New Hampshire Haiku

Cold November rain
Will turn to December snow
but what about Spain?

(Picture from here.)

Winter in New Hampshire

Technically it's still autumn, but if I told you I live in New Hampshire, and you know it's the very last week of November, you will probably make some assumptions about the weather I am currently experiencing. Indeed, an acquaintance told me about the soft, fluffy snow in her yard, the first blanketing snow of the season. She lives in New Mexico, however. In New Hampshire this season, we're expecting a big storm on December 1st -- a rain storm, with temperatures in the 60s. Now, to be fair, some of the higher elevations in the western regions like the Monadnocks have had an inch of snow on the ground earlier this month, and the White Mountains way up north are indeed probably very white right now -- look, check for yourself -- but in the central and southern part of the state where most New Hampshirites live, we got nada. And keep in mind that when I say "southern part of the state", I don't mean the part that borders Alabama. Southern New Hampshire is north of places like Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago in terms of latitude. Of course, the wee bit of Rockingham County that touches the ocean will likely be a bit warmer than the inland areas and stay snow-free for a while longer, but still... I think I'm developing a case of snow-envy.

Picture from here.

Meditations on Why New Hampshirites Don't Use the Turn Signal

I have a theory. New Hampshire has traditionally been a Republican state. Heck, it voted for Nixon...twice. But New Hampshire Republicans have tended to be old-line Republicans, who believed strongly in fiscal conservatism. As far as social issues were concerned, they applied the old Yankee beliefs about a man and his castle, which meant essentially that if something didn't happen in a blatantly public place (i.e., the town square, post office, etc.) then it was nobody's damned business. However, in recent years New Hampshire's political landscape has undergone some radical shifts with many Massachusetts lower middle class folks (read: "Democrats") flooding the southern part of the state, while other political groups like the supposedly Libertarian Free Staters (who behave more like anarchists) moving from all over the U.S. to Keene, New Hampshire to try to hijack the state and transform it into their version of an ideological paradise. This, compounded by the country-at-large's recent slide into ugly partisan mudslinging, has left many New Hampshirites feeling somewhat uneasy and imbalanced. Now, every four years when a presidential election is underway, New Hampshire gets overrun by baby-kissing, hand-shaking, perpetually-smiling liars who never wander more than twenty feet from a camera, and we're used to that. It's kind of like the cold you get every winter; you put in a few miserable days, but it eventually goes away and you just shake it off. However, this new political imbalance in New Hampshire is here to stay and they all want to change the state, re-shaping it into their own respective ideological image.

This is why, I suspect, New Hampshirites don't use turn signals while driving. I think it's because they are so politically shell-shocked that they are terrified that any directional indication towards the left or right will be mistaken for a political preference, and they'll immediately be pounced upon with placards, slogans and petitions.

Ok, it may need some work, but it's a theory. Work in progress.

They're Everywhere!

Once when our office manager wanted to warn everyone of a threat in our parking lot (in the form of a low-hanging but large hive, dangling precarious from a tree), she sent around to the whole office an e-mail telling us to beware the wasps. In my typical mischievous way, I immediately responded to my boss that OMG she's right! We're surrounded by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants!

I originally hail from an old industrial region, one well-packed with immigrants from colorful places -- the kinds of people that proper society uses the term 'ethnic' to describe -- and indeed, I am descended from just such peoples. (Have you noted my funny, decidedly non-English name yet?) In fact, it was only after moving to New England that I actually met someone named 'Smith'. Of course I'd heard the name a billion times from history and on television, but while I'd known 'Schmidts', I'd never known a 'Smith' before. When I met my first Smith here - by now, I know several of them; this is New Hampshire, after all) -- I joked with him, asking if when he and his wife registered at a hotel as 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith', if they got dirty looks from the staff. American television is filled with lots of characters with bland, English names, but I can probably count on one hand all the Smiths, Joneses, Coopers, Greens, and Millers I knew growing up. DeMarzios, Przybilaks and McInerneys were dime-a-dozen where I come from, but English names were actually fairly unusual, something I didn't realize until I moved to still remarkably WASPy New England. Now, to be fair, New England's industrial centers have also attracted their share of immigrants so that Portuguese is as likely to be heard in Boston or Providence as English, but once you get away from the urban centers -- and in New Hampshire, that's easy to do -- you enter WASPland. Sort of reminds me of the ever-duplicating Agent Smith from the Matrix movies....

New Hampshire Haiku III

Winter Coming to New Hampshire

November's night frost
See your breath, the clear night sky
Scraping your windshield

Borrow Free or Die!

In 1833, a Unitarian minister, one Dr. Abiel Abbot, got the idea that the town should have shared access to books to give citizens the chance to improve themselves -- remember that in 1833, books were like computers today, full of information and often difficult for rural people to get access to -- and so the town, Peterborough New Hampshire, took up a collection of books and thus established the first free town library. The town website reports that at first, the collection -- about 100 books - was kept in the general store, then eventually town hall, and finally, in 1893, a building was built exclusively for the library, where it still resides today. (However, the website also makes note that a movement is afoot to replace the 1893 library building with one larger and more modern. So much for history.) Dr. Abbot's idea really caught on, not just in Peterborough but soon all across New Hampshire, and then, eventually, across the U.S. 19th and early 20th century America build town libraries to help citizens educate themselves, to make information more accessible for the citizens of a democratic society.

Sadly, in our modern age, in part because of the internet but also in part due to social trends that no longer value education and self-improvement, many states, counties and towns are closing their libraries for budgetary reasons. Indeed, as I discovered when I tried to join the Peterborough Free Public Library, it is only free to the town's citizens -- of which I am not one -- and that for us non-tax-paying foreigners, the 'Free' library in Peterborough costs $50 a year. Ouch. In investigating further afield since, I have found that for many town libraries in New Hampshire -- most of which are still largely local town-funded -- not being a resident will cost you $50 a year to join. Hmm.

Is That Thing Moving...?

Where I come from, there is a town that was famous -- maybe infamous is the right word -- for its flamingos. The town was a suburban setting full of very modest, small two-bedroom middle class homes, and as such attracted a lot of newly-married couples getting started in life but as well many recently-arrived immigrants who had worked hard and were also just getting started on their own personal American Dreams. Somehow, this seemingly-innocent social mixture produced a toxic aesthetic environment in which a lot of these townsfolk came to the conclusion that it was a good idea to stick lots of those pink, plastic flamingos on their lawns -- on purpose! I remember even as a child being astonished by this.

Fast-forward many years later in my life when I'm living in New Hampshire, and we decide we're going to rent a stall in the local flea market to clear out some of the junk in the basement. When you do this sort of thing, it's not a good idea to mention it out loud because soon all your neighbors and friends are "volunteering" some of their own junk to be included in your flea market haul. One friend of my wife's who owned a store dumped a large cache of amazingly crass lawn ornaments on us, and despite my vigorous protests, they were included in our flea market display. There were colorful spinning wind wheels, pointless flags, streamers, faux wind socks, all sorts of stuff that, if placed on my lawn, would very quickly be subjected to unfortunate lawn mower accidents. Now, granted, they were all still wrapped in their original packaging and looked all colorful and shiny and new, but still... Just because I might laugh at a circus clown doesn't mean I want to bring them home. In any event, my wife had the last laugh and I was forced to somewhat re-assess New Hampshirites when, against all my dire predictions, all of that stuff sold out. In fact, there was a bidding war over the last spinning wheel.

Now, I have never been accused of having any taste or decorative sense, but I can't help but cast a wary eye at my neighbors now, just wondering if, given half a chance, they would stick a plastic pink flamingo on their lawn......

Veterans Day

When I first moved to New England, I spent a year or so in Massachusetts before moving to the paradise that is New Hampshire. You can imagine my surprise one day while living in Massachusetts when I was given off work on April 19. Dumb enough to look a gift horse in the mouth, I inquired why we were being given the day off, and was told it was Patriot's Day.

Now, I come from a region that also has a football team but one which is more prone historically to losing -- quite unused to winning, in fact -- so I felt a tingle of bitterness that a region like New England with its more successful football franchise could be so arrogant as to actually have a public holiday for its football team. Fine, I declared, I'll take your day off work, but don't expect me to hang any Tom Brady posters around my home, I gruffed. After some embarrassed glances -- you know the kind, when you realize there's a hopeless fool in your midst but you don't want to humiliate them in front of a crowd -- I was taken aside by some coworkers and informed that while they did indeed feel the New England Patriots deserved a public holiday, that no, Patriot's Day was in commemoration of the 1775 Battles of Lexington and Concord.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord were, of course, the opening battles of the American Revolution, as the British forces occupying Boston launched an early morning raid inland to arrest a few dissident leaders and the gunpowder rumored to be stockpiling in towns surrounding Boston. Of course, as everyone knows, the raid went disastrously awry when the raiding party stirred the local militias, brushing them aside at Lexington but being surprisingly rebuffed at Concord and harassed all the way back to Boston, losing more than 200 soldiers on that long road back to sniping American farmers hiding in nearby woods and homes. Worse, the raid resulted in outright war.

Patriots Day is not celebrated in New Hampshire, only in Massachusetts, but those two battles set the stage for the next battle, the American siege of British-occupied Boston and the Battle of Bunker Hill. The Battle of Bunker Hill -- Breed's Hill, as purists will quickly point out -- was the ultimately successful British attempt to drive American forces from the one of the highest heights around the city, but the battle took such a toll on British forces and in any event didn't end the American siege so that the British abandoned Boston altogether. This was a major American victory, though it is overshadowed by the fact the British forces that evacuated Boston then sailed south and seized New York, humiliating newly-appointed General Washington so much with his rudimentary attempt to defend Manhattan that Congress almost fired him. Oops: win some, lose some. Anyway, those American "forces" that laid siege to Boston in 1775 were in fact a motley collection of New England farmers and untrained militia, not a real army in any sense. New Hampshire militia and their later famous commander, General John Stark, played a crucial role in the battle, helping to prolong the British agony in seizing the hill.

What does all this mean? It ultimately means that today, on November 11, 2010, I can write these words as a free man. Veterans' Day is actually based on the end of World War I, whose armistice ended the fighting at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month (in 1918), but we've set it aside as a day to remember all veterans. I salute all veterans, past and present.

Some New Hampshire Haiku II

The season's first snow
Studded tires howl on the road
Look out for frost heaves

The Juice in New Hampshire

So let's say you're looking at a squirrel. Now, you're probably thinking, "OK, there's a squirrel. Happy little squirrel. Kinda cute. Hope he doesn't have rabies." Well, there may be a lot you don't know about that squirrel. What if, for instance, his girlfriend just dumped him? Or his mother-in-law moved in? Or he's living next to an old folks' home that plays Johnny Matthis music all day long? The fact is that you may actually be looking at a clinically depressed squirrel. How can you tell if your squirrel may be having emotional problems? Well, I don't know to be honest. What I do know is that at least a few squirrels have decided they could no longer take it and, after chittering the squirrel equivalent of "Goodbye, cruel world!", committed 切腹 (heri keri). This often involves throwing themselves into traffic, but a few take another route -- frying themselves in the electric transformers dangling overhead on phone poles. Now, this would be just another personal tragedy for some squirrel family, were it not for the fact that squirrels crisping themselves in electric equipment have a tendency to short out the transformer, causing electrical power outages for the rest of us -- ironically transforming their personal problems into larger community issues. When said toasted squirrel is a resident of New Hampshire, there is yet a further dimension to this tragedy because with so few roads -- think about it -- New Hampshire also has fewer electric lines, making us particularly susceptible to kamikaze squirrels. One such emotionally-crushed squirrel once knocked out half the grid in southern New Hampshire. No kidding.

Now, before I take my blame-the-squirrels theme too far, it should be noted that we may be seriously misinformed about suicidal squirrels. A friend whose father worked for a utility once told me that when some technical issue came up that was too complex to explain to the general public, they would sometimes attribute power outages to squirrels getting into transformers. Not kidding on that one, either.

So there you have it. A thinly-populated state's power infrastructure is very vulnerable and easily disrupted, and this same state is filled with emotionally-disturbed squirrels. It's sort of like the thorns on a rose analogy, no?

Didja hear about the ice storm in December of 08
I went without power for eleven straight days!

-- Super Secret Project, "Granite State of Mind"