We conclude our special travel series this summer with this poignant description and reflection of Gale Cottage in Franconia, NH, written by Elisabeth’s grandfather Philip E. Howard. We pray you have been encouraged and refreshed through all of these summer memoirs.
In the story of my upbringing, The Shaping of a Christian Family, I described “The Cottage” where we had vacations in New Hampshire. My grandfather wrote of a scene just across Gale River from that cottage. This exquisite piece has taken on new meaning for me now that I’ve reached the biblical quotient for old age (“threescore years and ten”):
“There is a little wooded hill, overlooking a broad and open valley in the northern New England country, from which the sunset view is very wonderful. Some who are privileged to live close to the foot of that knoll in the summer call it Goodbye Hill because it is their custom to let the afternoon outlook from this hill close their summer days just before leaving for home, a picture that lingers in the memory. The clearing on the brow of the hill faces the southeast. On the right is a village, and as one’s gaze sweeps the horizon at sunset, shadows of a great hill to the west steal over the village and river, touching all with the grey of evening. Turning to the left follow the rim of the valley along the mountain summits glowing with light, and beneath them the broad farms and sheltered white houses with glittering touches of streams in the meadows. The eyes sweep that horizon, but they rest inevitably upon Mt. Lafayette, lifting its brown peaks high against the sky to the east.
“The shadow upon the village mellows all the lines of nestling homes. The level rays of the sun, streaming forth beneath the bank of clouds in the west, tinge the foothills of Lafayette, and reach more and more with their marvelous artistry up and up the wooded slopes, until the craggy peaks themselves are arrayed in royal purple. It is a strange and wonderful revelation of titanic handiwork that upon the face of the mountain not far from the summit is a cross formed by upright and transverse ravines in the rock; and often in the early summer it is clearly outlined by the snows still lingering after the· winter’s storms when the rest of the mountain is clad in brown and grey and green…the sunset light reveals the cross as you gaze from Goodbye Hill.
“As you turn from the scene to take your way to the valley once more, the peaks of Lafayette fade into the broad shadow of twilight, while above them in the deepening blue of the sky a single star appears, shining in lonely splendor. The vision of evening as one sees it from Goodbye Hill does not easily fade.
“We need the evening light upon life in order to understand life at all. The blaze of day is often blinding. When shadows fall and light flows eastward along our own levels we see much that we never could see until then. A preacher-warrior, not long since gone to his rest, said to some friends who were asking him to record some of his reminiscences, ‘Yes, I shall be glad to do it. It is evening now, and the light is mellow.’ Life needs the mellow light for its interpretation, and it needs the Cross and the Star.”
Philip E. Howard, The Many Sided David (out of print)
**This excerpt was originally published in the May/June 1997 Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter.