Ski trip with Undertones
Cannon Mountain Ski Area and Echo Lake seen from Artist's Bluff.
Photo by David W. Brooks
Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
This time of year reminds me of spring skiing in Vermont and New Hampshire, bouncing down the mountain on that melting granular stuff, called “corn snow,’’ in the warming sunshine.
Back around 1957 I joined several of the kids of a large family and their very vivacious and seemingly very married mother on a trip to Cannon Mountain (home of such wonderfully named trails as “Polly’s Folly”) and the broader northern New Hampshire/Vermont area. When we got up there, a dashing man in an MG joined our group. While he was very nice to all, I sensed something, er special, was going on between him and the mother.
The mother eventually got divorced and married this rich, apparently charming, and handsome, man; her previous husband was merely rich. But this marriage didn’t last either. I visited her many years later, when she was running an inn she had converted from a mansion near the village center of a beautiful and affluent New England town, apparently with the help of a boyfriend she was living with. She was mellow, still very funny and, in a way, sexy.
Another highlight of the trip was our tour of what seemed to be the world’s maple syrup and maple candy manufacturing capital – St. Johnsbury, Vt. -- during the height of sap season. Rich aromas! (Visit the wonderful Fairbanks Museum in that town:
But my sharpest memory is how we were accompanied by that mysterious man. I thought of it many years later when reading L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, with its haunting opening: "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’’ Or is it more William Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” from his novel Requiem for a Nun.
The wonderful Fairbanks Museum, in St. Johnsbury, Vt.