| New England
by Cathy Guiles
Staff Writer
FILE PHOTO
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“Weirdest trip ever!”
That was the refrain of the New England Saints midway through our interim, as almost half of us came down with a mysterious illness. No one knew if the vomiting and nausea were caused by food poisoning, the -hour-flu” or a bizarre virus stalking the Eastern seaboard.
But the sickness had an unexpected effect on our group: it forced us to bond together and support each other, whether by offering cans of ginger ale or allowing sick people’s roommates to sleep on the floor in our rooms at the beautiful North Bridge Inn in Concord, Mass.
And thankfully, we had a lot of healthy moments together as well. Led by English Professors Gary Schmidt and Jerry Fondse, our group of 25 students first went to the Norlands Living History Museum in Maine, a working farm with no indoor plumbing or electricity. Taking on the names and identities of two 19th-century families, we performed chores indoors (making apple pies with lard, trying to cook bacon for 30 people on a wood stove) and outdoors (shoveling manure, milking a cow). But our time at the farm wasn’t all work and no play: we also enjoyed storytelling and a barn dance.
After two days getting acquainted with the rural life, we settled in Concord, home of the Transcendentalist movement. Concord is also the site of the battle of the North Bridge, where “the shot heard 'round the world” was fired, setting off the American Revolution. We visited Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau built his famous cabin; the Orchard House, home to Louisa May Alcott and her family, which inspired “Little Women,” and the Old Manse, home at different times to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
We also took several day trips, one to Plymouth, where we saw Plimoth Plantation and met several Pilgrims, and another to the birthplace of the Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier in Haverhill. In Salem, we learned about the 17th-century witch trials and toured the house that inspired Hawthorne’s “The House of the Seven Gables.”
In Lexington, we visited Buckman Tavern, where the minutemen gathered to face the British on April 19, 1775, and retraced their march to Concord. In Amherst, we toured Emily Dickinson’s home, while in Sudbury, we visited the Wayside Inn that inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to write, “Listen my children, and you shall hear/ Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”
Throughout our stay, we wrestled with the ideas presented in the various authors’ works and had our common perceptions of American history challenged. We debated whether the Revolutionary War was justified (still no consensus there) and learned that the Salem witch trials weren’t all that unusual for their time period.
So despite the bout with illness, during this interim, history, literature, nature, faith and people came together in a remarkable way, leading many of us to consider it the “best trip ever!”
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