The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz Page A

Naomi fought an urge to turn around and see what was so completely interesting. But then she spoke. “So what do you think. Would a kid raised in New Hampshire just automatically grow up to be Pat Buchanan or Phyllis Schlafly?”
    Naomi smiled at her. “Well, no. But you’d have your work cut out for you. I mean, I’ve been here nine years and I’ve never had a real woman friend.” Until now, she was too shy to add.
    â€œWell, the sixties did get to most places, in the end,” Judith said. “I mean, some places it didn’t turn up till the seventies, but still.”
    â€œNope.” Naomi shook her head. “They headed it off at the Connecticut River. They painted over the road signs so people kept driving till they hit Maine.” She speared a carrot out of the gravy. “It just never really happened here.”
    â€œBut how can that be true?” Joel said. “I mean, there’s no difference between New Hampshire and Vermont, is there?”
    â€œActually,” Naomi said, “there is a difference. They don’t even look alike, really, if you think about it. Vermont has rolling hills and green
valleys; you tend not to get them on this side of the river. A geologist I met once told me that, geologically, they’re quite distinct from each other. They actually belong to different plates or something, he said. The back-to-the-land types found this particular land very inhospitable for their purposes, while the land across the Connecticut River was a bit more forgiving. There were something like a hundred communes over there. You know”—she tore a piece of brown bread and spread it with apple butter—“Vermont had about a 10 percent population hike in the sixties.”
    â€œThat’s a lot of hippies,” Judith observed.
    â€œNot just hippies,” Naomi said. “The other reason was skiing.”
    â€œSkiing.” Joel laughed. “What does skiing have to do with it?”
    â€œOh, skiing was terribly important in the sixties. It was new, for one thing. I mean, it had been around for decades, but now there were big centers with lifts and snowmaking, and there were the new interstates to bring people up from Boston or New York for the weekend and still get them home in time for work on Monday. A lot of folks came and got hooked, and they looked around at what was happening in society and just decided to chuck their work and do what they liked. So you had a whole state full of college graduates running snowplows and tending bar. And after a few years, when they’d gotten it out of their systems, they dusted off the old degrees and started up businesses or began selling real estate, or they hung out their shingles, and voilà : a state full of professionals with residual political commitments. And of course, people go where there are already people doing what they want to be doing. People like to be with their own kind. They want to live among like-minded souls. Unlike me, of course,” she said with acrid self-deprecation. Then she smiled at Judith. “You said it yourself, you wished you’d moved to Putney.”
    Husband and wife exchanged a loaded look. “I would have loved to move to Putney,” Judith said.
    â€œLots of great people in Putney,” Naomi prompted. “They have a food co-op …”
    â€œYeah, yeah.” Then Judith smiled. “I knew this woman. She was a weaver in Putney. About five years ago she decided to move to Israel. She wanted to try living on a kibbutz. So she’s out in the field there, picking lemons or whatever, within shouting distance of the Lebanese border, and a guy comes up to her, says, ‘Don’t I know you? Aren’t you in the Putney co-op?’”

    Naomi grinned. “Still, I’m glad you came here. Seven more of us and we’ll have a minyan.”
    â€œThat’s supposed to be all men,” Joel said, tearing off