They traveled at night to avoid the wind, Nuge ahead in a boat towing the raft, Patty on the raft with two canoes lashed together in back, in hope they wouldn’t swamp. She has lived nearly 20,000 nights since that summer night in 1936, but she remembers that journey up the lake as if somehow it has been preserved under glass for her to admire for the rest of her life.

He has seen so much baseball in his scouting career, it’s dizzying to compute: over 36,000 hours, more than four years’ worth of watching baseball. “I’ve never gotten up and said, ‘I don’t want to go to a game,’” he says with disarming sincerity. “My first years of scouting, I rolled out of bed and thought I’d find another DiMaggio.”

Connie Small is 81; she lived 28 years in lighthouses in Maine and New Hampshire until Elson retired in 1949. Lighthouses go deeper with her than nostalgia, deeper than memory, into places she cannot explain. When fog moves in something builds up inside of her; if sleeping, she’ll wake with a start. “There’s always the feeling,” she says, “that we have to get the bell going. That there’s someone out there who needs the bell.”

He puts a pack of Kools on the kitchen table, saying it’s the only habit he has left. “I haven’t talked about the medal,” he says. “Too many bad experiences earning it, and too many bad experiences living with it. I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a long time. But I haven’t been ready.”

“There will always be a special cold place in my heart for ‘Salem’s Lot. It seemed to capture some of the special things about living in a small town that I’d known all my life... Maybe it’s just that when I wrote the book we were so poor and the trailer was little and cold and I could go down to my little furnace room where I wrote with a fourth-grade desk propped on my knees. And when I got excited it jiggled up and down as I hunched forward. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. I could go down there and fight vampires whenever I wanted.”

New England is an understated region. We have no special festive weeks, no Mardi Gras, no Kentucky Derby. What we do have to set us apart has always been with us—fall. The color marching up the hillsides, the morning snap of cold that gives way to warm afternoon sun, the startling sight of leaves blowing across our path, giving bounce to our step.

“It was bitter cold, nearly zero, that March weekend in Rangeley, Maine. A blustery wind gained force steadily, swirling the snow so that dog teams seemed to disappear through a veil of white—a “white-out” they called it. More than 50 dog teams raced that Saturday, one being driven by me, the greenest of greenhorns. After I left the starting line, Ivan Beliveau a leading sled-dog trainer and racer, owner of my team, turned to his wife, Kathy (the publicist for New England sled-dog racing who had helped concoct the scheme of letting me get the “feel” of the sport), and said, “We’ve made a mistake.” But all of that I learned later.

Shortly after 9 A.M. on Wednesday, January 5, 1983, a pale young man, accompanied by his father, stepped rapidly into the emergency room of Waltham Hospital, 10 miles west of Boston, and with a wild, anxious look in his eyes said that his chest and back hurt, that he could not catch his breath, and that at least once every minute, for reasons he could not explain, he was overtaken by an urge to gasp, as if frightened - a gasp so powerful it made him tremble. He could not swallow without gagging - "I feel like I'm choking," he said - and he added he had been unable to sleep.