The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [80]
I walked past the Peacham Inn – white clapboard, green shutters, no sign of life – and wandered up a hill, past a white Congregational church and pleasant, dozing houses. At the crest of the hill stood a broad green, with an obelisk and flagpole, and beside it an old cemetery. A zephyr wind teased the flag. Down the hill, across a broad valley, a series of pale green and brown hills rolled away to the horizon, like the swells of a sea. Below me the church bell tolled the hour, but otherwise there was not a sound. This was as perfect a spot as I had ever seen. I had a look at the obelisk. COMMEMORATING PEACHAM SOLDIERS 1869, it said, and had names carved in it, good New England names like Elijah W. Sargent, Lowell Sterns, Horace Rowe. There were forty-five names in all, too many surely for a mere hamlet in the hills. But then the cemetery beside the green also looked far too large for the size of the town. It covered the hillside and the grandeur of many of the monuments suggested that this had once been a place of wealth.
I went through the gate and had a look around. My eye was caught by one particularly handsome stone, an octagonal marble column surmounted by a granite sphere. The column logged the copious deaths of Hurds and their near relatives from Capt. Nathan Hurd in 1818 to Frances H. Bement in 1889. A small panel on the back said:
Nathan H. died July 24 1852 AE. 4 Y’s 1 M’o.
Joshua F. died July 31 1852 AE. 1 YR 11 M’s.
Children of J. & C. Pitkin.
What could it have been, I wondered, that carried off these two little brothers just a week apart? A fever? It seemed unlikely in July. An accident in which one died and the other lingered? Two unrelated events? I pictured the parents crouched at Joshua F.’s beside, watching his life ebb, praying to God not to take him as well, and having their hopes crushed. Isn’t life shitty? Everywhere I looked there was disappointment and heartbreak recorded in the stones: ‘Joseph, son of Ephraim and Sarah Carter, died March 18 1846, aged 18 yrs’, ‘Alma Foster, daut. of Zadock and Hannah Richardson, d. May 22, 1847, AE. 17 yrs’. So many were so young. I became infected with an inexpressible melancholy as I wandered alone among these hundreds of stilled souls, the emptied lives, the row upon row of ended dreams. Such a sad place! I stood there in the mild October sunshine, feeling so sorry for all these luckless people and their lost lives, reflecting bleakly on mortality and on my own dear, cherished family so far away in England, and I thought, ‘Well, fuck this,’ and walked back down the hill to the car.
* * *
I drove west across Vermont, into the Green Mountains. The mountains were dark and round and the valleys looked rich. Here the light seemed softer, sleepier, more autumnal. There was colour everywhere – trees the colour of mustard and rust, meadows of gold and green, colossal white barns, blue lakes. Here and there along the roadside, produce stands brimmed with pumpkins and squash and other autumn fruits. It was like a day trip to heaven. I wandered around on back roads. There was a surprising lot of small houses, some little better than shacks. I supposed there couldn’t be much work in a place like Vermont. The state has hardly any towns or industry. The biggest city, Burlington, has a population of just 37,000. Outside Groton I stopped at a roadside café for coffee and listened along with the other three customers to a fat young woman with a pair of ill-kempt children moaning in a loud voice about her financial problems to the woman behind the counter. ‘I still only get four dollars an hour,’ she was saying. ‘Harvey, he’s been at Fibberts for three years and he’s only just got his first raise. You know what he gets now? Four