The Franconia Killings(And Remembering Tubby Hayes)

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Bode Miller before this weekend, but I admit I am fascinated by the double shooting in Franconia, New Hampshire, where a cousin of Miller‘s killed a cop and then was killed himself.

I grew up in New Hampshire. It’s a small state and my first thought was—anyone I know? Apparently not: one account described the shooter’s family as “third-generation New Hampshirites” but then said they had arrived in 1962—about nine years after I moved away (so I guess that shows me). Apparently they’ve been bit of a challenge all along, and this plays into an intuition of mine. That is: for a long time I’ve entertained the notion that it’s not much that New Hampshirites are flinty eccentrics, but rather that the state has attracted a lot of people just recently (last three generations?) who know about the reputation and want to buy into it. Live free or die, it says on the license plate: as a principle, it is pretty bogus, but as PR, it is durable and effective.

I can think of at least two other reasons why New Hampshire might be, well, itself:

• Historically, this was not a great place to be. The soil is lousy and the winters are dreadful. Lots of people (my own ancestors among them) came up there in the 17rth/18^th Century and found it wasn’t that easy to get out.

• But some did get out, and for those left behind, there was a powerful motivation to go negative. Read old farm newspapers from the 19^th Century: they’re full of stories about former New Hampshirites who have crashed and burned in other places as if to say—see? They never should have left home.

[Anecdote: a few years ago, a famous economics textbook remarked that in New Hampshire, they farm goes to the last child, not the first. The authors regarded this fact as a puzzle. I wrote them a testy note pointing out that in New Hampshire, the farm is a liability, not an asset, and the kid who gets it is the one who is still at home when papa’s back breaks.]

Another take it sounds like the cop/victim was a bit of business himself (the whole thing has the makings of at least a TV movie). It brought to mind another episode, after I’d left New Hampshire, when I was working for a small-town daily newspaper in ‘Southern Ohio, not in the Appalachians, but nearby.

A cop got shot in a mountain community down outside of Portsmouth. Our own Sheriff, Tubby Hayes, explained to me, that it didn’t need to happen.

The boy went in there with his gun out, making a lot of noise, and somebody ambushed him (Tubby reasoned). What he should have done is drive to the clearing at the foot of the hill, and wait for someone to come down to meet him. Then he says: I need to talk to grandpa. There’ll be a palaver, but sooner or later, Grandpa will come down. The Sheriff will say: Grandpa, the boy’s got to come with me. There will be more palaver, but eventually, Grandpa will send the boy down. And nobody will get hurt.