A week or two ago while crashing through the woods near my home checking tubing lines on maple trees, a job that involves more walking than most, I was stricken with wanderlust. It's something that hits me often and hard. But I had only recently come home for good, I hoped, after years of reluctant globetrotting. I must not allow myself to be seduced so easily. I needed a project.
The project, I decided, would be a long walk, but a walk done in small sections of not more than a few days each. It would be my welcome home gift to myself, a personal celebration of the place I love more than any other. I would get it done before the snow flew in the fall, that much was certain, but I wasn't sure when I would find the time to start, or exactly what route I would follow. Unlike our neighbor to the west, New Hampshire does not have a unified foot trail that runs its length from south to north.
And that brings me back to last night's insomnia. At about ten I decided that the next day was going to be the big one, which meant that I really had to start thinking about logistics. A couple of hours online yielded promising results, and by the time I finally turned in I had committed my planned route for the first leg to memory.
I believe that if one can travel without a map, one should. (And that's coming from an avid collector of maps whose childhood ambition was to become a cartographer.) In my experience, one learns the land better by studying maps before or after going out, but not while actually moving over it; the land is a book to be read in its own right, a text in braille decipherable with the soles of the feet. Maps are its Talmud. Wandering without a map also gives the traveler a heightened sense of freedom and spontaneity; if you are not looking to your map (or GPS, for those less Luddite than I am) as a guiding light, you do not feel as compelled to follow the route you see laid out in fast ink before your eyes.
Despite having burnt the midnight oil, my eyes popped open at seven and I was seized with an adventurer's alacrity that pushed me out of bed and downstairs to make coffee. I went through my morning stretching routine, ate breakfast, and did a bit of last-minute fact checking on the internet. It was thirty degrees outside but forecast to go up to fifty. Perfect hiking weather. Along with my hiking boots, I grabbed a sweater, jacket, gloves, and tuque, just in case. I rummaged an old bike from the garage, tossed it into the back of the car, and was off.
After a quick stop at the hardware store, where I wanted to double-check a few details on USGS maps, I drove the forty minutes to Monadnock State Park in Jaffrey, where I would leave my vehicle to ride south on my bicycle to the Massachusetts border at Winchendon, about fourteen miles by road. Jaffrey in the late morning was a delight with its unique blend of blue-blood summer homes, whose distinctive cedar-shaked mansard construction and neat trim remind one of neighboring Dublin, and good old-fashioned New Hampshire Swamp Yankee dwellings. As a class, the latter rise in numbers as you sink south, down off Monadnock's flanks into the actual swamp country of Fitzwilliam.
It was a Saturday morning a month into calendar spring, and that meant yard sales. Donald Hall once remarked, only half joking, that this turning out of anything merchantable into the yard is the basis of the New Hampshire economy. But our yard sales differ from those you find in other parts of the country; they can be an ongoing affair, whether or not any sign announces that the sale is on. Offers are always accepted in the improvised rural economy.
A couple of years ago I was driving through the town of Wentworth, tucked away in the shadowy mountains of Grafton County, when I stopped to look at what seemed like a normal yard sale. But soon I found myself being sucked into the vortex of an at once primitive and sophisticated marketplace. The owner had a series of interconnected trailers strung out behind the one she lived in, each given to a particular kind of ware, like a department store. She sat inside the first trailer, the fine summer weather notwithstanding, in a nylon lawn chair smoking cigarettes in front of a loud electric fan. I remember picking up an item for examination, a glass perhaps. "Fifty cents," said the woman through smoke-grated vocal cords. I replaced the object. "Thirty," she said. Sold.
I pedaled south along the quiet country road from Jaffrey to Fitzwilliam, past the temporary "MUD" signs nailed into trees where the side roads turned off. Sometimes I wonder whether Yankee magazine orders these signs hung out in towns like Jaffrey and Dublin and Peterborough to give an air of quaintness. You never see them in poorer towns, and surely it is obvious to anyone that a dirt road will be muddy when the snow is melting and the frost is coming out of the ground.
After a few miles I was spit out on to Highway 12 for the final stretch toward the Massachusetts border. I knew I was getting close when I started seeing signs advertising cheap cigarettes and beer. Such stores, targeting the baser impulses of our neighbors, are one of the ugly faces New Hampshire presents to the world. More alcohol is purchased in New Hampshire than in any other state, but it is because of these borderside stores, and not because we are more prone to alcoholism than people elsewhere.
Repurposed from the bed of an abandoned branch of the Boston and Maine Railroad, the mixed-use recreational trail runs thirty-three miles from the state line to Keene, southwestern New Hampshire's principal town. This trail would make up the first two-thirds of my day's route.
I easily located the trailhead where I expected. The bed stretched off toward the northwest across swampy terrain that made it hard to find a place to hide my bicycle. But I eventually found a suitable spot and dragged some cut pine brush over the top of my stash for camouflage.
My route roughly followed Priest Brook through Fitzwilliam. Occasionally it crossed a dirt road that tunneled through the woods, but on these there was never any traffic. At every bridge I stopped to look into the clear water of the burbling brook. A couple of times I couldn’t resist running down the bridge embankments to wonder at the stonework that had been laid for the weight of trains and wrought with such care and elegance, though few human eyes would ever see it, deep as it was in the woods and far from any road. I felt I owed these little diversions to the craftsmen. Rather than see their efforts as wasted, I delighted in the fact that such style was now for the benefit of “mere” foot travelers.
Fitzwilliam Depot comprised the freshly painted shell of its namesake (an uninspired museum piece), a general store that appeared to be closed, and a firehouse. There was no life to be seen once I passed the animal welcoming committee. The place was as sleepy as the proverbial southern town on a Sunday afternoon. In less than two minutes I had crossed the whole village. Only at the far end of town did I see a sick-looking man not much older than myself making his way slowly along the trail on crutches. He walked with a woman who helped support him, stopping every few feet to rest. When I tried to greet them they averted their gazes.
I came to a quarry that was like so many my friends and I used to stumble upon as kids wandering in the woods of the Souhegan Valley, not far east of here—only this one had a hint of the exotic about it. Meltwater trickled down the terraced twenty-five-foot rock face at the end opposite me, cascading softly into the pool in streamlets that gleamed as the sun’s beams hit them. The green of the white pines, the hemlocks, the moss, and the earliest tiny leaves sprouting from other deciduous plants had a vibrancy after being freed from four months of snow cover that lent the scene a rainforest quality.
Walking on, I heard shouting from the trees atop the high bank of earth to my left. Then a man appeared, in this late fifties and winded, being pulled down the hill by an excited golden retriever. “She got into a porcupine,” he said. The man seemed more fazed than the dog by the misadventure. I expressed my concern as seemed appropriate and pushed north with his frustrated grumbling still in my ears.
At a reservoir south of Troy a large family was strung out along the dam fishing. The father ran dutifully back and forth among his sons and daughters as they called to him, each hoping he would help them to bring their big catches to the light of day. But all I saw coming up on the ends of their lines were sad-looking weeds. They seemed happy all the same.
Everywhere paths made their way off the main trunk and into the woods, inviting exploration. It seems that there must be, or once have been, an old footpath or cart track in every corner of New England. But I forged on, and soon the village of Troy hove into view as a village ought to—with first one steeple rising above the trees on the near horizon, then another, and finally a cluster of houses and other buildings huddled around a mill pond.
I was hungry and decided to duck into a bakery called Peggy Sue’s for lunch. The place was thoughtfully decorated and carried an array of sweet and savory breads. I ordered a sandwich and a root beer from a cashier who could have benefited from smiling lessons. But when my meal came out, it was in the hands of a bearded and enthusiastic chef who clearly took pride in his work, even when it came to a lowly grilled cheese sandwich. It was just the thing. I took my time eating, reminding myself that the point here was to amble and not to move as quickly as possible from A to B.
When I had finished my lunch I sauntered outside and zig-zagged my way casually up and down the green, just to get a feel for the place. Satisfied, I walked a short distance south out of town, and after less than a mile of traveling along a road—the only one I’d walk along all day—I stepped on to the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail, which stretches 114 miles from the Massachusetts-Connecticut border all the way to the summit of Grand Monadnock, for the final miles of my day’s walk.
The flatlands were behind me now. I climbed slowly into the maple-studded uplands and on to the summit ridge of Gap Mountain, where blueberry bushes replaced trees. The elevated view of Monadnock from the south was one I had never seen, and among the finest. From there I dipped down into a dark and damp hemlock forest that for a moment nearly tricked me into thinking I was in the Pacific Northwest.
It seemed like no more than fifteen minutes of brisk hopping brought me there, where people gaped at me for the fact that I was shirtless. As soon as I stopped to take in the familiar-yet-never-tiring view from the bare and rocky summit of this mountain I have climbed more than any other, I realized why: it was cold and very windy. I put on a shirt and jacket and stood for a few minutes to eat and drink while watching the sun settle to the horizon over southern Vermont.
Remembering that I still had my bike to retrieve, and that I was meant to have dinner with my folks that evening, I ran down the mountain, sliding on the remaining patches of snow and ice to expedite my descent, and drove the fourteen miles back to my stash. The peeping of the frogs in the bog was intense and pervasive and magical now, as I sloughed down the side of the railroad embankment and lifted the pine boughs to reveal my bicycle. Already I was thinking excitedly of the next leg of my journey.