by Tracy Kidder
In his first years as a cop, when he worked the midnight shift, and it was very early in the morning and almost everyone else was still asleep, Tommy would drive west toward the forested part of Northampton. Out Ryan Road to West Farms Road, then up a dirt track toward the top of a hill that he thought of as Turkey Hill. There, deep woods behind and an open vista before him, he’d get out of his patrol car, his coffee cup in hand, and, gazing toward Mount Tom, watch the sun rise over a corner of Northampton. He could see some of the town laid out below and imagine the rest, and he felt lordly, watching Northampton emerge from the dark, almost as if he were watching its creation, almost as if it all belonged to him.
Years ago, on foot patrol downtown, he’d walk into an alley off Main Street and imagine that a great metropolis lay at the other end. But he knew he was scarcely a big-city cop, and, he often told himself, he was better off for that. A lot of those cops spent half their careers doing nothing but traffic work, whereas he dealt with all sorts of crimes and problems. Real trouble arose less frequently here than in many places that called themselves cities, but he figured he could work in Northampton for forty years and, on the day he retired, his successor would still have plenty to do. In the meantime, he’d be working in a place where, he often told himself, a cop could make a difference.
It would be hard to prove that police work matters more where it’s needed less, but sometimes he could have an effect inconceivable in a large and violent city. One day back in 1993, a former member of the Latin Kings gang hailed Tommy and told him that a carload of Kings had just tried to abduct him. And they would have succeeded, this young man said, if Tommy hadn’t happened to drive by and scare them off. “The Kings got a termination out on me,” the former member said. Tommy took off after the car. He stopped it at downtown’s busiest intersection, right in front of the courthouse. Although he knew he was on shaky legal ground, Tommy ordered the young men out of the car and searched it—the kind of decision that had made him most unpopular among several local defense attorneys.
A crowd of citizens had gathered on the corner. Aware of many eyes on him, Tommy thought he might as well state his case publicly. He’d found necklaces of gang beads in the car. He held them up for all the crowd to see, and he bellowed at the young men, “Gang activity in Northampton will not be tolerated! You will not come to Northampton wearing your colors and displaying gang signs!”
The young men denied that they were Latin Kings.
Really? Tommy asked. Then how come they were wearing T-shirts that read ALMIGHTY LATIN KING NATION?
“Yo, man, you can have my shirt,” one of them said, disrobing on the spot.
About a year after that incident, Tommy was talking to a former gang member named Felix, a young man he’d known as a baby. Tommy asked him if many gangsters came to Northampton, and Felix said, “No, not too many, man. They don’t want to come here. They get hassled by cops. Yeah, they say you, O’Connor! They say you go up there and the bald-headed cop takes your shirts!”
It isn’t given to many to know a town as well as Tommy knew Northampton. A state detective friend who had never worked a long time in one place occasionally called Tommy to ask for information about Northampton residents. A certain person had come to his attention. Did Tommy know him? The detective would start laughing as Tommy answered, without a moment’s hesitation, “Yup, he’s going out with Daisy. Hangs at the Information Booth. Drives a blue Mustang. You want the license number?” This really was the right-sized town for him. Working here, he could arrest the person who was selling cocaine to his friend’s kid. He could make a gang think twice about colonizing the place, just by taking a youngster’s T-shirt.
He was thirty-three years old, and it seemed like an enviable way to spend the next thirty years, working in a town he could see entirely and feel he understood, all in one view from the top of Turkey Hill. Tempting from up there to think that he could protect it all, and keep it just as orderly and safe as it had seemed when he was a boy.
On his way home to Jean after the evening shift ended, Tommy almost always took a last drive down Forbes Avenue, through his old neighborhood. This was called performing a check on “the well-being.”
One summer evening, Tommy had been sitting with his father on the screened porch facing the street, and he’d seen a couple of young men he knew very well playing hacky-sack in the front yard of the house next door. A heroin addict and thief, and a drug dealer supposedly connected to an Asian gang from Lowell—both had moved in next door to his father. Tommy was sitting there, astonished, when a car pulled up and another familiar young man got out and walked up the path to that neighboring house, carrying a huge, potted, robust-looking marijuana plant.
Tommy went inside and called Peter Fappiano, the current drug detective, and told him to come in the back door of his father’s house. Together they wrote up an affidavit for a search warrant. They found the pot, but not the pot, as Tommy put it. They couldn’t arrest his father’s new neighbors. So Tommy called the owner of that house and told him about his tenants. Tommy also told the landlord the government might confiscate his house—which was most unlikely. Tommy laid it on thick. By the end of the conversation the man was apologizing. Two days later those renters were gone. “It’s not the neighborhood for them,” Tommy said afterward. “Even if they hadn’t been doing anything wrong.”
All had been peaceful ever since, and was peaceful still on these summer nights, as he made his last night watchman’s checks on Forbes Avenue, his car windows down, the cicadas and tree frogs filling up the air with insistent, inland sea sounds, summoning memories. The morning cry of “E-awkee!” The delicious feeling of grass and pavement on bare feet—you went barefoot and toughened up your feet, because that was what Indians did. Driving slowly down Forbes Avenue, the place full of living ghosts, he could imagine the promise of snow in the warm moist August air. It wouldn’t be very long before he and his pals had headed out for fresh territory, dragging toboggans toward Hospital Hill.
Tommy would pause in his car for a moment in front of his father’s house. Thinking of his mother, he looked for the flickering light in the living room windows that signaled Bill was watching TV. Then he drove away toward bed, the world of home and neighborhood and town still intact behind him.
Northampton’s day, it might be said, officially begins around nine, when the mayor walks into the Castle, city hall, at the apex of Main Street’s broad curve. On her way upstairs to her office, the mayor—Mary Ford, a heavy woman in her fifties—walks down a high-ceilinged corridor, past wooden doors darkened with age. Only the elevator, which she usually rides, looks modern. City hall speaks of ancestry and evolution. The old woodwork and the small signs that stick out beside doorways, representing just a handful of the city’s twenty-five departments—“Board of Health,” “Retirement,” “City Auditor,” “City Treasurer,” “City Clerk”—make the place feel like a museum of complex, everyday necessity. Those who still dream of transporting American-style democracy to fledgling republics, all at once and in one piece, might well despair at the sight.
Local government has functioned here for 341 years. It has been continuous back far beyond memory, back beyond its occupation of this century-old building. The mayor isn’t a native—she grew up in Pennsylvania—but she doesn’t represent a newfangled breach of tradition. Calvin Coolidge was mayor of Northampton, and he didn’t grow up here either.
Letters, computer printouts, forbiddingly thick bound documents cover the mayor’s desk, a sturdy oak table. The room makes you think of musty rugs and mothballs. She sits beside a huge old double-hung window. She could look out over rooftops toward the Holyoke Range, if there weren’t an air conditioner plugged into the lower half of the window, and if the blinds above weren’t lowered. She works mainly under fluorescent light. Visitors sit in straight-backed chairs lined up in front of her desk. Her aides, Mike and Corinne, sit in them now. This day starts with a long-range strategy session. The mayor stands at an e
asel. On a huge sheet of paper she’s laid out the big picture of what she hopes to accomplish during the rest of this term and her next. She will run unopposed this November, so she doesn’t have to campaign. She has two years and several months more in office, guaranteed. “It’s a big luxury. I can put my stamp on things,” she says.
On her easel she has written, “Jobs,” “Schools,” “Community Building,” and placed long lists under each. These include items like “Marketing Outreach” and “Efficiency,” “Morale” and “Computer Progress,” “Homeless” and “Old Buildings,” “Coke—When Is Peaking?” and “School Change?” One notices the question marks. It looks as if the budget might be balanced by next year, just one year later than she first planned. Barring disaster, that is. She wonders whether they’ll have enough free cash to plow the streets if it snows a lot this winter and whether they shouldn’t take out snow insurance. The new Coca-Cola factory is running, but not at full capacity—all two hundred new jobs may not materialize if Americans don’t take to the drink Fruitopia. A crack has appeared in the junior high’s new swimming pool, still under construction. She worked very hard, along with others, to persuade the town to improve the junior high. “And I’m proud of it. Because it’s a very positive thing for the community,” she says. Then she laughs, hard enough to shake all over. “But if the swimming pool crumbles, that’s it. That’s my career, down the tubes.” Northampton’s mayor still doesn’t directly control the various financial departments or the Department of Public Works. (“You don’t control the DPW?” the mayor of Somerville once asked Mayor Ford. “Then what’s the point of being mayor?”) And, of course, the mayor has little control over what the state government does, and no real way of redressing the fact that new state educational funding formulas unfairly penalize Northampton and threaten her dreams of improving the schools.
Standing beside her easel, the mayor sums up the prospects, in a high, cheery voice. “Hard as it is to change anything, it’s even harder because there are so many structures in place.” She chuckles. “And we may end up with very little change.”
Her aides return to their desks. Mayor Ford sits down at hers. She has just begun to sort through all the papers there, when through the open door Corinne calls, “Mary, the chamber of commerce is here.” After the chamber comes a woman from the Feldenkrais Learning Center, who wants to sell the city classes for its clerks, classes in how to avoid the injuries of deskbound life. “All those new phrases in my head,” the mayor murmurs afterward. “ ‘Surviving in a culture of chairs.’ ” All morning long the big picture on her easel atomizes. One who has mastered the Esperanto of the managerial class might say that even on “proactive” days she is forced to be “reactive.” A parade of petitioners comes and goes—the chair of the volunteer committee that is trying to arrange for a new fire station, various department chiefs, her son in search of lunch money. And the phone keeps ringing. Corinne calls from the outer office, “Mary, someone who can’t make the Cable TV Committee meeting tonight wants to speak to you about what she feels is the lack of public-access programming.”
Then Tom, her budget analyst, walks in. The mayor tells him that the personnel director wants her to spend some money on Feldenkrais training.
“That’s going to be the least of your worries, after you hear all of this,” says Tom. He hands her a draft of next year’s budget.
The mayor gazes at the sheaf of papers, then cries out, “We’ll only have a hundred and fifty thousand in free cash by January, before snow season?”
Tom narrows his eyes and stares at her.
“Okay, okay, okay,” she says. The mayor takes out a package of antacids and gobbles one.
The old town clock on the stone steeple of the First Church is telling the wrong time over Main Street. It is nearly two o’clock, in fact. A code of studied informality seems to guide most of the people on the sidewalks. Women tend to wear pants and not skirts, clogs and not pumps. In every street scene, people assert something, through the ways that they dress and act. But what do they say here? No one seems in a great hurry, but many seem serious. No one dresses to say, “I’m rich.” If anything, most say with their costumes, “I’m smart.” Many could be blue-collar workers or perpetual graduate students, or both. Or financiers. Guessing professions on Main Street is tricky.
When you see people in suits, though, it’s a good bet they work at the courthouse. Two such men stroll side by side past the First Church. Court recesses at one o’clock and resumes at two. They are heading back from lunch. The tall one is a middle-aged lawyer, the other a rather small, trim man of about fifty, with wire-rimmed glasses, gray hair, and a full gray beard. He looks detached from time, like a historical figure. This would be Judge W. Michael Ryan, of the District Court. He is a native and a former district attorney. The first time he ran for D.A., he came in fifth in a field of five candidates. “I never could decide if it was because I wasn’t well enough known, or too well-known,” he likes to say. “Probably the latter.”
Now from behind his beard comes a brightening look, in his eyes and around his mouth, a suggestion that he has tasted and enjoyed what he’s about to say. “Between the two of us we probably know almost everyone in town,” Judge Ryan tells his friend. “But we probably only know a few of the same people.” He points across Main Street toward a chain drugstore. “You look over there and you see CVS. I see Woolworth’s where I used to go as a kid.” The judge pauses. “As we walk down this street, we see two completely different towns.”
This piece of wisdom, the ascendancy of the subjective, dominates a lot of contemporary thought. Of course, the judge is right. Viewed through the eyes of individual inhabitants, all places are disparate, Northampton notably so.
It has achieved numerical stability through flux—about two-thirds of native children leave when they grow up, and newcomers replace them. Some of its thirty thousand residents work elsewhere and some people come from elsewhere to work here. A sizable proportion, about 16 percent, are students, and another 5 percent or so provide education at all levels, but Northampton is far from being a mere college town. About 13 percent of residents are children under eighteen, about 11 percent have retired, about 5 percent describe themselves as “home-makers” (all but a few female), only about 2 percent are unemployed, and about 10 percent make up what could be loosely called the working class. For a town its size, Northampton has an unusually large number of lawyers, doctors, clergy, judges. An extraordinary number, about two hundred, work in the psychological trade—a few earn half their incomes analyzing fellow analysts. The yearly census leaves it up to citizens to define themselves however they choose. A number pursue fairly unusual professions. There is a stump grinder, a storyteller, a quilter, a missionary, a rugby coach, a rug restorer, a buttonmaker, a weapons technician, a kayaker, an opera singer, a ballet accompanist, a bridal consultant, a fish smoker, an aircraft mechanic, three brewers, and three millwrights. A fair number of academics eschew the simple title “professor” and call themselves economists, astronomers, historians, philosophers. Northampton also has an aesthetician and a nail technician, a comedian, a green thumb, a collector, a domestic engineer. It has two residents who describe themselves as poets and one who calls herself a factotum, also two copy consultants, one key associate, one feminist, and five activists.
All those eyes see many different towns. The Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Pride March, once a rather grim and tense affair, has become a peaceful rite of spring and the March for Jesus follows, a few weeks later. The largest denomination in town is Roman Catholic. The largest single church is Christian evangelical, which stands for salvation through Christ, and the second largest is Unitarian Universalist, where God isn’t usually mentioned and parishioners are encouraged to create their own systems of belief. In the one, the hymns are soft rock tunes, and in the other, classical—played on a Steinway and an organ, occasionally a flute. Meanwhile, New Age mysticism flourishes here. The town has American Legion baseball and
contra dancing, a small Buddhist church and a very active Elks club, homes that cost $400,000 and many boardinghouses and halfway houses. Somehow it works. Northampton is the kind of place where a professor, potter, unemployed musician, former mental patient, a woman with a handsome alimony, can all be found on Sunday mornings sitting near one another at sidewalk tables outside the coffee shops. Somehow—is it the sum of unconcerted efforts?—a cohesive property seems to bind the place, as if it were a liquid held by surface tension.
Dave McDowell is a giant of a man. He came close to winning the national collegiate wrestling championship some years ago, and was invited to try out for the Dallas Cowboys. He couldn’t imagine why he’d want to play football, though, when he had a chance to go to seminary. Dave never sweats or shouts when he preaches, in the old gym of the former Northampton School for Girls, but he packs them in. The Episcopal priest sometimes sneaks over in mufti to listen. Dave’s church, the evangelical College Church, was the first in town to provide emergency shelter for the homeless. It also runs a clinic for people without health insurance.