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 […]
Make a Christmas tree farm visit a new family ritual! Just add a saw, snow, and a hillside filled with balsam, Fraser fir, and Scotch pine.
A massive set of iron gates guards the western flank of the College Green at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The Van Wickle Gates, ornately decorated with the university seal and gilded lions, anchored by stone and brick pillars, remain closed for virtually the entire year. Each fall, though, by tradition, the center gates […]
View a slide show from photographer Smari’s book on Walden: A Year. If you come early enough on a summer morning to Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, you get a sense of where Henry David Thoreau lived, and what he lived for. Light slants through the towering pines on the southeastern shore, glittering on the […]
Chester-Hadlyme Ferry Apr. 1-Nov. 30; $3 per vehicle, $1 pedestrians. Rte. 148, Hadlyme or Chester, CT 860-443-3856; ct.gov/dot Connecticut Audubon Society 1361 Main St., Glastonbury, CT 860-633-8402; ctaudubon.org Connecticut River Expeditions One-and-a-half-hour cruises; call or visit Web site for additional excursion packages and schedules. 67 Main St., Essex, CT 860-662-0577; ctriverexpeditions.orgGet Our FREE Yankee Best […]
Fifteen years ago, The Nature Conservancy included a surprising entry on its list of the Western Hemisphere’s 40 “Last Great Places”: the Connecticut River tidelands. Surprising, because the salt marshes and tidal flats at the mouth of New England’s longest river spread through a portion of the busy I-95 corridor of one of the most […]
In northern New England there are really five seasons. Some would say Indian summer and January thaw, too, which add to the rhythm of most years, but they’re inconsistent and ethereal. Mud season, though, is real, its own thing. The roads around here have been posted with a six-ton limit for a few weeks now, […]
Belonging to a ski club is about much more than skiing.
Behind the romance of curling woodsmoke, being a logger is one tough profession. Our wood chart shows you the relative heat values of New England’s fuel woods. You see the woodpiles everywhere around here, tidy rows covered by old corrugated roofing panels, sprawling jumbles beneath blue plastic tarps, glimpses of neatly stacked cordwood on back […]
Here in northern New England, the color comes on slowly, almost furtively. The first leaves turn — on diseased and dying trees — in late July, unbelievably, amid the suffocating lushness of high summer. By mid-August the early sumacs and swamp maples have joined in, and the slide is on despite the heat. Autumn‘s rapidly […]
The river flows north out of wild and remote Maine headwaters: Allagash Lake, Chamberlain Lake, Eagle Lake, where Thoreau once camped. Below Chase Rapids, the current quickens and turns riverine; the lakes become smaller and farther apart. By the time it joins with the St. John some 92 miles after starting out, the Allagash runs […]
Twenty-six years after the film, the image still lingers: Henry Fonda and Kate Hepburn, in the twilight of their lives, come for another glorious summer on Golden Pond. The movie and its 10 Oscar nominations created a valentine to a certain kind of timelessness, and a certain kind of lake. It was based on screenwriter […]
