Unresting castles

My ignorance in areas I thought I had covered is always wandering up from behind to whack me on the side of the head. It’s been doing this since childhood, and it’s often a joy, actually. Why it still surprises me is the mystery.

A few months ago I read an entertaining mystery by Charles Finch called A Beautiful Blue Death. The author is a young man whose blurb on the flyleaf says he is a graduate of Yale and Oxford. Interested, I googled him, and eventually got to his blog, where, as a sort of token of Spring, he had posted a poem by Philip Larkin.

I wrestle a bit with poetry. (As a reader, not a writer. With Whitman and Dickinson as the foundation stones of American poetry, I find real, sweaty, grappling necessary. I sometimes actually come to grips with W, but D always defeats me.) Although I admit to only trying Larkin after the awful posthumous to-do, I thought I’d achieved my usual nearly worthless superficial familiarity with his better-known work. But I’d never seen, read, or heard of The Trees, which I gather (Google again) is not exactly obscure. I read it roughly as the myth of Sisyphus made cyclical. What do you think?

At least even those of you who know it already can begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

More on eatin’

While I was up north, J&P introduced me to a new favorite of theirs. Stella’s is on the green in Lyme New Hampshire, in what used to be the hardware store. A very good delicatessen and take-out with a nice, reasonably priced restaurant behind. Decent pizzas, good beer. Went there twice. Be going back again.

New Englanders eat more ice cream than people in any other part of the US. This has led to a wonderful scattering of ice cream stands across the countryside, many of which have metastasized into hot dog stands as well. Thursday I would have stopped at the Rainbow, in Woodsville, NH, if it hadn’t been nearly invisible through solid sheets of rain when I passed. I pulled into the puddled lot of the Whippi Dip in Fairlee, Vermont, instead. Fat Bob’s, in Warren, NH (ice cream only...no dogs), is near Mt. Moosilauke and has long been a favorite of the Dartmouth Outing Club.

There are also a lot of good diners in this part of the world. I mentioned Isabell’s, which is not exactly a diner, but serves diner-style food. There’s also the classic Fairlee Diner in Fairlee, the very good Littleton Diner in Littleton, NH, and the P&H Truck Stop, which A introduced me to, just off I-91 in Wells River, VT, which has terrific home-made breads, cakes, and pies.

Ferreting out places like these and swapping names and locations with friends is one of the many small joys of visiting the north country.

The walkin’, day 2

The Wednesday storms—they were as advertised—partially cleared out the hot muggy weather, and Thursday was quite nice. I took the chance to climb up the back side of the Kinsmans and top out both North and South. The lower north peak, which barely pokes above treeline, is guarded by slabs that require a little scrambling. As usual, more awkward coming down than going up.


The south peak stands proud, and is marked by a fair-sized cairn, to which I added the usual good-luck stone.


Aside from a local woman who unhurriedly passed me as if I were standing still, I saw no one else until I ran into two men just below the summit of South Kinsman. They had come up the standard route from Franconia Notch. Heading back down, I met some camp groups that had made latish starts. I made a brief side trip to take in the views from Bald Peak on the way down. Up and down about 11 miles, 4,000 ft. ascent, book time about 8 hr., my time about 6 hr.

As I wrote in the post about yesterday’s walk, beating the formula-based book time is very common. My times were as quick as they were because I was carrying little weight. This trip gave me the chance to shake down the Inov8 Race Pro 18 I bought in Braemar during the Challenge.


I’d brought it along to New Hampshire for two planned short forays from Guyot Shelter up on the Bond ridge, and it worked very well as a daysack. The hydration bladder in the hipbelt is an inspired idea, and the pack carried comfortably. Good kit.

Trouble with Blogger...

...It won’t break text where I want it to. I can't control much in life, but I’m determined to control my own grafs.

Back when fixed.

The walkin’, day 1

The weather changed my plans. I was warned off the peaks Wednesday by the excellent Vermont Public Radio, which was calling for view-obscuring haze, followed by strong thunderstorms with lightning and possibly hail. I decided to skip the Bonds and stay low. I wandered out and back on an old favorite, down Zealand Notch on a trail that was once the bed of a logging railway. Flattish and easy walking, it’s a part of the AT that is northbound, but runs almost due south.


My college’s alma mater includes the lines:

They have the still North in their hearts,

The hill-winds in their veins,

And the granite of New Hampshire

In their muscles and their brains

I have a feeling that the last sentiment meant something different in 1894 than it means today, not that many of us don’t, in fact, have rocks in our heads. But walking this trail, it’s easy to see where the obsession with the intrusive, felsic, and igneous comes from.


I walked in as far as Thoreau Falls, soaked my feet,


and strolled back out, stopping to say hello at Zealand Falls Hut


to a member of the croo who was baking bread for the evening meal. I also met a charming Brit couple on a day walk to Zealand Mountain.

Out and back about 10 miles, 1,200 ft. ascent, book time about 6 hr., my time about 4 hr. (Everybody beats book time.)

Babe magnet...

...nah. I am that much rarer bird, a New Hampshire cop magnet. Yes, I was again stopped by a policeman while wending my way among the glorious mountains of Northern New England. This time was, I must say, the most pleasant stop I’ve ever experienced. And this time I was speeding. Driving in the mid-40s (MPH) along Rt. 117 in Sugar Hill (home of Polly’s Pancake Parlor), I cruised blithely (and, I thought, legally) past the town’s Chevy Blazer cruiser, and a little farther up the road saw the blue lights in my rear-view mirror. The center of the village, a short (one might, under other circumstances, say a speed-trap length) stretch, has a posted limit of 30.

The polite officer wished me a good morning, acquainted me with the aformentioned fact (minus the speed-trap part), asked me where I was planning to hike (my elegant clothing and grooming were the tip-off, I think), approved, collected my license and registration, and returned to his vehicle to run the check while I sat fidgeting under the raised hatch of my Outback. He emerged a few minutes later, told me with great good humor that I was apparently not a terrorist, that I was free to go, and that I should drive safely and have a good day. Not even a written warning, let alone a ticket. So I guess I won’t show up in the police blotters of small New England newspapers this time...no one will ever know.

Richard Mabey

You Brits know him, but I don’t. There was an article this morning in the Washington Post about his book, Nature Cure.

The article, by Adrian Higgins, is unusually sensitive and perceptive. He characterizes the writer’s depression as “a deep, numbing sense of despair induced by nothing in particular and everything in general,” and tells us that Mabey’s intention to make the book an investigation of depression “through an ecological prism” is “made harder by the fact that melancholy has no raison d’etre in biological terms.” He quotes Mabey as writing that depression “seems to have no connection with the biological business of living at all. And what it did to me was unearthly, in that it negated, cut dead, all the things in which I most believed: the importance of sensual engagement with the world, the link between feeling and intelligence, the inseparability of nature and culture.”

That “unearthly” cuts to the quick, doesn’t it?

Not a book I intend to let pass by.