Episode 63 | Cape Cod to Portsmouth, New Hampshire
A note before we get into this one. I’m recording some of this from a booth I’ve put together at home, doing voiceovers to tie the road footage together, which is either an improvement in production quality or just a different way of rambling. The jury is still out. The cat disapproves of the whole setup, but she’s not the director.
Getting Off the Cape
Getting off Cape Cod is straightforward until you try to hug the coast instead of taking the highway, at which point the GPS decides it has a grudge and starts issuing directions that seem designed to route you directly through Logan Airport.
I didn’t want to go to Boston. I made that clear to no one in particular. I eventually found Route 1A north, which runs up through a stretch of small Massachusetts coastal towns that rewarded the frustration. Good Harbor Beach appeared through the windshield like a consolation prize. Rockport, which I’d visited back in 2010 and have photographs of, appeared briefly and then disappeared because I failed to stop. I turned into Pigeon Cove instead, because it was there and I could.
Somewhere around Sandwich — the oldest town on Cape Cod, in case you were wondering about the name — I saw men on Cranberry Highway pushing what looked like manual lawnmowers through a bog. I’m fairly confident they were harvesting cranberries. I did not stop. I did not turn around. I am still thinking about it.
North Carolina
I arrived in Portsmouth and sat in the hotel room for a while scrolling through what was coming out of western North Carolina. Hurricane Helene had made it inland and done something nobody expected. Chimney Rock, essentially gone. The river through the village that I’d stayed along on a previous trip — just wreckage. Asheville, Hendersonville, the whole mountain region, cut off from water and food and roads.
I’d been planning to spend time in that area when I got home. Looking at property, actually. Boone, Cashiers, Highlands, somewhere up in the mountains. That plan went quiet for a while sitting in that Portsmouth room.
I’ve ridden out Florida hurricanes. I’ve gone in afterward and volunteered. I know what those first days look like. And I was up in New Hampshire with a camera, doing seven states. I couldn’t do anything from where I was. That’s a strange place to be, and I said as much out loud to nobody in the room.
Portsmouth
Portsmouth is a foodie town, the server told me at dinner. That’s one way to describe it. Lots of restaurants, lots of investment, a downtown that’s been genuinely revitalized over the last decade or so. She’d worked there a while. She liked it.
I asked where she lived. Not downtown, she said. Nobody who works down here lives near here. She’d found a room to rent, which she considered herself lucky for. Affordable housing in Portsmouth is not the reality you see from the restaurant tables. That’s the reality in the apartments above the restaurants, and it’s increasingly the same story in every coastal town I’ve passed through on this trip.
There was a rental sign on the walk that evening. $4,250 a month. It wasn’t advertising itself as anything special.
Someone at dinner told me about Prescott Park, a good vantage point for photographing the city in the morning. The walking tour started at 10:30 before I’d need to head to Maine. I noted both things and went back to the room to book tomorrow night somewhere further north.
Portsmouth in a day is not enough. But that’s what I had.
A Note on the Recording Booth
I built out a recording space at home — a small corner of the condo that’s acoustically decent and gives me somewhere to do voiceovers properly without a garbage truck ruining the take. It’s not much. There’s a dark wall in the studio space just outside it that I’ll be doing more filming in front of. The cat has claimed the bottom shelf. None of this was in the original plan for what this project would look like, but then again, nothing has been.
Maine next.
