"Water Ways"

by Nicholas Howe

a column originally published in the Conway Sun, Tuesday, July 21, 2001

I am not a water person. Many quite respectable people are, Walter Cronkite, my brother and my nephew among them, but I have never been able to see how the sight of miles and miles of water going by the side of a boat is a sure path to happiness.

It's not that I lack experience. My cousin Benjamin and I built a boat and launched it on the frog pond at our place in Jackson, but we had an imperfect grasp of the relationship between buoyancy and burden and the boat sank until the water was about up to our knees. This meant that the keel was resting on the bottom, which limited our nautical opportunities.

Some years later, I crossed the English Channel on a vessel that was larger, but not as inspiring. Another time I spent an evening of la dolce vita on a very large yacht just off the coast of the Riviera, which showed me that eleventh-generation Yankees do not find happiness in that kind of thing. Then last week I went to play music on Three Mile Island in Lake Winnipesaukee, partway along a chain including One Mile, Two Mile, Four Mile, Five Mile and, yes, Six Mile islands. TMI as it's called by those who love it, is by far the largest of the archipelago at forty-three acres in extent, and it's been owned by the Appalachian Mountain Club since 1900. Curiously, considering my non-water habits, the circumstances of the acquisition can be found in the chapter called "A Presidential Brain Trust" in my book Not Without Peril. Before the music began, I circumnavigated the wooded island on a footpath and came upon a man reading the book and just starting that chapter.

Not much has changed on Three Mile Island in the past hundred years. It's always been a popular summer retreat for rusticating Appies, but the paths connecting the various outposts of civilization still seem as if only a few people had trod them, and those outposts themselves remind us of a gentler time.

There are forty-seven cabins on the island, each equipped with two cot beds, a small table, and a kerosene lamp. The indoor facilities are outdoors; that is, centrally-located outhouses and available solar showers, which are black plastic bags with a spigot. For a shower, fill one with water, leave it in the sun for a few hours, then turn on the spigot. That, or jump into the lake. Ventilation in the cabins is equally straight-forward. There are wooden shutters hinged over openings in the walls, with a piece of clothes line coming in through the wall by way of a hole and a pulley. Pull and the shutter goes up, loosen and it comes down.

There are several buildings at the south end of the island with electricity brought in by way of an underwater cable. Here there is a dining room and a library and few other provisions for slightly less rigorous rustication. That is to say, things at Three Mile Island are just about the ways things used to be in Jackson when gentlefolk spent their summers here.

My great-grandmother bought the old Moody place on Black Mountain at just the time first settlements were made on Three Mile Island and, after the house was enlarged a bit, friends began spending the summer with us. Many of them would come back year after year, some of them grew up with us. The elders stayed in the house and the rising generation stayed in tents scattered around the property. Washing was pitchers and basins in the bedrooms or at a spring at the top of the pasture, and the other facilities were in a place called Woodbine Cottage, a four-hole outhouse that must have brought a level of intimacy not widely available in the cities. Nor were these summer friends unlettered rustics: a commanding general in the army and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court grew up with us. Soon the boys dragged some cot beds out into a field and put a roof and minimal siding around them, then the girls wanted a place, too, so they built another one. They were called The Boys House and The Girls House. The Burgesses came up from Providence every summer and a cabin was built for them, which was called The Burgess's House. Then there was the Peck House and the Hood House and Grandfather's House and The House Behind the Barn and The Log Cabin, which really wasn't one. There were outhouses here and there. Then came a larger Boys House and Stanley's Upper House. Ventilation was provided by wooden shutters hinged over openings in the walls, with a piece of clothes line coming in through the wall by way of a hole and a pulley. Pull and the shutter went up, loosened and it came down.

By this time, Joe Dodge had started to work at the Appalachian Mountain Club camp up in Pinkham Notch. There was another crewman in the notch, where the facilities consisted of two log cabins and, in season, a couple of tents. That was in 1922 and the first thing Joe did was to make a little roof over the outdoor wash stand; then in 1926, he decided to see if he could spend the winter there. Our place and AMC Pinkham have changed in the years since then, but Three Mile Island hasn't. More to the present point, it's still quite a long way from the mainland. The musicians were supposed to gather and be picked up at the dock at 5 p.m., but I was late. So as they say, I missed the boat. A skiff came over from TMI to meet a vegetable shipment but that was late, so I rode back with them.

The music went will, albeit with mosquito obbligato and rusticating Appies go to bed early, so it was about 10 p.m. when we packed up to go back to the mainland. The time we'd be in the senior TMI boat, a stately old cabin craft, not quite a teakwood and mahogany Chriscraft cruiser, but it was close enough. I've always admired those lovely wooden boats of the 1920s and '30s, the speedboats and the cruisers that were so popular that the sportiest automobiles were made to look like boats. There's a shop on Route 3 near the lake that sells them in original and in restored condition, and a few times when I was in the neighborhood I've lingered there pretending I was in the market to buy one. I think I could spend a pleasant summer just polishing it.

We got our instruments and other impedimenta stowed on board and the captain started the engine, then we cast off lines and moved out into the darkness to the low burble-burble-burble of the engine. The stars glowed faintly on the water going by the side of the boat and the gentle rocking led to a degree of happiness.