by John Brighton, Bauhan Publishing, Peterborough, N.H., 2019, 197 pages
I’m on board for most any good writing set in New Hampshire, be it fiction, politics, humor, geology, history, you name it, and now comes something unexpected and very engaging: a memoir set right here in my Sullivan County.
It’s titled The Forgotten County, a Story of Community, Family, and Friendship. It’s written by John Brighton, currently a Hanover resident, but you may as well say he’s from Washington, the rocky hill town in Sullivan County’s far southeastern corner, for that’s where much of his book is set and where so many of his life experiences are rooted.
The book is his first, but it is a polished work with a smooth, steady flow. Any academic reading it will be thrilled at the extensive footnotes. (Full disclosure: Brighton sought me out to talk about the New Hampshire dairy industry while he was working on his book, and I’m one of a swarm of references cited in his acknowledgments section.) And I’ll explain the title later.
The heart of Brighton’s memoir is his coming-of-age story, teenage years in the 1970s in Washington, where his family owned an old farm it used as a summer retreat from a home in Peterborough where Brighton’s father was a prominent attorney and district court judge. I loved this part, probably because it was a lot like my own teens a decade and a half earlier in another Sullivan County town, Plainfield. He drove back roads in a battered jeep, toiled on the town road crew, swam in a remote pond, cautiously flirted with girls and grew up in the embrace of a solid family.
He also forged deep and lasting friendships with the people of Washington, especially members of the Crane family, a tribe of farmers and woodsmen who had populated the town as far back as the 1700s. The Cranes he knew were last-stand dairy farmers, grinding out a living on thin, rocky soil and beset by the mean realities of modern-day American agriculture, the kind going almost extinct today in New Hampshire and Vermont. The book opens and closes with the sad account of the passing of one of the last of the Cranes, who dies in a field preparing to bale hay and is memorialized by hundreds at a service at which Brighton offers a tribute in verse to his fallen friend.
Brighton holds great affection for other people he grew to know in Washington, especially several Greatest Generation men who rarely discussed their service in World War II, but about whose great courage and sacrifice Brighton would eventually learn. A touching thread throughout involves Brighton’s relationship with a Washington summertime neighbor girl that began as a love-at-first-sight thing and then rolled through ups and downs for years before the two matured and settled into an enduring marriage.
Brighton recounts a “gap year” of adventure crossing the United States in a VW bus and then times working on a marine construction crew on Cape Cod, building docks and sandblasting boat hulls. Whatever he’s doing or wherever he is he keeps a detailed journal, and his times back in Washington seem to be the reference point always in the back of his thoughts.
As to the title of Brighton’s book, we need to go back to the early 1960s, a time when Wesley Powell was governor of New Hampshire, Powell was a journeyman Republican politician until the time he defied William Loeb, the reactionary publisher of the Manchester newspapers, on an appointment to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat and to welcome a van load of “reverse freedom riders” sent north by southern segregationists to try to embarrass Yankee civil rights advocates.
Powell coined the term “forgotten county” to describe Sullivan County, and a good case can still be made that it falls far down the list for attention in the New Hampshire power structure. Rockingham has Portsmouth and the seacoast; Hillsborough the two largest cities; Merrimack, the state capital; Cheshire, Monadnock and a Currier & Ives ambiance; Grafton Dartmouth and Franconia Notch; Belknap, Winnipesaukee; and so on, but Sullivan has nothing big to compare. Even though it has a town called Sunapee, the mountain and lake of the same name are mostly in Merrimack County, and Sullivan County rates barely 12 seats in the 400-member House of Representatives.
Brighton grants that, yes, Sullivan may be forgotten in the view of many, it remains, as does his town of Washington, a place steeped in history and much natural beauty, stuff apt to be embedded in the DNA of those with roots there yet.
His book is a smooth read, and it’s an engaging mix of interesting personal experiences and critical observations on aspects of life that have gone downhill since his youth.
Steve Taylor lives and farms in Meriden.
