On Celebrity Endorsements

Come across something written about Mt. Monadnock, and there’s a good change you’ll also find the names Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Now, we’re glad that Mt. Monadnock was good for them, but why is their endorsement so important? Anyone can see that this is a great mountain – beautiful to look upon, rendered so distinctly from so many different perspectives, relatively easy to climb, and yielding a magnificent view from the summit. But, drop these names, and suddenly “oh, Thoreau and Emerson spoke well of Monadnock – must be an even greater mountain”.

Thoreau peppers his writing with Latin botanicisms and other precious phraseology that endear him to us as the great naturalist. But let’s look at his account of final visit to Monadnock, in August of 1960.

“Choosing a place where the spruce was thick in this sunken rock yard, I cut out with a little hatchet a space for a camp in their midst, leaving two stout ones, six feet apart to rest my ridge pole on, and such limbs of these as would best form the gable ends. I then cut four spruces as rafters for the gable ends, leaving the stub ends of the branches to rest the cross-beams or girders on, of which there were two or three to each slope, and I made the roof very steep. Then cut an abundance of large flat spruce limbs, for our five feet long, and laid them on, shingle fashion, beginning at the ground and covering the stub ends. This made a foundation for two or three similar layers of smaller twigs. Then made a bed of the same, closed up the ends somewhat, and all was done.”

Thoreau used this as a base camp for all the next day, and then the following day “moved about a quarter mile along the edge of the plateau and built a new camp there.”

We can count our blessings that Thoreau didn’t fancy Monadnock any more than he did – had he stayed a month, moving camp a quarter mile every couple of days, he would have left the mountain deforested!

Do we really need two guys from Massachusetts who didn’t even have day jobs to enlighten us about Mt. Monadnock? Isn’t it time we transcended the transcendentalists? Of course, it’s not their fault – they didn’t sell their endorsements, and they might not even approve. It really has to do with our cultural obsession with celebrity. A place apparently becomes more sacred if it has been touched by a famous person.

The town of Peterborough has a similar situation with Thornton Wilder. Mentioning Peterborough without including Wilder’s name would be like talking about Microsoft without saying Bill Gates.

A profile of Peterborough in the current issue of New Hampshire magazine includes the usual Wilder coverage in a few paragraphs about the McDowell Colony (where Wilder spent several sessions), and then goes on to say “Just as Wilder did, current-day colonists are known to come to town, eat at the local restaurants, and shop at local stores.” And the point is? I mean, if someone is staying in Peterborough it sort of makes sense that at some point they will eat and shop locally. But there’s a bit of a thrill to the possibility that some of these “colonists” might either be famous, or perhaps will some day become famous.

This phenomenon is not unique to New Hampshire by any means, but for a state that prides itself on independent thinking, you’d hope that we might give less credence to celebrity endorsements, and more on assessing our natural, cultural, and civic resources for their own merit. Mt. Monadnock stands quite nicely on its own, thank you, and our town was our town long before it was Our Town.