Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  That was why Til, even before he reached his teens, became the mainstay of the farm, working alongside a hired man and his aging grandfather, the cavalryman. He started by bicycling or hitchhiking the eight miles from Arlington to the McLean farm. But by the age of twelve, he was getting out of school by noontime and driving an automobile out there himself. Because few tractors were available during the war, he worked behind draft horses and a borrowed pair of mules.

  At an early age, Til Hazel repeatedly proved that he could be every bit as driven as his father. The family legend has him reading encyclopedias as he lay recovering from such dreadful maladies as appendicitis and acute poison ivy.

  But more significantly, working the farm was the means by which he gained contact with his father—and his approval.

  “We used to have kind of a routine session after dinner—if he was home. Before he made his evening rounds. Where we would discuss what had happened at the farm. What the plans were. He got a lot of enjoyment out of that. And I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.” His mother called that precious half-hour ritual the Men’s Club.

  It was not that Til Hazel held any romantic notions about the land. “I figured out it was better to do something at school. Because you sure in hell weren’t going to get very far on a farm. That was clear to me from day one.”

  So when a teacher advised her bright, hard-working, and precocious young ward that he really only had two choices—to go to Iowa State to study agriculture, or to go to Harvard—for Til the decision was easy. Hazel knew nothing about Harvard. His classmates thought the acme of achievement was to attend William and Mary in the Colonial Virginia capital of Williamsburg. But his father had taken a few courses at Harvard while working for the Public Health Service. “My father said, ‘That’s good. I know Harvard,’ ” Hazel recalls.

  With that ringing endorsement, Til—ever dutiful—went off in the direction he was pointed. He had no sense that anyone thought it a particularly big deal. One influential uncle even doubted Harvard would do a future Virginian much good. Til’s mother’s concern was that he have a good suit. His personal attitude was that if college was the next thing on the agenda, Cambridge had to be better than Ames.

  In 1947, Til Hazel left Northern Virginia for New England. He would remain distant from the affairs of Arlington and Fairfax for ten years, only a sporadic visitor until after completing Harvard Law and his stretch in the service in the Army Judge Advocate’s Corps.

  Of his final summers on the farm, however, two things stick in his mind. The first was what a pleasure it was finally to have a tractor. Photos of him on top of his McCormick-Deering Farmall International Harvester Model H—with those two tiny wheels snugged together up front—show a satisfied man. Cutting the wheat and barley and oats and rye of McLean by pulling a combine behind a tractor was infinitely better than working with horses and mules. He never sentimentalizes that experience.

  The other thing that remains with him was watching, as he was making hay, the building on the horizon of a place called Pimmit Hills. It was the area’s first big postwar subdivision—hundreds of three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, single-level, $7950 homes. “I remember looking over there, and they probably had fifty or seventy-five houses all being framed at once. It was a really big deal.” Hazel remembers a picture on the cover of Life just like it. “It was a general topic of conversation among the farmers. It was, ‘Goodness, look at all these new houses and look at how much good it’s doing in the area.’ It was a fraction of the agenda that you now have out of these things. You know, a very minimal understanding of all that went with it.” So minimal, in fact, that one of the things Hazel noticed in streams that watered milk cows were feces that had escaped the subdivision’s primitive sewage facility.

  But the pollution was by no means what people were talking about. It was the blessing of this new growth, this prosperity. It seemed a miracle. “It was a tremendous new change. I was generally alleged to have been a pretty serious kid and I was interested in what was happening and what it meant for the farms.”

  Indeed, almost nobody in America expected this. If anything, the lurking fear had been that the war years might end up being the high point of people’s lives. There was little reason to think life would be much different after the war from the way it had been before. With all the veterans returning home looking for jobs, most people figured America would return to the Depression. Had not Roosevelt tried everything to pull the nation out of its doldrums? Nothing had worked. Now half the world was in ashes, Roosevelt was in his grave, and his third vice president, a man almost no one knew, was in charge. This was a recipe for prosperity? The most strike-ridden year in American history was 1946. Shortages of meat were widespread In 1947, America’s GNP hit its lowest level since 1942, adjusted for inflation. The pessimists’ worst fears seemed confirmed. The reason the Hazel family has no photos of Til with his team of horses is probably simple. There was no reason to think that era would ever end.

  The rest—as the saying goes—is history.

  Michael Barone in Our Country refers to 1947 as “a hinge in American history, a time in which the country changed quite markedly from one thing to another.”

  Following 1948, America’s gross national product, adjusted for inflation, grew at an average rate of 4.0 percent every year, for twenty years. That kind of sustained boom was without precedent in the annals of mankind. America was changed forever.

  While Til Hazel was away from his homeland, meanwhile, other things happened that would reverberate in the decades to come, as they influenced his view of the land.

  First, as an undergraduate at Harvard College, Hazel majored in American history. He started with the Revolution, wherein it seemed every other hero was a Virginian who had trod the ground he knew so well—from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to George Mason. That led him backward into European and especially British history from 1500 on, because it related directly to the Revolutionary history with which he was entranced.

  Decades later, the fact that he had been an American history major was as dumbfounding to one interlocutor as was Hazel’s relationship to the land. What about the Civil War? he was asked. That seemed an important question to ask a man who had thought to build a mall next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. Great sweeps of the Civil War were fought in Virginia, from Manassas to Chancellorsville to the Wilderness to Appomattox. Did you study much history of the Civil War?

  No, he says. “The Civil War always struck me as a great waste and a great tragedy and, you know, I don’t know whether it was I don’t like to lose or not. But I just never got all wound up in the Civil War. I was never particularly intrigued by the Civil War, except as it relates to physical things. Did I identify with the Confederates? Yes, oh yes. You’ve got to if you’re raised in my family. Lots of courageous activity, lots of exciting things, but all for no danged good reason. When you say ‘Lost Cause,’ you’ve said it all.

  “It just seemed to me a great waste.”

  A few years after he came to that conclusion, a second thing happened.

  His father sold Til’s farm.

  The farm that was the basis of their relationship, the land on which Til had sweated to build a concrete-block barn for his younger brother, Bill, to milk cows and even live sometimes … The place designed to be the family’s salvation, where it could go to ground in hard times …

  His father sold it. To developers.

  Hazel claims to this day that the transaction was of no particular concern to him. After all, the farm had been replaced by a new and far grander one two counties west, in Fauquier County. “In those days,” says Til, “it never occurred to anybody that you weren’t supposed to use the land for whatever purpose it was needed.”

  But on the warm September day in 1989—the one that started out with Hazel pacing the tower in Tysons—Til ended up concentrating seriously. Back and forth he swung the giant Oldsmobile, trying to get his bearings amid the convoluted swirls of an old
subdivision three miles east. He was looking for some particularly huge old trees, much larger than the suburban growths nearby. He wanted to show them to a reporter. They were the last things left from the farm where he had turned himself into a man.

  “My father was big on something he called a scarlet oak. He got some and I planted ’em and watered ’em and pruned ’em and picked the caterpillars off until I thought I’d never ever want to see another oak tree. Hey, you know what? There they are over there. Well I’ll be damned. See that oak tree? Yeah, I planted that tree in 1940. And there’s a couple more. We had a house in the middle of ’em. Those are our trees right there. This was a cornfield. And the creek is right down here. Boy, getting across that creek was a big issue. Now that cinder-block barn was right about there. And this was our garden and the hog pen. We had a little orchard back there. And those are the trees we planted. Those are the famous scarlet oak trees. I’m going to come back in the fall and see what color they turn. Most red oaks just get kinda dirty red. But those get brilliant red. And Dad, who was not much of a nature type, somewhere heard about that, and he insisted we were going to have scarlet oaks.”

  In fact, Hazel said, the boy and his father had talked about it at length. It was during their ritual evening rendezvous in which they shared a little time, just the two of them. The news that this serious, husky man-child, soon to be eleven, brought home of the progress of the oaks pleased his father a great deal, Hazel said. And that pleased him.

  This, of course, all happened—before the earth had moved.

  III

  The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise

  Man aint really evil, he jest aint got any sense.

  —William Faulkner

  IF YOU READ America’s favorite poets and novelists long enough, you notice that the last time we went through so fundamental a change in how we build cities, something ended up deeply severed in our souls.

  The “last time” was especially the 1840s on. That’s when America began to end as a place marked primarily by farms and quaint burgs with names like Harlem and Greenwich Village. With the Industrial Revolution came an upheaval in which the majority of people no longer lived in and off the countryside, or on eccentric hamlet lanes. By the turn of the twentieth century they were drawn to those teeming, steaming cities epitomized by New York and Chicago and Pittsburgh. There, wealth and jobs were created with the vast, clanking, astoundingly complex machinery of the textile mills, the steel mills, and the steam locomotives. These cities were built triumphantly on man’s newfound abilities to slash the very dirt from the ground—limestone from Ontario to Indiana, iron ore from northern Michigan to Minnesota, and coal from Pennsylvania to West Virginia to Kentucky—and turn it into such miracles of organization and genius as the Model T.

  These brawny, brawling, muscular cities, the legacies of which are our old downtowns, became the centers of our civilization. They were the place where the arts and museums were most “sophisticated,” the mores most “broad-minded,” the politics the most “progressive,” the attitudes most “tolerant.” They were where the energy levels of enterprise were deemed highest, enlightenment most bright, and where the nation’s values were well enough represented that we acculturated our immigrants there; it was where we turned them into Americans.

  But in some very deep ways, we hated those cities. American literature is shot through with a sense that this wealth of cities, this sense of progress, this urbanization, came at a horrific price. It came with a pervasive feeling of dislocation, alienation, conflict, anxiety, and loss.

  Again and again, our most respected writers make their meaning most clear—we left behind something vitally important when we fled to these cities. You can see it in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost.

  What is mourned in hundreds of different ways is the same thing: the severing of our direct ties to nature and to the land. There is in the writings of these Americans a constant yearning for connectedness between society, landscape, and mind. They do not find peace in the noise and hurly-burly of the big city, this land of the Machine. In 1844, Hawthorne sat down in a wood near Concord, Massachusetts, locally known as Sleepy Hollow, to record “such little events as may happen.” In the middle of his literary reverie, a steam locomotive—only recently invented—ripped through. With sudden abruptness it disrupted Hawthorne’s sense of time, nature, and reality. According to the cultural historian Leo Marx, “The train stands for a more sophisticated, complex style of life than the one represented by Sleepy Hollow; the passengers are ‘busy men, citizens from the hot street …’ The harsh noise evokes an image of intense, overheated, restless striving—a life of ‘all unquietness’ like that associated with great cities as far back as the story of the Tower of Babel.”

  Hawthorne’s was not an isolated flummox. For Americans, Leo Marx observed, “regenerative power is located in the natu ral terrain: access to undefiled, bountiful, sublime Nature is what accounts for the virtue and special good fortune of Americans. It enables them to design a community in the image of a garden, an ideal fusion of nature with art. The landscape thus becomes the symbolic repository of value of all kinds—economic, political, aesthetic, religious.

  “A strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth—since 1844, this motif appears everywhere in American writing … It is a complex, distinctly American form.”

  We are bound up in this conflict to this day. Our most fashionable foods and fibers are ones that are “natural.” The rugged individual at ease with the forces of nature even sells cigarettes, from the Camel man in his ravine-ringed Jeep to the Marlboro man on his backlit bronco. Families that have managed to find a “little place”—ten acres or so—“in the country”—a few hours’ drive beyond their homes—“that needs some work”—it’ll cost them a fortune—are envied. Others are eager to hear their tales. Seventy-six percent of all Americans describe themselves as environmentalists. There is precious little else about which we so thoroughly agree.

  Sigmund Freud was astonished by this yearning for “freedom from the grip of the external landscape … How has it come about that so many people have adopted this strange attitude of hostility to civilization?”

  But it is hardly an immature romanticism that drives this American idea. In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx argued that it was basic to the American psyche. In 1844 Wordsworth wrote a sonnet protesting the building of a railroad through the Lake District. Marx noted: “By placing the machine in opposition to the tranquillity and order located in the landscape, he makes it an emblem of the artificial, of the unfeeling … It is a token of what he likes to call the ‘fever of the world.’ ”

  In America this reinforces two contradictory world views that today are everywhere at war. These are the ones we have traced back to the very beginnings of America. The Virginia Cavaliers, arriving in Jamestown in 1607, looked out over the landscape and in their letters home wrote that this untrammeled nature is no less than a miraculous, bounteous Eden. Thirteen years later, the Pilgrims hove to off the coast of Massachusetts, and what they reported was a vision of unredeemed demonic Hell. This land would have no hope, yield no value, until it had been tamed by the civilizing influence of man.

  The dichotomy endures to this day. One sees the untouched land as an object of veneration, a source of spiritual strength. The other sees the land as a commodity to be used and exchanged for money, like any other. This division is crystallized in the reactions people have when they suddenly come upon a bulldozer as it bites into an “unspoiled” landscape. How you feel about the abrupt appearance of this Machine in the Garden is doubtless predicated on your idea of “progress.”

&n
bsp; Robert Nisbet, in History of the Idea of Progress, demonstrated that the basic notion was set up by the Greeks and Romans. The idea of progress originated in the belief that mankind has slowly, gradually, and continuously advanced from an original condition of cultural deprivation, ignorance, and insecurity to higher levels of civilization, and that such advancement will, with only occasional setbacks, continue. The Greeks saw the natural growth in knowledge over time as progress that would yield the natural advance of the human condition. The early Christians believed the spiritual perfection of mankind would culminate in a golden age of happiness on earth, a millennium ruled by the returned Christ. They got this idea in part from the Jews, who believed that history was divinely guided. As early as Augustine’s The City of God, Nisbet reported, all the essential terms of Utopia were in place: affluence, security, equity, freedom, tranquillity, and justice.

  When knowledge of the New World arrived in Europe, the possibilities seemed unlimited. By 1750, progress was not simply an important idea among many; it had become the overwhelming idea. From it were hung yearnings for equality, social justice, and popular democracy under law. These aspirations, attached to progress, were no longer deemed desirable; they were believed inevitable. Soon, freedom and liberty became thought of as necessary to progress. More important, they became seen as the very goal of progress—an ever-ascending realization of freedom, to the most remote future. That was why the opening shot of the American Revolution was the one heard round the world.

  By the 1800s, the idea of progress was no longer dependent on divine guidance. It was attached instead to faith in reason, science, and technology—the works of man himself. Then, as the twentieth century approached, progress was seen in the accumulation of power, especially by the state. For it was thought that the redemption and salvation—and especially the perfection—of man would be possible if his consciousness could just be shaped and elevated by sufficiently powerful means. Thus was the idea of progress ultimately perverted: Lincoln Steffens’ famously incorrect report upon his return from Russia in 1919 was: “I have been over into the future, and it works.” The Nazis’ Final Solution was so called in order that it be viewed as—progress.