Alexandersmap

    Category: Travel

    • The Rose Standish

      A little piece of historical trivia is the name of the very first ship to travel through the Cape Cod Canal when it opened on July 29, 1914.  Following the Jeopardy answering with a question format, What is the S.S. Rose Standish?  And the ship was the perfect choice to be first.

      Rose Standish was the first wife of Captain Myles Standish.  She was one of many who died in 1620 during the first winter after the Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts.  Myles Standish would explore the Manomet and Scusset Rivers three years later considering a canal.  That canal would finally be completed almost three hundred years later with great fanfare, with a future President of the United States, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, in attendance.

      That first ship, the S.S. Rose Standish, was a coastal passenger vessel built just two years earlier in 1912 and operated by the Nantasket Beach Steamboat Company of Boston.  On that July day in 1914, she led a parade of ships through the canal.  The celebratory mood was likely tempered by news breaking about events the previous day, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, marking the beginning of World War One.  Almost exactly four years after the canal opened that war would impact the canal itself when a German U-Boat surfaced off of Orleans and fired on a tug towing barges.  That prompted the United States Army Corps of Engineers to take over the struggling private Cape Cod Canal so ships wouldn’t have to take the more dangerous route around the cape.

      The S.S. Rose Standish would be in service into the 1930’s.  There’s a great picture from 1930 of her docked in Boston Harbor, right about when the Cape Cod Canal was being widened to its current 480 feet.  She likely outlived many of the people who witnessed that first trip up the canal 16 years before.  History is full of related twists and turns, and this story offers a good example with Rose Standish, one of the first pilgrims, a young Franklin D Roosevelt and a German U-Boat all playing a part in the same story.

    • Talking Turkey

      This morning I went for a 3 1/2 mile walk and came across a large tom turkey standing on the side of the road. A little later in my walk I saw another turkey, this time a hen, about twenty feet up in a tree. Two turkeys in 3 1/2 miles isn’t exactly extraordinary nowadays in New England, but I was on the Cape and you don’t think of turkeys and Cape Cod. But like everywhere else in New England the turkey population has exploded.

      When I was a kid running around in the woods of various towns in Middlesex County, Massachusetts I never saw a wild turkey. The first wild turkeys I ever saw were in South Kent, Connecticut in 1993. I remember it because it was a unique experience at the time. But Litchfield County is where you might expect to see wild turkey. It’s also where I saw my first coyote in the wild. Now you can see turkey almost anywhere.

      This exponential turkey population growth took place while we (most of us anyway) weren’t paying attention. Back in maybe 2007-2008 I recall seeing a few here and there but it was still a novel experience. Today in Southern New Hampshire it’s novel if I go a day without seeing or hearing one. There are an estimated 40,000+ turkey in New Hampshire today, and an estimated 200,000+ in New England.

      It wasn’t always this way. When Europeans first settled in New England they started clearing the land for farms. This destroyed the habitat of the wild animals that lived there, and those who didn’t die out from lack of habitat were eliminated through hunting. Turkey, deer, pigeons, wolves, bear, and countless other animals suffered the same fate. By 1850 turkey were largely extinct in New England.

      Efforts to re-introduce turkeys began in the 1930’s, first with releasing domesticated turkey into the wild. When that failed wild turkey were caught in Upstate New York and released in New England states. Over time those turkey reproduced and the population growth began to accelerate. One Tom can mate with many hens, which can hatch 6-12 eggs. With few predators it’s easy to see why the population exploded. Today they’re seemingly everywhere, including a little peninsula jutting out into Buzzards Bay.

    • Sauntering

      “Sauntering, which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy Lander.  They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.  Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere.  For this is the secret of successful sauntering.  He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more the vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea.  But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probably derivation.  For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.” – Henry David Thoreau, Walking

      Well that paragraph was a mess.  I love Thoreau, but my goodness does he go all over the place with his writing.  So while I’ve quoted him here, I’ve used boldface to emphasize a few points that fascinated me enough to include the quote at all.  First and foremost is the origin of the word itself.  Sauntering, from Sainte-Terrer, is a lovely example of how English words are derived.  Pure magic in this word; saunterer, both in origin and in the magic it conveys.  Thoreau’s second observation, that the successful saunterer is at home everywhere hits home for this saunterer at heart.  My own adventures in travel with purpose have confirmed this to be true.

      Three years ago I actually went to the Holy Land, not on a pilgrimage, but as a history buff.  Walking through the Old City was meaningful for me, I can only imagine what its like for the millions of followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  In some ways I was a vagabond walking through the Old City.  My purpose was history, and I found it to be a successful trip. I got as much out of seeing a cart loaded with bread or an old flight of stairs with two ramps built into them to accommodate carts like the one saw loaded with bread.

      Back to Thoreau for a moment, and something he wrote later in the same book: “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all other worldly engagements.” Which brings me to Gunstock…

      Today I went sauntering in a different way, with hikes up to Mount Gunstock and Mount Belknap.  You couldn’t pick two more different walks, between a hike in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire and a walk through the streets, churches and markets of the Old City in Jerusalem.  But to me, they’re both meaningful in their own way. One payoff is the views of the mountains and Lake Winnipesaukee, but so was the forest floor scattered with Trillium, the blueberry bushes in blossom, and criss-crossing a mountain stream several times. If sauntering means traveling on a path towards enlightenment, then both places can get you there.

    • Cafe Carpe Diem

      Like millions of bloggers, I’m sitting in a local coffee shop writing away with a slight espresso buzz.  I’m old enough to remember when coffee shops were very different animals, but young enough to appreciate the change.  To me signs of progress are increasingly great coffee shops, micro breweries and distilleries, locally-sourced food and the wide availability of avocados and artisan cheese.  Its the little things in life, and life boils down to these daily experiences strung out over however many days we’re given.

      “The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.” – James Taylor, Secret O’ Life

      Starbucks really accelerated the explosive growth of great coffee shops.  Even the crappy coffee places had to up their game a bit.  Samuel Adams on the east coast and Anchor Steam on the west coast upped the beer game in our darkest hours of beer mediocrity.  Others looked around and said we could do the same with whiskey and vodka and cheese and chocolate….  really almost anything.  Nowadays I can’t drive through any remote crossroads without seeing a sign for a distillery, organic meats and cheeses, vineyard, brewery or local coffee shop with freshly roasted Italian espresso.

      As a child of processed food 1970’s America I love how far we’ve come.  No longer the laughingstock of the world when it comes to food and spirits, America (at least the part I live in) has embraced all things artisan.  And that greatly enhances this daily experience.  Twenty years ago I remember driving to the Starbucks in the center of Andover, Massachusetts to get my dose of the good stuff.  There weren’t a lot of Starbucks on the east coast back then, but Andover had one, betraying the hipster culture of this Philips Andover prep town.  Two doors down from that Starbucks was a chain bagel place.  Today the bagel place is a distant memory – a casualty of low carb diets or changing tastes.  What was amazing in 1990 is average today.  And chain bagels are… average.

      That Starbucks is still going strong, but walking in I stood in the wrong spot and some Andover-attitude babushka jumped in front of me and whipped out her phone app without a thought for the injustice of it all.  The barista was unsympathetic; after all I stood in the wrong spot.  So I took a step back and looked around, realizing that it wasn’t really the vibe I was looking for anyway.  I walked out and walked down the street to a local coffee place called Nero, which has better food, acceptably robust coffee and an independent, cool vibe that met my needs.  And that’s where I wrote this blog, thinking about Wonder Bread, Schlitz Beer, Ring Dings, Howard Johnson’s Chicken Croquettes and how absolutely far we’ve come as a society, and how far I’ve come as a consumer.

    • The Pine Tree Riot

      Maine is known as the “Pine Tree State” for good reason; it’s one of the state’s most significant natural resources. New Hampshire has plenty of this particular resource as well, but “Granite State” works just as well. That combination of pine sap and granite makes for a gritty edge. New Hampshire settlers were no pushovers, as seen in people like John Stark and Robert Rogers (born in Methuen, but raised in NH). You can add Ebenezer Mudgett to that list.

      White pine trees made excellent ship masts, and the British Navy needed a lot of them. New Hampshire was a British colony, and in 1722 the New Hampshire General Court passed the Pine Tree Law, reserving the best of these white pines – those with a diameter greater than 12 inches, as the property of the King of England. The trees were marked with a distinctive broad arrow slash. For 50 years New Hampshire lived with this law simmering resentment. These same trees could be sold to merchant ships for a nice profit, or made into floor boards or other profitable products for the lumbermen and sawmills in the state.

      When British surveyors tried to enforce a fine on a sawmill in South Weare, the owner of that sawmill, Ebenezer Mudgett and 40-50 locals rose up in defiance on April 14, 1772. Defiance to them meant hauling the Sheriff and his Deputy out of bed in the middle of the night and beating them with sticks, cutting the ears off of their horses (WTF?) and sending them fleeing off into the night. Not exactly Saratoga but hey we had to start somewhere, right?

      Eventually eight men were charged in the assault, but received light fines. One of the judges in the Pine Tree Riot case was my old friend Theodore Atkinson (I think he’s reminding me that I ought to pay a bit more attention to his accomplishments soon). The case got a lot of attention in the colonies as many others felt the frustration of the Pine Tree Rioters.

      Some say the Pine Tree Riot and the relatively light fines inspired those who participated in the Boston Tea Party in December 1773. What is definitely true is the White Pine became a symbol for New Hampshire in the Revolutionary War, and flew at Bunker Hill when John Stark’s New Hampshire Regiment held off the British flanking maneuvers.

      Today you can have a pint of beer at Able Ebenezer’s Brewing Company in Merrimack, New Hampshire and scan the walls to read some of this history. Maybe have a pint of Broad Arrow as you look at the replica Pine Tree Flag on the wall. Either way, celebrate that New Hampshire independent streak and the role our forefathers played in the creation of these United States.

    • Rhumb Lines and the Great Circle

      Whenever I take a flight of any consequence, I inevitably pull out the airline’s magazine to flip through.  I usually end up scanning the flight maps that appear in the last few pages of the magazine to see the arcs of the travel routes from various hubs.  I’m not a navigator, and I’m definitely not a mathemetician, but I have a keen interest in travel and the most efficient way to get from point A to point B.  Rhumb lines illustrates how that happens on a big blue ball, where we can’t very well cut through the middle.  Instead, we calculate the great-circle distance, which is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, as measured along the surface of the sphere.  That dotted line that connects the two?  That’s our friend the rhumb line.

      On land rhumb lines don’t help much.  You’ve got to follow the lay of the land, accounting for natural obstacles to progress like mountains, large bodies of water or the George Washington Bridge.  Up in the air, or on the ocean where these types of obstacles are mostly eliminated (reefs and large continents excepted), plotting a course from say, London, latitude 51° :30 m:0 s N, longitude 0° :10 m:0 s W to Philadelphia, latitude 39° :56 m:58 s N, longitude 75° :9 m:21 s W is visually portrayed as a sweeping arc, as you’re flying from the smaller circumference northern latitude to the larger circumference southern latitude.

      Screen Shot 2019-05-19 at 8.04.49 AM

      There’s a nice online resource for visualizing this, as seen in the image above.  It comes from gpsvisualizer.com and allows you to enter either the longitude and latitude for your two points or simply plug in the airport codes for each as I did for London and Philadelphia.  This site didn’t help those Portuquese sailors trying to show other sailors how to sail to the Gulf of St Lawrence for cod fishing, so navigation maps were drawn and copied with the rhumb lines to show sailors which heading would get them there and back.

      I’ve made a few dotted lines across the world over the years, and hope to make many more.  I think basic navigation should be a requirement for all kids in school, as it teaches not just math skills but also illustrates how small we are blipping across the fragile surface of the earth.  Rhumb lines convey hope for the journey ahead, appreciation for how far we’ve come, and focus on the path we’re currently traveling on this great circle.  I’m surely not the only one to pluck that analogy out of this fundamental of navigation, but I’ll celebrate having gotten here eventually.

    • Frogs and All

      Yesterday, after thirteen lucky years together, our black lab Bodhi took his last breath.  Forgive me for this brief eulogy.

      There was the time you dug up every tulip bulb I’d just planted because you smelled the bone meal I used to fertilize them.

      There was the winter when we thought you escaped and were lost and drove around the neighborhood and then the town trying to find you late into the night, only to realize that you were lying under the shed all along.

      There were the countless questionable dining choices you made over the years on underwear, the extra ingredients in the cat litter, various leather goods and your favorite, flattened frog roadkill. The ongoing battle with the cats where they’d eat your food so you’d eat theirs. I respected that.

      I’ll miss those 10 PM power walks we’d do, and admit I don’t walk as much as I did when you were healthy. Back when you were a teenager you’d occasionally charge towards the woods, chasing a rabbit or a black bear or maybe a zombie; I was never really sure. I learned to anticipate those abrupt maneuvers and would spool out retractable leash like I was running out line on a marlin.

      Your best move was late night hide and seek. Pretty clever of you, being a black lab on a moonless night standing perfectly still when we let you out, until we gave up and went in for a flashlight. Even then you were usually found in the very last place I’d look for you.

      The pool filter won’t be the same without a full season of black fur clogging it up. You were one hell of a water dog, and swam so much you’d get ear infections. You always had a look of sheer delight when you would push the screen door to the side and sprint straight to Buzzards Bay, kids in chase behind you. You must have seal somewhere in the family tree.

      We’ll miss you Bodhi. 13 lucky years with you was not quite enough.  We loved you, frogs and all.

    • John Smith and New England

      Captain John Smith is usually associated with Jamestown and Pocahontas.  And he’s most famous for his relationship with the Native American tribes in Virginia.  Smith was proactively aggressive with hostile tribes, but proactively friendly with peaceful tribes.  There are plenty of examples in colonial history where hostile and peaceful tribes weren’t distinguished when it came to aggressive treatment of the Native Americans.  Pocahontas was just 11 when she met Smith, and it’s apparent that the stories of a romance between them are BS.  Whether she actually helped save his life is tougher to determine.

      Smith was an opportunist, but so were a lot of men coming to the virgin coast of North America.  What separated him from many others was his gift for self-promotion and his willingness to take risks to advance his standing.  But he backed up this, let’s call it entrepreneurial spirit with tactical and practical knowledge.  Many point out that the inhabitants of Jamestown didn’t fair so well when Smith went back to England.  Instead of growing and storing food for the harsh winter the settlers of Jamestown held out hope for supplies from England.  When the supplies never showed up as much as 90% of the population of Jamestown starved to death.

      Smith returned to North America in 1614 as ambitious as he was on his original trip.  This time he focused on what is now New England, and his crew worked on whaling and fishing to create a return on investment for those who funded the trip, while Smith and some others focused on mapping the coastline from the Bay of Fundy to the Hudson River.  Smith created a pretty accurate map, and betrayed his ambition by bringing the map to a young Prince Charles to have him choose place names for some of the locations.  A few of these, like the Charles River and Cape Ann, survive to this day.  Smith is credited with coming up with the name “New England” for this region, and named several other places on the map which have stuck.  But if he’d hoped to live on in infamy by naming the islands off Portsmouth, New Hampshire after himself, he’d be sorely disappointed to know they became known as Isle of Shoals.  But then again, Smith did enough to be remembered anyway.

    • Choice White Pines and Good Land

      I have a fascination with maps, and especially old maps, that dates back to when I was a kid tracing the route that we would take on family vacations.  When I started driving myself around I bought maps to help me navigate first the town I lived in and later New England and points beyond.  As a hiker I’d plot out where I’d be able to refill water bottles and camp for the night.  Maps were essential for navigating the world.

      Today GPS has stolen the magic of maps for everyday use in getting from point A to point B, but they can’t completely replace them.  I still plot out trips on Google Maps to plan the most efficient route.  I still love a good map; evident in the title of this blog.  So it was a delight to find a gem of an old map from 1761 created by Joseph Blanchard and Samuel Langdon.  This map has wonderfully random reference points like “From Connecticut River to a Great Pine Tree” and “This way captives have been carried by the Indians”.  This is a map you can fall in love with.

      Joseph Blanchard was born in the Nashua area and served as a Colonel during the French and Indian War.  He teamed with Samuel Langdon to create this map, which was published after Blanchard’s death.  It’s an amazing time capsule that highlights some contentious early days in our colonial history.  For me, the part of the map I love the most is in the present-day Plainfield/Montcalm area where the map designers noted “choice white pines and good land”.  A name like Montcalm jumps out if you’re talking about the French & Indian War, but apparently it’s not what the selectmen in that town were striving for when they named it.

      If you search online you’ll find there are a couple of versions of the map available for  viewing.  The black and white version I have above, and a color version, a portion of which I show below.  The towns have mostly remained the same, with a few splitting into a multiple towns along the way.  The rivers are fairly accurate, which is notable since these were the superhighways of the day.  The map reaches as far west as Schenectady and as for North as Quebec.  This territory was ground zero in the French and Indian War, and the wars with the French that preceded it.  It would be important again during the early years of the Revolutionary War.  I’ve had the opportunity to travel most of this region over the years, and spend a lot of time writing about it in this blog.  So this map put a spell on me that I haven’t shaken loose from just yet.

      “The paradox of mapmaking… is that as soon as you begin shrinking a geography down to usable size, you necessarily are forced to misrepresent it. By making choices about what to include and what to leave out, you change the map from a document faithfully documenting an area to one furthering a particular point of view.” – Michael Blanding, The Map Thief

      Blanchard and Langdon created a map that clearly furthered a point of view, lending credence to Blanding’s observation. The history buff in me delights in reading it. Would it look the same if a Native American warrior had drawn it? Surely not. But the map no longer serves the purpose of furthering a point of view as much as it creates a snapshot of what the map’s creators were thinking at the time. Either way it’s a fascinating dance across time.

    • Downpours and Rainbows

      On Friday I drove through a downpour. A wall of water driving so hard to the ground that it looked like a thick fog as I drove into it. Rain so hard it creates whiteout conditions on your windshield. Cars around me reacted as I did by immediately slowing down, flipping the wipers to their fastest setting and a quick glance in the mirror to see what’s driving up on you. Some folks do better in this than others and like me keep going at a much reduced speed until it passes. Others, perhaps with vision problems or a less forgiving car pull over into the breakdown lane. Drive long enough and you’ll inevitably experience this a few times, and indeed I have.

      Ohio, 2015 driving a rental car from Columbus to Cincinnati I hit sustained rain so hard and steady that highway traffic came to a crawl. Worst I’d ever experienced. Even worse than Stockbridge 2011 on I-84 North approaching the Massachusetts border with intense, heavy sheets of rain pounding the windshield. I got to the rest area in Charlton and they were broadcasting tornado warnings. Sure enough one crossed I-84 shortly after I’d driven through that spot. I think back on my timing that day quite a lot, and look at where it crossed whenever I drive through.

      Back to Friday, and I-88 westbound through Otego. Down below 45 MPH for a stretch with blinding truck spray making it all but impossible to see. Pressing on the rain abated enough to improve visibility and then I was through the other side. Intense sunshine from the late afternoon sun replaced the rain and I quickly put on my sunglasses. Knowing this combination well I glanced in the rear view mirror and sure enough there it was. I smiled at the timing of the Wells Bridge rest stop approaching I pulled in and took a quick photo.

      They say things are darkest before the dawn. Friday offered a new twist on that, with the rain hardest before Mother Nature rewarded us with a rainbow. I’d paid my penance for the view, while those heading eastbound had the reward (the better view) first only to drive into the storm afterwards. There’s probably an analogy to explore there, but it’s best to be on my way.