A Walk Up Squam Hill to Haskins

Because of the press of affairs, the wife and I and our foul-faced but good-natured boxer Mollie had to effect our Sunday stroll in two stanzas. A short drive from our School Street manse through the center of town took us to Squam Hill, to park

As we passed the property of Mrs. Joseph E. Critchett on Granite Street, we recalled her attractive garden of every summer that with a backward Spring had not blossomed. There were indications, however.

Mollie was already on digging bent, upturning the turf as if she were a backhoe trying to cheat a contractor out of a job. Pigeons rescued her attention as she made one fruitless lunge, only to see them soar skyward as she huffed and puffed as a four-year-old should. We enjoyed the sight of the ancestral home of the late Louis Rogers on Granite Street with its brand new blinds painted greenish blue and its roof and chimney top brightened in repair. Beyond was a spacious view of the ocean in all its deep blue and quiet without the sight of a sail or of a vessel of steam marring its tranquility. Peace of Spring had finally come to Sandy Bay.

For the first time in 1961, the wife and I heard the joyous song of peepers coming as usual from nowhere. These were sounds that thrilled our youngsters from baby days as we rode them across Nugent's Stretch in the Springtime. Even as they neared maturity at this time of year they reached hungrily for this sound of life reborn. It is another of freedom's calls.

Hiking up Squam Hill we were greeted by a puffed up robin red-breast, trees in bloom and a sweep of rocks and trees blended in a ghastly gray softened by darkish lichen clinging to the boulders. Thence up a steep and slippery hill to pause for a moment at a gurgling brook that winds in and out around the rocks and sings to you, come and cool your bare feet. All around it are lilies of the valley coming to life after a winter's hibernation.

The same blitheness ran through the scene as did that of the morning memory of our good young friend Teddy Cooper Sunday as he proudly displayed his brand new Sprite at the Sandy Bay Yacht Club wharf. Fibreglass, he said, it was made of. We should doubt him?

From here into a road full of potholes to twist a sensitive ankle which ours wasn't, then up an un-named path lacking of houses. We had reached Walter Tuck's domain, where he had reformed a once Socialist meeting hall into a candy emporium. In the clearing he trimmed out underbrush and left majestic pines.

Rough hewn stone walls dating back to our sires who founded the land greeted us. The wife and I can never get enough of this historic grandeur of Cape Ann and our four-footer can never get too much of bounding over them to nuzzle into the bracken searching out the strange smells of the past and the present. Above us are apt to be reminders of the current age, jets stamping out the puffy white trails of their modernism miles in the yonder.

As we climbed that slippery hill into Haskins Land, we had brought to mind similar walks with our two young'uns of another day when they raced ahead of us. We knew they would have been the first to reach newly painted settees at the top of the hill, restless for a real breath of summer to get them to Dock Square, to Old Garden Beach and other comfy places.

We finally came to Haskins Land at the top of the hill that oversees the whole of Sandy Bay and our town, a town from which the wife and I and Mollie never want to part.

J.P.C., Jr.