A Letter To Our Readers

By Mel Allen

Jun 11 2007

If a single sound and a single scent can hold the essence of a New England summer, surely they’re the crash of the surf breaking on our shores and the salty tang that hangs in the breeze as you get ever closer to the sea. Nature and geography have bestowed many gifts on our New England states — none greater than the hundreds of miles of our landscape that hug the Atlantic. Within the pages of this issue you’ll find our ode to the sea in summer. Even if you live miles from the coast, we want to bring the cadence, the smell, the beauty of the ocean to you. Turn the pages and find a selection of unique accommodations by the water in Maine; a Cape Cod town that offers exquisite shopping and history, plus a stretch of gorgeous seashore; a love letter to the Cape that anyone who has vacationed there will recognize; recipes featuring the fish that swim off our shores; even the visceral, literally breathtaking experience of swimming in water so frigid it makes our native surf seem downright balmy.

It’s one of life’s ironies that some of our most beautiful places also provide an excellent habitat for a creature not much larger than the period at the end of this sentence: the deer tick. Readers who have long loved Edie Clark’s “Mary’s Farm” column may not know that for years she was one of Yankee‘s most inspired writers of narrative nonfiction. Her eye for compelling storytelling is evident in her quest to discover the roots of Lyme disease, an illness that once felled her — and one afflicting so many New Englanders that I know of families who have all but moved indoors, so afraid are they of the tiny arachnid that carries the bacterium. When you finish her story, you’ll find yourself more attuned to the risks, but also more aware of what you can do to enjoy a safe and Lyme-free season.

So dig into our summer issue, buy some sunscreen, throw a blanket on the sand, and get as close to the surf as you can. The great essayist Henry Beston, whose splendid Outermost House captured the Cape’s raw beauty, once wrote: “The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.”

While those of us living in New England had our fill of rain this past spring, the sound of the sea on a summer day is nature’s way of saying, Here’s your reward — now listen.

Mel Allen

Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.

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