Where That Barn Used to Be
June 29 2011
My friend Gwen Newton sends me newspaper clippings, and recently I found in our mailbox at the end of our driveway a batch that included a piece titled “You Can Call It What You Want in the Woods” by Jack Savage, editor of Forest Notes: New Hampshire’s Conservation Magazine, published by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.
He wrote entertainingly about how, from childhood onward, we make up our own names for places so we’ll all know where we’re talking about.
I get into this subject a little in my “Mother Goose” piece (Ruth's Neighborhood, July 2011 (no longer online), mentioning that Don and I have named various rocks in the beaver pond out back. So when he says, “There’s a turtle sunning itself on Rock Ruhamah,” I know which rock he means. We also have named the four dead and hollow trees along the edge; the two taller ones are Stonehenge, the two shorter Callanish. So when I say, “There’s a kingfisher atop the right-hand Stonehenge,” he knows where to look. Sometimes this gets more complicated, such as:
Don: “What the hell is that bird on the branch of that birch that’s just beyond the left-hand Callanish?”
Me: “Where?”
“On the third branch down. Is it a cedar waxwing?”
“Where?”
Etc. I’m reminded of how, in Scotland, we agreed on our own pronunciation of the names on maps and road signs so that at least we would know what we meant even though we were pronouncing them incorrectly, yet still we got confused. “Stay on the A82 through Crianlarich—” “What?”
In a 1999 “Ruth’s Neighborhood” piece, “Making Tracks,” I describe the names for various spots along my snowshoeing route. Since I wrote that, those woods have been thoroughly logged (not by us; we don’t own that piece of land) and I haven’t wanted to see the devastation, so now I visit those spots in my memory. “Sleepy Lagoon” and “The Sunny Spot” must be still there, but the old maple in “Sugar Maple Corner” must be long gone.
Long gone.
It’s a joke about how folks in the country give directions to strangers, telling them, “Turn at the corner where the apple tree used to be.”
Our classic example of this is a barn in West Rumney on Route 25, the way that my parents (Dan and Ernestine/Ernie) and sister Penny and I always went from our home in Laconia to visit Nana, Dan’s mother, in Orford.
These visits were rather formal affairs, with “luncheon” not lunch, so there was some unwilling dolling up before we left. Dan was apt to put on a sport jacket and a tie, Ernie wore a good dress, and Penny and I were as sugar-and-spice as possible. During the drive in the old Mercury, apprehension was in the air (along with Dan and Ernie’s cigarette smoke). It wasn’t like the longer drives down to Lexington, Mass., to visit Ernie’s parents, which engendered an excited yet comfortable feeling. But I tried to find comfort in familiar landmarks along the way. A major one was a big barn with advertising painted on it, as was traditional with some barns on main roads. What was the ad for? Tobacco, I seem to recall, or am I just remembering trying not to be carsick when the cigarette smoke got too much?
After the visit at the handsome house on what’s known as the Ridge in Orford, we would all heave sighs of relief as we started home. Dan would whip off his tie; Penny and I would rejoice that we hadn’t spilled the finger bowls; Ernie would have a few choice observations about her mother-in-law. In summertime we stopped at Baker Pond, changed into the bathing suits Ernie had brought, and went for a swim. You had to walk far out in the pond to get deep enough, unlike at the beach we frequented on Lake Winnipesaukee.
When we were back in the car, Ernie doled out some of the peanut-butter cookies that Pearl, Nana’s maid, always sent home with us. Then we continued along Route 25A to 25 and went past that barn again.
As the years passed, we watched the barn decay. I grew up and married Don, who was interested in the barn because his mother’s family was from Rumney, though he had no relatives he knew of still living there and had never seen the barn until I introduced him to it. After Nana died, we took that route less often, so the disintegration of the barn was more obvious whenever we saw it. Finally we saw that the barn had completely collapsed.
But it’s still a landmark. Nowadays we drive that way for Don’s various visits to Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital in Lebanon. The junction with Route 118, which leads to Route 4 to Lebanon, is just beyond the barn. As he drives along Route 25, Don sometimes says, “Haven’t we gone past the junction?”
“Nope,” I say. “We haven’t yet reached where that barn used to be.”
He knows precisely what I mean.
