Summer Comes to New Hampshire

Summer has finally settled in, in Hampton, New Hampshire.

When I first moved here, one of my neighbors told me there are four distinct seasons in New Hampshire: Almost winter, winter, still winter and road repair season.

I've got through 9 winters up here and only one was really daunting. That winter it started snowing in early January and it snowed every single day for two months and it was cold enough the snow did not  melt between storms, so it just piled up higher and higher until it reached the roof over my front porch, so I could clear that roof by simply standing on the snow without a ladder.

Illegal Norway Maple growing in Hampton

This past winter was not like that, but it did snow most weeks between January and March. They clear the snow efficiently up here, so I missed only one day of work. 

Spring this year, however was cool and apart from a few hot days, you wore light jackets until Mid June. 

But now it's really summer. I know this because the sand sculpture on Route 27 just arose. 

Route 27 streams down toward the Atlantic until it finally ends at the sea wall at North Beach and you find yourself looking out over the gray ocean. Three miles before that happens, however, the road rises as it passes over an old railroad trestle and then it descends to cross Route 1 at the main intersection of  town.

Plaice Cove

Hampton is actually two towns: There is the town the tourists know, which is "Hampton Beach" which is a honky tonk cluttered with T shirt shops and pizza pallors and, teeming with traffic along  a broad white sand beach and people crowding the streets in flip flops and bathing suits, flaunting tatoos, displaying bodies which would look better with a little less display.

And then there is the real town of Hampton, where the year rounders live. 
This is centered at the intersection of Rte 27 and Rte 1, with the restaurant, "The Old Salt" which might be better named, "The Old Fish Fry" as it discharges a cloud of fried food smell which hangs over the crossroads. Across the street is the hardware store and next to that is Hagan's restaurant and bar,  and on the other corner is the Bistro attached to Chez Boucher, a french cooking school and haute cuisine restaurant. 

The town has finally decided to spend the money to bury the unsightly power lines which mar the scene. Or at least, the town has appropriated money to study the prospect of spending the money to bury the wires.
Spending money in Hampton is always a fight: Only recently did the middle school finally get the vote to do necessary repairs, after years of denial at the town voting during the "warrants." So it is something short of miraculous the money for burying the power lines is even being considered.

The summer ritual on Route 27 is the fashioning of the sand sculpture.  The man who owns the house on the northwest side of the route commissions a sand sculpture which covers part of his front lawn right up to the sidewalk.
My favorite was a bare breasted mermaid, languorously posed with a come hither look, but mysteriously, after a few weeks,  the breasts got reworked to include a discrete  top, or bra, which ruined the look.

Since then, the sculptures have been forgettable, but this year there is a bastardization of the old Coppertone advertisement which showed a dog pulling down the lower half of a young girl's swimming suit revealing her untanned bottom. This evolved from a much tamer drawing, and became an iconic ad which may just smack of child pornography today. 

The girl was about three or four, clearly pre pubescent, and in the 1950's and 1960's when nakedness was embarrassing and unwholesome, this was accepted as "cute" much as naked baby photos were. 

Personally, I never got all the winking and smiling about naked children, nor the relevance of children to Coppertone. You might think, well, you don't want to expose children to sunlight for fear of inducing skin cancer later in life, but in the days this ad ran, it was thought sunbathing was healthy and the add was about getting a tan and exposing yourself to its healthy rays.

Of course, over the years, this ad has been parodied from Rolling Stone Magazine to Playboy.



















In this year's sculpture she's all grown up and her bare bottom may or may not be untanned, but she cups a well developed breast in one hand and looks angry.
 The dog is just as cute as ever, but now the "Just for the Sun of It " inscription carries a different sort of implication.

If the mermaid was enough to scandalize the townspeople, then this new image ought to send at least some church goers into orbit. 

This is one of those instances you wish we still had small town newspapers in New Hampshire. Wouldn't you like to know how these images are chosen? Is it the homeowner suggesting it or does the artist have carte blanche or do they get together over beers or do they present designs to the local Rotarian club? 

Really, there is so much to ask about this transitory edifice and what it might say about life in small town New Hampshire.