Travels With Becky

What There Was Not To Tell

Sometimes my travels take me into the past. This week I traveled with Edie Clark all the way back to World War II through her book What There Was Not to Tell: A Story of Love and War. This story, gracefully constructed and artfully written by the longtime and beloved Yankee magazine columnist, makes that war personal. Through a treasury of family letters and extensive research, she reconstructs a love triangle between her mother, her father, and Tom—her mother’s first love, killed in battle. Tom, it seems, and his memory, lived in Edie’s family, coloring family dynamics for decades.


This is a powerful story of love, war and the lingering affects of tragedy that is as intimate as it is universal. How many of us live with ghosts we cannot name? Edie’s ghost had a name, Tom, but that made him no less mysterious. Or omnipresent. The story certainly struck home with me, as it will with any reader who comes, later in life, to understand (as much as a person can ever understand another) her parents and their relationship and how what came before affects the rest of their lives, including how they raise and relate to their children.

The book begins:

Whenever I have thought about World War II, which, until recently was not often, I never put my parents into the picture. Since they never talked about the war, I suppose I thought it was a brief chapter in their lives and one that was not of particular interest. Whenever I asked my father to tell me about the war, he would always say, “There isn’t much to tell.”

It wasn’t until after they died and I read the letters they left behind that their participation in the war and its indelible effect on them, and on my generation, became clear to me.

Edie’s empathy for her parents (her mother, a Marine, her father, a soldier)—and the lost pilot Tom—grows as she unwraps their story, layer by layer. This is family drama (why is mother so sad?), mystery (what really happened to Tom?), and truth about the resonance of loss through a lifetime and through generations.

Her first book, The Place He Made, about the life and early death of her husband Paul, affected me deeply. It’s one of those books that I recommend to special people—if I think they can handle it. It is both beautiful and emotionally wrenching. I didn’t think she could top that effort, but with this one . . . maybe so. With What There Was Not To Tell, Edie Clark establishes herself as one of the premiere writers of memoir working today.

And she lives just down the road in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Bridgewater Old Home Day!

There were bean hole beans, kids games, hot dogs and hamburgers from the Boy Scouts and a square dance! All held at the Old Meeting House, built in 1804. This used to be the center of town—but now it’s not. So it’s a few miles of riding on dirt roads, pull to the side to let oncoming traffic pass, watch out for the geese. To prepare to tell stories, I read the most excellent book, A Bicentennial History of Bridgewater NH 1788-1988 by Thomas Curren. It was great fun and a challenge to weave stories of historic Bridgewater with stories I’ve collected in other towns—some true, some true-ish, some, well, some make us smile whatever their origins.

Here are some of the stories I told the folks of Bridgewater on Saturday.

This photo is of the inside the Bridgewater Town House—while some folks think the ceiling should be replaced, others like the look of the old beams.

From Thomas Curren’s book: Huge hemlocks were chopped down and hewn into massive beams for sills, plates, and second-floor beams. . . . This was the occasion for a great gathering of persons from throughout the foothills of the White Mountains. . . . “Among the number were those who erected booths for the sale of spiritous liquors. The selectmen were troubled at this, and decided it would be a disgrace for men to be obliged to buy liquors on such an occasion, and they therefore purchased all the liquors on the ground and offered them to the crowd gratis. Thus was our beloved Town House born and duly baptized on that good day.”

When I recited this story, one of the listeners, called out:  “Rum.”  I guess the spiritous liquors were rum. No rum was served gratis or otherwise on this Old Home Day. Though perhaps the organizers will take it under consideration for future events, being historically accurate—the drinking of the rum—and all.

Which reminded me of the story out of Unity—why the town house floor was straight and even in places, crooked and uneven in others. The selectman told me the floor was installed by volunteers and it was a five kegger. The more the volunteers kegged, the crookeder the floor got. Rum again? Or perhaps hard cider.

From Thomas Curren’s book: There was, during these years, an expanding amount of trade and commerce among the farmers in town, including the common practice of taking mortgages on crops, livestock or other items in exchange for loans of cash. Including a mortgage from Jacob Huckins to A.P. Hoit for $18.81 securing a note on “one four-year-old red cow . . . all my potatoes growing near the house where I now live and one ton of hay in the shed chamber.”

Which reminded me of the story of Augustus “Gus” Cheney of Hebron, who took a mortgage out on a heifer for $10 from his neighbor Joel Gray, who lived up on the hill. One day, old Joel came down by Gus’s farm, said “Gus, you owe me $10 on that mortgage on that white-faced heifer. Gus said: “Ha, I done fooled you. I et that heifer.”

Undeterred, Joel reached his big dairy farmer hand into his front overall pocked and pulled out a folded paper:  ”Ha!,” he said, “but you didn’t et the mortgage.”

And finally, a story that reminded me of the time the ceiling fell in the back bedroom of my inlaw’s house on the Bog Road in West Concord. The Bridgewater story goes like this: 

Depression years: The man and woman were not enterprising sorts and had let their old place run down for some time with the disrepair getting quite a ways along. One day the husband was reading in the kitchen as his wife prepared a meal. A loud crash was heard to come from an adjoining room. The wife investigated. 

“What was that?” her husband inquired. 

“Oh dear,” she said, “that was the piano, it just fell into the basement.”  

“The whole floor’s rotten; we’d better be moving out,” concluded her husband, and so they did. In a short while the roof joined the piano in the cellar hole, where fifty yeas later they nourish a variety of forest growth, including a good-sized birch tree.

"Dare-reee-queen"

Truish story—slightly second or third hand.  The couple was driving north and bickering over how to pronounce the name of the town they were passing through.  “It’s pronounced BURR-lin,” said the husband.  “No,” argued the wife, “It’s Ber-LIN, like the city in Germany.”

The husband pulled into an ice cream place.  They were hankering for ice cream anyway.  When the soda jerk handed them their cones, the husband said, “Now, young man, please tell my wife—real slow—exactly where we are.”

The jerk said, real slow:  “Dare-reee-queen.”

I mention this is truish because the closest Dairy Queen to Berlin is in Glen.  I’ve stopped there myself for a bit of refreshment.

***

This one may be a joke; or maybe not.

Auntie had a spell, nearly fainted, and when she recounted the close call to her niece, the niece said:  “Auntie, why didn’t you call 911?”

Auntie said, “I thought about it, but I didn’t know their number.”

***

And these tales of yankee frugality I know (almost certainly) to be true.

She looked at the prices of cheese.  Swiss and sharp cheddar were both $6.95 a pound.  She bought the cheddar, because the Swiss was mostly holes.

Also: The fresh turkey Gram bought on sale at the Hannaford and roasted was so delicious, she went right back, bought two more and froze them.

Ice Fishing with Dad

Which reminds me of another story of those big lakes way up north. The natives took a newcomer out on the ice fishing. It was his first time. They drove right out to the middle of the lake in a pickup truck, all the gear in the back. As they drove across the ice, the newcomer noticed a bleach bottle tied to the end of a rope, 25 or 30 feet long, tied to the back of the truck. The bottle bounced on the ice as they drove.

“What’s that for?” he inquired of his companions.

“Oh,” they said, “that so if we go through the ice and drown, the bottle will float and they’ll know where to find us.”

My Dad - Would this guy lie to a minister?

Which reminds me of this true story of my dad and his buddies. I was a kid and we were ice fishing at School Pond in Danbury. I loved ice fishing! We’d make a little fire, cook hot dogs, wait for fish to bite and trigger the flags on the sets in the holes. Run like heck to try to hook the fish and haul them in.  

As I recall, my dad and his buddies (I think one of them was Uncle Fred), liked to drink a bit as they fished. And their favorite was muscatel wine which they bought and drank by the gallon.

On this day, the local minister who lived on the pond, walked across the ice to be friendly-like. He didn’t know much about ice fishing and had a lot of questions, which the grownups answered in all seriousness, him being a minister and all.

He inquired about the gallon bottle half full of golden liquid. “Oh,” Dad said, “that’s, um, alcohol. We pour it in the holes to keep them from freezing over.”

That’s a story that got told over and over at our house through the years.

Thrill of a Lifetime

From Wilbur M. Schurman’s I Remember, his chapter called, “The Thrill of a Lifetime”—here’s the short version of said thrill.

December 1933: Wilbur and his surveying colleagues Porter Schoff, Joe Whyte and Brad White were sent to the Second Connecticut Lake to measure the actual distance between two points visible from the air for calibration of ariel photographs.  

All well and good. It was winter, a fair day. For measurement purposes they were using a 100 foot chain—which was actually a steel tape with a rawhide lace at each end for tying up.  
The ice wasn’t all that thick, so Wilbur and Brad took the precaution of tying one of the rawhide laces at each end of the chair to each of their wrists, so if somebody fell through, they’d have something to hold on to.

Brad led the way. They started at 10 AM and by noon were about half way across the lake -- the warm sun was melting the ice as they went, making them a tad bit nervous.

Unbeknownst to them, during the night, the gates of the dam had been opened and the water level lowered, leaving about six inches between the water and the ice they were crossing.

Then comes the thrill. The two men were about 50 feet apart with the chain between them. When “all of a sudden there was a tremendous roar and a tremor like an earthquake. It was rumbling all around the mountains and the ice began to drop underneath us.  I suppose,” Wilbur writes, “it dropped to the water level.”

Wilbur ran one way. Brad ran the other.  When they hit 100 feet apart, the chain and laces held and they both crashed to the ice on their backs—much to the amusement of Joe and Porter, safe on shore.