Winter in Rockport – February – 06
It was to be two things for us; a chance to knock those snug winter doldrums askew before February’s onslaught, and a research trip for me. The choreography of our kids’ care and safety while we were away was in place and we’d been looking forward to this long weekend. Perhaps I was looking forward to it too much, since February, the month of my recently deceased brother’s birthday, was the month I’d chosen for our slip from everyday life. I needed a few days that couldn’t possibly align themselves with quotidian tasks and could transport me to the place where I’d set my novel, to the time and the house I’d chosen, and deliver my husband and me to more intimate corners of our marriage that seem more distant when life gets in the way.
Rockport, Massachusetts, a tiny town on Cape Ann that shares its getaway status in a very different way with Gloucester, is just 6 hours away from Philadelphia, without three kids, a dog, and stops for fast food and bathrooms times five. Once you get near it, you’ll know. Aside from the signs that start welcoming you into New England’s venerable towns established in the 16th and 17th centuries, you begin to feel the ocean, even in winter.
There is sand on the shoulders. Even mixed with grey, grainy snow, you can see the sand. The marshes along Route 128 are covered in snow, but by then, the bay is to your left and you’re about to enter the Cape.
I should mention that we’ve been to Rockport in the summer numerous times, to the same inn where we were headed on this particular Super Bowl February weekend when the Eagles were pitted against the Patriots (and lost). Summer in a town like Rockport that is nirvana for artists and shop owners from ice cream to sterling silver is the same to any tourist who doesn’t mind a bit of a crowd. We’ve loved it, coming ourselves two consecutive years as a treat following rigorous White Mountain hikes, then last summer bringing our children and my parents who also drank it in. We would have stayed on if school weren’t about to start.
A summer town in winter is a quirky choice to make for a getaway when your friends are going to the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Trinidad. It might even be a brave choice. But I had to see and feel Rockport buried in quiet to be able to understand it in a season other than the one that brings flocks of people, like a winged migration, between April and October.
Since we started coming here, we've favored the Linden Tree Inn. It is just a block up the road from the Atlantic Ocean and down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society. From the inn’s cupola, or widow's watch, through leafless branches you can see the Union Cemetery where the town’s Civil War soldiers are buried, and far to the right, a lighthouse, one of the twin Thacher lights. Rockport Presbyterian’s spire rises above the town, clearing the trees. Mill Pond, where in summer painters set their easels along its pathway, is a stone’s throw. Up here in winter, with the morning sun shining so brightly I can hardly see my computer’s monitor, I hear the ducks even with the windows closed, see them skating onto the ice as they land. It’s a small, square room, hardly larger than a bathroom, with a telescope and windows that ogle the town from all sides. You can see the foam of the ocean as it swirls and eddies against the rocks.
John and Tobey Shepherd, the innkeepers, have put two chairs up here and a table so that I can write. I like to imagine that one of my female characters spends time up here, wondering about her fate, why she’s been dealt such a loss. Perhaps it’s trite, having a character in a fishing town in the 1870’s lose her husband at sea. Or maybe it’s prophetic. I didn’t know what it felt like to lose a loved one when I set out to write my novel. Ironically, it was my brother, Colin, a writer working on his own book, who encouraged me to get off my laurels and just do. So, I am here for him, too.
One of the places we revisited was a café-bistro called Alchemy on Gloucester’s Main Street. When we first started going there after a leisurely poke-around across the street at Mystery Train, the used music/book store we can still hardly leave each time we enter, Alchemy was a charming carpet bag of a joint, with old couches on tattered rugs, baskets of books and toys to distract children while their parents fiendishly darted a few feet away to the juice and coffee bar and chose a dessert. Now, a couple of years after our first visit, the place is completely transformed. The couches are leather, elegantly strewn with throw pillows I coveted as soon as I sat back in one, and the menu is gourmet deli. The juice and coffee bar are gone, but the toy and baskets remain, stowed under a large coffee table. We sat there all afternoon, me poking at my laptop, my husband at his while he enjoyed the Greek salad and a latte and I lapped up the pumpkin carrot soup. The gratis wireless was a dividend we didn’t expect.
The Linden Tree Inn was built around 1850 as a residence and in the 1920’s it became an inn when the daughter who was raised in the house began to take in guests, calling it Broadview House. The Shepherds took it on as newlyweds in 2002 and keep it open all year, with lulls in winter that have made this house our home for this particular weekend. For, while they have retreats and conventions ideally scheduled for these quiet spells, we are the only guests. The house doesn’t echo with our footsteps; it absorbs us. The radiators twitter early in the evening, then fade to a whisper that keeps the house hearthside warm.
One thing we love about the Linden Tree is Tobey’s breakfasts, served in the formal dining room that is intimate enough to feel like your own and large enough to be almost grand, with elegant furniture, seamlessly built-in hutches that must date back to when the house was built, and a bay window where there is one of four tables for two around the larger table.
The aroma of Tobey’s scones swelling in the oven and her coffee ripening in the Bodum waft to the cathedral ceilings. Because we’re the only guests this weekend, we can ask for breakfast at whatever time our hearts desire it. Tobey is glad enough that we’re not early birds, but she and her husband, John, an affable Brit and an economics professor at Bentley College, are well-accustomed to those who rise early to take in what they can. If we’d said we eat breakfast at 7:30, they wouldn’t have blinked, though it would mean rising before the sun.
Something about being around the British, and remembering how I drank tea in Canada where I was born and raised, makes me want to drink my P.J. Tipps the way John would, so I do. After all, I’m on holiday.
After breakfast, we sometimes sat on the enclosed side porch, summery in any season, with white wicker furniture cushioned in blue with those Victorian patterns that invite you into another time. In the afternoon, it is drenched in sunlight and a perfect room for reading. Retreat groups and conferences that the Shepherds encourage to book at the inn gather there as they do in the dining and living rooms to conduct their programs.
In the summer, after a deliciously filling seafood meal at the locally popular Fish Shack (now under construction, but normally open in winter, too), we would amble along the Bearskin Neck toward the water and poke our heads in and out of shops and galleries, buy indiscriminate amounts of penny candy from Tuck’s. But it is winter. So, each evening after dinner we retire to the living room at the inn, a room off the main hallway, with plush couches flanking the doorway in an L-shape so that you feel brought toward them. There is a wood-burning stove and a pleasing Victorian sensibility in the way the room is furnished that flows with the rest of the house.
There Joe and I work on our separate projects, absorbed in them, just as free to stretch out and cuddle while we watch a movie as if we were in our own living space. On one evening, we do, and it’s more of a delight than I’d imagined. Somehow, I worried that this - something we can do at home in our own family room - would be a waste of precious time. But perhaps because it is precious, one should allow a little of it to go to waste now and then and to taste that pleasure without worrying about time ebbing the way the tide does.
As reliable as the tide were those few winter nights we spent at the inn, lulled by the house’s sonorous quiet, behind it the distant thunder of the surf, a rhythmic roar that placed itself just behind a membrane thin wall of my consciousness. It was quiet enough to allow for sleep, the thunder and hiss of the ocean present enough a reminder that we weren’t in Philadelphia.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Autumn in Rockport – November 18-06
To Mrs. Cynthia Peckham, I owe a debt of gratitude. This morning, I marched up to the Sandy Bay Historical Society at the top of King Street and she let me into the old house (by arrangement), once owned by one of her ancestors, Levi Sewall when he built it in 1832 out of granite from his quarry. She led me up into the reading room, where there were volumes of books, some of them entire genealogies for some of Rockport’s residents who take an interest in their provenance. There were also town records, history books and literature, as well as letters that I never even got to during my two hours.
But I found a plumb resource, a journal written in 1848-49 by a young Susannah Norwood Torrey, when she was in her early 20’s and newly married, living a middle class life in Rockport. It was a revelation to read something so similar to what I’ve created in my own head and committed to over 100 pages so far; the language, the overall mood, were eerily like that of my character, Marianne Parsons. I took away some pages of introduction to the transcribed journal and about two pages of what Susannah Norwood Torrey had written to get a feel for her daily rhythm. I am in complete disbelief. Susannah is, forgive me, almost a dead ringer for my protagonist, Marianne Parsons, with an aspect of her that veers a little away from the conventional just as Marianne’s nature tends to do.
Mrs. Peckham, curator of the Historical Society, is a descendant of the Norwood and Poole families; the Norwoods being great landowners going back to the early 18th century, the Pooles among the earliest settlers of Sandy Bay (founded in 1690 and which became the town of Rockport in 1840), once part of Gloucester. Mrs. P., in her 80’s herself, was generous with facts and remarkably clear-headed. She had much to offer and was happy to oblige as I ferreted through this and that stack she handed me, skimming a book or two before moving hungrily onto the next thing and losing myself in what I felt was the prize; the journal and the file on Hannah Jumper.
Before I knew anything about her other than that she was queen of Temperance, I had slipped Hannah Jumper into my book without knowing when she lived and died. The trail I’d begun to sniff a few days ago (on the internet) brought me to a book written about her by Eleanor C. Parsons, detailing the day Hannah and dozens of homemakers took to the establishments in Rockport, hatchets hidden under their lace shawls (July 8, 1856), to lay waste to any liquor they could find. Never married, an enterprising seamstress and handy with rendering medicine from herbs which is how, it is recorded, that she knew and was admired by Rockport’s women, Hannah Jumper was a spry 75 when she led that revolt against illicit supplies of alcohol. Though I hadn’t known until today about that riotous day in Rockport’s history and its effect on Temperance (which ended here in 2005 when the law of no liquor licenses was repealed in Rockport), I realized that if she’s going to be a guest at a dinner party at the Pringles’ table in my book, I had better figure out if she was still alive.
Of course, she wasn’t, not in 1870; she died in 1865. And, not only was she dead, this morning Mrs. Peckham told me that Hannah Jumper’s line is gone. She has no descendants, although Story Parsons, Eleanor Parsons' late husband, was descended from Hannah Jumper (I learned this later) whose maiden name was Parsons; how to keep it all straight! So, looking at the day the hatchet gang went on their liquor vanquishing rampage and realizing, too, that it was before the Civil War into which Rockport sent some of its men to fight but which was also not as significantly a part of their lives as in other parts of the Northeast, I’ve decided that I might place the diary in 1856-57 (a year in Marianne Parsons’ life) and include this historic event in my book as a bit of backdrop. I now have a document, written in 1933, of the account (as told to, and eye witnessed) of Hannah Jumper’s siege. It’s actually told in a decidedly light tone, and seemed even then to be a source of some amusement. The triumph of her will is celebrated.
The other touchstone I’ve been led to when researching Hannah Jumper is Eleanor C. Parsons, Rockport’s resident historian, perhaps one of several. To her enormous credit, Mrs. Peckham is definitely a fount of history with her familial ties to a rich legacy of town folk through the centuries. And this morning I asked this marvelous curator if Eleanor Parsons is accessible to anyone. So, she gave me her address and tel. number, saying the Mrs. Parsons would enjoy being “bothered,” as she’s often bored. Boredom can be lethal to an elderly person. No wonder Mrs. Parsons uses that still lucid brain to keep writing historical books.
Now I’m set to meet with her tomorrow afternoon. Her late husband is Story Parsons from Rockport, his family dating back to its earliest days. Though Mrs. Peckham – a woman, I soon learned, with an eagle eye for accuracy and truth in non-fiction - more or less waved her hand in dismissal of my worry that using the Parsons name might be a problem in my fictional work, I plan to ask the nonagenarian history maven if I can use her surname; just dumb luck on my part to have chosen it in the first place. She’s written an embarrassment of books on Rockport’s history, one of them about Hannah and her Hatchet Gang, and she’s 91 years old. She’s still writing and publishing!
So, I called the venerable Mrs. Eleanor Parsons and we spoke a few minutes. I figured, I’m only here another day and uncertain as to when I'll be back; I must make hay while the sun shines. She was only too happy to agree to a 2 o’clock meeting tomorrow at her house, down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society which is just a few minutes’ walk from the inn. I feel a little like a sleuth even though much of what I’m discovering seems organically to sprout from the thing I discover and turn over before it. But this is what research is and I don’t want to get too deep into it yet, just gather bits here and there to inform my story so that I can proceed and return later to facts and places as they occur and arise.
Right now, Joe is upstairs in our cozy room doing his own work and in an hour or so we’ll stroll back into town for dinner. We took a walk this afternoon after lunching on some crackers, cheese and fruit (and a bit of Port wine for me; my favorite in small, self-indulgent doses) which really hit the spot. I’m setting this elegantly furnished living room on fire with the after effects of too much cheese.
Later today or tomorrow, Tobey Shepherd, the proprietress of the Linden Tree Inn (along with her husband John whose English lineage – he’s from a naval family in Plymouth, England – is rich indeed) where we stay when we come here, is going to show me the interior staircases in this house where I’ve set my novel. In the four years and half-dozen times we’ve been coming to the inn, these staircases were unknown to me. This house is filled with rooms, two deep stories of them, topped off by a widow’s watch that I like to visit just to look through the ogling windows on all sides. Today they were steamy and I could only peer through one tiny space out to one of the twin Thacher lighthouses in the distance.
Being here with Joe, feeling the presence of the ghosts of my book’s characters, absorbing the warmth and comfort of this 155 year old house, is my heaven. Joe is cheering my efforts on when I gush about my discoveries, is happy to enjoy the surroundings as much as I do. He is a good companion.
In February when we were here, I struggled with the continuation of the book, my confidence and convictions wobbling. But it is nine months later, the full cycle of a pregnancy, and I’m ready to nurture it to the end and watch it grow beyond its beginnings; most vitally to help it along since it can’t grow without me to nudge it further.
To Mrs. Cynthia Peckham, I owe a debt of gratitude. This morning, I marched up to the Sandy Bay Historical Society at the top of King Street and she let me into the old house (by arrangement), once owned by one of her ancestors, Levi Sewall when he built it in 1832 out of granite from his quarry. She led me up into the reading room, where there were volumes of books, some of them entire genealogies for some of Rockport’s residents who take an interest in their provenance. There were also town records, history books and literature, as well as letters that I never even got to during my two hours.
But I found a plumb resource, a journal written in 1848-49 by a young Susannah Norwood Torrey, when she was in her early 20’s and newly married, living a middle class life in Rockport. It was a revelation to read something so similar to what I’ve created in my own head and committed to over 100 pages so far; the language, the overall mood, were eerily like that of my character, Marianne Parsons. I took away some pages of introduction to the transcribed journal and about two pages of what Susannah Norwood Torrey had written to get a feel for her daily rhythm. I am in complete disbelief. Susannah is, forgive me, almost a dead ringer for my protagonist, Marianne Parsons, with an aspect of her that veers a little away from the conventional just as Marianne’s nature tends to do.
Mrs. Peckham, curator of the Historical Society, is a descendant of the Norwood and Poole families; the Norwoods being great landowners going back to the early 18th century, the Pooles among the earliest settlers of Sandy Bay (founded in 1690 and which became the town of Rockport in 1840), once part of Gloucester. Mrs. P., in her 80’s herself, was generous with facts and remarkably clear-headed. She had much to offer and was happy to oblige as I ferreted through this and that stack she handed me, skimming a book or two before moving hungrily onto the next thing and losing myself in what I felt was the prize; the journal and the file on Hannah Jumper.
Before I knew anything about her other than that she was queen of Temperance, I had slipped Hannah Jumper into my book without knowing when she lived and died. The trail I’d begun to sniff a few days ago (on the internet) brought me to a book written about her by Eleanor C. Parsons, detailing the day Hannah and dozens of homemakers took to the establishments in Rockport, hatchets hidden under their lace shawls (July 8, 1856), to lay waste to any liquor they could find. Never married, an enterprising seamstress and handy with rendering medicine from herbs which is how, it is recorded, that she knew and was admired by Rockport’s women, Hannah Jumper was a spry 75 when she led that revolt against illicit supplies of alcohol. Though I hadn’t known until today about that riotous day in Rockport’s history and its effect on Temperance (which ended here in 2005 when the law of no liquor licenses was repealed in Rockport), I realized that if she’s going to be a guest at a dinner party at the Pringles’ table in my book, I had better figure out if she was still alive.
Of course, she wasn’t, not in 1870; she died in 1865. And, not only was she dead, this morning Mrs. Peckham told me that Hannah Jumper’s line is gone. She has no descendants, although Story Parsons, Eleanor Parsons' late husband, was descended from Hannah Jumper (I learned this later) whose maiden name was Parsons; how to keep it all straight! So, looking at the day the hatchet gang went on their liquor vanquishing rampage and realizing, too, that it was before the Civil War into which Rockport sent some of its men to fight but which was also not as significantly a part of their lives as in other parts of the Northeast, I’ve decided that I might place the diary in 1856-57 (a year in Marianne Parsons’ life) and include this historic event in my book as a bit of backdrop. I now have a document, written in 1933, of the account (as told to, and eye witnessed) of Hannah Jumper’s siege. It’s actually told in a decidedly light tone, and seemed even then to be a source of some amusement. The triumph of her will is celebrated.
The other touchstone I’ve been led to when researching Hannah Jumper is Eleanor C. Parsons, Rockport’s resident historian, perhaps one of several. To her enormous credit, Mrs. Peckham is definitely a fount of history with her familial ties to a rich legacy of town folk through the centuries. And this morning I asked this marvelous curator if Eleanor Parsons is accessible to anyone. So, she gave me her address and tel. number, saying the Mrs. Parsons would enjoy being “bothered,” as she’s often bored. Boredom can be lethal to an elderly person. No wonder Mrs. Parsons uses that still lucid brain to keep writing historical books.
Now I’m set to meet with her tomorrow afternoon. Her late husband is Story Parsons from Rockport, his family dating back to its earliest days. Though Mrs. Peckham – a woman, I soon learned, with an eagle eye for accuracy and truth in non-fiction - more or less waved her hand in dismissal of my worry that using the Parsons name might be a problem in my fictional work, I plan to ask the nonagenarian history maven if I can use her surname; just dumb luck on my part to have chosen it in the first place. She’s written an embarrassment of books on Rockport’s history, one of them about Hannah and her Hatchet Gang, and she’s 91 years old. She’s still writing and publishing!
So, I called the venerable Mrs. Eleanor Parsons and we spoke a few minutes. I figured, I’m only here another day and uncertain as to when I'll be back; I must make hay while the sun shines. She was only too happy to agree to a 2 o’clock meeting tomorrow at her house, down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society which is just a few minutes’ walk from the inn. I feel a little like a sleuth even though much of what I’m discovering seems organically to sprout from the thing I discover and turn over before it. But this is what research is and I don’t want to get too deep into it yet, just gather bits here and there to inform my story so that I can proceed and return later to facts and places as they occur and arise.
Right now, Joe is upstairs in our cozy room doing his own work and in an hour or so we’ll stroll back into town for dinner. We took a walk this afternoon after lunching on some crackers, cheese and fruit (and a bit of Port wine for me; my favorite in small, self-indulgent doses) which really hit the spot. I’m setting this elegantly furnished living room on fire with the after effects of too much cheese.
Later today or tomorrow, Tobey Shepherd, the proprietress of the Linden Tree Inn (along with her husband John whose English lineage – he’s from a naval family in Plymouth, England – is rich indeed) where we stay when we come here, is going to show me the interior staircases in this house where I’ve set my novel. In the four years and half-dozen times we’ve been coming to the inn, these staircases were unknown to me. This house is filled with rooms, two deep stories of them, topped off by a widow’s watch that I like to visit just to look through the ogling windows on all sides. Today they were steamy and I could only peer through one tiny space out to one of the twin Thacher lighthouses in the distance.
Being here with Joe, feeling the presence of the ghosts of my book’s characters, absorbing the warmth and comfort of this 155 year old house, is my heaven. Joe is cheering my efforts on when I gush about my discoveries, is happy to enjoy the surroundings as much as I do. He is a good companion.
In February when we were here, I struggled with the continuation of the book, my confidence and convictions wobbling. But it is nine months later, the full cycle of a pregnancy, and I’m ready to nurture it to the end and watch it grow beyond its beginnings; most vitally to help it along since it can’t grow without me to nudge it further.
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