Kearsarge

I call it “Kearsarge” and it dominates the view westward through our picture window from my recliner where I’d been spending a lot of time recovering from leg surgery. It wasn’t always called that, however. An old woman who owned a property I managed way back in the 20th century called it “Pequawket Mountain,” and that was the official name for it until 1957, the year it officially became “Kearsarge North.”

Why, though? New Hampshire already had a Mount Kearsarge in Merrimack County and what was wrong with “Pequawket Mountain”? That’s what the Pequawket Indians, the local Abenaki branch living in Fryeburg and Conway, called it. It’s one of the most prominent peaks looking west from Fryeburg and Lovell. A trail leading to the top begins in village of Kearsarge which is part of Conway, NH. Perhaps the village people pressured whatever official body decided such things to rename it.

From my property, the mountain is almost due west and its profile is classic. Its southern slope is a long, straight, thirty-degree diagonal leading to the summit after which it drops off with pleasing symmetry to the north for about a third the length of the southern slope. The effect is similar to a wave. As a child, before I ever saw Kearsarge, I drew mountains in almost exactly those relative dimensions. The profile seen from Kezar Lake five miles north of me is similar and I have taken many photographs from both venues. When seen from Fryeburg Village, Kearsarge’s profile is quite different — more a rounded dome than a wave. 

Last October, Kearsarge seemed to bend light at sunset

In early March, the sun sets right behind Kearsarge. I mark seasonal progress by how far north of it the sun descends each evening. By the summer solstice, sunsets will have proceeded northward past Mount Washington to the Baldfaces before turning back southward again until the winter solstice. Often I see stunning displays of light, clouds, colors, and mists too beautiful to describe. Afternoon thunderstorms come in over those mountains too, and my favorite sunsets occur when they break up just as the sun is nearing the horizon. Its rays poke through the mists just before it drops behind again.

Rain squall one evening last summer

Never do I tire of watching all this, and it’s not just the sunsets. Our house is perched on the side of Christian Hill in Lovell which rises to our east. I don’t see rays of sun until after they have first lit up the eastern slopes of Kearsarge and the other mountains. It’s quite stunning after a winter storm during which snow or ice coats every branch of every tree on every mountain. The rising sun lights up each slope — first the very top and then proceeding downward to the base. On such mornings it seems our Creator is in a good mood and wants to show off.

Mount Washington one morning last year

After our house was built on what was then a fully-treed lot, it took me about ten years to open up the view. Each summer I’d cut enough for eight cords to keep the family warm over winter, then I’d twitch each tree up to the landing with an old Ford 8N farm tractor. It was a lot of work, but I saved money on oil, and there was the added benefit of seeing more mountains each succeeding year. I felt like a sculptor, and the more I did, the more our new house felt like home. 

Kearsarge from North Fryeburg corn field last month

When my wife started hinting at downsizing after the kids moved out, I knew I would have a hard time ever selling this place. I’d prefer to die here.

Kearsarge is one of the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Maine, which are relatively young compared to the Green Mountains of Vermont further west. According to prevailing geological opinion, the two ranges were formed by different mountain-building processes. The White Mountains were formed over 100 million years ago as subsurface magma intrusions later exposed by plate tectonics, glaciation, and other erosional processes. The Green Mountains were formed about 400 million years ago when tropical shorelines of an ancient sea were folded upward by continental drift and then also eroded by glaciers.

It’s hard to wrap my mind around such time spans but I keep trying. Four times, glaciers covered those mountains with ice over a mile thick above them, lastly only 20,000 years ago. The earliest humans we know of were in the area only13,000 years ago. Viewed from Lovell, Kearsarge is almost completely tree-covered except for areas recently clearcut. During winter, snow reflects sunlight back to me from those scars and it takes years for newer growth to cover them. They remind me of scars on my head when my mother exposed them using hair clippers to give me a “wiffle” after school let out for summer. By September, those scars were covered too.

My Favorite Mug

I didn’t want to bother St. Anthony to help me look for my coffee mug. For two days it was lost and I thought I looked everywhere, but then I found it so obviously I hadn’t. It’s a “Big Apple” mug — red plastic with a black cover and it fits well in my hand. It also fits in the cup holders of both my truck and car and it’s an important part of my life. My hand knows right where to go for a sip without my brain having to instruct it.

“Big Apple” has nothing to do with New York City lest readers from places outside Maine get that impression. It’s the name given to a chain of convenience stores in Maine and New Hampshire begun by the CN Brown Heating Oil Company way back in the twentieth century. Carleton N. Brown, for whom the company is named, lived on Christian Hill Road where I live now and I knew his daughter, Susie. Her daughter and my three were playmates, but that association has little to do with my attachment to that coffee mug. Like I said, it fits in my hand nicely. It’s comfortable. There’s a place on the rim of its black cover that melted in the dishwasher drying cycle sometime in the 90s and my thumb goes there automatically when I drink from it. I don’t have that dishwasher anymore — brought it to the Lovell dump years ago — but I still have the mug.

Everyone knows LL Bean is a Maine-based store. Smaller, but also unique to Maine are Reny's Department Stores and Big Apple Stores. I have an even older Big Apple mug that I keep at our South Portland house. It’s also red and black, but has a more uniform shape — made in the days before vehicles came with cup holders. It’s shorter, without that narrow part moulded into the bottom to fit cup holders. It fit on the dashboard of three different pickup trucks I drove back then, but not in the cup holders of my present vehicles. I use it only for afternoon tea which I tend to drink in the house or out on the deck. I also have a newer-vintage Big Apple mug down there for morning coffee and for traveling. I used to have about ten of them, but now I'm down to three.

All of them fit under the new Keurig machines we have in both houses too. I like my coffee dark while my wife likes hers medium, and since I was always up first to make the coffee when we had one of those old coffeemakers, I brewed it dark. “You can put more cream in yours,” I’d suggest to her, but she went out and bought those Keurigs. Each cup tends to be more expensive, but we get it the way we like it: Green Mountain Dark Magic for me and Dunkin Donuts for her. They’re extravagant, I know, but coffee is important. I have three mugfuls in the morning. Then it’s one cup of tea in the afternoon, a glass of red wine with dinner and another for dessert. 

When getting my twice-a-year teeth cleaning, Amy, my hygienist asks me if I drink coffee, tea or red wine, which stain teeth. “Yes,” I respond, “All three, and I have no intention of stopping any, ever.”

But back to St. Anthony. My wife nearly always suggests a prayer to him when I lose something because he’s the patron saint of lost things, she says. I’m not a true believer in that stuff but I have to admit, two valuable items I thought were gone forever turned up after she prayed to him. One was my first pair of prescription glasses.

We were on our boat in Kezar Lake and we pulled up onto a remote beach for a swim. I took off my glasses with their red lanyard and put them on the bow before diving in, but didn’t put them back on when we left. Later, when I noticed they were missing, I remembered where I’d left them and figured they were at the bottom in upper bay, which is the deepest part — over 160 feet. I imagined they bounced off the bow as we raced back to the marina over choppy water. For the next two weeks I wore old drugstore glasses and made another appointment with the optometrist. Each time I complained about them, my wife offered up another prayer. Then I was out for a boat ride with a client/friend and asked him to go over close to that beach. There they were with their red lanyard on the sandy bottom in about three feet of water.

While loading a pile of brush into my truck last summer, I swatted a bug near my ear and knocked one of my tiny hearing aids into the brush pile I was standing in. I had paid $5600 for both a year before, so I carefully examined every limb I loaded, but couldn’t find it. My wife again suggested St. Anthony, but again I was skeptical. She went with me to unload at the dump, and together we examined each limb carefully as we offloaded — and suddenly there on the tailgate was my $2800 hearing aid.

Coincidence? Who knows? Thank you St. Anthony.

Cold Morning Muse

Moonset over Chatham, NH

So cold it was the other morning the leaves of my wife’s rhododendrons were curled up. The previous night’s full moon lit surrounding woods with silver and it’s nearly always frigid under a full moon in a Maine winter. The sun had been up an hour and I should have gone out to run, but I decided to wait ’til noon. My iPhone app said it would be 22 degrees by then and my ears wouldn’t freeze too badly. Could wear a hat I suppose, but I don’t like to.

The Moats and Mt. Kearsarge

Cold winter mornings put me in writing mood and that’s what I planned. By noon I’d feel like getting up to stretch my muscles and clear my head. Running in cold air helps that. It was time to renew work on a big writing project I had put down last spring because I had to get away from it. I was so far into it all winter that I couldn’t see it whole. So immersed was I in its parts that it wasn’t clear how they’d fit together and flow and I hoped my six-month respite would remedy that.

The Baldfaces in winter

My workspace in our Lovell house is an upstairs office, and it was a mess. I don’t let my wife clean in there so everything had a layer of light-gray dust. Cobwebs formed in the windows and mustiness assaulted the nostrils of anyone entering. Anything touched would leave fingers chalky. Clutter covered my desk and every other horizontal surface. Boxes spilled out of the closet prevented closing its bi-fold doors. It’s a former bedroom and was always neat and clean when it belonged to my daughter - and she went off to college twenty years ago. I had cleaned it up before, but I couldn’t remember the last time. Organizing my writing project would take several weeks at least and attempts to do it in an unorganized environment would probably retard the effort.

Winter sunset over Jackson, NH

In case the reader get an impression that I haven't labored in my office for a long time, let me say that I have a high tolerance for messy work environments. However, it had deteriorated to the point where even I couldn’t stand it anymore. Cleaning up my sorry space should only have taken an afternoon, but so many old papers and pictures were unearthed to re-read and re-examine that it took me two days. Such textual and visual remnants of times gone by evoked memories and emotions - most good, some not, but all of them vestiges of ordinary life. I had to feel them and let them go. Some of these sentimental remnants I saved, but the bulk of them went to the dump along with old computer equipment, old files I would never need (I hope), and even some old photographs. These last were images that looked great on a computer screen, but lost something when I sent them out to be printed as eight-by-tens. There was enough old stuff to fill two trash barrels, which I immediately took to the dump lest I change my mind and retrieve any of it.

The back field in winter

My office windows overlook a back field I spent seven years clearing with my my old chainsaw and a 1949 Ford 8N tractor. Never do I tire of looking at the view all that clearing exposed. I cut about eight cords a year to heat the house each winter until I opened up the woods as much as I wanted. All four children have been gone for several years and we don’t really need all this space which we now heat with oil. My wife would like to downsize - and I see the logic in that, but I like it here. Some of my life’s labors haven’t produced much but that long labor did. Where else would I be able to look out on such a beautiful result? Someday I’ll leave, but knowing me, I might put it off so long that I’ll do so horizontally.

August sunset over Mt. Washington, NH

All photos are views I see from my office. Be hard to leave this.