The six New England states of MASSACHUSETTS, RHODE ISLAND,
CONNECTICUT, NEW HAMPSHIRE, VERMONT and MAINE like to
view themselves as the repository of all that is intrinsically
American. In this version of history, the tangled streets of old
Boston, the farms of Connecticut and the village greens of Vermont
are the cradle of the nation. Certainly, nostalgia is at the root
of the region's tourist trade; while the real business of making a
living happens in cities for the most part well off the tourist
trail, innumerable small towns have been dolled up to recapture a
past that is at best wishful, and at times purely fictional.
Picturesque they may be, with white-spired churches beside
immaculate rolling greens, but they're not always authentic:
there's little to distinguish a clapboard house built last year
from another, two hundred years old, which has just had its annual
coat of white paint.
The genteel seaside towns of modern Cape Cod and Rhode Island
are a far cry from the first European settlements in New England.
While the Pilgrims congregated in neat and pristine communities,
later arrivals, with so much land to choose from, felt no need to
reconstruct the compact little villages they had left behind in
Europe. Instead, they fanned out across the Native American fields,
or straggled their farmhouses in endless strips along the newly
built roadways (thus establishing a more genuinely American style
of development). As the European foothold on the continent became
more certain, the coastline came increasingly to be viewed as prime
real estate, to be lined with grand patrician homes - from the
Vanderbilt mansions of Newport to the presidential compounds of the
Bush and Kennedy families.
The Ivy League colleges - Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, et al
- still embody New England's strong sense of its own superiority,
though in fact the region's traditional role as home to the WASP
elite is due more to the vagaries of history and ideology than to
economic or cultural realities. Its thin soil and harsh climate
made it difficult for the first pioneers to sustain an agricultural
way of life, while the industrial prosperity of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries is now for the most part a distant
memory. Despite recent diversification, and the development of some
high-tech industries, New England has pokets, mostly in rural
Vermont and New Hampshire, that are as poor as any in the US
economic base.
New England can be a rather pricey place to visit, especially
in late September and October, when visitors flock to see the
magnificent fall foliage . Its tourist facilities are aimed
at weekenders from the big cities as much as outsiders; places like
Cape Cod make convenient short breaks for locals, but
they're not the bucolic retreats you might expect.
Connecticut and Rhode Island in particular clearly
form part of the great east coast megalopolis, which stretches from
Washington to Boston - you rarely escape the feeling that you're
traveling through some vast suburb of New York. Boston
itself, however, is a vibrant and stimulating city, while further
up the coast the towns finally thin out and the scenery gets
appealing (as does the seafood ). Inland, too, the lakes and
mountains of New Hampshire , and particularly Maine ,
offer rural wildernesses to rival any in the nation. Vermont
is slightly less diverse, but its country roads offer pleasant
wandering through tiny villages and serene forests.