Homesick Yankee Ramblings Part 6 - Wright's Farm

 
Wright's Farm is a family-style chicken restaurant in Harrisville, RI. It's owned an operated by the Galleshaw Family. It's located near the border of central Massachusetts. Going to Wright's Farm is a local Blackstone Valley tradition. Here's how it works:

1. You drive to Wright's Farm. This involves some stress, because unless you're with 10 people, you can't make a reservation. You discuss how long the wait will be on your ride.
2. Arrive at Wright's Farm. Despair upon viewing that the front parking lot and most of the back lot are full.
3. Go inside anyways and wait in a long line to get a number. It takes two teenage girls to give you this number, one to talk to you and one to scrawl feverishly in a planner. They hand you a wooden coin with a number on it and tell you how long the wait will be. Despair again.
4. Find out your wait is 2+ hours. Now it's time to drink at the bar and buy Rhode Island lottery scratch tickets. Many people also go outside to smoke butts, though this is not recommended as A. smoking is gross and B. you might miss hearing your name called. Miracles happen a Wright's Farm, so you might get called early.
4. Size up the other people waiting for tables. Listen to other people have their numbers called over a loudspeaker. Get hungrier. (I should note here that pre-starving yourself to consume as much food as possible is part of the Wright's Farm ritual, but it makes waiting worse).
5. Lose on all the scratch tickets. Lose at Keno. Get hungrier. You will feel your soul begin to slip from your body as hunger becomes unbearable.
6. They call your number. Rush to the counter. Follow a teenager into a banquet hall and be seated. Wait for your waitress. This waitress will be a gruff, middle-aged Swamp Yankee who will ultimately be dissatisfied with her tip. However, she is still awesome and you wouldn't want a nice waitress.
7. You do not have options at Wright's Farm. They bring the following items, family-style, to your table - oddly gray, but tasty, chicken, mushy shells and sauce, hard rolls with frozen butter, the hard bits of iceberg lettuce covered in the tastiest salad dressing, over-fried french fries. If you order a Coke, your glass will be small and you will need many. That's because the rest of the food costs a flat rate per person, but drinks all cost something. Stick with water.
8. Eat until you get sick. Then eat part of your ice cream dessert.

As you can see, eating at Wright's Farm is a ritual. As vegans in the Southwest, Wright's Farm seems very far away indeed, but my in-laws are thoughtful enough to keep we prodigal Yankees stocked with southern New England essentials. For our anniversary, they sent a six pack of individually wrapped Narragansett beers. I saved the box. Then, the other day, we got some Red Rose tea, Autocrat coffee milk syrup, and Wright's Farm Salad dressing!

Red Rose tea is the brand that comes with the Noah's Ark figurines. It's just regular black tea, but it's better than Lipton. Their website says it's available out west, but I haven't seen it and believe me, I looked.

Even some New Englanders look at me a bit sideways when I talk about Autocrat coffee milk, but I love the stuff. Other kids called me Autocrat in middle school because it was all I drank.

In honor of these New England items in our kitchen, we prepared faux-Wright's Farm for dinner last night. Everything came out very similarly to Wright's Farm - soggy salad, over-fried fries - absolutely delicious. Except the tofu, which was still delicious, but quite inauthentic.

Homesick Yankee Ramblings Part 5 - Cape Cod

I just checked Dr. Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York out of the library and it's got me plenty homesick. Dwight was a Congregationalist minister and the president of Yale from 1795-1817. He was also the grandson of the famous Northampton minister, Jonathan Edwards of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God fame. Travels, which spans four volumes, reads like a journal. Dwight stitches together detailed notes of many, many towns, villages, cities, natural sites, and various short biographies of notable people. The book was published in 1822, a few years after Dwight's death in 1817. Needless to say, I'll be posting some more quotes from Dr. Dwight here in the near future.

From Travels in New England and New York, Vol. III, Letter X:
"It has been a frequent opinion that this beach, and not improbably the whole township of Provincetown, will one day, and that at no distant period of time, be swept away by the ocean. I was not able to obtain satisfactory information concerning this subject, particularly as judicious persons differed entirely both as to facts and probabilities. Some averred that the beach has been greatly diminished within a moderate period. Others, particularly one, a discreet man, insisted that what it lost on one side it regularly gained on the other. It is now more than one hundred yards wide, and appears to the eye of a stranger as if every vestige of it might be easily swept away within two or three years."

"This remarkable object is an enormous mass of sand, such as has been already described, fine, light, of a yellowish hue, and the sport of every wind. It is blown into plains, valleys, and hills. The hills are of every height from ten to two hundred feet. Frequently they are naked, round, and extremely elegant; and often rough, pointed, wild and fantastical, with all the varied forms which are seen at times in drifts of snow."



Luckily for us, Dwight's fear that Provincetown would be washed away was never realized. Sitting out here in the desert, I'm sure the Cape's as beautiful now as it was when the Nauset lived there, or in 1620 when the Puritans arrived, or in 1800 when Timothy Dwight stood speculating on the beach, or when Thoreau called it a "wild, rank place", or when Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, and Jackson Pollack hung out there, or when Scott and Connie loved the water, boats, and stores in 1967, or when Erin and I and her family had a fire on the beach in 2007.

Homesick Yankee Ramblings Part 4 - Antiques and Country Stores

From reverse: "Black Lantern Antiques and Country Store Museum - Mohawk Trail - Charlemont, Mass 01339. Early Country Store Items. A nostalgic trip to the past. Old time favorites for all. Nina Noga, Curator"

Ok, I know that there are antique stores in Arizona, but for the most part, they sell things you get at flea markets in Massachusetts. The Arizonan version of the flea market, the swap meet, sells mostly fake Ed Hardy crap and lame cell phone covers. Therefore, I miss New England antique shops and country stores. To make matters worse, my brother visits them frequently and posts pictures of all the great stuff he finds on Flickr.

Country stores in the Northeast always smell like scented candles. They sell cool things like breadmaking kits in Ball jars, sticks of honey, and different kinds of fudge. I'm also a sucker for magnets, though country-theme cow flags aren't really my thing.

As for antique stores, every one is a museum filled with great stuff you can take home. New England antique stores have a lot of artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth century with the occasional older find thrown in. I tend to want to buy animal themed stuff or naturalist artifacts, though Erin uses her veto power to prevent taxidermy purchases. It's really fascinating to see what things have the power to move from consumer items to artifacts and how the objects shift roles when they move from the retail store to the antique shop. To become an "Antique" is probably like Heaven in object afterlife, while becoming "garbage" is Hell. After a hard life as a work object, the antique is retired, placed in a safe location and meticulously maintained. If objects commit mortal sins, like breaking or becoming obsolete too quickly, they're discarded, crushed, recycled, buried.

As I look around my house and wonder at how some of the old things I have made the transition, I also look at many of my new things and wonder what the future holds for them. The silver lining of this way of thinking is that it make me want to take care of my stuff; the toxic lining is that it predisposes me to being a hoarder.

Homesick Yankee Ramblings Part 3 - The Mohawk Trail

With all the rain and wildflowers out here in the desert, I got to thinking about taking the truck down the Apache Trail to see what's happening. From there my mind wandered back east, homeward, to Massachusetts and the Mohawk trail. There are innumerable scenic routes throughout the country named after Native Americans; the Apache Trail just east of Phoenix and then there's the Navajo Trail in the Four Corners area. The Mohawk Trail is a former Native American trade route in western Massachusetts that has become a famous scenic drive from Orange to Williamstown. One of the many notable features of the ride is this hairpin turn, but it follows a serpentine path for 65 miles.

This postcard, sent in 1929, is one of my most challenging paleographic experiments. I think it reads:
"Sun and fine snow up here. I like N. Adams very much. I went to K.P. Thursday night also long Sunday. Received fine reception. We are having a lot of cloudy weather weather (sic) I am right side of Mt. Greylock. Wish you all Happy New Year. H.P."
Sent to: Mr. & Mrs. Fred Gardner
            Court St.
            Whitman, Mass

Here's a great slide show with more photographs of more old Mohawk Trail Postcards and a rad book from 1875 entitled The Mohawk Trail; It's History and Course.

I'll get back that way sometime I suppose. I remember driving my red clunker Volvo on the Mohawk Trail, trying to coax it up the hills and the breaks screeching as I went down and the smell of the brakes burning. We moved out here and had a parallel experience as the truck's brakes smoldered down the Apache Trail - perhaps I'm the wrong person to advise driving these routes, but I maintain that you should get your brakes checked and go for one of these rides.

Homesick Yankee Rambling Part 2 - Worcester State Hospital

The remains of Worcester State Hospital's administration building sits and watches the hustle and bustle of Route 9 and the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Built on the Kirkbride Model in 1877, it stood for over a hundred years before succumbing to a massive fire in 1991.

It's an iconic building in the area. I was really excited to find this postcard from 1904 that shows it with both wings intact. Kirkbride hospitals (named for their pioneer, Thomas Story Kirkbride) incorporate architectural design into a theory of psychiatric convalescence. Basically, the various wards were staggered in wings that moved diagonally back and away from a central administration building. The idea was that this design would allow the patients to see out the windows and have pleasant views and breezes. As their health improved, they would move toward the central administration building. The women's wings were often much longer than the men's wings, as it was mistakenly thought that women more often suffered from mental ailments. It was probably really just extreme boredom and depression from a society that left them horribly under-stimulated.

When we lived in Worcester, Erin and I visited the ruins of the hospital fairly often. It's a really impressive place. There were once many Kirkbride hospital in the Northeast and Midwest, but most have been destroyed. Some have been repurposed, which is great. About five years ago we took a road trip around the northeast and visited Kirkbride hospitals in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, and, of course, Massachusetts. I'll post those pictures sometime when I'm homesick again, but for today, here are some more shots of Worcester State Hospital. To see inside, visit Opacity.

Homesick Yankee Ramblings

A quick scan of this blog reveals that I love Arizona, but I'm from Massachusetts. Many of the photographs and items around our house came out west with us. Every so often I get to looking at one of these things and I get a strong urge to go to where the photograph was taken. Such is the case with these chickadee photos.

There's a spot near the Quabbin Reservoir in the western part of central Massachusetts where birds will eat out of your hand during winter months. I don't want to reveal the exact location, but I will say that it's in an abandoned orchard a short ways into the woods. People have hung bird feeders around and keep them stocked with seed. If you bring some seed, just place it in your hand and wait a moment. Pretty soon a chickadee or titmouse or nuthatch will come along, perch on your fingers, select a good looking seed, and fly off.

I'm not entirely sure that I think its a good idea to encourage wild animals to lose their natural wariness of people. In the same orchard, deer wander about at a distance. They won't come too close, but they don't run away even when you get pretty close. Still, I want to visit this spot so badly and I wish it wasn't over two-thousand miles away.

We shot this on 35mm and developed it in closet I had converted into a darkroom. I used an antique Durst enlarger. It was a lot of fun. Can't help but missing my darkroom and my Worcester apartment.

I noticed that when I Geotagged this photo on Flickr it says this was "Taken in Enfield, Massachusetts." Enfield is no longer a populated town; it was flooded in the 1940's in the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir. This picture was taken in a town that no longer exists. From this distance, its non-existence feels so true.