A timely look at a timeless place: New England is memories, history, places that call to us, an endlessly varied landscape, but is the winter over yet?

• Author: Levin, Dan
• Position: Diversions

There is a village outside Boston where a tea-colored stream flows through the portals of an old stone bridge, and fish of a size to frighten a grown man are finning in the shadows. I dream of this place, of chill April dawns when we were 15 and 16 and tiny trout lay like jewels in an ancient wicker creel. So what if a friend named Pete put worms in my sandwich? He wasn't U.S. Army Captain Peter Kleinberg yet--dead in Vietnam. Life was still nearly perfect, and the stream never disappointed as the years passed. Its rich summer redolence was often in my thoughts, and always, in returning, there was the welcoming roar of the upstream waterfall. Enormous bronze carp nosed towards it in the current every spring. Narrowing and gaining force between the bridge abutments, the stream had scoured out the bottom to form dark pools, and the experience of gazing into their shadows never changed. I'd stand there breathlessly, waiting.... One June day I was hip deep in the shadows when a crater opened up in the water and my minnow-lure disappeared. A bass we'll call Jaws leaped out, and out--three feet away. Be still, my heart. But this is not a fishing story. It's a story of deep appreciation and hope, of changes in climate and deep introspection. I dream of the bridge and the stream, yet recently I've wondered if it's time to say goodbye.

BOSTON HARBOR HAS never looked more beautiful. The jumbo jet to south Florida has risen out of Logan Airport and there are the lighthouses, Boston and Graves. They shimmer in the icy March air. The tide is low. Rockweed hangs from the ledgy shores of the Brewsters, and I smell it. From 3,000 feet I smell it. Through impermeable fuselage walls and double-thick windows I smell the rockweed and the salt air. John Keats wrote, "Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter." I smell the rockweed and the salt air, so much a part of great days by the north Atlantic.

The plane is banking now and there's Little Nahant, one man's vote for Best Summer Place in the History of the World. But that was before they filled in every open space and water access with houses, when small boys could still lie among wild roses at the edge of a cliff and watch the fog roll in. On late June nights, newly arrived from a world of bricks and asphalt, the school year just ended, we'd lie awake and listen to the crickets and know that summer was forever. The neighbors--retirees named Heinz and Bailey--had arrived in early May. Our...