A Fantasy Crushed
But I learn to live without it
By Stuart Smith
In several movies from the classic Hollywood era, there was a mythical rural paradise called “Connecticut” where sophisticated but harried New Yorkers could retreat to escape the city rat race. “Holiday Inn” (1942) is probably the best-known film of this genre. It starred Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, and featured Irving Berlin’s perennial hit song “White Christmas.”
In the movie, Jim, a popular New York City nightclub entertainer, prepares for his final performance before retiring to marriage and life on a farm in Connecticut. He plans to turn his farm into “Holiday Inn,” an entertainment venue open only on holidays. The film encourages moviegoers to imagine this as a place with all the glamour of big city nightlife but set in the serene New England countryside.
In a movie as recent as “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) the same mythical New England is still playing a role. In New York City, Kathy (Faye Dunaway) is torn between helping Joe (Robert Redford) escape assassins vs. traveling North to a ski weekend in Vermont with her boyfriend. Again, the dangerous city is played against the serenity of an imagined Vermont. (To see how this dramatic device works, imagine Jim or Kathy dreaming of leaving for, say, Iowa or Nebraska).
My fantasy
A version of this fantasy played in my mind in my early years. My family lived in a peaceful, boring New Jersey suburb of New York City, but we often spent vacations at a New Hampshire bed-and-breakfast owned by a college friend of my mom’s. Many of the guests there were from the Greater New York City area, including a few from my hometown. I grew to love the farmland, mountains, forests, and lakes.
My parents had taken me into New York City many times, so I knew what that was like. When I was an elementary schooler I could see straight into Manhattan from the top of my street. But as the years went by, the view was increasingly obscured by air pollution from chemical plants and refineries on the coastal plain between my town and the city. If you wanted to go into the city, you would have to drive down into that miasma.
By the time I got to high school, I began thinking I had to get out of here as soon as I could and move to New England. I in fact did move (to Massachusetts), but not until several years later. Meanwhile, I still held onto the Hollywood fantasy. How was it possible to maintain this rose-colored view?
It all depends on how you get there
When my family began vacationing in New Hampshire, the Interstate Highway System didn’t exist yet. We would wind our way up from northern New Jersey along a pre-WWII route that mostly maintained the vision of a rural paradise: the Merritt and Wilbur Cross Parkways through Connecticut, Route 12 up through the hills of Worcester County to the New Hampshire border, and then on to the New Hampshire Lakes Region via the old US Route 3. The trip was a seemingly unbroken panorama of small villages, hills, fields, forests, and lakes.
There was a discordant note on one vacation trip to New Hampshire. We passed through the city of Worcester, MA right after the tornado of 1953. I remember seeing a severely damaged factory where huge commercial boiler tanks were scattered all over the place like toys.
The Interstate Highway System: I-495
Nowadays most of the trip would be on the Interstate Highway System. In particular, almost any trip into or through New England would use some stretch of I-495. Route 495 is roughly a 30-mile radius semicircle around the center of Boston. It is unquestionably one of the most heavily traveled routes in New England, but a Saturday Night Live sketch by Kevin Nealon carried this fact to a ridiculous extreme. As a “trip advisor” Nealon’s character made it appear that it was almost impossible to get anywhere in New England without using 495. Even getting from North Station to South Station in Boston, a distance of one mile, it was still necessary to use 495. I don’t know how viewers around the country reacted to this sketch, but I’m sure those from the Northeast Corridor split their sides laughing.
In later trips to New England, we used I-95, which passed through the harbor areas of New Haven and Bridgeport in the very real Connecticut. To survive the air pollution over this stretch we would close the car windows and turn off the air conditioning. During the trips on I-95, we crossed the Mianus River Bridge, which is in the town of Cos Cob, Connecticut. The bridge collapsed on June 28, 1983. Two tractor-trailers and two cars plunged into the river. Three people were killed and three were injured.
Military Operations Area
Much of the airspace over the White Mountains and the Green Mountains, among the most scenic areas of New England, is designated as a Military Operations Area (MOA). MOAs are generally located over rural areas to minimize noise in populated areas.
Although MOAs do not restrict “VFR” operations (that is, flying in conditions generally clear enough to allow the pilot to see where the aircraft is going), pilots operating under VFR are urged to exercise extreme caution while flying within, near, or below an active MOA. Military pilots sometimes underfly an MOA at low altitude without warning. I know this for a fact because a flight of A-10 Thunderbolts (a.k.a. “Warthogs”) roared right under me in Franconia Notch going at least 250 mph faster than I was.
Many years earlier I was in a meadow in Vermont making out with my girlfriend. We were repeatedly startled by thundering sonic booms created by Vermont Air National Guard jets practicing high-speed combat maneuvers in the MOA over the Green Mountains.
I should note in passing that the girl’s family owned a farm, and shortly before my visit, a local teenager had burned down their barn for no particular reason. One of the girl’s jobs on the farm was to put numbered labels on hay bales her father had made. This was to keep track of possible thefts by neighbors and hay purchasers. I also learned at about that time that Vermont had a relatively high suicide rate.
No peace in the mountains
For hundreds of years, the White Mountains have attracted droves of hikers. Unfortunately, the trails are now so overused that erosion and damage to plant life due to the heavy foot traffic have become serious problems.
On one hike with my college’s outdoors club, we encountered a group of young men wearing heavy backpacks running up the trail to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s hut on Mt. Lafayette to restock the hut’s food, water, and medical supplies. They made it to the top in 45 minutes. Two hours later my group arrived at the top. While we were on the trail crossing from Mt. Lafayette to Mt. Lincoln we were nearly trampled by a group of extremely fit young women running the other way. It was the Dartmouth women’s ski team getting in shape for winter competition.
My descent back to the trailhead was a pounding series of jumps down from boulder to boulder. My knees began to become stiff and my progress downward got slower and slower. The club’s faculty advisor finally sent some people back up the trail to rescue me. Fortunately, I was able to complete the descent under my own power, but I had painful knees for weeks afterward.
The Top of New England
My wife and I once rode the famous Mt. Washington cog railway. The steepness of the cog railway’s climb is second only to that of the Pilatus Railway in Switzerland. At the base station the day of our trip, a man with a British accent told us “it’s a bit fresh up there.” The summit was in the clouds and snow by the time we reached the top, so we were never able to enjoy the spectacular views up into Canada and out into the Atlantic Ocean. We were encouraged by railway employees to reboard the train immediately for the descent. On the way down a violent storm blew the top off the passenger car. We rode the rest of the way down with snow accumulating in the car.
The cog railway at that time had never had a fatality, but on September 17, 1967, eight passengers were killed and 72 injured when the engine derailed about a mile below the summit. The engine rolled off the trestle while the uncoupled passenger car slid several hundred feet into a large rock.
Realities
As an adult, I finally moved to Massachusetts and married a local girl. By this time the accumulated experience of the previous years had left me with a realistic view of the region, but I still felt that this was really where I belonged. During my first few years here, political corruption and organized crime were rampant in Boston. This era is depicted in movies like “The Departed” and “Black Mass.” Most of that has long since been cleaned up, and I feel that I live in a great state — not perfect, of course, but always trying to be better. And New Hampshire no longer serves as the state where Massachusetts residents could shop at the malls and buy liquor on Sunday, visit a chiropractor, and buy fireworks legally. We can do all of that now, except for buying fireworks (We’re the only state with an absolute ban on sales of fireworks.) We can now appreciate New Hampshire for its natural beauty.
