Storytime With the Wizard of Monadnock #1

Fire on the Mountain

Note: Storytime with the Wizard of Monadnock is a recurring segment that concludes each episode of our new podcast, Underground Over the Air. In anticipation of our second episode - due out today! - we wanted to share the transcript from the first storytime. Be sure and subscribe to the podcast on any of your favorite apps - and stay tuned for episode 2.

All right everyone out there, gather round. Refresh your drinks, light up whatever you got, get comfortable. This is storytime.

All this time listening to those Robert Hunter words, “The storyteller makes no choice,” and I didn’t realize until recently that they’re sometimes meant quite literally. Not that I don’t actually like telling stories, mind you, but the fact is that I’m not actually here by choice.

Don’t take it personally. I’m not even upset about it. I always knew this was a possibility. I was taking a risk, back in 2012, when I unilaterally declared myself Wizard of Monadnock – and I know how that sounds, but I swear this wasn’t a power grab. I mean…what power is there actually to grab? You’d be surprised at how few perks there are for being Wizard of Monadnock. No, I just had this sense that the mountain and the region that bears its name by rights should have a wizard, and as far as I could tell (or, legally speaking, upon information and belief) nobody occupied the role. Assuming this to be true, it seemed like the role could be considered available to anyone willing to make a good faith attempt at fulfilling it, regardless of formal qualifications.

This assessment I made was very fortunate for myself, because I, of course, had no credentials. (Truth is, whether or not I actually have credentials now is very much up for debate in certain circles – but we can save that story for another time.)

Anyway, however noble I felt my intentions, I knew that there were two major risks. The first one is the obvious one: that I’d been wrong and someone else was already the Wizard of Monadnock, and that person would undoubtedly be pissed off to some degree. Now, it’s been eight years and nobody’s come to claim or complain, so I generally assume we’re safe in this regard. In any case, I probably wouldn’t accept any such claim or grievance at this point; whoever they are, they’ve been derelict, invisible, and/or absent for so long, I’d argue my claim on the basis of use and development alone. The land is mine by virtue of the fact that I’ve been on it and working it.

The second risk, however, was that the job would come with requirements of which I had no way of knowing, and thus could in no way be certain of fulfilling, or even certain that I’m prepared and able to do so. Well, it turns out, in a little-known section of New Hampshire’s RSA – not the one you can find online but the complete one you can only view at the State House in Concord – says that any currently-operating regional wizard must provide a certain amount of tale-spinning and myth-making for the people of that region on an annual basis. This was only called to my attention recently – and by none other than our illustrious and Norman Rockwell-designed Town Moderator, a retired judge who knows the legal code like nobody else in six generations.

Fortunately, I write a fair amount, and I used to do a little podcast show of my own, and in the course of doing so, I certainly did some of my required storytelling. But alas, my hours have always fallen far short on an annual basis and after eight years? You do the math. That shit adds up. So here I am, doing my makeup hours – which by some calculations will take at least the next ten years to fully complete.

So you’re kinda stuck with me and my ramblings for a long time. That’s why I told you to get comfortable, pour the drinks and dim the lights and all that. Some might want to hear these stories by a crackling fire, but I also highly recommend a sunken living room covered in soft carpet, if you can find something like that.

I mean, like I said, I don’t mind telling stories, sometimes I do it anyway, and being forced to do it is actually a good thing even if I never like being forced to do much of anything at all. On the one hand, I don’t need another thing added to my plate, but on the other, if I’m really being honest, I have to admit that in this case the law is right. I should be telling stories.

Especially now, right? In times like these, isn’t a good storyteller needed maybe more than ever? This is fun even for me – with all the time I spend writing things like essays and sermons, making points and arguments and all that – Christ, you can even lump my uncontrollably combative Facebook posts into the mix – this is an awesome chance to just kinda let my hair down and shake it out. I’m not here to convince you of anything, teach you a lesson, or even make a broader comment about society. I’m just here to tell stories, to entertain, mildly amuse, what have you.

And you know what, maybe it wouldn’t surprise you to learn that I have a lot of stories – a lot of stories just my own, never mind all the stories I can draw on from other sources.

So yeah, BAM, just like that – I already got you, you didn’t even realize but that was your first story, a story about thinking about storytelling. But okay, let’s move that off to the side. What’s good? What is entertaining right now? What do people wanna hear? I know what people always wanna hear about, and you’re all probably no different – you wanna hear about the time I saw three UFOs or the time I controlled lightning in a thunderstorm on the beach. Am I wrong? I can see you all nodding through the internet. But you can’t expect me to be that easy. I’m an accommodating and hospitable guy, but that’s like just giving away the store right out of the gate. I lead off with the UFO story and how do I follow that? No, no.

No, we’re gonna start with the small beans – and the small beans taste awesome, make no mistake about that – and then we’ll work our way up and see how far we get.

The post-colonial story of this land begins with feudalism and wolves – as all good stories do. Starting way back in like 1629, this whole hunk of New Hampshire, beyond being the home to a complex network of roving, interconnected tribes – who had by this point already been decimated by European Livestock Diseases – was part of a big English royal land parcel. And there were wolves here, they lived here. These days, we worry about bears – at least I worry about bears, no matter how many times people explain to me that they don’t kill anybody here – but back then, there were wolves to worry about.

Now, of course, you bring up wolves to any die-hard, multi-generation, good work ethic New Hampshirite, and you’ll find this is nearly as controversial a subject as the Great Mountain Lion Debate. Leaving that aside for now, the wolf thing: officially, wolves were extirpated from New Hampshire a little over two hundred years ago. (That’s a cool word, isn’t it? It means basically “extinct within an area” – like, wolves aren’t extinct because they still live other places, but they don’t live here and they don’t visit here.) But some people still claim that isn’t true. Especially in the North Country. They point to trail camera evidence. My buddy PJ has claimed for over a decade now that he once saw a whole pack of wolves walking behind his condo complex right in Keene. I still can’t decide if I believe him, but the truth is that he’s always been a pretty reliable narrator. More often than not, anyway.

But Fish and Game – in other words, the GUBMINT – insists there are no wolves and that the trail cameras (and probably PJ) are seeing coyotes or some kind of blasphemous hybrid of coyote and dog. (Some call such a creature “coydogs”, and this is also controversial, because some people – on both sides of the wolf debate – very strongly that they don’t exist, either.) From here, there’s two possibilities that can explain why Fish and Game would say there are no wolves. One is that there aren’t any wolves. The other is that there are some wolves, but they don’t to deal with it, and if they admit they are real, they will then have to deal with it. I don’t even really understand what’s involved, but I’m sure there’s all manner of endangered species regulations.

But back in the day, the only regulation was that everyone was supposed to murder all the wolves.

For over a hundred years, the king – well, presumably more than one king – didn’t do much more than own this hunk of land. I wonder how it made him feel to own it – if he noticed a difference in feeling, temperament, or satisfaction from waking up in the morning and knowing there was a place called New Hampshire and it was his. Or hers. There might’ve been queens during that time. Christ, now that I think about it, Oliver Cromwell must’ve owned New Hampshire for a hot minute. Think about that.

But anyway, no king or general or prime minister ever came here and given the shortage of cameras during this period, it’s unlikely that anyone ever even brought them a picture of it. Maybe a sketch of some trees – but what is that to a monarch? An emperor?

Eventually, though, in the wet and wild 1700s, the area came to resemble less of a medieval estate and more of the Colonial AMERICA we’ve come to know and love. For a hundred years, all manner of English weirdos had begun to arrive on the New England coast, expanding out into what’s now Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and eventually places like New Hampshire and Maine. They actually settled west of here first, setting up trading posts and FORTS along the Connecticut River. Slowly, the settlements from east and west crept toward the middle, marking the genesis of our strange little society we have here.

All the trees were cut down and everybody had sheep. You know who eats sheep? Wolves. And the response, as I said, was to murder the wolves. There are countless stories of wolf hunts, growing even more dramatic as the wolf population no doubt dwindled close to nothing. Eventually, the discovery of just one or two of these wild dog cousins could mean the marshaling of every farmer from three towns to chase it until the job was done. More than once, the chase led to the mountain. Yes, THE mountain.

Once they came to believe the wolves were holed up by the top, making their last stand on the holy high ground, as it were, so they rushed up there only to find a mother bear and her baby. Like savages, they decided to steal the cub, which bit off the finger of the teenager carrying it.

These English and/or formerly-English weirdos seemed to have an affinity for the nuclear option, which is funny since nuclear weapons wouldn’t be invented for another century and a half or so. But remember how I said the wolves were EXTIRPAED from New Hampshire in the early 1800s? Let me tell you what that extirpation looked like around here: they set the god damn mountain on fire. Like, “Ya know what, we can’t find those goddamn things, so let’s just burn a mountain. We’ll burn the fuck out of it, burn it so bad the soil gets scorched right off the top.” I mean, what could go wrong, right? They did this more than once, too. The way they tell it, the fires raged for days or weeks, making the sky glow at night and filling the air with smoke in the day time.

They burned the top of the whole mountain! A lot of people assume Monadnock is bare at the top because you go “above the treeline”, but that’s ridiculous. It’s only 3,000 feet high, there is no treeline from altitude. Just from ARSON. Two hundred some-odd years later, it’s still like that.

And there’s no wolves. At least, officially.

These are just the stories anybody can find in any book at the Toadstool, the old town histories nobody reads are full of them, and that’s why this is small beans, that’s why we’re just scratching the surface.

There’s a whole lot people don’t know. The early stories fail to adequately explain even obvious spiritual phenomena, like the fact that Monadnock is an unusually holy, consecrated, or magical place, or the notion that Keene is controlled by one or more evil demons. These are things one can only know from either deep study – always involving direct experience! – or from knowing the right people and getting them to talk. These old Yankee types can be like all OMERTA sometimes, you wouldn’t even believe it.

But really, you need both. And in the meantime, you’ve got me. You’ve got things you wanna know and I’ve got hours I need to log telling it to you and that’s what we’ve done here tonight and that’s what we’re gonna do going forward. This is all the small beans you get this time, though; next time, we’ll see, maybe we can throw a couple hunks of hot dog in the casserole.