by Matt Weiland
My parents were not alone. Most in Brookline were rootless. Boston University and Boston College students were inhaled into its streets each fall and exhaled back to the nation every summer. My friend John Lin’s mother came to school every Chinese New Year with great greasy paper bags of homemade shrimp toast. My next-door neighbor’s father grew up in Denmark and made his own bread and put actual candles on his Christmas tree. And I made my friends and my world among the professors’ kids and the children of divorce who traveled to Brookline like pilgrims.
Every summer during college, I would work at the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater, a beautiful old cinema from the 1920s famous for its double features of art films and samurai movies. I saw Annie Hall there when I was nine years old. And that’s what I did instead of playing soccer. Coolidge Corner is Brookline’s commercial hub, home to the famed S.S. Pierce Building, which in turn once housed that great and noble failed experiment in single-subject retailing, “Pudding It First.”
I had been working at the Coolidge since high school, and it was a very pleasant job. The primary responsibilities were selling tickets to the art films, directing patrons to the theater, making popcorn, melting butter, and then nothing. While it did not pay much, it offered hour upon hour of glorious nothing: the kind of perfect balance between work and wise silence that the Brook Farmers could only have dreamed of.
This nothing might be spent sitting on the blue bench on the street, reading and watching the slow river of Harvard Street roll by, a parade of childhood friends and local eccentrics (the skirted man, the bearded woman). Or visiting friends at other nearby merchants—the young English majors at the bookstore, or Jay at the record store, or the woman at the Coffee Connection who would eventually become my wife—and getting free things from them, knowing that I had the power to admit them gratis to Wings of Desire in return, in the spirit of perfect cooperation.
My favorite place in the theater was the old-fashioned glass ticket booth. I would lock myself in, cramped up at the knees by the ticket machine, everything smelling of oil and metal and cigarette smoke. I would watch Brookline, and contemplate, and hatch my scheme. When I was done with college, I would move back, and get all my friends to move back, and everything would be the same, forever. I would form my own utopia … my own home … amazingly, impossibly, right in my own hometown.
I certainly had a lot of time to dream of that utopia in that booth, my cabin in the woods, because I really wasn’t selling a whole lot of tickets. I dreamed it watching the record store close, and the Coffee Connection close. I dreamed it as friends who were moving away came and said good-bye and kissed the glass that separated me from the world. I dreamed it as I watched two women march before the theater, chanting in thick Russian accents: “Help keep this theater from demolishing,” because it had been sold, and its future was uncertain. I dreamed it watching the Brookline sky, so wide and liquid blue, not a building over six stories high in sight, turn purple and dark. I watched the time pass, and I hated every minute of it.
The Brook Farm community failed in 1847. It had always struggled financially, and then things grew difficult when, a few years earlier, its founder became enamored of Charles Fourier and his very specific idea of communal living.
Very specifically, his idea was that everyone should live in the same building, called a Phalanstery, which would house workshops, living quarters, dining halls, libraries, salons—everything that life might offer under the same enormous, enormous roof. And, really, why would anyone not want to live that way—a whole life, from work to study to sex, in a single ship-like building, adrift in a wilderness? They were building the Phalanstery when it caught fire and burned down. For some reason, they didn’t try building it again. No one came back to utopia after that, not even its founder.
I live in New York City now, largely because the woman who would become my wife told me she was moving here. We’ve been here for thirteen years, and I have not regretted my betrayal, though I do not call myself a “New Yorker.”
You may be surprised to learn, though, that I still live part time in Massachusetts. I certainly was surprised to learn it.
Here is what happened.
About twenty years ago, my parents sold the sixteen-room house, and as you might guess, this gave them enough capital for two normal houses and a college education for me. They found one normal house in the eastern end of Brookline, the very last block of the town before Boston, right in the shadow of Fenway Park, if you can believe it, because I guess they had a sense of humor.
The other was a small, 1970s-era junk-modern cabin with a sloping roof and unfinished solar heating system in the hills of western Massachusetts.
The house is at the northern end of the Pioneer Valley, a cluster of little towns and farms and closed mills that follow the twining routes of the Connecticut River and I—91, north from Springfield, through Northampton and Deerfield and Greenfield all the way up to Vermont. There are cornfields and dairy farms and incongruous fields of shade tobacco for cigar wrappers, the leaves still dried in long, beat-up shacks that hug the road. And for every field, there’s a fall: Turner’s Falls, Miller’s Falls, Shelburne Falls, etc., because surrounding the river are high, rolling hills cut through with swift little rivers that used to power all sorts of mills.
We had been coming out to the Hill Towns for years. My mother had a good friend who had grown up in Greenfield, named Jackie, and from time to time we would spend weekends with her in her little three-room house that hung over the North River at the end of a then-unnamed road. Jackie got her mail by walking across a condemned bridge to go to the general store. On one side of her house was a barely marked path cutting steeply down to the river, its banks of solid rocks cut over millennia into “potholes,” natural round basins full of dark water and little flies. On the other side of the house were her only neighbors, a family who seemed to collect stray dogs and snowmobiles.
I am not trying to give you the impression that this was charming. Rather, I mean to say that as beautiful as the area was, and as much fun as I had there, it was all tinged by the reasonable fear that I was going to fall off a bridge, be bit by a dog, lose my footing on a hill, crack my head open on a slippery rock, and drown. This was not the Berkshires, with its quaint inns and twilight picnics where you would listen to the Boston Symphony Orchestra while eating pasta salad on a soft lawn surrounded by fireflies. This was a cluster of anxious, struggling little towns full of failed and failing businesses, badly constructed houses, and people sitting outside them, staring at you as you drove by.
An hour south, the traveler will find Northampton and Amherst—former homes of Calvin Coolidge and Emily Dickinson. These two prosperous towns host five intensely liberal liberal arts colleges, including Hampshire, which has granted at least one degree, I happen to know, in stand-up comedy. But up here, this was what those college kids called “Massatucky,” which is cruel and unfair to both Massachusetts and Kentucky, but you get the picture.
There was an organic market in Shelburne Falls, though, and a store selling middle-aged hippie jewelry and intricate blown-glass sculptures that looked like little planets. From time to time, Jackie would ruefully comment that the area was being invaded by New Yorkers, buying up weekend homes and studio space on the cheap. But I never saw any evidence of it, and even as a teenager I thought she was insane. Why would someone from New York drive four hours to come here for the weekend? Didn’t New York have its own depressed former mill towns to visit?
It made more sense that the hills would be invaded by moneyed folk just two hours away, from Brookline, for example. And so my mother decided to look for a place there. She wanted a house by a river, like Jackie’s, but since you can’t build on the river anymore, those are hard to come by. Instead she bought the junk-modern cabin on the side of a hill next to what had been a pond, until the beavers dammed it up into a bog. She and my dad would spend weekends there. And I would visit with the woman who was now my wife. And some years later,
my mother died, and not long after, Jackie died as well. (That’s how it goes with cancer; if you don’t know it yet, you will eventually.) My dad had lost interest in the place, or could not bear it any more. And I once again found myself with a home in Massachusetts.
It was not a very good or big house, and at nights the bugs came up from the bog fiercely. But we were not rich, and the night stars were bright and dazzling and free. We had children, and we began carting them up there for the better part of the summer out of the feeling that they would benefit from the opportunity to run around in a space larger than a living room.
The area has come up in the world somewhat, largely on the back of scented candles. Surely the traveler is familiar with Yankee Candle, with its massive compound of candles, housewares, and year-round Christmas supplies in Deerfield—“The Scenter of the Universe?” We spent a couple of school vacations and hot summers there, in relatively pleasant but absolute and unremitting isolation, enjoying it to some degree; to some degree wondering what we were doing.
The time came though, not long ago, when our two children were growing larger, and the house was growing more junky than ever, and the sentimental pleasure of keeping up my mother’s failed colony in the hills was beginning to wear off. We were about to give up and sell it, when something happened.
Our neighbor came over. It was amazing. He just walked across the street, Samoset-like, to say: “Welcome, strangers.” He had his daughter with him, a year older than my own. He and his wife were locals, but they had just bought the land across the street and built a house there. I told him I hadn’t even noticed. By then our two daughters were playing. I stood there, not knowing what to do.
“Would you like a ginger ale?” I said.
And he said yes, and luckily I had some ginger ale, and for the first time in the dozen years my mother and I had had the house, we had company.
I explained to him that we were probably going to move, because the house was too small and falling apart. We watched our daughters playing. And he said, “Did I mention I build and renovate houses?”
Then another thing happened. Looking for Internet access, I found myself in a used bookstore thirty minutes south, by yet another little river, in a converted grist mill. They had free wireless there, and a café. The café had been started by a young couple, she from Amherst, he from Texas. They both had nose rings and big ideas about having readings and concerts in the café, and selling vegetarian food and carefully selected wines.
But just to be clear, they were not assholes. They were lovely and smart, and they sold “Cowboy Coffee” with the grounds left in the bottom. Every time someone bought a cup and finished it, they would take a Polaroid and put it on the wall. I looked around and saw dozens and dozens of young people, old people, locals, college kids, Massholes and Massatuckians and dozens more, all holding up their empty cups, grinning through the caffeine haze, initiated into their own little coffee utopia.
“I would like to have some of that coffee,” I said. “I would like to be on that wall.”
“OK,” said the young couple.
And I drank it, and it was terrible. And then I had my picture taken. I was a New Yorker now, and I had invaded. But I felt more at home in Massachusetts than ever.
“What is that television show?” I asked, pointing to a tiny TV.
“We have a closed circuit link to the baby eagles that have just been hatched at the local bird sanctuary,” they said.
“That sounds perfectly reasonable,” I said.
“That is,” they said, “unless there is a Red Sox game on.”
And I stopped and I thought about it for a moment. And then I said, “That sounds perfectly reasonable, too.”
MICHIGAN
CAPITAL Lansing
ENTERED UNION 1837 (26th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From an Indian word meaning “great or large lake”
NICKNAME Wolverine State or Great Lake State
MOTTO Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice (“If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around you”)
RESIDENTS Michigander
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 15
STATE BIRD robin
STATE FLOWER apple blossom
STATE TREE white pine
STATE SONG “My Michigan” and “Michigan, My Michigan”
LAND AREA 56,804 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Wexford Co., 5 mi. NNW of Cadillac
POPULATION 10,120,860
WHITE 80.2%
BLACK 14.2%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.6%
ASIAN 1.8%
HISPANIC/LATINO 3.3%
UNDER 18 26.1%
65 AND OVER 12.3%
MEDIAN AGE 35.5
MICHIGAN
Mohammed Naseehu Ali
In October of 1988, my parents—as if to punish me for some egregious offense deserving of banishment—took me, their first son, to the airport in Accra, Ghana’s capital city, and put me on a Boeing 747 bound for America. The departure hall, with its malfunctioning cooling system and creaky ceiling fans that only recycled trapped heat, was just as hot and humid as outside. When my flight was announced for boarding, the horde of family members who came to bid me good-bye huddled in a corner, and with hands and heads facing the heavens, prayed for my protection and well-being in America. My destination was Interlochen, a small northern Michigan town of 3,500 people. Six hundred of them were temporary residents of the Interlochen Arts Academy, where I was enrolled to begin my sophomore year of high school.
It was the first time I had left Ghana and the comfort of Hausa-Islamic culture, which, as a way of strengthening kinship and religious cohesion, emphasized doing everything—from praying and eating to traveling—in the company of other Muslims. I made my way alone across the ocean, first to New York, then to Detroit, and finally to Traverse City, at the northern tip of Michigan. As I headed west, everything got whiter: Of the four hundred or so passengers on the flight from Ghana, more than three-quarters were black. By the time we had crossed the Atlantic and I had switched to a smaller plane to Detroit, the percentage of black and white was roughly fifty-fifty. On the final leg of the trip, I was the only black person on the plane.
During the layover in Detroit, I headed for the payphone. An uncle had given me a roll of U.S. quarters and implored me to call him upon arrival or in case of emergency. I was excited to tell him I was here, in America! Also, I was supposed to use some of the quarters to call and notify school authorities that I was on my way—since all efforts to reach the admission’s office through Ghana Telecom had proven futile in the week before my departure. But not knowing how to use a payphone—and with a new immigrant’s timidity barring me from mustering the nerve to ask how—I bungled my way and somehow lost all but four of the quarters. I couldn’t understand the fast-paced American accent of the phone’s automated operator, and I was never sure exactly when to put in the coins—before or during or after conversation. It felt like playing a slot machine on which you could only lose. I boarded my third flight of the day without reaching my uncle.
Finally, almost exactly twenty-four hours after I had left West Africa, the puddle jumper that flew me gingerly over the lakes, marshlands, and deep pine forests of northern Michigan taxied onto the tarmac of the airport in Traverse City, known as the Cherry Capital Airport. Though my own research had warned me of the cold temperatures in northern Michigan, I realized during the short walk from the plane to the airport building that no amount of reading could have prepared anyone for such drastic climate change. Up to my arrival I had not experienced temperature below sixty degrees, and therefore wasn’t equipped with the biological or mental thermal gauge to be able to tell what cold—real cold—meant. I was wearing a fugu robe, a matching pair of loose pants, and a Hausa embroidered hat. I couldn’t have been more climatically out of place than a polar bear that suddenly finds itself in the middle of the West African bush.
I’d watched plenty of American movies, though, so I confidently assumed that ev
ery airport in America was the size of a small city. But there I was in an airport even smaller than the one in Accra. I had anxiously noted the absence of any other black person in the airport when we landed, and double-takes from other passengers were making me nervous. Within fifteen minutes of the propeller plane’s landing, the long, rectangular hall that served as arrival and departure halls was all but deserted. Of the handful of people remaining, I was the only passenger—the others were airline and airport employees. The baggage handler, who also served as airport custodian, began locking the doors and windows, and prepared to close the airport for the night. Perhaps my parents’ decision to send me off to a boarding school in the woods of northern Michigan was a punishment after all.
Beginning to panic, I headed to the airport’s phone booth, where I was almost sure the four quarters I had left would meet the same fate as the ones I had lost in Detroit. Just then a lady dressed in full airline employee accoutrement—white shirt, multi-colored scarf, and pressed, navy trousers—approached.
“Hello,” she said, warmly but with a hitch in her voice. She seemed kind but a little bewildered, which I took to be her reaction to the elaborate hand-stitched Ghanaian outfit I had on.
“Hello,” I said in a thick, Johnny-just-drop, Ghanaian-accented English.
“The airport will be closing in a few minutes. … Do you need any assistance with transportation or anything?”
I was so nervous I could only stammer: “I am going to Inta-low-chin. …”
She gave me a puzzled look. “Inta-low-chin?”
“Yes, Inta-low-chin Arts Academy,” I blurted out, thinking God help me, I may be in the wrong town altogether. “Oh, you mean Interlochen, the arts camp!” I couldn’t even pronounce the one word I needed most to know.
Michigan’s name is derived from the original French settlers’ bastardization of the Ojibwe tribe term, Mishigami, meaning “large water” or “large lake.” It is the only bi-peninsular state in the United States; it has the longest freshwater shoreline in the world, and the second longest total shoreline in the continental United States next to Alaska. After California and Florida, there are more recreational boats in Michigan than anywhere in America. Bounded by four of the five Great Lakes (Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Superior), and with hundreds of little lakes dotted all over the state, a person in Michigan is never more than six miles from a natural water source.