EAST MONTPELIER – I’ve had the dubious good fortune during the past five years to drive every couple of weeks or so to the neighborhood of Boston. It’s becoming a habit, casually alternating visits to Nahant with my friend Bea’s visits here in Vermont. But where else would we be but Boston on the weekend of the Fourth of July, especially on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence?
“Cradle of Liberty,” it’s been called, or “Birthplace of Freedom,” names I heartily endorse in spite of Philadephia’s competing claims. Boston’s where the tea got dumped into the harbor; where a raucous crowd of protesters got shot at by British regulars; where the British army set out from to capture two prominent patriots, Sam Adams and John Hancock (who were fast asleep in Lexington); and where General Gage planned to receive the arms and gunpowder his troops would confiscate in Concord on their ill-fated expedition. In short, it’s where the real brouhahas took place. Philadelphia was by contrast a faculty meeting. It produced what has long been a masterpiece; but if you’re going to celebrate the birth of a nation, it involved a gritty struggle in the mud and, alternately, ice of New England.
Imagine, for example, the prodigies required to move sixty tons of captured cannon three hundred miles from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in the dead of winter. But Henry Knox, a 25-year-old bookseller-turned-soldier, dragged that mass of ordnance on sleds pulled by oxen and horses, and accomplished it in 56 days (it’s possible to trace his path pretty closely today). When General Howe, Gage’s replacement, looked up at the heights around Boston one late January morning and spotted a ring of cannon muzzles facing him, he threw in the towel and evacuated the city.
Which is why, even considering all the Enlightenment-inspired rhetoric that subsequently adorned the results of the meeting in the safer environs of Philadelphia, it’s Boston for me when it comes to the birth of our nation.
There were to be fireworks, of course (not a favorite of mine or Kiki’s), and there’d be crowds of latter-day patriots enjoying as much as possible a “heat dome” scheduled to break over the coast on the Fourth.
Unlike many revelers, we’d have the great advantage of being at Bea’s house on an island offshore from the pyrotechnics on Friday night and could watch them in comfort without the jostling of the crowds (again, not a favorite of mine or Kiki’s), and during the hottest part of Saturday we could, if we wished, sit on the breeze-prone “Spanish porch” reading or chatting and watching the ducks, and Bea could, as is her wont, take an extended swim at high tide in the cool sea in her front yard. It aroused in me faint feelings of unworthiness; but somehow I took them in stride.
A very fast catamaran ferry runs from a wharf near Bea’s to the Long Wharf in Boston, near the Aquarium. From that landing it’s a short walk to the Chart House, the oldest building in the waterfront, now a restaurant with outdoor tables. Why not? Kiki could go with us and scrounge around under the table while entangling her leash in the legs of my chair. The ferry features a senior discount. If we aren’t seniors, I can’t imagine who is. We took the noon boat in, and would return on the four o’clock.
It was hot! Crowded, too, but with that air of mutual suffering and fellowship that I find so attractive about Boston. So many locals were either away for the weekend or staying indoors because of the heat, that there were plenty of shaded tables in the patio of the restaurant. We ordered a bottle of cold Pellegrino (served elegantly in chianti glasses). Kiki got a bowl of water, and we dined leisurely in equal elegance.
The restaurant patio was the perfect spot for people-watching (which we both enjoy; Kiki sent to sleep between my feet). The variety of patriotic duds, T-shirts, shorts, hats, most of them probably violating the Code of Flag Ethics, seemed endless. They streamed by from the docks where the harbor tours tied up. We’d missed the annual parading of the USS Constitution. Next year, maybe.
Across the bay at four o’clock to a steamy car and then home. I took a nap by the open windows; Bea swam. Long after dark, we put the nation to bed with the “1812 Overture.” We couldn’t hear it, but when the orchestra plays it over in Boston, world-class fireworks light the sky. Good night, Bea and Kiki. And you, too, dear USA.
Willem Lange is a contractor, writer and storyteller who lives in East Montpelier, Vermont.
