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March 17, 1998
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No green beer and leprechauns and shamrocks for me. Nosirree. Just another day. I went to Salisbury Beach for a walk. It was colder and windier than I expected and my nose wouldn't stop running. Why exactly does your nose run when a cold wind blows in your face? I walked for awhile and watched a huge raft of eiders besporting themselves near the breakwater. I pointed out the eiders to a grandmother/mother/son family group who were visiting Salisbury for the first time. For some reason they had decided it was too cold or too far to go to Ogunquit, so they went to Salisbury. Except for the fact that Ogunquit is a quaint, arty, classic Maine seacoast town and Salisbury Beach is a honkytonk closed for the winter, it's just as good. Their noses were all running copiously too. They'd never seen eiders before either. For some reason, instead of going home when I got frozen solid and tired of wiping my nose, I drove to Exeter . Exeter is a small New Hampshire town about 8 miles from Salisbury and home to the other Phillips Academy (that is, not Andover), and another one of those places settled by religious nonconformists banished from Massachusetts. According to the WPA guide to New Hampshire:
A couple of historical markers commemorate this fact but don't seem to agree on the spelling of capital. One says "capital" and one says "capitol". Websters New Collegiate Dictionary gives us:
I guess the historic markers meant "capital", unless the town of Exeter was also a building. So, in this town or building, I browsed heavily at Water Street Books and finally bought Jill Lepore's The Name of War, which I carried over to the Coffee Mill and started reading despite my pile of unread books at home. I like it already. She devotes pages and pages in the beginning to whether the sachem in question was called Philip or Metacom and which of these was his name. Ya gotta love it. However, she's 20 pages into it before she mentions, almost in passing, that Philip/Metacom was Massasoit's son. That's the thing that got me so interested in King Philip's War. I must have slept through that part in history class or not realized what it meant, but in reading about Rhode Island history I kept coming across it. So, in the space of a generation the native people and the settlers went from friends to deadly enemies. Anyway, I sat for a long time at the Coffee Mill sipping my tea and reading The Name of War. Altogether a strange way to spend St. Patrick's Day. | |
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