When Johanna, my wife, and I visited New Zealand, we learned from Rachel that we were likely the only ones to call “William A. Snelling” — Billy. I had known him as Uncle Bill, brother of my mother. As a young boy, however, it was confusing because his father, my grandfather, was also known as Uncle Bill. Maybe “Billy” came naturally, helped by a vestigial memory to distinguish between the two “William Snellings”. And when he came to visit America, some thirty years since I had last seen him, Billy seemed the perfect way for Johanna to address him, carrying an intimacy, special status, and deep fondness. So for us, he will always be Billy.
We had become fast friends on his visit to our home in Rhode Island. Billy had come from directing his high school drama group in “The Crucible” — a tortured play, which examines the trial of witches, set in Salem, Massachusetts, a community about two hours to the north. We learned that Billy’s passion for literature had made him familiar with our area, and that his visit would be even more special if we could arrange pilgrimages to the haunts of his favorite authors. Unlike the great spaces of America that Billy would discover on his later adventures, New England is compact. We were ready for touring.
The fall weather for his visit could not have been more wonderful — high, clear days, warm when the sun was out, but enough chill to light a fire in the evening. Cool and mostly dry days that made walking, an essential identity for Billy, a real pleasure. The trees were putting on their autumn show with the maples red, aspens golden, and the oaks a deep brown.
In a series of concentric circles, we planned our trips. First was New Bedford, the town famous for outfitting the whaling ships in Moby Dick, and where, early in the book Ishmael meets Queequeg, come to New Bedford, from the South Seas, selling New Zealand shrunken heads. The Seaman’s Bethel, referenced as the Whaleman’s Chapel, still stands and honors the memories of the whalemen and even contemporary fishermen lost at sea. Then we were off to Nantucket, a
sandy island about 30 miles from the coast and former whaling center. We walked the cliff path at ’Sconset, which, with the environmental changes since Billy’s visit, is no longer there, claimed by a rising ocean and fierce storms.
Next was Boston, and urban center with a tempered skyline, and more European style avenues, alleyways, and public parks than New York. In the Boston Common, a treed park in the city center, Billy discovered gray squirrels. For us, squirrels had always been as common as pigeons but for Billy, with their bushy tails, gymnastic skills bounding from tree to tree, and their fast gambol as they escaped a lunging dog, the squirrels were a marvel. He changed our view of them, and today, we often think of Billy as we see them among our bird feeders, striving to get the bounty of seeds either by attempted leaps from a branch, or sliding down the wires holding the feeder, but failing, and finally settling into to eat what seeds have dropped to the ground.
From Boston, we headed inland and northward to Robert Frost country and the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. We stayed with friends at their cabin by a lake, giving Billy a sense of forest living. To reach the Frost place, we took the notch road — a rutted, dirt roadway, wide enough for a car, that is the short cut over the mountains but accessible only before the snow. The notch took us deep into the aspen and birch forrest, a shimmering golden bowl of autumn leaves held on stark white trunks and branches. The Frost house is a very simple farmhouse, on the side of a hill. That’s it. There are no interactive museum exhibits, no cafe, nor interpretive signage. It is Robert Frost’s house, as it was when he lived there. Billy had arrived at a special place, pleased that it still had the spirit of the poet about the landscape.
We had numerous other odd adventures, some where the contemporary world suddenly intruded. We stopped for lunch at the bar of an historic inn on the edge of a green in a quintessential New England town, white church and all. During lunch, the staff wheeled a television into the bar area and the bar filled with a crowd. We were about the hear the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial. For a moment, staid New England became star-struck with the antics that had fueled
the tabloids and the daytime TV shows.
On our return to Rhode Island, we settled into our coastal life with walks on the beach with our dog, a companion who made Billy’s stay more like home. We had time with our cats, which included a very large, gentle male, Maine Coon cat, Josey, and a spry, female jellicle cat, Fred. You can see, we had some confusion in the naming of our animals, but Billy seemed to know their language as well as he knew the language of his New Zealand cats.
For a final trip, Billy wanted to visit Salem. It was getting later in October, when the passion for the now global non-religious holiday of Halloween takes hold. Salem, with its tradition of witches makes the very most of the Halloween association and becomes a carnival of kitsch, spookiness, and horror leading up to the holiday. Billy, who had hoped greater respect for the true horror of the witch trials, was stunned by the crass commercialism and shocked by the false history he knew so well from his studies of literature. Crestfallen and worried that Billy would take back with him as his last memory the worst of American culture, we detoured to the Rebecca Nurse Homestead.
The Rebecca Nurse Homestead is the only public house of one of the executed Salem witches. Her body was supposedly secretly retrieved by her son and buried in a unmarked grave on the property. The original house, first built in 1638 still stands, with its property providing a buffer from a now suburban community, so that the restoration of the gardens and orchard along with the rebuilding of the stonewalls and fences, give the place a true sense of its times. Billy knew all this history — he could have happily served as a guide and would have ensured visitors would understand the human violation and mania that fed the fears leading to the trials and execution of innocent neighbors.
With Billy’s visit, we got to see New England differently. He left us to travel by train, the great distance of America to San Francisco and the west coast. Throughout this trip we had dispatches from the road. We remember our last conversation with him from San Francisco. He had just walked the Muir Woods,
stunned by the grandeur of the redwood forest with its three hundred foot trees. He was back in his hotel in San Francisco — he remarked that the city was sort of boring, it reminded him a little of Auckland — and he reminisced about his time in New England, and suggesting all along we should visit New Zealand.
Luckily, we were able to make a visit come true. We met him at his “miner’s cottage” in Waihi. He introduced us his large ginger cat. We toured his garden, amazed at his green thumb that he had shown us in photographs, and had a wonderful conversation with him and Margaret. He still remembered our adventures. Especially the squirrels, whose magic a mystery to many, he knew we understood.