The Great Northern Express is a tale not of two cities but, give or take a few, of one hundred. Specifically, it is the story of the monumental book tour I made the summer I turned sixty-five. That journey was inspired by a much shorter trip: a walk up the street to our village’s tiny post office, where I received an unexpected letter.
This is also the story of how my wife, Phillis, and I came to settle in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. It, too, began with a journey: this one when we were just twenty-one, to interview for teaching jobs in the remote mill town of Orleans, in the northern Green Mountains just south of the Canadian border, where we planned to teach for a year or two, save some money, and then move on to graduate school.
I have divided The Great Northern Express into three parts: Faith, Hope, and Love. Certainly, faith, hope, and love are what sustained me during a sojourn I feared might be my last. The sixty-five chapters here suggest how, upon reaching an age when many people think about retiring, or already have, I set out to rededicate myself to what has been my profession for more than four decades. Since I am, by both trade and personal inclination, a storyteller, each chapter tells a story.
I have changed the names of a few of the people I have written about. In two or three cases I combined characters to further conceal actual identities. Like Henry David Thoreau, who in fact spent slightly more than two years at Walden Pond, which he compressed into one calendar year in Walden, I have also occasionally used experiences from earlier or later times in my life.
The Great Northern Express is the story of how, as I traveled from coast to coast and border to border in the summer of my sixty-fifth year, two journeys seemed to meld into the narrative of one writer’s search, in his life and work, for the true meaning of home.