Lefty rube randomly roams the right coast

• Bostonians, we read on the plane east, don't like you calling their city "Beantown."
• Without planning to, Nancy and I drive through Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween Day. More than 200,000 people, we hear on public radio, will converge on Salem this day. The center of town is literally a carnival, with rides and booths. We drive past the Salem Witch Museum, with a bronze statue of Roger Conant, founder of Salem. His flowing robes and pilgrim hat, so close to the museum, make visitors mistake him for a witch, apparently. The night before, a drunk driver killed a women and two children during the weeks-long Halloween celebration. We already resolve not to stick around.
• Hampton, New Hampshire, is shut down for the year. Not getting around much, as we do, we had not conceived of a town battening itself from lack of use. But Hampton is a beach town, dependent on those beaches filling with people and staying in their ocean-view hotels and eating their hot dogs and fro-yos, and buying their sunglasses and souvenir beach towels. When the beach is empty the "vacancy" signs shut off, and the hotels stand as ghosts in the windy fall mist, and the vendors' markets are clamped down with plywood or iron accordion fences. A few people walked the beach. Who knows where they stayed?
• After the 26th sighting, we finally succumbed to Dunkin' Donuts. Also at the 27th, 32nd, 36th and 42nd Dunkin' Donuts. Also maybe the 43rd. Dunkin' Donuts is (are?) more prevalent by far than church spires in this coastal New England to which we ventured. We avoided Dunkin' Donuts for about a day, resolving (1) we'd buy local (whatever that means) and (2) I'd had Dunkin' Donuts coffee, made from grounds I had bought at a grocery story a couple of years before; it was awful, the worst I'd ever drunk. At the 27th Dunkin' Donuts, it turns out, the coffee is not awful. The place is clean and cheerful and orange and magenta. A Dunkin' Donuts "old fashioned" is not what I'm used to, the heavy glazed pastry that looks like it was fried in mid explosion, but a plain cake doughnut. We did not dunk.
• "My son says you must have superpowers," says a mom at Kalmus Beach with her two boys. They are collecting the cast-off armor of horseshoe crabs, with their menacing spike tails, from the beach. I have just finished swimming along the beach, named for a president of the Technicolor company. The water is clear, and below me, parallel to the shore, it looks like someone has furnished an aquarium but forgot the fish. Grasses sprinkled with clam shells sway below me. The water is 51 degrees. It is foggy and I'm leery about swimming. The ferries heading to Nantucket are rumbling and coughing invisibly offshore, shaking the water it seems, and though I think I'm safe from them if I swim very close to the beach, I am not entirely sure. I swim anyway. My friend Doug said that I could have swum past the Kennedy family's house. I didn't get very far, though, happy enough for the swim.
  
• On the stone obelisk marking the grave of William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, is a Hebrew inscription, translated as "Jehovah is our help."
• The State Station stop on the Orange T line subway literally opens to the street from the Old Statehouse building, where All the Trouble Started. Subway riders are just steps away from the Boston Massacre, just a floor below where Colonial governors were being hated and plotted against. Forgive me for filtering history through pop culture, but I couldn't help feeling like we had entered Diagon Alley.
• Two people were selling Allagash Beer, made in Portland, Maine, while we ate at a pub in Hyannis on Cape Cod. By that, I mean they weren't servers, but sales reps moving from table to table pouring samples of their beer and touting its flavor; but also approving of our choices of beer that did not include Allagash. We told the sellers we were out from California on our first trip to New England. "What part of Cali?" They asked at separate times. They read in our eyes that we didn't like them calling it "Cali."
• "Welcome! Welcome!" said two women eating at a sidewalk table in front of Coffee Time Bake Shop in Salem. We felt welcomed, and cheerful when they recommended real cream-filled Bismarks, whatever they are. They are delightful fist-sized mounds of heavy whipped cream between bar sugar doughnuts. As in most things last week, we rationalized our wolfing them down by saying we were on vacation. One of the women told us she is soooo glad to be retired.
• First clear sign I wasn't home anymore: A kid walking through the airport with a hockey stick in hand and two extremely large equipment bags slung around his neck.
• Finally I can tell people I went to Harvard. The Red T Line train takes you right to Harvard Square, where we betrayed ourselves as tourists, despite our casual wear, by reading every sign available. Lesser known William Dawes rode north past here to warn residents of the British Army's coming. We know this because brass hoofprints are embedded in the concrete, as are words proclaiming Dawes' ride. We know more about Paul Revere's ride, but not much more.
• Does anyone in California call his/her state "Cali?"
• Construction crews are repairing brick in the street in front of Paul Revere's home, a very old home sandwiched between buildings in Boston's North End. It is small and cozy, made cramped by all the people visiting while we did, and we wondered how chaotic this place is in the summer tourist season. Revere was but one of hundreds who lived in this 350-year-old house, we learn from one of the many signs posted. Guides in each room tried to tell us things too, but the plethora of signs competed full strength with the guides' narrative, and after a short time we just had to leave.
• Useful tip: Don't climb the 294 steps to the top of the monument at Bunker Hill immediately after eating fish and chips at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown, or anywhere else for that matter. You'll make it, and the view of Boston's harbors will be as refreshing as the breeze shooting through the openings at the top, but you won't be very comfortable.
• Warren Tavern's fish and chips: Second best among six fish and chips meals consumed this weeklong trip. We're on vacation, we resolved.
• "We thought Bostonians didn't like people calling this Beantown," we tell the server at Beantown Pub near Boston Commons. She is from Colombia and had only been in Boston about eight months, and didn't really know of this controversy. Later she returned from the kitchen with the cook's story about why Boston is called Beantown.
• Beantown Pub's fish and chips: The best of six fish and chips dinners during the week. Also, someone plays two Pearl Jam songs on the jukebox there, and someone else plays a great song we'd never heard, "The Sun is Shining Down," by J.J. Grey and Mofro It sounds like salvation, and we needed saving from a long day of walking through Boston, through the wet cobbled streets in anxious search of a tavern. We had seen Beantown Pub a couple of hours before, and made fun of it. We changed our minds seeing it the second time.
• Did you know the Boston Bruins logo — A block B inside of an 8-spoked wagon wheel shape — refers to Boston as the Hub City, an idea promoted by Oliver Wendell Holmes who called this the "hub of the universe?" Do you care? I guess Boston has room to brag.
• Succumbing to serendipity, the real theme of this trip (the officially stated reason was to see Boston), we drove past a pedestrian bridge that led to a peninsula created by a tidal pond corralled for the express purpose of making ice for cutting and selling. Of course we had to walk it and see where it led, which was through birchy woods. The tide was going out, and the water roared under the bridge out to sea. I'm sorry to say so much happened I can't tell you offhand where we were.
• Evening ritual: Nancy would work her magic finding a place to stay, and we'd end up in a palace of riches — two TVs! Multiple rooms! Fully appointed kitchens! — for a quarter to a third of the usual summer rates. It was a bit ridiculous for one-night stays.
• Petey's clam chowder was as good as our friend Doug promised, and just the stuff after a swim at Rye Beach in New Hampshire, which Doug also recommended. That was the second swim, the first being at Singing Beach (the sand "sings" under your feet) off Manchester-by-the-Sea, with Doug, my swim friend who abandoned me and returned to his native New England and his beer career, and Martha, whom I had met on facebook®™ but not yet in person. She opened her home as a staging area for the swim, where the clear water was 55 degrees and calm. Rye Beach was windier and a bit disconcerting, since I was swimming by myself with Nancy walking parallel to me. Gulls hovered and dove farther out in the water, and what little I knew about hovering and diving gulls suggested something else was in the water; I swam with long looks under the water back toward the starting point. Waves exploded the sand to little dust storms beneath me.
• Old Orchard Beach defied the compass. Even with the Atlantic Ocean as our marker, we had a hard time finding the place, and then finding it again when we left the hotel for dinner. We couldn't even find the dinner place we were looking for, and settled for something close, which didn't help us after. Old Orchard Beach is another shuttered summertime playland, the skeleton of its Ferris wheel and roller coaster showing with the next sunrise.
• We hardly saw one ugly house in a couple of hundred miles of driving. Maybe it was the coast; maybe we had seen a rarified sliver of New England. It was all becoming suspiciously storybook in how many beautiful homes were strung together.
• Official beast of New England: The rider mower.
• Useful tip: Plan a whole day to go through the museum for the U.S.S. Constitution in Charlestown, across the Charles River from Boston. It is so full of interactive devices and means of explaining a sailor's and shipwright's life that you need the day and fresh energy to take it on. We had neither the day nor energy, and we regretted not spending more time there.
• After two days, we had walked 26 miles through Boston.
• The Freedom Trail, taking you from Boston Commons to Bunker Hill (really Breed's Hill, carved with bunkers in the battle with British soldiers), is for the most part a brick line along the sidewalks leading you through revolutionary history. It took us an inordinately long time to figure that out.
• We saw the flashing Citgo sign from a distance, marking the site of Fenway Park, from adirondack chairs on a dock on the chilly Charles River.
• Streets and beaches where we meandered were amazingly clean! Don't mess with New England.
• Plymouth Rock is a boulder, carved with the year 1620 (which is not the year the year was carved in it, but after the rock had been glued back together in the late 1800s after being split apart). The Rock is on beach sand, covered in footprints despite the famous boulder's enshrinement in its own fenced-off granite temple. Nancy said she thought Plymouth Rock was like Morro Rock, a mountainous formation marking Plymouth. But it's not like we had a conversation about what Plymouth Rock would be like; we didn't necessarily plan to be in Plymouth anyway, so the topic never came up. Now we were at the headwaters of all those coloring pages from first grade, all those lessons about how the Indians saved the pilgrims from starvation with a dinner or corn and squash, and showed them how to fertilize crops with fish. If the buildings and towns are very old, it's mostly because we have forgotten about the people who were here even before that, some of whose names remain on landmarks. Plymouth Rock landed on them.
• We saw a bronze duck and her ducklings from the Robert McCloskey book "Make Way for Ducklings," celebrated in the Boston Public Garden.
• We heard a flutist play hornpipes from the bridge over the pond in the park, which was fun until a couple dressed for the opera took up the flutist's time insisting he play songs that the couple hummed for him.
• The pass for the T Line subway through Boston is called a CharlieTicket or CharlieCard. They're named after Charlie, memorialized in a 1949 protest song called "M.T.A." satirizing subway fee increases at the time. Charlie, spending his dime to take the subway, learns he needs another nickel, which he doesn't have, to get off the train, and is doomed to ride the train forever. His wife throws a sandwich to him through the open window of the train each day from the Scollay Square Station (now Government Center) at a quarter past two.
• Written for a mayoral candidate who protested the subway fee increases, the song didn't help the guy win. The Kingston Trio made it a hit, after changing the candidate's name because some Bostonians accused him of being a communist sympathizer.
• The CharlieTicket day pass cost us $12 apiece. We're on vacation, we consoled each other.
• Our little cocoon in California has nothing on New England for political campaigning. Signs proliferate, including a mile stretch along the New Hampshire shore of nothing but Trump signs. People stood on the overpasses on the Cape Cod freeway, waving signs for their candidates. I flipped off a Trump contingent as we passed underneath. One of them looked straight at me. Shortly after, I think the man said to his cohort, "You know, this just doesn't feel right," dropped his sign and went home to vote early for Hillary Clinton.
• Despite having co-opted Charlie and angst over the nation's oldest subway system, the T Line is wonderful, especially for this rube who hates driving through cities, especially unfamiliar ones. It squeaks and makes horrible noises and writhes beneath the city — someone should make a symphony from its unnatural sounds — but the T Line gets you all over the area, and every train was crowded. Sacramento's Light Rail is a laughable imitation.
• At Freeport, Maine, our turnaround point, we bypass the L.L. Bean headquarters (serendipity!) for a walk through a state park along Casco Bay. So many islands out in the water! Such calm water, and no swimmers! What a waste. A woman getting her puppy used to the water asks if we were from "away" (just like I'd read Mainers say!) and said we should go to Acadia National Park, two hours farther north. Damn this woman, enticing us away from our unplanned plans! We had yet to see Boston, our stated goal. We went south.
• By serendipity, we saw were Paul Revere's family sat in the Old North Church. The floor of the church is penned off, sort of human corrals, and parishioners bought these pens. The walls of each pen are high, kind of like going to church in a modern rabbit warren of office cubicles. We also saw where Revere landed on reaching Charlestown at night to ride to Lexington.
• A member of the Curley Community Center in South Boston hosts us for a swim in the harbor. Men convened on one side of the center, women the other, and they were generally not allowed on each other's beach or facilities, but they could swim together in the 50-degree water beyond the tall wooden fences that extend into the harbor. Our host was just your average Harvard neurobiology professor (he didn't say this; I found out later), cursing his forgetfulness having left his swimsuit back home.
• "California Stop" my ass! Massachusetts residents are far more lax about stopping and looking before turning into traffic. They seem to be aggressively polite, by which I mean they are apt to turn left directly in front of you, and are almost as apt to stop in traffic to let drivers turn left in front of them. Turning left is a desperate measure, somehow.
• On Cape Cod are "breakdown lanes," and at rush hour drivers are allowed to drive on the shoulders. I propose they be called "breakneck lanes," because drivers reached 80 miles an hour along the shoulders, onramp drivers be damned.
• We saw where John Hancock was buried, in a burying ground (not cemetery) where lichen-licked tombstones lean and lurch. Disney's Imagineers must have had New England burying grounds in mind when designing the Haunted Mansion. Yes, my pop culture is showing again.
• Nothing's good in movie theaters these days. Thank God, since were forced to see more of Boston instead.
• Gulls, some cormorants, but not one barking seal, or any other sea life. No birdsong, even in deep woods, except for some chittering along a street one morning in Gloucester. What's going on?
• Saco ("Socko"), Maine, where Sam Brannan is from, is mostly a city of theme parks now, shuttered for the winter. Sam essentially created the Gold Rush in California, and profited from it, and never went back to New England. What would he think of Saco now?
• In Wallaston, a Boston suburb, we stayed at a brand new Howard Johnson hotel. I thought the hotel chain had disappeared, but here was a new one, with a giant adirondack chair outside the office as its symbol. Turns out (serendipity!) the first Howard Johnson restaurant was founded by a man named Howard Johnson (go figure!), in Wallaston.
• We miss the end of the greatest Game 7 in World Series history, and we feel sorry for easterners, who have to stay up so late to watch baseball games.
• "Paul Revere's Ride," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, we learn, is a poem that elevates a then relatively unknown man to everlasting memory, and sacrifices fact in order create an Everyman hero to rally support for the Union in advance of the Civil War.
• We are not happy with Portland, Maine, where Longfellow was born, because it gave us a parking ticket. You'd think parking enforcement would give you the benefit of the doubt if you buy a parking pass but then park in a poorly marked commercial zone anyway. The old port neighborhood is nice, though.
• This is my souvenir.