakers has 70 rooms in its 125,000 square feet and is decorated in Gilded Age style. How many people would it take just to keep that dusted? When we visited Mark Twain’s home earlier in the day, that home felt immense—but you could fit more than a dozen houses of that size in this one. Almost half a million people visit The Breakers each year. It is one of the rare historic homes that allows photography, so bring your camera if you ever visit. The third floor is not open to the public, as it is still occupied by Countess Sylvia Szapary, who has a life estate, which means she can live there for as long as she chooses.

  I had to stop and think about that. What would it be like to live in a home the size of a Walmart Supercenter (albeit one decorated somewhat more opulently) and have more than a thousand people a day tramp through your lower floors? I can only imagine, and now I think I have yet another short story to write, but that is for another day.

  As we were leaving, Dawn observed, “Babe, if you’ll just buy me The Breakers, I’ll never ask for anything again.”

  I took that under advisement, but for now, she will have to make do with a few postcards and a magnet I picked up for her at the gift shop.

  By the time we left The Breakers, it was actually cooling off a bit. Temperatures had dropped down into the 70s, which was the closest thing to cool we had found since we hit Eastern Washington. We found a small motel called the Sea Whale, with a view of the water.

  One of the things I had promised Dawn on the trip was her first whole lobster, and we made that happen in Newport. Me? I am not much of a seafood enthusiast, so I stuck with a delicious shepherd’s pie. Luckily, the waitress recognized that we were not professional lobster eaters and gave Dawn a quick tutorial in how to attack it. She mastered it quickly.

  Day Thirty-Nine

  One thing about Rhode Island is that, no matter which direction you’re going, it doesn’t take long to drive out of the state. I think it takes longer to drive across Los Angeles than it does to drive across or up Rhode Island. The latter drive is a lot more pleasant, though.

  We had our sights set on Massachusetts, and more specifically, Sa
lem. I’m pretty sure everyone is familiar with the infamous Salem witch trials. We wanted to get a feel for the town where fear and hysteria overtook an entire population in the 1690s. In my blog, I referred to the witch trials as “example 1083-B of what happens when self-righteous people with a limited worldview are put in charge of everyone else.” I’ll stand by that statement.

  My first exposure to Salem and the trials was way back in the mid-1960s. Long before I read about the historic event in books or in school, I saw an episode of Bewitched set in Salem. Sure enough, as we drove through the middle of town, we saw a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery in character as Sam from that television series. I’m pretty sure the current citizens of Salem would rather people remember the town through a sunny sixties sitcom than through the horrible reality of what occurred in the seventeenth century.

  The Salem witch trials were certainly not the only instance of ordinary people being accused of supernatural crimes and put to death for it. In fact, a rash of these events occurred across New England. Mass hysteria is usually blamed for the outbreak of righteousness and poison that swept the upper east corner of our nation. I can’t help but wonder how much of it was actually a settling of old scores, rejections, bad business deals, and so on.

  I always knew how terrible the whole enterprise was. But, once we got to the simple memorial for the victims of the hysteria, the reality came home. That memorial is simple and profound: Beside the cemetery called The Burying Point is a row of benches, each inscribed with the name of one of the victims.

  The one that most affected me was the memorial bench of Giles Corey. Most of the other accused were hanged, but Corey refused to enter a plea. I understand where he was coming from, and think I would have done the same thing. Once you were accused, you were essentially dead, one way or another. When Corey refused to plea, the judges decided to use a technique called “pressing”: The accused is laid in a pit, a board is laid across him or her, and heavy stones are laid on top of the board. When I say “heavy stones,” I mean stones so big it took several men just to pick them up. Every time the sheriff asked him for a plea, Corey would say, “More weight!” After three days, and after once again saying, “More weight!” Corey died.

  Giles Corey’s Bench in Salem

  Not that any of the accused had it easy, but imagine the incredible suffering he endured to not give in. Dawn says I am the most stubborn man she’s ever met, but I don’t think I could hold a candle to the bravery and unwillingness to bend that Giles Corey displayed.

  People still leave small mementoes and flowers on various benches, paying tribute to lives that would have been long forgotten if not for fate choosing them for a certain infamy.

  We’d seen some old cemeteries on our trip, but I don’t think we’d seen any graves as old as we did in The Burying Point. Some dated from the 1600s. Many of the stones had degraded to a point where they were no longer legible, but still they stood.

  We did see a lot of graves belonging to a family named Hathorne, the clan of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote The House of Seven Gables. His ancestors were part of the witch trials, so he added the “w” to his name to separate himself from that infamy. In fact, a relative, John Hathorne, was the only known judge who never repented his decision to kill people he believed to be witches. I understand the name change.

  The house Hawthorne wrote about in his most famous book is also in Salem, so we took the tour. He never lived in the house that had once famously had seven gables, but his cousin Susannah Ingersoll did, and he often visited there. His cousin loved to tell him stories that involved the history of the house, so when he wrote the followup to his novel The Scarlet Letter, he chose to write a gothic novel set in the house.

  If I had read and loved The House of the Seven Gables, I’m sure seeing the house would have had more impact on me. I had been assigned The Scarlet Letter in high school, though, and didn’t particularly enjoy it, so I never returned to Hawthorne.

  One interesting aside: When Hawthorne saw the house, it had been remodeled and only had three gables. He didn’t like the ring of a book called The House of Three Gables, though, so he wrote about it as it had once looked.

  We’d seen some old houses on our trip, but nothing as old as this one, which dates to 1668. As far as I have learned, it’s the oldest surviving wooden private home still standing in America. It was at risk of being torn down in the early twentieth century, but a woman named Caroline Emmerton bought it, established a foundation, and restored the property.

  The House of Seven Gables

  Unfortunately, when they did the restoration, they made the original building adhere more to the novel by adding a secret passage, which we got to use. The secret passage was very narrow and twisting, like a shorter version of the passage we used to climb up inside the Statue of Liberty a few years ago. Personally, I would have preferred the house as it had been built, but tourism is an important factor in keeping it up.

  We liked much of Salem, although I will admit Dawn enjoyed it more than I did. There was something about the memorial and the hangings and pressings that cast a pall over the town and the day for me. One thing we both hated was the traffic in Salem, with its narrow streets, hyper-aggressive drivers, and confusing intersections. At one point, Dawn had stopped to let an old woman with a walker cross in the crosswalk in front of her. The driver behind us laid on his horn the whole time. I guess he would have preferred us to just run the old girl over. In Salem, we walked wherever possible, and that was much more pleasant.

  I had planned on taking another ghost/historical tour of Salem as soon as it got dark. We’d loved the tour we took of New Orleans that way, and thought we’d probably learn a lot of history that isn’t easily available in books.

  Once we got to our motel and checked in, though, I felt terrible. I didn’t know if I was coming down with a bug or the bad vibes of the historical events were weighing on me. Either way, I lay down on the bed to rest for a few minutes, and I was lights-out until morning.

  Day Forty

  We had a decision to make. The far northeast was beckoning to us. We had been dreaming of Vermont and Maine ever since we started the trip, and now we were tantalizingly close. But, just a bit behind us to the south lay Boston—one on the short list of cities where we had hoped to spend at least a few hours.

  We knew that having just a few hours in Boston was laughable. It is one of the most historically rich cities in the country. We knew we couldn’t get through a tenth of what we wanted to see in half a day, but if nothing else, we wanted to get the flavor of the city.

  We immediately learned that Salem’s traffic wasn’t so bad after all. Boston’s was much worse. Boston’s road system seemed to specialize in three things—tunnels, side streets so narrow a car will barely fit, and bridges. We had somewhat negative encounters with all three and spent more time lost in Boston than we did anywhere else on the trip.

  It was a gloomy, gray day with a spitting rain reminiscent of Washington. We almost felt at home. We only had time to hit a couple of sights, but both were excellent.

  Our first stop was at Paul Revere House. This was much more modest than the other famous houses we’d toured thus far. Paul Revere was a silver mason and a business owner, but distinctly middle-class. He had sixteen children with his two wives, eleven of whom survived into adulthood. It’s no wonder Revere worked so hard. We enjoyed having the opportunity to walk through his home and get a sense of what his eighteenth-century life was like, especially in a more modest home. Nothing will make you appreciate a home with central heat and air, cable television and Internet as much as walking through a dark, smoky house from that era.

  The Paul Revere House

  Later, we drove around Boston for a while. We found some tree-lined streets that were quiet and attractive, and a few neighborhoods where things looked a little rougher. Basically, like any other city.

  Dawn loves the movie Black Mass, starring Johnny Depp as Whitey Bulger, so we contemplated looking
up some of the locations from the film, but that would have been time-consuming and entailed us driving through more Boston traffic, which didn’t seem like much fun.

  So, we swung by the USS Constitution and walked through both it and its well-laid-out museum, which gives an excellent perspective on what life was like for the sailors on board the ship during the War of 1812. The biggest thing I learned while walking around the craft itself was that I’m glad not to have been a sailor in those days. It’s hard to picture spending my days clambering up and down those slippery ladders or ropes. I think my life expectancy at sea would have been plus or minus one day.

  One last word on Boston: That famous accent, where “r’s” are nowhere to be found, has never been my favorite accent. Okay, I’ll be honest. I hate a Boston accent. It just rings harshly in my ear. Dawn, on the other hand, is thrilled by it. Everywhere we go, when people talk to us, I can see her mumbling to herself, repeating their accent, cementing it in her mind. Watching TV in the room at night, whenever she hears someone speak in that distinct accent, she repeats it back until she’s got it. As we drove through the city itself, she would ask if I would like to “Pahk the cah.” When something amused her, she called it a “pissah.” I think I’ve changed my mind on this accent now. When Dawn does it, it’s very fetching.

  After being completely soaked in Boston, we turned north and drove through New Hampshire.

  We knew we’d hit a lot more of that state on the way back through, so we drove right on through to Maine.

  Aren’t there certain states that just have a resonance for you, even if you’ve never been there before? If you grew up on the east coast, I can see states like Colorado or California, or even Washington, having that aura of attraction. For Dawn and me, Maine has that effect on us. It’s been number one on our hit parade from the time we left home.