In New Hampshire: Chewing on Granite

By John Skow

This has been a summer of some discontent in New Hampshire, and it is not hard to see why. The sun is shining, a gentle breeze is blowing from the west, and the temperature is 84DEG. The lake is not far away. Blissful, you may murmur, if the gentle breeze and the lapping of the lake let you get a murmur in edgewise. But the New Hampshireman is not at ease with bliss. He knows that there is a catch to it. Finding and cherishing catches is a matter with which he is entirely at ease.

First, there is the hard truth that winter is nearly upon us. What's left of summer? A scrap of September. Good weather of a crisp and forbidding sort may continue through the first couple of weeks of October. That's it; finito. No point in getting comfortable. The New Hampshireman admires winter for its length and awfulness, and for the way in which it bears out his view of the world, but he does not look forward to it. Not looking forward to winter is his philosophy. But that is too simple. A flatlander who finds one of us sunk in gloom at the beginning of July, fossilized by dread of winter, may think that he has understood the New Hampshire soul. This is not likely. What the tourist is almost certain to miss is that the New Hampshireman may not be wrestling with the prospect of the winter immediately ahead. "Aye-yuh," the foresighted backwoodsman is thinking, "summah's about petered out, and then we got six-seven months uh wintah, guess we'll make it, just barely, and then after the black flies, we got summah again for a couple uh weeks, and then, damn sure, we got wintah, and I don't know if I'm up to it." A New Hampshire pessimist in good summer form can fret about blizzards three or four years away.

Winter, however, is not the only grave matter that the New Hampshireman finds to brood about in the gentle weeks that follow the summer solstice. True, the presidential campaign is not a matter for concern. We did our best in the New Hampshire primary to warn the nation of the perils that lay ahead, by picking Carter and Reagan. If the nation went ahead and picked Carter and Reagan anyway, despite our effort to sound the alarm, that is no business of ours.

The same cannot be said of the caterpillars. New Hampshire has been eaten by caterpillars, most of them the larval form of the gypsy moth. Properly, these caterpillars, bristly brown and yellow chaps with red and blue spots, belong down south in Massachusetts, where for some years they have chewed the leaves from increasingly large patches of woodland. Reports of this munching have been received with equanimity in New Hampshire, whose yeomen tend to take the view that something is always chewing on Massachusetts. If there is anything left to chew there after crooked paving contractors and easy-had tax assessors have put down their napkins, the New Hampshireman is perfectly willing to leave it to adolescent moths.

For New Hampshire to be ingested is quite another matter. If the Granite State is edible, it is a poor sort of granite. Less-favored areas of the nation have mudslides, floods, strip mining, droughts, marching armies of real estate agents with compound eyes and side-mounted mandibles and, yesbygod, a volcano. (Mount St. Helens ash in the air caused the June frost here, sure as raccoons eat sweet corn, and never mind that we have June frost 18 years in 20.)

Now the caterpillars have come north of Peterborough and east of Keene. What they eat is the leaves of hardwood trees. Foresters say that a sturdy tree can be defoliated three years in a row without losing its poise, so the grumbling heard here thus far is not of board feet lost to lumbermen. It is of seemliness outraged. The damned bugs belong down in Lowell or Peabody, or out on the Cape eating clam rolls. LIVE FREE OR DIE, as our pugnacious license plate motto recommends, but if you are a gypsy moth, do it some place else.

High in our maple, oak and beech trees, however, their chewing at midsummer is loud enough to be audible. The noise sounds so much like soft wind that it is soothing. Billions of minute, odorless brown particles of caterpillar scat fall as a result, and the ears of a listener are tricked into informing his brain that a very light rain is pattering down. So far, the tourists have not seemed to understand what is happening, and are well pleased with the sound of very light rain on rainless days.

This is not to say the plague of caterpillars is all that concerns us. Such traditional summer amusements as malicious zucchini giving and sanctimonious woodpiling are still practiced.

The zucchini jest depends on the pretense that these monstrous garden tumors are edible and on the certain knowledge that in a New Hampshire family, what has been cooked as food, however pulpy and woeful, must be eaten. Woodpiling is a form of boastfulness left over from colonial times, and it consists of erecting in plam sight an unnecessarily large and stately pile of cordwood, with plumb sides and flashy square corners. Such a fortress wrests envy, respect and despair, as it is intended to, from all New Hampshire males and a good many homesteading females who have not yet bucked, split and stacked their own supply of wood for the winter. In my town, for instance, there is a meadow in which stand, drying nobly, seven two-cord stacks of firewood. Clearly the fabricator of these splendid piles will be warm not only through the winter ahead, which all agree will be unusually cold, but even through the dark and dread winter of the year after next.

Yet not all of his awesome boast is on view. Part of its subtlety depends on the fact that everyone in town knows the man who began and finished these piles.

He is 79 years old. His reason for stacking the wood in his meadow, he says, is that he has stacked so much wood in his barn already that there isn't room for more. His real reason is to set an example for the rest of us, as an elder of the tribe should do. I am inclined to believe that his tribe will persist, despite the caterpillars that now beset it.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.