By Archer Thomas
I remember every day of the week my mother died. It was the sultry end of summer in New England, gray skies dawn to dusk, every day except Tuesday (my mother died on a Friday). My grandfather and I were driving back to Maine from Brigham and Women’s for a night of respite. The sun shone brightly, and I dozed in the passenger seat. Knowing I was asleep, my grandfather exited 95 in Newbury. The sudden shade of wizened oak trees arching the road woke me up.
“I thought I’d take a look around.” He explained.
My grandfather grew up on a farm along the marshy banks of the Parker River. His father dealt Jersey cattle up and down the East Coast. In 1952, their barn went up in flames and within two weeks the family had moved to a new farm in Randolph, Vermont. Still, Newbury was home to him. It was why he felt so attached to the land, why he settled in Maine where one can till a stony acre and no one thinks it strange.
The farm was eventually bought by the town, and now hosts the campus of the regional high school. As we poked around the parking lot of the sprawling, squat building, he decided to take the car onto a walkway snaking around the back. At that moment, despite it being summer break, a teacher popped up and furiously motioned to have us roll down the window.
“You can’t drive here!” He sputtered.
“This is where I grew up. We used to paddle down to Plum Island from the landing back here—do you know anyone with the last name Moody?” My grandfather replied frankly.
“My wife’s relatives! She’s from around here.” The teacher seemed placated and let us pull around the school’s lawn.
We drove towards the Atlantic, passing subdivisions named after the families whose children my grandfather knew, fellow cattle farmers and millers, people with brackish water in their blood. As we noticed how the land had changed, how gaudy houses replaced open fields and trees invaded fallow pastures, a silence fell over us.
Eventually we reached a secluded bend in the road along Plum Island Sound. In the distance was a sandy spit of land reaching outwards into the blue horizon. At its tip was a tiny lighthouse, its element glinting in the noonday sun. My grandfather stopped the car.
“I remember looking at that lighthouse in 1945,” he reflected, “and knowing I wanted to be a historian.”
He never became a historian. He was a doctor.
I didn’t know why, but I understood. The horizon, the lighthouse, the Sound. Everything in that moment spoke of infinity. I wanted to take him away from this place, beyond the sea, to a land where history was alive, where it still meant something.
“See!” I would say, beckoning forwards. “That place was a disappointment, but beyond here lies a million more lighthouses and a million more spits of land! Isn’t life exactly what you’d hoped it would be?”
Sometimes I wonder what will become of the countryside. I picture where the pieces will fall, the lucky parts becoming bedroom communities and the unlucky ones slowly but surely hollowing out. In both cases, the new chapter of rural America represents the death of what rural life once meant. Like a wandering ghost, I wonder if we will realize the countryside has been dead this whole time, and that the vacationers, back-to-the-landers, and super-commuters have merely obscured the rot.
I am reminded of a poem by Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic. Its first stanza goes like this:
Vivo sin vivir en mí
y tan alta vida espero
que muero porque no muero.
Archer Thomas (he/him) is a first-year Master in City Planning candidate at MIT and an urbanist working at the intersection of data, economics, and history. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College, a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, and is from Maine.