yrus Cloud was in a veritable swivet.
The old coot had been scouring newspapers and magazines since the turn of the New Year (at 114, it was his second witnessing of a century flopping over) and trying to catch up on political comings and goings relating to the New Hampshire presidential primary.
What jolted him most was not what some man-who-would-be-president had to say, but instead what some Flatlander reporter had written for a magazine down in Manhattan.
Check this out, Ford, he wrote to me. That press from away rolls in here every four years and, facts be damned, conjures up its own notion, for outside consumption, of what life is like up here among the rustics, where the men are taciturn, the women are tough, they've all got guns and gumption, everybody's a political party unto themselves looking for a private convention with each candidate, and the rugged land is tougher than anybody, native or visitor.
Inside the big envelope he left for me on the seat of the Willys, I could see that what riled Cyrus was right there on a clipping from New York magazine in which a fella named Craig Horowitz wrote about traveling on a bus with John McCain.
''One afternoon while riding from Nashua to Merrimack, McCain sat in his usual spot on the couch in the back of the bus. Sipping at his ever-present cup of coffee and looking content, he happily traded observations with reporters ... as the beautiful lakes and small towns and mountains of New Hampshire scrolled by unnoticed in the big windows.''
You know, Ford, he said in an accompanying note, either this fella was so numb from travel he didn't know the bus was really rolling through flat southern New Hampshire and not the North Country, or he just figured the image would sound good back home, so he went ahead and used it anyway. And Ford, that set me to thinking: I could be one of these outside chroniclers of our times if all I had to do was write down what came to mind. So I did a little experiment. I set out in my pickup on a two-day trip, pretending I had different presidential candidates sitting on the seat beside me (Better put down that Longneck Bud, Senator; frost heaves ahead and you don't want to chip a tooth) all through the trip. Here's what I found.
And what Cyrus ''found,'' he scrawled on the back of cereal boxtops, which he saves by the hundreds. They tumbled from the envelope.
It had been a steamy fall day early in the campaign when I rode with senator Bill Bradley up I-93 just south of Concord. Traffic was backed up to there all the way up to 393 and out 106 to Loudon. The senator could not have known that the Shaker Village, so typical of New Hampshire, could draw such a throng ...
Gary Bauer, his feet not quite reaching the truck floor, sat beside me as we discussed the cosmos, and he was lost so far out there in that cosmos, he probably didn't realize as we rolled through New London that this hardscrabble little village, clinging like the last root to a hilltop, is filled with folks who fight to hang on to their land and simple homes ...
Alan Keyes was preaching to me as we rumbled along the road just south of Charlestown where the Connecticut comes up tight against the land. Had he not been so engrossed in his spiel, he might have remarked on the work ethic of the hardy lobstermen whose boats bobbed on the waters just off to our left ...
George Dubya - he let me call him that to his face - had his feet up on the dashboard in relaxed Texas fashion as we rolled through the village of Hopkinton. It is doubtful he knew that those two-story, whitewashed buildings that are close-packed along Main Street are tenements as old as 250 years and house entire familes whose mothers and fathers must go out to work each day in rugged New Hampshire fashion.
Senator McCain was talking straight as we rolled into Berlin, so straight he never looked right and so missed the Androscoggin River just above the city and never saw the big wooden and stone piers like steps out on the water where the rich used to berth their yachts when they came sailing into town for a night of revelry and crisp, clean New Hampshire air.
Vice President Al Gore caused a parade of dark cars behind the truck (never seen so many smoked windows in my life) as we rolled through Keene. Him being an environmentalist, I was surprised he did not remark on the massive elms that overhang Main Street, shading it for its entire stretch through the city ...
Senator Orrin Hatch was the quietest of the bunch, which is probably why he had nothing to say as we crossed the Southern Tier on Route 101 and rolled through the vast farmlands, still preserved just as they were 200 years ago, owing to the individual stubbornness of New Hampshire natives who would never give up land to developers.
If we had more candidates, Ford, I could continue our soiree through the political landscape of this fine state: show them the vital role Pease Air Force Base - and therefore the iron-willed people of the Granite State - continues to play in our national defense; or go to the University of New Hampshire to see the Loeb Monument, erected in honor of all that the Manchester journal, which gets published on newsprint, has done to further education for our children, from kindergarten to college; or down to the mills in Manchester, where we could listen to the Merrimack flow by and wait for all the happy millhands to come dancing out after a hard day's work.
It would take a lot of boxtops, Ford, but when you're out there on the front lines, trying to chronicle the lives and cares and thoughts of a whole state with facts as you see 'em, it would be a small price to pay.
Royal Ford is a member of the Globe Staff. His e-mail address is ford@globe.com
