Photos & Text: Julie Schwietert Collazo
**
We spent last week in New England, visiting properties in New Hampshire and Vermont while working on a story about what makes hotels “green,” or environmentally friendly.
It was Francisco’s and Mariel’s first trip to these two states, and my first return years after a childhood family trip.
These states have always struck me as a bit different from the rest of the US. Hugging each other, one is notoriously conservative, the other notoriously liberal. Yet both, in their own ways, seem deeply private, interested in preserving what they view as their own (whether land or ways of living), and marked by a certain nativism.
“It looks like the kind of place where people buy deer burger,” Francisco said as we entered the Franconia Pass in New Hampshire right at dusk. When I wrote that on Twitter, locals replied, “They don’t BUY deer burger; they shoot it.”
*
We forget how diverse our own countries are. Not 300 miles from where we live in New York City, there’s this whole other world, a world where “Moose Crossing” signs replace “Pedestrian Xing,” where people shoot and skin the meat they eat, where people still make their own syrup.
It’s important to step into that world once in a while, to get away from billboards and buzz and the comfort of relatively anonymous urban living and to sit with people who talk about what it’s like to farm land, or make handcrafts out of timber leavings, or who are opposed to windmill farms because they’ll blight the landscape.
It’s important to remember to contest this popular yet fallacious idea that somehow we’ve all become homogenized.
Chew on that when you eat your next hamburger.
Really liked this, Julie. Especially living outside of the US it’s easy to think of it as just this monolithic bulk of a country, but like anywhere, it’s diverse. Jorge and I were talking about where we’d live if we moved there and we were like, “Portland, Maine!” then “Taos, New Mexico!” then “New Orleans!” I’ve only been to one of those places, but the images conjured up by each one were so, so different.
Pittsfield! I think I miss VT.
And Sarah, Portland is an awesome town (and much more affordable than Taos!).
I really like your last point, that America is not some single, vanilla entity. I find I’m often the victim of this type of thinking. The rest of the world looks so much more exciting.
There are many places in the USA in which you can feel foreign.
Keith-
I think most people who are able to travel outside their own countries fall victim to this kind of thinking, so don’t feel alone. For sure, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of places in the US where you can feel foreign as an American. Just ask my husband about Rifle, Colorado sometime.
A lovely observation, Julie. This makes me think of northern Michigan, where both of my parents are from. Having moved around so much this place, where my extended family lived (and I visited numerous times), is really where I feel my personal culture is rooted. It’s the closest thing I have to a home town. And although I was a teenager in Atlanta, I always felt a bit foreign there.
Even now I’m still taken aback a little when foreigners talk about “Americans” or “the American accent”. I think, “Which one do they mean?”.
I was recently looking through the WWOOF USA book for farms in New England and found it interesting that many of the “off the grid” places are in Maine, NH and Vermont. Duarte and I agree that if we were to settle in the US long-term, we’d probably choose one of those states for the freedom and privacy compared to neighboring “Taxachusetts.” There’s a libertarian movement called the Free State Project that aims to settle 20,000+ like-minded individuals in New Hampshire, which is quite appealing in the wake of the Patriot Act.
Ah! I do believe you have helped me begin to satisfy one of my curiosities, Heather! I saw a Free flag while we were in Vermont, but no one seemed really willing to explain exactly what it meant. And believe me, I asked!