Blue Highways: Boston, Massachusetts

Unfolding the Map

I didn't feel particularly inspired by today's quote, and it probably shows in the post.  I apologize, all of you visiting Littourati.  But, don't take that to mean that the quote, and maybe the post, might not bring something to mind for you.  If something comes, feel free to share in a comment.  Oh, and if you want to see exactly how far we've come in this Blue Highways journey, check out the map.

Book Quote

"Tractor-trailer rigs (using two-thirds more fuel per cargo-ton than a locomotive) blasted me all the way to Boston."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 4

Downtown Boston. Photo by "Nelson48" and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Boston, Massachusetts

What kid doesn't like trucks?  I don't mean the little pickup trucks, but the huge semi-tractor trailer trucks that barrel down roads and freeways.  Well, I was one kid that tended more toward the trains than the trucks.

I think it had to do with growing up in a little logging town where the only links to the outside world were over miles of twisting, curving mountain roads.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I suffered motion-sickness a lot going over these roads, and trucks were kind of an enemy.  A car could travel faster over these roads.  Trucks would slow precipitously going uphill, thus prolonging my agony when we'd get behind them.  I could only hope that they would be kind enough to use one of the "turnouts" along the side of the road to let us pass.  Some did, some didn't.  Either way, logging trucks, lumber trucks and other types of cargo trucks sometimes literally made me sick.

As I got older, I became more aware that trucks were replacing trains as the primary mover of freight.  I had noticed that our freight train, which used to go out once per night moving lumber over to the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, started making less frequent runs.  Once a night became 4 times a week, became 2-3 times per week, and then became one time per week, until it ceased operation completely.  We owned property on the railroad where we had a cabin, and where in the summer we slept outside not 50 feet from the railroad tracks.  I have some vivid memories of waking up at night to the sound of the freight train, it's light appearing around the bend and seemingly illuminating the entire valley, then after the cacophonous sound of the engine the clacking and whistling of the empty freight cars, and then lonely clack of the caboose and the voices of the watchmen as the little red caboose light disappeared slowly from sight and I was able to fall asleep to the sound of the receding train.

In high school, I worked in the lumber mill, and loaded both trucks and train cars though my primary job was to load trucks.  I worked on a team consisting of a tallyman, a forklift operator and me (the dog).  I would climb on the trucks, guide the lumber bundles into position, and then use a machine to band them together before binding them with straps to the truck itself.  It was good work in the coastal air, but I missed the trains.

I understand why trucks are used - moving freight by truck is cheaper, right now, than by train.  But they also cause a lot of wear and tear on the roads and can be threats in themselves.  I have been stranded twice indirectly because of trucks after I ran over a piece of shredded tire on the road which caused damage to my car.  I hear that as fuel prices rise, it may become more cost effective to ship more and more things by train again.  I hope so.

I am not going to write much this post about Boston.  LHM doesn't really stop there because, in Blue Highways, he does his best to avoid the cities.  And to tell you the truth, it is so long since I have been to Boston that I don't remember much about it.  The trips were always short, a weekend at the most, usually a day trip, so I really didn't get much of a chance to get a true feeling for the city.  I remember being in the area of Faneuil Hall and the market near there, I remember driving up from Connecticut after a wedding to get lobster at one of the lobster restaurants, and I remember the accents.

In fact, it's the accents that to me are the most intriguing thing about Boston.  It's rare in the United States to hear accents that are just so front and center as the accents in Boston.  Even Brooklyn accents, which can be pretty heavy, don't stand out so much to me as Boston accents do.  It's like the accent has a mind of its own and flattens vowels, eliminates the letter "r" in some words and stubbornly inserts it in others, despite the speakers intentions.  I have learned that accents that seem to hate the "r" so much are called "non-rhotic."  Wikipedia quotes Jon Stewart's America, incorrectly I might add, which states that John Adams drafted the Massachusetts Constitution but delegates refused to ratify the letter "R."

I love it.  I love accents, and I'm glad they occur because they give character to a region and by extension, our whole country.  I'm never happier than when I'm talking to someone with an accent.  I was recently watching a documentary that had an acclaimed scientist who wrote a book, and it was hard for me to concentrate because her Boston accent was just so pronounced that it hooked me.  Here is a National Public Radio piece on the Boston accent:

I also feel bad about spending time writing on Boston because, well, I've fessed up to it before, I don't know much about America's Revolution, and Boston played a big part in that struggle.  The Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre and Paul Revere, of course, were covered a little in my history classes in school.  But beyond these things, I didn't know much about Boston's history in the war.  For example, the Siege of Boston, a successful siege by George Washington that eventually drove the British out of the city after eleven months in the early part of the war, was something that I either never paid much attention to or I just didn't hear about it.

On one of my trips, however, I paid homage at what many Bostonians consider, with pride, their greatest shrine.  Yes, that would be Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox and one of the oldest stadiums in baseball.  I can say that it was a true honor to be there and I hope that one day, this baseball fan can return.

Musical Interlude

Here's a fun little song, by They Might Be Giants, that plays on the Boston accent and figures of Bostonian speech (i.e. "wicked," "scorcher," "critta," "pissah").  Enjoy Wicked Little Critta.

If you want to know more about Boston

There's a lot.  Here's a few basics:

Boston Daily
Boston Food Bloggers
Boston Globe (newspaper)
Boston Herald (newspaper)
Boston Magazine
Boston Phoenix (alternative newspaper)
City of Boston
Grub Street Boston (food blog)
Travel Blogs About Boston
Wikipedia: Boston

Next up:  Wellesley, Massachusetts

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