Blue Highways (53 page)

“The Wasp,” she said in a Green Mountain voice.

“You mean like white-Anglo—”

“I mean like the high school mascot. First owner was a teacher.”

“It’s a nice, simple place.”

“We try. Woodstock’s gettin’ a little too high pollutin’ for me.” She meant “highfalutin.”

Two men, one carrying a small Crescent wrench on a key ring, were talking about a new son. I wasn’t paying attention until the father said, “That’s what saved the marriage.” My head snapped up as if someone shouted my name.

“Babies don’t save marriages,” the friend said.

“This one did. I got down on myself when we found out Claudia couldn’t get pregnant because of me. She was sorry, but she coulda lived with it. Not me. That’s when I started running around proving.”

“So how’d she get knocked up?”

“I changed my drawers.”

The friend laughed. “Then you ate a gallon of oysters.”

“Doctor found out I was low on sperms. Said my drawers was too tight—too much heat. Tight pants don’t allow the animal heat to escape, and the high temperature kills off sperms. When I started wearing my old Army drawers again, Claud was pregnant inside three months.”

I finished breakfast and drove up highway 4 in full envy of a man who could correct his marital problems by changing his shorts. The road crossed Quechee Gorge, an unexpected hundred-sixty-five-foot-deep sluice cut through stony flanks of the mountain; a couple clutched the bridge railing as they uneasily peered down into the gloom. Then over the Connecticut River and into Hanover, New Hampshire. The morning was hot—the hottest yet—and I had no mind for the road.

I killed off most of the day by wandering around the Dartmouth campus. The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock founded the college with his own library and a log hut in the woods and a goal of providing “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land in reading, writing, and all parts of Learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing and christianizing Children of Pagans.” The Dartmouth motto reflects its origin:
Vox clamantis in deserto
. But now the voice crying in the (semi) wilderness was that of the tribal Americans who comprised one percent of the enrollment and who were decrying the unofficial nickname of the athletic teams—the Indians—as well as the “Scalp ’em” cheers, the faculty dining room murals depicting Indians in various states of carousal, and a popular rally song:

Oh, Eleazar wheelock was a very pious man;

He went into the wilderness to teach the Indian,

With a Gradus ad Parnassum, a Bible, and a drum,

And five hundred gallons of New England rum.

As best I could tell, the students, faculty, and administration would gladly put the Indian rah-rah to rest by using the other nickname, “The Green.” But alums—there was the problem. They might tolerate women graduates, but to give up their official Wah-hoo-wah!, that was too much. And so the murals got carefully boarded over but not taken down.

In the afternoon, I went on again. Near West Canaan, I stopped at Al’s Steamed Dogs & Filling Station. A hand-painted sign:
EAT HERE AND GET GAS
. Al’s was closed. The sky darkened, a shower doused the road and cooled things in the White Mountains. The villages seemed to seep down the slopes to settle in the valleys along streams where people of another time built multiwindowed stone and brick factories and mills. Most of the old buildings and mill dams had been done in by cheap electric power and centralized industry. But there was talk of again tapping the unused energy in the New England streams with small, computer-designed turbines.

I took route 104 up to the motel congestion of the west side of Lake Winnipesaukee—the lake with a hundred thirty different spellings and almost as many translations from the Indian (the best is “the smile of the Great Spirit”)—and then around to the north shore into quieter country. On this corner of the lake, instead of stationwagons with wet swimtrunks tied to antennas and door handles, there were worn pickups, each hauling at least one rusty something.

It was sundown when I reached Melvin Village, a tiny place between the Ossipee Mountains and the northeast shore of the big lake. Among the old, white clapboard and black-shuttered houses lay an almost absolute calm. The only noise came from the diminutive Melvin River—in truth, a brook—sliding over a dam of commensurate size. Behind the dam, the water darkly translucent and nearly encircled by maples and the steep slopes of the Ossipees, a pair of bufflehead ducks paddled silently, then beat a long ascent into the twilight.

The town, pure New England, was so plain it was almost stark. I drove up and back the main street, New Hampshire 109, and looked for a place to pull in for the night. At the edge of town, I stopped at the Snack Bar, a wooden building with a porch screened against mosquitoes. It was late May, but the evening pressed close like midsummer.

I ate a grinder—elsewhere called a hero, hoagie, poorboy, submarine, sub, torpedo, Italian—and drank a chocolate frappe—elsewhere called a milkshake or malted velvet or cabinet. Although the true milkshake doesn’t exist east of the Appalachians, the grinder was the best thing to happen to me in a day: thinly sliced beef and ham, slivered tomatoes, chopped lettuce, and minced hot peppers, all dressed down with vinegar and oil. I went back to the window to order another.

“You like my sandwich?” the proprietor said.

“Decidedly delicious.”

The owner, Bert LaFrance, once lost a talent contest to Danny Kaye and used to sing and dance with his brother in traveling tent shows playing the New England mill towns and later the gold-mine section of Ontario where streets were mud and everything was wide open. “Twenty bucks a week,” he said. “So who cared about money? We did. But work meant more. I was a poor man’s Desi Arnaz: sang and danced to ‘Night and Day,’ ‘That Old Black Magic.’ All played on the conga drums. We performed with Benny Goodman, Sarah Vaughn, the Three Sons. Later when I was working with a couple of girls, we had a twelve-minute routine with six costume changes. But by then tent shows were dying out. They held their own against movies, but not television. It was good while it lasted, even during the war. I was a Marine and got assigned to a show-biz unit that performed to sell war bonds. I thought I had it made. Then one day an officer comes up and tells us we’re going overseas. I asked where. ‘Don’t ask,’ he says. In four weeks, we went from the boards to Guadalcanal.” LaFrance shook his head. “Life! But what the hell, Melvin Village is a place called lovely.”

“Who’s Melvin?”

“Melvin? Oh, you mean Melvin like in Village. Don’t know. Ask Len.”

“Who’s Len?”

Len was standing behind me. He and his wife had moved from Boston to take over the Hansel and Gretel Gift Shop. “Don’t know either, I’m afraid,” he said, “but I know who does. If you’re staying, I’ll introduce you tomorrow. She is—if anyone is—Melvin Village. A real live Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“Born on the Fourth of July?”

“She goes back farther than that.”

M
ARION
Horner Robie had not been Melvin Village for all her eighty years; the first seven decades she was just another citizen of fewer than five hundred, although when she ran the post office, grocery and dry goods store, telephone switchboard, and the fire dispatch all at the same time, she was (admittedly) “the big cheese.”

Her white clapboard house, a long two-story building with a wooden sidewalk porch and boxes of red geraniums, thrust its north foundation into the Melvin River just downstream from the dam. The west half of the place was now a fabric and yarn shop; on the other side Mrs. Robie lived.

She sat on her sofa, the one bedecked with history books and a pair of stuffed animals, in the old room with pressed-tin ceiling, tall windows, fireplace, china cabinet, and the slow tock of a pendulum. Her longtime friend, Mrs. Ramsbotham, pottered about in the kitchen as she rattled up beef stew.

In broad New England vowels, Mrs. Robie said: “I never planned on becoming the big cheese, you see. It fell about that way as chance does. In fact, when I was a young woman I left the village for the more exciting life at the YWCA in Boston. More exciting compared to farming our hills. I attended Bryant and Stratton Business School in Boston for two winters, nineteen eighteen through nineteen twenty. Then I worked in the city as a bookkeeper for the Chester I. Campbell Company. We put on industrial exhibitions. After my Boston time, I ended up back here, not because of excitement in Melvin Village, but because of other things, like a sense of belonging—to the land and to history. I tried teaching school a year, but never was I cut out to be a teacher, so I became a shopkeeper with my father. And postmaster later. If you can believe it, we had three general stores in town then, and the post office got passed back and forth across the street depending on whether the President was a Democrat or Republican. Mr. Roosevelt appointed me in nineteen thirty-nine even though I wasn’t of his persuasion. The post office was an honor, and good for business, but our excitement was the switchboard. My father founded the Tuftonboro Telephone Company in this very building, and later, we became the first company in Continental Telephone, third largest in the country today.”

“What was the excitement?”

“Fires. When one broke out, I’d crank the magneto with my right hand and pull all the keys down with the left and set every phone in town to ringing—three long, three short. Whoever could, went off to fight the fire.”

“You’ve spent most of your life right here in this house?”

“I and Continental Telephone, born in this very house. Hope to die here. And why not? First and last memories in the same place. My parents kept me as a baby in a box under the counter, down with the Uneeda biscuits.”

“It’s a fine old place.”

“The oldest part dates from eighteen sixteen. In those days, they rolled casks of rum into our cellar. Nearest rum now is Wolfeboro, and that’s just as well. Our store, from the earliest days, was the gathering place for hunting yarns and entertainment. Always a checkerboard glued to a table. When a wagon arrived with new barrels of flour, the men amused themselves by seeing who could lift the heaviest barrel. Would that amuse you?”

“Where’s the ladle, dear?” Mrs. Ramsbotham called in. “Oh! Never mind. It’s in my hand.”

“I’ll tell you something about Melvin Village in the days of flour barrels—say eighteen fifty,” Mrs. Robie said. “It wasn’t as pretty as it is now. Not so quaint, I’d say. Yes, we had the pond up where the gristmill was—a lovely place to ice skate, but a freshet came off the mountain about nineteen fifteen and washed it away. We have the salmon dam and pond there now. Other than that, not such a pretty town then. Paving the road got rid of the dust and mud. And a curious thing helped. The men who worked up at the new Bald Peak estate—quite a luxurious place—those men saw what a little carpentry and planting, a little paint and cleaning could do. Things began to look better down here, too, after a while. But most of all, educating the children improved our village.”

“Don’t forget the new families,” Mrs. Ramsbotham called between vigorous stirrings.

“It’s better when people choose to live in a place rather than having to live somewhere out of necessity. Newcomers have built nice homes and maintained old ones. Brought in pride of ownership. They’ve seen the special quality about our village is that things abide a little longer here.”

“Someone told me you’re the voice of the past in the town.”

“Live long enough and you turn into history regardless of what you know. But what I haven’t seen, I’ve studied. Take our lake. Two-thirds of its history I’ve read, the other third I’ve lived. Used to be big log rafts moving down the lake to the sawmills. And fine lake steamers like the
Cork Leg
. When I went off to Boston, I took the
Governor Endicott
down to The Weirs. Good steamer service then up and down the lake and even to some of the islands. More than three hundred islands out there—one for every day of the year we say.” She laughed. “Now you’ve got this old lady remembering. The overland stage used to come through. Boats and coaches were important to us because we’ve never been on any main route. People tried to change that, but nothing came of it. Now, I can see that our—our apartness, let’s call it—our apartness has preserved us.”

“Tell him about the crowds when the salmon start migrating,” Mrs. Ramsbotham said over a clatter of utensils.

“Salmon Stripping Sunday every November. Puts us on the map. You see, Winnipesaukee has more volume than surface—deeper than it is wide and long. Three hundred feet deep. Clear water with enough dissolved oxygen to support a landlocked species of salmon. When the water begins to cool, they go upstream, but they don’t die after spawning like ocean salmon. The conservation commission comes out to trap salmon in pens below the dam and strip eggs for hatcheries. Gets busy here then, and we have some affairs down at the schoolhouse that turn into hog wrassles. But, once a year, we can survive it.”

“This corner of Winnipesaukee’s much quieter than the south and west sides.”

“We have summer people, but we don’t get tramps for the simple reason you have to entertain yourself here. On the other side, you can get entertained. We cultivate the idea that we’re a reserved village.”

“Summer visitors must be something new. The town looks so unchanged.”

“Heavens no. Since the eighteen eighties. Families would come up by train and steamer from Boston to get out of the heat. The fathers just for weekends, but the rest of a family for the whole summer. John Greenleaf Whittier summered here in those days. Visitors have been important to the village ever since the Civil War. You see, our soldiers found out there was land in the West that contained more soil than rock, and our population fell. We’ve grown only a smidgen since. Still don’t have home postal delivery.”

Mrs. Ramsbotham called from the kitchen, “The saltshaker has walked off again, but I’ll soon find it.”

“We’re a peaceful place now, but this land has been troubled,” Mrs. Robie said. “The French once paid Indians to kill British and American settlers who came in here. That’s part of the reason we’re a newer town than some in Kentucky or Tennessee. People were slow to arrive.”