State by State

by Matt Weiland

  A few years ago, when my parents found that the Eagle Valley had filled up with housing developments and shopping centers, they moved away to the south fork of the White River, up against the Flat Tops Wilderness and twenty-two miles from the nearest town of Meeker. So they went back to the land a second time, now with a satellite TV and Internet subscription. My father put in a landing strip at the bottom of the driveway. My mother, who had seemed like such a sociable person, turned out to be satisfied writing emails to her friends and far-flung children, and taking long hikes with my father and their dogs. And the hikes you can take on the south fork are truly something, with deer and elk, foxes, ermine, and pheasants, even the occasional black bear or mountain lion, slipping through the stands of spruce and aspen and ponderosa pine, while the blank sound of the river unfurls itself continuously in the distance below.

  We forget that before the nineteenth century mountains were not what they are today: they were wild, waste places, difficult when not impossible to live on or to cultivate, and they weren’t considered beautiful. In the days before, say, the Louisiana Purchase (in which Jefferson acquired for the United States a corner of what’s now Colorado), if an ordinary American were asked to explain why some places on earth were mountains and others were not, he would probably have replied, in line with the physico-theology of the day, that such inhospitable land must have been cursed or simply abandoned by God. And even if he didn’t believe in such explanations, the cultural hangover from them would have prevented him from regarding mountain landscapes as picturesque. It took Romanticism in philosophy and the arts, with its creed of individual spiritual growth and its love of wildness and of solitude, to bring about a revaluation of mountains. Then their barrenness became their purity, and their quality of abandonment a symbol of spiritual independence—a fundamental shift in perceptions that at length became the second nature of the ordinary person, especially once supplemented by a geological understanding of how mountains form. Today not even the fundamentalists of Colorado Springs ascribe the existence of mountains to eruptions of God’s temper.

  Colorado has been one of America’s proving grounds of romantic individualism, and lately has come to illustrate the contradictions of romanticism as a mass phenomenon. The contradictions are inevitable when everyone seeks seclusion in the same pristine spots; there goes their seclusion and pristineness. So you move on to another valley and renew the process you have just fled, or you remain in your large house on its small lawn of scorched grass, and resent your neighbors for spoiling your view as you spoil theirs. In theory, it would be possible to build dense townships and small cities in the mountains, thus concentrating in one place a population that is after all united, if in anything, by its attraction to intact landscapes. In practice, even a still-small town like Eagle is an amorphous spill of suburbs and commercial parks spreading out from a disused old downtown. And that, too, might be fine—everyone might consider sprawl perfectly fine—if most Coloradans didn’t still long for the old uncluttered land, and feel that it was everyone but themselves and their like-minded friends who was a blight on the face of nature.

  The other contradiction of mass romanticism in Colorado comes from the geology of the state itself: coal, natural gas, and oil shale, all of which Colorado has in abundance. There in the mountains my parents have created the happiest picture of married life in one’s sixties that I know, but by the time I reach their age I doubt whether oil will be so plentiful and cheap that it will be possible to fly a small plane from a landing strip at the bottom of your driveway, or drive twenty or forty or sixty miles to go grocery shopping. And if these things do remain possible, it may be because Colorado’s Piceance Basin, not far west of my parent’s home, and Colorado’s Roane Plateau, not far south, have been so intensively mined and drilled for their respective reserves of oil shale and natural gas that the area will be unrecognizable. The land Coloradans cherish, land they came for or have stayed for, will turn out to have been loved not wisely but too well, as the burning of fossil fuels generally spells the end of a stable climate (perhaps including a stable ski season), and provokes a series of droughts that a dry part of the country with a population growing by almost 2 percent a year would seem unlikely to endure with special grace. It’s hard to predict what will happen to Colorado, and to the country from which it is hardly divided by its set of perpendicular lines, but it seems clear enough by now that you can’t have a population of many millions pursuing a lifestyle devoted to seclusion, mobility, and the picturesque without undermining those same things. Already that cruciform snowfield first seen as a Roman cross by the pair of lost Spanish missionaries tends to melt away and disappear for longer and longer portions of each year.

  CONNECTICUT

  CAPITAL Hartford

  ENTERED UNION 1788 (5th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From an Indian word, Quinnehtukqut, meaning “beside the long tidal river”

  NICKNAMES Constitution State or Nutmeg State

  MOTTO Qui transtulit sustinet (“He who transplanted still sustains”)

  RESIDENTS Connecticuter or Nutmegger

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 5

  STATE BIRD American robin

  STATE FLOWER mountain laurel

  STATE TREE whiteoak

  STATE SONG “Yankee Doodle”

  LAND AREA 4,844 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Hartford Co., at East Berlin

  POPULATION 3,510,297

  WHITE 81.6%

  BLACK 9.1%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%

  ASIAN 2.4%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 9.4%

  UNDER 18 24.7%

  65 AND OVER 13.8%

  MEDIAN AGE 37.4

  CONNECTICUT

  Rick Moody

  Connecticut is a state that’s hard to love, but which I love anyhow, as one often loves what wounds—if only for the familiarity. It’s a state where almost nothing is made, where the affluence of the state as a whole is in marked contrast to the deprivation and desperation of the cities. A state where a veneer of propriety is belied by the acting-out behavior of citizens and politicians alike. A state where the preeminent approaches to life are rectitude and hypocrisy. A state of marshes, of estuaries, of farms that are no longer farmed. A state that you drive through, on the way to somewhere else, somewhere better. A white state, whose cities are black. A state well known for WASPs that is now largely kept up by Latinos. A state that does almost nothing first or best, but which did once, indisputably, build the finest roadway in the land.

  To enter the Merritt Parkway from the west, you do so from the Hutchinson River Parkway, which itself runs from the marshes of Co-Op City, in the Bronx, all the way to the Connecticut line. The Hutch is a pretty drive, but these days the last few miles are divided by ugly, industrial cement lane dividers that I’ve been told have one purpose only: to protect against multi-vehicle crashes featuring that monstrosity of postmodernity, the sport utility vehicle.

  But in this way you are carried onto the Merritt, onto 37.5 miles of verdant, hilly, narrow limited-access road that is now designated a National Scenic Byway. The Merritt, naturally, has avoided ugly, functional cement lane dividers. The Merritt, in all but a very few places, is never less than verdant, always quaint, always old-fashioned. It suggests a Connecticut of myth, a green and pleasant respite from the high velocity of city life.

  When this suburban artery appears in my dreams, as it often does, what I see are its forested passages and rolling hills, which were neither cut nor filled during the laborious construction process, begun in 1938, well before the interstate highway boom of the late forties and fifties. Recently, however, the parallel one hundred and fifty feet of green space that runs alongside the Merritt, procured back at the time of the original land acquisition, has come to the attention of the Department of Traffic planners, who’d love to get their hands on it in order to add some more lanes. The state is chipping away at every feature of the Merritt’s original design. There’s even legislation afoot to
permit longer vehicles to drive on the Merritt, thus ending the passenger-cars-only rule that has been on the books since the parkway was first opened. What’s to become of this beautiful and iconic roadway? And what becomes of the old idea of Connecticut if the Connecticut that was once visible from the parkway no longer exists?

  I moved out of state in 1975, when I went off to boarding school in New Hampshire. My mother, whose father had lived in Pelham, New York, moved back there herself. My father bought an apartment in Manhattan, and a house on Fishers Island, a possession of New York State that, according to legend, became New York State territory in a trade for Greenwich, Connecticut. Ever since my father bought that house I have been driving back and forth across Connecticut, almost always on the Merritt, to the Fishers Island Ferry Terminal in New London. To do so, I drive to the very end of the parkway, at the Housatonic River bridge. In the old days, this was a steel grid bridge, and it was very slippery. On the way across the Housatonic, then as now, you could see the Sikorsky helicopter factory, major supplier to the Pentagon (they build the Black Hawk helicopter, among other models), and one of the state’s largest remaining businesses.

  In the thirty years since I moved away, I have watched Connecticut pave itself over, bit by bit, town by town. The legendary New York City suburbs of Fairfield County, where I was raised, grow ever more like the metropolitan sections of New Jersey, full of McMansions and subdivisions. This despite the former importance of zoning to the development of Connecticut. I’ve watched the phenomenon of American Indian gambling pavilions in the eastern part of the state, and I’ve watched the further dilapidation of the cities, as one local politician after another is carted away to the penitentiary.

  Exit 28, among the first of several exits in Greenwich (where the Merritt begins), takes you off the parkway at Round Hill Road. That’s the street on which you will find, nestled among the estates, the legendary Round Hill Club, golfing destination of choice in Fairfield County and a summer spot for relaxation for the affluent of Greenwich when they’re not summering on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Greenwich has the highest per capita income ($99,300) in the county that has the highest per capita income in the state that has the highest per capita income in the country. When I was growing up, Greenwich had a strange, sinister allure. It was the place where all the power and glamour concentrated themselves. Its winding, leafy streets concealed houses owned by tennis players, musicians, captains of industry, and, as you know from the Martha Moxley narrative, a brace of distantly related Kennedys. All the kids seemed to go to Greenwich Country Day. They wore a lot of corduroy.

  In boarding school I met a lot of kids from Greenwich. Among them a young woman I’ll call Fiona (the other names here are also changed), whose family were regulars at the Round Hill Club. Her dad worked in finance. Her mom was an heiress. Both her parents had rather bad drinking problems. One day after graduation, though I had only a learner’s permit, I made off with my mother’s Olds Cutlass Supreme and drove from Pelham to Greenwich to locate Fiona. I took my brother and stepbrother with me. We had all been drinking. I believe we drank the whole way to Greenwich.

  By dead reckoning I turned a certain corner and found Fiona’s familial manse, just off the parkway. We got out of the car with the inflated self-regard of desperados. After I rang the doorbell and called out, Fiona turned up before us. Her mother stood at the far side of the turnaround in the driveway to watch suspiciously. Eventually, we were invited to go swimming in their pool, which, like everything else about the property was large. Something was wrong, and Fiona and her mother seemed to be arguing, and so ultimately we interlopers left, as precipitously as we had come. We took the interstate back to Pelham, and I scraped the Olds on the side of the garage door and didn’t tell my mother about it. This episode seems to me now to reek of Connecticut, to reek of the melancholy, desperation, and drunkenness that lie below the pristine surfaces of the richest county in the richest state.

  But it’s just the beginning. Five years later, I met Fiona again at a dance recital. She’d been to a school out West that specialized in modern dance, and for her M.F.A. she was about to apply to a similar program at Tisch School of the Arts in New York. She was a lesbian. With a very bad drinking problem. I had one too. We were imperfect for each other. Especially since there was a girlfriend with whom she lived.

  Soon, it was Fiona and I who were living together, except that we were both sleeping around on the side and drinking a lot. In the interval, her parents had divorced. Occasionally we went to the Round Hill Club to visit with Fiona’s dad. Her mom, in exile from the country club set, was showing signs of what turned out to be a very bad case of anorexia. In Fiona’s family, problems of this sort ran on the distaff line.

  After the divorce, her mom got a little rental unit in Greenwich, not far off the Merritt. Fiona and I were now not only drinking a lot but consuming (to our subsequent regret) an abundance of cocaine.

  One morning, Fiona said: “No one’s heard from my mother for three days.” We didn’t panic at first. It was just one of those things that wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Barely concealed addictions, her eating disorder, these made for a fair amount of undependability. It was a day or two later that Fiona got the call. Her mother had been found dead in her rental in Greenwich. Diet aids had apparently helped to engender sudden heart failure in her late forties.

  The Merritt Parkway arcs around a manmade pond in Greenwich, created as a by-product of parkway construction. It once had a few picnic tables for those who intended to watch the Sunday drivers. The road then passes through Stamford. I’m leaving out the Stamford exit that heads downtown, because almost everyone in Connecticut wishes that the state had no cities, that its cities were relocated elsewhere. The Connecticut cities are hives of civic corruption (Bridgeport, Waterbury), or else are simply being emptied (Hartford, New London) because of an almost total absence of industry. These cities are well known for their criminal activity, for their gangs, for their political corruption, and for draining the state coffers of its tax monies. The Merritt avoids these cities almost entirely and so manages to preserve its stylized beauty. In fact, probably what the Merritt Parkway does, by avoiding the cities, and connecting instead the affluent villages of the state of Connecticut with the megalopolis to its south, is promote a notion of the bedroom community. The suburbs of Connecticut are the institutional model for suburbs everywhere else. Brookline, Massachusetts; Grosse Point, Michigan; Oak Park, Illinois—they all follow a model developed in Westchester and Fairfield counties—the satellites of wealth and power that orbit around New York City, the first great city of the New World. These suburbs, made possible by commuter railroads and limited-access roadways, were founded on notions that, through the dissemination of Connecticut, would work everywhere: Build good public (and private) schools, zone relentlessly, drive out minorities.

  Stamford, at Exit 34 (where Route 104 runs into the city center), is where the people of color of Connecticut landed during LBJ’s Great Society. (The same neighborhood now houses numerous corporations, or divisions thereof: Conair, Pitney Bowes, MXEnergy, Time Warner Cable, etc., bent on avoiding the taxation in the city of New York.) Of this and other fiscally challenged metropolises, you can get a better idea from I-95, which visits them all. Exit 34, Long Ridge Road, like its relative at Exit 35, High Ridge Road, gives access to the north side of Stamford, where we moved when we were, relatively speaking, poor. I was nine years old, my brother was seven, my sister twelve. This was after my parents divorced, and my mother, as happened in those days, got custody. There was a rule about her not moving farther than fifty miles away. My father stayed in Darien (Exit 37) where we’d lived before the separation. We set ourselves up in Stamford, in 1970, and I started that fall at Northeast Elementary School.

  For a number of reasons, Northeast was completely different from school in Darien. For example: Jewish kids! I didn’t even know what Jewish meant.

  Two boys who lived on my street,
Bruce and Steve, both of them Jewish, wore their hair longer than we were allowed to, and sported bell-bottoms of a particularly unrepentant variety. Though my mother was always trying to dress me like I would be an accountant when I grew up, they made some efforts to befriend me.

  Both were well informed in sexual matters. Despite the disintegration of my own family, which had more than a little to do with extra-marital nonsense, I knew nothing about sex. Bruce and Steve filled me in with torrents of specifics and with exhibits, beginning, for example, with Bruce’s mother’s vibrator. Or was it her dildo? We also saw her prescription for birth control pills. A further lesson involved an explanation of the burden of menstruation.

  Later in life, when I was at the Jewish Museum for a literary event, I ran into Bruce, after thirty or more years. And it was he who had, in fact, become an accountant.

  Another friend at Exit 35, or thereabouts, was an African-American kid named Hampton. Hampton was funny, imperturbable, athletic, gregarious. I liked him a lot. However, as with the Jewish kids, I knew nothing about African-American kids. I was dimly aware that difference was important, or at least that conflict adhered to this idea of difference. But I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it. Did I have a responsibility? Should I have known that I came from a part of the world that was racially, ethnically, and religiously homogenous, as a lot of Connecticut still is, and that because of this I needed to make an effort to show some respect? One day Hampton asked me if I would come over to his house to play, and I froze. In Darien, I’d gone to visit a friend and found detritus everywhere, newspapers piled high, dishes with food encrusted all over the place, empty bottles, trash. Later, I understood that this friend’s parents had fallen out of life somehow. With drink probably. At the time I couldn’t understand how anyone could live there and not experience family life as a kind of imprisonment.