A Pilgrim’s Digression

To wrap up my account of our tour of Concord yesterday, we had lunch at an ancient inn called the Colonial, where Concordians once stockpiled the weapons that the British regulars were marching to seize that fateful day in April 1775.

There, I ate perhaps the best yankee pot roast I have ever had in my life. It was truly a memorable meal, the gravy thick and rich, so that I imagined it simmering in a wrought iron skillet that dated back to the origins of the inn in the eighteenth century.

Afterwards, we walked out the Lexington road to the Orchard House, home to the Alcotts. Nearby stood the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson as well, the Wayside, which we did not tour. What one quickly realizes, upon visiting these historic towns, is that nearly every home and every plot of land holds some sort of historic connotation. One could spend days visiting sites throughout the town and environs and never view all the history on display.

Instead, we visited the Alcott house, a good choice I believe. The Concord museum has a replica of Emerson’s study on display; the Orchard house has Louisa May Alcott’s room, and much of her family home, intact and authentic as it was when she and her father and siblings lived there. As the tour guide said, over 80% of the artifacts in the house are original to the house and family.

When you climb the stairs to Louisa’s room, you see her desk, built into the wall, where she wrote Little Women. Upon the lintel above the fireplace is an owl painted by her sister May (the model for Amy in Little Women). In May’s small room, one can still see where she drew upon the walls and window frames with her pencils. So much about the house simply feels real, as if the Alcotts stepped out for a few moments and are bound to return any moment. Nothing is under glass or roped off.

Walking across the uneven floors, hearing the guide describe how the Alcott girls would perform in plays for their parents and guests in the parlor (Louisa always played the male roles), one can easily imagine their presence still habiting this close, familial space.

So much history is disappointingly remote; the history of family life, via a particular family, can be surprisingly real and vibrant, when properly represented.

The contrast between the real–the Alcott family life–and the vague and dryly musty was made apparent today, when we ventured into Boston for the first time.

We drove to a T station and took the subway into the city, but before we got to the station we sat in traffic as bad as Washington, D.C., traffic for probably an hour. The word “stress” probably accurately summarizes the day, after that initial stressful beginning.

Not that our trip to Boston was a bad experience, but it definitely left us exhausted and undesirous of returning to the city anytime soon. Our goal was to take a trolley tour to catch all the important sites, and then to walk to those sites along the Freedom Trail that we felt were especially necessary to see.

After sitting through the city tour once, I chose to tour the U.S.S. Constitution, anchored in the Charles River, and Lynn’s mom chose to tour Paul Revere’s house. Lynn wanted to ride the swan boats in the Boston Public Gardens. It turned out that we were only able to tour the Paul Revere house.

For one thing, the trolley tour took far too long. And although we were able to continue using the trolleys the rest of the day as public transportation, because the trolley conductors were given a tour along a pre-ordained route, if you wanted to stop somewhere near the end of the tour you had to sit on the trolley all the way through the tour. This consumed an inordinate amount of time during the day, as you can imagine.

In retrospect, I think that the trolley tour was good for getting an overview of everything there is to see in the city, but afterwards we should have gone our own way, using the metro to get from point to point, or simply walking.

Unfortunately, walking was not much of an option, because Lynn’s mother exhausts quickly. So, as I said, we toured the Paul Rever house which, as I foreshadowed earlier, was a disappointment compared to the Alcott house. So little of the Revere house was original, and the house itself had gone through so many transformations–from home, to cigar store, to boarding house, to restored “museum”–that it was hard to feel that anyone had ever lived in it and made it a home. There were no scribbled drawings on the window sills, certainly.

Afterwards, we caught the trolley to the shipyard to see the Constitution, the one stop on the tour I was really looking forward to. For one thing, it was FREE, perhaps the only site in all of Massachussetts that was truly without any kind of charge, hidden or overt. It is owned and operated by the U.S. Navy, being the oldest warship still in commission, and as in Washington any site owned by the governement is free and open to the public.

Once we arrived, though, the heat proved too much for Lynn’s mom. The breeze that had been blowing from the ocean all day had dropped, and the sun had become baking. After waiting with me for the guided tour, she finally decided she didn’t want to see it that bad and so she and Lynn said they would wait for me in the ship museum.

The tour started after a bit, and we were just descending below decks to hear about the ordinary lives of sailors aboard a warship–they only slept on average four hours a night, for example, and their daily rations were higher in sodium than a weeks worth of food for a modern person–when my cell phone rang.

It was Lynn’s mother. She was ready to go. The last trolley was at 5:00 and it was now 3:30, and if we were going to ride the swan boats, we had to get going, now. I had protested several times that we did not have to hold ourselves to the trolley schedule; I could find our way around just fine via the metro. But we had paid nearly a hundred bucks for the three of us to take that trolley tour, and Lynn’s mom did not want to do anymore walking anyway (her hips were hurting, and she was getting hot, tired, and quite cranky).

So like it or not, our day had to end because the trolley tour ended at 5:00. Needless to say, by the time we caught the trolley and rode to the Public Gardens, it was 4:30, and there was not enough time to ride the boats and catch the last trolley at 5:00.

“But there’s a metro station right there!” I said. “We don’t need to ride the damned trolley!” But I was overruled, and so we skipped the swan boats and rode the trolley back to the first stop, and from there walked to a metro station which we took out of town.

It was an exhausting, somewhat frustrating day. The city was congested, tourist-filled, and expensive. I don’t feel like I really got to experience the city, or its sites, in anything like comfort. Salespeople were nasty to us. One of the trolley conductors under his breath called us “assholes” because, rather than getting in the trolley he wanted us to ride, we wanted to wait for a trolley that was not as crammed with tourists, so we could all three sit together.

And just try to find a public bathroom in Boston. Lynn went into a Starbucks, a Dunkin Donuts’, and a Quiznos looking for a bathroom, even willing to buy something in order to take a pee. No bathrooms in any of these places. She ended up holding it until we got home. Earlier in the day, the only place I had found to go to the bathroom was a high-priced Marriot near the Quincy Market.

Yes, I am through with Boston for awhile. The U.S.S. Constitution is worth seeing, but I can’t say that I really found the paid historic sites worthy of such an important city. The only other thing worth seeing in Boston are the old graveyards where so many important figures from American history are buried.

Other than that, I would recommend people wanting to discover the origins of the American nation to visit Lexington and Concord and devote the majority of their vacation to those two towns and maybe some of the other towns nearby, such as Salem.

If you must see Boston, give it a day and no more, as we did. You won’t be missing much.