THE OLD MANOF THE MOUNTAIN
THE OLD MAN
Franconia Notch in northern New Hampshire is a narrow mountain pass threading its way between the Franconia Range to the east and the Kinsman Range to the west. The northernmost peak on the Kinsman Range is Cannon Mountain, in times gone by known as Profile Mountain in honor of the Great Stone Face that adorns it.
This place hosts some of the planet’s most awesome geography. Its changeable weather can create a mystical place or a daunting laboratory of the world’s worst weather. I have driven in clear conditions into Franconia Notch from one direction or the other only to encounter a blizzard and to be unable to see more than inches beyond my windshield. I have come within a whisker of colliding with a moose ambling across the road up there. I have climbed the mountains on both sides and looked down upon small airplanes flying through the Notch and upon electrical storms below me. Though I am not ready to die yet, I have told my children that I want to be cremated and I want them to scatter my ashes from the summit of Mt. Lafayette, the peak at the north end of the Franconia Range faced by the Old Man of the Mountain, so that I may merge with that place.
Nearly 30 years ago when I adopted the North Country as my home, and waited for my friendly but reserved northern New England neighbors to adopt me, U. S. Route 3 wended its way through the Notch, a narrow two-lane road with an occasional wide shoulder to accommodate the hikers who parked and set off on the many trails there. Highway planners had determined that Interstate Highway 93, the link between Boston and Montreal, would pass through the Notch. Friends of the Notch rallied as they did half a century ago to fend off a perceived threat to this special place. In the 1920’s after fire destroyed the mammoth Profile House hotel and its thousands of acres were put up for sale, the state and environmental groups and school children collaborated to save the Notch from the woodsmen’s saws. I know people who as children “bought a tree” by donating their pennies to this effort. In the 80’s a battle shaped up between the highway builders and the environmentalists. Ultimately a compromise was forged which resulted in an "engineering marvel" and avoided this several miles in northern New Hampshire from becoming the only interrupted link in the nationwide highway system, while at the same time safeguarding the treasures of the Notch and actually making some of them more accessible to the appreciation of its many visitors.
So today what we are told is the only two-lane interstate highway meanders through. Should you visit Franconia Notch, slow down and get out of synch with the throngs of tourists. Stop and link up with this ancient place. There is magic here.
As you drive north from Concord, New Hampshire on Interstate 93, you might be struck with the beauty of the rolling hills in the Lakes Region, and as you continue your gradual climb you will eventually spot the ancient peaks of the White Mountains. The climax is majestic Franconia Notch, a mountain pass that snakes its way beneath the solemn gaze of the Old Man of the Mountains, the Great Stoneface Hawthorne wrote about, a natural rock formation that assumes a human profile, now held in repose by a web of cables to make sure that the same forces that created that visage don't gnaw away at its underpinnings to send it crashing to the notch floor some 2,000 feet below.
This is because the Old Man has become the trademark of New Hampshire, the state where I live, and in the long run it will bring more tourists to our region suspended from the side of Cannon Mountain than it will in a pile next to Profile Lake.
And riding north from Concord, whether in the summer when the luxuriant hills are a rich green, in the fall when they are on fire with the yellows of the birch and the reds of the maple, or in the winter when they are blanketed white with snow, you may well comment to yourself, especially if you are accustomed to the customary commuter's experience on some of our busier urban and suburban highways, this must be the most beautiful highway in the country. And I believe it is.
If this doesn't take you down a peg or two, consider the fact that we are headed north to my hometown, Littleton, New Hampshire, the ninth best small town in the country, this according to Norman Crampton in his 1995 edition of The 100 Best Small Towns in America! Who commissions studies like these, anyway? I often wonder. But not for long. I like my little town, it has helped me raise three wonderful daughters; it has provided me with hundreds of people, many of whose names I still do not know, who say hello to me every time I pass them; and a peace that many of you should know.
And, state trademark or not, I slow down every time I travel the Notch, in daylight anyway, to look up in wonder at the Old Man of the Mountain.
But even traveling on one of the nation's most beautiful highways can become a bit boring now and then after you have done it hundreds of times. Try as our changing seasons and our always changeable weather might to make it different every time, I always get a little restless halfway home, near tiny Ashland. I have a friend from Ashland, and I used to tease him about what I called the Ashland “Industrial Park,” a couple of paved acres adjacent to the interstate exit and home to a Burger King and the state liquor store, a fitting industrial base for Ashland I told him. The Ashland Industrial Park also has a convenience store which at one time featured Häagen Dazs in its frozen dairy case. And they carried my favorite flavor, chocolate chocolate chip. (Actually I prefer Belgian chocolate chocolate, but I have never found this flavor outside of their ice cream shops in the malls. Perhaps it is too potent to be dispensed unless under the watchful gaze of Häagen Dazs-trained professionals.)
So as I headed north a battle took shape, as I struggled with my sincere desire to behave and continue my journey without interruption, and a dark longing to indulge in an entire pint of chocolate chocolate chip. I had made advance preparations for my fall, as there was a stainless steel spoon in the glove compartment. Experience had taught me that the flimsy plastic ones you could pick up at the convenience store were not up to an assault on a pint of Häagen Dazs straight out of the cooler. There is no rationalization for this sort of indulgence. Rarely have you earned the right to indulge in this way; pure and simple, you just want that ice cream. And mile after beautiful mile, Ashland would pull me on, like some siren of old. Finally, after several miles of conflict my darker side would prevail, and I would pull off at the exit and prepare for this guilty pleasure.
But I don't do this anymore. The last few times I lost this struggle, only to find at first that they were out of chocolate chocolate chip, and no substitute would do; later that they had apparently discontinued Häagen Dazs altogether. At first I assumed that some little discontinuity between the smooth theoretical curves of the supply and demand functions on the one hand, and the realities of the marketplace, especially here in Ashland, was responsible. Later I came to realize that something less random than this was at work. Had some troglodyte taken over responsibility for the frozen dairy case? Perhaps some palateless number cruncher in the home office had run a few spreadsheets and decided Häagen Dazs wasn't working for them anymore?
I can't risk this sort of disappointment anymore. I don't stop in Ashland now. It is bad enough to lose the battle of wills with a pint of ice cream, but there is an added humiliation when you walk out of the store empty-handed and unfulfilled, your self-esteem smashed, your mouth still watering, your stomach awash in digestive juices ready to do their job.
As I escape Ashland and accelerate up the entrance ramp, back on the highway now, black clouds gather in the west; as I speed north, devoid now of any purpose but getting home, lightning begins to flash ahead in the Notch. As I get closer, the mountains on either side rise up like some gigantic vise; once I attain the valley floor in the mountain pass I am driving in the clouds. To my mind, it's still the most beautiful highway in the country, even in the thick mountain mist. And the Old Man, invisible now high in the clouds... well, he is still there. But I will still check the next time I head south.
New Hampshire was settled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some would say that after a respite of a century and a half it is being settled again now. Naturally the first settlements were along the coast. To encourage settlers to move inland the king, through his emissary the royal governor, chartered townships in the wilderness and made land grants to individuals, usually on certain conditions, such as that they would clear and cultivate so many acres with in such-and-such a period of time.
The White Mountains presented quite a barrier to this process, so much so that my hometown of Littleton was first settled by way of the Connecticut River. This presented a much less direct route than the Pemigewasset River which, thanks to its union with the Merrimack River, runs almost straight from the seacoast to Franconia Notch. In fact the headwaters of the Pemigewasset begin right under the nose of the Old Man.
The story of Luke Brooks is well known in these parts. He was the farmer who is reputed
to have first caught a glimpse of the great profile in 1805 from a spot on the shore of
Profile Lake where there was a break in the thick forest. Other versions would have it
that the stone face was first spotted by Francis Whitcomb or Nathaniel Hall. Whoever it
might have been, think of their wonder when they stared up and saw that granite profile
suspended from the side of the mountain high above them! But, never mind: I have my
own version of that first sighting.
Imagine my mythical pioneer. He left England in the first half of the seventeenth century, perhaps a religious refugee, maybe just an adventurer or an early entrepreneur. He passed a miserable voyage across the Atlantic to the New World, and ended up in Portsmouth, then known as Strawberry Banke, and back then part of Massachusetts. He was indentured to a master who had paid for his passage, but after seven years he had worked off his debt and he was freed from the bond. The same determination that had carried him across the ocean and allowed him to persevere under indenture qualified him as a pioneer, and so he continued to work hard and after a few years had accumulated a modest savings: enough to acquire a horse, an ax and a plow, some supplies and most importantly a one hundred acre grant.
He would, as they said, "pitch his right" - clear and cultivate his grant and thereby meet the conditions of the charter and gain title. So, his head full of dreams of a homestead of his own, hewn from the North Country woods, he loaded his horse with his tools and supplies, his land grant clutched in his fist, and struck out north, first to Concord, then on to Plymouth, New Hampshire. Here he retained the services of a guide to take him to Morristown, for it was by this name that Franconia was then known. He and his guide fought their way north, following the same route now followed by Interstate 93; the grade increased mile after mile and they sensed that above the trees the bigger and bigger mountains loomed, closing in above the mountain pass.
Suddenly the guide stopped. Our pioneer, grateful for the rest, but anxious for an explanation, inquired of the reason for the interruption of their journey, and the guide gestured up through a break in the trees and to the west. "Up there. By my reckoning that's your lot and range."
Happy homesteading. Back then there was little market for stone profiles.
Glaciers had the largely unvaried habit of running from north to south, gouging out the landscape in front of them. This has left us in northern New England with handy avenues running in those directions, but a paucity of east-west lanes in which to travel.
Little Franconia Village lies just north of the Notch, in plain view of Mt. Lafayette and Cannon Mountain, the two enormous granite pillars that majestically frame the entrance to the Notch from the north. The “engineering marvel” that is I-93 now pours out of the Notch and cuts an unfortunate swath through that charming village. The Notch fared better when the highway makers paid their visit.
The west side of the Notch is formed by the Kinsman Range, named after Nathan Kinsman, supposedly the first settler - or at least the most prominent early settler - in the small Town of Easton where I once lived. Easton is in the plain to the west of this range of mountains, and approximately 64% of it is now part of the White Mountain National Forest. Easton has no town center, and its couple of hundred inhabitants are scattered here and there in the areas not incorporated into the national forest.
Years ago, when Nathan Kinsman was establishing his tavern where weary travelers could stop for the night, Easton was actually the east part of the Town of Landaff. Again the glaciers had been insensitive to the needs created by those back in England who generously drew our maps, and difficult terrain effectively segregated East Landaff and West Landaff. A dispute over the Bungay Road, necessary to exploit the abundant timberland in the east part of the town, but regarded by those in the west part as a pointless expenditure, led to the eventual bifurcation of the town and so Easton was born in 1876.
Bungay Corner on that road gave its name to the wind that howls up the same glacier-formed valley from time to time, the Bungay Jar, which sets up what is believed to be the Bernoulli Effect, causing a roar to emanate from the twin peaks of Mount Kinsman high above the valley.
I had an old friend years ago when I lived there who had worked the roads all his life. He had been a highway worker before modern machinery made this job so much easier. He owned a farm in Easton Valley not far from where I lived, and often I would drive by and see him raking the shoulder of the road in front of his place, the habits of a lifetime of work proving hard to break even well into his retirement. Ion was a large man, even in his 80’s. He must have been a very powerful man when he was younger working the roads.
It was the highways that had brought me to the North Country and, as an itinerant child of this modern era, I realized that I conceive of roads as something to take me somewhere and to take me there quickly, to deliver goods and merchandise here and there, to get things and people to places. Seeing Ion standing on the side of the road, with his rake supporting him as much as he was working it, and having listened to his stories and thereby vicariously shared his perspective for a moment, I understood that for him, never having ranged all that far during his long life, a road was something that brought people and things by, and often they did not stop but passed by the likes of Ion, Easton and the North Country on their way to some place else.
(Momentarily I am reminded of the old New England tale of the Flatlander stopping to ask directions of the old-timer, perhaps it was Ion, who replied dryly, “You can’t get there from here.”)
Often we are bystanders, watching the hurly-burly of modern life swirl around us. Standing still has is merits, and sound thinking can take place when you are standing on the stable footings provided by these ancient granite mountains.
There are other notches here in northern New England. One is Kinsman Notch, on the south end of the range of the same name, up the Lost River Road from Bungay Corner. But the original Kinsman Notch was a bit north of there, up the Reel Brook Trail in fact, not far from Ion’s farm, indeed once within sight of Nathan Kinsman's tavern. It was there that Easton’s Mormon Settlement was reputed to have been located more than a century and a half ago. The story goes that a small community of Mormons from Vermont had settled in that remote part of town, but that one day the folks in the valley had looked up and noticed that no smoke was coming from the chimneys there. They investigated and found food on the table, stoves yet warm, daily tasks apparently interrupted, the people gone. It is said that the Mormons had responded to the call of their prophet, Joseph Smith, and started their pilgrimage west, without the benefit of the Bungay Road which would not be built for another half century. Robert Frost, who lived and wrote for a while in Franconia, wrote of Easton’s Mormons in his poem “A Fountain, A Bottle, A Donkey’s Ears and Some Books.” Some scholarly investigation conducted upon the celebration of 100 years of Easton’s independence from the tyranny of West Landaff established the presence of some Mormons in town back then, but failed to bear out the old tale. Still, men and women moved by the spirit to leave their hearths and begin a trek across the continent, it makes a better story, doesn’t it?
