New England hard cider was once a fixture in every farmhouse basement. Now, brands like Farnum Hill Ciders are ushering in a comeback.
Jim Collins
Magazine
First Light: The Art of the Sail
As Robbie Doyle likes to say, he didn’t open a sail loft in Marblehead because the area needed another sailmaker. In 1982, the centuries-old tradition along Massachusetts’ North Shore was still quietly humming along; when Doyle started his company, 10 lofts operated in and around Marblehead. Doyle opened a sail loft because he thought he […]
Magazine
The Guide and the Allagash
Read more: Wooden and Canvas Canoes This Yankee Classic is from July/August 2001 Gil Gilpatrick lifts the last of the coolers into his varnished cedar canoe and shoves off from the banks of a rutted logging road, down Indian Stream. The stream emerges from a culvert behind him; ahead of him it curves and slips […]
Yankee
Wood and Canvas Canoes
Twenty years ago I paddled down the St. John River in northern Maine on an eight-day wilderness canoe trip. I remember much about the rhythm of that ice-out trip: how the eight of us put in below Baker Lake into a shallow, smooth current. The water quickened and grew more powerful with each gathering day, […]
SLIDE SHOW: Train Photos with Pinhole Camera by Brandon Dole I’ve carried two clear memories of trains with me from the years I spent growing up in Walpole, New Hampshire. In one of them, I’m 12 years old, crouched along a gravel embankment with a couple of boys from North Walpole, waiting for a northbound […]
New Hampshire
Orange, NH: The Town Party
Read more: Small-Town Holiday Celebrations There are layers in every town that touch and connect its residents. Ritual, communal gathering, collective memory: In the New Hampshire town where I live, those layers are almost visible in our annual town Christmas party. I think of them most strongly at the end of the party, when, by […]
New England
New England Hawk Migration | Watching the Skies
Each fall, as thousands of raptors fly southward over New England, hundreds of volunteers watch and keep count. On a cold October morning at Lighthouse Point in Connecticut, Bill Banks stands in an open field and squints into a brightening sky. The distant roar of traffic along the I-95 corridor washes over him. The sun, […]
I returned to my hometown this week. The Walpole, New Hampshire, “Old Home Days” committee had invited me to give a reading at the library. I arrived early enough to catch the end of the parade and let the familiar landmarks settle in: the big shade trees and stately white Colonial homes lining Main Street, […]
Massachusetts
Chatham, MA: Cape Cod Baseball
On a sultry Fourth of July evening in the Cape Cod town of Chatham, a red sun drops beyond the tall, dark trees behind the left-field scoreboard. Red-white-and-blue bunting drapes the length of the outfield fence. The evening sky, its lacy clouds edged in pink, gives the warm, feel-good sense of a Maxfield Parrish painting; […]
Living
Painting Lake Champlain
This May, an extraordinary traveling art exhibit will begin its six-month celebration of Lake Champlain, the lake that Samuel de Champlain first explored 400 years ago. The exhibit–39 pieces of art, most of them paintings–was created by contemporary artists living and working in Vermont. I had the good fortune of seeing the collection come together […]
Magazine
Stone Wall Defender Robert Thorson
SLIDE SHOW: New England stone walls by William Hubbell, from Good Fences: A Pictorial History of New England’s Stone Walls (Down East Books, 2006; $29.95) When geologist Robert Thorson came to work at the University of Connecticut in 1984, he was smitten by stone walls. In all his travels–from Minnesota to the Pacific Northwest to […]
Living
Hockey Fever
I like almost everything about pond hockey: the potluck quality of the players (young and old, male and female), the 12-on-12 games that last all afternoon, the universally acknowledged rules (goals marked by winter boots a hockey-stick length apart) and rituals (teams sorted by sticks gathered and tossed into two random piles, to be collected […]