Blue Highways: Mystic, Connecticut

Unfolding the Map

If you are feeling a presence that you can't quite explain, something mysterious and unknown, yet full of meaning, it may mean that you have entered a mystical place, or what you think might be mystical.  We'll find out in this post if Mystic is mystical.  To find this place where the name might mean everything, do some divining at the map.

Book Quote

"I headed toward New London, through Mystic, where they used to build the clipper ships."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 6

Downtown Mystic, Connecticut. Photo by boboroshi and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Mystic, Connecticut

I like movies, and my first introduction to Mystic, Connecticut was through the movie Mystic Pizza.  Before that movie came out, I had not been aware of the place.

The word "mystic" has always been, for me, one of those words that almost completely describes what it touches, and yet doesn't describe it at all.  Mystic is a mysterious word (notice that it has the same root, "myst," as mysterious), that conveys a lot of below-the-surface meaning.  It is a word that I have been drawn to every time I read it in print or hear it in conversation.  I think that it probably has that effect on many people.

The title Mystic Pizza therefore caught my eye.  I didn't quite know what to expect, but it turned out to be a coming-of-age film about three young women.  Julia Roberts had her first notable role in it, as did Annabeth Gish and Lili Taylor.  It was a nice movie, and I enjoyed it.  I later learned that my wife did a play as a young girl with Annabeth Gish (who is about her age) in Iowa, and we have recently seen Ms. Gish's parents at events in Albuquerque, where we and they now live.

This tale feels somewhat disjointed, but there's a point here somewhere.  On a trip to visit friends in Connecticut in the mid-1990s, I decided, on the basis of the name of the town and the fact that I had seen Mystic Pizza, to drive down to Mystic and see what all of the fuss was about.  Mystic, as I remember it, was a pretty little town trading on its historical shipbuilding heritage.  I bummed about, looking at things, and of course eating at Mystic Pizza.  Perhaps I thought that the beautiful young starlets would still be hanging about, ready to serve me a plate of hot, steaming pizza slices.  Of course, they were long gone.  But the town was still there, and its name was still an attraction, though it didn't seem any more mystical to me than anywhere else.

But what is a mystic, and how might this moniker fit to Mystic, Connecticut?  After all, mysticism and mystics are very specific things.  Mysticism is the attempt to reach different states of awareness awareness, and sometimes a union with the Divine or a Supreme Being.  In this sense, a mystic is a person who practices mysticism.  All major religions that have existed have had elements of mysticism in them.  Anything that brings one to different states of consciousness, or anyplace beyond what we normally see and hear, is mysticism.  Simple prayer is a form of mysticism, as the goal is to somehow come in contact with a deity or deities.  Meditation can be another form of mysticism in certain faiths.  In my imagination, this definition of mysticism conflated itself with the naming of Mystic, Connecticut.  New England was one of the flashpoints of religious confrontation in the New World as it was being settled, as various forms of Christianity, including forms of mysticism based on Christianity, battled among themselves and also with the harsh environment and the native traditions. I just assumed that Mystic, Connecticut reflected that history.  I also made assumptions based on the literature and history of the times, where people who might have been practicing mysticism were denounced as witches and either driven away or often killed.

Well, it turns out that Mystic, Connecticut sits at the mouth of the Mystic River, and is named for the river.

That still didn't disabuse me of my notions.  In fact, it made my imagination wander even farther.  The Mystic River sounds even more fantastic, more magical, more mysterious, than Mystic, Connecticut.  Certainly, all that history and religion came together to lead to the name of the river.  I tried to imagine how the name of the river came about.  Perhaps settlers, newly arrived to the area, saw the Mystic River heading into the dark forests and hills of Connecticut, areas where mystery reigned, shadows concealed unknown terrors and perhaps wonders and realities that only the imagination could conjure.  If you've ever read Washington Irving or Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know that the areas beyond the settlers' front doorstep were unknown and sometimes terrifying.  Thunder could easily be giants bowling, men could fall asleep for 100 years, and the Devil, bad spirits and witches roamed the dark forests.

Alas, however, I was was to be disappointed.  The Mystic River was a derivation of the Wampanoag Indian word for, quite simply, "big river."  The only mysticism attached to the river and to Mystic, Connecticut was the imagination that I attached to them.

Despite my disappointment at learning the truth, I have to admit that places where our minds wander are often influenced by place and by the labels we attach to them.  Would Mystic Pizza,  Mystic, Connecticut and the Mystic River have captured my imagination if they were entitled Big River Pizza, Big River, Connecticut and Big River River?  Probably not.  In that sense, I got my money's worth out of Mystic even before I saw it and if the reality didn't match my imagination, well, that happens in life.

On the other hand, often the name of a place belies the mystical and amazing experiences there.  For the incredible natural wonder that it is, the name "Grand Canyon" seems to be a little under-descriptive for a place that inspires such awe and wonder that it can almost put one in another level of consciousness.  The near religious experience I had hearing the call to prayer for the first time in Istanbul (was Constantinople) was not something I prepared for in going to a country called Turkey.  Romantic encounters that send one to unimagined heights of love and pleasure often occur with people whose names are simply Fred, Mary, Joe, or Karen.  Names are only identifiers, and the true mysticism of a place or person will come through despite how they are called.  I may have found that Mystic did not live up to my vivid imagination, but I know Mystic is mystical to many.  It certainly is a lovely town with a wonderful seaport museum.  Every place and everyone has the potential to be mystical to someone, and that is what makes our universe special.  You never know when something or someone will bring you to a higher level of awareness, and make you feel like you've touched the Divine.

Musical Interlude

If one song captures the mystic for me, it's Van Morrison's Into the Mystic.  It is one of those songs that feels like it just came out perfect from the beginning, and that it was conceived somewhere on a higher plane.  Simple, but multiply layered and beautiful.

If you want to know more about Mystic

Greater Mystic Chamber of Commerce
Mystic Aquarium
Mystic Country
Mystic Seaport
Old Mistick Village
Wikipedia: Mystic

Next up:  New London, Connecticut

Blue Highways: Forest House Lodge, New York

Unfolding the Map

A venture into the forest can be a transforming experience, regardless of the moods of the forest on any particular day.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) wanders into a forest and eventually seeks out the warmth of the Forest House Lodge roadhouse.  While we sit with him for a few moments at the bar with a Genessee Cream Ale, I'll reflect a little on my love for the forest.  If you want to get lost in an Adirondack Forest, enter underneath the boughs and push past the brambles to the map.  Watch for poison ivy!

Book Quote

"The forest became heavier, sky darker, mountains higher, settlements further apart....I was at the heart of a great wilderness second only to the Northwoods of Maine in the eastern United States.  An occasional woodsy gift shop or burger stand built like a chalet did not prevent the forest from being pervasive, ominous, and forbidding; nor did they quiet the strange cries of birds from the dark hemlock.  Then a cold rain blew down, turned to hail, then eased to a drizzly fog.  It was early afternoon, yet headlights vanished after twenty yards as if the damp extinguished the beams.  Birch, alder, conifers - nothing but trees and water and fog for miles.

"East of the village of Blue Mountain Lake, dominated by a bluish hump of the Adirondacks, the road descended to a small building - part house, part tavern - snugged against a wooded hill and surrounded by vaporous mountains.  The mist glowed orange from a neon beer sign.  The building, white clapboard trimmed in red with a silvery corrugated tin roof, was the Forest House Lodge.  In fact, it wasn't a lodge, but something even better: an antique roadhouse.  The roadhouse - institution and word - has nearly disappeared from America."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

I'd love to have found an image of the Forest House Lodge, but alas, I couldn't. Here's a picture of the Adirondack Museum, nearby in Blue Mountain Lake. Photo at < a href="http://www.art.com">Art.com Click on photo to go to host page.

Forest House Lodge, New York

LHM sets up his stop at the Forest House Lodge by contrasting the gloom of the forest with the coziness of the roadhouse.  I will come back to this theme a little later.  In the interim, I'd like to share with you why I love forests, even if they are dark, gloomy and scary.

I grew up in an area that was heavily forested.  I say "was" because over the years, as the lumber company in my hometown went from being a locally-owned corporation to a subsidiary of major corporations such as Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific, and as shareholders began to demand more, a cycle of greater cutting occurred.  The logs that exited forest logging roads on trucks got smaller and smaller.  It will take many generations for the redwood forests that I grew up in to regenerate themselves.

However, when I was young the forest was a big place, and even if as an adult I can see how much we've lost, it is still a big place, especially when I stand on the side of the road at the summit of Seven Mile Hill and look out over the tree-covered mountains toward the coast.

It was in these forests that I learned the beauty of nature.  If you've never experienced late afternoon in a Northern California forest on a sunny spring or summer day, you haven't experienced one of life's pleasures.  On the ground level, the light streams through the breaks in the leaves and leaves a diagonal dappled pattern on the forest floor.  Insects buzz, serving as a break in the silence save for the rush of a breeze in the leaves.  Above, the light shining through leaves that are just opaque enough to allow a little light through turns those leaves a brilliant green.  The radiant blue of the sky above contrasts just right with the greens of the forest.  The dried leaves on the forest floor have their own, woody and loamy scent.

I even loved the forest in winter.  A redwood forest in winter, some would say, is a pretty miserable place.  Cold and misty, you get chilled to the bone while water droplets from the trees fall onto your neck and travel down inside your shirt, along your spine, and deposit themselves in your underwear.  The deciduous trees have lost all their leaves, so everything seems barren despite the leaves still present on the conifers.  There is perpetual fog, partly because the trees themselves create their own ecosystems and therefore create the fog that lingers around their treetops and the rain that nourishes their roots.  The forest carpet of dead leaves is wet, like a sponge, and hideous looking huge mushrooms, most likely poisonous, spring up everywhere.  Yet, even in this environment, I was happy.  The rivers ran full, often with salmon swimming to their spawning grounds.  The air smelled fresh and clean.  When we had a cabin, the wet outdoors meant lazy days indoors by a fire.

Regardless of the time of year or the circumstances, when I'm in the middle of a forest it seems like a living being.  I don't just mean that there are lots of trees, plants and animals that are all living and dying in their individualities.  I mean that taken all together, it is as if I am standing in the midst of a large, living, breathing being.  It is hard to describe, and if you're concentrating on some task, you're bound to miss it.  But if you stand and listen, and open your mind, you can feel the spirit of the forest.  My father, who for all his faults could have moments of extreme transcendence, used to tell me to "listen to the trees," and we'd sit in silence.  I think that in those moments that he was tapped into something larger than himself, me, and all of us that have confined ourselves to a narrow range of our senses.

And this sounds a lot like what LHM describes in his quote - this sense of the forest as something larger.  For LHM, however, he feels a need to escape it.  Let's do a little thought experiment.  Let's imagine that LHM is traveling not in 1980 but in 1780.  Ghost Dancing is not a van but a carriage of some kind, perhaps a stage, drawn by horses and a driver.  While LHM dozes and muses in the carriage, the forest outside broods and darkens, an energy that can't be understood but can be felt.  It's cold.  After a long time of travel, the carriage descends into a valley and at the bottom is light, warmth, food and drink and a little mystery and intrigue.  The roadhouse.

LHM writes the roadhouse is disappearing from American life.  I would argue that it has just reacted to the more mobile American way of life.  A roadhouse originally offered both food and lodging, along with entertainment and gambling, but now you rarely find a place that is not a hotel that can offer such amenities.  It makes sense that when society relies on horse or foot-powered transport that all of the amenities needed by travelers is concentrated in one place.  That is probably why they were considered to be a little disreputable, as Wikipedia puts it.  It seems to me that the function of the roadhouse, in the modern age, has split among multiple types of establishments.  Hotels, restaurants, casinos, and nightclubs all offer individualized parts of the roadhouse.  Interestingly enough, those establishments that offer all of those things are now considered upscale, and called resorts.

In Europe, one can still find remnants of what we would consider the roadhouse, though more reputable.  I've read that in parts of Europe, such as Germany and Austria, one can go for a hike in the mountains and forests, and find establishments serving food, drink and even lodging at various points along the way.  I wish we had more of this concept in the U.S., along with the right to traverse private property as is common in places like Sweden.  Such privileges would make even more forests available to the common person, might encourage more healthy outdoor activities, and would certainly get me out in the mountains and forests more often.  Thankfully, I still have my own little corner of a forest in the form of thirteen acres in Northern California.  Even though I hardly get there anymore, it is nice to know that this small slice of forest, a part of a disappearing forest that once covered much of the western United States, is still there for me.  I can still tap into that energy that connects us with something larger than ourselves.

Musical Interlude

In this post, I'll include two songs.  The first is Redwood Tree by Van Morrison and I thought the song captured some of the feeling I had about my own redwood forest and my love of forests in particular.

The second song, Roadhouse Blues by The Doors, is a modern reference to the checkered past of that particular American institution.

If you want to know more about Forest House Lodge

I couldn't find much on the Forest House Lodge Bed and Breakfast, which the former roadhouse has become.  Here's some information on Blue Mountain Lake, the community in which it is situated.

Adirondack.net: Blue Mountain Lake
Adirondack Museum
Indian Lake Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Blue Mountain Lake

Next up: Somewhere on the Hudson River