“An eager beaver,” Willy commented. “And a lonely one with a big secret, from what it sounds.”

“I like it,” Joe said. “I think we should hear him out.”

“Field trip?” Sam suggested, smiling.

Joe nodded. “Yup.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Much is made about the thinly inhabited, heavily forested northern belt that skirts the Canadian border from Lake Champlain to the Atlantic Ocean, eventually melding into where the U.S. yields to equally rugged New Brunswick. It is generally viewed broadly by outsiders, caricatured with references to lumberjacks, rough living, hostile weather, and funny accents.

As with most clichés, there is some truth to that, but mostly on the surface. The uppermost reaches of Vermont and New Hampshire do appear similar on the map—verdant and empty. Vermont is wide where its sister state is narrow, just as the reverse holds true for where they abut Massachusetts to the south. They each have colorful mountain ranges—the Greens and the Whites—that overlook the Connecticut River, and they both have access to water, in the form of Lake Champlain for Vermont and a bit of the Atlantic for New Hampshire.

But for travelers driving north along Interstate 93, heading for the top of the Granite State, their true differences start looming with the force of a spiritual realization. If the timeworn phrase “We’re not in Kansas anymore” ever rang true, it’s here.

Joe had always been hard-pressed to know how to capture the distinction between the two. But driving with Willy toward Thomaston now—since Lester and Sam still hadn’t concluded their survey of Don Kalfus’s peregrinations in Shaw’s stolen Mercedes—Joe finally thought he’d hit on a reasonable descriptor: northern New Hampshire, unlike Vermont, was “muscular.”

That didn’t nearly capture it all, but it touched on how the forested peaks up here, unlike in the upper Green Mountains, looked bigger, taller, steeper, and more threatening. There was an ominousness to this region that had been smothered by the millennia just across the Connecticut River.

It wasn’t headliner news, he realized. The peaks of the Whites were all those things. The second-highest winds ever recorded on the globe—including in the Himalayas—had been clocked on Mount Washington, and the death toll among hikers, climbers, and recreational day strollers was legion. Where EMS rescue teams elsewhere were occasionally called upon to enter the mountains and bring out the lost, injured, and dead, here they’d developed into highly trained, well-equipped teams that did little else.

And that didn’t address the snow. Unlike atop the more worn-down Green Mountains, New Hampshire’s Whites were still slathered in feet of the stuff. It loomed threateningly at the tops of cliffs and clotted ravines and streambeds to where an unwary person could vanish from sight, only to reappear weeks later as wrinkled remains.

Just as with human muscularity, the impact wasn’t wholly negative. These ancient peaks also deserved terms like “majestic,” “soaring,” and “breathtakingly beautiful.” Joe acknowledged those as perfectly true, but at the moment, he wasn’t given to poetical flights of fancy. The impression of feeling encircled by snow and ice man-killers fitted his dark mood well.