Early Spring up here in New Hampshire is stick picking up time. Everywhere around town you see home owners walking around their yards picking up the branches which have snapped off the trees and scattered about the yards in the late winter storms. Some simply carry the twigs in their arms, others use wagons and others use tarps to collect the branches, but everyone, one way or another, does it. You cannot mow your lawn, when your lawn finally greens up enough to be mowed, until you pick up all the twigs and branches.
I cannot recall a similar phenomenon in Maryland.
Late March and April in Maryland, it simply started pouring like a rain forest and then your lawn rose up and you got out the mower. I lived in a forest, in Maryland, but I cannot remember clearing the yard of hundreds of branches and twigs, not once in over two decades.
One impediment to mowing we did have in Maryland we do not have in New Hampshire was deer poop. Deer over ran our yards, in Maryland, ate our flower beds, our shrubs, stomped on our plantings. And deer are big. It's not like you can just shoo them away. Up here in New Hampshire we have wild turkeys who traipse across our yards, but they are much more polite, don't poop much and all you have to do is go out and stare at them, and they melt back into the woods.
I don't know where all the deer are in New Hampshire. It may have something to do with the gun laws up here. In New Hampshire it is legal to aim your gun at a deer across a road and shoot him. There are only 9 roads in New Hampshire it's illegal to shoot across, among them Interstates 95 and 93, which are eight lane divided highways. Otherwise, it's open season. That may have something to do with the attitude of deer up here. They must think: These people up here are truly crazy. No way I'm walking across their lawns.
In New Hampshire, you can shoot your shot gun within 100 feet of a domicile. That's "domicile" --as in somebody's house. The deer are not crazy. They avoid people in New Hampshire.
After an hour of picking up sticks, this morning, I decided there must be a better way to spend an early Spring day in New Hampshire and I persuaded everyone in the house to join an expedition to New Found Lake.
Many neighbors have said good things about New Found Lake. The water is still very clear, because there are few motor boats. Lake Winnipesaukee used to be so clear you could see down thirty feet. That was 1957. I can remember that. When we first vacationed on Lake Winnipesaukee, there were no motor boats allowed--except for the cruise ship Mount Washington, which we could see from our cabin on the lake shore. But now Lake Winnipesaukee is hustling and bustling with jet skis and speed boats and there is an oily sheen on the surface.
Within a few miles of Winnipesaukee are three lakes which are more serene, and New Found Lake is one of them.
I liked the name. New Found Lake. Where was it before they found it? Was it just wandering around New Hampshire?
The lake was still partially frozen this afternoon, and along the road which encircles it, dirty snow banks haven't yet melted. It is clearly before season. We stopped at a General Store in Hebron, which as far as I could see consists of a General Store, which shares a building with the post office, a church and one traffic signal, which must be for the summer traffic because there was not enough traffic today to justify a stop sign, much less a traffic signal.
My neighbors were right. New Found Lake is unspoiled and much as what I remember Lake Winnipesaukee was like 60 years ago. The woman in the General Store who made our sandwiches looked just like the woman I remember from 1957, in the store near our cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee, plaid shirt, hair in a braided pigtail, chatting about the new bacon she'd just got in. It was like a scene out of the "Twilight Zone," except she wasn't spooky.
So that's the report from Lake New Found, where all the women are strong, all the men are beautiful and all the children are above average.
I cannot recall a similar phenomenon in Maryland.
Late March and April in Maryland, it simply started pouring like a rain forest and then your lawn rose up and you got out the mower. I lived in a forest, in Maryland, but I cannot remember clearing the yard of hundreds of branches and twigs, not once in over two decades.
One impediment to mowing we did have in Maryland we do not have in New Hampshire was deer poop. Deer over ran our yards, in Maryland, ate our flower beds, our shrubs, stomped on our plantings. And deer are big. It's not like you can just shoo them away. Up here in New Hampshire we have wild turkeys who traipse across our yards, but they are much more polite, don't poop much and all you have to do is go out and stare at them, and they melt back into the woods.
I don't know where all the deer are in New Hampshire. It may have something to do with the gun laws up here. In New Hampshire it is legal to aim your gun at a deer across a road and shoot him. There are only 9 roads in New Hampshire it's illegal to shoot across, among them Interstates 95 and 93, which are eight lane divided highways. Otherwise, it's open season. That may have something to do with the attitude of deer up here. They must think: These people up here are truly crazy. No way I'm walking across their lawns.
In New Hampshire, you can shoot your shot gun within 100 feet of a domicile. That's "domicile" --as in somebody's house. The deer are not crazy. They avoid people in New Hampshire.
After an hour of picking up sticks, this morning, I decided there must be a better way to spend an early Spring day in New Hampshire and I persuaded everyone in the house to join an expedition to New Found Lake.
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| Pink Lake, Obadiah Youngblood |
Many neighbors have said good things about New Found Lake. The water is still very clear, because there are few motor boats. Lake Winnipesaukee used to be so clear you could see down thirty feet. That was 1957. I can remember that. When we first vacationed on Lake Winnipesaukee, there were no motor boats allowed--except for the cruise ship Mount Washington, which we could see from our cabin on the lake shore. But now Lake Winnipesaukee is hustling and bustling with jet skis and speed boats and there is an oily sheen on the surface.
Within a few miles of Winnipesaukee are three lakes which are more serene, and New Found Lake is one of them.
I liked the name. New Found Lake. Where was it before they found it? Was it just wandering around New Hampshire?
The lake was still partially frozen this afternoon, and along the road which encircles it, dirty snow banks haven't yet melted. It is clearly before season. We stopped at a General Store in Hebron, which as far as I could see consists of a General Store, which shares a building with the post office, a church and one traffic signal, which must be for the summer traffic because there was not enough traffic today to justify a stop sign, much less a traffic signal.
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| Tugboat, Obadiah Youngblood |
My neighbors were right. New Found Lake is unspoiled and much as what I remember Lake Winnipesaukee was like 60 years ago. The woman in the General Store who made our sandwiches looked just like the woman I remember from 1957, in the store near our cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee, plaid shirt, hair in a braided pigtail, chatting about the new bacon she'd just got in. It was like a scene out of the "Twilight Zone," except she wasn't spooky.
So that's the report from Lake New Found, where all the women are strong, all the men are beautiful and all the children are above average.
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