Home on a Range: Walks Between Massachusetts and Quebec
Every landscape is suited to a particular kind of movement. In the
wintertime, the rolling hills and forests of Scandinavia are meant to be skied
through. In the dense woods of eastern North America, however, snowshoes
never evolved into skis, and I have a pet theory that this anthropological
curiosity has to do with the landscape itself. Travel across the earth's arid expanses—whether
desert, prairie, or tundra—has often been best accomplished with the aid of
animals. The Canadian Shield, with its ubiquitous and elegantly connected
waters, almost cries out for canoes to ply its wild lakes and rivers. A friend
from away came for a hike in the White Mountains a few years ago and as we
walked turned to me and said, "This place was meant for hiking. It's just
perfect." New England is indeed a place that invites simple travel on
foot. If you don't believe me, ask Henry Thoreau, whose ambulatory exploits are
the stuff of literary legend. Here we walk.
Those who know me know that I like to walk across places, to see them thoroughly. But I'm not attracted to the usual way of doing things—settling on an established long-distance trail and following it down. No, I'd rather create my own path, stitching together fragments of actual trails and ad hoc surrogates, whether frozen lakes in winter, abandoned cart tracks, old railroad beds, or even the odd town or state road when necessary. The reason for this is that I am about as interested in culture as I am in nature, and when I'm out walking I want to see a bit of both, preferably where the two merge and mingle. Sticking to recreational trails is, to my mind, often something of an artificial proposition (especially in the crowded east), albeit one that is not without a kind of antidotal value in our equally artificial cultural environment.
I have spent most of the past fifteen years away from home. Last fall I decided to move back, which I had been wanting to do since my early twenties. Home means something different to everyone; it is based on a given—physical place—but from that given it admits of exploration and definition. My home is and will always be northern New England, and now that I am back here I know of no greater joy than getting to know this place better and better until the day I die. Before I do so literally, I want to sink into it and absorb its essences into myself. I hope everyone feels this way about their homes. It is a good feeling.
I have long been a traveler, but a reluctant one. Going to far off places is something I have always done as a matter of course, but wherever I have gone I have invariably fallen prey to a homesickness whose intensity is hard to describe to anyone who has never felt it. It is a deep aching for this place, not just for loved ones or familiar institutions, but for the physical context in which I first began to work out how the world fits together. But the seductive power of travel is undeniably there, torturing my consciousness implacably. Bruce Chatwin would have said it is the nomadic drive, the most natural thing in the word. If it is so, allowances must be made for it.
Turning this contradiction over again and again in my head the past couple of years—the coexistence of an apparent need to move about and one to stay put—I have hit upon the idea of range. Nomads, after all, live on ranges; they do not just roam at random over the land. Animals too live on defined ranges. So perhaps being home does not mean hunkering down single-mindedly on a homestead in the town you grew up in, although certainly that may be an important anchor. Rather home is a range, possibly structured in concentric circles, with the magnetic force of longing strongest at the middle. It is up to us to define and know our home ranges.
In his book Long Distance, Bill McKibben tells the story of an Amazonian tribe whose custom it was to run around their territory once a year. “The run,” he writes, “seemed to delineate in physical space their sense of collective identity.” The core of my range—my home—is New Hampshire (although in a broader sense I envisage it stretching transnationally from the St. Lawrence, where many of my oldest and most emotionally charged memories come from, to the Atlantic), and while I cannot commit to circumambulating the whole state every year (“beating the bounds,” to use a delightful Yankee phrase), walking its length from south to north seemed well within my abilities. So that is what I have done this summer, in sections and as free time from other obligations permitted.
The journal entries here are a record of my travels at home. I hope this makes them a unique kind of travelogue, of a place seen through familiar eyes, but eyes that have seen much of many other places too. At the same time, I hope that it will be of no less interest to friends and strangers who live in entirely different places and know nothing at all about this small but rich corner of the world.
In closing I should say something about the name of the website. North of Boston was Robert Frost’s second book of poems. Frost, to whom Vermont also lays valid claim, was deeply connected to this same range (and in fact spent a part of his young life in my hometown). So I have decided to name the site with his evocative phrase (which New Hampshire poet Donald Hall has also taken up in his writings) that to me seems to highlight our cherished marginality. When I was living elsewhere, I would often think to myself the closing lines of a poem from a later collection of Frost’s, a poem entitled “New Hampshire”:
It's restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.
At present I am living in New Hampshire. And it is the most restful thing I know.
Those who know me know that I like to walk across places, to see them thoroughly. But I'm not attracted to the usual way of doing things—settling on an established long-distance trail and following it down. No, I'd rather create my own path, stitching together fragments of actual trails and ad hoc surrogates, whether frozen lakes in winter, abandoned cart tracks, old railroad beds, or even the odd town or state road when necessary. The reason for this is that I am about as interested in culture as I am in nature, and when I'm out walking I want to see a bit of both, preferably where the two merge and mingle. Sticking to recreational trails is, to my mind, often something of an artificial proposition (especially in the crowded east), albeit one that is not without a kind of antidotal value in our equally artificial cultural environment.
I have spent most of the past fifteen years away from home. Last fall I decided to move back, which I had been wanting to do since my early twenties. Home means something different to everyone; it is based on a given—physical place—but from that given it admits of exploration and definition. My home is and will always be northern New England, and now that I am back here I know of no greater joy than getting to know this place better and better until the day I die. Before I do so literally, I want to sink into it and absorb its essences into myself. I hope everyone feels this way about their homes. It is a good feeling.
I have long been a traveler, but a reluctant one. Going to far off places is something I have always done as a matter of course, but wherever I have gone I have invariably fallen prey to a homesickness whose intensity is hard to describe to anyone who has never felt it. It is a deep aching for this place, not just for loved ones or familiar institutions, but for the physical context in which I first began to work out how the world fits together. But the seductive power of travel is undeniably there, torturing my consciousness implacably. Bruce Chatwin would have said it is the nomadic drive, the most natural thing in the word. If it is so, allowances must be made for it.
Turning this contradiction over again and again in my head the past couple of years—the coexistence of an apparent need to move about and one to stay put—I have hit upon the idea of range. Nomads, after all, live on ranges; they do not just roam at random over the land. Animals too live on defined ranges. So perhaps being home does not mean hunkering down single-mindedly on a homestead in the town you grew up in, although certainly that may be an important anchor. Rather home is a range, possibly structured in concentric circles, with the magnetic force of longing strongest at the middle. It is up to us to define and know our home ranges.
In his book Long Distance, Bill McKibben tells the story of an Amazonian tribe whose custom it was to run around their territory once a year. “The run,” he writes, “seemed to delineate in physical space their sense of collective identity.” The core of my range—my home—is New Hampshire (although in a broader sense I envisage it stretching transnationally from the St. Lawrence, where many of my oldest and most emotionally charged memories come from, to the Atlantic), and while I cannot commit to circumambulating the whole state every year (“beating the bounds,” to use a delightful Yankee phrase), walking its length from south to north seemed well within my abilities. So that is what I have done this summer, in sections and as free time from other obligations permitted.
The journal entries here are a record of my travels at home. I hope this makes them a unique kind of travelogue, of a place seen through familiar eyes, but eyes that have seen much of many other places too. At the same time, I hope that it will be of no less interest to friends and strangers who live in entirely different places and know nothing at all about this small but rich corner of the world.
In closing I should say something about the name of the website. North of Boston was Robert Frost’s second book of poems. Frost, to whom Vermont also lays valid claim, was deeply connected to this same range (and in fact spent a part of his young life in my hometown). So I have decided to name the site with his evocative phrase (which New Hampshire poet Donald Hall has also taken up in his writings) that to me seems to highlight our cherished marginality. When I was living elsewhere, I would often think to myself the closing lines of a poem from a later collection of Frost’s, a poem entitled “New Hampshire”:
It's restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.
At present I am living in New Hampshire. And it is the most restful thing I know.