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A Complex, Contradictory, Lovely Place

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(page 2 of 3)

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."