The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [77]
At Wiscasset, a third of the way up the coast to New Brunswick, I lost heart altogether. Wiscasset bills itself on the signboard at the edge of town as the prettiest village in Maine, which doesn’t say a whole lot for the rest of the state. I don’t mean to suggest that Wiscasset was awful, because it wasn’t. It had a steep main street lined with craft shops and other yuppie emporia sloping down to a placid inlet of the Atlantic. Two old wooden ships sat rotting on the bank. It was OK. It just wasn’t worth driving four hours to get there.
Abruptly I decided to abandon Route I and plunge northward, into the dense pine forests of central Maine, heading in an irregular line for the White Mountains, on a road that went up and down, up and down, like a rucked carpet. After a few miles I began to sense a change of atmosphere. The clouds were low and shapeless, the daylight meagre. Winter clearly was closing in. I was only seventy miles or so from Canada and it was evident that winters here were long and severe. It was written in the crumbling roads and in the huge stacks of firewood that stood outside each lonely cabin. Many chimneys were already sprouting a wintry wisp of smoke. It was barely October, but already the land had the cold and lifeless feel of winter. It was the kind of atmosphere that makes you want to turn up your collar and head for home.
Just beyond Gilead I passed into New Hampshire and the landscape became more interesting. The White Mountains rose up before me, big and round, the colour of wood-ash. Presumably they take their name from the birch trees that cover them. I drove on an empty highway through a forest of trembling leaves. The skies were still flat and low, the weather cold, but at least I was out of the monotony of the Maine woods. The road rose and fell and swept along the edge of a boulder-strewn creek. The scenery was infinitely better – but still there was no colour, none of the brilliant golds and reds of autumn that I had been led to expect. Everything from the ground to the sky was a dull, cadaverous grey.
I drove past Mt Washington, the highest peak in the north-eastern US (6,288 feet, for those of you who are keeping notes). But its real claim to fame is as the windiest place in America. It’s something to do with . . . well, with the way the wind blows, of course. Anyway, the highest wind speed ever recorded anywhere on earth was logged on the top of Mt Washington in April 1934 when a gust of – pencils ready? – 231 miles an hour whistled through. That must have been an experience and a half for the meteorologists who worked up there. Can you imagine trying to describe a wind like that to somebody? ‘Well, it was, you know, real . . . windy. I mean, really windy. Do you know what I’m saying?’ It must be very frustrating to have a truly unique experience.
Just beyond it, I came to Bretton Woods, which I had always pictured as a quaint little town. But in fact there was no town at all, just a hotel and a ski lift. The hotel was huge and looked like a medieval fortress, but with a bright red roof. It looked like a cross between Monte Cassino and a Pizza Hut. It was here in 1944 that economists and politicians from twenty-eight nations got together and agreed to set up the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It certainly looked a nice place to make economic history. As John Maynard Keynes remarked at the time in a letter to his brother, Milton: ‘It has been a most satisfactory week. The negotiations have been cordial, the food here is superb and the waiters are ever so pretty.’
I stopped for the night at Littleton, which, as the name suggests, was a little town near the Vermont border. I pulled into the Littleton Motel on the main street. On the office door was a sign that said ‘If you want ice or advice, come before 6.30. I’m taking the wife to dinner. (“And about time too!” – wife).’ Inside was an old guy on crutches who told me