Ordinary Time

The Wyeth Hurd family Web site tells me that both Henriette Wyeth Hurd and Carolyn Wyeth were artists in their own right, Henriette being “considered by many art scholars to be one of the great women painters of the  20th century.”  Henriette’s Wikipedia entry is a stub noting that she is a portrait and still life painter, the wife of artist Peter Hurd,  daughter of “illustrator” N. C. Wyeth, sister of artist  Andrew Wyeth, and mother of artist Michael Hurd. Carolyn seems primarily to be known for having taught Jamie to focus on shapes in his art. After her father died in 1945, she cared for her mother for 28 years, taught art, and painted.  “In spite of her avoidance of publicity,” she is thought by some to be “the best painter in the family.” This could be hooey. But I saw none of their work at the Wyeth Center, so I have no way of judging for myself.  Nor does anyone else.   And that does disappoint me.

The High Tide, too, like the Thatcher Brook Inn, was one of those places that calls on you to relax and spend a couple of days, use it as a home base, explore, read, be at peace. I felt a bit like one of those ugly Americans on a tour of my own country – if it’s Wednesday, this must be Camden. I did get to sit on the back porch of our duplex for a little while Thursday morning, despite the coolness. Every porch or deck I’ve ever sat on has offered me a tree to relate to.  This one was big, and just beginning to leaf out. The tiny green leaves, so many of them against the cloudy sky, and the dark bark, looked like a William Morris print, symmetrical and lovely. Then it began to rain, and I came in. My idea of taking a schooner outing in Camden was pretty much scotched by the weather, and besides, there was the Farnsworth in Rockland to see. 

The Farnsworth Art Museum has a nationally recognized collection of American art. The museum's permanent collection Maine in America houses great names in 18th- and 19th-century American art history, including the luminist painter Fitz Hugh Lane and the American impressionist Childe Hassam.  I say great names not just because of their art, but because I really like their names, which sound terribly romantic and not very Yankee at all.  This is no accident.  Artists need cool names. 
 

Fitz Hugh Lane was crippled, probably from polio, though early accounts cite the cause of his paralysis “eating some seeds of the apple peru” while playing in his father’s garden – the “apple peru” being a tomato. His real name was Nathaniel Rogers Lane; for unknown reasons he changed it to Fitz Henry Lane, but someone misremembered it and the misremembered name stuck.  The presence of light in his maritime paintings is indeed striking: the paint seems to glow.  Childe Hassam, who had a bit of a reputation with the ladies, dropped his first name, “Frederick,” at the suggestion of his oft-painted friend, Celia Thaxter, because it sounded more Byronic. (The word "childe" is an archaic term for a knight in training, and is also related to the word "shield." Byron wrote a poem entitled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that was largely about Byron himself.) Their paintings, however, stand on their own.  But the real reason most people come to the Farnsworth is the Wyeth Center, which  exclusively features the works of Andrew, N.C. and Jamie Wyeth – known on their Web site as “America’s first family of art.”

I have a confession to make.  When I planned this trip, I originally intended a pilgrimage to Stockbridge, Massachusetts as well, to see the work of the first American artist who truly captured my imagination – Norman Rockwell.  I am embarrassed about this now, because the general consensus today is that Rockwell’s work is sentimental nostalgia. But when I was a preteen, we got a huge coffee table book full of his Saturday Evening Post covers, and I would pour over pictures like The Marriage License and Girl at Mirror and Going Out.  I had the same feeling viewing the pictures of Norman Rockwell that I had when I walked out of the Sound of Music with my mother years before – that if I just held that image of that singing family crossing the Alps in my heart, my life, too, could become beautiful, heroic, and free from ambiguity. I did not need Clean Makeup from Noxzema to turn me into Cheryl Tiegs; I did not need the pink clamshell of promise from  Mark Eden. What I needed was an artist who could look at me like Norman Rockwell viewed the world:  as essentially wholesome and hopeful and good. But time did not permit a visit to Stockbridge.  

A  love of Andrew Wyeth, “the Painter of the People,” is considered quite respectable these days.  Unless you are an art critic, like Brian O’Doherty. Then it is your duty to note that “his stardom has cannibalized his art to a degree unprecedented by any other artist with pretensions to seriousness.”  In fact, I find to my dismay that “Informed opinion, when it thinks about the matter at all, has removed his art from its genteel inheritance of Eakins and Homer, and relegated it to the company of such an amiable mythmonger as Norman Rockwell.”  So much for my increased artistic sophistication. I think I’ll just go back to knowing what I like.

My mother taught me the art of prolonging a vacation by picking a book up in each place that I stayed on some local subject that intrigued me. I actually acquired The Secret Life of Lobsters in Connecticut, but I bought it in large part because of The Great Lobster Debate. I thought I might get an answer there to my question of why lobsters most certainly taste better in Maine.  As it happens, I ended up giving the book to my mom for her birthday, with the proviso that I get to read it afterwards.  I had first heard about Lobsters on NPR,  and was fascinated by the details about lobster molting and mating in that brief interview of Trevor Corson, as well as amused by the inside story of the now famous Barbie lobster. The author has impressive credentials as an investigative science journalist, and spent two years’ as a commercial fisherman aboard the lobster boat Double Trouble before writing his book. I figured if anyone knew whether lobsters could be happy, he would.

Some pretty interesting things come up when you google “happy lobsters.” For one thing, I learned that my debate with Dave was really only a mild precursor to the currently raging Truly Great Lobster Debate sparked by Whole Foods’ decision to stop selling live lobster, essentially on PETA grounds: first, because they could not ensure them a good quality of life during their transport or their time in the store; and second, because selling live lobsters encourages boiling live lobsters, which is a form of animal torture. The controversy was profiled in a New York Times article  (ironically enough, no longer available without cost from NYT, but published without permission on the Web site of an animal rights organization), where the suggestion was made that Whole Foods was scoring points with sensitive shoppers by discontinuing an item that wasn’t selling well anyway.   I’m not a great fan of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: not since they protested outside Eakin Elementary School, and my second grade daughter came home and announced that a man dressed up as a giant carrot told her her parents were committing child abuse by feeding her meat.  Although I’m all for the humane treatment of sentient creatures –  those we kill for food as well as those we domesticate –this crossed a line with me. It occurred to me to wonder if Trevor Corson had a Web site for his book, and if he blogged: when I found that, I really hit pay dirt.   Corson’s July 2 entry is particularly good at summarizing the ironies of Whole Foods’ humane “solution” to their lobster dilemma.  

I didn’t know quite how to describe it at the time, but reading the reactions of food writer Michael Ruhlman and bad boy chef Anthony Bourdain (such inventive language! Bourdain is clearly the king of nouveau obscene), as well as Corson himself, to the PETA controversy, I can now understand more clearly what infuriated me when Crusader Carrot accosted my child. Messing with my kid’s head, for one thing: but on a larger scale, by the comparison. It offended me that the sufferings of children whose bones had been broken, or who had been locked in closets, or prostituted to support a parent’s crack habit, were being used as a metaphor.  It angered me that my child could have a powerful and important concept that could protect her blurred into uselessness by their rhetoric.  Apparently things haven't changed very much.     

I read enough on Trevor Corson’s web site to conclude I was not likely to get much support for my happy lobster theory from his book; still, I had yet to resolve my Taste question.  Let's face it:  I was interested in the happiness of Paula's tummy more than the well being of homarus americanus.  Trusting that the Internet is more than a series of tubes, despite the pneumatic theories of our senator from Alaska, I took the opportunity to click on the “Ask a question” link, and sent Mr. Corson a query. Perhaps you can settle an argument for me, I began.  I went on to tell him the various theories I had heard for why lobsters from Maine taste better, and threw in a query about large versus small lobsters as well.  I have to say, I'm not sure I can tell you whether size matters, he replied: 

I've heard it all -- big lobsters taste terrible, they taste great, both views expressed with equal conviction. I don't eat big lobsters because we throw those back in Maine.  As for freshness.  I think a live lobster straight out of the sea in the Maine coast in summer or fall has a better chance of being tastier than one in Minnesota in, say, March. Lobsters molt in summer and I prefer the taste of a recently mottled lobster -- there's less meat, but it's usually sweeter. And if it's straight from the sea it's probably been eating a natural diet and running around and whatnot. ...It's hard to imagine that long-term storage doesn't cause at least some deterioration of taste, from changes in or lack of diet or exercise or something.

 

What a charming man.  I shall have to do so indeed.   No hurry, mom.

All across the state of Maine Wednesday afternoon, I picked Venezuelan soot out of my scalp like gritty dandruff. It was a longer trip to the coast than it appeared on Mapquest, because we went through so many small towns.  Maine also gets the award for the most poorly marked highway changes on the trip.  We got close to the shore around five and decided not to take dinner in Belfast, as I had planned, but to go straight to Camden, where we were staying.  Near the water it was chilly enough to want Dave’s Polartec jacket again. I was warm in it, and it made me feel small and protected, which was politically incorrect, but kind of fun.  

The High Tide Inn was a beautiful place and our room was part of a secluded duplex with a view of the water. Inside the Inn itself, where we checked in, a fire was in the fireplace.   We asked our innkeeper what was a good place for dinner. “De-pends,” he said slowly, in that Yankee drawl – different from the drawl you hear in the South, but still laid back and rural. “What do you like?” 

Neither one of us wanted to act like tourists and chime out “Seafood!” so we muttered something like “everything.” Which, of course, me being a foodie and Dave just liking food, we do.

 “Well, have you been into town?” he asked, as if that were the obvious first step. No, we said sheepishly, we came from the north. He looked over his bifocals like a professor who has just been informed that the dog ate both of our term papers. “Well, I suggest you just go down and look around till you find something you like. ‘Twon’t be hard.” And then, indulgently, he gave us a few suggestions.

On our way into Camden we must have seen a dozen other inns and bed and breakfasts; Maine was certainly the place for them.  We parked the car (pahked the cah) and walked around as our host suggested, and then settled on Bayview Lobster, which was, as the name implied, right on the water.  Although we sat on the deck, it was tented over with plastic windows to keep things warm.  Little white Christmas lights swung festively along the rail.  I had been waiting for this – the Coastal Seafood Moment – for the entire trip.  

I could not resist having some mussels for an appetizer – they looked so delicious at the table next to us, where the man and woman sat eating in silence, the food apparently the only good thing between them – fearing, after I ordered these, that they would spoil my appetite.  They did not.  When the lobster came, it was everything I had anticipated it would be – succulent, fresh tasting, sweet, just amazing. I ignored the side dishes altogether: who needed ‘em.

And then came The Great Lobster Debate. 

While I am rhapsodizing over my crustacean, Dave remarks, casually, that there is “really no logical reason a Maine lobster should taste any better than a lobster in the Midwest.”  After all, the freshness is not at issue: they’re live till you cook them. Nor is there any special technique: all you do is drop them in a pot of boiling water.  Why shouldn’t a Red Lobster in Bloomington do that just as well as the Bayview?

“But there must be,” I say. “Otherwise why did I come all the way out here to eat fresh Maine lobster?”  

“Atmosphere?” he suggests.

I begin to get a little defensive.  Certainly my palate is more sophisticated than that. “This is definitely the best lobster I have ever had. There must be a reason.”

“So what is it?” he asks.

I light upon the only possible answer. “I think these lobsters must be happier than the ones at Red Lobster – less traumatized.” 

“Yeah," says Dave. “That must be it.” And giggles. Dave and Jon Stewart: the only two men in my life who can giggle and still be Manly.

We take another perambulation to walk off our happy lobsters, looking at the boats in the harbor.  Dave’s interested in the gear; I pay attention to the names.  About one, the “Too Elusive” from Wilmington, DE,  I spin out an elaborate story. The owner is a credit card profiteer who has bought the boat off the ill-gotten gains of some poor sucker’s too elusive credit card balance, the result of years of paying off only the minimum. I tell Dave he must pirate this boat, take it over “for righteousness sake,” and paint upon it a new name, “Good Credit.” It is his duty. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll do that.”  And giggles.  

We eat ice cream, get chased out of a bookshop, and go home. 

It takes 1000 gallons of water and a ton of coal just to go up Mt. Washington. The coal furnace that is used to make the steam for the engine is not terrifically clean, and with the windows open it doesn’t take long for soot to get everywhere. Venezuelan soot: for some reason Hugh Chávez’ coal burns more efficiently than coal from Virginia. You can feel it as it hit your skin, large grains of black sand, and occasionally the ash is hot. One burns me slightly; it feels like being stung by a horse fly. Oh well. Ash happens.

But the view going up Mt. Washington is gorgeous, and you feel like you are really taking a railway to the moon as the heavy forests give way to scrub pine and rocks, and then just rocks. Except for the occasional patch of snow, the terrain might as well be lunar. Occasionally we see stones piled up in cairns, used to guide hikers in bad weather. Hikers have a ritual way of greeting the train when they see it, the brakeman tells us, that also reinforces the “railway to the moon” metaphor. We see hikers, but none of them are Moonies. 

The air grows colder and colder, and we begin to see less and less. In the museum a large round topographical map depicts the view from the top of Mt. Washington on a clear day – clean out to the coast of Maine. In fact, the peak is shrouded in dense fog 60% of the time. Not something they advertise when you pay for your ticket. Bummer. We are glad we have brought warm clothes – it’s 30 degrees colder at the top of the mountain - or rather, I am glad Dave brought both jacket and sweatshirt, and is willing to lend me one. It feels good to let somebody else be the mommy.  In the 20 minutes they give us before descent (some will stay longer, and take the afternoon train down), we barely have time to clamber to the post that indicates we have reached the summit. I offer to take a picture for the family of four– it is as much as they can do to get all of them together up there for a shot without tumbling over the edge. The woman smiles through chattering teeth.   Despite the flip flops, which give her no grip whatsoever on the uneven stones, she wants to reciprocate. 

The result is one of my favorite shots of the trip. All around us, there’s nothing but desolate wasteland and fog. But we look happy. We are happy. You can’t tell where we’ve been, or where we’re going. We might be completely alone, with no one to rely on but each other. But we’re not, you see. There’s a mysterious Egyptian in the fog. There’s a woman with emergency instructions chained to her wrist, surrounded by friends, living a normal life.  And directly in front of us, pointing the camera, is a mom teetering on a rock in flip flops, and a dad with a front pack chock full o' baby. He steadies her hip with one hand as their four year old tugs on the other, pleading that she has to go. I have fixed these fellow passengers in my memory, letting them grow luminous there.  Is that recognition of beauty and bravery their gift to me, or mine to them?  It does not matter.  What I do know is that they are the ones - the unexpectedly beloved - who will finally save Christmas.

Sylvester Marsh conceived the idea of the Cog Railway after getting lost hiking up the mountain. He’d been having his own midlife crisis, having made a fortune in the meatpacking industry and retiring early, only to find he didn’t have the least idea what to do next. A midlife crisis is uncomfortable, but getting lost on Mt. Washington is dangerous, even now; the climate there can rival Antarctica, and well over a hundred people have died under such circumstances, many of hypothermia. We think wind chill is bad in Minnesota; on Mt. Washington, it can reach -120 degF. The world’s highest wind speed – 231 mph – was recorded on the top of Mt. Washington. Perhaps this is because they don’t have appropriate equipment to record such things in the Himalayas; but it’s still impressive. 

There were two problems that (quite literally) got Marsh’s gears turning: the incredibly steep incline, and the need for an engine that could propel itself up the mountain as the railway was being built. Using cogs wasn’t a new idea; the very first railroad in England had used this “rack and pinion” approach, but it was an old-fashioned solution that had gone out of favor. When Marsh presented his plan to the New Hampshire Legislature, they laughed out loud. One legislator suggested he “might as well build a railway to the Moon.” But they gave him permission to try – with his own money. 

The brakeman gives us a running commentary as we make our ascent. We will go about 4 miles an hour up the mountain, he tells us, and about 6 miles an hour back down – a two hour trip, with a 20 minute stop at the top. Though if you were a workman in the early days, he notes, you could get down a lot quicker on “the Devil’s Shingle.” We had seen pictures in the museum. It looks for all the world like a toboggan, which, with the addition of a cog, essentially it was. The record speed was two and a half minutes. That meant going down this raised wooden trestle railway at about 60 miles per hour. Hey. When the whistle blows, it’s time to go home.   

We sat three or four rows from the front. Ahead of us were two couples evidently traveling together. They plopped themselves down one in front of the other like kids on a school bus and chatted amiably across the seatback. I envied their easy familiarity. The woman closest to us was in her late thirties, I would guess, leggy and athletic-looking, her brown hair drawn up in a pony tale: pretty, though beneath her tan I could see the pockmarks of a youth plagued with acne. On her wrist was a medical emergency bracelet, and I wondered what instructions were on the other side. Was she diabetic? epileptic? hemophiliac? allergic to bee stings?  I’ll never know.      

And why now do I remember these people?  The mysterious man, the family, the couples traveling together? With the exception of the foreign-looking man traveling alone, who is sitting behind me in one of our pictures, I will never see them again. In my memory of that photograph when I first saw it on Dave’s computer, my foreign gentleman looks dazed, unsure of how he got into my camera, anxious and alone. A week later, when I look again on my laptop at home, I find I am the one that looks like a deer caught in the headlights. Is that the real me? I wonder.  What in heaven’s name is going through my head?   

Trains.  A lot of trains.  In one of the little grooves in my gray matter, the Little Engine That Could still runs on her Sunday School track, knowing she has to save Christmas.  I think I can I think I can I think I can.  On another track – probably on a collision course – Descartes furiously pumps at his push-cart.  I think, I am; I think, I am; I think, I am.  Writing grants, I convince myself that it does not matter that the work is not creative: I am, like Thomas,  being a really useful engine. And that justifies my existence. If the train should jump the track, do you want your money back?  Ask my divorce lawyer, and you’ll get one answer; ask Jane and Franklin Pierce, and you’ll get quite another.

In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl says that in both the accuracy and the inaccuracy of memories, we are being told something important about ourselves.  This is not entirely narcissism: it is in that tension between recognizing yourself in someone, and recognizing that that someone is living their own life, outside your understanding and experience, that revelation comes. Sometimes a bad photo is just a bad photo. But in this case I have remembered the feelings mirrored on my own face precisely: I have just given them to somebody else.  This is worth paying attention to as the cog turns, and we climb, tooth by tooth, up the mountain. 

We got to our motel in Bretton Woods around four. Above the Notch was clean, inexpensive, and friendly, and I’d recommend it to anyone - but for pictures we went across the street to the toney Mt. Washington Resort Hotel, sat on the wraparound veranda and pretended we belonged there. There was no need to head to Gorham for a sunset Moose Tour, having bagged a freebie drinking by the roadside in the White Mountain National Forest; still, those of you who don’t lead such charmed lives might want to consider this option. 

A Gentleman of Leisure But what's missing from this picture? Click for another.

Wednesday morning we arrived at 10:30 sharp to claim our reserved tickets for the Cog Railway up Mt. Washington. If Watty Piper - whoever s/he was - had wanted to tell the story of a real Little Engine That Could, this would have been the place to do the research. I will spare you the academic controversy regarding the gender of that engine, and whether the text is sexist because all the big important engines are male or feminist because it empowers women and values children and relationships. For heaven’s sake, it was a Sunday School fable. And like many such fables, boys and girls, it probably did as much harm as good in the world. As we grow into the complex reality of adulthood, we all have to face the fact that in some situations“I think I can” is really not going to cut it. The trick, of course, is figuring out which situations those are.  Anyone who has been through a divorce knows the truth of this. 

The reason a normal engine has so much trouble getting up a mountain is that it is has to be heavy enough to pull the cars behind it, with enough force to generate the friction needed to keep the cars on the track. On the Cog Railway, which has been in near continuous operation since 1869 (it missed a few years during the second World War), the coal-fired steam engine pushes the passenger car up the 6,288 ft mountain; on the way down it serves as an engine brake. There’s a rack running down between the rails, into which a cog gear engages. The engine turns the cog, and the train climbs the mountain tooth by tooth – rather like a hitching a ride on a giant bicycle chain. And here’s an interesting point: unlike conventional trains, at no point during the trip are the engine and the passenger car actually coupled. They go up and down the mountain together companionably, without being hitched. It’s an unusual relationship, but it works. I take some comfort in that.    

The train didn’t actually leave until eleven, so we spent some time in the museum beforehand. There was a video of the history of the Cog, where we joined a foreign-looking man who sat watching by himself - olive skinned, balding, with a silvery beard. I had the notion that he was from Egypt, perhaps, though I can’t tell you why. I thought at first he was waiting for his wife to get out of the restroom or something, but when we boarded the train, he was still alone. My monkey mind ran back and forth in its little cage, speculating. Perhaps he was a businessman traveling in the area, filling up time between appointments. Perhaps he was retired and on a family visit, keeping busy while the grandchildren were in school and his son and daughter-in-law were working. Perhaps he was vacationing by himself. How sad, I thought.   All the lonely people:  where do they all come from?

Most everyone else, I saw, traveled in couples, or as a family. A mom and dad got on with a clingy four year old and a fat baby in a front pack, carrying enough paraphrenalia to be planning a permanent stay on Mt. Washington. The mom looked exhausted. She had remembered to bring jackets for everyone else; she herself wore a t-shirt, old maternity shorts and a pair of flip-flops. It is not hard for me to imagine their night in the hotel together: the baby waking up ever four hours, dad snoring, the four year old wetting the bed. Ah, the joys of the family vacation. It made me tired just to look at her.

Most of Tuesday Dave and I spent on the Kancamagus Highway traveling through the White Mountains. The highway's name comes from Kancamagus "Fearless One," the third and final leader of the Penacook Confederacy of 17 New England tribes unified by his grandfather, Passaconaway (Child of the Bear) in 1627.  Trying to be authentic, we stopped at the P&C in Lincoln (pretending that the initials stood for  Penacook Confederacy, not Producer and Consumer) and stocked up on provisions.  Just inside the White Mountain National Forest, we found the Otter Rocks Day Use area with picnic tables, put our three dollars in an envelope in the slot, and sat and ate our lunch, enjoying the sun coming through the trees and the stream dancing over the rocks. A young couple parked their car next to ours and went down closer to the stream. They climbed around on the rocks, talked and laughed. It became apparent after a while that the young man was trying to decide whether or not to take the plunge. His girlfriend was having none of it. When he finally did, we applauded, and they looked up, startled, then smiled. The young man bowed, acknowledging our recognition. When they came up, I gave them both a cookie: him for his bravery, and her for her good sense.  

Nathaniel Hawthorne, too, has connections to New Hampshire, and wrote a collection of stories set in the White Mountains, one of which is called “The Great Stone Face,” about the effect on a young boy of living beneath a cliff that nature has carved into the semblance of a wise face. My guidebook, which was several years old, had told me that one of the most famous sites in the White Mountains was the “Old Man of the Mountain” at Franconia Notch, and it is this famous cliff face that Hawthorne is writing about in his story. The boy’s mother tells him there is a prophecy that a man will appear to them who looks just like the face in the mountain, and he will bring great wisdom to the village.  The boy (who does not seem to have a father) spends a lot of time gazing at the face, and imagining the wise counsel of the man who would come.  

A number of men who the villagers believe resemble the Great Stone Face make their appearance in the story: a wealthy man, a general, a politician, a poet.  As the boy grows into a man, he meets each one, and in none of them does he see the resemblance trumpeted by the masses – a shadow, perhaps, but not the real thing. There is a special sadness to Hawthorne’s examination of the failure of the politician to live into the ideal when his friendship with Franklin Pierce is taken into account; and what is lacking in the poet is no doubt a recognition of his own failings.  

 In the meantime the boy continues to spend time in the mountains, gazing at the Great Stone Face, learning from its quiet strength and beauty. The people in the village begin to notice as the young man grows older that his character is noble and fine, and that although he speaks seldom, when he does, he is always worth listening to. Eventually he attracts something of a following, and takes to giving little sermons on the mountain. It is the poet, finally, who recognizes - in the wise old man that the boy becomes - the features of the prophecy come true. Allegory does not appeal to sophisticated readers today, but the final transformation is still elegant.

The White Mountains are in fact majestic.  At first Dave and I tried to stop at every overlook, till we realized if we kept it up it would take us all day to cross the state: there was just too much scenic grandeur. I took a lot of pictures, a sample of which you can see by clicking on the picture below: 

We did not go through Franconia Notch,which is north of the Kancamagus, but even if we had, I would not have a picture of the Great Stone Face.  You can see the beneficent profile of the Old Man of the Mountain on the New Hampshire quarter; but you can no longer see it at Franconia Notch. On May 3, 2003, the Old Man of the Mountains collapsed in a landslide. The online scrapbook of letters and condolences from people across the country to the State of New Hampshire for the loss of this national treasure runs 76 pages:

To forget the old man in the mountain is like forgetting the face of God. Rick Cooper  Flowood, Mississippi. 

I just saw that the Old Man passed away….best wishes and deepest condolences. Margo Lemberger.  

To all the politicians and bureaucrats--Leave Him Be! Let him RIP! He, like each one of us, is Irreplaceable! Don't even think of putting a cheap replica up there. This is NEW HAMPSHIRE---not Disney World! He lives on in the minds and memories of millions of people all over the world who will tell of his story to the generations to come who did not see him. Matthew Flynn, Westwood, MA. 

Tuesday May 30, and a significant portion of Wednesday the 31^st, we spent in New Hampshire, home state to two American Presidents.  Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth Commander-in-Chief, is widely thought to have been one of the worst presidents in American history.  Josiah “Jed” Bartlet was the President New Hampshire would like to have given us.  The name Franklin Pierce may seem familiar to you in a non-Presidential context.  It did to me. Benjamin Franklin Pierce was the “real” name of the fictional character “Hawkeye” Pierce in the book M*A*S*H, by Richard Hooker.  The book led to a successful Robert Altman film and an even more successful TV series with a very different tone from the book or the movie. It was the Korean War as seen from the post-Vietnam 1970’s, and it starred the man whose name became synonymous with SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy): Alan Alda.  And what was Alan Alda’s most recent role? Arnold Vinick.  And who was he trying to succeed as President? Jed Bartlet. Coincidence?  I think not.

Brought in as a dark horse candidate (as was Jed Bartlet), Franklin Pierce won during the contentious years before secession primarily because he had expressed no strong opinions – though he was a “doughface” –  that is, a Northerner with Southern sympathies. (Recently I saw the phrase reinvented to refer to Democrats who cave when the Bush administration assaults the U.S. Constitution.) He was a charming, convivial man, who struggled with alcohol most of his life, in a profession whose wheels were lubricated by it. Pierce’s great- great- grandnephew, our current President, seems to have conquered that demon before he entered politics: now he’s just driving the rest of us to drink.

Pierce had wooed and eventually married the daughter of the president of Bowdoin College, Jane Appleton – painfully shy, deeply religious, pro-temperance and tubercular – partly to straighten himself out. The approach was not entirely successful. Neither she nor her family saw politics as a gentleman’s profession.  She detested Washington and often refused to live there. On several occasions Pierce swore off politics and alcohol for her sake, but the lure of both overcame his best intentions.  Pierce resigned his seat in the Senate in 1841 and returned to his law practice in New Hampshire, only to be nominated for President, with four other candidates, by the Democratic party. He assured Jane nothing would come of it; when she heard he had not only won the nomination, but had accepted it, she fainted. Later it came out that he had in fact actively courted the nomination, and he and Jed Bartlet had another thing in common: a wife who felt personally betrayed.  

Two months before Pierce’s inauguration, on a train between Andover and Lawrence, the Pierces and their eleven year old son Benjamin were  traveling together when their car derailed and toppled over an embankment. Benjamin, 11, was crushed to death before his parents’ eyes.  Jane's first child had died in infancy, and the second of epidemic typhus at age four.  She saw this final blow as divine retribution for her husband’s ambition. In a haze of guilt and grief, Franklin Pierce was not sworn in as President; he affirmed the Oath of Office on a law book, and left the Bible out of it. His wife did not attend the inauguration. There was no inaugural ball. That night, and for many nights thereafter, Jane Pierce spent her time writing to her dead son asking his forgiveness, trying to contact him in séances (something the wife of the sixteenth president, Mary Todd Lincoln, did as well), and seeking comfort in religion. The White House state rooms were decked in permanent mourning bunting.  

Pierce was a politician, not a leader, and politics is a fickle mistress. His unsuccessful attempts to acquire Cuba, where slavery and a plantation economy also reigned, were seen in terms of their impact upon domestic tensions.  That and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which reopened the question of slavery in the West, made Pierce so unpopular in the North that his party refused to nominate him for a second term. "After the White House what is there to do but drink?" he reportedly quipped, and proceeded to make good on the observation. A letter he wrote expressing sympathies for his former cabinet member Jefferson Davis made him anathema in Washington, and when Jane Pierce died in 1863, the only person who came to mourn with him was his Bowdoin college friend and biographer, Nathaniel Hawthorne.    When Abraham Lincoln was shot, Pierce’s house was mobbed. He died in 1869, of cirrhosis of the liver. New Hampshire named a college after him; the school’s web site gives the years of the term Pierce “proudly served” and leaves it at that.  If Jed Bartlet did not exist, New Hampshire must be glad Hollywood chose to invent him.

Looking both presidents up on Wikipedia, you would be hard pressed to tell fiction from reality.  Pierce’s entry is about a thousand words longer than Bartlet’s, but the format is so similar as to be indistinguishable.  There is one telltale giveaway, besides the (very) occasional reference to the word “fictional.” The table listing Pierce’s cabinet members doesn’t have the actors playing each in parentheses.  When you compare Bartlet and his real-life namesake, Josiah Bartlett, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the historical personage only beats out the fictional character by 76 words.  Take out the links to the former governors of new Hampshire, and Jed's entry is 121 words longer.  Some things about the brave new world of user-generated content make me a little squeamish.  You can find out anything on the Internet: whether it’s true or not.