The first time I knew the feeling of leaving home I was a month shy of 11, though what I felt then was home leaving me. My mother, sister, and little brother went to spend the summer on the island of Jamaica, where my mother had grown up and where her parents still lived. I stayed home to play Little League. A strange sense of loneliness soon settled in, as I waited all day in the unfamiliar quiet for my dad to come home to take me to practice or a game, and afterward we’d go to a diner or simply open a carton of ice cream. I never forgot what I learned that summer: Home did not just mean a roof and walls and familiar rooms, but the people you lived with inside.

Since then, I have left numerous homes: off to college, leaving college, leaving the Peace Corps, leaving Maine. Then I came to Yankee in October 1979—and never left. I have been part of more than 400 issues of this magazine. I have lived tens of thousands of hours inside this sprawling red building, have worked alongside so many people here, have known and published so many writers. There has been little distance for me between home with family and my second home here with another family—one where day after day we talk ideas, plan issues, look at layouts, meet in hallways and offices, look after each other.

My coworkers have been part of my life for so long that I have been here when their children were born and seen them grow up and have their own children. I have lost colleagues I will never forget, and I have welcomed new ones I will never forget.

For the past few years, when people asked me when I was going to retire, I replied by saying they don’t understand the feeling of holding a new issue in their hands, or of finding a story that arrives unassigned, like a stranger knocking on the door asking to come in, and then beginning to read it and knowing Yankee’s readers will want to read it, too. They don’t understand what it’s like to get a phone call from a friend to say she’s seen a Facebook post about a Maine lobsterman named Joel Woods who takes photos of a life that few of us ever know. And then to sit in Woods’s cottage on the Maine coast and see his work, and then publish it, and then enter it in the annual City and Regional Magazine Association contest to be judged against photos by professionals across the country. (Joel Woods took first place.)

And then there is that hard-to-define connection with readers, so strong at times I can almost hear their voices when they write. I have kept hundreds of their cards and letters and several thousands of their emails, which speak to a bond that runs deeper than just editor and subscriber. They want me to know how much Yankee means to them. They tell of losses in their lives and how Yankee kept them grounded, how we have kept New England alive for them no matter where they live. They talk about their family as if we here at Yankee all belonged, too.

They write things like this: Dear Mel, I think I can be so familiar as to call you by your first name though we have never met in person; we have known each other for decades though only through Yankee.

Or this one, a nod to my long-standing editor’s photo: Check your closet, Mel. Caught between all those red shirts must be one navy-blue or forest-green shirt you could don for Yankee issues. Please?

But there is always an end time. There is always a sense that if not now, when?

In early January, our conference room filled with everyone who works here in Dublin as well as former colleagues who had left or retired. We all enjoyed some good food, and then I told them what they had meant to me, and they told me what I had meant to them. And I am 78 but I felt like a boy as I tried, not always successfully, to choke back tears when a colleague was doing the same.

If you were in the room with us, I would have wanted you to know this: Many days I walk with several editors to a dirt path that runs past a pretty cemetery and ends at a spot where we gaze out upon lake and mountain. And each time I say, “Can you believe how lucky we are to see this where we work?”

I’d want you to know how we pulled together during the pandemic and saw one another only on a screen, and we still put together issues that made us all proud.

I’d want you to know about the time Rudy, my Jack Russell, escaped from my car in the Yankee parking lot and I was certain I’d lost him forever. But within an hour my staff had made “Lost Dog” posters, and everyone fanned out to distribute them and to look for Rudy. And late that night, as I lay in the back of my car at Yankee, hoping somehow Rudy would find his way back, my colleague Joe arrived at the parking lot. Driving once more along the darkened roads, he’d found Rudy walking along the highway and called him into the truck. Now, he held Rudy out to me.

I’d want you to know about working alongside Jud Hale, the former editor in chief whose uncle Robb Sagendorph started Yankee in 1935, and hearing him walking to his office calling hello to everyone he passed. And how Sarah, an editor with The Old Farmer’s Almanac, whose offices are just down the hall, always bakes me a chocolate zucchini bread for my birthday because she knows it’s my favorite.

I’d want you to have seen me this past New Year’s Day, alone in my office, stepping over the plastic crates I’d brought to fill with what I had saved all these years—which seems to be nearly every manuscript, notebook, calendar, magazine, and newspaper clipping, plus enough odds and ends to fill my newly rented storage unit a few miles away. When I took down all the cards from readers and photos from my bulletin board, I remembered the boy from a long-ago summer who had the sensation of home changing right then and there, and I was glad I was alone on New Year’s in my office.

So this is the last issue of Yankee with my name at the top of the masthead. For 90 years, Yankee has evolved, always changing, because times and challenges change. But this remains: We are New England’s voice, whether in this magazine in your hands, or our Weekends with Yankee TV show, or our website and newsletters, or even our online New England Store.

Now, I will be working on a collection of my stories, and I will continue looking for new ones to write. You can find me at melallen716@gmail.com. I leave knowing that the people I have worked with for so long, who care about this region so deeply, will continue to do the work they do so well. I will always hold them close. I will still come by and join the walk on the dirt path to where lake and mountain appear. And I am certain that if I ever lose my way, they will find me and bring me home.

***

See More: Yankee Magazine Announces New Organizational Plan Following Retirement of Longtime Top Editor Mel Allen

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This is what separates the die-hard landscape photographer from the rest of us: It is six below zero. Armed with cameras and a battery of lenses, the 10 participants in a weekend photo workshop in and around Maine’s Acadia National Park are focused not on the bitter cold, but on the way sea smoke rises from the water, or how the waves at Thunder Cove seem to explode against the shore.

They will notice the intricate patterns formed by water trickling over rock, and the exquisitely delicate coating of ice on a small plant. They will seek out snow-covered paths and frozen lakes to walk on, the park’s famous cliffs all around. They will be excited to see fog draping Bass Harbor’s working waterfront as boats vanish into the mist. 

Acadia National Park is considered among the most beautiful in the country. More than 3 million visitors arrive each year to see its iconic views of ocean and lakes meeting boulders and cliffs. But come deep winter, it quiets, the solitude welcomed.

At daybreak, when the photographers catch first light, their breath freezes in an instant. No matter how many layers they wear, the windswept cold reminds them that this still beauty comes at a price. But they already accepted that when they signed up for the “Winter in Acadia” workshop led by Benjamin Williamson and John K. Putnam, notable Maine photographers who have shot here in all seasons and who serve on these annual expeditions as guides, teachers, and fellow image hunters.

“We encourage them to find something unique, not just the iconic images,” Williamson says. “We tell them, ‘Go for whatever catches your eye.’” He adds that he and Putnam always see with new eyes each time they lead a winter weekend in Acadia. And this also remains true: No matter how cold it gets, the hunger for the perfect image burns strong, and the reward for everyone comes when they gather back inside to see what they have found.

To learn more about the “Winter in Acadia” photo workshops, go to jkputnam.com/winter-in-acadia.

Scenes of Acadia National Park in Winter

The post The Quiet Beauty of Acadia National Park in Winter appeared first on New England.

I want to show you a special place on this fine spring morning in Portland, Maine. Walk south on Exchange Street in the heart of the Old Port. The one-way street is just shy of a quarter mile as it stretches to Casco Bay and spills out near Commercial Street. This is the Portland that brings endless streams of visitors. But this is not the special place I want to show you. 

Follow me a few blocks west on Commercial Street, away from ferries steaming to the islands, away from the boutiques and tourists. There, at 225 Commercial Street, nestled between a men’s clothing store and a shop selling wine and cigars, is a five-story brick building with tall windows facing the water.

We climb steps to the second floor. The sign on the door reads “The Telling Room.” Before we go in, take a moment to imagine being young and leaving behind everything you have known—friends, family, landscape, language—to come to a new country, and having few ways to express what you have seen and endured along the way. And even then: Who would listen or understand? Loneliness is a part of your new life, like the snow and the cold.

Or imagine growing up in a small Maine town while wrestling with questions of sexual or gender identity, knowing kids in school talk about you, feeling as much an outsider as if you had arrived from another continent, too.

Or simply imagine being young, and not knowing what lies ahead for you.  

Now: Imagine opening this door intoa place where you can sit beside someone who will help you writethe stories that have stayed inside you for so long, you sometimes don’t remember they are there. A place where, after you hear others share their lives, you can take a breath and begin telling about your own—and everything changes. 

It is here, in this place called TheTelling Room, that young people are asked to be brave. To trust others. To know that they can tell their stories, and to believe their stories matter.And for the past 20 years, The Telling Room has shown them how. That’s what waits on the other side of the door.

 And there’s no place quite like it anywhere.

———

“We’re dealing with all this heavy stuff, but it’s all driven by the stories that kids need to tell and are compelled to tell and urgently want to tell.” —Michael Paterniti, cofounder of The Telling Room

———

To understand what happens at The Telling Room, which has seen more than 35,000 young people take part in its programs all across Maine, let’s step back a few decades. Creative newcomers are putting down roots in Portland, and ideas and energy are everywhere. One day in 2004, three people are sitting in a booth at a Congress Street café. They are in their mid-30s, and two are a married couple: Michael Paterniti and Sara Corbett, both accomplished journalists as well as the parents of two preschoolers. With them is their friend Susan Conley, an author and a passionate teacher of writing. She grew up in midcoast Maine and, after teaching in Boston, moved to Portland with her husband and their two preschool-age children.

At this time, Portland is seeing an influx of writers, artists, musicians, makers, and chefs. But also arriving in the city is the first big wave of asylum seekers from Africa, Afghanistan, and the Middle East—families who had fled the kind of danger and turmoil that Paterniti and Corbett had both reported on. “I found the same young people I had seen in Sudan now on the other side, in Portland,” Paterniti tells me now, 20 years later. “You would see the end of their journey here. It felt really vital that we help them tell their story.”

Paterniti and Corbett have recently returned from a village in Spain, where they spent hours in a cave set deep in a hillside. Inside was a special space, El Contador, literally “the counting room,” which also translates as “the telling room.” There, they heard stories by a man named Ambrosio who held his listeners spellbound.

Sitting in the café, the trio begin talking about their belief that children are natural storytellers who need their own “telling room” to discover their voices. “We wanted to show them the path,” Conley remembers. So they hatch an idea: Start a nonprofit writing center where young people can come for free and learn how to unlock the stories they had lived.

The problem was, as Conley puts it, “we had all these wild ideas, but we had no students.” So they begin meetingwith teachers throughout the city, telling them, “Many students feel unheard, not seen. Let us help you reach them.”

Theyvolunteer in high schools, middle schools, elementary schools. They work with kids who’d been in Maine all their lives as well as those who had just landed here, with a new language to learn. Calling their project The Telling Room, they believe in their mission even in the face of its mounting obligations. “The conflict was, we’re writers. We have to write and produce,” Conley tells me.“And we were really, really overtired. It took a serious personal toll. But we kept hearing yes from teachers—We need you.”

Paterniti remembers Conley saying once, “It’s like we have seven tickets a day to spend. So you spend three tickets on family, three tickets on work. And we only have one ticket left for The Telling Room. Except The Telling Room is taking three tickets.”

“But we had to keep doing it, because it mattered,” he adds. “These kids were telling unbelievable stories. And there was this awe at how these kids were finding the words, the courage to tell these stories out loud.”

And then angels arrive:A foundation awards them $8,000. “It was life-changing,” Conley recalls. With the funds, they hirethe poet Gibson Fay-LeBlanc to be the first program director of a nonprofit writing center that doesn’texist yet. They applyfor more grants, small ones and then big national ones. Local businesses takenote. Donations come in. By 2007, The Telling Room finally has a place to call home—the sunny spaces on Commercial Street where it’s been ever since—and the ability to publish its first anthology of young writers’ work, I Remember Warm Rain.

An installation called the Story House Project launches that first book at Portland’s nonprofit SPACE Gallery. Students at the Maine College of Art & Design created posters to illustrate the writers’ words and built a series of sculptural “houses”—some representing what the writers had left behind, others showing the writers’ imaginings of what a home could be. Inside each house, audio of a story is playing.

One of these is stories by Aruna Kenyi. He is 16, maybe 17. He has spent hours with Paterniti, sitting beside him in a room at Portland High School, as Aruna spoke his words into a tape recorder. He told Paterniti about being 5 years old in South Sudan when soldiers burned his village. He ran and hid with his older brother in a cane field. He was certain his parents were dead. He hid and walked for more than a year before reaching a refugee camp, and then walked again when the camp became too dangerous.

After each session, Paterniti transcribed the tape so they could look together at the words in Aruna’s new language. Eventually, a way to put them into a story took shape. And now, for the first time, Portland will hear it.

In the house, Aruna’s audio begins: “I have no photographs of my past, none of my village or parents or me as a boy there, none of the places where we fled or the camps in which we lived, nor of my friends.” After Aruna came to Maine, the listeners learn, a letter arrived and inside was a photograph of his mother and father, still alive thousands of miles away. 

Looking back on that night at the SPACE Gallery, Paterniti remembers it as a seminal moment for The Telling Room. “We all saw you can be vulnerable. You can be emotional. You can tell your story. All seems possible.” 

———

“Who are the youth of Maine? What stories are we missing? There is a need for us to be here.” —Kristina M.J. Powell, executive director of The Telling Room

———

The day of my visit to The Telling Room begins with a field trip by fifth-graders from the Village School in Gorham, about 10 miles west of Portland. It is one of the 42 Maine schools that will reach out to The Telling Room this year. The kids wander around the large central loft, which is filled with light from tall windows. Chairs and shelves are painted cheery red and green. The sofas are deep and comfy, and the tables hold jars filled with pens and pencils. A poster on the wall sets out a simple ethos: “We Agree to: No Phones; Pen to Paper; Respect Other People’s Work; Don’t Hold Back.”

In all the rooms and offices, books line the shelves. They range from classics by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald to modern-day works by Telling Room mentors and visiting authors. But most precious here are the nearly 230 titles that hold the writings of more than 5,000 young people. Whatever else they do in life, their stories will live inside these books.

But to call them books does not do them justice. “Books” is a quiet word. The pages in these volumes are not. Instead, they are filled with voices. Some emerge from memories that have sometimes traveled across years and thousands of miles; others come from growing up in Aroostook or in fishing villages on the Maine coast.Here are stories from the Young Writers & Leaders program, focused on high school students with international backgrounds. Their stories slowly shift as the years pass: There are fewer tales of harrowing journeys to a new land, as their journeys now lead inward—the struggle not in the getting here, but in the being here. And here are novels and poetry collections and memoirs from the Young Emerging Authors program, in which four high schoolers each spend nearly a year creating just one work that becomes as polished and professional as if they were far older writers.

Whenever schoolkids visit, they learn about these books, written by young people just like them. The message is clear: You, too, can do this. And one way to begin is simply to look closely at the life swirling around you.

Before long, the kids from the Village School go outside with their teacher, Alison Penley, to walk around, to see the life of the Portland waterfront so they can come back in and write about it. Once inside theygrab pencils and paper and sprawl on the red carpet, or sit hunched at the tables. Telling Room teachers Kathryn Williams and Jack Gendron move from one to the next, helping to coax a few more words. “What do you want to happen next?” Williams asks one boy.  

After a half hour, the children gather in a circle. Williams, who writes young-adult fiction and who has been teaching here for a decade, tells them, “I think writing looks like walking in the world and just eavesdropping. You know what writing is? It’s being curious. It’s asking, What if?”

Then she asks everyone to share something they had written. “Sharing your writing can make you feel a little embarrassed,” she tells them. “The more you share, the easier it becomes.”

One boy says he wrote about a pirate. Gendron, a poet, asks, “What do you think it is like to raise a pirate?” With a shy, proud smile, another boy reads about his father’s gold watch. A girl says she wrote a play about getting ready to go to a party.

I watch and think what The Telling Room wants to do with field trips like this is not to teach writing—the way it does during the months-long workshops. This is about striking a match, and hoping a spark may catch.

———

“When I came to The Telling Room it was a very powerful feeling, knowing that I could share my stories honestly, and feel like I would be listened to.” —Leigh Ellis, whose novel Bach in the Barn was published in 2021 

———

By midafternoon during my visit, when the schools are out, high school students begin to arrive at The Telling Room. Four are in the Young Emerging Authors program, and I meet them in a small room where they are working under the final deadline for their 10-month project. There are three high school sophomores and one junior, high achievers who have signed up for the intensity of writing a solo book. Each has been working with a mentor under the direction of program lead Jude Marx and teacher Kathryn Williams.

They introduce themselves and their work to me. Josie Ellis’s poetry revolves around the theme of water. Margaret Horton’s novel features a heroine living in the last human settlement on earth. Madeleine Turgelsky has set what she calls her “sapphic novel” during the ’80s AIDS epidemic in New York. Natalia Mbadu’s memoir of struggling with faith is a mix of prose and lyrics.

Each of them has just received feedback from an outside reader, someone coming to their work for the first time, and they admit to me it can be scary to see new critiques after putting in so much effort. The room is quiet as they scroll through the suggestions. They have only two weeks to make changes. Soon their books will be off to a printer, ready for their own book launch and reading in September.

Marx sits beside Josie to discuss a problem her reader has flagged. Josie has written more than 30 poems, and while many address different people—her mother, her siblings, her friends—she uses “you” for nearly all. It’s a problem she needs to solve, and time is not her friend. “I want it to be perfect,” she says softly.

Outside in the big loft space, students in the Young Writers & Leaders program have gathered. Before joining them, I meet with Sonya Tomlinson, who has been with The Telling Room from the early days. On her bulletin board she has pinned group photos of every young person she has taught: 437 in all, from 57 countries. She talks about them as if they were family, and she admits she feels protective of these students, who—because she and co-teacher Hipai Pamba are very good at what they do—open up their lives to each other.

When I mention the challenges today of being an immigrant, Tomlinson stops me. “We do not use the word immigrant.We do not use the word refugee,” she says. “Our students told us they don’t want to be identified by those words. They don’t want people to feel pity for their hardships. We say our students are multilingual, multicultural. And for some that’s not their story. It’s their parents’ story.”

And because of that, she is sensitive to the fact that “students may reveal something to their family that they haven’t been able to express. And what they write lives forever. Your grandchild is going to pick this up and see who you were in 10th grade. So we talk about that.”

Tomlinson shows me apoem by a Muslim girl who no longer wants to wear the hijab. She feels that her mother is proud of her only when she dresses religiously, “and she doesn’t want to anymore,” Tomlinson says. “I told her, ‘I need to know you feel OK publishing this. Because your mom will read it.’ Her mother came to herreading, and afterward she found me to say thank you.”

At around 4, the students sit down in a circle with Tomlinson and Pamba. They read a snippet from the session’s writing prompt—where they find calm, or whether they’ve had a dream—and then they talk about what lies ahead. On this day, they are only a few weeks away from the program’s end. At a reading at the Portland Museum of Art later this month, they will see the new book Outbeam the Sun—their book—for the first time. “It doesn’t set in that they’re published authors until the book is in their hands,” Pamba, a former Telling Room student herself, tells me. “You look through and find your story and see your photo.”

In the circle, a number of the students admit they are nervous because soon they will stand on the museum’s auditorium stage and they will read. And for the first time, their family will hear their stories.

Pamba understands the nerves, but offers this advice: “When you finish reading, take a moment at the end and listen to the applause. Feel the awe.”

On this day, I keep hearing how The Telling Room believes in these students. That the teachers don’t tell them they’ll be a writer one day, but that they are right now.

———

“Without writing, I wouldn’t know what would be on my mind every day, what would give me the joy in my life…. Writing is my way of creating life.” —Sunila DeLoacth, writing at The Telling Room in 2024 

———

Later that month, I return to Maine for the book launch and reading. The young writers’ photos are displayed on a big screen on the stage as one by one, they walk to the podium.

Here is Nevaeh Lynn-Rose Patt. She is 16. We hear about her childhood in the state of Washington where her mother often left her and her little brother on their own while she chased her next fix. Now she is with a new family she loves in Maine. But “I don’t want to forget that feeling of abandonment and loneliness. The person I am now was created by the person I was before.”

Here is Noemia Nzolameso, who tells about trying to fit in with white classmates and realizing she needs to be true to herself. Here is Faisal Azeez, his voice crisp and confident, telling about the growing distance he felt during the pandemic from the brother he loves.

Here is Angelique Kabisa, as composed as if she has done this all her life, reading about how she needs to be a success in life in order to honor the sacrifice her parents made to bring her here to have a chance at a better life.

And here is Cristina Zalabantu. She is 17 and came to Portland from Angola when she was 5. “As the Stars Watch” is a memory of a home she has never forgotten, the first story she has put out into the world: If welcome were a home, it would be our house. I remember not being able to fall asleep most of the time. The three of us slept in the kitchen. There was a little window where I could see the bright stars watching me as they reflected into the room. I loved watching the stars…

When everyone has read and the audience has stood and clapped, the young men and women take it all in from the stage as if in a theater—and in a way, they are. This is their moment in the spotlight. As I watch them in the hallway afterward clutching their books, I think about how every young person I have spoken with has told me how The Telling Room has changed their lives.

But I think about how for all these years, so many people reading and listening to them have also been changed. Because what the founders of The Telling Room always knew is something Paterniti once wrote years ago to Aruna Kenyi: You speak—and we listen, as if it happened to us. 

To learn more about The Telling Room’s programs, events, and published works, go to tellingroom.org.

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If you were an apple, especially one plucked from an heirloom tree, you’d do well to be sliced on a JK Adams “Q-Tee” cutting board—a design that goes back more than 60 years—before being served with hunks of Vermont cheddar. If, on the other hand, you were a fresh-from-the-oven turkey, you could wind up atop something truly prestigious: the JK Adams maple reversible carving board, which for many years has been named the best of its kind by the experts at America’s Test Kitchen.

At a time when many bemoan the loss of U.S. manufacturing, there might be a lesson in this venerable family business just outside the village of Dorset, Vermont. Simply put: If you make something better than anyone else, people will want it.

Like all great American success stories, this one springs from humble origins. In 1944, Josiah Knowles Adams began manufacturing a small wooden pull toy dubbed the Speedy Racer in a small Dorset garage. His creation caught on, and Adams soon moved operations into a former icehouse located in the spot off Route 30 where his namesake company still stands today. 

Adams’s fledgling wood-products business added T-squares and slide rules to its line, and in 1949 an industrial engineer named Malcolm Cooper Sr. joined as a partner. A man of talent and vision who eventually became the company’s owner, Cooper had ambition that matched the country’s growing appetite for kitchen products that were both practical and aesthetically pleasing.

His son, Malcolm Cooper Jr., once told a reporter, “I don’t recall us ever talking about sports or political news around the dinner table. It was always about the business and how to drive the business forward.” (When asked why his father did not give his own name to the company, he chalked it up to Yankee thrift: It would cost too much to change the stationery.)

Using wood from North American hardwood forests—maple, ash, walnut, cherry—the elder Cooper designed kitchen products meant to endure and be passed down through generations. He was always tinkering: One day, frustrated by how awkward it was to pull kitchen knives from their holders, he cut the bottom of a wooden block so that it slanted at a 45-degree angle. Knives slid in and out of the block with ease, and the world took notice. He also created the first modular wine rack, as well as the rotating spice rack.

As JK Adams continued turning out wooden products ranging from rolling pins to carving boards and trays, it was bringing something new to the kitchen seemingly every year. Plus, Cooper knew how to build and keep a business competitive, and in time he was able to pass the reins down to his son, Malcolm Jr., the current owner and chairman.

Today, a visit to the company’s Dorset headquarters offers the chance not only to browse the on-site Kitchen Store, but also to peek at what goes into the company’s guaranteed-for-life creations. Daily guided tours lead visitors along a catwalk to an observation deck, which looks down on the action in the 40,000-square-foot workspace. The whine of power saws, the smell of cut hardwood, the roar of massive industrial fans—they’re all part of a steady thrum of creation. And as befits a company that owes its name to Yankee frugality, nearly every scrap of wood here goes either to heating the plant or into a useful part of something.

A few years ago, Malcolm Cooper Jr. told a reporter why he was confident that despite global market pressures, there would always be a need for the craftsmanship he saw at work every day.

“Wood has been used for tools, shelter, and accessories since the start of recorded human history,” he said. “It’s attractive, warm to the touch, and relatively easy to work with. People always come back to wood. Dad believed that if you build something that is functional and well made, people will buy it. We are going to hold on to that.” jkadams.com 

The post JK Adams Cutting Boards | Made in New England appeared first on New England.

In my 45th autumn in the Monadnock Region since I first arrived here one October, I ask myself: Where would I take a friend who has never been to this beguiling place tucked into southwestern New Hampshire? And this is my answer. Here is where we’d go.   

Let’s begin on high, looking for hawks. We drive up a twisting 1.3-mile road at Miller State Park to reach the 2,290-foot summit of Pack Monadnock, the little sibling of the mountain for which this region is named. The park lies four miles east of downtown Peterborough, and we will soon stop there—but now, on a brisk fall morning, we look outward and upward.

The wind swirls, the air cools, and color sweeps across the landscape below us, visible through summit clearings. A sign points to an outcropping where on clear days you can see all the way to Boston, 75 miles distant. Another sign leads you to a view of Mount Monadnock itself. “The mountain that stands alone” looms to the west, in the town of Jaffrey; for two centuries, the stark bald summit of this signature peak has enticed hundreds of thousands of visitors to climb to the top.

Another day, we might join them on one of Monadnock’s many trails, but this morning we’re headed for the “hawk watch” observation deck. The thermals above Pack Monadnock make this a key point in a raptor migration highway, attracting crowds of hawks as they wing their way southward each autumn. A few years ago, watchers counted more than 5,000 on a single day. Naturalists from the Harris Center for Conservation Education in nearby Hancock often will be on hand to identify and talk about the soaring hawks, falcons, and eagles that keep our eyes skyward.

And this is how many people first come to know the Monadnock Region: from mountain summits with sweeping views that take in forests and lakes and distant villages. But those of us who live here know it for the intimacy of small towns with waterways too numerous to name. We know it for slow drives in fresh air. And for the country lanes where we walk and bike, the trails we hike, the ponds and rivers we paddle. But we also know it for sitting, for taking our ease by town greens and stone walls and at cafés, watching the business of a town unfold; and for driving endless curves, ever alert for the unexpected. We know it for the artists and musicians and chefs and artisan bakers who have settled here, giving travelers new reasons to visit out-of-the-way places that once were all but forgotten. 

So come meander with me. We will start from Peterborough, my hometown, and loop southward and then north and west before returning. The next day we will set off from Keene, the region’s only city, with some 23,000 residents. On each drive we’ll stop often, and as day passes easily into twilight, we will wonder where the time went.

The Peterborough Drive: A Day of Small-Town Delights

For me, Peterborough defines the Monadnock Region more than any other of its nearly 40 towns. Just before you reach the town from the east, the road opens up to a view of Mount Monadnock that is both an invitation and a promise. Here is the peace and beauty that for more than a century has inspired thousands of writers, painters, filmmakers, and other artists to create masterpieces in their cabins at MacDowell, one of the oldest artist residency programs in the country. You can feel that inspiration as you stroll among Peterborough’s shops, restaurants, and parks, accompanied by the music of two rivers coursing through town. To my mind, the most memorable kind of foliage display is a single tree erupting with color, and the tall maple in Depot Square will stop you cold. You will know the one I mean—right by the walking bridge next to Bowerbird & Friends, a gem of an antiques and decor shop.

We could pass hours exploring in town, but instead a sweet drive takes us through villages that connect one to the next like a ribbon through forest and farmland and old homes fronting country roads. We first come to the center of Temple, home to America’s oldest town band, and pause to visit the Old Burying Ground, where the early settlers lie in the most bucolic final resting place you could imagine. Next comes a slight detour to Ben’s Sugar Shack and the Maple Station Market, after which you’ll never think of maple syrup (and fresh maple doughnuts) the same way again.

The road climbs on the way to Hilltop Café in Wilton; at times it feels as if we are driving into the clouds hanging over the meadows. The risk of stopping at the café is that with a setting so lovely and peaceful, and food so satisfying, we’ll be reluctant to leave. But leave we must, so we follow the Souhegan River to the turn to visit Frye’s Measure Mill, a historic Wilton landmark where Shaker- and colonial-style wooden boxes have been made since 1858.

We pass through Lyndeborough and Greenfield before stopping in Francestown. If you can’t come here for foliage season, visit on Labor Day, when Francestown puts on a celebration unlike any I know, with parade floats and a rummage sale that fills a dozen horse stalls just off the village center. This is also where to find the Francestown Village Store, a place to which I’m always drawn. After operating nonstop for more than 200 years, it closed a few years ago, and townspeople lamented they had lost their community’s “beating heart.” Then a Wall Street Journal story about the store caught the eye of a West Coast man who was taken by its sentiment. He bought the building, paid for its renovation, and donated it to the local historical society. A newly arrived resident took over running the store, which today opens at 6 a.m. and lets you load up on everything from sandwiches to wine and local crafts until 9 p.m.

Next we head to Hancock, a village that many of us locals consider the most picture-perfect of all, with a Main Street lined with historic homes and a tidy green, a café that attracts foodies from miles around, a shop selling artisanal goat cheese, and a pond on the edge of downtown. We pull in at the nearby Harris Center, whose conservation efforts have shaped the region for decades, and whose trails to mountain vistas will end our day’s journey, just north of Peterborough, as it began: with wonder at nature’s autumn carnival.

The Keene Drive: A Sampler of Regional Superlatives

We begin in the college town of Keene by walking down New England’s widest Main Street, past enough eateries to keep us nourished for weeks, and pause at Hannah Grimes Marketplace to shop for New England–made crafts and goodies to send to our kids who have long since moved away. In autumn, another Main Street lure is the Keene Pumpkin Festival, a day celebrated with thousands of hand-carved jack-o’-lanterns.

A dozen miles north lies Walpole, a town where it is easy to summon superlatives. Is Alyson’s Orchard the prettiest in the country? We say yes. Are the L.A. Burdick Chocolate Shop and Café and the adjoining Restaurant at Burdick’s worthy of driving an hour (or more) to enjoy? And is the town green, lined with historic homes and churches, the best place in the world to walk off the Burdick’s feast you just enjoyed? Yes, and yes.

Next, we’re off to East Alstead. We find Old Settlers Road, a long dirt byway that reminds us why we live in the Monadnock Region, because it leads to Orchard Hill Breadworks. Set on a knoll looking out across acres of rolling fields, this is the place to discover some of the finest, freshest loaves in the land. At a shaded picnic table, we enjoy lunch while watching cyclists cruising past on a lane that takes them all the way to Hancock.

Then we wind our way through Marlow and Stoddard and Nelson—each village offering lakes and ponds and launching spots to entice any paddler—before stopping for an afternoon treat in Harrisville. Considered to be the best-preserved 19th-century industrial community in the country, this is one of the Monadnock Region’s undisputed historic gems. For decades, visitors have strolled beside Harrisville’s lovely pond, taking photos of the original brick mill buildings that are now home to entrepreneurs and artisans including Harrisville Designs, which continues the village’s textile heritage as it spins wool into heirloom-quality yarn. On a hilltop overlooking the village center is Harrisville General Store, which ranks among the best country stores anywhere with its fresh farm-to-table fare.

From there, it’s five minutes to Dublin and Yankee headquarters, where we take the same walk that’s a lunchtime favorite for me and my staff, a half-hour ramble that leads to Dublin Lake and a view of Monadnock rising behind it. Finally, we drive south through Jaffrey to Jaffrey Center, where the author Willa Cather wrote and lived, before starting back to Keene by way of country roads. A few miles later, we pull over and stop, spellbound. You will know exactly where. A stretch of farmland flows toward the base of Mount Monadnock, which seems planted just for you, just for autumn. And at that moment you may feel kinship with the hawks that are compelled to return every fall, generation after generation, to one of the most beautiful places you will ever know.

See More: Guide to New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region | Eat, Stay, Play

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In the September/October issue of Yankee, editor Mel Allen takes readers on a pair of back-road autumn drives in the place he calls home, New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region. Here, he recaps those same routes with turn-by-turn instructions, plus a few extra local gems you’ll find along the way.

Drive #1: Peterborough Loop

Begin with a morning hawk watch at Miller State Park, about 4 miles east of Peterborough on Route 101. (For a sweet refueling stop, Ben’s Sugar Shack and Maple Station Market is less than 2 miles farther east on 101 — time your visit right, and you can pick up some warm, fresh-made maple doughnuts.) 

Now, start your drive:

• Go west on 101 to downtown Peterborough, where you can explore one of America’s best small towns.

• Go east on 101 for about 1 mile, then turn right onto Route 123. You’ll pass Rosaly’s Garden & Farmstand, the state’s first organic farm stand (open till Oct. 1), and Casalis State Forest, a nature preserve with a 3-mile walking loop.

• After 5 miles, turn left onto Nashua Road. This becomes West Road and leads into the heart of Temple, where highlights include Temple Village Cemetery (with its famous archway dedicated to “The Wives and Mothers of 1776”), and a village green bandstand that’s home to the Temple Town Band, the oldest in the country. A historical sign across from the green gives another hit of history: This is where the Temple Glass Factory, founded in 1780, became the first glassmaker in New Hampshire.

• Go east on General Miller Highway/Temple Road about 3 miles to West Wilton. On this two-lane country road you’ll pass the former home of one of New England’s most distinguished soldiers, General James Miller, who lived here from 1815-1851. (Nathaniel Hawthorne was a frequent visitor.) In West Wilton, another historical sign tells you that this modest spot was once home to thriving mills that made everything from milk can stoppers to knobs and cider. You’ll also see signs for Sheldrick Forest Preserve, a nearby Nature Conservancy property with three miles of trails through old-growth forest.

• Continue briefly on Temple Road to Route 101. Turn right and head east on 101 for about 2 miles. Turn right onto Isaac Frye Highway and head south 1.6 miles. Turn left onto Abbott Hill Road, then proceed 1 mile to Hilltop Café. The drive to Hilltop Café, one of our favorite eateries, is extra-special in autumn, as you meander past farm meadows and century-old farmhouses.

• From Hilltop Café, turn right onto Abbot Hill Road and head north to Route 101. Take a right onto 101, then a quick left onto Route 31 N. At about 1.8 miles veer left onto Burton Highway. Look for the sign for Fryes Measure Mill. A living historical treasure, Fryes Measure Mill makes Colonial- and Shaker-style boxes using much of the same water-powered machinery from its beginnings in the 1850s.

• Return to Route 31 N and turn left. Continue north 9 miles, then turn right onto Route 136E. Continue 5 miles to Francestown. This part of the drive leads through Lyndeborough and Greenfield, where you’ll pass Zephyr Lake (stop at its canoe launch to view foliage reflected in the water). In Francestown, discover streets lined with handsome homes, a stunner of a while church, and the must-visit Francestown Village Store.  

• From Francestown, pick up Route 136 W, which becomes Forest Road and takes you Main Street in Hancock, about 11 miles total. The quintessential New England village, Hancock boasts a pretty downtown lake called Norway Pond, and shares 718-acre Nubanusit Lake with the village of Nelson. Fiddleheads Café is a local dining favorite; a few steps away is Main Street Cheese, whose goats you can visit in the backyard meadow.

• Go west on Main Street and turn left onto Old Dublin Road, then right on Kings Highway, to the Harris Center for Conservation Education, about 2 miles total (be alert for the center’s discreet sign). The tree-lined road will be ablaze in autumn color as you head to the center, whose staff help lead the autumn hawk watches at Miller State Park and have taught thousands of New England schoolchildren to love the natural world. All trails at the center are open to the public: West Side trails take you to gorgeous summit views on two mountains, while East Side trails let you meander along easier forest paths, with fall foliage as your constant companion.

The Harris Center is the last stop of the day before returning to Peterborough, 10 miles south.

Drive #2: Keene Loop

Begin in Keene, on the western edge of the Monadnock Region. With a population about 24,000, it’s one of those small cities that when people discover it, they wonder why they had never known about it before.  Keene’s Central Square, located at the head of one of the widest Main Streets in the country, has been honored as one of America’s best public spaces. You can easily spend hours strolling the streets, visiting shops and restaurants — and perusing thousands of jack-o’-lanterns if you’re there during October’s Keene Pumpkin Festival.

It’s not an easy town to leave on a pretty fall day, but we have some special places to visit.

• Leave Keene on Route 12 and head north to Walpole, 17 miles away. As you near Walpole, stop into Alyson’s Orchard. A long dirt road climbs from the highway to the orchard, and when you get to the top, turn around: The views west to the Connecticut River Valley are among the best views of any orchard in New England. After filling your bags with apples, continue on to downtown Walpole (look for the sign just under 4 miles north of Alyson’s, and turn right). The photogenic town of 3,600 features a town green lined with churches and country homes. If you indulge in some fine dining at The Restaurant at Burdick’s, you may well see local resident and famed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Next door is the L.A. Burdick’s Chocolate Shop and Café, where they will gladly warm up that chocolate chip cookie you’re buying.

• Head north on Main Street in Walpole to join Route 123, then turn right on Upper Walpole Road, then right on Whitcomb Road/Route 123 S—and stay with Route 123 S to reach East Alstead, about 13 miles away. This leg of the drive takes you past the lovely 1752 Bellows Walpole Inn & the Potato Barn and, less than a mile north of the inn, the Hungry Diner, which serves farm-to-table food, with many ingredients coming directly from the diner’s farm. (Have a pooch along? On the menu is a beef patty for your dog; outdoor seating is available, too.) From there, a gorgeous country drive follows the Cold River to East Alstead, where you can enjoy fresh-from-the-oven bread and beautiful scenery at Orchard Hill Breadworks.

• Head west from East Alstead on Route 123 S for about 14 miles, veer right onto Route 9 W for about 4.5 miles, then turn right on Granite Lake Road, left on Murdough Hill Road, left on Nelson Road, and straight on into Harrisville, about 7 more miles. As you leave East Alstead on 123 S, you’ll pass pretty Lake Warren, now protected as a wildlife preserve. In Stoddard, look for the 220-acre Pitcher Mountain Farm, which raises and sells pasture-fed bison meat. Harrisville is an exquisitely preserved 19th-century mill village with a glistening lake. Browse the weaving and knitting supplies at Harrisville Designs, and be sure to try the terrific food at Harrisville General Store, where on any given day you’ll find a Yankee staffer lingering over a lunch special before returning to the office.

• Head south from Harrisville on Dublin Road to Route 101, about 4 miles. You’re now in Dublin. Turn left, and you’ll see the headquarters of Yankee and The Old Farmers Almanac. Turn right, and in less than a mile you’ll be rewarded with the sight of Mount Monadnock rising over Dublin Lake. That setting is what has drawn artists and writers to the area for 200 years. The mountain’s pull drew Henry David Thoreau, who climbed it four times and even slept near the summit. “That New Hampshire bluff will longest haunt our dreams,” he wrote. 

• Wrapping things up: You can continue west on Route 101 to return to Keene, about 12 miles distant. But there is one little detour I’d urge you to take. Reverse direction on 101, and in less than a minute take a right on Upper Jaffrey Road, which becomes Dublin Road as it leads to Route 124 and Jaffrey Center. There, stop at the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse and the cemetery where novelist Willa Cather is buried. Then head west on 124 back toward Keene. In about 1.4 miles, on the right-hand side, the trees along the road give way to an open field with a farmhouse and barn, and you may see other cars already pulled over on the shoulder here. Everyone has a favorite view of Mount Monadnock, but the one from this spot is mine: Across the field, the southeastern flank of the mountain seems close enough to touch. There is simply no better way to end a drive through its namesake corner of the world.

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When Sam Hooper was growing up on his family’s farm in Brookfield, Vermont, he worked alongside his parents and brothers, haying, cutting wood, slopping pigs, repairing fences, clearing snow—a multitude of chores all done by hand. The rugged labor took its toll on his work gloves (“I’d go through five pairs in just a winter,” he recalls), until one day he put on a Green Mountain–brand pair. They were meticulously handmade from goatskin, a craft honed and perfected by three generations of the Haupt family and their small company in the nearby town of Randolph. And that day is when this glove story begins.

“I went, Wow,” Hooper says. “I was floored by them”—by how comfortable they were, how supple and flexible, and so durable that he could not wear them out. Hands down, they were unlike any he had ever worn.

Hooper eventually went off to college in Connecticut. Upon graduating in 2016, he returned home to work in the marketing department of Vermont Creamery, which was founded by his mother, Allison, and Bob Reese, and known nationwide for its butter and its specialty cheeses made from cow and goat milk. Soon afterward, he learned that Kurt Haupt Jr., the third generation to own Green Mountain Glove Company, was preparing to retire.

The company was struggling. A few years earlier, a major garden supply retailer that featured Green Mountain work gloves as a top-of-the-line product had been sold to a national corporation, which chose to offer cheaper, mass-produced gloves. Even the company’s core business—protective gloves made specifically for lineworkers, a product that needed to be flawless to ensure their safety—was under increasing pressure from overseas manufacturers. One of the country’s last local glove makers was fighting to survive.

Hooper, then 23, had long been fascinated by the manufacturing process. At the creamery he had seen raw milk become 4 million pounds of products sold to people who loved them. Green Mountain Glove Company had been in Vermont since 1920, and unlike young entrepreneurs who flock to start-ups, Hooper had this feeling, this optimism, that he might be able to stitch his ambition and vision to its existing legacy. In the summer of 2017, he went to see Kurt Haupt.

“I asked to be an apprentice,” Hooper says. “I wanted to know every step of the process that’s been perfected the Haupt way…. I asked Kurt, ‘How did you learn?’ He told me that one winter he needed gloves, and his father said, ‘Fine. I’m setting you up at this machine. Just get used to following the material. It takes a lot of time as you graduate to the next step.’”

For six months, Haupt and his daughter, Heidi, taught Hooper the intricate steps to make the best work gloves in the world, and also why each step mattered. And Hooper kept graduating to the next one.

He learned why the fibers in goatskin made it both supple and tough; how to look for the slightest imperfections in the leather; how to select and cut sections for thumbs, for fingers, for the back; why they sewed seams on the outside (so there would be more finger space inside); how to do the special double seams and the tricky thumb attachments. He also learned that the incessant clatter of the company’s sewing machines from the 1940s and ’50s was the music of skilled sewers, some of whom had worked on the machines longer than he had been alive. 

By the end of his apprenticeship, Hooper could make a glove that would pass as a Haupt. At night he did market research, figuring out whether he could—or should—make the leap from student to owner. He decided yes, and in early 2018, Hooper became the first person outside the Haupt family to own the company. Heidi Haupt stayed on as operations manager and sewing supervisor, as well as keeper of institutional memory.

Hooper knew the challenges. For one thing, the company’s factory was showing its age. Driven by an environmental ethic, he converted the coal burner to wood pellets, retrofitted the building with its first layers of insulation, and added solar panels. Within two years he had created a net-zero user of power.

He also needed to expand the customer base well beyond the time-honored utility worker. “We can’t lose sight that we make gloves for people where it’s life and death that they are made right,” he says. “The fact that we make gloves for utility lineworkers gives us leverage: ‘These gloves are made for people who trust their lives to them. Now they are for you.’”

His most delicate decision was to rebrand the entire line: Green Mountain Glove Company became Vermont Glove. “It was a bit scary,” Hooper admits. “They had a 100-year-old heritage. I did not want to offend the Haupt family. That name represented four generations of the best glove makers in the world. But I got their blessing. It was the right time, if we were going to be widely known to consumers and not just utility workers.

“And when you ask people outside New England where the Green Mountains are, many don’t know. Vermont has cachet—you aspire to its lifestyle. We felt being here for a century making these gloves gave us clout to use the name.”

But some traditions remained. For instance, many glove styles still bear names that read like codes, such as the most popular all-purpose glove, the AG47R0. “I have no idea where that name comes from,” Hooper says. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s always been that name. It’s kind of cool, really.”

And so, sometimes the young lead the way. The workforce has expanded, while the number of gloves that leave the factory each month is now more than 1,300 pairs. “But we have to be careful we don’t grow too fast,” he says.

Today, at age 30, Hooper works 80 to 90 hours a week. He lives in an old hunting camp on his family’s 67-acre homestead. He still works outdoors as often as he can. Still works with a pair of gloves made just down the road, as comfortable and as strong as the first ones that made him go Wow.

“We think about who we are, our value system,” Hooper says. “It does matter. We are time-tested. We are still here. That is a testament.” vermontglove.com

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My Yankee life began in 1977 when I lived in an unheated cabin on the shores of Keoka Lake in Waterford, Maine, a village with a pretty town green and historic houses bordered by stone walls. I had no running water—the owner having drained the pipes before he left in late fall—so on winter mornings I chopped a hole in the frozen lake and carried buckets of clear, very cold water to the cabin, where I heated it on the always-stoked woodstove. I lived at one end of the lake, and, after writing all morning, I would walk across the ice to visit with Alice Rounds, the postmistress and owner of L.R. Rounds General Store, the village’s social hub. The store was separated from the post office by short swinging doors, and Alice’s cry, “I’ll be right there!” bounced back and forth between the two. I had never sent stories to magazines before that year, and whenever I delivered something I’d written into her hands, Alice would wish it a fruitful journey. In a Maine village where locals took their time warming up to newcomers, she skipped the preliminaries and became a friend.

I tell you this because one of those stories had landed at Yankee. It was published in the October 1977 issue, my first byline in this magazine. I wrote about Waterford—the lake, a scenic mountain hike, orchards, a gem of a restaurant, and worthy sites overlooked by most travelers. The story ran without photos. Only black type on white paper. Yet within a few days of Yankee’s arrival in their mailboxes, readers came to Waterford to see for themselves. A local cidermaker told me people brought their copy and asked for his autograph. The chef-owner of the small French restaurant said he was taking reservations for days. Alice’s store had never seen so many new people at one time. Yankee had said, Here is what you can see and do here. And so they came.

I never forgot that trust that readers have in us. So, in setting out to describe my most unforgettable places and experiences over these past decades, I combed through memories as if choosing from hundreds of family photos, knowing I can frame only a precious few. What exactly sears a place into memory is undefinable. It may be the power of a beautiful landscape or the exhilaration of a risky adventure; sometimes, it’s simply the people I met whose stories touched me. And in making my choices, I wanted to be sure that these experiences are still out there today—for you, the readers, who may be looking to make memories of your own. 

* * * *

Perhaps because I was raised as far from wilderness as you can imagine, I sought stories in places so remote that sometimes you needed a bush pilot to get there. No wonder I was drawn to the North Woods of Maine. If you have never set foot in Chesuncook Village…or canoed on the West Branch of the Penobscot River, where moose browse in the shallows…or had a Registered Maine Guide take you miles out onto West Grand Lake…or traveled to the end of the road in Allagash Village, you may not know how far the cry of coyotes can carry, how close the stars can seem on New England’s darkest nights. 

One winter when my son Dan was still a baby, I strapped him onto my lap in a float­plane that took off from Moose­head Lake. We soon put down on the ice of Chamberlain Lake. That’s where I found Patty Nugent and her Nugent’s Camps, one of the most famous sporting camps in the state. Patty, then 81, met us with a snowmobile and a “driver” to carry us through deep snow to the cabins that she and her husband, Al, had carved from the forest 50 years earlier. And over the next four days, while baby Dan was passed hand to hand among the small winter staff like a puppy, Patty told me their story.

It began in the summer of 1936, when Patty and Al stowed all their belongings on a handmade raft and paddled across Chamberlain Lake until they reached its eastern shore. This was back when you could stake claim to wild lands, and they had planned to build a sporting camp for fishermen and hunters. She told me about how they found the perfect location as if the memory had been preserved under glass for her to admire the rest of her life.

“We started up the lake in a canoe, looking for a campsite,” she said. “Went up one side, came down the other. I looked across and saw a little green knoll. Nuge said it was located where the prevailing wind would keep the flies away. He put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Just right, little girl. This is just right.’” Years later, after the Nugents had gained national fame for their sporting camp, Al died of a heart attack while clearing wood. Patty put a stone on his grave with the words “Just Right.”

At the end of the four days, Patty bid us good-bye as we waited for the float plane to pick us up. And I can still hear her parting words: “I’d give everything back in a minute for just one night to do over. The night me and Nuge pushed off and floated so slow up the lake, and in the dawn I looked across and saw that little green knoll.”

* * * *

If I could have chosen where I’d want to be when a mama black bear bit me, it would’ve been right where I was: in the snowy depths of Baxter State Park, alongside Maine’s black bear biologist. The park’s 200,000-plus acres are the most revered stretch of wilderness in New England, and to me the grandest place to step away from the comforts of daily life. (If you don’t know Baxter, look on a state map for the big green patch about 85 miles north of Bangor.) Former governor Percival Baxter spent more than 30 years buying up these mountains, rivers, lakes, and dense forests before giving it all to the people of Maine to be kept “forever wild.”

The biologist was crawling into the dens of bears he had radio-collared months earlier. His task was to monitor how they were faring. I crawled in after him to watch as he jabbed a tranquilizer dart into one mother, her cubs snugged up against her; he would need her to stay docile as he took each youngster outside the den to weigh and measure it. I’ll never forget the dank closeness of that space, or the life lesson I learned not long after exiting it: When a bear biologist hands you a net to drape across a den to ensure mother and babies stay separated, remember to ask, Are you sure you gave her enough tranquilizer? This particular bear, protecting her home, erupted from the den. A clamped jaw on my gloved hand and then my leg revealed her raw power, even though she had not eaten for months. It was worth the follow-up tetanus shot to always keep the memory of a bear living a life “forever wild” in the flesh.

The beauty of the New England coast rivals any in the world. After sailing Maine’s Penobscot Bay on a windjammer, I wrote about the tight quarters and the need for nighttime earplugs to dampen fellow passengers’ snores—yet also about the intimacy that we felt with the bay and its islands, a feeling no ocean liner could ever give. I have witnessed sunsets around the world, but never one that could compare to when we anchored off a small island, color spreading so intensely across the sky that everyone fell silent.

And how do I choose one beach? I have walked Maine’s Popham Beach at low tide to Fox Island, then scampered back when the tide started to rise; ridden across the windswept dunes of the Cape Cod National Seashore; inhaled the solitude of Rhode Island’s Napatree Point. With New England’s hundreds of miles of beaches, I cannot explain why a barely half-mile stretch of sand eight miles south of Portland remains special to me, except I think Higgins Beach has always been where I’d want to live, looking out to the twinkling lights of Prouts Neck at night. It was here that I slept in my all-time favorite room: the Tower Room at The Breakers, a modest inn, as comfy as a favorite sweater, that’s been family-run since 1957. The room came with inconveniences (third floor, low ceiling), but its eight windows let in light and breeze, and the breaking of the waves sounded as clear as if I were lying on the sand. I awoke to the sunrise and settled before the windows in a rocking chair. There had been a storm, so the sea boomed. Just beyond a window, the flag waved. All the while I sat listening, almost as if waiting for the cry to hoist sails.

* * * *

One of the gifts that Yankee’s longtime editor, Jud Hale, gave me was his blessing to find adventures.I was only the second journalist to join Wayne Hockmeyer, Maine’s whitewater rafting pioneer, in plunging through the ferocious rapids of the Kennebec Gorge. I will always carry the mix of fear and adrenaline I felt when Hockmeyer told us, “A river gives no guarantees. If you are careless, you can go out.”  

Eight years later I coaxed my sister, Anita, and her 12-year-old son, Adam, to join me. Anita was just a year older than me, but she was a city girl. To her, “outdoor adventure” meant a drive in the country. I told her about The Forks and its community of rafting companies with their lodges, hot tubs, and restaurants; I left out Magic Falls and its 12-foot drop, where the pressure on the raft can shoot you like a champagne cork into the waiting Kennebec.

Before we climbed into the raft, she grew quiet. “I’m not sure I can do this,” she told the guide. “I’m an indoor person.” The guide replied, “This is the outdoor adventure for indoor people.”

Right from the start, we were drenched by the river as the raft buckled and felt as if it were being sucked into a hole. Anita held on. When we pulled into shore, her face glowed. She promised to return—and not be fearful.

When Anita fell ill some years after, and we both knew the outcome, we would talk about all the things we had done together, from childhood to then. And we always found a way to laugh, remembering how no matter how afraid she had been, she had done it. And she had not wanted it to end.

* * * *

Of all my stories, the one with the most apt title was about my foray into sled dog racing: “The Worst 30 Minutes of My Entire Life.” The near-six-mile race was on Rangeley Lake, and just as my five-dog team was about to start, a blizzard flew at us out of nowhere.As the snow swirled, I watched the team ahead of me—whose driver, I had been assured, would look out for my team—disappear into the whiteout. The confidence I had gained from two days of training drained out of me, along with any sense of writerly adventure. Even now, I recall how my heart pounded as the dogs strained forward and the starter counted down, “Four, three, two, one….” I was conscious of two shouts before all noise faded into the wind. One was from the starter: “DON’T LET GO OF THE SLED!” And the other was from my dogs’ frantic owner: “WE MADE A MISTAKE!”

I did everything wrong that first day, including getting entangled with not one, but two other dog teams. But I somehow struggled to the finish line, and the second day, under blue sky, we raced along as if I had been doing it my whole life. For days afterward, I would return to those moments when we passed other teams, and the heads of the dogs would snap to the side, and sometimes there would be a low growl and a fleeting nip…and then we would be past.

* * * *

And still, more memories seem to speak: Tell them about me, they say.

How can I not include my winter weekend atop Mount Washington in the depths of winter, wind howling outside the weather observatory, the otherworldly rime ice coating the buildings, the feeling of how thin the line is between safety and peril in such harsh yet beautiful surroundings?

Or the summer night when I joined thousands of people along the banks where Providence’s rivers flow together to see the stunning WaterFire installation? Music cascaded all around, and fire tenders glided past, setting bonfires alight. Every molecule of my body seemed to absorb the sounds, the light, the smoke rising from the water.

Or the day at Mystic Seaport when I climbed down into the hold of the Charles W. Morgan, the last surviving wooden whaling ship, and felt what it must have been like to be a whaler, living at sea for months, even years, filling that hold with blubber and whale bones?

Or when the owner of the North Hero House in the Champlain Islands, one of my favorite places on earth, said he wanted to show me a place few of his guests ever saw? We turned off a dirt road just minutes from the inn, and suddenly the dusk sky was filled with a torrent of great blue herons coming home to roost, the sounds of their rookery making me feel as if I had wandered into a secret prehistoric society.

I want to end with my newest “forever” travel memory. In late October my wife, Annie, and I, along with Rudy, our old Jack Russell, spent a week on Cape Cod in a tiny shingled cottage in North Truro. The cottage was called Lil Rose, and in the mild ocean air, roses still bloomed. The beach stretched to Provincetown, and each morning we walked a mile or two before Rudy grew tired and I picked him up and carried him, his head resting on my hands. We then drove to P-town and took in the heady mix of people and shops and endless bicycles swerving in and out along the narrow streets. Each day ended at Race Point Beach. The sunsets there draw an audience every evening, but it was in the cool air of late afternoon that the seals bobbed past us, only a few feet away, diving through the waves. I watched them swim farther west until they vanished. I picked Rudy up, and as the sun began to set and the seals headed back to whatever bit of land they knew as their home, so, too, did we.  

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To someone who has never visited Shelburne Museum: Forget what you think a museum is. Instead, imagine driving a winding country road. Encountering sights both stunning and unexpected, you want to stop around every curve. You planned to go for an hour or two, but—not wanting to miss anything—you keep driving. And in the end, you’re sorry when it’s time to turn for home. That is what exploring Shelburne Museum’s campus of awe-inspiring art and history feels like.

Founded in the town of Shelburne in 1947, the museum is the singular creation of Electra Havemeyer Webb, who was driven to collect—and display—everything and anything that caught her eye. Raised in an opulent New York home with European masterworks on the walls, she found inexhaustible delight in carvings, decoys, and dolls. She loved whimsy (where else can you see the world’s largest collections of glass canes and trivets?) and exquisite crafts. In creating what she called “a collection of collections,” she pursued art, architecture, and artifacts until her death in 1960. “Some people have the place and find the piece,” she once said. “Not I. I buy the piece and find the place.” Her vision. Your gift. 

7 Best Things to See at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont

Circus Building miniatures.

Behold two magnificent obsessions with making a tiny world. Roy Arnold’s 500-foot-long circus parade showcases his 30-year devotion to hand-carving 4,000 tiny figures in intricate detail (the wagon wheels even have working brakes). Sharing space is Edgar Kirk’s 3,500-piece miniature three-ring circus, crafted with a penknife and a jigsaw over nearly half a century.

Electra Havemeyer Webb Memorial Building.

A “masterpiece” theater unfolds in an intimate setting. In these seven rooms re-created from Webb’s Park Avenue apartment, you can get close to works by the likes of Monet and Rembrandt. (Art lovers will also want to drop into the nearby Webb Gallery of American Art to spy one of Webb’s final acquisitions, Andrew Wyeth’s heart-stopping Soaring.)

Ticonderoga. Yes, that is a real 220-foot-long paddle-wheel steamboat that plied Lake Champlain more than a century ago. In one of Webb’s most improbable pursuits of an eye-catching relic, the “Ti” arrived in 1955 after a months-long journey of being hauled, foot by foot, across two miles of rugged terrain.

The Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries at Hat and Fragrance. If quilters and embroiderers had a hall of fame, it would look a lot like this. In addition to more than 700 quilts, the collection includes fine examples of samplers, hooked rugs, and woven coverlets, revealing how women used uncommon talents to make their way into a male-dominated world of arts and crafts. One highlight among many: Patty Yoder’s contemporary hooked rugs portraying life on her Vermont farm.

Stagecoach Inn folk art. Grandma Moses herself celebrated her 100th birthday at this temple of folk art—Webb’s truest love—set in a 1783 Vermont inn. Beginning with a cigar-store figure she bought at age 19, Webb acquired a lifetime trove of weathervanes, trade signs, and regional artwork long before they were considered collector’s items.

Dorset House decoys. Nature and art become one in these 1,400 wildfowl decoys created by the most accomplished 19th- and 20th-century crafters. Webb’s collection played a major role in such decoys being recognized as unique American art.

Round Barn carriages. Inside the 1901 Shaker-style Round Barn lies Shelburne Museum’s origin story: After her husband’s family gifted her 28 elegant horse-drawn carriages in 1946, Webb wanted to preserve and display them for the public. Gaze at the gold satin-lined interior of an 1890 Million et Guiet Berlin Coach, and imagine riding like royalty. Then stroll among the barn’s nearly 200 horse-drawn wagons, stagecoaches, and sleighs to see how ordinary New Englanders moved around, too. shelburnemuseum.org

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When talking about a photographer, we often refer to their “eye,” as if what is seen through their lens explains what emerges for us as viewers. And the photos you see here certainly reflect the keen and restless eye of Greta Rybus, whose work has often appeared in Yankee as well as in many other publications. And with her brand-new book, Hot Springs (Ten Speed Press), her eye takes readers on a world tour of 14 countries. “Hot springs have helped shape the culture of these places—what does that look like?” she says.

But to understand the depth of Rybus’s work, you need to know as much about her heart as her eye, and how she is inspired to show how people care for their places, and each other.

Raised in the Mountain West with stints overseas, Rybus came to Maine after college to intern for a Portland photo agency—the only work offer she had received. “I fell for Maine, how its landscape could be both harsh and nourishing,” says Rybus, who still lives in Portland today.

As a freelance photojournalist, she carries versions of the same cameras she used in college. “I want to think about equipment as little as possible,” she says. “I want to think about the experience.” And the breadth of her experiences is vast, from immersing herself in the world of wild sheep and the Mainers who care for them, to capturing the haunting moments of a home in Senegal being washed into the sea—an event, she says, that changed her life and spurred her desire to show climate change not as an abstract concept but as a burning reality.

To make her delicately beautiful landscapes and portraits, she strives to find intimacy and empathy with her subjects. “I’m asking people to be vulnerable” to what she calls “an interview with my camera,” she says. What she learns with her heart shows up in her eye, and we feel them both.

To see more of Greta Rybus’s work, including a preview of her new book, Hot Springs, go to gretarybus.com.

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Upon entering the photography studio of Jim Westphalen, which sits down a country lane just off busy Route 7 in Shelburne, Vermont, I stopped. A photo titled Ocean Outcrop 2 held me like few images I have seen. And I have seen many. This image from Reid State Park in Georgetown, Maine, occupied much of the wall, and I felt as if I were standing right there, on the sea-slick rocks. That is not an unusual response to a Westphalen photo. There is no glass on the frame. Nothing between the eye and the image. “I want people to sink into the picture,” he says.

I visited Westphalen just a few months after he put the finishing touches on his first documentary film, Vanish: Disappearing Icons of a Rural America. Four years in the making, it follows his passion to create art from the forgotten and mostly unseen structures that once filled the lives of people in a different era: farmhouses, barns, churches, silos, schoolhouses, railroad cars. They are relics he has cherished for decades, searching them out wherever he is—on the coast, in rural New England, out in Western prairies. In the film, we see him peering through the large-format view camera he has carried for 35 years, hands numb from cold and snow; stepping cautiously inside abandoned buildings; being buffeted by windstorms. He will wait for hours until light and shadow converge at just the right moment. He wants to stop time. To let others see what he does: that decay is both poignant and beautiful.

After years as a successful commercial photographer, first in New York and then in Vermont, where he’s lived since the mid-1990s, Westphalen today is a fixture in prominent fine art galleries. Collectors find his work there; others see it on Instagram or in his book, or hear about it via word of mouth, and then seek out his light-filled studio, where they may spend several hours. It is new territory for him. And a prominence he did not chase. 

He traces his life today to something he saw in 1996 near Poultney, Vermont. “I had just moved to Vermont, and I saw this old house that was being slowly covered by vines of wild cucumber. I remember being so excited, seeing the textures of the old barnboard, the glass-less windows, the drop shadows, the rusted roof. The feeling it was all being reclaimed by nature. I was like, Oh wow.”

Whenever he could steal time from his work shooting for resorts and magazines and architecture firms, he’d roam Vermont, stopping whenever he found a structure that seemed it was just holding on, fighting for another year, even if nobody else cared. “Over time, as I processed these images,” he says, “I saw I have a body of work. Some people told me it was too sad, that nobody would get it. But I kept shooting.”

In the fall of 2014, an exhibit in Burlington of what he called his “Vanish” work showed Westphalen he had tapped into something, a longing to know what was being lost. “I was nervous,” he says. “Will anybody care about these? [But] I saw from their reaction it was not just me. I realized I can make art. I can sell art from these images.”

A coffee table book called Vanish followed, and now the film. “My stuff is not nostalgia,” he says. “I see it as a respite from the craziness of the world. When I go out there, my cameras set up, whether on the coast or in a rural landscape, I get in that space. Just this calming thing.”       

He is soon to be 65. “My wife reminds me the clock is ticking. But I feel I am just getting started. I’ll always have a passion for the disappearing.”

“Always?” I ask.

“Forever,” he replies.

To see a wider portfolio of Jim Westphalen’s work and to find out how to watch Vanish, go to jimwestphalenfineart.com.

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When Hayley DeLuca was in high school in York, Maine, she once visited me here at the Yankee office, in New Hampshire. Her dad, Dean, is a longtime colleague of mine, and Hayley — who had always loved to write — was considering studying journalism in college. She arrived with lots of good questions, and our visit passed quickly. After high school, she studied economics at Emmanuel College in Boston. She spent a semester in Italy and graduated with a slew of dean’s list honors. Hayley soon moved with her boyfriend to Chicago, to work at a startup that made educational software to help high school students prepare for college. Her life held all the promise that a young person should know. And then, as her family wrote, life took a turn.

When she was 15, Hayley presented with liver dysfunction, but Boston Children’s Hospital was unable to pinpoint an accurate disease diagnosis. In the ensuing 10 years, Hayley’s liver disease was dormant and remained without a diagnosis. However, in the summer of 2022, her disease made an unexpected reappearance, and her doctors were finally able to diagnose Hayley with primary sclerosing cholangitis. PSC is a very rare autoimmune liver disease that attacks the bile ducts inside and outside of the liver. There is no known cause and no effective treatment for PSC, nor is there a cure.

In the past year, her quality of life has dramatically decreased. She has had several hospitalizations, had stents placed in some of her damaged bile ducts, experienced bouts of pancreatitis, and endured monthly attacks of cholangitis (bile duct infections). Hayley’s doctors at both the University of Chicago and Massachusetts General Hospital have determined that a liver transplant is necessary.

It is essential that Hayley receives a transplant from a living donor. This necessity is due to the scoring system for organs called MELD (Model for End-stage Liver Disease). Although patients with PSC become extremely sick and in urgent need of a transplant, the MELD score is not designed for rare liver diseases, and individuals rarely have a MELD score high enough for a deceased donor transplant. While waiting for a transplant, people with PSC are at a high risk of developing bile duct cancer. Despite this concerning possible disease development, patients with PSC still make up only 5% of all liver transplants in the United States, as it remains so challenging, if not ultimately impossible to be a priority patient on the deceased donor list. Crucially, a living donor allows Hayley and the transplant team to schedule the transplant before she is too ill and her body is too weak.

After I read this plea from Hayley’s family, I called her in Chicago. She had recently flown to see her parents in Maine but had been ill the whole week — this, after coming off an “amazing” six months of relatively good days. “I never know when it’s going to happen,” she told me.

She was doing her best to keep working from her apartment. She still held on to the optimism and hope of youth. “I think it’s harder for the people around me,” she said. “I try to stay as active as I can. I exercise daily. I do my best to stay outside.”

And, she added, I’m the most grateful I’ve ever been in my life.” 

Finding a living donor through an article like this is a bit like writing a message, sealing it in a bottle, and flinging it into the sea, hoping one day someone will look down into the water, or along the edge of a beach, and reach down. But sometimes it happens.

One of the best writing students I ever had was a young man named Justin. This past December, he donated a kidney so that a child he had never met could live. We say “hero” with such ease, and so often, that we may forget what a true hero can do. That it is possible for an ordinary person to save a life.

The liver is the only organ that can rejuvenate to full size and function. When someone decides to see whether they might qualify as a donor, the understanding is there will need to be tests and evaluations. There needs to be a match. In Hayley’s case:

– Blood type A or O
– Close in physical size (she is 5 feet, 6 inches). The closer the donor is to her height, better the chances that the liver size will be a good match.
– Healthy with no pre-existing conditions
– Between the ages of 18 and 55

If there is a match, the donor will give 70% of their healthy liver to Hayley, but remember: The liver is the only organ that can rejuvenate itself. Also, all healthcare costs will be covered by Hayley’s family.  

Hayley continues to write me. After our call, she sent me a poem she wrote this past winter, titled “Bananas.”

How do I wish I could share with people my struggle? 
I don’t know, honestly. 
It’s hard because so many days, most days I look okay. 
This disease eats you from the inside.
How do I explain it? 
You are a bright, yellow banana. 
But when you peel back the banana it’s crawling with spiders. 
With rot. 
With disease. 
I guess that’s how PSC is. 
I’m rotting. 
But I look okay most days. 
I’m dropping weight.
But at least I’m skinny. 
People tell me I look good. Healthy. 
That’s what they would say to the bright yellow banana. 
You look good. 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

If you’d like to be a liver donor candidate for Hayley DeLuca and live in New England, call Massachusetts General Hospital at 617-643-5202 or fill out Mass General’s Living Donor Form. When filling out the form, select Living Liver Donor and specify Hayley DeLuca. Next, Mass General’s living donor nurse coordinator will contact you to describe the process, gather additional information about your medical history, and obtain consent for evaluation. Know that by calling or filling out this form you are not committing to be a donor. Visit Mass General’s website for more in-depth information about the process. Any questions can be directed to Mass General at mghlivingliverdonors@partners.org or 617-643-5202; all conversations are confidential.

If you live in the Midwest, where Hayley resides, you can call University of Chicago Medicine at 773-702-0620 or fill out the UChicago Medicine Living Donor Form. After that, a member of the living donor team will contact you. Know that by calling or filling out this form you are not committing to be a donor. Visit UChicago Medicine’s website for more in-depth information about the process. All conversations are confidential.

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