Alexandersmap

    Month: April 2019

    • Merrill’s Marauders Bridge

      Route 3 crosses the Souhegan River in Merrimack, New Hampshire.  The bridge that spans the river in this place is called the Merrill’s Marauders Bridge, named after the Army Rangers who volunteered for “a dangerous and hazardous mission” behind enemy lines in Burma in World War Two.  The Rangers were led by Brigadier General Frank Merrill and accomplished some extraordinary things during the war.

      Marching a thousand miles through the jungle, Merrill’s Marauders attacked the flanks of elite, battle-hardened Japanese troops time and again.  This is not unlike the warfare that Roger’s Rangers conducted during the French and Indian War.  The Marauders captured a strategically important airfield called Myitkyina Airfield, disrupted supply lines and generally overcame vastly superior numbers to win critical battles against the Japanese.

      After the war, General Merrill became the Commissioner of Highways for the State of New Hampshire.  Apparently this bridge over the Souhegan River was his favorite in the state, and he and his Marauders are immortalized with the bridge now named for them.  I think Robert Rogers would appreciate it as much as Merrill’s Marauders did.

    • Bearded Bicycle Guy

      I was driving to an appointment when I saw something interesting.  A guy I’ve seen for years riding his bicycle around the town next to mine was standing in a Shaws parking lot with a big green trash bag and a hundred seagulls flying around him excitedly.  The source of their excitement was the bread crumbs flying out of the green bag as he lifted it, shook and twisted it.

      This man is well known in town, and I’ve known him as the bearded bicycle guy who rides up and down the major retail stretch between two towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.  I’ve assumed he was homeless, but maybe he’s just and avid bicyclist with plenty of time on his hands and a penchant for recycling bottles and cans.  Either way, he’s pretty harmless.  I suppose I could stop and ask him about himself someday, but I’m more likely going to just keep driving.  That probably says more about me than him.  We all have busy lives to live, and stopping my car for a moment to ask an apparent homeless man what his story is seems like more commitment than it’s worth.

      Bearded bicycle guy is different from me, but he wasn’t looking at all concerned about it.  So why should I be?  He’s just another guy marching through time, just like me.  The difference between us this morning is that he was the center of a storm of his own making, as a hundred gulls swirled around him for their feeding.  They obviously knew the drill well, and were as attentive as the gulls that follow a fishing boat as it heads back to shore with the fishermen cleaning the fish throwing scraps over the stern.  And he was clearly enjoying the moment as much as the gulls were.

      I’m not sure who is having a more successful day.  I’ve booked some key meetings, moved some projects forward, caught up with two guys I went to college with, worked out this morning and read a few pages in my book before I went to work.  It’s been a good day.  And yet bearded bicycle guy was having every bit as much fun, perhaps a lot more, than I was.  He may just do the same thing tomorrow too.

    • True North

      Feeling the need to go north.  Far north.  Labrador north.  Iceland north.  Pennan north.  Denmark and Sweden and Finland north.  Viking territory.  Inuit territory.  The kind of places that require commitment to get to.  As spring takes hold in New Hampshire and I’m dreaming of warmer days, I’m also thinking of these places.  Aurora Borealis north.  Tundra north.  Icebergs floating by north.  I blame Jacques for the icebergs, I hadn’t thought of them until he showed me how many were floating around out there.

      I just finished a renovation project in Pocasset.  I’ve checked one box and I’m looking at the bucket list of wanderlust places, and north announces I let another season go by without a visit.  Baseball and crocuses and opening the pool are here, and I’m thinking about going north.  Such is the life of a restless explorer.
      Shelving grand adventures for the moment, spring does bring with it opportunity for exploration locally.  Plenty of old forts and lighthouses and state parks to visit.  Plenty of opportunities for adventure right here in New England and New York.  North will have to wait a bit longer.  But not much longer.

    • The Old Worthen

      The oldest bar in Lowell, Massachusetts is today called The Worthen House.  Back when I was in college it was called The Old Worthen, and that’s still how I like to remember it.  If you walk into the place today you’ll find tables and a long bar that runs front to back.  The bar is essentially the same, but the tables were an addition after a fire gutted the old place.

      They say that Edgar Allen Poe frequented the place and wrote at least some of The Raven here.  More recently, Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg drank at the Old Worthen.  That’s all fine and good, and as a history buff I appreciate those who came before me, but for me the Worthen was our college bar.  I spent my formative drinking years at The Old Worthen, and those memories are locked in my brain more than any class I took in college.

      Taking nothing away from the current place, back in the mid-1980’s The Old Worthen was a bit of a dump.  Wooden booths were jammed with hearty drinkers.  If you asked the bartender they’d give you a knife to carve your name into the walls.  We put away plenty of pitchers of cheap beer back in our day.

      The Old Worthen had a juke box.  For the life of me I can’t remember how many songs that juke box had, but there were five that always seemed to be playing.  My Way by Frank Sinatra, Mercedes Benz by Janis Joplin, Crazy by Patsy Cline, Tainted Love by Soft Cell and the hairspray rock anthem for somebody, Here I Go Again by Whitesnake.  That’s an eclectic mix of songs if I ever saw one.   The songs that were playing were usually determined by which table had the most quarters.  When we ran out of quarters somebody would jump in with hairspray rock.

      They say there’s a ghost on the second floor of the place.  I never saw a ghost in all the time I spent in that building, but then I never did get up to the second floor.  I like to dance with ghosts, as I’ve written about before.  But for me that doesn’t mean some spirit moving the plates around, it’s looking up at the leather belt driven ceiling fans and knowing I was looking at exactly the same thing that Jack and Allan were looking at 30 years before me.  A part of me lives on in the Worthen, as it does for thousands of others who walked through that front door.

      I’ve been back to the Worthen a couple of times over the years since college, but my time there is done.  The Worthen House belongs to the next generation of drinkers.  And just as the experience I had in the 80’s was different from the experience Kerouac had in the 50’s and Poe had in the mid-1840’s when he was living on the second floor, so too the experience is likely different for the generations that have come after me.  But I’m happy that it keeps on going year after year.