My wife Rebecca and I went on vacation to New England this past week. The leaves are changing, it is 25-30 degrees cooler and it truly is a beautiful part of our country and hopefully at some point I will be able to visit again.
But………… I have noticed a few things. First thing. It’s the motherland for white people. Where have all the brother’s gone. In my state where the black population is 30% to states where it is less than 2% and in a country where everything is about race you can’t help but notice. Try finding a hip hop station on the New Hampshire radio dial and you’ll have better luck locating Bigfoot. Now I do find that appealing because I’m not a Hip Hop fan. Let me make myself perfectly clear. The music is appealing. Vermont is like New Hampshire musically. They have plenty of jam bands, plenty of Phish, a whole cottage industry of white guys with acoustic guitars singing about maple syrup and heartbreak, but if you ask a local record shop to point you to the rap section and you’ll get a shrug and a Grateful Dead bootleg instead. Maine is beautiful but I don’t want to let it off the hook. Maine’s the sneaky one. Lighthouses and lobster rolls priced like a car payment. The closest thing to diversity is deciding whether your chowder has too much thyme in it. I guess culture doesn’t show up on its own. It follows the people. And there ain’t no culture here.
Number two: The men’s bathrooms. Where the hell are the dividers at the urinals? Just a series of porcelain thrones. I’m from South Carolina, where a man requires a minimum four-foot buffer, a load-bearing partition, and ideally a moat before he’ll relieve himself anywhere near a stranger. But up here, where friendliness runs so deep it apparently overrides basic urinary dignity.
Number three: College football is non-existent. Their idea of tailgating is sipping apple cider at the plethora of farmers markets that are in whatever town you happen to be in. Everyone is out hiking, or biking, or rock climbing radiating the specific wellness of people who have never once had to explain to their cardiologist what livermush or a fried bologna sandwich is.
Number four: It is Sunday and the NFL is on. Specifically the Carolina Panthers are playing. And forget finding a sports bar with options or finding a Sports Bar period. There isn’t one. There’s a pub…singular…. always with exactly three TVs, and all three are permanently locked onto the Patriots and and God help you if you’re not on board with the Patriots, because up here that’s not a preference, it’s a state religion. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick are basically deceased saints they still light candles for.
Number five: Everyone is so friendly. I am not a world traveler by any stretch but I have been to many places in the USA. The people in New England are extremely nice. Not the “Bless your heart” kind of nice we are used to as we stab you in the back when you turn to leave. We went to J’s Oyster’s in Portland last night and made friends with the whole staff. Going back tonight. Maybe it’s tourism economics; when your whole state runs on leaf-peepers and ski money, “be delightful to strangers” becomes less a personality trait and more a job requirement. Maybe it’s good healthcare, low crime, a maple syrup surplus or when Buffy and Biff’s biggest daily hardship is choosing a chowder. I guess you’ve got a lot of leftover bandwidth for being warm to strangers. Whatever it works because they are a friendly lot.
Number six: The food here is outstanding. We’re batting 1000 on restaurants. For a place that seems to have very little culture it has some amazing restaurants. When I wasn’t walking one of the million trails, gazing at the what seemed like hundreds of lighthouses and covered bridges here or following Rebecca at the endless amount of shops in Woodstock VT where every building is a lovingly restored colonial, every storefront sells something involving lavender, and the covered bridge is maintained with the kind of reverence most places reserve for war memorials but the food……of all the great grub I have poured down my gullet it is this beet salad I am having dreams about. A freaking beet salad!! Pickled beet, whipped goat cheese, a drizzle of local maple syrup, jalapeños, sprinkled chip of some kind. The kind of dish that makes you understand, on some cellular level, why people move here and never leave, mortgage rates be damned. Honestly, I think about that salad more than I think about most of the people I’ve met in my life, which says something either about the salad or about me, and I’ve decided not to examine which. I finished it in eleven minutes and grieved for the rest of the afternoon.
It’s 4am at the airport and I’m on my way home hopefully to some cooler weather and to two dogs that hopefully remember me.
