Mosher - The great northern express: a writers journey home

BOOKS BY HOWARD FRANK MOSHER

Disappearances

Where the Rivers Flow North

Marie Blythe

A Stranger in the Kingdom

Northern Borders

North Country

The Fall of the Year

The True Account

Waiting for Teddy Williams

On Kingdom Mountain

Walking to Gatlinburg

The Great Northern Express

Copyright 2012 by Howard Frank Mosher

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House,
Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to The New England Press, Inc., for
permission to reprint The Trouble with a Son, The Waves, and Senior
Year from Star in the Shed Window: Collected Poems 19331988 by James
Hayford (Shelburne, VT; The New England Press, Inc., 1989).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mosher, Howard Frank.
The great northern express : a writers journey home / Howard Frank
Mosher.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Mosher, Howard Frank. 2. Novelists, American21st centuryBiography. I. Title.
PS3563.O8844Z46 2011
813.54dc22
[B] 2011015302

eISBN: 978-0-307-45095-1

Jacket design by Misa Erder
Jacket photography by ICHIRO/Getty Images

v3.1

For my grandchildren,

Frank James Williamson

and

True Hilton Williamson

The Great Northern Express is a tale not of two cities but, give or take a few, of one hundred. Specifically, it is the story of the monumental book tour I made the summer I turned sixty-five. That journey was inspired by a much shorter trip: a walk up the street to our villages tiny post office, where I received an unexpected letter.

This is also the story of how my wife, Phillis, and I came to settle in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It, too, began with a journey: this one when we were just twenty-one, to interview for teaching jobs in the remote mill town of Orleans, in the northern Green Mountains just south of the Canadian border, where we planned to teach for a year or two, save some money, and then move on to graduate school.

I have divided The Great Northern Express into three parts: Faith, Hope, and Love. Certainly, faith, hope, and love are what sustained me during a sojourn I feared might be my last. The sixty-five chapters here suggest how, upon reaching an age when many people think about retiring, or already have, I set out to rededicate myself to what has been my profession for more than four decades. Since I am, by both trade and personal inclination, a storyteller, each chapter tells a story.

I have changed the names of a few of the people I have written about. In two or three cases I combined characters to further conceal actual identities. Like Henry David Thoreau, who in fact spent slightly more than two years at Walden Pond, which he compressed into one calendar year in Walden, I have also occasionally used experiences from earlier or later times in my life.

The Great Northern Express is the story of how, as I traveled from coast to coast and border to border in the summer of my sixty-fifth year, two journeys seemed to meld into the narrative of one writers search, in his life and work, for the true meaning of home.

My first home was a ghost town. Hidden away in a remote hollow of the Catskill Mountains, the company-owned hamlet of Chichester went bankrupt in 1939, three years before I was born. A few families, ours included, hung on for several more years. But without its once-prosperous furniture factory, which reopened a couple of times in my early boyhood only to shut down a few months later, Chichester was just another dying upstate mill town. By the time I turned five, the place was on its last legs, and looked it.

While many of my happiest memories date from those years in the CatskillsI caught my first trout in the stream behind our house when I was four, shagged foul balls for older kids at the overgrown diamond on the village greenfrom the fall when I entered first grade until my first year of high school, my family moved, by my count, ten times. My dad, a schoolteacher, had itchy feet, like Pa Ingalls in Laura Ingalls Wilders Little House books. After leaving Chichester, we Moshers would strike out for new territory every year or so. And although I never wanted to leave any of the towns where we temporarily alighted, I dont recall thinking there was anything unusual about pulling up stakes at the end of every school year and relocating. In those days I was a ballplaying, daydreaming, reading little guy with a slew of imaginary companions, mostly from the books I devouredHuck Finn, Treasure Islands Jim Hawkins, David Copperfield. So long as our family stayed together and I could find a nearby trout brook, a ball field, and a steady supply of books to read, I didnt care how often we moved.

Still, I have always regarded Chichester as my hometown. If asked for a favorite early memory, Id recall sitting between my dad and Reg Bennett in the front seat of Dads old, battleship-gray DeSoto on the mountaintop behind our house, trying to dial in the YankeesRed Sox game on the car radio. As the house lights of the town below began to wink on in the twilight, and Mel Allen or Curt Gowdy waxed poetic about the Bronx Bombers or the boys from Beantown, Reg and Dad would talk baseball. Regmy fathers best friend, fishing partner, and teaching colleaguewas a second father and honorary uncle to me. In temperament, Dad and Reg were as different from each other as lifelong friends can be. My father was a big, outgoing, nonjudgmental man, comfortable with himself and others. A natural leader, he caught for the Chichester town baseball team, as he had for his high school nine. Reg was slighter in build and was several inches shorter. He was combative and, if wronged, quick to pick a fight. He pitched for the Chichester team. Over the years he had perfected a hard-breaking curve, which he could and frequently did use to brush aggressive hitters back from the plate or knock them down. Like my grandfather Mosher, my father had a romantic outlook on life, which I have inherited. Reg, for his part, was a realist, with an ironical turn of mind and a dry sense of humor that I loved.

Reg loved to argue. My father did not. Sooner or later, though, Dad would be drawn into a debate, amicable enough at first, often over the relative merits of their two favorite players. Dad, a true-blue Yankee fan, was a Joe DiMaggio man. Reg was a devotee of Ted Williams. As the evening wore on and the game became heatedas YankeeRed Sox games are wont to dothe baseball arguments between my father and uncle intensified. Soon theyd both get mad, stop addressing each other directly, and begin arguing by proxy, through me.

Howard Frank, my uncle saidas a boy, I was often addressed by both names to distinguish me from my father, Howard HudsonHoward Frank, I am here to tell you that Ted Williams is the greatest pure hitter in the history of the game.