LenEdgerly.com

There were no rooms in the inn this weekend at Normandy Farms Family Camping Resort in Foxboro, so we drove in the rain in rush-hour stop-and-go Boston-area traffic to reach a secluded state park in Hingham, Massachusetts. We are one of about four RVs here at Wompatuck State Park, which used to be used for testing artillery in World War II but now is a pretty woods where the camping sites are far apart, thus fairly private.

I'm having fun exploring the towns outside of Boston during this phase of the ramble, because when I grew up in Wayland I never came to these places. Hingham? I heard about it in WBZ Radio traffic reports. Foxboro? Before the football stadium was built there, I'm not sure I'd ever heard of it. This early sense of geography is tribal. As a boy, I had a vague sense that those who lived 40 minutes away were not "our people" and that they might not take kindly to our intruding on their affairs. But now I'm rolling across New England in a 32-foot motorhome, a goofy Denver tourist wherever I go, so why not check out some of those tribal territories I never knew as a kid? This could lead anywhere: Hull? Revere? Swamscott?

It helps that I'm reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which evokes the terrors of traveling into Africa with cannibals as crew on the little river steamer, looking for Mr. Kurtz.

For now, we will make a Volvo foray into deepest, darkest Hingham to find the heart of darkness at a coffee shop with WI-FI.

Saturday, October 21, 2006