New Hampshire's Sense of Snow

I am now beginning my seventh year in New Hampshire.  My parents hauled me up  to this strange and wonderful land when I was nine. My family rented a cabin on Lake Winnipesaukie . It was August and sweltering  in Washington, D.C., but it was eighty degrees and dry in New Hampshire and it got so cool at night, you needed a sweatshirt. It was paradise. I never wanted to go  home, and certainly never back South. My parents laughed and said, "You'd never last a single winter up here."

The year before, Peyton Place had been published and my parents asked some locals, who had the cabin next to ours, what they thought of it. They said they thought there was a lot of truth to it, to the depiction of small town New Hampshire, with all the repressed secrets of desire and resentment. I had not read the book, but this was my first introduction into the idea of a different culture, with unspoken rules. I concluded adults kept secrets and these people up in New Hampshire lived by these rules, broke these rules, kept secrets,  and my parents understood all this.

Stray comments, like, "Oh, taciturn New Englanders," floated by occasionally, as when the man brought us the rowboat, after my father asked where he could rent one. No commitment had been made, nothing said, the man simply showed up with a rowboat. So, I learned, these people were not like people down home. 

When I finally got the chance to live my dream, and moved up here, I arrived with all the excitement of an anthropologist come to live among an exotic tribe, to learn their ways. Margaret Mead among the Samoans, Colin Turnbull among the Forest People.  Here I was among these Northerners, who were more reserved, revealed less and needed to be studied and explored to be understood.

It has finally snowed, the first real snow of the season, with more to come this week. I am the only person on my street of ten houses who does not own a snow blower. It takes me 45 minutes to clear my driveway with my shovel. This is a cause of great consternation among my neighbors, all of whom are New Englanders, most from New Hampshire, and every last one owns a snow blower and it is a source of great pain and wonder to them to see me shoveling snow by hand. 

I have violated some local more, some folkway. (I also mow my lawn without a ride on mower, but that's another story.) I have to get up early to shovel my driveway, but I'm usually awake at 5 AM, and only one other neighbor gets up that early, so I can usually get the driveway done without upsetting the whole block. A retired man, two doors down, comes up with his snow blower at 7 AM and does my whole driveway again, just to drive home the point that you do not clear your driveway properly without a snow blower and no man is a man who does not own a snow blower. The guy who plows the street usually blocks me in around 6:45, so the snow blower is actually useful.

These Granite Staters do not understand the joy I cannot contain whenever it snows. In Maryland, snow was an occasional gift from God: You got the day off from school and spent all day with your friends sledding and drinking hot chocolate and running in and out of neighbors' houses.  My mother, who taught high school, was the happiest woman in the neighborhood on snow days and she spent all morning on the phone with her school teacher friends, exulting about the free day off. These were the same teachers I occasionally encountered in our living room, drinking martinis, laughing raucously and making the typical New York City bar sound like the tea room at a convent. On snow days,  I could hear them on the other end of the line yowling with delight. 

But these Granite Staters do not look skyward with the same hope and anticipation. Snow is just snow. You deal with snow. You may embrace it, but you do not endow it with special significance, like, it's a gift from a loving God who wants you to be happy occasionally.

In many ways, these villagers seem like the people I grew up with, but they seemed puzzled when I described the importance of prestige in my own home land--brand named clothes, colleges, vacation homes in Vail, country clubs, titles of various jobs in the government--none of that seemed to mean much to them, and ultimately, I decided none of that should mean much.  

One woman I worked with refused to listen to NPR because it had so many stories about Africa and Europe, places she had never been and would never go, so why should she care? She had never flown on an airplane. But most of the natives here have traveled just as extensively as the folks back home and clearly got just as much out of it. They just did not try to parlay the experience into something to brag about.

In fact, natives here do very little bragging. Where I grew up, parents bragged so relentlessly about their children, about their athletic victories, SAT scores, college acceptances, you sometimes wondered if they were talking about children or prize horses. 

Not in New Hampshire. There is little chest thumping. One mother apologized about mentioning her daughter had her picture in the paper, playing volleyball.  In Washington, D.C.,that mother would have emailed it to all her friends and to any college her kid was applying to.  And it wasn't like the mother was claiming the kid was the best volleyball player on the planet and would get into Harvard because of it. She apologized for mentioning it. I went home and looked it up, and it was very clear why the editor had chosen that particular photo--the kid is gorgeous. Of course, the mother would never say that. Not up here.

Maybe if I had kids at Winnacunet, I'd be telling a different story. Maybe, parents are just as insufferable up here. I just haven't seen it.

Mostly, in fact, it's more like England here than France. Sometimes you want to hear somebody sing, "Fie on Goodness, Fie!"  So many here cleave to the proper and the safe, but they make it work. It may not be thrilling, but it's very comfortable. And nobody burns crosses on anyone else's lawn. 

I can just hear Ms. Maud's eyes rolling (if you could hear eyes rolling)--she will object I am not talking about a place, so much as a time of life. If I just got out to Ri-Ra's or The Press Room in Portsmouth, or the Bistro or 401 in Hampton, more often, I'd experience plenty of fun and intrigue.  This is undoubtedly true--my wife gets out to these places every week, and she confirms, the Seacoast is FUN.  

And there are wonderful, exciting people up here, critical, funny people. I've met one woman who actually loves David Sedaris and Bob Dylan.  How much more can you ask? It may simply be the concentration is not as dense. Or it may be I've simply spent too much time at work. 

I'm headed out now, down to the hardware store, where they do not have a pot belly stove, but they do have some old codgers who hang out there, talking about the weather.