The road not taken

Last fall we took a leaf-peeping trip to New Hampshire and Maine. The foliage was late and less than spectacular; it didn't capture all my attention and perhaps that put me in a reflective mood.

The first day, we drove across the Kankamagus Highway from west to east. I showed Hubby the wonderful roadside area known as Lower Falls where a cold river tumbles out of the mountains and carves potholes and whirlpools out of sheer granite. As a teenager, I spent many days splashing in that frigid stream and sunning myself on the smooth rocks. The 'highway" was dirt then and the smell of dust on huckleberry bushes and the scent of sunwarmed pine needles still calls back New Hampshire to me. As we emerged into a traffic jam in Conway, we could have crossed the highway and taken the road to Silver Lake where I spent a summer working at Camp Allegro. But instead, we headed for the Fryeburg Fair - our destination for the next day. So it seemed that I had chosen to bypass nostalgia on this trip. But maybe not....

It think it was the summer of 1958; I was a high school girl at my first away-from-home job. I worked in the kitchen of a girls' summer camp. I was lucky that I wasn't a counselor - I had evenings off, and this gave me and the other kitchen girls time to socialize with the town boys. I, of course, fell for the "catch" of the town, a handsome boy named Wayne who had just graduated from high school. As modern day romances go, it was a pretty chaste relationship: movies, cheeseburgers at the coffee shop, handholding, shy kisses... All this teenage bliss was punctuated by breakneck trips to make curfew, barreling over the mountain roads at speeds approaching 100 mph - and this was before the introduction of seatbelts!

Inevitably, fall came and I returned home. The heartthrob enlisted in the Marines. I saw him in his dress uniform one week-end, fantasized about a wedding someday and walking out of a church under crossed swords. But it went the way of all summer romances and after exchanging letters for a while we lost touch. He went to flight school in Pensacola; I finished high school and went to college. Our lives diverged...

Fast forward to the week-end foliage trip. Thanks to the wonders of internet research, I know that my teenage love has returned to his hometown after a military career. I know that his flying may have involved him with covert action during the VietNam war. I also know that, because of my anti-war activities, I have a file in Washington. As most folks in rural New Hampshire, I suspect that he is a rock-ribbed Republican; I am a proud Liberal. Our lives diverged...

I am walking down the midway at the Fryeburg Fair; I'm trying to resist the deep-fried everything and noticing how obese the local fairgoers seem. Suppose my 15 year old dreams had come true and I was now a sixty-something matronly wife of Wayne living in the hills of New Hampshire - would I be here as a different person? I hear the thwock, thwock, thwock of the rotor blades as the excursion helicopter flights circle the fairground - I wonder if Wayne is piloting them...

So many choices in life have brought me to where I am - a happy, chubby wife of a different man and grandmother of four.