A Traveler’s Quandary: From Norwich to Boston

Written by Libby Chamberlin

On a misty March afternoon I boarded a southbound bus in Hanover, New Hampshire. It was dismal and rainy, piles of dirty snow hugged each curb and the cars that passed on the road were shadows of salt and soot. For the second time in 48 hours, I was going to make the two-and-a-half-hour commute between Vermont and Boston. It was the spring of my junior year at a boarding school outside Boston and I had made the commute, both by bus and by car many times. This time, I was headed back to school after a weekend at home in Norwich. From the truck, my mother watched me make my way from the glass shelter to the bus, making sure I crossed the three yards of slick concrete safely.

My family’s truck is one of the few left on the roads of my town. Priuses and luxury SUVs have slowly replaced many trucks and other working vehicles that made my hometown and surrounding area, the Upper Valley, the desirable, bucolic destination of hundreds of “blow-ins” over the last ten years. But just as the Upper Valley has grown in size, it has also lost a few like me.

My parents were both blow-ins, the trade winds of their lives had sent them sailing from Chicago and Philadelphia into the Valley a few decades ago. They had settled on the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, in Lyme, the town directly north of Hanover. Both my brother and I were born in Lyme in a house on the river. Shortly after my brother’s birth my parents moved our family to Norwich where the wave of my parent’s migration crested and broke gently upon the crumbling mortar and cellar-stones of a well-worn cape on a quiet residential street.

Despite my ever-changing hometown, I know that a trip to Dan and Whit’s, a two-minute walk from my house, takes about twenty minutes. Intending to buy milk and eggs, I know I will always see a familiar face—someone who knows my name, which stringed instrument I play and that I still don’t have my driver’s license. In return, I know the general record of their kids’ sports team, the name of their dog and I always enquire as to their summer plans. I love Norwich. I feel confined by it. Sometimes, a lot of the time, I wish I hadn’t left it.

I’m lucky to have grown up in the Upper Valley. This reflection, however, I’ve come to understand is one that comes only with distance. As I talk to former classmates at Hanover High, I hear the same words repeated over and over. “You’re so lucky you left.”

I wave briefly to the idling pickup that deposited me at the bus stop. Satisfied with my safe passage onto the bus, my mother pulls away from the curb and rounds the Dartmouth Green, heading back west. Balancing the end of my bag on my thigh while making sure my backpack isn’t in anybody’s way, I find a free seat midway down the bus. Plopping down in the plush seat I wedge my back up against the window. I rest my elbow on the windowsill. The bus is sparsely populated. A handful of college students, heading south on spring break. A French family of three, mother, father and toddler, speaking quietly, swiftly with puckered lips. Settling into my emergency exit seat I pull out a book, plug into my iPod and settle in for the ride. I had entered the hazy dream-state of travelers. Time ticks on, dusk comes, but it could just as well be with the groggy, unaware blur of an early morning. As it passes, travelers’ time is marked by thoughts and in-transit movies. It is merely book-ended by definite times that the outside world, too, observes. The digital numbers of Indiglo watches are replaced with varied breathing and scenery flashing past outside.

We stop in Lebanon to pick up more travelers and the bus barrels south. The seats and baggage racks fill up. The roads widen and become more crowded with each passing mile.

Following these roads and going away to boarding school lugs behind it still its own baggage. Despite the wealth of the Valley, few kids go to prep schools. The public school system in Hanover and Norwich is strong and I had spent my entire life in it. By the end of my eighth grade year I was set to enter into honors levels courses at Hanover High, so why would a good kid and a strong student like me leave the Upper Valley?

Snow begins to fall. It’s wet snow, greasy snow, as my mother would describe it. It dims the lights of the cars around us, blurring them with its heavy blanket. It leaves thick trails on the window and pulls my eyes from the pages of text in my lap. Fully distracted, I let my eyes wander. They search subconsciously for a familiar face on the bus. Landing on my neighbor across the aisle, I shake the feeling of familiarity. I’m probably just looking for familiarity along the great expanse of road, nondescript highway between two homes.

My choice to leave the Upper Valley in pursuit of a different education was not an easy one. While many logical factors contributed to the choice, it’s the illogical, emotional ones that carry the greatest truth and, of course, are the most difficult to express. Already at the end of my eighth grade year, my classmates and I had begun to feel the fist of the Upper Valley clench around us. Opportunities abounded outside the Valley, more even than Hanover High could have afforded me. I was ready to move on to wider horizons.

Subconsciously, I knew that with my entry into high school, a huge milestone passed, would come the natural loss of innocence. I knew too that I couldn’t face that loss here in the Valley, the little Eden of my childhood. I’d rather make this transition in Massachusetts (they’re all tourists anyway so who cares, I reasoned). So in an act of what I now call preservation, I left. Over the years, the roads and hills of the Upper Valley, once as familiar to me as the lines and whorls on my palm, have been replaced by the streets and buildings of Boston.

While Boston has become familiar to me it is by no means the warmth I know in Norwich. There is no Dan and Whit’s and drivers definitely don’t stop for errant pedestrians. While I have benefited from all that my school and the city itself have offered me, I often wonder what it would have been like to stay in Norwich.

I turn back to my iPod and book, drawing my eyes from my neighbor across the aisle. A movie begins to play on each of the busses flickering screens. It’s a recent release and I pay mild attention, having already seen it a few months earlier. I doze. Near the Bow exit on route 93, I pull myself out of the half-hearted sleep into which I had fallen. The snow has turned to sleet falling steadily outside. The bus speeds onwards, southwards, into the night. The snow of my departure has transformed, finally, into rain. The roads are unfamiliar and slippery.

We enter Boston, hurdling past the Fleet Center, curving around the north side of Boston toward South Station. The sky is black outside my window and rain falls heavily on the city. The final minutes of our trip tick past, blurred by hard, wet bullets.

The bus rounds the final bend, twisting through the streets of Chinatown and into South Station, bay 17. The other passengers fumble with bags and groggily lift their wrists to their faces, becoming once again cognizant of time.

I sigh and pick up my bag. I squeeze my way down the aisle and off the bus, thanking the driver. I needle my way through South Station, familiar but unfriendly. Pulling my rain jacket hood over my head, I make the mad dash through the street dark street, blurred with rain, to the underground web of the Boston subway system and back to school.