If you have ever considered camping in New Hampshire's White Mountains over Thanksgiving weekend, I say go for it. I say pick a campground in Crawford Notch, which is nestled directly south of the Presidential Range. Mount Washington, the range's centerpiece and the apex of the Northeast at 6,288 feet, rises bald and brown above its adjacent peaks; or it's suddenly white, given its notoriously quick-changing weather.
Don't try backpacking. Load up a vehicle with gear. There is no sense in going at it like an ascetic. No one else but you and your party will be around to impress with your ability to simplify. And it will likely be cold, so you'll need layers of clothes and your thickest sleeping bags. Pack ridiculous amounts of food--this is no time for granola and freeze-dried casserole. You are a mammal and it is winter. Your instincts will make you crave fat, meat, full-bodied beer. Besides, camping so far north in late November requires long-built affection for the place, and for the companions you'll bring along. It takes the kind of love you'd want to honor with a hearty feast.
Even Thoreau, living so deliberately at Walden, kept three chairs in his cabin: one for himself, "two for friendship, three for society." So bring a friend to your White Mountain Thanksgiving; make it a good friend because those New Hampshire nights get cold. Take another friend; of course, the third friend will want a sleeping-bag buddy too, so now you've got yourself some society. Let's say you're a society of four, best of friends, who share the notion that camping is one of life's deliberate pleasures.
When you have chosen your campground, gather great piles of firewood and kindling. Some carry an ax, but for my money, a folding handsaw is better. An ax is only good for splitting dry logs, and you rarely find those for free. There's satisfaction in finding your own dead wood, in sectioning it to burn, taking turns with the saw to chip-in and keep warm. You will find birch, which burns long, and evergreens, which burn bright. Whether the wood is split or wet, it will burn if you gather enough kindling. Accumulate heaps and heaps of the small stuff, more than you can imagine using; the small stuff keeps the big fuel burning fine.
Maybe you believe that you are the best fire-maker in your bunch. Maybe you think that a core of crumpled paper surrounded by a teepee of medium-width branches overlain with twigs makes the best foundation for a good campfire. Maybe you like the fire to burn your way, nice and hot with plenty of wood about to throw on for pure light. Well, you can't have your way all the time; you have to give your society their say. Sometimes someone else wants to start the fire. Sometimes someone else adjusts the logs in a manner with which you disagree. All you can do is sit back, drink your beer, and holler your second-guesses.
When the kindling and logs have burnt down to a deep bed of coals, keep it going. You'll need the coals for cooking. There are very few bears in the Whites and raccoons won't enter the firepit, so you can let your coals smouldering indefinitely and keep hot food handy.
Mornings, the first person who wakes should dress and emerge into frigid air, throw some kindling on the coals and break the ice that has formed on the water pots. Put two quarts of water into a kettle and place it directly over the fire; no need to wait for the wood to burn down entirely. When the water boils, take the kettle from the fire and stir in fresh ground coffee. Place the kettle amongst the coals to keep it warm, but don't let it boil up again. The grounds will settle to the bottom with the flecks of ash that have fallen in. The smell of coffee on winter air will coax your society from the naked comfort of their tents and zipper-joined sleeping bags.
The sun will be very white and low, its light attenuated, slicing through the trees as you make breakfast. You will want to cook bacon or sausage. Of sausage, I think there's no better choice than a savory sage blend imported from the Midwest where they know how to treat a pig, and if you are a savvy traveler, you will have purchased a few pounds in advance and stored it in your freezer for just such occasions. When the spicy pucks of sausage have achieved their crisp pan-caramelization, you crack and beat your eggs. You can't always find farm fresh eggs, and that's a shame, but even powdered eggs are better than none. Try to get real eggs in any case; if that's too tough for you, start worrying. After all, camping and feasting in winter is anything but easy and effortless.
On cheese however, you should not compromise, not with Vermont cheddar being churned and pressed in the state next door. That cheese is made with love you can taste, its milk drawn from blithe cows who graze in cheerful glades, and if you don't believe me, well, just go through Vermont and see for yourself. Choose the sharp cheddar; cut it into chunks with a use-dulled camping knife, the same knife that whittles walking sticks and opens cans.
Warm some hunks of bread on the fire pit's grate. If the pit doesn't have a grate, place stones amongst the coals and warm your bread on the stones. Cook the eggs. The sausage puck goes onto the bread first, then come the eggs, topped with a chunk of cheese and another layer bread to hold it all together. Give the cheese a minute to melt over the eggs while the sausage's savory oils permeate the bread. Take and eat the breakfast sandwich with uncommon hunger and gratitude; take and drink the smoky coffee with a splash of icy milk and a soul full of matinal joy.
And if you want to hike, you should do so, though you will not be able to reach the summits of mountains because the high granite is covered with ice, and the peaks have all been snowed on. Peaks aren't everything. As Melville wrote, "there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even the lowest swoop of the mountain is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." There are plenty of hikes in the gorges, high enough. One trail leads to Arethusa Falls, New Hampshire's highest falls at 200 feet. Another crosses the Appalachian Trail, then leads you in to Ripley Falls, a hundred foot cascade. The waters run down over pink and grey granite, coating the rocks and cliffs in ice, rushing down into other flumes or colleting in still pools. You'll be reluctant to leave these places, so you'll stay and look until you're certain they won't leave you.
When you're warm again, having returned to the fire for coffee or tea, you may want to share some reading with your society, get a sense of the place's history from books that are its archive. Perhaps you'll find a book about place names, and you'll learn about the Crawford family who settled the notch. If your enthusiasm and admiration for the Crawfords go untempered, your society may tease you. From then on, Ethan Allen Crawford may be known as your nineteenth century boyfriend.
Or perhaps you'll learn about the tragedy of the Willey Slide, where, in 1826, a mudslide pulled down the face of the mountain and the seven members of the Willey family. Samuel Willey left his reading glasses on the family bible, opened to Psalm 18, which says "the lord is my rock," and fled his house with his family, running straight into the mudslide. The slide split in two, sparing the Willey house where it stood on the mountainside. You might share with your society the Hawthorne story, "The Ambitious Guest," in which Hawthorne re-imagines the Willey Slide. It's a good campfire story, as are a few others in the collection which take place in New Hampshire, even if you never cared much for Hawthorne, thinking his moral imperatives heavy-handed. His New Hampshire stories may soften your opinion, and you'll give old Nathaniel another chance.
But maybe you'd prefer to read some poetry by New Hampshire resident Robert Frost, something like his Mountain Interval. Come to think of it, why not go over to his old, simple house. It's but a few miles up the road from your campsite. Walk around Robert Frost's yard, flip the flag up and down on his rusty mailbox and think awhile about those dark, deep woods that he considered one snowy evening. Think about the stoicism of Puritans in a hard land, about what it means to be their cultural descendants.
Or think instead about Frost's "Birches" while you walk back to the stream called Dry River, which lives in the birches that are white against November brown. Birch logs strung with icicles will cross the hymn-rippling stream, and all the round stones of the river bed will be blue and green and pink and mustard yellow, colors you never noticed before because there were bright leaves and flowers to look at and now there are none. The sun never climbs very high, so there beside the stream the smiling faces of your society, your most-beloved, will be cast chiaroscuro, and you may embrace each other for no reason at all. Or instead, you'll chicken-fight, knocking each other off logs as if all of you were kids again and the passage of time existed only to give you distinct and dear seasons. Then you'll think, as Frost did, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
Of course, you don't need to open a book to remember "The Road Not Taken." Nor is it necessarily articulated that the reason behind trips like these is "knowing how way leads on to way," that changes come with each passing year, that your society will scatter. These White Mountains will not be your backyard forever. It is essential, then, this urge to celebrate the moment, the place, the present company.
So you should cook a Thanksgiving dinner for yourselves, right there in the fire pit. Don't hold back. Put the work into it. Bank up a thick bed of coals for the turkey. Put the bird in a covered pot with some water, some salt and spices, and set the pot right in the center of the coals. Dam some kindling around the pot's circumference; when it burns down, bank it all up again. Peel potatoes, wrap them in foil with sweet cream butter and slices of garlic. Open a can of corn and shove it into coals with tongs. Boil and mash a butternut squash, adding butter, brown sugar and a dash each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Heat sweet potatoes. Ladle some juice from the turkey pot and add starch to make gravy. Reserve a saucepan for some Stove-Top, best stuffing you can buy in a box. Let cranberries cool in the evening air. You're going to have to bring your pie already made, though. If there's a way to bake pie in a campfire, I don't know it yet.
When the food is all cooked, lay the feast across the picnic table. If you don't have a table, use logs. Put a little bit of everything on your plate. The hot food and complementary flavors may stimulate you to the point of tears. Try things in combination: turkey and potatoes, corn and squash, stuffing and sweet potatoes. Clear the palate with the tart smack of cranberries. When you've filled yourselves with so much American food, you'll rest again around the well-established, crackling fire. You will wonder what the animals are thinking when the aromatic spirits of Thanksgiving go weaving through the birches and up the slopes. You will think about all the families in houses down in the valleys below, around their tables, sanctifying the myth of our founding colonizers' fraternity with the first Americans, the people of this particular earth. And maybe you know it's in part a gluttonous lie; let it go. Be now. Be with your society, which is a family, too. Be transcendentally and pragmatically grateful.
You should have some strong beer on hand, a winter ale perhaps, and some warming liquor like brandy or even spiced rum. When the dishes are reasonably clean you should get down to drinking in earnest. It settles the stomach and invigorates the soul. Tell old stories over again, lest you forget them. Talk about the multitudes of stars so far from ambient light, about moose and whales, about all the roads not taken and the roads that lie ahead. And if you get silly and start to sing and dance, that's fine. There is no one else in the mountains to bother; you are the only human beings in the notch.
And if you tire of fire dancing, you can walk out to the highway and lie right down on the yellow line, staring into the celestial depths that lay beyond the black silhouettes of the mountains, and if you don't blink, the sky will draw closer and let you see it better. And even if a truck or two passes by, you will hear it miles before it reaches you. Maybe you and your society will hear it coming and you'll stand at the side of the road and moon the trucker as he pushes on by, and you'll laugh till it hurts, rechristening the notch White Ass Pass. But if the trucker gears down and rolls back in reverse, you yourself will probably run for the woods. Your society won't be surprised. They know you're a runner; you've always said so. But they also know you're a faller. So when you trip and your face hits the granite, it is you who will be shocked, and not necessarily your society.
Yes, if you want to camp in New Hampshire in late November, I say go for it. But be prepared, not only for the during part, but for the afterwards part too. Be prepared for the respect you'll get when you go back to work with granite wounds to the face, full of stories. Be prepared for each ensuing Thanksgiving, when you'll remember what a good time you had up there, back then. Because you won't be quite as happy cooped up in some urban apartment, the windows steamed from cooking, but not smoked. Nor will you be quite as happy all clean and dressed-up for some prix-fixe Thanksgiving brunch under tinkling chandeliers, which will only remind you of those birch-strung icicles. Go for it, I say, but be aware: it may ruin your sense of Thanksgiving gratitude for years.
Don't try backpacking. Load up a vehicle with gear. There is no sense in going at it like an ascetic. No one else but you and your party will be around to impress with your ability to simplify. And it will likely be cold, so you'll need layers of clothes and your thickest sleeping bags. Pack ridiculous amounts of food--this is no time for granola and freeze-dried casserole. You are a mammal and it is winter. Your instincts will make you crave fat, meat, full-bodied beer. Besides, camping so far north in late November requires long-built affection for the place, and for the companions you'll bring along. It takes the kind of love you'd want to honor with a hearty feast.
Even Thoreau, living so deliberately at Walden, kept three chairs in his cabin: one for himself, "two for friendship, three for society." So bring a friend to your White Mountain Thanksgiving; make it a good friend because those New Hampshire nights get cold. Take another friend; of course, the third friend will want a sleeping-bag buddy too, so now you've got yourself some society. Let's say you're a society of four, best of friends, who share the notion that camping is one of life's deliberate pleasures.
When you have chosen your campground, gather great piles of firewood and kindling. Some carry an ax, but for my money, a folding handsaw is better. An ax is only good for splitting dry logs, and you rarely find those for free. There's satisfaction in finding your own dead wood, in sectioning it to burn, taking turns with the saw to chip-in and keep warm. You will find birch, which burns long, and evergreens, which burn bright. Whether the wood is split or wet, it will burn if you gather enough kindling. Accumulate heaps and heaps of the small stuff, more than you can imagine using; the small stuff keeps the big fuel burning fine.
Maybe you believe that you are the best fire-maker in your bunch. Maybe you think that a core of crumpled paper surrounded by a teepee of medium-width branches overlain with twigs makes the best foundation for a good campfire. Maybe you like the fire to burn your way, nice and hot with plenty of wood about to throw on for pure light. Well, you can't have your way all the time; you have to give your society their say. Sometimes someone else wants to start the fire. Sometimes someone else adjusts the logs in a manner with which you disagree. All you can do is sit back, drink your beer, and holler your second-guesses.
When the kindling and logs have burnt down to a deep bed of coals, keep it going. You'll need the coals for cooking. There are very few bears in the Whites and raccoons won't enter the firepit, so you can let your coals smouldering indefinitely and keep hot food handy.
Mornings, the first person who wakes should dress and emerge into frigid air, throw some kindling on the coals and break the ice that has formed on the water pots. Put two quarts of water into a kettle and place it directly over the fire; no need to wait for the wood to burn down entirely. When the water boils, take the kettle from the fire and stir in fresh ground coffee. Place the kettle amongst the coals to keep it warm, but don't let it boil up again. The grounds will settle to the bottom with the flecks of ash that have fallen in. The smell of coffee on winter air will coax your society from the naked comfort of their tents and zipper-joined sleeping bags.
The sun will be very white and low, its light attenuated, slicing through the trees as you make breakfast. You will want to cook bacon or sausage. Of sausage, I think there's no better choice than a savory sage blend imported from the Midwest where they know how to treat a pig, and if you are a savvy traveler, you will have purchased a few pounds in advance and stored it in your freezer for just such occasions. When the spicy pucks of sausage have achieved their crisp pan-caramelization, you crack and beat your eggs. You can't always find farm fresh eggs, and that's a shame, but even powdered eggs are better than none. Try to get real eggs in any case; if that's too tough for you, start worrying. After all, camping and feasting in winter is anything but easy and effortless.
On cheese however, you should not compromise, not with Vermont cheddar being churned and pressed in the state next door. That cheese is made with love you can taste, its milk drawn from blithe cows who graze in cheerful glades, and if you don't believe me, well, just go through Vermont and see for yourself. Choose the sharp cheddar; cut it into chunks with a use-dulled camping knife, the same knife that whittles walking sticks and opens cans.
Warm some hunks of bread on the fire pit's grate. If the pit doesn't have a grate, place stones amongst the coals and warm your bread on the stones. Cook the eggs. The sausage puck goes onto the bread first, then come the eggs, topped with a chunk of cheese and another layer bread to hold it all together. Give the cheese a minute to melt over the eggs while the sausage's savory oils permeate the bread. Take and eat the breakfast sandwich with uncommon hunger and gratitude; take and drink the smoky coffee with a splash of icy milk and a soul full of matinal joy.
And if you want to hike, you should do so, though you will not be able to reach the summits of mountains because the high granite is covered with ice, and the peaks have all been snowed on. Peaks aren't everything. As Melville wrote, "there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even the lowest swoop of the mountain is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar." There are plenty of hikes in the gorges, high enough. One trail leads to Arethusa Falls, New Hampshire's highest falls at 200 feet. Another crosses the Appalachian Trail, then leads you in to Ripley Falls, a hundred foot cascade. The waters run down over pink and grey granite, coating the rocks and cliffs in ice, rushing down into other flumes or colleting in still pools. You'll be reluctant to leave these places, so you'll stay and look until you're certain they won't leave you.
When you're warm again, having returned to the fire for coffee or tea, you may want to share some reading with your society, get a sense of the place's history from books that are its archive. Perhaps you'll find a book about place names, and you'll learn about the Crawford family who settled the notch. If your enthusiasm and admiration for the Crawfords go untempered, your society may tease you. From then on, Ethan Allen Crawford may be known as your nineteenth century boyfriend.
Or perhaps you'll learn about the tragedy of the Willey Slide, where, in 1826, a mudslide pulled down the face of the mountain and the seven members of the Willey family. Samuel Willey left his reading glasses on the family bible, opened to Psalm 18, which says "the lord is my rock," and fled his house with his family, running straight into the mudslide. The slide split in two, sparing the Willey house where it stood on the mountainside. You might share with your society the Hawthorne story, "The Ambitious Guest," in which Hawthorne re-imagines the Willey Slide. It's a good campfire story, as are a few others in the collection which take place in New Hampshire, even if you never cared much for Hawthorne, thinking his moral imperatives heavy-handed. His New Hampshire stories may soften your opinion, and you'll give old Nathaniel another chance.
But maybe you'd prefer to read some poetry by New Hampshire resident Robert Frost, something like his Mountain Interval. Come to think of it, why not go over to his old, simple house. It's but a few miles up the road from your campsite. Walk around Robert Frost's yard, flip the flag up and down on his rusty mailbox and think awhile about those dark, deep woods that he considered one snowy evening. Think about the stoicism of Puritans in a hard land, about what it means to be their cultural descendants.
Or think instead about Frost's "Birches" while you walk back to the stream called Dry River, which lives in the birches that are white against November brown. Birch logs strung with icicles will cross the hymn-rippling stream, and all the round stones of the river bed will be blue and green and pink and mustard yellow, colors you never noticed before because there were bright leaves and flowers to look at and now there are none. The sun never climbs very high, so there beside the stream the smiling faces of your society, your most-beloved, will be cast chiaroscuro, and you may embrace each other for no reason at all. Or instead, you'll chicken-fight, knocking each other off logs as if all of you were kids again and the passage of time existed only to give you distinct and dear seasons. Then you'll think, as Frost did, "One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
Of course, you don't need to open a book to remember "The Road Not Taken." Nor is it necessarily articulated that the reason behind trips like these is "knowing how way leads on to way," that changes come with each passing year, that your society will scatter. These White Mountains will not be your backyard forever. It is essential, then, this urge to celebrate the moment, the place, the present company.
So you should cook a Thanksgiving dinner for yourselves, right there in the fire pit. Don't hold back. Put the work into it. Bank up a thick bed of coals for the turkey. Put the bird in a covered pot with some water, some salt and spices, and set the pot right in the center of the coals. Dam some kindling around the pot's circumference; when it burns down, bank it all up again. Peel potatoes, wrap them in foil with sweet cream butter and slices of garlic. Open a can of corn and shove it into coals with tongs. Boil and mash a butternut squash, adding butter, brown sugar and a dash each of cinnamon and nutmeg. Heat sweet potatoes. Ladle some juice from the turkey pot and add starch to make gravy. Reserve a saucepan for some Stove-Top, best stuffing you can buy in a box. Let cranberries cool in the evening air. You're going to have to bring your pie already made, though. If there's a way to bake pie in a campfire, I don't know it yet.
When the food is all cooked, lay the feast across the picnic table. If you don't have a table, use logs. Put a little bit of everything on your plate. The hot food and complementary flavors may stimulate you to the point of tears. Try things in combination: turkey and potatoes, corn and squash, stuffing and sweet potatoes. Clear the palate with the tart smack of cranberries. When you've filled yourselves with so much American food, you'll rest again around the well-established, crackling fire. You will wonder what the animals are thinking when the aromatic spirits of Thanksgiving go weaving through the birches and up the slopes. You will think about all the families in houses down in the valleys below, around their tables, sanctifying the myth of our founding colonizers' fraternity with the first Americans, the people of this particular earth. And maybe you know it's in part a gluttonous lie; let it go. Be now. Be with your society, which is a family, too. Be transcendentally and pragmatically grateful.
You should have some strong beer on hand, a winter ale perhaps, and some warming liquor like brandy or even spiced rum. When the dishes are reasonably clean you should get down to drinking in earnest. It settles the stomach and invigorates the soul. Tell old stories over again, lest you forget them. Talk about the multitudes of stars so far from ambient light, about moose and whales, about all the roads not taken and the roads that lie ahead. And if you get silly and start to sing and dance, that's fine. There is no one else in the mountains to bother; you are the only human beings in the notch.
And if you tire of fire dancing, you can walk out to the highway and lie right down on the yellow line, staring into the celestial depths that lay beyond the black silhouettes of the mountains, and if you don't blink, the sky will draw closer and let you see it better. And even if a truck or two passes by, you will hear it miles before it reaches you. Maybe you and your society will hear it coming and you'll stand at the side of the road and moon the trucker as he pushes on by, and you'll laugh till it hurts, rechristening the notch White Ass Pass. But if the trucker gears down and rolls back in reverse, you yourself will probably run for the woods. Your society won't be surprised. They know you're a runner; you've always said so. But they also know you're a faller. So when you trip and your face hits the granite, it is you who will be shocked, and not necessarily your society.
Yes, if you want to camp in New Hampshire in late November, I say go for it. But be prepared, not only for the during part, but for the afterwards part too. Be prepared for the respect you'll get when you go back to work with granite wounds to the face, full of stories. Be prepared for each ensuing Thanksgiving, when you'll remember what a good time you had up there, back then. Because you won't be quite as happy cooped up in some urban apartment, the windows steamed from cooking, but not smoked. Nor will you be quite as happy all clean and dressed-up for some prix-fixe Thanksgiving brunch under tinkling chandeliers, which will only remind you of those birch-strung icicles. Go for it, I say, but be aware: it may ruin your sense of Thanksgiving gratitude for years.
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