#176. Bretton Woods (Monday, October 9, 2023)

What was your best day…of stumbling upon history that only you could appreciate?

We were only looking for a gas station…

Those words, or some reasonable facsimile, have never in the history of narrative literature preceded an inconsequential event. Usually it’s something horrifying and traumatic, with the gas station never actually found.

Well, as you’ve probably guessed from this story’s presence here, only the third part is true.

Jerry Qing had suggested a spontaneous Thanksgiving-weekend road trip through New England: Montreal to Bangor, then Acadia and Bar Harbor, Portland, and finally back through New Hampshire and Vermont.

New England in peak fall was beautiful, though nothing before Monday felt especially notable. Jerry and I did have a rare argument Sunday night after my poor navigation caused us to miss several stops, but we handled it in the traditional male fashion: “let’s do our own thing tonight and be normal again tomorrow.”¹

And that is exactly what happens. Monday starts with an Allagash brewery tour,² followed by excellent fish and chips and chowder on the Portland waterfront. Then Jerry takes over the driving and we head northwest through New Hampshire.

About an hour in, with the tank approaching half-empty, Jerry searches the GPS for gas stations. As he scrolls, one name jumps out at me: “Bretton Woods.”

Bretton Woods. The place whose 1944 conference helped establish the postwar international monetary system, including the IMF and World Bank and the dollar-centered monetary order.

Jerry and I both worked in finance. We obviously knew Bretton Woods as an institution and historical event. Neither of us had ever really processed that it was also an actual place—and apparently one directly on our route. Without that gas search, we would have driven right past it.

So naturally we go. Bretton Woods turns out to be the Mount Washington Hotel, a huge functioning luxury resort at the foot of Mount Washington. There are grand public rooms, shops, balconies, gardens—and surprisingly little acknowledgment that the modern financial system was substantially redesigned there eighty years earlier.

A small side room has the participating countries’ flags; another has photographs and historical accounts.³ That’s basically it.

Still, those two hours inside the hotel feel magical in a very understated way. Nothing visibly screams “site of one of the defining events in modern global finance,” which somehow makes it better: we can look at these ordinary rooms and recognize what happened there without the place doing much to tell us. (They really should build a proper museum there for the finance nerds within weekend range of Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and New York.)

I buy the mandatory Mount Washington Bretton Woods T-shirt for future office basketball games, and then we’re off—a brief pit stop at a physical place that, a few hours earlier, had existed only in our collective imagination.

His “own thing” was going to bed. Mine was trying and failing to find nightlife in downtown Portland, ending up on a sketchy empty street, Ubering to the wrong hotel, then retreating to our actual hotel to watch Fair Play and eat unlimited VIP-room popcorn.
Apparently, the unique taste of their beer came from a one-of-a-kind fungus that floated into a brewery tank from outside ten years earlier. I picked up a 2013 bottle of a special wine-beer hybrid, which still occupies the “open only after extreme life/career success” slot on my shelf.
This is also where we learned that Keynes was ill and drinking heavily during the conference. We speculated whether that was a key contributor to the pound sterling losing out to the US dollar as global reserve currency.