It wasn't my original home, but somehow I developed a distaste for New England.. for people from where I was born and raised, New England was somehow a tasteful retreat, a place where you could bring something to the locals but you could respect them as well, somehow an amiable exchange from the perspective of the inflated self worth of an urban colonist. Elvis Presley once described Scientologists as being all head and no heart, and that thoughtful little piece of Mississippi insight would explain in some funny way what we liked about New Englanders after life in the Big City had subjected us to the worlds 40 flavors of passion, hatred, and insanity.. for as much as New York could be provincial in it's narcissistic insanity, New England offered somehow a cerebral distance from all that was a seething microcosm of the worlds problems. New Yorkers can't search for relief for too long, and you need look no further than that New Yorker Cartoon to know that we didn't expect to find our solutions within 2000 miles of the other side of the Hudson.. hell they came to us for what ails 'em...It also seemed to offer the solutions. All head, no heart.. the Californians would ride us, the only people who unnerve New Yorkers despite all their protestations otherwise, for our habits, somehow the solutions to the worlds problems seemed to be associated with imagery of a farm, and the closest farms we seemed to know existed where someone had once invited us to Christmas in New England.. they had a farm right down the road, imagine that, what a thing, a farm.. so.. elemental.. so Wow.. Cows.. the whole shooting match, and that farmer, he's so.. flinty.. so.. real! That's how the whole sad infatuation started, and after a bit you find yourself living the plot or a John O'Brien film, Fred Tuttle embarrasses you in all the ways you want to be embarrassed, you big city fool, while teaching you the way of hard work and self denial.. Gee Gosh Darn, who did I think I was.. life wraps up pretty well like a Green Acres Episode, I buy a house someplace quaint, raise left handed bees and name my kids Juniper and Sage...
It felt as if the place had been eaten over, that as much as it was recovering, reforesting, that it would never truly be wild again, at least in it's southern reaches, not without some highly processed three times public commented permission, some variant on the probate court orphans of the Yellowstone Wolves...
But after all this wore off, this fantasy of a tasteful providing of the worlds needs in a squeaky clean socially unassailable way that never really involved going down Conrad's dark river of savagery (well, you were expected to read about it, but doing it.. tisk tisk. so.. republican)..it felt like it had been eaten over, and once one realizes the true extent of the world's savagery, you realize New England's only remaining savagery was indifference, which is a particularly awkward form, cowardly as well...and it's virtues had been defined so long ago at some Congregationalist or even Puritan Pulpit that there was no room for redefinition.. sure it was kind of nice, keeps the hoi palloi at bay.. New England, the last bastion against the bougie fucks who are turning the rest of America into something from that Joni Mitchell Song (New Englanders love Joni Mitchell.. it doesn't mean you got all freaky and went off with the Dead to California.. it just means you make choices to keep things nice.. we like nice.. nice and cautious..), parking lots stopped by all that taciturn judgement, that thrifty farmer common sense.. but underneath that judgement it started to fester at me that that soundness, that judgement, was a combination of a control to keep things just the way the autistic old farmer likes it, where the world needs him, where the eldest brother gets to keep being in charge, but also it was based on a fear of true adventure, of riding down the river to the unknown (there's a dam on the river you wouldn't notice it unless you knew where to look, and by the way, the salmon haven't been past it in 100 years...).. it's the responsible one who won't ever realize he could go further, but if he could, why would he?.. it gets cold out there, we go places in the spring... and it's uncomfortable.. and the people out there, if I could slip past New York and out into the world.. they don't have the same self control.. what would they do to me.. what might I do to them.. what might I learn to like.. it's all too risky, and risk don't milk the cows.. so the New Englander stays up in his isolated little corner of organized paradise, in a willful ignorance of worldly pleasures that the biblical basis of America's oldest culture might abhor.., perhaps for the better for never having seen Tijuana's den's of sin and Nuku Hiva's soaring spires of jungled mystery, quietly contributing in the ways he feels fit, but what of you that never taken wild ride, George Bailey, will it irk you to the end, and who are you to raise the young with only second hand answers...is there not a pride in the mistakes you have made having been your own? As I write, all that pretentious clapboard sided order seems almost nice, crickets in the evening fog, moths buzzing about the front porch lamp. I wonder what I railed against, but do we seek our equals and stop the machinery of growth to avoid it's awkward stages, call it good and seal it up like old Sturbridge Village.. stay a precocious 12 for ever without tasting the forbidden fruit of 13, pine for a wood handled past instead of going through the ugly stages of the present for a perhaps broader future.. I guess they will never know as the fight the next windmill farm, and I might never either, for as much as I pine for it's domestic tranquility, I don't know what I would say in such environs, when I open my mouth about the wonders I have seen...
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