A Reliable Storm Gauge

Recollections of the Solarium

Editor's Note: This piece by Jackson's Nick Howe was originally published in Country Journal. During the intervening years, the Wentworth Hall has undergone a major transition, and in the last 12 months, much of the resort has been resurrected by developer Ernie Mallett. Still, Howe's affection for the solarium remains intact.

They've taken down the solarium at Wentworth Hall. it was in the interest of public safety, I suppose, but for me it means that the severity of summer storms can never again be accurately judged.

The solarium was the centerpiece in the diadem of Wentworth Hall, which was itself the standard of opulence in my youth. By the time I was old enough to notice such things, the fashion in summer hotels was no longer the cool Yankee rigor of a meat and potatoes menu and bracing hikes along the White Mountain trails. The old converted farmhouse taking lodgers was giving way to the resort; now European chefs prepared dishes described in five languages, golf links surrounded the sprawling compounds, and dance bands crooned far into the night. And Wentworth Hall had the solarium.

Of all the summer hotels I had seen in northern New Hampshire, this was the biggest and the richest. By itself it was larger than many towns that I had seen, an endless congerie of elegant yellow buildings marching westward from the bottom of Jackson Falls. I knew the town of Jackson well enough -- my family of school teachers had spent their summers there for 50 years -- but I knew nothing of Wentworth Hall. I could only guess at the exotic life beyond the wrought iron gates of the entrance and estimate the worldliness of the clientele by the number of Lincolns and Cadillacs parked outside the gate, and the diversity of their number plates.

Jackson had been a magnet for vacationers from the beginning. The Wildcat River drops into the center of town in a cascade a quarter-mile long and 150 feet high. At the top, the river flows under Fairview Bridge, and there are long quiet pools where generations of children have taken their first splashing, breathless strokes, buoyed by a parental finger hooked into their bathing suits. Then the river narrows through two fissures in the broad ledges where we had our picnics and our sunbaths. The first is a hopping step wide for a seven-year-old, and making that leap is the next station in prowess after swimming across the pools above. The other passage is a surging race of foam 30 feet long, and to slide otter-like down the channel, bumping off the hidden projections and lunging for the stop rock at the end, is a sterner test.

Below this falls the begin, the first being a smooth curtain hiding a cavern that can hold three or four cousins brave enough to duck through the sheet of water and crouch behind in the roar, looking out at the vague, wavering world they left behind. Further down, the falls are really steep, a torrent of churning water too dangerous for any human use, and an impassable barrier between our summer afternoons and the mysteries of Wentworth Hall. At the bottom, just at the point where the cataract leveled to rapids, was the solarium.

Where the resort backed up against the river, the entrepreneurs had built a series of terraced platforms out over the water. By day, languid vacationers in canvas deck chairs sipped their drinks, protected from the sun and spray by their dark glasses and wide-brimmed hats, their unguents, their linens, and their silks. By night, strings of colored bulbs lit their dancing, reflecting off the water plunging just beyond the last railings. In those days before World War II broadened all our horizons, this was the outer edge of human invention, and we marveled at its careless grace.

We loved rainstorms. We could see them coming, sweeping toward us over Mount Washington and its southern flanks, then draping the valley in front of our house with black curtains while we were still in sunlight, and finally crashing onto our roof while we ran to close the windows. Then we'd all gather on the long front porch, standing as close to the sheets of water as we dared and watching through the wind and the scud for lightning strokes in the mountains all around. A thick rope of water would pour from the gutter at the end of the porch roof, and we'd turn our faces up in it so the pressure of the fall would bulge our cheeks. Sometimes, the girls would wash their hair in it, and then we'd all run out into the rain as the first sun followed the storm across the valley to our house.

If the rain was long one, lasting undiminished through the night, or if it was a cloudburst, as we called the tumultuous thunderstorms of August, or if it was an equinoxial storm, as we called hurricanes in those days, we could hear the rising roar of Jackson Falls more than a mile away in the valley below us. Then, at a moment only a grownup could declare, we'd all go down to look at the falls.

As the run-off from the mountains filled the tributary brooks, the familiar river would become a brown maelstrom. Surging sheets of water swept over the smooth granite where we had eaten our picnics lunches the day before, and the well-remembered geography of pool, channel and cascade would disappear into an unbroken sluice of foam. Later, when the storm had passed, we'd make another trip. We'd go further down this time, where the road led beyond the steep part or the solarium.

My oldest cousin understood things. He could, for instance, explain the difference between the "good", "better", "best", models of chemical toilets in the Sears Roebuck Catalog. Furthermore, he had pioneered the development of the method by which we calculated the severity of summer storms. If the deck chairs had been swept up against the railings of the solarium, it meant that the water had risen above the floor and marked a storm of more than average power. If the railing themselves were broken and washed downstream, we knew that the storm had been strong enough to tear dead limbs from trees far up the river, and we rated it a cloudburst. And if sections of the platform itself had been carried away, we knew we had been in the presence of an equinoxial storm, a calamity so rare we could list each one in our memory.

Wentworth Hall is closed now. The broken windows go unrepaired, the paint peels from the crumbling portico, and the dead leaves of autumns past molder in the weed-choked gardens all summer long. Finally, some unknown hand dismantled the rotting planks of the solarium, fearful, perhaps, that children would wander out over the water and fall through. Stubby concrete piers and rusting anchor bolts are all that mark the site of that once-splendid promenade.

For myself, I've come to know quite a lot about the weather, I have a barograph and a thermograph and a rain-gauge and an anemometer and a sling psychrometer and ledgers filled with twice-daily observations. I can call clouds by their Latin names and talk about isobars and occluded fronts and katabatic flow and even venture some not altogether improbable theories to account for the changing patterns in New England weather over the past 40 years. But I have no instruments so precisely calibrated as the Wentworth Hall solarium, and my shelf of data summaries can never tall as much as the casting away of deck chairs, railings and floorboards.