Commute
From late high school through college, I spent my summers making beds, digging holes, and mowing grass at a camp in Andover, NH. An arrow stretched between my old house and Elbo-Edge would measure seven miles and point southwest. But in New England, straight lines do not exist.
So I drive southeast along the Pemigewasset valley, southwest between cottages crowding Webster Lake, west past maple trees tethered to a massive tank, then uphill, through cattle fields stretched between Dyers Crossing and Halcyon Hill, an into East Andover.
At Highland Lake, the water is cold and clear, ideal conditions for smallmouth bass. The lake is fed by Tilton Brook on the northwest and, from the south, by a short loop of Sucker Brook. On the eastern edge, a channel cuts north, forming a peninsula. At the end of the peninsula, a seaplane has been moored. The channel is bridged by Maple St. Under the bridge, the water falls, and Sucker Brook resumes.
At the end of the channel, near the bridge, the bank is wide and grassy, divided from Maple Street by a wooden fence. Perennials, maintained in neat clumps, stare at the sky, indifferent to the loons that cruise the channel. Earwigs hide in yellow lilies, black ants tend blooms, and a honey bee drinks from a coneflower.
I continute on Maple Street. Just past the powerline cut, a black bear crosses the road. Turkeys flock on a hillside fenced in stone. Ravens fly among the orchard. On Old College Road, lined by more stone, all the houses are white and colonial and old and beautiful. Elbow Pond Road traces the final descent, past goats and deer and horses, across a beaver-flooded wetland, and over the brook that cuts the pass between Ragged Mountain and Tucker Mountain. Fourteen miles and 25 minutes later, I arrive, having sampled the best of the Sunapee Uplands.