Dunwich is a very odd place. First of all, you’ll notice that it does not appear on any map of New England. And this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the plus side it limits the amount of traffic that traverses its roads. On the minus side it’s darn hard to enter and leave it. For instance, there are no gas stations in Dunwich so whenever I need to fill up the old gas tank, I have to find a way out of town and find my way back in again afterward. And it’s not a matter of just heading down any road until you reach the town limits. Strictly speaking there are no limits. If you travel on Aylesbury Pike past Sentinel Hill for about three hours you’ll come back to Sentinel Hill again. And if you turn off at Whateley Lane and go for about two hours, you’ll notice a singularity in the middle of the road. And if you get too close to it, you’ll be pulled in and find yourself in the alimentary canal of Yog Sothoth. And that’s not a good place to be. So, you can see that commuting is somewhat problematic. But for all of the locals it’s really just an acquired skill that is taught from father to son. It’s all a matter of geometry. Einstein believed that our space time was a variety of non-Euclidean geometry called Riemannian. And it is. However, Dunwich has a different geometry called Bishopian after the famous Dunwichian mathematician (or wizard) Septimus Bishop who measured the curvature of Dunwichian space and codified the equations for translating back and forth between the two universes.
The mathematics is too complex for most people without advanced training to follow. On a practical level if you close your right eye and squint your left and slam down the accelerator just at the right location on the Dunwich side, you’ll reach normal space. And from normal space if you close your left eye and squint with your right eye while slamming on the breaks you can return to Dunwichian space from some well-known anomalies.
For the most part this kind of travel is a routine. But every once in a while, something seems to go wrong. I was driving at night in a snow storm in Dunwich a few years back and I sneezed too hard and must have activated an anomaly. When I blinked my eyes open again, it was broad daylight and obviously a summer day in some warm climate. I found out I was in Tallahassee Florida and it was six months in the past. And this caused all kinds of problems when I got back to Dunwich and ran into my earlier self, watching tv in my living room. I had a devil of a time murdering my doppelganger and sinking him in the swamp. He seemed to know all of my fighting tricks and just refused to die like a good sport. Some people are like that.
I don’t live there now but I spent virtually my entire life in metro Atlanta, where an entirely different form of travel mathematics is practiced.
I challenge anyone to get from the Atlanta suburb of Smyrna (home of Glock BTW) to the suburb Alpharetta on any given Friday at 4:30 PM. It simply cannot be accomplished with any 2D solution.
I know of at least one example of someone who had to fight the gridlock of the highways of New York City and developed a “road rage” driving style that made “Mad Max” kook like a little old lady driver. I had to drive with him once and thought my life was about to end more than once during the drive. Now, he had been a New York City cabbie in his youth so maybe that informed his style. But it was a hair raising experience.
Here in sight of the old Danvers State Hospital there are several large fields that are used to grow corn. Often in the spring and early Summer the roads get a deep fog such that at best you can see the corn along the sides of the road. It’s days like that that make one fervently hope L. Nivens For A Foggy Night really is just fiction. Sometimes I just stick to State RT 114 if I’m headed down to Danvers or Peabody rather than the shorcut.
I don’t think the “weirdness” of New England is only because people have lived here for a long time. It is inherently weird. But it doesn’t hurt that there are so many weird people here.