Christina Tree’s travel writing has shown New England to the world. And after 50 years, she’s still hitting the road in search of new adventures because, as she puts it, “I never wanted to be left behind.”
By Mel Allen
Apr 13 2018
One day in July 1968, Christina Tree, a freshly hired assistant travel editor for The Boston Globe, drove into Ogunquit, Maine, to report her first story. Actually, a friend was driving: The 23-year-old Tree owned a hastily bought powder-blue stick-shift VW Bug, but she had passed her driving test only a few days earlier on an automatic and did not know how to drive this one.
Among the questions the Globe asked before hiring her, an obvious one had been missed: Could she drive?
Up until that point, Tree hadn’t needed a car to find adventure. She grew up in New York City, and on her last night before moving to Boston she had walked over the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 in the morning, and then went to Sloppy Louie’s in the Fulton Fish Market for chowder. She called a tugboat company, saying she was a writer for The Boston Globe and wanted to see life on a tugboat for a potential story. At dawn she was onboard, eating breakfast with the crew, watching them bring in the ocean liner New Amsterdam. “That was my good-bye to New York,” she recalls.
In Ogunquit, which she knew from childhood vacations, she walked the Marginal Way, drifted in and out of the hotels, and spoke to as many people as she could about what made the beach town special. “I was trying to remember where I used to swim, the nature of the place, the surge of people on weekends,” she says. Fifty years later, what she remembers the most from her first assignment is riding a bicycle up Mount Agamenticus, her basket filled with strawberries, and taking a spill that left her clothes smeared with red—then having to go into a packed Ogunquit Playhouse looking as if she had been mauled. Her challenges did not end there: Her friend could not stay and drove the car back to Boston, leaving the new Globe assistant travel editor to buy a bus ticket home.
A few days later, she wrote her story.
The Abenaki Indians long ago picked a strip of firm beach and white dunes as their “Ogunquit” or “place by the sea.”… Like a high tide, weekend visitors flow in to the wide beach, eddy around the cove shops, studios and restaurants … and then recede, leaving the town much as they found it.
She wrote about how the Marginal Way had come to be, and about the now-forgotten trolleys that ran through town after the turn of the century. She suggested places to eat, and where travelers could stay by the sea. She also let readers in on a local secret: Roby Littlefield, a man who helped preserve the beach for public use, still sold strawberries at 35 cents a basket. (Money is left at the counter of the barn while he tends his patch.)
The components of the Chris Tree style were clear from the start: history, to show how the past percolated into the present; crisp observation; bright language; and an insistent curiosity, which led her to offbeat characters away from usual tourist haunts.
Since that first article, she has never stopped telling travel stories. When she became a mother (three sons), she left the Globe to freelance for the paper as well as for Yankee, and to write travel books. She has driven a succession of 10 other cars since the VW and has seen the odometers spin to just shy of a million miles—nearly all in the service of showing off New England to the world. On a rotating basis, she returns to its states—especially Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire—to find out what is new, what has changed, what stories she may be missing, year after year. A Chris Tree sighting in many towns has become as much a part of the local calendar as their festivals. “We used to joke that I could have my car break down on any road anywhere,” she says, “and I’d be able to call someone who lived nearby.”
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That “we” refers to Chris’s husband of 46 years, Bill Davis, who was a Globe travel editor for more than three decades. The three of us are sitting together on a sunny October morning in the living room of the late-19th-century house they bought in 1975 on a quiet Cambridge, Massachusetts, street. They purchased the house with what Chris calls her “windfall advance” for what would eventually become Massachusetts: An Explorer’s Guide. Though that initial book enjoyed only modest success, it spawned a seemingly endless flurry of Explorer’s Guide titles by Christina Tree (later written with a tight cadre of coauthors). The first travel guides since the Depression’s WPA books to focus on individual New England states—and the first to go beyond the “go, see, do”formula—they have sold more than 400,000 copies to date. Over the years, Chris also wrote a historical tour of New England (How New England Happened), a lodging guide (Best Places to Stay in New England),and books devoted to back-road trekking and the Maine coast and its islands.
Chris chafes at the caricature of a travel writer as someone who scoots in and out of hotels testing mattresses and peering into bathrooms, all the while scribbling away; who gets chummy with chefs and dines out constantly on the house; or, more recently, who dives into the Internet and writes travelogues via TripAdvisor reviews. “So many people think, Oh, the gravy train,” she says.
She prides herself on being a chronicler of place and an observer of how tourism has shaped the times and culture we live in. She peppers her accounts with history, characters, and local color, while still choosing the places to eat and sleep and visit that she would want to show her friends. For anyone looking for just a quick travel tip, her books can seem daunting: They depart the printer at nearly 600 pages, sometimes more. It’s as if she’s absorbed so much of a destination that she simply has to pour it all out. For her part, Chris says her books are like “recipes with lots of ingredients, so the readers can pick and choose to plan their own discoveries.”
This summer will mark half a century of Chris Tree’s road-tripping through New England. I have known her for a good chunk of that time, and I doubt we ever had a story meeting that did not last at least twice as long as I had anticipated: She always arrived with too many of her “great finds” to fit into any plan I may have made for my day.
I’ve arrived at her home on this fall day to ask how she did it, how she kept searching for new roads, how she kept finding surprises, kept knocking on doors and stepping inside. She is 73; her husband, who has been a frequent travel partner, is 85, beset by shaky knees, and the road for him has gotten harder. Chris has had her own share of health setbacks, but still she heads north. “I’m addicted to puzzling out places,” she explains. “I have to find out about them. I can’t let go of the fun of walking the streets.
“It’s what I do,” she continues. “And I have to go back to see if I still have it right.”
There is definitely a missionary zeal that comes through—what Bill calls “a passion that nobody else will ever have like this.” (Indeed, Chris wrote me recently that she feels her work “provides a noble service by getting readers off their butts and out to enjoy the amazing places and people within easy reach.”)
“She is relentless,” Bill says, smiling. “The most relentless person I know.”
Chris’s hair is short, more gray than not. She is dressed casually in a purple top and sweater and dark slacks. Her face is pixie-like, round and open, with eyes that spark with curiosity. When she tells about her life, she talks fast, her hands rarely still. At times, I struggle to keep up.
Kim Grant knows what this is like. A graduate of Chris’s alma mater, Mount Holyoke College, Kim was recruited in 1984 to help research inns and B&Bs for Best Places to Stay, and later went on to her own travel writing career. In her first meeting with Chris, “anecdotes from her years on the road oozed from every cell,” she tells me via email. “Back stories that would infuse my reviews with detail darted around like pinballs. And they kept coming. I madly scribbled notes. Wait, is that town in the Champlain Valley or the Northeast Kingdom? Wait, which of those two B&Bs was just sold? Wait, wait….”
Chris tells me about being an only child and traveling the world with her mother and her international-banker father. Arriving in each new foreign town, her parents would pore over their Michelin Guide to find where they would stay. Chris would write or draw what she had seen in her journal. She was learning to look around and feel new places through her skin.
When we start talking about her years at the Globe, she and Bill both smile at the memories. There was the time when the two once shared a desk and a typewriter; she was supposed to clear out by 5 p.m. each day, and he would take over at 6. But she was often late to file, and finally Bill sold her his old Smith-Corona for five dollars so they could both work. Then there was her bosses’ brilliant idea to send “the new girl”—who’d had only a few ski lessons on modest Mount Tom—to ski the biggest mountains in New England. Each time she arrived at the base, she would be met by a mountain pro who naturally assumed that a ski writer could easily keep up, no matter how wild the descent.
She tells me about having three sons, spaced only a few years apart, and how, after she left the paper, she would tote them around on the road like a mama kangaroo to the amusement of the people she met. (Her son Tim remembers what it was like when his mother picked him up from summer camp in Maine: “There was never any going straight home. Mom always insisted on making a million stops. It would take us days to drive home.”)
But mostly the story she wants me to know is how she came on the scene to write about New England just as the region was being rediscovered as a major destination, in the late 1960s and through the ’70s. She became an expert on New England’s history in time for the Bicentennial; she immersed herself in B&Bs and small inns just as travelers were starting to look beyond chain hotels and roadside tourist courts. As the outdoors boom began to get under way, she became an adventurer who rafted, canoed, kayaked, biked, hiked, cross-country skied, and joined every inn-to-inn tour imaginable. “I never wanted to be left behind,” she says.
She was there when the grand hotels found new life. She was one of the first to see the potential of Portland’s Old Port, and she was there when new highways opened up the north country, and travelers began to discover that the Maine coast went beyond Bar Harbor. She was there to see old mill towns and old seaports surge into new lives. She was there to see a conservation ethic sweep over New England, and thousands of acres preserved.
These are the stories she loves to tell.
“I was so lucky,” she says. “I just grew with it. I rode the crest of the wave.”
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Not long after my visit to Cambridge, I meet Chris in the southern Vermont town of Brattleboro, which she describes as “a college town without a college.” It’s a blue-sky Friday, with foliage still coloring the hillside. A few weeks ago she put the finishing touches on a new book, Backroads & Byways of Vermont. Today she’s doing a final scouting trip for the next edition of Vermont: An Explorer’s Guide.
I find her in Amy’s Bakery Arts Café on Main Street, sitting by the window. The view looks out to the West River and a mountain—Wantastiquet, she tells me, a touch of pride in her voice, after checking her barely-held-together 2015 edition of the Vermont Explorer’s Guide. She wears a vest over a blue fleece top, jeans, and sneakers. Resting on the table beside the Vermont book is the third edition of Best Places to Stay in New England, as she often re-reads her books when walking through a lodging, to see if her description needs amending. In her hand she holds a 6-by-8-inch notebook. A few words will remind her of what she observes.
Chris sips her coffee and says she slept little the night before. She stayed in a small B&B south of Woodstock, where she had been doing some fact-finding. A few years ago she had taken a tour of this same B&B with its new owners and been impressed enough to include it in the Explorer’s Guide. This time the place felt off-putting, its innkeeper disengaged, and her sleepless night would be offset by the consolation of dropping it from the new edition. This is how she shows displeasure—not with criticism, because she understands how precarious the tourism business can be, but with omission.
Her agenda this morning includes visiting the chamber of commerce to ask what has opened, closed, or moved. There are shops to browse, an art gallery to check in on. There are two B&Bs and one inn to visit, and she has already phoned their innkeepers so as not to take them by surprise. She does not do hit-and-runs.
Outside, she directs my gaze to a massive brick building that in the late 1800s housed the Hotel Brooks. “This is where Rudyard Kipling hung out in Brattleboro with a local doctor,” she says. “The doctor told him about a ship captain in Gloucester, and that gave him the idea for Captains Courageous.” I say that she knows as much about most towns as locals do—it’s as though she has hundreds of hometowns. She replies that her father never owned, always rented. “When I walked with him through neighborhoods,” Chris says, “I felt he owned it all. When you know about a place, you can own it.”
At the Crosby House, she hugs owner Lynn Kuralt, who recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of turning her home into a B&B. They talk about the many years they have known each other. Chris pokes her head into the living room. “Yes,” she says, “I had written ‘marble mantel,’ and there it is.” Kuralt shows Chris a bedroom with a black faux-marble fireplace. “I am sure I stayed in this room,” Chris says. She recalls that Kuralt’s late husband, Tom, had done much of the “amazing” woodwork throughout the house. “This is what I remember, all these touches,” she says. At the end of their visit, the two women walk outside. Kuralt says she hopes to find a buyer soon. “I won’t take that seriously until you tell me sold,” Chris says, then adds, “This may be my swan song, too. But maybe, as long as I can do this”—and she executes three deep knee bends.
The day unfolds with stops and starts, with stories of the road, stories she wants to do. She talks about a new development in Wilmington, Vermont—and did I know what a seventh-generation Vermonter was doing to revitalize White River Junction? She describes, almost as in a reverie, going to the Rockingham Meeting House, and how the woman who greeted her knew so much of its history, and how she told Chris about a country ride that would take her through a covered bridge and past one of the most beautiful small cemeteries she would ever see—all within minutes of the Vermont Country Store and the crowds of people stopping there who wouldn’t know it existed.
The week before, at her home, Chris admitted she was working her way through a low period. She said she had written in her journal two years ago: What am I to do, now that my career is ending and familiar roles no longer apply? Is there any use for all this info in my head? She told me, “I had energy I don’t have anymore. And I had words I don’t have anymore.” In her last story for the Globe, she had misspelled someone’s name. “I was ashamed,” she said. But she had also recently opened boxes and found letters she had received over the years from readers who had been led to unexpected places, and from the staff of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who said nobody had ever captured it so well. “Wow. Such air in my sails.”
Late last summer, Chris and Bill took an 11-day trip through northern Maine. They made a circle along the Washington County coast: up through Grand Lake Stream into Aroostook County, then up into the St. John Valley, then down to Millinocket and along the rugged Golden Road to Moosehead Lake, before ending on the Blue Hill Peninsula.
“I’d drive,” Bill told me, “and it took forever to get anywhere. ‘There’s a dirt road,’ she’d say. ‘What’s down there? Back up! Back up!’”
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
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