Edward Hungerford - All Along the Shore

relax. sit down. and catch up on your reading:

Letters From New Orleans by Rob Walker
"Endearing, honest, funny and moving..."
-- The New York Times Book Review

A Terrible Thunder by Peter Hernon
"A Terrible Thunder is more than just another fashionable journalistic rehashing of a crime. In its depiction of Essex's abrupt transmogrification it raises questions about the accumulated effect of petty but persistent injustices and about the individual's capacity to endure aggrievement."
-- New York Times Book Review

Forty Four Presidents by MZA & Maria Sputnik
A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment -- documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends.

Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory by Mickey Hess
It is the funniest, most honest depiction of the struggle almost all college graduates face when trying to decide what the hell they're going to do with the rest of their lives.
--Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned

More at www.gcpress.com or at your local bookstore.

IN all this world there is but one New England.

You may travel afar and see many features of creation repeated, here, there, everywhere.... A bit of jutting headland of the California coast, set in with distant mountains and pointed with a low cypress tree and a pink stucco house may make you think of Italy; a Florida estate cleverly fashioned by landscape artists and architects may bring to your mind the south of Spain -- but New England never, never repeats herself.

Where else may you go and find as sternly beautiful a coast as that which twists and turns itself north from Boston town, all the way down in Maine to Calais and the Canada line? On the one hand, the sea:"... the eternal flow of... smooth billows toward the shore...." The northern sea of boundless blue in summer, and in winter ofttimes of an almost unspeakable anger.

The sea, elsewhere? I'll grant you that. But not the New England sort of a sea -- not even all these beauties and delights that our North Shore furnishes: long, sandy, shelving beaches for the sort of bathers who like the exhilaration of coolness as they battle with the waves; yachts, making off toward the blue horizon; fine estates, wooded, rocky, dignified, coming down to wet their feet in the very waters of the Atlantic; jutting headlands, now and then bearing upon the tips of their thrusted fingers a stately lighthouse, or perhaps a brace of lights -- as at Thatcher's Island or Cape Elizabeth.

Do you still believe that you will find this sort of thing in many places outside of New England?

If you do, let me visualize for you one thing more -- the old New England seaport town. Now we have you. There is a cove; a harbor in deepwater; the town itself clinging stoutly and manfully to a sharp uprising hill; its neat, white houses and its many trees and its narrow streets clutching at ledges of rock; all the way up from the fringe of weatherbeaten wharves and warehouses at its waterside. Accent and emphasis to all of this by a white spire or two --rising above the greenery; perhaps in that ancient belfry you still may find the nine-pound shot that a vainglorious British general planted there---more than a century ago.... In the narrow streets splotches of sunlight coming down through the interstices of the trees and splaying themselves upon the roadway and the sidewalk. Neat palinged fences, scrupulously white, and lined, perhaps with roses, and with hollyhocks. Ladies with wide skirts and with parasols coming out the broad doors of the old houses and picking their way along the narrow walks.... This is New England. Where else in all creation may it be duplicated?

And when this New England comes intimately down to the sea; to the bold brave coast of our North Shore, its interest and its fascination are compounded. Sometimes the rocky shore breaks for a space and then we have those selfsame smooth and sandy beaches; and then the rocks conquer once again and one finds the summer homes, large and small, of an intelligent and a perceptive America. There are hotels, of a great variety, all the way along this coast. Small inns and eating-places dot its course, all the way from Revere Beach to well beyond Portland. Smooth highways run close to its shore for its entire distance.... A place of great natural beauty has been made into the playground of a nation, without sacrifice of that beauty or its inherent dignity.... The North Shore treasures its traditions. It will permit no sacrifice of them, whatsoever. It welcomes cordially the tourist. But he must respect it. And then, this done, he surely will come to love it.

THE North Shore begins its course almost within the limits of Boston itself. Winthrop and Revere and Nahant form the introduction to this wonder coast, and Winthrop and Revere and Nahant are today all but component parts of metropolitan Boston--in its entirety the second city in the United States.

For our purposes, however, the North Shore is to begin at Swampscott, thirteen miles from Boston and just barely beyond the busy manufacturing city of Lynn. It is at Swampscott that the cottage life of the North Shore has its inception. Here, too, are the first of the large hotels that draw their patronage from every state of the Union. The close proximity of this exceedingly high class resort to Boston -- it is but thirty minutes out from North Station -- with the frequent train service gives it an especial popularity. King's Beach and Fisherman's Beach are the beginnings of North Shore's opportunities for fine bathing, quite outside of the throngs of Boston folk who go to the beaches nearer their town. At Phillips Beach and Beach Bluff, just beyond Swampscott, these opportunities are repeated, while the Tedesco Club, within the town limits, maintains an excellent golf-course, available to the surrounding neighborhood.

Yet all of this -- Swampscott, Phillips Beach, Clifton, Devereux -- are but preparations for Marblehead, which occupies a long, narrow, rocky headland, giving on the south to an excellent harbor, dotted here and there with small islands.

Marblehead is the first of the really high spots of our North Shore--the very first of the really historic old towns that dot its way and give to it so much of its real flavor and personality. For more than two centuries and a half Marblehead has fought for its bare existence. It rarely ever has been an easy battle; rarely ever a winning one. The men who go down to sea have but little joy in the going. A hard life always. With death at all times but a step behind.

And still Marblehead has had her triumphs. The little fishermen's houses that line her narrow, crooked, twisted streets may bespeak to you the poverty and wretchedness of an ancient fishing town, but how about its huge old houses? Triumph-- triumph against adversity--planned these. Success upbuilded them.... And forget not that if today the commercial importance of Marblehead has sunk to a mere nothingness, her social distinction has risen, proportionately. The place has great antiquity, great charm, great beauty. To which may be added the prestige that comes not alone from its fine hotels and its elaborate cottages, but from the fact that it is an important station for several exclusive yacht-clubs.