Searching for the Essence of New England Spirit

Arriving in New England from the south, the visitor notices a change in the atmosphere, for now one is approaching an area that wears its seasons with a difference:

Here are woods and hills and meadows and stone fences and the beginning of the Appalachian chain of mountains that extend all the way to Alabama.

New England possesses the priceless gift of variety, which it bestows extravagantly.

Not only are the seasons more pronounced in New England, but the texture of life seems to change.

A combination of individualism and duty takes possession of the soul here, where an eccentric is more likely to be admired than feared, where discontent is as freely aired as agreement.

When Ralph Waldo Emerson dropped by the Concord jail in Massachusetts to visit his friend Henry David Thoreau, who had refused to pay taxes, Emerson inquired, “Why are you here?” There was a moment’s silence before Thoreau replied: “Why aren’t you?”

It has been said that landscapes form the character of the people they shelter, and if human beings are expressions of their landscapes, this is a true portrait of New England.

The first place that the morning sun shines upon the continental United States is Mt. Katahdin in Maine, a state I know well because, for five or six months of each year, I live on a small island in Casco Bay, and I know the great fluctuations in its weather--from the humid haze that enshrouds the coast in summer to the cruel cold of winter.

Autumn Twilight

A still twilight on the Maine coast in autumn is a thing of great beauty, especially when the leaves are turning, the days are growing short and the tide is flowing . . . covering the dark secrets of the sea world and creeping across the low stones and invading the crevices of the rocks.

Maine is a place of extremes, and it is seldom the same for long--sometimes shadowy and obscure, sometimes splendidly lit by sun.

Upland Game Birds

Across the rolling meadows of Connecticut and Massachusetts are ancient fences of fieldstone, and in the low areas in autumn there are golden thickets of alder, birch and goldenrod. Upland game birds, who will spend the winter in those thickets, make splashes of color in the hedgerows.

The voice of the whippoorwill sounds in the evening air, a flutelike announcement that another summer has ended, that life will endure and that after a few months of cold, the sunshine will once more warm the earth.

Unlike other sections of the country, New England is a place of reasonable but frugal people, in whose town meetings one is likely to hear more dissenting than assenting.

The people take great pride in their town squares and commons, their neatly cropped lawns, their freshly painted clapboard houses, their fondness for order and neatness and their fiscal conservatism.

When Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as President of the United States by the light of the kerosene lamp in his father’s home in Swampscott, Mass., he proposed that he and his father wander down the street to the grocery and get a soft drink to celebrate the occasion.

After drinking a Moxie the new President laid a nickel on the counter and said to his father: “That’s to pay for mine.” So much for the New England character.

Self-Sufficient Colonists

It is a temptation to say that New England conservatism and caution are traceable to the hardships faced by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as those of Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

The New England colonist grew grain and made his own meal, cheese, candles and soap. He grew his own wool and flax, and in the winter the wool was cleaned, carded, combed, spun, woven and dyed. The dye came from hickory or butternut bark. The colonist made his own shoes, even tanning the leather.

There is an enduring spirit in the air of New England, and although Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut are industrial states, large areas are pastoral, where the streams run clear and cold through the meadows, where the air is clean, where the church steeples of the small towns glisten white, and where the village greens are manicured and unlittered.

Maine, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts are “bottle bill” states, where all beverage bottles and cans require a deposit that generally guarantees their return, instead of a destiny of being tossed from a speeding car. The highways of these states are among the cleanest in the nation.

Most people consider autumn a melancholy season, punctuating as it does the end of summer, but in New England it is lively and colorful.

Last October, I was driving on a back road in Connecticut, a road that meandered through a forest, and I think my admiration for the New England countryside touched on the extreme that morning.

Connecticut Sunlight

Although the leaves on the trees were gloriously afire, enough had already fallen to let the sunlight filter through. Poets have written rhapsodically about the mottled sunlight of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, but Connecticut that day was even lovelier.

Clumps of birch trees, their white bark sparkling in the clear light, loomed like ghosts among the oak and spruce. Rocky lanes led off into the woods, and when the forest fell behind me, small farmhouses nestled close to the road, with dogs and chickens scampering about and geese on the march. The odor of barnyards was in the air, and the scent of brush fires came and went.

Travel posters picture the forests of Vermont reddening in the autumn, and farmers tapping the sugar maples, but in fact, all of the New England states are like that.

The poplars turning to gold on the commons of a New Hampshire village, or the sight of waves beating against the rocks of Pemaquid Light in Maine, or a trawler working a tiny cove on Cape Cod, are common touches. But most visitors are awed by the sight of such beauty.

Parts of Maine remain primitive, even wilderness. In the northwoods country, the landscape is dominated by wilderness and lakes, with deep, trackless forests and bogs. Here the dark recesses of woodland are difficult to reach, and even hunters and wardens find passage baffling.

Wildlife abounds. Moose are now so plentiful in this inaccessible country that in the autumn of 1982 the state reopened the long-closed moose-hunting season. In these woods are one of the few places in the nation where one may still find landlocked salmon.

Rhode Island announces to the world on its auto license plates that it is “The Ocean State,” and perhaps its 40-mile coastline does indeed qualify that tiny state for such a distinction.

Ten miles offshore from Point Judith lies Block Island, a tiny bit of Rhode Island with high bluffs and moors whose gentle hills and freshwater ponds give the place an English atmosphere.

The houses sparkle in the clear autumn sunlight and the harsh Atlantic scours the beaches and headlands. Block Island has a brief summer tourist season, with visitors filling the small hotels and boarding houses in the village where the ferries dock, but by October the island has been returned to the natives.

That is a shame because in autumn it is a quiet and peaceful place, seemingly as detached emotionally from the mainland as it is physically.

There is a great deal more to New England--the great expanse of country that reaches westward across the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains, the deep valley between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks where the land drops off to form Lake Champlain and Lake George, New York’s beautiful and fertile river valleys, the Berkshires of Massachusetts, the salt smell of Gloucester and Marblehead, even the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, which offer some of the nation’s most stunning scenery.

In this northeastern corner of America the mountains and forests and the coast of the Atlantic Ocean have not yet been spoiled.

The nation began here, and thus New England remains living proof that landscapes are indeed reconciled with great events.