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Helen-Chantal Pike

The Pike Log: Random Entries About Making His Story Mine

Expats Unite!

January 6, 2013
Tags: Lindsay Cobb, The Vulture, Eleanor Leger, Eden Ice, Princeton, Beth Kanell, Montclair, Kingdom Books, Kate Kelly, Fair Haven, Ranney School, Steve and Elaine Dolch Pacholek, Bergen County, Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen, Dalton, nh, St. Johnsbury, Village Book Store & Cafe, Littleton, Eatontown, Bellows Falls
My longest-running friend from high school and fellow Vermonter: Lindsay Cobb.
Like a first high school crush, some of us never get over the stories of Ernest Hemingway and his Parisian-based copains. While neither Vermont nor New Hampshire have cosmopolitan cities to rival Paris, they do have expatriates, none more obvious to me than the one-time New Jersey residents who voluntarily left home for the romance of  Read More 
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I've Been Poached, and I Like It!

December 3, 2012
Tags: Gail Kimball, Tim O'Shea, Rabbit Hill Inn, WREN, LaBelle Winery, Le Rendez Vous Bakery, Upper Waterford, Monroe, nh, Moonstruck, Asbury Park
Later!
It’s been a long time since I’ve been wooed.

Though, to be honest, the ever-present beckoning of chocolate anything can make my glands go Pavlov in a nanosecond. On a magazine assignment Saturday I drove north more than 60 miles in lightly falling snow. The itinerary’s bonus was the  Read More 
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Aren't We All Unfinished?

June 12, 2012
Tags: Bernard Lyle Kobel, Ludwig Moorehead, Lynn Franklin, Asbury Park, Jersey Shore, White Mountain Museum of Forest History, Northeastern Vermont Development Association, New York Times, Maine Sunday Telegram, Littleton Courier, Monmouth College
We compartmentalize our lives to organize the chaos: Is that good? How you apply the pronoun is a step to figuring out your own M.O.

Interested in the discoveries captured in this photo? Follow the Pike Log to the end for the extended caption. Thanks!
You’ve probably read at least one story about somebody who turned 50 and decided to change her or his life’s trajectory: lose weight, get a divorce (or married), change jobs (or where you live), take up sky-diving (or sing in a rock-and-roll band). For me it stacked up like this: one third of  Read More 
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I See the (New) Starting Line

April 30, 2012
Tags: Upper Waterford, Trout Brook, New Hampshire, Asbury Park, Casino, Palace Amusements
From a squiggly black line on an 1875 map to the real deal: Instead of prettily meandering through a colonial village on its way to 15 Mile Falls, Trout Brook now empties into the river much higher up the hill thanks to the dam built in 1954. Behind me New Hampshire's Presidential Range defines the skyline.
It was so early that March morning fog sat on Moore Lake like a giant cotton puff, hiding not only the snow-capped Presidentials but also the ice blue of the dammed up Connecticut. Unlike the '90s when it took equipment to break into Asbury Park's Casino Arena and Palace Amusements to find forgotten stories, here all I had to do was waited patiently. This ritual, my life-long ritual,  Read More 
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How My Beloved Aunt Became a Cover Girl

February 28, 2012
Tags: Waterford Town Report, Boxcar & Caboose, Waterford School, Elizabeth Roberta Pike, Robert Taggart Pike, Monmouth College, Asbury Park, Beth Kanell
Elizabeth Roberta Pike and her grandfather, R.T. Pike, circa 1918, in Upper Waterford, VT.
Picture it: January 10. It's Phase 1 of the North Woods move and 70+ boxes of dishes, files, books, and clothing form a labyrinth through the house. The Time Warner Cable guy is threading lines that will offset my Verizon cell phone's mountain-challenged message "searching for service".

Lots of interesting things can happen when you're incommunicado.  Read More 
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Making Kodak Moments

January 20, 2012
Tags: Eastman Kodak, Upper Connecticut River Valley, George Russell, Kilburn Brothers, University of Masscahusetts Lowell Center for Lowell History, Asbury Park, Robert E. Pike, ABC World News
When archiving my photos, 1999 emerged as the year that defined two passions: the Jersey Shore and the Upper Connecticut River Valley. Click this link to Facebook, and friend me if you want to see the mini digital albums I've created.
I loved them all: the cool blues of Ektachrome, the Hollywood movie colors of Kodachrome, and the 3200-speed of B&W film that enabled me to photograph through a hole in a boarded up wall the interior of the Palace Amusements in Asbury Park, NJ. It was the early '90s.

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I Can See the Finish Line!

December 31, 2011
Tags: David Brooks, New York Times, CBS, Amazing Race, Asbury Park, Robert E. Pike, Connecticut River Valley
Riverside Cemetery, peaceful home of my ancestors who had led an industrious farm life settling Waterford, VT after the Revolution.
Behind me is a course I've run for a little more than 20 years here on the north Jersey shore, in my childhood home in Eatontown, once a bugler's call away from Fort Monmouth that was decommissioned a couple of months ago. Click any menu tab to discover what I've been up as the  Read More 
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