Blue Highways (52 page)

“Wilderness doesn’t mean untouched.”

“Then it doesn’t mean anything worth anything.”

“If you knew a place that had never been walked over by civilized man, would you stay out of it?”

“I would. Of course I would.”

“You wouldn’t either,” the woman said. “You’d walk every foot of it and brag about your experience and refuse to tell anyone else where it was.”

“That’s it,” he said. “Get your coat.”

O
UR
beginnings do not foreshadow our ends if one judges by the Hudson River. A few miles east of the Bad Luck Ponds, the Hudson came down between the ridges to race alongside route 28; it was a mountain stream: clear, cold, shallow, noisy. A few miles from its source in Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds a mile up on Mount Marcy (the Indian name for the mountain is better: Tahawus, “Cloud-splitter”) and three hundred river miles from the thousand oily piers of Hoboken, Weehawken, and Manhattan, here it was a canoer’s watercourse. Above the little Hudson, spumes of mist rose from the mountains like campfire smoke.

Route 8 dropped out of the Adirondacks to Lake George, the way lined with resort homes and summer camps that advertise in the back pages of the
New York Times Magazine
. At Hague, I turned north and followed the water up a narrow valley to Ticonderoga and cut through town to the shore of Lake Champlain where, under the dark brow of the fort built by the British against French and Indian raids, I waited for the ferry.

A ferry, interrupted off and on only during the Revolutionary War, had crossed the long lake at this narrow point since the 1740s. The boat of 1759, large enough to carry a stagecoach, had a sail, but on windless days, boatmen walked the length of it and pushed with a single, thirty-foot oar. After Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, the crossing became a critical link in holding the northwestern portion of the colonies, even though Redcoats recaptured the fort and ferry two years later before it came again into American hands. When the British finally left after two wars, they returned as tourists. One, James Buckingham, wrote in 1838:

We descended to the ferry across Lake Champlain, where we passed over in one of the rudest boats I had ever seen. It was little more than an oblong trough…. With single sail, the helmsman steering with a long oar, we soon crossed the lake, and landed at the station of Shoreham.

Almost a century and a half later, I made the same crossing with only a few technological changes here and there: the sail and oarsman had given way to a modified, Navy-surplus landing craft attached to a cargo barge. On the other bank, the Old Stone House that Buckingham had passed, built in 1823 of big blocks dragged across the frozen lake from ruined Fort Ticonderoga, still stood, although now an antique shop.

The storm blew on west, and a soft amber light fell over Vermont to give the rise of wet fields deep relief and color. Through the villages of Orwell, Sudbury, and Goshen Corners, past the old groceries with
SALADA TEA
lettered in gold on front windows, and into the Green Mountains (which, some say,
Vermont
means in French despite cynical literalists who insist on “Worm Mountain”).

The White River led through highlands to route 12. Before realizing it, I was nearly across the narrow state. I drove past the Delectable Mountains (from
Pilgrim’s Progress
) to a village surrounded on all sides by still more mountains and opened only by two rocky brooks. It looked like the set for an Andy Hardy movie—things quaint in the manner of Norman Rockwell. A small green encircled by Georgian and Federal houses with white picket fences and hitching posts joined the town center of two- and three-story granite buildings, each with many muntined windows. Around the green, along the pickets, lilacs and apple trees blossomed. Maybe the town wasn’t the prettiest village in America, but if the townspeople wanted to make the claim, I wouldn’t have disputed them. It was Woodstock, Vermont.

The streets spread from the green into wrenching twists that defied even compass reckoning as they played between Mount Tom and Mount Peg and between the Ottauquechee River and Kedron Brook. There wasn’t much level ground in the dell, so the old firehouse hung over the brook, and another building stuck a foundation corner into the water. In spite of its smallness, the town had seven bridges—one of them a fine, covered structure. Most of the big elms were gone, but by intermixing species the town still retained tall maples, which prevented the barrenness of other New England villages that have lost elms.

Although the current population of twelve hundred was the largest ever, the town once had a medical school and five newspapers. In those early days, citizens manufactured combs, haut-boy reeds, Rumsford firedoors, pianofortes, brandy, and pottery. Today, except for a small ski-lift assembly plant, Woodstock was a citizenry of clerks: the shop windows displayed Vermont cheese, maple candy, maple syrup, hand-painted wallpaper, Williamsburg reproductions, Hickey-Freeman suits, period furniture, early ironwork, primitives, pewter ware, Chinese Export porcelain, English antiques, Izod pullovers, new wooden toys, antique dolls, tinware, kitchen collectibles, old prints of grouse, brass candlesticks, and copper pots. There were inns, restaurants, and a dozen real estate offices (outsiders own half of the residential and agricultural land in Vermont). About the mountains were ski slopes and hiking and horse trails, and in the south end of the valley, tennis courts, a skating rink, and a golf course. In other words, the village lived by the tourist—the well-heeled tourist. But few places in the country fused tourism and town life so well. In Woodstock, they were parts of the whole.

Any New England town worth its colonial salt has at least one bell cast in Paul Revere’s foundry; like a DAR certificate, it’s a touchstone of authenticity. Here, they boasted of four.

Yet things were not always so civilized in Woodstock. The first white man to see the site, Ensign Richardson, wrote in 1761 that the dingle was a “spruce hurricane” unfit for habitation other than by Indians. But settlers came anyway and cut out a green for grazing and put up stocks and a whipping post and cleared the lower hills for raising Merino sheep. Now the sheep were gone and the forest had taken back the mountains; gone too was any indication of where on the green lies buried the boiled heart of a child thought to be a vampire.

Ensign Richardson’s view notwithstanding, the town had been blessed with its wooded setting and the resources around it. From Massachusetts and Connecticut, the first settlers brought along an established culture because the remoteness of the village forced them to grow and manufacture most of their necessities; but after the railroad came through, they began losing their self-sufficiency and depended more and more on goods made elsewhere, and the little independent industries disappeared. Then the railroad started carrying in people looking for spruce hurricanes: upland game-bird shooters, deer hunters, trout fishermen, horsemen, skiers (the first ski tow in the country was on old man Gilbert’s farm outside of town), and hikers following the Appalachian Trail, which passes just to the north. And still more: golfers, tennis players, summer camp children, students for the equestrian and photographic “country” schools. And shoppers.

A chamber of commerce flier claimed that the citizens had “zealously guided Woodstock’s development and growth past the hazards of change that overtook much of the country”; perhaps, at least for now, that was true. Indeed, the town was free of golden-arch strip development and shopping centers (one nineteenth-century textile mill had been remodeled into a shopping arcade), and the core of the village remained where it has always been—on the green. At night, when automobiles left the streets, Woodstock had the appearance of another century because, in place of the old businesses that died—the hatter, baker, saddler, tinsmith, fuller, foundryman, wheelwright, miller, wainwright—new businesses had come to use the old buildings in new ways so that Woodstock wasn’t a restoration or even a renovation, but rather a town—like the best English villages—with a continuous and evident past.

The careful Yankees, overseeing both their past and their future, managed to lure a class of vacationers who came to stay for a week or a month, and they came with money, although Woodstock wasn’t noticeably more expensive than a gimcrack tourist dive.

If the village had a fault, it lay in both a hubris about its picturesqueness and in its visitors with new money and new facades. While I walked the streets, I had the sense that the men, still wearing their club ties, had sung in collegiate glee clubs and that the women attended colleges where one’s serviette was kept in a napkin cubby.

I
F
you keep a mental list of things in America that you can kiss goodbye, add the tourist home to it. As an institution it isn’t extinct, but nearly so, thanks to the insistence of the American vacationer for star-burst-in-the-sky motels. You might as well ask him to share his toothbrush as his bathroom. Yet a proper tourist home is a third the expense and twice as clean as any cellblock motel. It can be like staying with Grandmother.

In Woodstock I took lodgings in the Bagley Tourist Home, a tall frame house on a hill with a high view of the Ottauquechee and the Green Mountains. An armoire and spool spindle bed filled most of the wallpapered room; at the window, an apple tree sprinkled petals against the screen. The bathroom, a clean and flowery pink place, was down the hall.

Raymond Bagley was a retired machinist and his wife a former schoolteacher who managed things and sold jams and jellies. For a time, I thought the quaintness might overwhelm me, but, as I sat talking with the Bagleys on the front-porch glider, the feeling passed. Much of what I learned about Woodstock came during two evenings on the porch. He and his wife both grew up in Woodstock; unlike some of the villagers—many from other states—the Bagleys showed no animosity toward “flatlanders” (anyone from outside the Green or White Mountains) who kept the town prosperous.

After sunset I went down to the village for dinner at Bentley’s, a place, the menu said, with “the dignity of old wood and lush tropical plants.” The diners wore heels and Von Furstenberg signature dresses or plaid shirts and L. L. Bean hiking boots. The men had pointy, thrusty names like Dirk and Derek and Pyke. I heard conversations about Grand Marnier crepes and glacé fruit and the problems of paying for a daughter’s ballet lessons. An engaged couple dithered over whether to polish their shoe soles for the wedding—after all, they would kneel in front of the congregation. Because I’d never eaten a shad roe omelet before, I ordered one, figuring I could write it off to experience, but I almost ordered a second.

Around and up and down, I walked through town and watched Kedron Brook have its go at the rocks. The splashing and roe gave me a thirst, so I went to the Woodstock Inn, a big posh place of high-polish maintenance with an eighteen-hole putting green off the garden terrace. Laurance Rockefeller, who married a local woman and still helicoptered in to relax, owned the inn.

Cars parked in front were either elaborate hood-ornament models or Saabs, the Volkswagen of the Ivy League. On a BMW was a bumper sticker:
POLO AT SKIDMORE
. On a Mercedes a vanity license plate:
STYLE
. Throughout I saw a compulsion toward panache, a thing these people needed as the peacock needs its iridescent plumes.

In the piney taproom I sat near a table of two men and their wives who wore the colors for that spring: pink and Kelly green touched up with white. The women were in perfect trim like mortuary lawns, and the husbands wore clothes for the man who knows where he’s going. They drank cranberry liqueur and Harvey’s Bristol Cream with creme. The conversation was about suitable gifts to take the children at home with grandmothers. The decision: volleyballs for the boys, stuffed kangaroos for the girls, brandied apricot cakes for grandmothers.

I wondered what the boys were doing at Sonny’s Place in Dime Box, Texas.

T
HE
dreams were the kind I would have welcomed the police to rouse me from: twisted distortions of fact and desire all turning on the Cherokee offering a new marriage. At last I woke to find myself alone in the wallpapered tourist room. The desolation seemed to have velocity it hit so hard. I poured a whiskey, watched apple petals tap the screen, and waited out the night.

I spent the day on Mount Tom. Had I owned a ghost shirt, I’d have danced madly all over that mountain. Instead, I tried to keep from looking inward, tried to reach outward, but, as Black Elk says, certain things among the shadows of a man’s life do not have to be remembered—they remember themselves.

By evening my judgment had given way, and I called home. I was talking fast, talking, talking, trying to find where we stood, how our chances were. She talked. No matter how we tried, our words—confounded—ran athwart and, as usual, we ended up at cross-purposes. Neither of us knew where to go from there. Nothing to do but hang up. When I put the receiver down and heard the line ding dead, I tried to excuse the failure by thinking that nothing ever works out over a telephone.

The door of the booth stuck, and I went into a rage, slamming the thing, yelling. People looked around. I went off waiting for insight, but all I got was desolation again.

Black Elk on seeing his people on the blue road: “I did not know then how much was ended.”

S
OME
men take their broken marriages to church-basement workshops. I took mine to the highways and attempted to tuck it away for nearly eleven thousand miles. I had poked into things along the byroads, all the while hiding from my own failure. I hadn’t forgotten it—I’d merely held down certain thoughts the way a murderer might hold under a person he’s trying to drown.

Not so much to eat as to occupy myself, I went into a no-name, three-calendar, ten-stool cafe with walls of linoleum. Idling, I asked the cook who lifted hot lids with her apron ends, “What’s the name of your diner?”