North of Concord

I wrote this in June - the vegetation is different today than it was then, but the road is the same.

One of the things I’ve grown to love about living in the Upper Valley is the road home. It seems that most often when we have been away we end up returning on Interstate 89. Last weekend we went to Boston for a graduation party and returned in the late afternoon of a perfect spring day. I remembered my first visit to the area almost fifteen years ago up the same highway. Wondrously, nothing has changed.

The road slopes upward from Concord. You don’t notice the other changes at first. There are seven cars heading north with us at Hopkinton where the mountains start peeking out above the trees. At first you only catch glimpses of them and then they slip back behind the trees. If you are not looking, you can miss them at first.

Five cars exit toward Henniker, leaving us and only one other car in sight. The highway suddenly feels different. We round a bend and the land falls away, exposing a wide vista, a range of low mountain peaks you can’t miss, though they are soon hidden behind the trees again. This section of the highway always makes me feel as if I’ve crossed a border, as if I’ve entered a different region. Though the peaks are not visible again until exit 6 for Contoocook, I know they are there and I feel as if I have left the cities and the suburbs and the trafficked places behind.

Road signs tick off the miles in increments of two tenths of a mile. North 89, 13.8 is followed by North 89, 14. The bridges are all carefully numbered as well; bridge 29 occurs at mile 27.2. In this well-watered region there is a bridge almost every mile. Signs indicate the mileage to Warner, New London, Sutton, Bradford, Grantham, Springfield, Kearsarge, Sunapee - old English names interspersed with names created from Native American languages. Exits are few and usually look like country roads. There is only one fast food restaurant on the 60 mile highway between Concord and Lebanon and no billboards, of course. We pass only two trucks, one a lumber truck carrying roofbeams and one an Atlas moving van.

Further north, Kearsarge Mountain becomes visible. As the road curves the mountain seems to move, now to the right of the highway, now to the left. The forested hillside is mottled with a dozen shades of green, patchy with sun and cloud-shadow. The bright new greens of the leafy trees contrast sharply with the gray-green needles of the pines . The occasional fragile birch flutters its yellowy leaves lightly. A cell phone tower, badly disguised as a fir tree, rises awkwardly above the natural treetops, but little else disturbs the pristine landscape. Moose crossing signs replace the deer crossing signs we saw near Concord. There are no moose today though we pass a dead porcupine on the shoulder of the road, an unfortunate, spiky mound.

The sky is big today, not like a Mid Western sky with its low horizon, but bright blue and filled with cirro-cumulus clouds that try to tower but become wispy and distracted at the edges and drift apart. For long stretches the dense forests on the sides of the highway turn the road into a corridor, a tunnel with the roof lifted off. The occasional breaks in the trees most often are filled with water. There are bogs punctuated with dead trees, gray and straight as telephone poles growing multiple knobby arms, lakes dotted with small piney islands, small rivers and brooks that disappear under the roadway.

I think every time I drive this stretch that living in northern New England is like living on a cul-de-sac. Few people come here except those who belong here. We are not, like Dayton or Indianapolis, on the way to anywhere, unless you count the Canadian border. People come here to vacation then turn around and go back or they come here to stay like we did.

The last major landmark before home is a rest area on a granite outcropping above the highway. Then the exits begin to become more frequent again as we pass the tiny Whaleback Ski Area, the Upper Valley Humane Society. Signs for exit 16 display the name "Purmort", a made-up name taken from the name of an early settler in order to meet naming conventions for interstate exits. The only Purmort on the map is a family cemetery. The next exit is Methodist Hill which we use in good weather. We cross over the interstate, down a road that looks like a wrong turn to nowhere and begin the steep climb up the country road that will take us over the hill into Plainfield and then home. It’s good to be back.