"Winnipesaukee - A Potpourri" - E. Palmer Clarke

[mcdude]

LONG ISLAND FOLKS
Chapter 23.
(For My Mother)

Long Island, now, is essentially an island of woods. The island road, from the bridge at Moultonboro Neck to the Greene House at its southern end, winds beneath beautiful beeches and birches and oaks and pines - and skirts, during its three or four miles, but few cleared acres. These are the farms that once were among the most productive in New Hampshire. But times change, and the farms today, where planting is done at all, are only subsistence farms. Even these are for the benefit, largely, of those who, like myself, are summer visitors, and the old farmhouses , or the sites of those that have gone with the years, echo each summer with the laughter of extra-state visitors, some of whom are enjoying Winnipesaukee for the first time; others, who have been lured there year after year by her charms. It is not to the road and the cleared acres that my mind turns when I think of Long Island. Rather it is too the magnificent woods, first growth timber largely, with a wildness that I enjoy, the sort of wildness that from being a city dweller fifty weeks in the year I find a bit eerie when, just at the dusk, an owl, stirring in a tree for his night’s rounds, demands “Who-oo-oo?” Or when the inimitable shriek of the loon sounds in the cove close at hand. Here, too, the drumming of the woodcock, or the sudden snapping of twigs under the feet of a young deer impress the uninitiated with a new sense of the values of things, and the primitive things, if one is of that sort, become the first things - things that through a winter’s waiting for this holiday, will bring him back again, holding out, so to speak, like Oliver Twist, his bowl for more.

Such should be the reaction from any holiday worth having. I know two men, brothers, whose annual holiday, usually of two weeks’ duration, consists of getting into an automobile and driving 4,000 miles in the two weeks, coming home more in need of the vacation than when they set out. On the other hand, I know two men, brothers also, who spent a like length of time on Lake Sunapee, fishing every day and only fishing. From their tent to their boat, day after day, for two weeks, without asking a question as to who lived here or there and already proposing that next year they try Squam because the fishing is better.

I fished, too, at Winnipesaukee. At least I rowed about four miles into the lake and sat there with a line overboard while the fish enjoyed the frogs’ legs and the hellgrammites and the crawfish I had placed on my hook, But I am going back to Long Island because there is a piece of rock in the driveway that I suspect was brought down by the glacier from the Laurentian Mountains. I couldn’t break it with my sledgehammer last year, and I want to try it again this year. I am going back because we found three queer lizards in the punky wood of an old oak stump, and I want to plant with checkerberry and rattlesnake plantain and partridge berry and princes’ pine and moss - my New Hampshire in New Haven.

And more than all of these, I want to meet the folks. Long Island folks of the ‘30s and the ‘50s and the ‘80s and the early 1900s - those people who built the first houses on the island. They will not be on the road, unless at dusk I shall find them there, but I know that even at high noon I’ll see them in the woods. I have met them this winter - in a general way - and now I want to know them better. Uriah, for example, I know will not be in the road - he must have taken to the woods during the summer boarder era, and I feel very certain that that Virginia car speeding down the road to Harry Brown’s hotel did not encourage his emergence. Uriah was not the sort to take a chance.

There is a story of Uriah that I like. And I think, in spite of the story, that I would enjoy him, for there is a touch of something very fundamental in it. Uriah, it seems, owned a farm halfway down the island road - a good farm, with high ground commanding a splendid view of the lake, and the Ossipees to the northeast. Doctor Smith, looking for a small farm for himself, persuaded Uriah to sell a few acres from his farm, and, agreed on price and terms, the doctor gave Uriah his cheque. A winter passed, and when, in the Spring, the good doctor arrived to superintend the building of his own farmhouse, Uriah approached him and inquired whether he would be able during the next month to pay the note he had given for the land. “Note!” exclaimed the doctor, “why you - “ and I am informed that a cavalry sergeant would have blushed. “That was no note, that was a cheque! And you had better get it into a bank soon or there will be no money left to pay it with.” The cheque went into Laconia that morning, and it may have been to make up the lost interest that Uriah took to selling worms for fishing to the summer boarders at Island Home, at the rate of two for one cent, the fisherman to do his own digging - and Uriah to count.


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The tall, lean man, bronzed with summer sun and winter wind, with one brown eye and one blue, and a kindly light in both, though one is glass, I shall meet in my woods, carrying a gun, will be Robert Lamprey - less a farmer than a hunter, in spite of his prize corn. For with nine* children to feed he most often take to the wood, or to the lake. (*I may have underestimated Robert. One of his nieces this summer mentioned his twenty-one children. E.P.C.) Robert seems to have had a rare sense of fun, shrewd Yankee fun, wholesome and hearty. Bald as a ball, he wears his wig - his new black one. And even the glass eye laughs as he tells of the sale of his old brown one to Sam Jones. It would not fit Sam as it should, and with a native thrift, rather than admit he had been bested, Same wore that wig for years, tied to his head with a starched brown shoestring which passed beneath his chin, ludicrous in the sharp contrast it made with his white beard.

And if I meet a lady in the woods it will probably be Arvilla Lamprey, Robert’s sister-in-law, the lady who on August 1, 1872 wrote from Long Island the letter to her daughter I have on my desk before me. “Our folks,” she writes, “commenced haying here yesterday. Horace and Willie and John Hayes are helping them. Horace has done his haying, all but his meadow. Ben helped him.”

She goes on “I will now have a history of my journey home. After leaving you at the Depot at North Reading I got to South Lawrence all right. Stopped there till twenty minutes past one and then took the train to Dover. I asked the conductor if I should have to change cars between there and Alton Bay and he said no, if I would take the back car of all, which I did when I got to Exeter and that carried me to Alton Bay. I then took the Mount Washington and expected to get home soon, but when we got to Wolfeboro we found that the Lake (The Lady of the Lake - another steamer) had left a large party in the forenoon and had promised to come and get them at three o’clock but did not come, and so the Mount Washington took them to the Weirs and by that means didn’t go up in this broad (to the west of Long Island) but said I could come down in the morning with them and they would whistle for someone to came after me. I got into Center Harbor to Lettice’s (her sister-in-law) about dark. I thought it would be wet getting out into the little boat the next morning because it looked like rain, and so about seven o’clock I started out and went down to Horace’s afoot.” (Five miles from Center Harbor to her son’s home on Moultonboro Neck.)

These, then, are the folks I shall meet in the woods on Long Island. How interesting it would be to go out in the Duck Trap with Uncle Robert in that queer boat of his, piled high with brush to resemble a small wooded rock, from which he shoots duck for dinner, and loons for sport and to show his prowess. Or better yet, since some of it would taste so fine this minute, what sport it would be to watch John Brown’s wife making her famous cheese. There is a Lorelei on Long Island - she is continuously combing her golden hair and singing her golden song, and I am drifting - too slowly - down the weeks to her shores.”

Poem by E. Palmer Clarke