Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 16
IHADALWAYSthoughtthatNewEnglandwasnothingbutmapletreesandwhitechurches
and old guys in checkered shirts sitting around iron stoves in country general stores swap-
pingtalltalesandspittinginthecrackerbarrel.ButiflowerNewHampshirewasanythingto
go by, clearly I had been misinformed. There was just modern commercial squalorshopping
centers, gas stations, motels. Every once in a while there would be a white church or clap-
board inn standing incongruously in the midst of Burger Kings and Texacos. But far from
mollifying the ugliness, it only intensified it; reminding you what had been thrown away for
the sake of drive-through burgers and cheap gasoline.
At Salisbury, I joined old Route 1, intending to follow it up the coast through Maine. Route
1, as the name suggests, is the patriarch of American roads, the first federal highway. It
stretches
for 2,500 miles from the Canadian border to the Florida Keys. For forty years it was the
main highway along the eastern seaboard, connecting all the big cities of the North-Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington-with the beaches and citrus groves of the
South. It must have been wonderful in the i930s and 1940s to drive from Maine to Florida
on vacation, going through all those big marvelous cities and then passing on to the hills of
Virginia and the green mountains of the Carolinas, getting warmer with the passing miles.
But by the 1960s Route I had become too congested to be practical-a third of all Americans
live within twenty miles of it-and Interstate 9s was built to zip traffic up and down the coast
with only the most fleeting sense of a changing landscape. Today Route i is still there, but
you would need weeks to drive its entire length. Now it is just a local road, an endless city
street, an epic stretch of shopping malls.
I had hoped that here in rural New England it would retain something of its former charm,
but it seemed not to. I drove through a chill morning drizzle and wondered if ever I would
findtherealNewEngland.AtPortsmouth,aninstantlyforgettablelittletown,Icrossedover
into Maine on an iron bridge over the gray Piscataqua River. Seen through the rhythmic
swish of windshield wipers, Maine too looked ominously unpromising, a further sprawl of
shopping centers and muddy new housing developments.
BeyondKennebunkportthesuburbsatlastgavewaytoforest.Hereandtheremassivebrown
boulders emerged eerily from the earth, like subterranean creatures coming up for air, and
occasionally I caught glimpses of the sea-a gray plane, cold and bleak. I drove and drove,
thinking that any moment now I would encounter the fabled Maine of lobster pots and surf-
