More winter, please

By Meghan McCarthy McPhaul

The Gale River rose this morning to nearly level with the road. Yesterday afternoon there were ice dams clogging the river along Route 18 in Franconia. The temperature was 53 degrees. On January 30. In New Hampshire.

This morning I dropped two kids at kindergarten and headed with the third to preschool, following the road that skirts the river from Franconia into Sugar Hill. The ice was cleared from the water, dog house-sized chunks of it lining the banks. The preschool is located in an old farm house, just across the road from the river. Three years ago, the low room of the preschool flooded. This morning it looked like it might again.

Within moments of our arrival, the water rose and its flow seemed to speed up. Huge blocks of ice churned along with the water. Soon we noticed sturdy tree branches and stumps carried downstream with the ice. The river seemed dangerously close to spilling its banks and creeping across the road.

This is about the third time this winter that wildly fluctuating temperatures have made the river freeze, then thaw. Normally we see ice dams only in the spring. This winter, it seems, we notice them almost weekly – clogging the river, then melting in a January heat wave and clearing out again.

In the past week we have seen temperatures drop to 20 degrees below zero and rise to more than 50 degrees above. Monday night it snowed nice, light, fluffy flakes that accumulated to a few inches. I’m happy I snuck out to ski Tuesday morning for a few runs, because yesterday it felt like April. Last night it poured. This morning the winter river rose to nearly flood level. This afternoon the wind is howling through the valleys, causing the tall white pines to dance precariously high above the ground, and pushing the cooling air through our old windows.

By tomorrow morning, the wind chill should bring the temperature back down to zero. It is supposed to snow. That sounds good to me. More winter, please. I’ll take my spring in April.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Helping those who help others

The ballroom at the Mount Washington Hotel filled last Friday evening with firefighters, police officers, emergency first responders, and residents of communities throughout the region, all dressed to the nines for the fifth annual awards dinner of the North Country Public Safety Foundation.

The dinner is a way to thank these professionals and volunteers – who are, essentially, always on duty – for their service to the community. Throughout the evening a slideshow played behind the stage, showing these folks at the work they do. One photo was of Jose Pequeno, former police chief of Sugar Hill. He is smiling in the photograph, sitting behind a desk, with photos of his family lining the wall. That photo accompanied a 2005 article I wrote about Jose, then Sugar Hill’s only police officer, just after he was called up by the National Guard for a tour of duty in Iraq.

Jose had earned a reputation as a good guy, quick to smile, always ready to offer a helping hand. The day I took that photograph he was both apprehensive and happy. He worried about leaving his wife and three young children (now teenagers) behind as he went halfway across the world to war. He was proud to be fulfilling his duty as a soldier. He was ready to serve and confident that he would return home safely.

There is no certainty in life, even less in war. In March of 2006, about a year after I took that photo, Jose was devastatingly injured in an explosion in Iraq. As news of his injuries reached home, there was an immediate effort to “Bring Jose Home,” and from that effort emerged the North Country Public Safety Foundation. 

I was in the newsroom the day word came from Iraq of the explosion that killed National Guardsman Christopher Merchant of Vermont and injured Jose. Both men were 32 at the time, the same age as me. Eventually we learned that Jose’s injuries were severe and included a debilitating head injury from which he has never recovered.

A month after the explosion in Iraq, as Jose remained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., friends and neighbors gathered for a fundraising dinner and auction at the Sugar Hill Meetinghouse to kick off the Bring Jose Home campaign. That night, the community raised over $22,000 for their police chief and his family.

The effort eventually garnered more than $120,000, enough to build the Pequeno family a wheelchair-accessible home in Lisbon. “This has been a project that has meant a lot to a lot of people,” Sugar Hill Fire Chief Allan Clark said the day the house was finished. “It was more than helping our police chief, but a statement of helping those who help others.”

For a series of complicated reasons, Jose did not come home to New Hampshire. He lives in Florida with other family and access to regular medical care. But the North Country Public Safety Foundation has grown from the initial Bring Jose Home effort, raising nearly $1 million in its six years, money that goes directly to helping those who help others in our communities.

Throughout the ceremony last week, speaker after speaker told of the cooperation and collaboration these professionals and volunteers share, from community to community, between departments, and across specific occupational lines. I was honored to share a table with a few of these folks, including Sugar Hill Police Chief Dave Wentworth and Assistant Fire Chief Doug Glover, who both worked with Jose, knew him far better than I did, and surely think of him often as they do their work.

I imagine I’m not the only person who wishes things had been different, that Jose and so many others did not have to go to war, that we could again see the smile he had that day in the photograph. We also hope that we will never need the services of firefighters or EMTs, law enforcement officers or search and rescue volunteers. But it is a comfort to know they are standing by, just in case. 

This essay appears in the November 9, 2012 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Unloading the World’s Greatest Cheddar, with a little help from their friends

Harman’s Cheese & Country Store in Sugar Hill, NH, ships its “World’s Greatest Cheddar Cheese” to customers around the country and, sometimes, across the globe. A whopping twelve tons of Harman’s really aged cheddar leaves the store each year, either through customers who visit the small, red clapboard house tucked along Main Street or through mail order sales.

Last week, friends and neighbors gathered at the store to help with the annual unloading of the cheese – all 25,661 pounds of it – which arrived via tractor trailer truck from upstate New York, where it is made and aged two years specifically for Harman’s.

Harman’s is a family business, purchased from the original owners (John and Kate Harman) in 1981 by Maxine and Bert Aldrich. Bert died two years ago, and Maxine continues to run the store with her daughter Brenda Aldrich. The small shop offers plenty of local flavor – Zelda’s Jams and Jellies from Lancaster to the north, Two Sisters’ garlic jellies from Canterbury to the south, maple syrup produced right down the road, and other gourmet food items from throughout New England.

In the quiet town of Sugar Hill, without its own bank or grocer or village store, Harman’s is a place where locals often stop in for the latest scuttlebutt and to stock up on cheese and some of the other eclectic regional items stocked in the small store. Because the store is along one of the prettiest drives around, visitors also come in for directions or a gander at the items inside.

The Aldriches do a lot for the community, much of it behind the scenes, including organizing and promoting the annual Lupine Festival in the spring and the Celebration of Autumn each fall, which attract visitors from near and far.

Their friends and neighbors reciprocate during the annual unloading of the cheddar. Last week’s unloading crew included Brenda and Maxine, a couple of strong-backed neighbors, and a few friends. Some of them have helped unload the World’s Greatest Cheddar for years. Others are new to the scene.

Together they moved 600 blocks of cheese – each weighs upwards of 45 pounds – from the truck, down antique rollers, and into the walk-in cooler which by day’s end was filled to capacity. Overflow was carted to Windy Ridge Orchard in No. Haverhill, one of a handful of area businesses that will lend cooler space to Harman’s on occasion.

The folks who gathered to unload the cheese were all volunteers, and willing ones. Their payment for a couple hours of hard work? The satisfaction of helping a good neighbor with a tough job – and a block of the World’s Greatest Cheddar Cheese, of course.

Local Resources

Last weekend Franconia held its annual Old Home Day celebration, which this year feted the 100^th anniversary of the town’s beautiful Abbie Greenleaf Library. Just up the road, Sugar Hill is celebrating 50 years as an incorporated town, with much discussion of its history – as a town reaching the ½ century mark and as a community with families and stories that reach back to the 1700s.

Both events highlight the importance of local resources. Not the natural resources that draw both residents and visitors to this beautiful neck of the woods, but the kind that are more rarely discussed – our libraries and museums, whose stature is small, but whose import to the local community is immeasurable.

These are the places we go when we have questions that cannot be answered via a Google search. They are the places we visit to see how our towns looked 100 years ago, find out who came before us, or discover what grand building once stood at the top of those elaborate but now overgrown stone steps leading seemingly to nowhere.

Libraries offer much more than borrowed books. They are a place to find information of all sorts, to sit quietly and read, and sometimes to access the Internet – a big deal in a place where many folks are still stuck on dial-up connections at home. Larger libraries, like Littleton’s, also have microfilm of local newspapers covering several decades, along with other historical resources. These can be a boon to people conducting research, but they’re also a kick to look through, revealing enticing glimpses into bygone days.

As a resident of Franconia, I often visit the Abbie Greenleaf library, built the same year as Fenway Park. The building is well kept and the gardens out front are a glorious assortment of colorful blooms through the summer. But the real treasure is inside, where the librarians can point you in the direction of well-worn history tomes or the latest reading sensation – or offer a suggestion if you just don’t know what you want.

Likewise, our area’s museums are treasure troves of local history, revealed through photographs, personal notes, and carefully considered exhibits. While searching for one thing or another in our local museums, I have discovered unexpected gems. It is here that I found the glorious Profile House which once reigned in splendor over Franconia Notch. It is here, too, that I gained important insight into the later development of Cannon Mountain as a ski area. And it is here that I learned that as successful a poet as Robert Frost became, he was not much for farming, despite keeping a cow in his Franconia barn.

Over the years, for various stories and projects, I have turned to several local resources – the Franconia Heritage Museum, tucked into a former residence gifted to the town; the Sugar Hill Historical Museum occupying a neat, bright building and adjacent carriage barn in the center of town; the Littleton Historical Society’s museum nestled into the lower level of that town’s Opera House; and the NewEngland Ski Museum, housed in a tiny building and former maintenance shed at the base of Cannon Mountain’s tramway.

These museums range from all volunteer staff to full-time employees. Some are open a few hours during summer weeks, others nearly year-round. All hold information in the form of scrapbooks, photographs, interview transcripts, books and newspaper clippings and little tidbits of information tucked here and there that together paint a picture of our region’s history – its people and commerce and changing landscapes.

Usually, these small museums (and municipal libraries) operate on shoestring budgets. Many rely heavily on meager membership fees from a core of interested supporters to keep the doors open and the bills paid. If you haven’t visited your local library or museum lately, I encourage you to do so – and to support it however you can. You never know what you might discover.

A version of this essay appears in this week’s edition of the Record Littleton.