Blue Highways: Kennebunkport, Maine

Unfolding the Map

We pull into the Atlantic seaside town of Kennebunkport, Maine with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  I doubt we'll be able to have a beer with Dubya, or hang out with George Senior and Barbara, but we can explore the place with LHM a little while and reflect on going behind the facades of towns and cities.  To see where Kennebunkport's pretty face and place is located, sashay over to the map.

Book Quote

"I did what you do in Kennebunkport: walk the odd angles and sudden turns of alleyways and cul-de-sacs among the bleached shingled buildings, climb the exterior stairs to the old lofts, step around lobster pots and upturned dinghies."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 2

Dock Square in Kennebunkport, Maine. Photo by Eric H. and hosted at VisitingNewEngland.com. Click on photo to go to host page.

Kennebunkport, Maine

I love exploring places.  There's nothing better for me than poking around, putting my nose into things, and trying to discover not only what a place might want you to see, but those other things that don't generally get put front and center.

I once read a phrase about traveling by train that has stayed with me forever.  I read, regarding the difference between car and train travel, that in a car you are often shunted by towns on an interstate.  If you end up going through a downtown you see the best the town has to offer - the storefronts, plazas, parks, and the best houses.  Often either side of the town is framed with the storefront strips which may not be aesthetically pleasing, but which offer you the things you want and need.  In other words, the highways bring out America's Sunday best combined with the practical.

On a train, the article argued, you will enter a town through the back ways..  You often travel through the less desirable parts of town, where there are empty warehouses and where the houses have either lost their luster or are completely dilapidated.  Sometimes this is so apparent that when you get off the train in the downtown you wonder if you are in the same place.  If driving is seeing America's towns and cities at their prettiest and most presentable, the article argued, then often taking the train is like seeing America's towns and cities in their underwear, sitting on the sofa and scratching themselves and wondering where the glory days have gone.

In other words, just like people, American towns and cities put on facades.  Sometimes the facades are physical.  In my hometown, for example, a lot of the historic buildings had or have false storefronts built up high to resemble two-story buildings.  They aren't.  The buildings are really are one story and you see this if you observe any of those buildings from the side and can see the facade.  Sometimes the facades are the public faces that cities and town put on.  For example, a town in Iowa celebrates its Dutch heritage with windmills and tulips, while other towns point your attention to art and culture.  It is similar to a man slapping on aftershave and a tie, or a woman wearing a nice dress and makeup.

Perhaps such finery is nice, but at the risk of seeming like a pervert, I kind of like the underwear.

I like exploring in the places that are, purposely or not, where a lot of people don't go.  Don't get me wrong.  When I visit a town I enjoy walking along the main streets and going in and out of the shops.  I like hanging out nicely dressed once in awhile with others who are dressed to impress, I enjoy looking at what towns and cities want us to see.  At least for a little while.

Then, I go looking for the other stuff.  What is down that back alley?  What might I find on the "wrong side of the tracks?"  Many times, I find nothing.  Many times there is nothing to see.  But sometimes...

Sometimes you find little things.  A small museum that hardly anybody visits.  A little store that has interesting and strange knick-knacks.  A person who is willing to talk about what he or she remembers about the town or city history.  A character that is immensely entertaining.  Perhaps you will be invited into see a house that has an interesting history, or some qirk that you might never see anywhere else.  Sometimes, you might even chance on an element of the seedy, even risky.  I try not to get into places where it is too risky or too seedy, though one can always find oneself in such places if one is not careful.

The characters, the quirks, and the interesting happenings are few and far between.  Many times you find nothing.  But the point is, unless you "walk the odd angles and sudden turns of alleyways and cul-de-sacs among the bleached shingled buildings, climb the exterior stairs to the old lofts", you're never going to have a chance to see such places or meet such people.

Now, there are some people who, inexplicably to me, are not interested in the "out-of-the-way" or "off-the-beaten-path" places.  There are those who prefer the chain restaurants because they know exactly what they will get to eat.  They prefer the malls and the familiar types of shops found in every place across the United States.  The familiar is comforting and takes away uncertainty.

That's not me.  If there's a new food to try in a new place that I've never heard of, I'm there.  I may not like it, but often it's simply the experience that is the reward, not whether I actually like it or not.  If there's a strange shop or museum, I'm there.  This yearning to find the absurd, the interesting, and the strange is what has led me to such amazing little places like the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, little out of the way, unorganized or organized small-town museums with stuffed two-headed calves and every little item donated by town patrons for a hundred or more years.  It led me to the Bone Lady in New Mexico.  All of these experiences enriched me in one way or another.  It led me to love the surprises that our lives and journeys sometimes throw at us if we are willing to go to places that we might never have considered.

When you see a lonely road going somewhere into the hills, do you have an urge to explore it?  Are you always wondering what comes around the next bend?  Are you willing to explore the back alleys of a town or city.  If you see a person who is doing something you don't understand, is your inclination to stop and question them?  If you see a sign for a roadside attraction that seems a little strange, do you pull off to see it?  If so, then you know what I'm writing about.  You understand that sometimes, if you get behind the scenes, venture behind the curtain, there are wonderful things to be seen and experienced.

Which brings me back to Kennebunkport.  You can spend time seeing the shops, hanging out on the beach, or visiting the Bush family compound (if you're a VIP or a friend of one of the George's), and that's all good.  But, as LHM points out in the chapter, give me the small and out-of-the-way eateries on the south side of the river too.  You can visit a locality, but it's often special to find, taste, touch and live what's truly local, ungussied, unvarnished and therefore, utterly real.

Musical Interlude

I didn't read Coraline or see the movie, but this song called Exploration from the movie, sung by a childrens' choir and complete with nonsensical lyrics, seems to encompass the lightheartedness but also anticipation of exploration.  I doubt LHM had this type of tune going through his head when he explored Kennebunkport, but he could have!

If you want to know more about Kennebunkport

Kennebunkport.com
Kennebunkport Chamber of Commerce
Kennebunkport, Maine
Town of Kennebunkport
Wikipedia: Kennebunkport

Next up: Cape Porpoise, Maine

Blue Highways: Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine

Unfolding the Map

We cross into Maine with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) and head toward the farthest easternmost point of our journey.  As we part the fog in Ghost Dancing, I'll reflect on fog and what it has meant to me.  To find yourself in the grayness, trudge through the mist to the map.

Book Quote

"Although I was still miles from the ocean, a heavy sea fog came in to the muffle the obscure woods and lie over the land like a sheet of dirty muslin.  I saw no cars or people, few lights in the houses.  The windshield wipers, brushing at the fog, switched back and forth like cats' tails.  I lost myself to the monotonous rhythm and darkness as past and present fused and dim things came and went in a staccato of moments separated by miles of darkness.  On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers.  Time is not the traveler's fourth dimension - change is.

"The towns - Springvale, Sanford, Kennebunk - watery globs of blue light, washed across the windows in the cold downpour that came on...."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 1

Sanford, Maine town hall and annex. Photo by ShazBat73 and found at archBoston.org. Click on photo to go to host site.Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine

Carl Sandburg wrote in a famous short poem that "fog comes, on little cat feet," or something of the sort.  I am not sure that I ever saw fog as a cat, though it does slip in silently and disappear just as fast.

One of the things I miss most after living in the desert for 8 years is fog, or really, any air moisture at all.  As LHM discovers driving into Maine, fog can be intense and thick.  Growing up along the Pacific Ocean, fog was a regular part of my life.  Sometimes it lay offshore, a silent presence reminding you that your beautiful day could be fleeting.  Sometimes it enveloped the area in a cold blanket of gray, turning everything but the nearest objects into indistinct, ghostly replicas of themselves.

I used to love those times. I can very easily slip into reverie when the fog rolls in, almost as if the mists serve as a melding of time and space and everything, past, present and future, converges in that spot.  Fog can serve as a metaphor for many things.  My wife still remembers and never fails to embarrass me about how I used a fog metaphor to sum up my indecision on our budding relationship.

Within the fog, everything becomes silent.  At one and the same time, sounds nearest you become more distinct, even as sounds farther away become more muffled.  Yet even that does not become a universal law. In the midst of fog, I have heard the offshore buoys cry their mournful moaning sound, like the sound of lost souls at sea, almost as if they were right beside me, even though I might be a mile away from the ocean, and maybe two miles away from them.

The most beautiful thing to experience in fog are the forests, particularly the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest.  Only the part of the forest right around you is apparent. If you look up, often the tops of the trees are shrouded with mist, and only the spatter of large, falling drops of water remind you that there are indeed leaves and tree crowns above condensing water and sending it earthward.

There is something about the fog that seems to calm everything.  The ocean that was raging just the day before now lies gray and placid beneath the feathery light yet implacably dense and heavy blanket of moisture.  There are barely even waves, as the mighty Pacific appears to settle into a period of quiet restfulness.

There is something about fog that alters reality.  It changes our view of time and space.  I'm not sure that I necessarily agree with LHM's assertion that change, rather than time, is the fourth dimension.  I still feel the passage of time in fog, though it seems different, perhaps slower.  I have driven, like LHM, down the fog shrouded coastline, sometimes in fog so thick that on roads that I would usually travel 40-50 miles per hour I have to slow to 20-30 miles per hour because of visibility.  The fog stretches out the length of the drive, leaving me more time to myself, to reflect, to think.  That reflection and thinking, time that I wouldn't necessarily have to engage in such activity otherwise, is a boon, for it's in that extra time that the seeds for change is laid.

It is on a foggy night, when the fog is extra thick, that one really gets a true measure of themselves.  The inky blackness gets inkier.  The lights from houses shine wanly, barely penetrating the blackness.  In driving one's headlights, especially on high, hit the wall of water in the air which might as well be bricks as far as the light is concerned.  It is at these times, especially along the coastlines, that one can feel alone, wrapped in a cocoon of cold dampness.  One might wonder if he or she is part of the world at all, or if somehow in travel one has slipped into an alternate and lonely universe of monocolor - a muted, sepia-toned world of light and dark and all measures of gray in between.

I love when the fog breaks in the daytime.  It is not a glorious infusion of sunlight, splintering the grayness and suddenly bringing color into the world.  Instead, the fog breaks slowly.  One notices, at first, a lightening of the sky above.  A hint of blue appears in what had been grayness overhead.  Around one, flowers, trees and plant hues go from muted or even drab to a hint of the glorious color that they possess.  As the fog gradually lifts, the colors emerge more brightly, until suddenly one realizes that the fog is gone.  It has slipped out like a master thief, having stolen time and reality, color and sound, but in the end leaving just a brief memory of its presence and nothing else to mark its passage save, perhaps, a few rapidly disappearing droplets on the leaves.

You'd think I'd be satisfied living in a place that gets an average of 320 days of sunshine a year.  But you can't take the coast out of the boy that has been raised there, and sometimes, I miss the fog.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't find a song that really captures what fog is to me.  There are pieces of what I want in a few things, so I will put them here.  The first is Fog by Hiroyuki Eto.  I don't know anything about this artist, but the song sort of captures the laziness and calmness which which I associate with fog.

The next is by Mnongo Neb, another artist that I don't know about but whose tune, Road in Fog, captures some of the melancholy that comes with fog.

If you want to know more about Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk

Sanford-Springvale Chamber of Commerce
Town of Kennebunk
Town of Sanford
Wikipedia: Kennebunk
Wikipedia: Sanford
Wikipedia: Springvale

Next up: Kennebunkport, Maine

Blue Highways: Hunter's Maple Farm, New Hampshire

Unfolding the Map

We stop at a maple syrup farm in rural New Hampshire, just outside Melvin Village.  There William Least Heat-Moon LHM learns how a sixth generation farmer can not only keep a tradition going, but do so with the winds of modernization and progress blowing against him.  If you want to get a little sweetness on your tongue, go to the map, but don't dribble that syrupy goodness on it.

Book Quote

"'I could sell of pieces for house lots, and I wouldn't have to work anymore.  But I'd lose more than just our land.  The old families of the township are pretty well gone and dispersed, and the old homesteads keep disappearin'.  Younger people almost have to go away to find proper work.  'Tis a beautiful place, but not a good one for an intelligent young person.  I took the college preparatory course at Tilton School and went to the University of New Hampshire for two years.  But I came back.  Didn't seem like anything special returnin' home then.  Now it looks like somethin' you may not see happen again.'"

Tom Hunter - Maple syrup maker
Blue Highways:  Part 8, Chapter 12

Hunter's Sap House. Photo by "Senter Cove Guy" and posted at Winnipesaukee Forum. Click on photo to go to host page.

Hunter's Maple Farm, New Hampshire

At one time, the land on which I grew up was part of a large homestead or farm.  Our house was supposedly the house where the landowner lived.  It was built sometime in the early 20th century, and was the newer house of the owner as I remember.  Out at the western edge of our four acres - the "back forty" as my dad always called it - I could look across the neighbor's field and see the original homestead and beyond that, a former dance hall turned into a large barn. 

When I grew up, there weren't very many people that lived around us, as the land that was owned were relatively large tracts with one house on them.  But over the years, things changed.  People either subdivided their land to get extra money as real estate prices went up, and new owners built houses on those subdivided plots, or sometimes people built another house on their own property for rental or for another family member.  The net result was more people, and though the neighborhood where I grew up is still quiet, it is less quiet than when I was young.

Even we subdivided our land.  To pay off some debts, my mom sold an acre to our next door neighbors.  They promptly built a large garage on it to house some heavy equipment and a private home mechanic shop.  Every time I look out my mom's front window, I remember that acre and the football games I used to play with my friends in that field, and the flowers that grew out of the two burnt-out stumps and I get a little wisp of nostalgia.

As our country has moved from a rural, agriculture economy to a blue-collar manufacturing economy and now to a white-collar service economy, a few things have happened.  Young people, once shown the excitement of cities and the promise of more money and greater quality of life in cities, began to eschew the family farms for better jobs.  Now, as manufacturing declines, young people continue to concentrate in cities, focusing on hi-tech, business, engineering and other modern pursuits.

In Blue Highways, the quote above comes from a chapter where LHM visits a maple syrup farm in rural New Hampshire.  Given the way the world is moving, it might seem amazing that such a thing can still exist.  In fact, reading through the rest of LHM's profile of the proprietor, Tom Hunter, it becomes clear that the farm cannot exist on maple syrup alone.  The profits pay his taxes, but he and his family have other diversified businesses that bring in income, including a trailer park, an excavating business and a barge transport company.  And yet, he says that there isn't much to keep the young people on the farm or in the family business.  He says this with only a tinge of regret, and a resignation that the world works in a different way now.

In my hometown, the second wave of the movement from manufacturing and blue-collar work to a service economy was felt keenly.  When my father grew up, the place that most enterprising young men went to work was the town lumber mill, one of the biggest on the west coast.  Other people followed their fathers into the fishing industry.  Now, the lumber mill has been closed almost 15 years, the fishing industry has been decimated by regulations designed to protect against overfishing, and my town has made a lurching and sometimes painful transition to a tourist-oriented and service economy.  Young people who want to try to improve their livelihoods and lifestyles usually go away to college and then disperse across California.

I'm not a Luddite, nor am I necessarily a Romantic.  I don't think that humans should necessarily give up progress and keep society in stasis, locked in an arrested state of development so that we remain a snapshot of what has been and will always be.  And yet, I am always filled with some nostalgia when I think of what we leave behind as we rush headlong toward greater progress.  My grandmother, for instance, grew up in an area and time when automobiles were a rarity and a telephone was a luxury.  I know she looked back with some yearning on her childhood.  I know I look back with nostalgia on simpler times that I experienced - times that probably seemed very complex to my grandmother.  I wonder if in 40 years, as I contemplate the end of my time on earth, I will look back with nostalgia on when I only had to worry about my smart phone, my IPad, and the busy life I built with those things.

There are times as I write this when I wish I could go back to Fort Bragg, live in my house or in a cabin on the Noyo River, have a garden and live simply, but not leisurely because it would be hard work.  Maybe I will someday.  As I looked up Hunter's Farm online, I discovered that this maple syrup operation, in business since 1815, is still being farmed by the seventh generation of Hunters.  We CAN stay rooted, we don't all have to leave and, if I interpret what I read correctly, we can go back from whence we came or something like it if we want.

Musical Interlude

John Mellencamp wrote a song in the 80s, at a time when the family farm was under attack, caught between the efficiencies of corporate farming and government policies.  Here, in Rain on the Scarecrow, he sings about the disappearing family farms.

And here's a simple little song, Sugar Time, by someone named William Weaver with photos of a maple syrup operation.

If you want to know more about Hunter's Maple Farm

Well, there's not really much.  But take a look at this thread describing a visit to Hunter's, and this listing of maple syrup producers in New Hampshire if you want to visit Hunter's or someplace like it.

Next up: Springvale, Sanford and Kennebunk, Maine

Blue Highways: Melvin Village, New Hampshire

Unfolding the Map

The Blue Highways quote below, about an elderly resident of Melvin Village who helps William Least Heat-Moon see, through her long years of perspective, that change is constant and a recurring, cyclical happening, leads me to reflect on the influence of the elderly residents of my hometown on the fabric of its social structure.  To age gracefully in Melvin Village, pass some of your precious time at the map.

Book Quote

"Marion 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.'....

"....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...'"

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 11

Melvin Village, New Hampshire from Lake Winnipesaukee. Photo at the Melvin Village Soy Candles website. Click on photo to go to host site.

Melvin Village, New Hampshire

When I map a book like On the Road or Blue Highways, both geographically or cognitively, I never quite know where the cognitive topography will take me.  In this post, I am going to a place that surprises me.

It shouldn't be so surprising.  After all, LHM meets a woman who, partly because of her advanced years, has become the self-described "big cheese" of Melvin Village, New Hampshire.  To me, age really defines those who actually are the big cheeses from those are "wannabee" big cheeses or who think they are big cheeses.

With that awkward beginning, I now get to my point.  I grew up in a small town, and there one always can find those people who, because of their age, have reached a lofty status among the rest of the people in the town.  These people are the town elders, whose major accomplishments have been to live and experience and to reach a point where they can pass their experience, history, memories and wisdom to the generations behind them.  Every culture that I can think of puts older people into a class reserved entirely for them.  Somewhat removed but always sought out in case of crisis.  A recent viewing of The Seven Samurai by the great director Akira Kurosawa reminded me of this common instinct in our cultures.  In the movie villagers, tired of repeated attacks by bandits, consult the oldest man in the village to ask him what they should do.  His advice, hire seven samurai to defend the village from the next expected attack, is heeded and with the aid of the samurai, the villagers repel the attackers.

Gertrude White never had to give such advice to my hometown residents, though I had no doubt that she would have if needed.  Actually, I have no doubt that she would have led the defense if the village was attacked.  From the day I first remember her, when I was perhaps three or four, to the day that she died, she always seemed old to me.  She owned a stretch of land along Airport Road, an unknown number (to me) of acres that once served as the town airport for which the street was named.  I think I was only in her house once, however we always had some kind of contact with her.  She ran a horse riding club.  My grandmother, who was a good friend but who I believe also looked up to Mrs. White as a mentor often rode horses with her in the local Paul Bunyan Days parades.  My grandmother was perhaps 10-15 years younger than Mrs. White, but I think their shared history of growing up and living in the area brought them together and, as their ages became greater the difference between them grew less and less.

As the matriarch of the horse club, Mrs. White touched the lives of a lot of young children, mostly girls.  Our summer weekends often revolved around her horse shows, in which manes and tails tore around barrels or ripped around the track at breakneck speed with very fragile little girls clinging to them.  But I remember that Mrs. White was also heavily involved in town business and affairs, and can think of a couple of times when I heard of residents of my parents generation approaching her for advice or to learn some history about how the town handled certain situations in the past.  As she got older, her mystique, augmented by her large house, seemed to grow.  When she died, somewhere approaching 100 years old, it was like the passing of an era that we could never get back.

My grandmother, Mary Cox, was very similar.  She was something of what I considered the last of the pioneers of Northern California.  She grew up in the woods where her father and grandfather ran a small lumber mill.  She married a fisherman who turned lumberman in the depression, and then reverted back to fisherman.  She raised four children (one of which was my mother) in logging camps in the woods during the heart of the Great Depression.  After her husband died of cancer when she was in her fifties, she used it as an opportunity to get the education she always wanted but never had, and got her nursing degree.  She worked until she was into her seventies and forced into retirement because of a back and knee injury sustained while trying to hold up an unsteady and heavy patient.

My grandmother was the focal point of our family.  Our lives, especially as she got older, revolved around her.  My sisters and cousins spent afternoons after school and entire summer days over at her house riding her horses.  Family members went to her for advice, and often received blunt words from a woman who had seen almost everything in her life and knew that the solution to life's problems began with the person who was having them.  Sometimes family members, as she got older, tried to keep news from her of certain family members' bad behavior, or problems that arose within the family.  It didn't matter - she always seemed to know anyhow.  I often went to talk to her to hear first-person accounts stories of growing up and living in places and times that otherwise I would only be able to read about.  My grandmother was also, for a time, the only one of our family that had traveled to Europe, and her accounts of visiting her relatives in Austria fascinated me and fueled my own desire to travel to other places.

When my grandmother died in her mid-nineties in 2001, her passing was like the breaking of the cement that held disparate elements of the extended family together.  Her children, my mom and her remaining siblings, still come together for the holidays but the spark that fed them, my grandmother, is missed.

If you view a small town as an extended family, the influence, wisdom, history and common-sense that our elders provide is incalcuable.  It is no accident that it seems that in smaller locales that elders are held in the most esteem, and valued more.  In large cities, it is easy enough to become lost in the teeming masses, and I think that older people are often forgotten in those places where the business of life often takes precedence over the relations and the connections that we need.  Our policies, which make it harder for our older members of society to live and get by, also do not help.

I have learned, however, that there is no substitute for an older, wiser presence in our lives.  We may not agree with everything our elders say and they can be as wrong as anyone else.  I would argue that isn't the point.  When they speak with us, we are almost compelled to listen, and it is in our listening that we give ourselves the space to come to our own wisdom and solutions.  I wish I could thank my grandmother for those times that she made me stop, think, and take stock, whether or not her views were useful to me or not.  Just her presence was sometimes enough.

Musical Interlude

The Who's My Generation was originally about the younger generation telling the older generation where it could go and what it could do to itself.  It's pretty amazing that this group of older people, The Zimmers, have turned that song on its head.  Now they're doing the singing, and telling the rest of us where to go.  Good for them!

I also had to include Neil Young's Old Man, that melancholy air that shows that young people and old people often have the same needs.

If you want to know more about Melvin Village

Sorry, there's not too much on Melvin Village.

Wikipedia: Melvin Village

Next up:  Hunter's Maple Farm, New Hampshire

Blue Highways: Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire

Unfolding the Map

We get to a rural area of Lake Winnipesaukee with William Leat Heat-Moon (LHM) where he remarks on the pickups he sees.  I grew up with pickups and have lots of memories about them and the DIY culture in small towns that makes them necessary.  If you want to know where Lake Winnipesaukee is located, do some DIY at the map.

Book Quote

"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."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 10

Sunset over Lake Winnipesaukee, by Valerie Laroque. Photo hosted at Travelpod. Click on photo to go to host page.

Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire

The words that catch my eye in the quote above are "worn pickups, each hauling at least one rusty something."

If you have read a few of my posts as we journey with LHM together in Blue Highways, you know that I grew up in a small town in Northern California.  One of the facets of living in a small town is that the number of services and amenities available to people is limited.  Sure, you can probably find every service that is needed, or every item that you want, but there are still restricted choices.  What if, for some reason, you don't trust or like the service?  What if the model and make is no longer available?

By necessity, people who live in small towns are usually DIYers in some way, shape or form.  They do their own landscaping, their own gardening, their own building.  If repairs need to be made on automobiles, many of them do it themselves unless the job is so complicated that it needs to go to a shop.

And because hauling needs to be done, people in small towns own pickups.  A typical two-car family will often have a sedan of some type, and a pickup.  I grew up with a succession of pickups that my father owned.  The first I remember was his International Harvester and his last truck before he died was a Ford F150, I think, but I'm not quite sure.

Not only that, but in my town every truck had some things that were standard accoutrements.  Each truck had a gun rack, because almost everyone went hunting at some point or another during the year.  Each truck also usually came equipped with a chain saw, because almost every home was heated by a fireplace or stove.  In the forests around where I lived, downed trees were often available to be cut up for firewood with the appropriate permits.  A chain saw could also be used to clear a downed tree on the road.  Often an industrious group of drivers could clear a road before the official highway maintenance people got there.  Every truck also had something called a "come-along," which was a type of pulley that one used if one got stuck in the mud or in a river somewhere, one could wrap a chain around a tree, attach it to the come-along, and pull themselves out of their predicament.

In a town full of full to partial DIYers, it often meant that one didn't necessarily need to go to the stores to buy things.  Chances are that someone had a needed item if you looked around carefully enough.  My father had a barn, where he kept a lot of stuff.  A wide range of tools, some useful, some not, for various purposes.  Lumber, for that room he was going to redo.  Nuts, bolts, nails and screws that he had saved from various other projects that might come in handy.  Old appliances that just might be able to be fixed some day.  The barn was probably a chemical nightmare, as he kept old cans of paint well past the time that they were useful.  Seeds for gardening that he had saved over the years.  Various bits of metal.  My father was only a partial DIYer, and didn't have a lot of skills in fix-it or repair or metalworking, but yet he kept these things just in case they were needed.

My next door neighbor, Mr. Cleary, was more skilled in a lot of things, and his barn showed it.  He was skilled in auto mechanics, and had all but the most heavy equipment needed to repair his family's cars.  If he ever needed to put the car up in the air, he knew a few people who had the lifts to allow him to do that.

And, like LHM describes about Lake Winnipesaukee, I too often saw people hauling things around in their trucks - old rusty things that didn't seem like they would have a purpose, but they did.  If it was an old metal frame of something, barely recognizable as former office shelving, for instance, it could be put to use for something.  Perhaps it could be reconfigured into a rack to hold stuff in the barn, or a planter for out in the garden.  Old appliances could be scavenged for parts that might fit into newer appliances that with a twist here and a poke there could be made to run for another few years.  Old cars, sitting in yards, could either be repaired with scavenged parts from other vehicles or serve as parts supplies themselves, donating their innards like people donate kidneys, so that other cars might live longer.  If anything was thrown away, it was because it either had no conceived further use or because it had been scavenged for everything that it was worth.

One of the most popular radio shows on our local radio station was the Swap Shop.  People called in to Ellie, the host, and said what they were looking for.  Others would call in and announce what they had.  Sometimes they were selling, sometimes they were willing to trade.  But it was another indication that the store was often the last step in the chain to finding something one needed.

I make it sound like our town, and perhaps other rural areas around the country, were filled with hoarders.  Unlike hoarders, who collect for no discernible purpose other than their obsession, there was a purpose in the collection of things.  They served purposes and, since my parents' generation grew up in the Great Depression, there was perhaps a drive to wring all possible usefulness out of every item they purchased and, if someone else could use what they couldn't, to make sure that it was available to them when needed.  It stands in stark contrast to today, where we are used to things working until they die, and then they are thrown away and another cheap model is bought.  Every town used to have a few shops where appliances were fixed, even small appliances like toasters.  Now, a toaster dies and we just run to Wal Mart and pick up another.

In a month or so, I will go back to my hometown to visit my mom.  I'll hear and see her neighbor, with his garage and shed, working on some piece of equipment that needs repair.  I'll see the pickup trucks with their chain saws and their gun racks and come-alongs, many perhaps more modern looking but with the same accessories as yesteryear.  And, I'll take another stroll through my dad's barn, where many of the things that he left still sit, waiting for their new purpose to be discovered.

Musical Interlude

In the spirit of what they are now calling the DIY generation, Debbie Harry teamed up with punk rockers Rachelle Garniez and Palmyra Delran on a song called Do It Yourself.  The song aims to encourage kids to learn about doing things on their own.  The song can be found on the album KinderAngst.

And of course, it wouldn't be complete without a song about pickup trucks.  Would you believe that most of the songs about pickup trucks are in the country music genre?  Here is legendary Texas artist Jerry Jeff Walker singing his poignant Pickup Truck Song.

If you want to know more about Lake Winnipesaukee

Lake Winnipesaukee.net
Lake Winnipesaukee Museum
Lake Winnipesaukee Travel Guide
New Hampshire Lakes Region Tourism Association: Lake Winnipesaukee
Wikipedia: Lake Winnipesaukee
Winnipesaukee.com

Next up:  Melvin Village, New Hampshire