Another crisp, blue day, warming up to a hot July afternoon. From my home in Tamworth, New Hampsire I look across the fields and gardens of the Behr farm, an array of vegetables gardens, silver and swaying mature winter rye (now being mown for straw), and at the forest edge, chicken tractors. The forest at the end of the field shows the deepening green of summer. Beyond, the Ossipee Mountains are an even deeper blue-green, mottled with the dark speckles of faraway spruce and fir. On the other side of my home is Main Street, and just across the bridge, over the Swift River, is Tamworth Village. Towards the end of Main Street the pastures and outbuildings of the Remick Museum stretch up the Great Hill Road toward the Hemenway State Forest. Mountains, forest, farm, and community, one next to the other.
In my imagination I rise above the village, forest and farms. I see the Bearcamp Valley spread out below, stretching between the Sandwich Mountain Range and the Ossipees. The Community School is a few miles from the Village, and the Bearcamp River winds from South Tamworth into the Town of Sandwich and Sandwich Notch. One can walk the Bearcamp Valley Trail from South Tamworth to Beede Falls. Then it’s just seven miles through the mountains along Sandwich Notch Road to the Curious Gourds Studio and Garden at the Sandwich Mountain Farm. From “the farm,” as we call it, one looks to the northeast to the Acteon Ridge and Sandwich and Black Mountains. Welch and Dickey Mountains are to the North. Between the Ridge and Welch and Dickey, the Mad River flows from Waterville to the Pemigewassett River and the towns of Thornton, Campton and Plymouth.
For may years I have made my way through the geographic wall of mountains, driving (summer/fall) and skiing (winter) on the rough but passable road in Sandwich Notch, or hiking the obscure wilderness trek of Lost Pass. This travel and desire to see a connection between communities is mirrored on a larger scale by my traveling and living in Costa Rica and New Hampshire over the last twenty years. My effort to explore the world through the Whiteblack the Penguin story expands this vision to the globe.
I am left with questions. How do the isolated (and sometimes insular) cultures, societies and economies of localities connect to others while maintaining a sense of place and commitment to nearby community? How do we think and act regionally and globally while also staying focused on the local? How do we make a nexus from loci?
wonderful questions!