Mel Allen's New England from YankeeMagazine.com

Role Reversal

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:00:00 +0100

When you read this, I'll be, by the grace of God and the pilot's skill, in Japan. I've traveled some in the world, but never beyond a six-hour flight, and as I type this, I have no idea at all how I'll spend some 15 hours on an airplane. I suppose I could write my stories that are overdue. Or read one of those great classic books we always promise we'll read on vacation. But we never do, always ending up with some cheesy magazine, or a novel with short paragraphs and heroes and villains and lots of plot. I imagine some of the time I'll reflect on the strange, always mysterious process by which a child grows up and moves out into his own world — a world I'll now visit, speaking not a word of the native language. I'll be dependent on my son's knowledge. He will, in a sense, be sure I cross the street and look both ways.

My son Dan graduated a year ago from a fine college in California (he'd visited all the sturdy New England colleges, but when he saw the trees and the school's Spanish architecture and all the students in shorts and sandals in March, he was there), where he became deeply interested in Asian life and culture. He studied beginning Japanese last summer for 10 days at the justifiably famous Rassias summer program at Dartmouth College (www.rassias.com). I've rarely seen him so enthused about learning. They know what they're doing there, making language a vital, living experience. And then in what seemed to me a blur of a departure at the airport, he was off, to a new job teaching English at a public middle school. He turned once as he passed through the passenger line, and I turned to wave back. And then a plane took him as far away as I could imagine, to where, when I'm waking up here, it's dark and families are settling in for bed.

He's making all the plans: where we stay, what we see, how we get from point A to point B. My younger son, Josh, is coming with me, a day after his own college year ends — and there we'll be, three Allen boys in a land where only one of us knows how to get around. It seems so close in my memory, the days I'd hoist him to my shoulders so that he could look around and see what's up. Holding his arms above water while he learned that the harder he kicked, the more splashes he made, the more fun he had. And one day I let go, and he stayed afloat, and one more day, it seemed, he was off in the deep end. The years turning over one page at time — seemingly a book with no end, until suddenly it's going so fast, like a blur, and no matter how much you want to hold on for more time, to keep the child just a tad longer, it's past. The only rewind is in our memory.

So I'm sure my airplane hours will be spent right there. He wants to show us Tokyo and his school in Kasukabe, and Mt. Fuji, and Hiroshima and Nara and Kyoto. Right now they're all just names and paragraphs in a guidebook. They all sound wonderful and exotic, and the joy of travel is always the mystery anyway. What I'm looking forward to the most is seeing my guide, who, once I let go, never stopped seeking the deeps.

The Hardwood Blooms of Spring

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

Every day I walk a few miles in the neighborhoods of my town. These days, more and more houses are sporting a sure sign of spring: cords of firewood, neatly stacked and beautifully arranged as if by a sculptor. No sooner do we get through one winter than we get ready for the next. The sight of wood, seasoning in the open, or under the cover of a roof or a plastic canopy, is as comforting to us who live in country towns as anything I know.

I don't know what can give an urbanite a similar surge of comfort. A bank statement? A reserved parking space? I have no clue, but this past weekend I spent a warm May day happily stacking my first cord and half. I admit I'm not the artisan I wish I were. I actually have woodpile envy. I see neighbors whose stacks look as if they could withstand a hurricane. They must have played much longer with Lincoln Logs than I did.

I start off wanting my wood to look beautiful and tight -- but after an hour or so, I lose a bit of patience, and instead of fitting the perfect piece into just the right opening, I reason that in six months I'll just be toting the wood upstairs straight to the stove. So I go more for the modern-art look: a bit helter-skelter, hoping my neighbors will admire the fine chunks of oak and maple and cherrywood I've acquired, rather than the design.

This is my first spring in my old house by the river that I've bought with Annie, so it's the first woodpile my neighbors will have a chance to observe and from which get a reading on me I imagine. On my walk today, I saw a woodpile at the top of a nearby hill where the woodpile architect had fitted his split logs in a fashion I hadn't thought of. My next cords will arrive soon. I'll shamelessly model my next stack on my neighbor's. I hope my patience matches my desire.

Why People Love New England

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:00:00 +0100

A few weeks ago, a reader named Dawn Rigoni left this comment on my blog: "... I'm one of those people who is 'homesick for New England' even though I've never lived there. I've dreamed of living in Vermont ever since I was little, even though I've never been; my favorite school librarian moved away to Weathersfield, Vermont, when I was a child and sent me a postcard, and ever since, I've felt that my heart belongs to a place I've never set foot in ... Please know how fortunate you are to live in such a beautiful corner of the world!"

I've heard this often in my years here at Yankee -- letters and calls from distant places from people who feel they belong to a region they've never seen. It's as though they have a memory in their hearts of New England. Now I don't imagine that in that yearning they consider negotiating a rotary in Boston, or crawling along Storrow Drive at 5 p.m., or shoveling out after a nor'easter, or even working in the garden with blackflies swarming in May. I think they dream of small towns, stone walls, seas pounding on rocks, pine trees and maples, sugar shacks, town meetings, country stores, rolling hills, and town greens -- all those markers that tell us where we are when we're here.

I don't think New Englanders feel this way about distant places -- at least none I know. Oh, every winter, especially during a cold snap, or when spring takes forever to bloom, I hear friends talking about sunny climes and tropical breezes -- but that's escape talk, fleeting and understandable, not a bone-deep feeling like the one my correspondent, Dawn, describes.

I wonder how many of us who live here take New England for granted. It's the easiest thing to do, like looking at the face of a loved one so often that you no longer really see it. This is what happened in the '60s and '70s, and even into the '80s, when some of the most cherished and historic houses in various towns and cities in New England fell to wrecking balls. In their place rose condo complexes, parking lots, home developments, and department stores. We forgot how lovely those faces were.

In the next month, a photographer for Yankee will be traveling to some of the most beautiful places in the region, all of which were preserved by people who never forgot to see. We're lucky -- among the luckiest people anywhere. I hope one day Dawn Rigoni gets to see for herself.

The Old Volumes of Yankee Magazine

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

In a small room on the second floor of Yankee are bookshelves lined with the old-timers—the bound volumes of the magazine since the day we began in 1935. I came on board in October 1979, so naturally I feel more kinship with the volumes that date from my arrival, sort of like an album of family pictures where I know all the faces. The ones from before then still feel like family, but from another time, the great-uncles and -aunts I never really got to spend much time with.

From time to time I bring home a volume or two and just thumb through them. Besides a certain nostalgia and curiosity about the magazine from a few decades back, I'm fascinated to see New England re-emerge as I turn the pages. This past weekend I did just that, and I'm telling you, I was more entertained than by anything I could have put on the television.

Let me just tell you about one trip down memory lane and see whether you agree.

This came from the September 1978 issue. Its title, "Two Whole Towns for Sale," pretty much sums it up. Yankee's eternally popular "House for Sale" Moseyer (whose identity has been a closely guarded secret from the public ever since I came here) had found one heck of a story. Basically, the entire village of Cambridgeport, Vermont, about halfway between Saxtons River and Grafton Village, was up for grabs. Consider what the Moseyer wrote: "On its main street, Route 121, are 14 houses in addition to the church, Bell's garage/post office/store, and the plant of Unified Data Products Corp. Of these, a dozen are either openly for sale or most certainly available if you made an offer. Raymond Cushing owns four, including his own, and not including a fifth which he thinks he has sold. One is a little place east of the church for $13,000. Another is a nine-room brick house at $18,000... It would appear you could purchase almost all of Cambridgeport, including the old mill and pond, for somewhere in the vicinity of $200,00, probably less..."

Well, don't you think that gets our attention today? I'm not immune to the "what-if" game we all play at times. What if you'd bought this little Vermont town 30 years ago — what might you have done with it? It's a make-believe yet curiously real game of New England Monopoly. I think I may just have to ask the Moseyer to head back to Cambridgeport one of these days to see what happened to all those Vermont houses.

Where People Fly

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

This past Sunday I drove west about 30 miles, to Brattleboro, Vermont, where the best of what a core group of people in a community can do was on full display. From the early 1920s, when outdoor visionary Fred Harris, founder of both the Brattleboro Outing Club and the Dartmouth Outing Club, brought Brattleboro to the forefront of ski jumping in New England, Harris Hill has seen people fly.

I don't know of any event more spectacular to see in person than a bona fide ski-jumping competition, when some of the best young jumpers in the world converge. About 15 years ago, I made a point to bring my two ski-enthusiast young boys to Harris Hill during Brattleboro's Winter Carnival. We trudged as high as we could get, sometimes slipping in the snow on the steep inclines, then hauling up again. And when we got high enough to be where the jumpers took off, they'd swoosh by, and then suddenly with a sound like a flock of geese taking off, they'd just soar, their bodies leaning forward, their skis splayed to the side, before landing, way below us, like miniature replicas of what we'd just seen up close.

There was a time when ski jumping was one of the elite sports at many New England high schools. But school officials grew wary of the potential for lawsuits if a student were hurt. No matter how many football players broke bones, or basketball players took elbows to the face, ski jumping just looked really dangerous, especially if school administrators did not grow up with the sport.

So one by one, ski jumping all but disappeared from the New England winter landscape. Brattleboro, and Harris Hill, held on long after it probably should have succumbed. There was too much history, too many memories; the sport was in the blood of so many local people, and the competitions continued.

But the physical structure of the jump, as important to the safety of the athletes as a runway is to a pilot, deteriorated beyond what simple goodwill and nostalgia and love could repair. The hill needed real renovation, real funding. So a group of people took charge. That's the way it has always worked in small communities. A few people with a lot of drive gather more people, and then a movement is underway. It's how towns keep moving forward, with or without governments propping things up. They raised nearly $500,000 —think of that! — to make their ski jump one of the best in the country. They even put in nifty stairs for spectators to use, and from what I could tell looking around, they pretty much spruced up everything — press box, landing zone — just as you would any local landmark that helps define who you are as a town. Now once again, Harris Hill is one of the premier venues in the country.

So that's why I came to the hill Sunday. The two-day event was a big deal. The competition had started the day before, and each day some 4,000-plus people walked through a field of Olympic-caliber mud to the jump area. The sky was clear blue; the sun took away winter's chill and bathed everyone in a springlike glow. The athletes came from seven states and two European countries. Among them were some of the best junior jumpers in the world: young athletes, female and male, with so many jumps ahead of them, here and across the ocean. They dream of the Winter Olympics, if not the one a year away, then the next one, or the one after.

I climbed again, remembering again how steep a 90-meter jump can be, and I stopped right alongside the takeoff. And again I saw them speed by, 60 miles an hour of intense focus; then they launched. And the child in everyone who was there wanted to gasp in delight to see these people fly.

The Smells of New England

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

You've probably heard that a week or so ago, one of the big news items coming from New York was that city officials have solved the several-year mystery of why at certain times the scent of maple syrup was wafting downtown. What I don't know is whether they thought it smelled like the fake stuff or like the real New England maple, which to me is one of the sweetest, most marvelous scents I know.

At first some people were alarmed. Buildings were evacuated and inspectors marched in, looking, I presume, for a bearded, flannel-clad Vermonter hiding out in some attic nook with his syrup evaporator and a cord of wood, just boiling away. But last week, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the smell had apparently emanated from a New Jersey factory that was using roasted fenugreek seeds in making an array of fragrances-and that from time to time things would continue to get a bit maply in the Big Apple, but no worries.

All of which got me thinking about the smells of New England I carry with me and what would happen if New Yorkers could get a whiff now and then of those. Because if maple syrup gets them in a tizzy, how about if they woke up to any of these New England scents, which we own as much as we own the mountains and rivers and forests?

Paper mills. More and more the northern New England paper mills have closed or have drastically changed their processing as the major paper companies have taken their work overseas. But the distinctive cabbage odor that came from those great smokestacks and carried on the wind for miles was once the singular smell of those company towns. Residents always said it was "the smell of money." They were right. Most of their jobs have gone, and with them much of that peculiar, precious smell.

County-fair fried dough. Stroll the dirt paths between the stalls of the great New England county fairs and breath deep-once you've embraced fried dough, it stays with you forever.

Freshly split maple trees. Late spring is when many of us have our winter wood delivered, whether we split it ourselves or it arrives already split. The most welcome smell for me is when my axe bites into a chunk of maple. The forest seems to explode all around me.

Italian sausages on Yawkey Way. There are stages to enjoying a Red Sox game. First, of course, is getting a ticket. But once that's in hand, thousands of fans mill about in the blocks surrounding Fenway Park, all sharing in that excitement of a summer night, a game ahead. And it all begins with an Italian sausage smothered in peppers and onions. If you've been there, done that, you know that deep, earthy smell.

Low tide on the Maine coast. The mud flats are rippled; you smell the seaweed, the clams, the mud, the water. Seagulls provide the music.

Bait barrels on a lobstering wharf. The smell a lobster craves, and will go through the gates of hell for — or at least the opening of a lobster trap — to satisfy a primordial hunger. Head Down East, hang out on a wharf where lobster boats are at anchor, and soak it in.

Freshly steamed lobster and butter. That bait results in the smell of a New England summer evening - something that has brought people to the coast for generations. The bib dangling from the neck, the little cups of melted butter, the sharp, startling smell of the meat coming away from the tail, as you hold it poised just an instant before biting.

Potato fields in Aroostook County, Maine. I picked potatoes with a few dozen schoolchildren in Aroostook many years ago. It was for one of my first stories for Yankee, and what I remember so well is the smell of the dirt: thousands of acres of dirt being dug up by all those eager hands, and the potatoes overflowing the baskets. It was simply the smell of land and heritage all wrapped in soil and spud.

Apple orchard. Think late September. A day of sun. Maybe 55 degrees. You're reaching into a tree full of McIntoshes, and you pick the first one you've held this season. Bite. The crunch, the taste, and the smell all meld. Fall.

Balsam fir. Trees and wreaths piled high from the forests of Washington County, Maine. Your house is transformed. For a while you put aside the hustle and bustle of getting ready for Christmas. For now, freshly cut balsam stands in your room, hangs by the door.

Those are my 10, for now. I also wanted to say summer hay, and November woodsmoke, not to mention the fried-clam shacks of the North Shore, sun lotion on the sands of Cape Cod… but I'll hold off, mostly because I want to know which New England scents stay with you the most.

The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:00:00 +0100

The Rise and Fall of Eddie Perez Hartford's Mayor on the Hot Seat

I don't know Eddie Perez, the embattled mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. But when you assign a story, edit the story, work with the photographer, see the story in layout, write a title, then see the story in the June 2006 Yankee (Eddie Perez: Mayor of Hartford), you can't help but feel some sort of affinity. So last week, when the news broke that the state of Connecticut was charging Eddie Perez with bribery, fabricating evidence, and conspiracy to fabricate evidence, well, it shook those of us who worked on the story. In the story he was portrayed by the people of Hartford as a local hero and a role model. The first Latino mayor of Hartford was an inspiration across the region.

Here's part of what we published in 2006:

In trying to create better days ahead for Hartford, Perez draws on his own unlikely journey to City Hall. He sits in the regal mayor's office and speaks of his mother, on welfare with nine children; tenements so desperate that the family moved 21 times in eight years; junkies in the hallways; riots in the streets; friends who died; brothers addicted to drugs and sent to prison; his own involvement with a gang called the Ghetto Brothers.

"I model the behavior I want [kids] to follow," he says. "I'm an example of the reality that it can be done."

Then, in 2001, after just about everyone had given up on Hartford -- one of America's poorest cities in one of America's richest states -- Perez became the first Latino mayor in Hartford history.

He was reelected in 2003, this time to a four-year term, and handed a new city charter that strengthened the mayor's powers. Years of weak-mayor/city manager government had failed miserably. One city manager, in the early 1990s, had commuted from Chicago. Hartford had ceded control of its schools, its economic development, even its downtown parking, to the state. Hartford had been in freefall for decades, symbolized by the night in 1978 when the roof of the Hartford Civic Center collapsed under heavy snow just hours after a college basketball game. The city's lone professional sports franchise, hockey's Whalers, left town. Football's New England Patriots spurned a generous offer to move into a new riverfront stadium. Hartford, the nation's insurance capital, was mockingly called "America's File Cabinet" by a Boston newspaper columnist.

Now, in the early summer of 2006, Perez presides over a city that bills itself, optimistically, as "New England's Rising Star." "I live the American dream every day," he says.

Hartford needed Eddie Perez to be as good as his word. But the state charges that a contractor who had done many jobs for the city also did more than $40,000 worth of work on Perez's house, apparently without charge. At least until investigations began and cancelled checks were produced-all of which led to the charge of fabricating evidence. We don't know how any of this will eventually play out. We do have, for starters, Eddie Perez's apology-which has not calmed the waters in the city.

"First, I wish to apologize to the people of Hartford. My lapse in judgment in using a city contractor to perform work on my house was inexcusable. Though I firmly believe that I have not committed a crime, I have allowed the appearance of impropriety to color how those may view my administration. For this, I am truly sorry and take full responsibility. "As you know, I turned over records and cancelled checks showing the payment for the work performed by the contractor in question, Carlos Costa. Costa is a longtime friend and a capable contractor. In spring of 2005, he began the project to renovate my bathroom and install a new kitchen countertop in my house.

"In June of 2005, my life was turned upside down when my wife, Marie, collapsed at a community function and underwent surgery and treatment for multiple brain aneurysms. It was not clear she was going to live, and I spent the better part of that year working to bring her back to health. During the period of Maria's illness, the work was delayed.

"Mr. Costa completed most of the work in 2006 and he billed me $20,217 in early 2007. I had made inquiries for securing financing during the summer of 2006. After I received the invoice in early 2007, I made an additional inquiry. I obtained financing from the Hartford Federal Credit Union and then paid Mr. Costa in July of 2007. I have previously released those records and paid for all permitting and inspections of the property.

"At various times, Carlos Costa has worked on city construction contracts. In 2003, he won a competitive bid for the Park Street Streetscape improvements and was the low bidder. The bid was awarded by the Department of Public Works, the project is complete, and as of this date, the city has spent less than the original $7.3 million estimate of the cost of the project.

"Even though Mr. Costa was paid for the work he completed at my house, it was a mistake on my part to retain a city contractor to perform work at my house. Further, I should have ensured the proper permits were obtained. The perception in today's environment has the potential to undermine public confidence in government. "That being said, I firmly believe that I did not commit a criminal act. Anyone who has followed my decades of community and public service knows that there has never even been an allegation that I have betrayed the public trust. The voters of Hartford have voted for me twice since these facts have become public, and with humility, I will continue to do the job that they have elected me to do.

"I look forward to a quick trial on these allegations and look forward to a vindication in court."

If only the mayor's words could heal the damage done to his reputation and the faith put in him by so many thousands. And the hope that here was an example of how a local kid could pull himself from the bottom to the top. But the people who know him so well, the reporters at the Hartford Courant who are covering the story, aren't buying what Perez is selling. From reading their coverage, it seems they feel betrayed, too.

As if they didn't know him, either.

Small Towns, Big Stories

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Saturday night I gave a speech to the Hillsborough, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce. It was their annual awards evening, where a business of the year and citizen of the year would be recognized, and generally a time when all the members could gather and sit at long tables in the American Legion Hall, have some drinks and pasta and pork loin and chat about their lives and their town. The night was bitterly cold, but the feeling inside the American Legion Hall was full of warmth and small town spirit. If you ever need an answer to what city people sometimes ask -- "How could you ever live in such a small town?" -- being there would have provided the answer.

Their citizen of the year, a woman who everyone knows as "Jenks," received a standing ovation that only family could give, and it was obvious, in their affection for her and all the things she has done in that town, that she is family to all. She served on so many committees and town projects the person presenting her award ran out of breath and let out a sort of breathless cry, "I'm not done yet!"

The business of the year went to a local insurance agency and again you felt that the owner knew every single person in town, and probably insured everyone. He had everybody laughing when he told about how he was persuaded to pony up $2000 a few years back to sponsor a sign welcoming people to Hillsborough, only to find out a few days later that he couldn't have his company's name on it. It was funny in the telling, sort of a joke's-on-me type of tale. All in all, Jimmy Stewart from It's a Wonderful Life could have popped in and felt right at home.

I called my talk "Voices of New England" and because I was speaking to a chamber of commerce whose members owned the small businesses that keep the economy going for all of us, I chose stories of people I have met over my 30-year career at Yankee who had all come through hard times and persevered.

I told about the Bachelder family in Epsom, New Hampshire. I called the story "Fire on the Farm" -- about how, after a devastating fire, instead of simply shutting down their farm, selling their land and dairy herd, like so many hundreds of small dairy farmers in the past 20 years, they determined to rebuild, with the help of neighbors.

I drove out to the farm for the first time on a lovely Saturday. Keith's mother, Ruth, proved a writer's dream. She is a born storyteller, and it was as if she had waited to simply tell the story -- not of the fire, but of the family, about her roots as a farm girl, about her courtship with her husband, Charles, all those years ago. "He was a farm boy. I was a farm girl," she began. And I was hooked.

In her country kitchen she talked about the joy of working from dawn to dusk, fighting to keep a little farm going. I had not known very much about the plight of the small New England dairy farmer when I entered Ruth's home. Until Ruth and her daughter, Sarah, talked to me, I had never realized how the huge corporate dairy farms in the West make it all but impossible for the traditional New England farmer to compete. There are dairy farms in Idaho, Sarah told me, with thousands of cows. She and her family were milking fewer than 40.

A hard life, Ruth said over and over, but one she would never trade. She talked about standing in the middle of the road on a spring evening and hollering that dinner was ready, watching her two daughters and two sons run from the barn where they'd been playing. And how all her children's friends wanted to come for dinner because of the farm-fresh cooking.

_______________

I talked, too, about Ralph Thomas. We extol our multi-millionaire athletes, and sportswriters casually call them heroic. Consider this: In October 1977, Ralph Thomas, a Penobscot Indian from Gardiner, Maine, set off to run a marathon in Niagara Falls. He worked his shift in a broiler house hauling live chickens from 2 a.m. to 10 a.m. He showered and was on the road by 11. After driving alone to Rochester, New York, for 12 hours, he stopped and napped for about five hours, then set off for the race, arriving at 11 A.M. half an hour before his start. His time was 2:32, placing him 19th out of 2200 runners.

______________

I told the story of Connie Small, one of the last of the wives of a lighthouse keeper. She died a few years back in Kittery, Maine. She told me about the time she blistered the skin off her hands when her husband, Elson, was away and the bell broke down during a storm. "I untied the ropes we used to ring the bell by hand when we saluted the lighthouse tender. I pulled for an hour and a half -- I knew Elson was out there."

She lived on Avery's Rock -- the most desolate lighthouse three miles out in Machias Bay. There was no earth, only a half-acre of boulders and a wooden plank leading from the house to the boat slip. She was 21. There was no phone, no electricity. Rain washed off the roof into cisterns stored beneath the pantry. She saw only Elson, and at night while she knit socks or sewed quilts or bedding or clothes, she'd twist the radio dial hoping to hear another voice, however faint.

Once, winching the boat onto the slip, she caught her arm under the clamper, crushing it beneath the cogs. "I walked the floor all night," she told me. "Next day, Elson got me to shore. I had to take the mail team nine miles to Machias, while Elson returned to the light.

_________________

And I told the good people of Hillsborough the amazing saga of Will Smith. When I met him he was 31-year-old Gulf War veteran. He was a student at Bowdoin College, captain of the basketball team, surrounded by 20-year-olds, and a single dad to his infant daughter, Olivia. Will couldn't afford daycare, so Olivia accompanied him to class and basketball practice. Soon, the physical and financial strain began to take its toll on Will.

Will woke at 4 a.m. to squeeze in studying time. His Navy funds and financial aid didn't cover the cost of living or caring for Olivia's asthma. Will began skipping meals so his daughter could eat. He lost 17 pounds and nearly gave up hope. "My body was wearing down, my mind was wearing down, but Olivia never lost faith in me."

The memory of his own mother, a single parent who had raised 10 children, and his love for Olivia inspired Will to reach out for help. "It wasn't until I was able to accept the help I was given that things turned around." Will and Olivia moved into the dorms, eating in the school's cafeteria. The gym became her playground, his teammates her favorite babysitters.

He told me about the time when his car broke down. "She let me know then that the car, my grades, money didn't matter. She was glad the car was broken because we could walk together. That kept things in perspective. The most important thing in my life is her."

I was at his graduation, when Will became the first single father to graduate from Bowdoin College. And there was one special person on stage with him as he received his diploma, his roommate, Olivia.

___________________

I spoke for half hour or so, talking about these people and many more. Sometimes I need a chance, myself, to remember how good people face hard times, and find ways to come through, stronger than ever. I imagine in that American Legion Hall on Saturday I could have found many stories of strength and character, if only there had been time to listen.

A Complex, Contradictory, Lovely Place

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 05:00:00 +0100

I once read in a guidebook: "Of all the natural regions of the United States, New England is the smallest, the most compact and convenient to get around in, the most homogeneous... " For four decades now, I've lived and worked in New England, the land from which America evolved. There are few nooks and crannies of this six-state region I haven't seen, and I must disagree. New England and its people may be many things -- lovely, cantankerous, industrious, fiercely independent, innovative, complex, contradictory, frugal, eccentric, emotionally reserved, unpretentious -- but certainly not homogeneous.

Yes, it's small. Six states. One, Rhode Island, is the nation's smallest. You can zip in and out in the time it takes the world champion Boston Red Sox to play a game. The others -- Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine -- can tuck inside Oklahoma and still leave room to stretch out. But homogeneous? New England is Harvard University -- the first of 270 colleges and universities located throughout New England -- an intellectual force of nature. New England is also where many public schools struggle to hang on for dear life, and where one state, New Hampshire, ranks dead last in the United States for public aid to education. New England is gleaming Boston; vibrant Providence, Rhode Island, a city reborn with artists and craftspeople; Portland, Maine, whose restaurants rival the best in the country. New England is also Maine's unorganized territories, those wild lands in the north, inhabited by some 8,000 people, comprising nearly half the state's area. New England is Boston's bustling Logan Airport. It's also Greenville, Maine, where the float planes of bush pilots take off from Moosehead Lake to take hunters and fishermen to remote cabins, where the only sounds are wind, coyotes, bobcats, and loons.

New England includes one of America's wealthiest states, Connecticut, and one of its poorest, Maine. New England is Newport, Rhode Island, where magnificent yachts ply gleaming Narragansett Bay, but it's also Newport, New Hampshire, home to maple sugar houses, apple orchards, and once-thriving mills hoping for new uses. New England is miles of warm sand along the shores of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket islands. It's also home to Mount Washington, in the White Mountains, the most lethal mountain in North America for those who fail to respect what a 6,288-foot altitude means in a New Hampshire winter.

I can travel just 20 or so miles from my home in New Hampshire's Monadnock region, where century-old summer mansions sit on green knolls overlooking deep blue lakes, and find the forgotten pockets of poverty where the "woodchucks" live, a cruel yet pervasive name for the rural poor whose protein, the story persists, as often as not comes from varmints and deer harvested out of season. Few frills ever adorn these lives. They'll probably never set foot on Boston's Beacon Hill, never shop on that city's ritzy Newbury Street, never dine on lobster.

New England has three of the whitest states in the country: Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. Yet in Hartford, Connecticut, Spanish is spoken in countless neighborhoods; great clusters of Cambodians make their home in Lowell, Massachusetts; and thousands of Somalian refugees have started new lives in Lewiston, Maine. And that's the point: We live so close together, we can't escape one another's lives. We are all New Englanders.

But there remains, as well, even now in the 21st century, the New England of our sweetest imaginings. It has to do with small towns, ingenuity, self-reliance, rugged individualism. Possibly these are myths in 2009, perpetuated in part by magazines like my own. Possibly we need to believe in them. No place in America possesses such a sense of tradition and continuity — a place with an identity so strong that no matter where I travel in the world, when I say I am a New Englander, people nod and have a sense of where I come from. This New England is at once real and wished for.

My office at Yankee Magazine looks out upon this town's volunteer fire department. If I crane my head just a bit, I see the town hall. Next door is the white-steepled community church. A bulletin board outside the barn-red Yankee building announces community comings and goings, lost pets, weddings, births, deaths. At lunch I walk along dirt roads within sight of Mount Monadnock, the second-most-climbed mountain in the world. I see deer, foxes, hawks. Once I saw a black bear. In summer I swim in any of two dozen lakes and ponds within 10 miles of my house. In September I'll pick apples, the first tart crop of McIntosh, and I'll return for sweeter Red Delicious and Macoun in early October. In winter I'll ice-skate at night on the lighted town pond a few miles west, with a fire glowing along the bank where wool-hatted children huddle close, their breath frosting.

But... New England is also where people tend to conserve their words and feelings as if they could be taxed. This saddens many who come here from "away." Many leave within a few winters, yearn to throw off what feels to them like a claustrophobic soul tightness. Somehow even this reluctance to befriend newcomers goes back to history and memory, to some intuitive sense that living here implies a desire for privacy. My favorite New England story is about two Maine fishermen who have been drifting for days, surviving on the blood of sea birds. Near death they sight a distant ship. One fisherman waves his shirt wildly, screaming, pleading for rescue. His companion says quietly, "Jed, don't do anything to make you beholden to them."

With all of its gifts, despite all of its faults, New England holds America's imagination like no other region. That's because everyone grows up learning that here you find America's hometown, where on April 19, 1775, in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, were fired the first shots of the American Revolution. Visitors come here from across America, looking for that elusive sense of place, of a way to belong to something well-rooted and well-tended. Thomas McIntyre, former senator from New Hampshire, once wrote about "the craving-to recapture personal identity... the feeling that somehow we have lost our way, that to find it again we must retrace our steps."

The defining institution of New England has always been our obsession with being America's old country. With retracing our steps. With that comes the need to hold onto tradition and ritual and memory. More than anything, those are the ways the region is knit, more than by weather, or soil, or shared borders, or politics, or sports. I once spent time on the Tuttle Farm in Dover, New Hampshire, the oldest family farm in America, dating from 1632. Twelve generations of Tuttles have worked the same land, and the patriarch of the family when I saw them was Hugh Tuttle, who died in 2002. "I keep having this feeling when I'm walking across a freshly cultivated field," Hugh Tuttle told me. "I'll suddenly think, 'My God, my ancestors have put a foot right there, where I've put mine. Would they approve of the way I'm treating the land?' "

New England is where people are keepers. We keep family recipes, quilts, tools from grandparents, land. One writer described all this keeping as "our neurotic preoccupation with antiques and graveyards and the doings of the long deceased." New Englanders were savers and re-users long before "recycling" became a word we all used. The remnants they save are partly rooted in a long-nurtured frugality-those bits of cloth, those scraps of metal, do come in handy, maybe, someday. New Englanders are expected to "wear it out, use it up, make do, or do without." How frugal are we? Donald Hall, America's poet laureate, who lives on his ancestral land in New Hampshire, once wrote, "When we tore down the sap house my great-grandfather built, we found that he had propped one four-by-four on a flat piece of stone -- which was his own father's broken headstone. Replacing the frostbitten marker from the old Andover graveyard, he had taken the busted granite home and put it to good use."

There's also a doggedness here, a resiliency. An ethic not to whine, but to get through, to endure. The feeling that earlier New Englanders went through much more. We shouldn't complain. I met a farmer not long ago, a man in his eighties who made his living delivering fresh eggs to more than 100 families using only his horse and buggy. He'd been doing that for 60 years. His house was old and worn, and a great black woodstove and a second wood furnace heated the drafty place. I asked him if he had backup heat, oil perhaps. He looked at me, surprised. "Backup is me putting in more wood," he said.

One winter day I found myself in Caribou, Maine, known throughout the state as perhaps the coldest spot in a state that does not fear cold. A woman told me a story, one that has been passed down through her family, like an heirloom. It happened on a day that ever since has been known as "Cold Friday." The date was February 13, 1861. It was, she said, 36 degrees below zero, with a vicious wind. A mailman named Bubar set out with the mail. He went on snowshoes 12 miles to the town of Presque Isle, got his load of mail, and started home. But the wind got him, and he cut down a cedar tree and kept a fire going all night to stay alive. "The next day," she said proudly, "he brought the mail."

I've known many Bubars. These aren't the sort of people who succumb to the lore of the easy life, the lure of celebrity. Continuity and work, work and continuity. The legacy of the Puritans has never let go. We who live here always hope that the sense of important things, the tenacity, these great gifts of New England, will fix itself to our children's spirits. It is the greatest gift I can leave my own two sons, this complex, contradictory little place. New England. They were born here. They are native sons. That can never be taken away.

Writers of the Future

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:00:00 +0100

For eight years I've taught magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The class is always small, seminar-like, about 12 or 13 students. Over 15 weeks we get to know each other well. They write unflinchingly about their lives in personal essays, they explore the lives of strangers in their profiles, and they must also write a service story -- where they delve into the intricacies of a topic they may never have realized could become a magazine story. The class that just ended a few weeks ago, for example, produced service stories about taking care of your car, how to find the best vintage clothing in Massachusetts, cooking with spices, and a museum in New York dedicated to the lives in turn-of-the-century tenements, to name just a few. We read the stories in class and discuss them, fine-tuning all the while.

I look at these students, all between 20 and 23 years old, and wonder what their futures hold. Newspapers across the country are cutting staff dramatically; magazines, too. In a few months, journalism schools all across the nation will graduate many hundreds of eager, talented reporters and writers, and what happens if there are far too few slots for them? At what point will their eagerness turn to disillusionment? At what point will the skills they've absorbed through college and internships slip away into the fog of memory, as they do this or that to support themselves? Every day I read about one stimulus plan or another; all of these stories talk about staggering amounts of dollars so that two or three million new jobs will be created. I read that roads will be built, bridges fixed, schools expanded. And I wonder how any of this may impact the students whose lives I shared for just a bit these past months.

One young man seems a throwback to the reporters of the 1940s. He lives and breathes newspapers, working at the daily campus paper, taking on assignments for other publications in his spare time, and now and then finds time to fit classes in. At times, I had an issue with his missing class to cover stories -- but I have no doubt that he'll work 16 hours a day if need be for any newspaper that will give him a chance. But what happens if he doesn't get that chance?

I'm biased, I know, toward the importance of vibrant newspapers and magazines. Nobody benefits when cities lose the voices of reporters whose job it is to find out what's really happening beyond the spin. In its own way, the infrastructure of information is being damaged as much as any bridge. We hear that the three million jobs that nearly a trillion dollars will help create will let more of us buy cars and houses, so then there's more work for tire makers and carpenters and carpet makers and so on.

Here's a small, simple request that we all also remember to buy our local newspapers, to keep them alive. For a few hundred years now, the best reporters have helped us all steer clear of propaganda. Their mission is to shine a light on the issues that affect us all. If we don't make a place for the new voices of this generation to hone their skills in balanced and careful reporting, one day we'll all wonder why although we're a nation of spanking-new roads and bridges, when we drive off we don't really know where we're heading.