“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
– Mark Twain
It's been a long time since I woke up with that elephant on my chest at 2 a.m., thinking about work. But there it was a few hours ago. I need worry beads on the nightstand. Or some sort of edible cannabis concoction that will wear off after, say, three hours.
This past weekend we made our way east in the Mighty Columbia to see P's best friend, who's encountered some health headwinds lately.
For our flight, however, it was all tailwinds on a beautiful, sunny summer day.
The drive to Nashua takes nearly seven hours, but we were there in about an hour and twenty minutes. Flying changes things, makes the northeast smaller, turns loved ones three hundred miles away into neighbors.
The FBO in Nashua treated us right, with the strongly smoke-scented rental car pulled right in front of the plane as soon as the prop quit spinning. Once we left the gate, however, we were treated to the unlovely sprawl that is the town of Nashua, crawling through traffic up Highway 101A toward Greenfield.
In fairness, it could've been anywhere I have lived in my life. Tustin Avenue in Orange, California. Independence Parkway in Plano. Canton Highway in Marietta. Twenty-third Street in Panama City. All ugly, low-rise chain restaurants and strip malls, traffic signals and brake lights punctuating our crawl.
Why have I lived in these awful places since I was born, my existence up until the pandemic a drift between tract houses in neighborhoods that had been some farmer's field or woods or swamp a year or two before, places with no soul or history or reason to be except to make money and hand it over to Kohl's or Chic Filet or Target?
Well, think about it. My job requires for sustenance a steady stream of civil disputes over botched construction projects, swindling business partners, real estate ventures veered off into the ditch. That requires a lot of economic activity, which in turn draws lawyers like vultures to feed off the mayhem.
But there's no mayhem in places like Corning, at least as near as I can tell. It's a problem. P's profession doesn't require that sort of critical mass--some of the busiest places she's worked, from what she's told me, were in the middle of nowhere, and treated a steady stream of victims of car wrecks and tractor rollovers flown in from miles in every direction.
Another digression on my part.
We did finally pass from nasty Nashua out into leafy green hills where the speed limit is 40 but that's no problem, not at all, because driving any faster on those winding roads and blind curves would be a recipe for instant death.
Finally arriving at P's friend's house, a custom low rise near the crest of a hill, with quirky Buddhist art on the walls stuffed with hay as insulation, we settled into conversation over a glass of wine until we were told a nap was in order for our host, and we should go see the goats and the cemetery over in Hancock.
This proved to be a great recommendation, because my farmer wife had the opportunity to sniff hay,
and to play with the kids lounging outside under a sunshade.
Out back the residents of the Main Street Cheese farm had created the most amazing garden, exploding with everything from tomato plants to potatoes to all manner of herbs. Peg was in heaven.
Speaking of which . . . the garden backed up to the old town cemetery, a shady expanse on a bluff bordered by the garden on one side and a pond on the others.
We encountered the coolest headstone ever. One sort of gets a sense of these people. It almost makes us want to be buried somewhere, just for the chance to have a monument like this.
Well, almost. No rush. Really. Most of these folks up on this hill have been permanent residents here far longer than they were alive. We'll arrive soon enough.
And there's a surprising number of war dead. Here Peg walks the far northern corner of the plot, where an obelisk marks the final resting place of a captain in the Union Army who died in 1863, surrounded by the graves of his wife and kids.
And the wild flowers! New Hampshire presents the most beautiful array of flora, carelessly sprouting from every hill it seems. P created a bouquet and left it on one of the tombs.
Finally we took our leave of Hancock and its robust alumni association.
If you're curious about the goat farm, here's their link.
And yes, these folks are northeastern liberals to the core. There's an honor box for whatever you take from the unstaffed "store", really just a couple refrigerators full of goat cheese and goat meat, along with a self-published book you can purchase to read all about their vision of nurturing local economies. It's the very opposite of that chain store desert from which we emerged in Nashua, from which I emerged when we found our way up here to Corning.
After a quick grocery stop we returned just as our host was emerging from her nap. I built a fire outside where we enjoyed the early evening coolness and told stories until she again took her leave for the night, leaving P and me to enjoy the hot tub under a canopy of stars and moon.
We both slept like a rock once we gave up on the idea of sleeping together in the same twin bed (P likes to explore her space while asleep, rendering anything less than a double, or preferably a queen, a difficult proposition for your correspondent), with crisp, cool air pouring through the open windows and cascading down across the room. It was like the very best campout slumber you've ever experienced.
The next morning the ladies were determined to engage in blueberry picking after coffee.
These were not the puffy, bland blueberries one finds in the South if one has the temerity to venture into the snake-infested swamps to pick them. The northern variety is smaller, firmer, and apparently a little more tart.
And they are just growing along the roadsides, not in bushes but in what one could fairly characterize as blueberry trees, reminding me of the titi or mayhaws that grow in the South.
Up in the Granite State, they don't worry much about snakes. Ticks are another matter, as this place presents the constant threat of Lyme Disease whenever one ventures into tall grass. Our host insisted Peg wear long socks, which she made me vow not to document with a photograph.
But I couldn't figure out how to capture the poignant moment of two old friends, telling stories and enjoying each others' company on a blueberry quest, without including the socks.
So just try to ignore them. I'll buy P a fashionable pair of anti-tick boots before the next visit.
With a couple nice-sized tubs of blueberries to show for our efforts, we drove the smoking, dented old Subaru back up the hill so P's friend could take a nap and we could hit the road for the airport. I'm sure P will be back soon, probably when I return to Florida for work.
The next leg of our trip was comprised of a total of six minutes in the air, as we flew from Nashua over to Lawrence to have lunch with the kids. As we approached the field, the tower directed me to an alternative runway, and after we landed we saw why--a V-tailed Bonanza had suffered a gear failure on the main runway, and cantered off the pavement into the grass. It was clearly the most interesting thing to happen at KLWM in a long time, and everyone who worked at the airport stood along the hangar wall watching the rescue crews trying to figure out how to get the plane out of the ditch after the family who'd taken the wild ride all walked away. "Nice to hear he had insurance. He's going to need it," one of the spectators mused.
Issac and Olivia were waiting out front, and had found us a nice Thai place not five minutes from the airport. Over steaming plates of not nearly spicy enough Pad Thai, we were regaled with tales of Greece and Crete from their last trip, and spent a little time planning our next adventures, assuming airline travel is still a thing next year.
Getting into the air a little before three, we flew the lovely westward track across the Hudson Valley and the Catskills back to KELM with nary a cloud in the sky, Peg watching videos on her phone while I pondered our emergency landing options if the prop quit turning in this rugged terrain.
By five I was on our front porch, nursing a Jameson's and catching up with my mother as she recovers from Covid in an assisted living facility tucked in the middle of a endless sprawl of identical McMansions and chain restaurants. To each her own.
It was also the twenty-fifth anniversary of my Drew Deanie's entry into this world, so I wished him a happy birthday and checked to see if he'd received the Amazon gift card I emailed. It turned out he had not, because I'd bungled the email address.
And so it goes.
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