Salaam Salem
We set off without breakfast this morning, initially planning to stop when we saw something, but out appetites were sated by a tube of Fritos Hoops we had lying around in the car, so that came to nothing.
We stopped at a convenient Wal-Mart to buy a cheap suitcase to take our accumulated stuff home in. I blame Canada's weak currency, and the bulkiness of denim, in part. We found some of those vacuum bags for packing clothes up in the minimum space, and will be trying them out before the evening is through.
We decided to take the direct route to Boston: down Interstate 95. This took us through a series of tolls, the price of which we didn't object to, but the queue for one of which was ridiculous. I think that because of this queue we'd have been quicker going on US-1 all the way.
Our plan was to stop at the Tourist Information centre we knew would be on the Massachusetts border, then to plan the rest of our day from there. We ignored a sign for a TIC because we were in New Hampshire. Immediately after the turn-off, but before the TIC building itself, was the sign for the Massachusett state line. With no practical way to turn back, we decided to look out for another information centre.
We turned off I-95 because we saw a sign for a Welcome Centre. This tuned out to be a tiny and useless thing, devoted to some nowhere place we weren't interested in, but the detour brought us onto Highway 1A, which I noticed would take us directly to Salem, Massachusett -- famous for the witch trials, and somewhere Debbie had been keen to take a look at, so we got on the road, and found it to be a lot more pleasant than I-95.
Arriving in Salem, we found that (unsurprisingly) it had taken full advantage of its notoriety and is packed with Witch museums, Witch souvenir shops and the like. It was 5:30 and most things seemed to close at seven, so we decided to stay the night. We went to the tourist information office and asked about motels and hotels in the area. Americans are very literal about accommodation classes. We were told in no uncertain terms that there were no motels or hotels in Salem and that we'd have to drive out of town. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said there were plenty of B&Bs, and let us use the phone to book one. We went along and got our room, in an archetypal New England clapboard house.
We didn't take the time to settle in the B&B before dashing off to see the Witch Museum. This took the form of a multimedia presentation, based around an audio commentary as various parts of a series of waxwork tableaux were lit up. An additional display discussed the perception of witches through the ages -- from the Earth Mother, through the green cackling crone in the Wizard of Oz to the drippy deluded goths of today. I liked wall devoted to a table explaining various witch hunts through the ages:
| Fear |
+ |
Trigger |
= |
Scapegoat |
| God/Devil |
|
Hysterical girls |
|
Alleged witches |
| Communism |
|
McCarthy |
|
US Socialists |
| Infection |
|
AIDS |
|
Homosexuals |
| Japan |
|
Pearl Harbor |
|
Japanese Americans |
A young man in front of us muttered to his girlfriend "terrorism plus 9/11 equals, um" then repeated himself with variations a few times trying to get it to fit.
We wandered around town for a while killing time, waiting for 8:00 when we knew a walking tour was going to start. Some of that time we passed in a bookshop which was franky terrifying -- not because of the content of the books (as one might expect in Salem) but because of the way they were stacked -- haphazardly in stacks eight feet high, some shelves overhanging alarmingly. I saw several intriguing spines which I simply didn't dare try and dislodge from their files for fear of triggering an avalanche. Everyone in the shop spoke in whispers, afraid of the slightest vibration, except for the proprietor.
The walking tour began, and we were led from place to place and told ghost stories. Few of the stories had satisfying endings (perhaps because they were true?) and most of them involved frankly unbelievable phenomena (perhaps because they weren't true?). The best story of all wasn't a ghost story at all. In the centre of the town is a statue of the town's founder. There are three holes in the statue at around his knee level. He wears the clothes of the time: a stovepipe hat and a cape, and the sculptor gave him a menacing and powerful air in line with the town's reputation. Apparently the statue was misrepresented in a TV documentary in the late 90s, and described as a statue of a warlock. A fundamentalist nutcase decided he objected to statues of warlocks, and so Salem experienced its first and only drive-by shooting -- explaining the holes in the statue.
The tour seemed quite mundane at the time, and yet... only Debbie and I attended, but when I got back to the B&B and looked at my pictures, every one of them contains images of humanoid figures, as if restless spirits were coming on the walking tours even after death...
The Boston area suffers from its Puritan past: at 9:30 most of the restaurants we found were shut. We ended up following the advice of an arbitary man in the street who offered to help when he saw us peering at a map. He sent us to a little pub called the Witches Brew. We found it. It had only three tables and the bar was lined with chattering locals. The food was plentiful and delicious, just as our benefactor had promised. We went back the same way to thank him, but he had gone. As we peered around, another passer by asked us what we were looking for. We decribed him. The man replied "why, that sounds like Jed. He always liked to hang around on this corner helping out tourists... but Jed's been dead for twenty years".
Back in the B&B, I'm typing this while Debbie condenses our belongings into our suitcases. It all seems to fit well enough. Tomorrow we may have time to do a little more sightseeing before going to the airport.