Inside New England Book

Most outsiders know at least a couple of things about New England, like that when it comes to directions, you can't get there from here, and when it comes to weather, just wait a minute and it'll change. But it takes a real insider to parse the several meanings of the word ayuh. As Judson D. Hale writes in his newly reissued classic, Inside New England, ayuh, depending on subtle shifts in pronunciation, can mean I heard what you said, I hear you but I really do not agree with you, I really sympathize with you, You are wasting your time and my time because you're telling me something I already know, or I am making fun of those amusing old characters you find in New England. Hale, who was born in Boston, grew up in rural Vanceboro, Maine, and has spent his adulthood in Dublin, N.H., counts himself among those amusing old characters. But, as a longtime editor of Yankee magazine and The Old Farmer's Almanac, he's also spent a lifetime observing, researching and writing about the people, places, legends and lore of the six New England states -- Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont -- and the differences among them. Each state, Hale writes, has its own personality. Furthermore, he continues, each feels superior to the other five. Maine, for instance, has several faces. A third of the state is forested wilderness; that's the Maine of trapping, fishing, lumbering and tall tales. Then there's potato Maine, Aroostook County, which hugs the Canadian border and is populated by potato fields and potato famers. There's backcountry Maine, with its scrubby woodlands, bleak villages, and extreme poverty. The picture-postcard Maine, the state of lobster traps and rocky shore and pine-covered islands -- what Hale calls the Maine of artists, of poets, of the soul -- exists, too. Rhode Island also has its contrasts. It was once the greatest slave-trading colony in America, but it was also the first community in the world to allow freedom of religion. As such, Hale writes, it has just naturally developed a reputation for tolerance. It boasts the country's first Baptist Church (Providence), the first Jewish synagogue (Newport), and the first cotton mill (Pawtucket). If you want to fit in there, Hale adds, be sure to pronounce the state's name Ruh Dilan. If that seems stupid, he writes, then call it 'stoopit.' Most every region of New England, of course, has its own version of dropping its R's and then tacking them on where they don't belong (what an idear!). That's just one of the things for which New England is legendary. Hale addresses many of New England's historic (and not-so-historic) legends as well. Those romantic stories about widow's walks, the fenced-in platforms atop houses by the sea where women watched for their husbands' ships to come in? All bunk. They were built as places to store buckets of sand and water for dumping down the flue in case of a chimney fire. Why is there a Marie Antoinette House in North Edgecomb, Maine? Turns out the queen of France had made plans to escape during the French Revolution, and had her furniture shipped to the Maine house, but was beheaded before she could be rescued by Lafayette. A few decades later, one John Doherty escaped from Ireland and began the practice of medicine, under the name Dr. John Wilson, in various southeastern Vermont towns. It wasn't until he died that the local folks learned that their trusted physician was not a physician at all, but rather a notorious British highwayman. Hale meanders through these stories and more, providing humorous anecdotes from his Yankee years, his northern Maine upbringing and his life as a year-round summer person in Dublin, N.H.Read More