April 21st, 2006, 9:48 pm

Backwards on the Downeaster

Early morning sunlight filtered through the trees casts shadows on my lap, my book, making it difficult to read. My hand rests on the bulge of my belly, another clasps a soda, as I read Michael Pollan’s well-researched book that describes how, exactly, I’ve come to consume so many calories of corn processed into high fructose corn syrup. The connection between one hand and the other becomes too obvious, so I put up the book and the soda to take out the Powerbook.

Plugged into the Downeaster train, we ride, backwards, from the small towns in New Hampshire back into the bowels of Boston, soon to disappear into more trains and wait for the planes that will take me farther South, back to my temporary home in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia.

How to describe New Hampshire?

The furthest north I’ve ever been ? - though technically, that honor goes to Portland, Maine, where we travelled to see Wilco.

The smallest town I’ve ever spent time in ? - surely, there is competition for this title in the pitstops along I-10 in West Texas.

The purest town I’ve ever seen? - hardly, for the Swiss Alps house Gimmelwald, with an improbably wholesome hostel and sparkling spring water.

In flip-flops and turquoise, it was hard not to feel as the stranger in a strange land, among the tiny, picture-esque houses and quaint coffeeshops. I’ve nothing to compare it to except for movies; no frame of reference to describe a town that’s truly walkable, a place where late April is just bringing spring, and daffodils are just beginning their upwards ascent.

Once upon a time, I talked to a newspaper editor in a small town in Vermont about coming to work for him. It was a straight path with a foreseeable future: small paper in a small town, then a medium paper in a medium town, with the promise of the biggest paper in the biggest town, as the lure to endure the years of disquietude.

Seeing, finally, a glimpse of the Northeast, I imagined what that life would have been like, if I had chosen to live it. It’s not for me, I don’t think - the cold would have frozen my ambition.

Equally true: the heat has mellowed it. Corporate comfort has rendered the writer mute, just as effectively as the punk rock boys and $4 PBR pitchers.

The scenery now is greener - further south, there is grass. We are almost to Woburn, Massachusetts. I see a tiny church steeple, then a river shimmering with early morning sun, a jeep along a road, a processing plant or factory or a salt mine or just plainly, more trees.

I think now of my hero, M.F.K. Fisher, and her writings on traveling. Early in the 20th century, her trips were filled with foreign waiters on impossibly dirty steamers, who served her countless delicacies - like fresh cheeses and homegrown liquers - of which she tastefully consumed more than even the most imaginative waiter would have assumed possible for a young American lady.

Flip flops, Powerbook and Barq’s seem to provide less inspiration for me, the writer that was. But to my left, there is a little girl, with dark hair like mine, watching me type. Perhaps to her I seem a writer - perhaps to her it seems glamourous - dirty jeans, dirty feet, and the hope to someday do something more.

Another journalist friend of mine lives up in the hinterlands - Maine, specifically. She’s younger than me, but much more certain - she has a house and an almost-husband. She’s happy with the small paper, happy with her salt box house, happy to wear sweaters and drink joe in defense of the snow.

Is there a gene that makes people certain? Makes them happy, makes them sure? Seeing Woburn, remembering New Hampshire, imagining Vermont - I can’t imagine saying it - “Yes, this - this thing I have found is the thing for me. I have it, and now I am happy, and there is nothing more for me to decide.”