North by Northeast

Crawford Notch, Carroll, New Hampshire, from Elephant Rock

Sometimes I know exactly what I'm looking for. And sometimes I'm just looking for places that are inherently dramatic, places that tell a story—places like Crawford Notch.

Thousands of years ago, a glacier scoured out this valley and left a literal notch, less than 100 feet across at its apex. No white man knew of it until the 1770s. But by the 19th century it had become New England's Northwest Passage. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about it. Thomas Cole painted it. Railroaders ran track right through it. Then loggers stripped the trees at its base and grand hotels rose up like airy castles on its rises.

It seemed a perfect place for an apprentice lawyer named Will Pike to make a stand on an August day in 1787. He and his brother are searching for a stolen first draft of the U. S. Constitution in a town nearby. But the bad guys are right on their heels and head them off at the Notch, where a tragic duel ensues.

"On either side of the twelve-mile-long valley dropped walls of stubborn greenery or bare granite or slagged rock, in some places a mile or more apart, in others so close that if a man shouted in one direction, his voice would echo back to him, then past him, then echo again from the other side."

The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island, from the Cliff Walk

In Colonial days, the Quakers found welcome in Newport; so did the Jews, who built America's first synagogue on Touro Street. The town also ran 21 distilleries, because Newport ships carried rum to Africa, African slaves to the West Indies, and West Indies molasses back to the distilleries. The Revolution destroyed the shipping business, and the town slept until the 1850s, when a real estate baron built a road out to a seaward-facing cliff. After that, keeping up with the Joneses—or the Vanderbilts— would never be the same.

Stroll the Cliff Walk today, with the ocean on one side and the grand "cottages" on the other, and let your imagination go. Perhaps, as I did, you'll see one of my characters—a humble housemaid named Rosie, running from her lecherous boss on a night in 1919. Or maybe you'll see the ghost of the industrialist who built his giant monument to money. And maybe, like Peter Fallon, you'll wonder what difference there is now between the rich ghost and the ghost of his housemaid. Time has left them both in its wake.

"Even with the traffic and the tourist buses and the cruise ships disgorging gawkers in tank tops and Tevas, Peter Fallon felt time itself flowing along the boulevards, bubbling up through the manhole covers, reacting in the air with molecules of fried food and exhaust, so that every breath of today carried a scent of the past, whether people knew what they were inhaling or not."