New Hampshire: A Family Retreat

Autumn

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens —
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood
without diminishment

— Jane Hirshfield, October Palace

My second fall visit to the Monadnock region in as many years. This time I’m accompanied by Jane’s entire side of the family - Jordan’s cousins, aunt and uncle, and grandparents. We’ve rented a house that sits on a wooded peninsula on the edge of the outflow from Comtoocook Lake, steps away from the scenic rail trail that runs from the Massachusetts border up to Jaffrey, NH. Last year on my midweek, solo birthday trip, I stayed for two nights in an inn in town, spending my days driving around the region, walking the woods, and poking along the northern end of the trail. Although that trip was marked by gloomy weather and decidedly post-peak conditions along most of the woods and waterways, it was also a trip that sticks out fondly in my memory as emblematic of the quieter, more contemplative side of New England’s autumn. Jane’s family visiting provides me with a timely reason to bring everyone to see the region.

As far as fall colour goes, its been a banner year for New England’s hardwood deciduous forests - one of the best we’ve seen during our time here (perhaps right next to 2022’s early October trip to the Northeast Kingdom). The trees are robust after a summer of steady precipitation and milder temperatures. and a few weeks of cool mornings (a September nor’easter notwithstanding) have brought out beautiful rainbow foliage in the region’s maples, ashes, elms, and birches. Even the oaks are turning bright orange instead of their usual bronze hues. The house we’re living in - surrounded on three sides by calm water and turning trees - is a perfect place to experience this autumn show. We drive from Boston in separate cars (the three of us with Jane’s dad in the front seat), and after we get the house unlocked and Jordan settled in, I head out to do our groceries for the week at the nearby Market Basket. Although I was hoping to acquire a prime rib to roast for one of our family dinners, I wind up prepping other dishes instead — two baby back rib racks, haddock fillets, skirt steak, and shaved steak for open-face sandwiches - along with an assortment of drinks and snacks to keep everyone entertained.

We spend our first afternoon, a rainy one, taking a brief walk around the property and to the nearby boat launch before we settle in and make dinner. I alternate between taking photos of the foliage and the wildlife (kids), and we put on some seasonal tunes from the Stardew Valley soundtrack on Spotify. “It’s like Stardew Valley come to life!” says Jordan’s cousin Luke, who has brought his game guidebook from California to show me and Aunt Jane. I teach the kids about a few of the nearby trees (white oak, white birch); they’re more interested in throwing rocks into the river.

The next morning, Jane’s dad and I head out for another stroll around the property while waiting for the kids to breakfast and get ready. As a woodland photographer, it’s quite a treat for me to be able to wake up and roll out of bed into such beautiful forests conditions, so I make use of it as much as I can. This morning, the preceding night’s thunderstorms have cleared, the air is crisp, and the side light is streaming in through the trees, across the beautiful waterway to our east. The weather couldn’t be any nicer: blue skies and downright balmy temperatures by our October standards. We drive out, passing through “downtown” Jaffrey (with its new road bridge) and heading about half an hour due east to Windy Hill Orchard on the outskirts of Greenville. Coming into town on River Street and seeing the tall church steeple across the water, I make a mental note to peruse this area more thoroughly in the future; the trees look lovely framing the buildings at the water’s edge.

At the orchard, Jane grabs a bushel bag for us at the farm store, and after taking some family portraits in the nearby pumpkin patch, we head across the street to pick apples. It’s Jordan’s third time picking apples this fall, but his routine seemingly doesn’t get old: he finds the brightest plumpest apple he can find within a few feet of the ground, and then promptly climbs into Jane’s little handwagon and sits himself down. He’s content to munch on his one apple for the rest of the outing, while the rest of us do all the hard work. Back at the farmstand, we look at the little decorative pumpkins on sale, while the kids get snacks. I buy a four-pack of sparkling cider as well as a frozen caramel apple cider, which Jordan promptly drinks the majority of. Jordan’s uncle and cousin disappear into the massive corn maze behind the store, but soon return after discovering that the “real deal” is much tougher than the autumn farmstands they’ve visited before in Southern California. We head back to the house to eat lunch and nap.

In the afternoon, Jordan skips his nap. He’s much too excited to have family around, and to keep messing around the house and trying new things. Speaking of trying new things, we plop him and his older cousin in personal flotation devices and head down to the dock to launch a kayak. Jordan’s cousin has never been kayaking before, so he decides to ride with Aunt Jane to learn how to paddle. We take turns doing laps on the quiet stretch of river that adjoins our wooded peninsula; one adult paddling at a time while the others wrangle the boys. I mostly stay on shore, using the long end of my Tamron travel lens to take photos of everyone on the water. On the nearby forest floor, I show the boys striped wintergreen, American wintergreen berries, and mushrooms. They take to collecting oak acorns; I hammer one open to show them the inner nut, and explain how forest animals and indigenous peoples alike relied on the oak as an important source of food.

In the evening, after dinner (haddock fillets en papillote with squashes and cherry tomatoes, topped with herb butter), I head out again to photograph moonrise from the water’s edge. Jane brings out firewood and s’mores ingredients, and she makes a furtive and very smoky attempt to start on a campfire in the rain-soaked fire pit while the kids watch. I try explaining to her the difference between tinder and kindling, but none of us are very motivated to find kindling in the growing darkness; we wind up roasting marshmallows over the kitchen’s stovetop range and enjoying our s’mores in the enclosed outdoor patio.

On Thursday (Jane’s birthday), we awaken to a chilly and fine, beautiful morning. While the kids eat breakfast and Jordan’s older cousin does some mandatory vacation-week homework from his school, I don my sweater and gloves and take another walk-about on the rail trail outside of our front door. Mid-morning, we head out to Miller State Park just outside of Petersborough NH. There, a short auto road climbs up to the summit of Pack Monadnock Mountain, which I visited a year ago. This year, we bring the kids to see the Boston skyline in the distance on the blue horizon, and down to the northward viewing platform where birders from Mass Audubon are busy with the annual raptor count. In every direction, the forested hillsides are turning shades of fiery orange and yellow, muted as they are under the glare of the late morning sun. After climbing the fire lookout tower and stopping for souvenirs at the little gift stand in the parking lot, we bring the kids back toward Jaffrey, stopping at McDonald’s for an easy and fast lunch.

The afternoon is spent lazing around again. I head out to the grocery store to pick up a cake for Jane and a bundle of birthday goodies from the nearby Marshall’s, where I am hilarious the third of three husbands shopping for their wives’ birthdays from the clearance shelf. I pick up a screaming Christmas goat, a scented candle, and a nice card to go with them. Then, it’s back to the kitchen to prep the last of our family dinners in the house. We celebrate Jane’s birthday with an overabundance of desserts before returning to Boston in another rainstorm the following morning.

Maine: Lost Woods

“I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused - a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love - then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.”

— Rachel Carson
The Sense of Wonder

One of the amazing parts about being Jordan’s dad is that he has taught me to see the world again - no small feat considering that one of my lifelong avocations involves peering through a viewfinder and constantly looking for beautiful stuff in the everyday world. For a few years in early grade school, when Pokémon had just arrived stateside and was all the rage (games, trading cards, Saturday morning cartoons), I had a touch-activated talking toy Pikachu that I carried around with me constantly. It was the perfect size to handhold, and I carried it everywhere until it short-circuited in a school bathroom incident and never talked again. I made a list of things I wanted to show my Pikachu or have him experience - special places in my childhood world, vacation destinations, milestones, a laundry list of sights from the highway and the backseat window (this being suburban Southern California). For me as a kid, it was natural and instinctual to imagine that Pikachu would enjoy these things, find them meaningful, maybe benefit somehow. But that instinct stayed with me into adulthood; I still find it meaningful to share what I find meaningful and beautiful, to document and story-tell and make a visual and written narrative of how the world affects me, and I it. Now, instead of a talking Pikachu, for going-on-four-years-and-counting I’ve had a bilingual, incessantly talking mini-me who constantly asks, “Why?!”, pretends to know about things he knows nothing about (because he knows I’ll tell him anyways, and won’t call him out), and loves nothing more than escaping from preschool for a few days to go on an adventure.

In the last week of summer, at the tail end of August, we bring Jordan on a road trip up the coast of Maine to Southport Island, which Jane and I last visited almost exactly four years ago. Jordan was nearly a third-trimester fetus at that time, and I had just taken over as a fellowship program director. It’s weird how time keeps compressing toward a sort of singularity, the older we get. In the car heading north past Portland, we tell Jordan that he was in Mama’s belly the last time the three of us came this way on the interstate. “Why?! And then was I born at your work-hospital [he says this like a non-hyphenated noun, to distinguish it presumably from all the other, lesser non-work-hospitals]?” “Yes, you were.” “Why?!” And on it goes. We visited Southport back then in part to pay homage to Rachel Carson, whose work has been highly influential to me (and to some smaller extent Jane) since high school. While living primarily in Maryland, Carson made her summer home on Southport for nearly twelve years and, as it were, she fell in love on that stretch of rocky New England coast. Her writing about the sea, her personal letters which speak deeply to the influence of natural and human love upon her place in the world, and her brief essay on the importance of wonder in childhood, have all continued to draw me back, demanding re-reading and re-visiting as I grow older and move through different chapters of my own life; I’ve quoted excerpts from the latter essay, The Sense of Wonder, throughout this journal entry. It seemed only fitting that, with a toddler in tow, we should return to the island that meant so much to Carson and her own sense of love, wonder, and connection to (mutual obligation toward) the salvation of the natural world. That, and the nearby Boothbay Village Railway Museum. Because it is not a phase, and Jordan is absolutely loco for locomotives.

After a long car ride up from Boston (longer than any singular drive we’ve made in recent memory, save this past spring’s road-tripping around Iceland and Washington), Jordan’s had some false-alarm “tummy hurts” situations, and we’ve stopped once or twice for bathroom breaks and serendipitous smoothies (shoutout to the Tropical Smoothie Cafe on Route 1 just north of the city). North of Portland, we continue along the coastal road toward Maine’s Midcoast, and we stop for lunch at the Taste of Maine restaurant in Woolwich, just half an hour away from the Boothbay/Southport region. I freely admit that I picked this restaurant purely because it has a giant inflatable lobster straddling its roof (which Jordan takes a hilarious photo with, out front). We hem and haw over the typical seafood options before ordering a two-and-a-half-foot monster lobster roll, which our waiter brings out with some fanfare. We take a family photo with the thing. The next table over can’t stop laughing at us; they ask us if we regret our decision, and we say it was Jordan’s decision (it was not; he’s not a big fan of lobster). It comes with two slices of watermelon and a single pickle. I have the pickle and Jordan gets to work on the watermelon.

Half an hour and way too much drawn butter later, Jane swears we’ll never order a lobster roll again (spoiler alert: she’s completely wrong). We pile back into the car and make the short remaining drive toward Southport, moods buoyed now that our bellies are full. Jane lets out a fart so rancid that even Jordan complains and asks me to open the window. We reach the Ocean Gate Inn and check into our one-bedroom cabin; we spend the rest of the afternoon exploring our bayside resort and campy-glampy situation for the next four nights. Jane falls asleep and Jordan refuses to do so, so I can take him out for a Daddy-and-me walk around the surrounding woods and down to the floating dock where boats are moored for communal use. We play Pirate Ship (using a little blue telescope to look out of the bottom of a wooden playground playset), and we find cool flowers to tell Mama about when she wakes up (goldenrods, hydrangeas, and beach roses). After Jane awakens, I make a grocery run to the Hannaford’s in nearby Boothbay while Jane and Jordan get to more exploring. On the shopping list, in addition to ready-to-heat dinners and basic staples: Sour Cream ‘n Onion Pringles for Jordan, a sugar-free seltzer water for Jane, and a fucking quart of ice cream for me. I initially choose Orange Sherbet but then replace it with Peanut Butter Fudge Explosion. Jane laughs at the flavor name when she sees it; from that alone, you can tell that it’s been quite the summer for me at work. Post-dinner, we pick up golf balls/clubs from the resort office and try our hands at the mini-golf. Jordan can’t quite grasp the concept and keeps picking up the ball and dropping it in the hole after each stroke. We end our evening down by the water, a rosy sunset developing over the waters of the Sheepscot River, and the tidal channel that runs out to the bay.

“… And the voices of living things: No child should grow up unaware of the dawn chorus of the birds in spring. He will never forget the experience of a specially planned early rising and going out in the predawn darkness. The first voices are heard before daybreak. It is easy to pick out these first, solitary singers. Perhaps a few cardinals are uttering their clear, rising whistles, like someone calling a dog. Then the song of a whitethroat, pure and ethereal, with the dreamy quality of remembered joy. Off in some distant patch of woods a whippoorwill continues his monotonous night chant, rhythmic and insistent, sound that is felt almost more than heard. Robins, thrushes, song sparrows, jays, vireos add their voices. The chorus picks up volume as more and more robins join in, contributing a fierce rhythm of their own that soon becomes dominant in the wild medley of voices. In that dawn chorus one hears the throb of life itself.”

— Rachel Carson
The Sense of Wonder

Early to bed, and early to rise. I have vivid dreams that night, but wake to the peaceful sounds of birdsong in the forest outside our front door. Jordan, having skipped his nap during yesterday’s long car ride up the coast, sleeps in later than usual. Well-rested and eager to take my camera on a (too rare nowadays) sunrise walk, I head out for a stroll down to the water and then around the local woods, where there is a lily-covered pond with a small dock. The sidelight at this early hour is magical, with sunbeams streaming through the canopy, and mist faintly rising from the water’s surface. A very slight coolness lingers in the air, and little signs of colour change are beginning to show in some of the hardwood trees. It does feel like the end of summer - but not just yet.

After we grab a hot breakfast in the galley (Jordan eating a full-grown man’s portion of sausage and bacon, and then becoming obsessed with the word ‘galley’: “Can you get me ice from the ice machine by the galley? Why?!”) we head out to Boothbay for the morning. It’s railway museum day, and Jordan goes nuts once we pull into the parking lot and witness a vintage narrow-gauge steam engine backing up across the property to couple with its passenger cars. As we have some spare time before our scheduled train ride around the outdoor village-museum, we head off exploring by foot, walking around the historic buildings, saying hello to the village’s two resident goats, and heading up to the model railroad museum. Jordan finds more than one red caboose this morning, and pretends to be a conductor each time. After our train ride, we head into the nearby gift shop to buy him a train whistle and a new t-shirt. Jane also grabs a bag of berry-flavored popcorn for some reason (ugh).

Back in our cabin, we make sandwiches for lunch before settling in for a toddler nap. The afternoon is mostly spent lazing around. We check out paddles from the resort and head down to the water to give Jordan his first sea kayaking experience. With a toddler on the lap, boating traffic in the nearby gut, and relatively strong tides in this part of coastal Maine, it’s a fairly furtive attempt. Jane and I make a few laps around the secluded little cove where the floating dock sits, before we head back to the cabin. The evening involves leftovers, ice cream, and TV dinner (watching train videos on Youtube, of course). This is vacation, after all. I head back out in the evening to photograph the dusk hour on the bay, and around camp. The string lights illuminating the benches outside the galley make for a lovely, moody photograph; a light drizzle is beginning to fall as I head back inside.

“I remember a summer night when such a thought came to me strongly. It was a clear night without a moon. With a friend, I went out on a flat headland that is almost a tiny island, being all but surrounded by the waters of the bay. There the horizons are remote and distant rims on the edge of space. We lay and looked up at the sky and the millions of stars that blazed in darkness. The night was so still that we could hear the buoy on the ledges out beyond the mouth of the bay. Once or twice a word spoken by someone on the far shore was carried across on the clear air. A few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of other human life; my companion and I were alone with the stars. I have never seen them more beautiful: t he misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere… It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night perhaps they will never see it… An experience like that, when one’s thoughts are released to roam through the lonely spaces of the universe, can be shared with a child even if you don’t know the name of a single star. You can still drink in the beauty, and think and wonder at the meaning of what you see.

— Rachel Carson
The Sense of Wonder

Morning again. I had a rougher night of sleep (the curse of being sleep-sensitive; when I am too well-rested, my body almost seems to naturally course-correct and subject itself to a bit more insomnia, for no apparent rhyme nor reason). Jordan is first up; he asks to join us on the big king bed, clambers all over me, and practically slaps me awake and pries my eyelids open. We three head out in the early morning to walk the woods together. I bring Jordan down to the nearby fishing pond; he promptly finds himself a big stick and pretends to cast a line into the water. It’s hard to know what he’s thinking in moments like this, out in nature. He’s a natural homebody like me; during the workweek, even if the weather’s nice and we finish dinner early, we often have to force him out of the house to get him away from his train books and his train toys and his one-track mind. Even worse if there are any phone or computer screens involved (i.e. when allowed on the weekend). But once he’s outside, walking through the woods and experiencing the world at his toddler’s eye-level, he does seem to enjoy it and soak it up a bit. I love when he names different trees (oak and maple and their leaves and their respective acorns/seeds), and this morning he cries out, “the hydrangeas are so beautiful!” as he steps out of the cabin door and sees the blue flowers beside our front porch. In the woods, I teach him to be silent and use all of his senses. This morning, we mostly use our ears. While I’m not very good at identifying birds by their calls, I ask him to imagine what they might look like and what they might be saying to each other. “Can I talk too? Why?!” he asks, almost immediately breaking the silence. He blows his train whistle in imitation.

After another stupidly large breakfast (we’re at the point of the trip where, perhaps feeling the literal and metaphoric weight of the 2.5-foot lobster roll two days ago, every free meal that we can load up on is another meal that we can celebrate not paying for), we drive out to the western side of Southport Island, to Hendrick’s Head and the nearby beach. Jane and I visited this spot four years ago - that time, under a somberly cloudy but beautiful sunrise. Today, at mid-morning, we’re greeted with a brilliantly blue and almost annoyingly cloudless sky. We walk down the beach, and Jordan pokes around in the sand and in the intertidal mud. We take a family portrait together, and I teach him about tides; at this point of low tide, the high-water mark looks almost unbelievably high above our heads (see photo of Jane below). Just as we did four years ago, we take a brief stroll in the woods surrounding Hendrick’s Head (Jordan taking the lead on the forest trail - until he realizes that there isn’t another beach at the end of the walk). In the car, we also swing by the lane leading to Rachel Carson’s old cottage, which still bears her name. Afterward, we make a brief stop at the Southport General Store - Jordan filling up the giant Connect Four outside, while Jane sniffs candles and perfumes inside the gift shop. We buy a slice of pizza and a pesto salad for lunch; Jordan admires the incredible produce, and we have to stop him from picking up every last tomato and comparing them to his skull.

Another slow afternoon and evening. Jordan is little picky about his nap today (he’s in the process, we believe, of gradually dropping his final mid-day nap - which, when it soon happens, will truly mark the end of an era and the final death knell for Jane’s and my last remaining block of free time on the weekend). We wind up heading out in the early evening to swim in the resort pool, Jordan clinging tightly onto me as I float around in the chill air of early dusk (“I’m a koala bear! I’m a motorboat! I’m coldy [cold]!”) Someday I’ll teach him to swim. For now, I’ll keep accepting the hourlong hug of a giggling, stupidly silly toddler who refuses to wear goggles and can’t imagine anything more fun than Baba wafting him through the water. Showered and dried off, Jordan and I settle in front of the television (train videos again, of course) while Jane goes out for takeout from nearby Robinson’s Wharf. She comes back with fish and chips, fried calamari with banana peppers, and a fried shrimp basket. Nutrition is not our concern. We had nothing but bacon and eggs for breakfast this morning. Adequate servings of vegetables are a workweek thing. After dinner, we head down to the water again, firing up a campfire and making s’mores (compliments of our local friendly camp counselors, aka resort employees). Jordan enjoys roasting his marshmallow (very, very carefully - for he has about as much sense of fire safety as he does of water safety). I walk down to the floating dock with Jordan and we listen to the fish “dancing” along the surface of the water. I take a few dusk compositions of the pine-clad shoreline and some nearby cottages lit by windowlight. Then, as the night settles in, it’s back to our cabin, and to bed.

“What is the value of preserving and strengthening this sense of awe and wonder, this recognition of something beyond the boundaries of human existence? Is the exploration of the natural world just a pleasant way to pass the golden hours of childhood or is there something deeper? I am sure there is something much deeper, something lasting and significant. Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.”

— Rachel Carson
The Sense of Wonder

On the final full day of our trip, we make a morning outing to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in nearby Boothbay after our obligatory resort breakfast. You’d think that blueberry pancakes with quasi-Mrs. Buttersworth high-fructose corn syrup might get old after a few days, but they fucking don’t. Jordan again eats enough sausages to pay for his share of the accommodations. We take a winding backroad across Sawyers Island to the botanical garden, along the way passing more picturesque shorelines, tidal channels, and water’s-edge cabins. At the gardens, we pay for admission and get a nice map of the property which highlights its whimsical, kid-friendly zones, replete with a family of troll sculptures spread across the gardens. I have a lovely time engaging in flower photography (it’s a partly overcast morning - wonderful for this type of shooting), while Jordan excitedly careens from one troll to the next. Near the children’s garden, he finds a bear sculpture and gives it a hug. “I am his sister, this is my brother,” he says convincingly. Then he grabs its butt/tail and laughs. We show him monarch butterflies, Solomon’s seal (“Blue berries! Can I eat? Why?!”), multicolored garden dahlias, and a fairy village in the forest. He meets three trolls: mighty tree-hugging Roskva (“Does he need to cut his toenails? Why?!”), baby Lilja (“Does she want a hug? Why?!”), and grandpapa Birk (“Is this 阿公 troll? Why is he twisting?!”).

We end our morning in Boothbay Harbor, where we grab ice cream at the Downeast Ice Cream Factory (where Jordan jams out to a very Eastern European house/trance mix while burying his lower face in a strawberry ice cream cone) and walk along the harbor footbridge before grabbing more takeout. Jordan gets a ham-and-cheese sandwich. I cave in and ask Jane to get me a lobster roll (having lasted all of three days before relapsing). I browse the local library-sponsored book store and pick up two books: Near Home, a beautiful collection of black-and-white photography by Robert Mitchell around the Boothbay Region, and Lighthouse Lullaby, a nautical-themed children’s book for Jordan. It’s another lazy afternoon, involving some time at the pool and down by the water, canoeing as a family around the little cove beside the camp. We are back in Boston at noon the following day after a long car ride back down I-95 (Jordan trooping through over three hours in the car and a mild bit of mid-week traffic), concluding a wonderful few days of exploration and re-connection along the coast of Maine.

New Hampshire: Northwood

The weekend after my marathon, and thankfully my body has mostly recovered (sans a few toenails - what are toenails even for, really?). I head out on my second foliage run of the month, northward-bound again. This time, I’m heading to a beautiful but oft-bypassed part of New Hampshire - the Merrimack Valley wedged between the Seacoast to the east, the Lakes and White Mountains to the north, and Monadnock to the west. Five years here in New England, and I feel like I’m just beginning to see all that the region has to offer. Returning to old familiar, cherished landscapes is always deeply inspiring and meaningful, but there’s something to be said for exploring new places as well. Although it’s been more than two weeks since my birthday-week jaunt to the Monadnock region (where the foliage was beautiful but decidedly post-peak), I find that the autumn colours here in the valley - perhaps owing to the lower elevation and closer proximity to the coast - are popping off. With the exception of some barren swaths of swamp maples in boggy ground, the region’s hardwoods are a panoply of bright and beautiful hues. Solo again, I carve a winding path through the rural part of the valley: walking the rail trail east of Candia, hiking a section of the Great Brook Trail in Deerfield, exploring the periphery of Freeses Pond, and scouting out my sunrise spot (Stonehouse Pond) before taking a long stroll around the lake at Northwood Meadows State Park.

Northwood (finally, the namesake of this page of the blog - though I imagine I might eventually visit other Northwoods here on Turtle Island) is little less sleepy than your prototypic New England village, but no less quirky and quaint. Whereas my time in Jaffrey two weeks ago felt melancholic and wistful (perhaps owing to the stormy weather) today’s travels feel rambunctious and unbridled. I spend the day carefully exploring small byways, finding places to pull off the road and explore on foot. Some of my favorite moments, none of which were pre-planned: strolling the quiet neighborhood of Deerfield Parade to photograph the nearby brook and cemetery. Spotting a pair of wild otters, swimming carefree in Freeses Pond. Getting location pointers from a fellow walker in Candia - and being mistaken more than once for a birder (woman watching me peer through my viewfinder: “So what should I be looking for?” Me: “Uh, trees?”). Stumbling upon some of the most astounding autumn scenes I’ve ever photographed, beside the area’s many ponds and meadows (proof that even in a drought-affected “off” year, New England’s fall beauty still reveals itself in ample measure). Toward sunset, I grab dinner at Northwoods Brewing Company, a lively family spot with good food, a dairy bar, and a nice selection of mocktails. A few minutes away is my home for the night, Lake Shore Farm Inn beside Jenness Pond. I take my last shots of the evening at the little boat launch and private beach behind the inn: a perfectly calm, perfectly reflected scene of maples and sunset clouds across the water. Upon checking in, I find that I’ve accidentally booked a two-bedroom family suite - no doubt when I thought (earlier in planning) that someone, anyone, would be riding shotgun with me this weekend. I’m usually good about fixing and adjusting these travel bookings, but life has admittedly been a little busy recently. I have a quiet night writing, reading, and reviewing photos - just me, myself, and I.

In the morning, I rise early to photograph sunrise. Well, it’s not any earlier than Jordan normally has us up, I suppose. This is the nice part about mid- and late-fall photography. The days are short, and the nights are restful. Winding my way back eastward through Northwood, I make my way down to the shore of Stonehouse Pond, where pale dawn light is just beginning to hit the granite cliff at Stonehouse Pond. In some sense, this sunrise shoot is the entire purpose of my overnight trip - this pond being one that I spotted years ago while scouting for autumn photography locations. After watching the sun rise against the trees on the opposite shore, it’s southward-bound to Boston, back to the highway along winding country roads.