Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir

Prologue

[1] [ Prologue ] “I’m not going! I’m not going! I’m not going!” I screamed, as I fell to my knees and tears streamed down my cheeks. This outburst was not a stubborn child’s tantrum. I was a forty-two-year-old college professor with a family and a mortgage. For three nights running I had awakened with a start at 3:00 a.m. I bolted out of bed, rushed down the stairs of our white Cape Cod house with green shutters in Cranston, Rhode Island, and began nervously pacing around an obstacle course of packed boxes. In a matter of minutes my wife once again stood face-to-face with me in the dark. And again we retreated to the family den in the back of the house so as not to awaken Antonia, our fifteen-year-old daughter, sleeping upstairs. “I have already said my goodbyes,” Dorothy calmly reminded me. “Well, that’s ok. I’m not going.” “Your name will be mud in New England,” she prodded me. “I’m still not going.” “But the house is sold, and we’ve bought another one in Maine.” “We haven’t signed any final papers. I’m not going, I tell you,” my voice nearly at a shriek. I knew that I might be squandering an opportunity that I would regret for the rest of my life. I’ll deal with that possibility later, I told myself. This crisis erupted during the third week in June of 1987, days before we were to exit Rhode Island, our move paid for by my new employer, the state university in Portland, Maine. During the preceding February, just as I was promoted to full professor at Rhode Island College in Providence, I had tendered my resignation. I gave up tenure, and so did Dorothy, an associate professor at the college, for the uncertainty and snowbanks of Maine. I had interviewed twice, in January and February, the only times I had visited Maine. I had always considered the state, when I thought about it at all, as New England’s Siberia. By the second month of winter, Portland was under siege from the snow. I had not seen banks of plowed snow more than six feet high since New England’s crippling “Blizzard of ’78.” In Portland, icicles were also measured in feet. Many residents had forgone gutters, I learned, to avoid ice dams from melting and freezing snow. Icicles hung from rooflines, like the stalactites in caves that we learned about in grammar school. Then there were the homemade signs nailed to telephone Another City upon a Hill [2] poles: “Roof Shoveling, Call ——.” Even in southern New England I hated winter. “Thank God another January is over,” I used to say each year as I counted the days until the Red Sox began spring training. Now I was venturing to a place where the temperature averaged ten degrees below Providence and six feet of snow fell in a typical winter. There were compensations, I had concluded, when I accepted my new position. With ten thousand students, the University of Southern Maine was a rapidly growing institution. It was located in a booming area anchored by a beautiful city that New England Monthly magazine had recently named the best place to live in the entire six-state region. After a national search, I had been chosen as the director of a new interdisciplinary graduate program with a focus on the study of New England. My doctorate was in American studies; I held a joint appointment in the history and English departments at “RIC”; and my research and publications focused on colonial New England. “You’re our man,” the chairman of the search committee had indiscreetly said to me after the first round of daylong interviews. “You’ll hear from us soon.” I was not eager to leave Rhode Island, where most of Dorothy’s family lived and where we both had job security. I had only responded to the Maine advertisement to see if I would be offered the position. Then, offer in hand, I would approach the RIC administration and ask for a modest raise to my low salary. Such a practice was common among research universities, which regularly tried to poach outstanding professors. I was soon reminded that I labored far from that grove of academia. Between my interviews in Maine, I went to see RIC’s academic vice president. He and I had a good relationship. When...