Up the creek: Rural living through the lens of Gilmanton, mostly

If you are reading this, you probably live in a small town in New Hampshire. Maybe it is a big small town like, say, Laconia, which is all fancy, with sidewalks and boutique stores that sell swanky shoes and organic wheatgrass juice. Or maybe it is a small small town, like Sanbornton, where 97% of all civic life happens at either the dump or the post office.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter which one of the myriad Lakes Region podunks you call home, because if you live here, you know.

You know what it is like to wake on a cold winter morning and watch snow falling on the town green as the church steeple looms, lovely and white, in the background.

You have a neighbor (or maybe your friend has a neighbor) who enjoys exercising his Second Amendment rights by shooting at piles of dirt at 11 p.m. every Saturday night.

You know of the headaches inherent in driving on dirt roads in mud season, and you also know the name and the backstory of every single person who whines on your town’s Facebook page about how the roads should be paved.

You are familiar with the slur “Go back to Massachusetts.”

You feel misunderstood by the national media, which only pays attention to New Hampshire every four years, when it runs photos of presidential candidates cooking pancakes at the local Elks Club.

You love where you live and you also hate where you live.

I feel your pain, for I happen to inhabit what is arguably the quintessential New Hampshire small town. Gilmanton, which sits 8 miles south of Laconia with a population of 3,758, is where novelist Grace Metalious finished writing her 1956 blockbuster “Peyton Place,” about pettiness, crimes and carnality in, ahem, a small New England town. “Peyton Place” spawned a 1957 movie and, later, a TV series starring Mia Farrow. Metalious’ tawdry tale became so integral to American culture that the term entered the national lexicon. The Urban Dictionary defined a “Peyton Place” as “a location or a group replete with gossip, secrets, and double-crosses.”

In one pivotal scene in “Peyton Place,” a teenage girl murders her sexually abusive stepfather in a sheep pen. The killing is modeled after a real-life 1946 Gilmanton murder, which saw a 16-year-old girl fatally shooting her incestuous dad. Seventy-eight years on, the code of silence surrounding that horrible incident is still so fierce locally that I hesitate to divulge the names of the parties involved.

So yeah, here in Gilmanton we know about how the fears and the claustrophobia can well up in small towns. We know the toxicity of secrets and storytelling. We know it perhaps even more than folks in Alton and Moultonborough do. We are an especially small town-y small town.

I became a full-time Gilmantonite a decade ago, taking up residence in a circa 1790 farmhouse where I’d been a summer visitor for the first 50 years of my life. I work as a journalist, mostly for national magazines, and over the past 25 years, I’ve traveled on reporting missions to more than 20 countries and all 50 states. I’ve snuck into Manuel Noriega’s abandoned beach house in Panama and camped out in the minus 30 degree Fahrenheit chill of the Alaskan Arctic while cross-country skiing with the U.S. military.

But if you asked me what place most obsesses me, the answer would be easy: Gilmanton. I have known this place my whole life. In my house, there are still marks on the wall from when my parents measured my height at the ages of 1, 2 and 3. In 2017, my siblings and I cast our mother’s ashes onto the black skin of a pond here in town.

As a writer, I keep finding my gaze pulled back to Gilmanton, so much that over the years, for magazines, I’ve written repeatedly about the place. I’ve written about the picket fence lining my lawn, about my bitterly fought but failed bid to become the president of a beach club here and about the hot water I got in 2020, when I hosted a Black Lives Matter rally on Gilmanton’s town green.

When Daily Sun editor Julie Hirshan Hart agreed, over coffee, to let me write a column about life in Gilmanton — well, jeezum, I was super psyched. Starting this month, you will be hearing from me, more or less, every other Saturday.

Expect in-depth stories about rich characters, both current and historical. Expect some essayish riffs on country living. Expect humor, a sliver of enchantment (like anyone else, I can get gaga over New Hampshire in springtime) and also expect large servings of the gimlet-eyed skepticism promised by this newspaper’s most excellent motto, “Seeking the truth and printing it.” You may also get the odd field trip in my columns — to New Hampton, say, or to Barnstead or maybe, well, Nigeria, which I’ll be visiting for work later this winter. My subject, always, will be rural living.

Each column will be premised on two ideas. No. 1: Gilmanton, in its small towniness, can usually serve as a stand-in for other small towns in the region; and No. 2: All of New Hampshire’s towns are, in this global age, connected to the larger world. Issues like climate change and the war in the Middle East are as relevant here as they are anywhere else, and it’s pretty hard to walk down the street in Laconia without hearing the word “Trump.” While I’m not aiming to turn this column into a bully pulpit, I will explore the political complexities of what it’s like to live in rural America in 2024.

Anyway, there’s the plan. Maybe you tune into every column, as you might follow a podcast or Garrison Keillor’s old radio show Lake Wobegon. Or maybe, every time my byline appears, you see red and fire off a scathing letter to the editor. Please don’t hold back. I welcome feedback in all forms.

I will see you all again soon. Until then, be well. Do good work, and for God’s sake, stop shooting guns after 10 p.m.

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Bill Donahue has written for Outside, Harper's, The Atlantic and The Washington Post Magazine. He lives in Gilmanton, and his book, "Unbound: Unforgettable True Stories From The World of Endurance Sports," will be published by Rowman & Littlefield in June.