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It has been a very long winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, a cold siege—even now past Easter there is snow on the ground in parts of the northwestern hill country of Connecticut. April, as T.S. Eliot wrote, is the “cruellest month.” So Winter, despite the calendar, may yet have a sting in its tail; let’s hope not. Yesterday was the warmest day since October. The landscape has begun to stir at last; snowdrops are pushing up under the prickly stems of the old rose bush planted in 1906. Birds back from wintering in the South are reclaiming their summer space, checking out a suitable spot to build a nest up in the eves of the house. Small green buds are beginning to appear at the end of twigs as trees and bushes that seemed entirely dead show signs of life. Our small mountain town is called the “icebox” of Connecticut, and this year it has fully lived up to its reputation, but Spring miraculously is here again.
The U.S. census results are just out—up on the mountain the population of permanent residents is 1,500 all told; it was a few hundred more than this a hundred years ago. But the number is deceptive—people have second homes here, weekenders from New York or Boston. In the summer students from Yale University’s School of Arts and Music fill the town, lithe of body and brilliant of mind, virtuosi in the making, their viola, cellos, and trombones slung over their shoulders as they trudge across the village green in front of the old congregational church on the way to master class. Hundreds of concert goers drive in each weekend in June and August for chamber music concerts. These summer concerts, now common across America, were invented here. They are performed in a magnificent oak-timbered music shed built in the 1880s, set in the grounds of an old mansion which was bequeathed many decades ago for the enjoyment of music lovers by a farsighted widow in the grand New England style of beneficent philanthropy.
At my boarding school in England the teachers were not great fans of progress. If not hostile to the idea, they were at the least skeptical about it. History to them seemed more cyclical than linear. Most of them fought in and survived the second World War. They had been brought up with an imperial vision of the world, yet as they returned to civilian life, they faced a gray Britain diminished and diminishing as the colonial empire imploded and industrial and financial dominance seeped away. They tended to be men of the Left in the British sense, who saw the post-war Labor government and its welfare state as a long overdue social revolution; even if they taught at a private school, with a curriculum more attuned to producing administrators intended for India, where in fact the sun by then had already set on the British Raj. With their strong classical education they would not have approved of the positivist faith in progress emblazoned on Brazil’s flag: to them such presumption would have seemed a needless provocation of the ancient gods.
It is astounding today to see the backdrops of old Hitchcock movies of the 1950s, to see how close my teacher’s world then was to the nineteenth century, and how far it was from the twenty-first, with London dockland scenes of tall rows of arching cranes, militant workers, endless strikes, ships lined up for unloading, and gloomy grubby unhealthy alleys, dank, not so far removed from the time of Dickens. These have disappeared so totally today they might just as well have been part of a faded print of London in 1640 as of the mid twentieth-century.
It is very odd how movies of that time about the future missed the essential changes to come, the gentrification of old slums, or the post-colonial immigration which transformed London and even more the industrial cities of the midlands and North into a multiracial mosaic. The future as foreseen during the middle years of the twentieth century had “time machines” to be sure; but they were made with tooth-edged cranking gears and sockets that needed spanners to fix and oil cans to lubricate! No one foresaw the miniaturization that would produce a magic box like this “Think Pad” that connects me instantaneously to www.no.com.br.
Perhaps change was never linear; or at least the perception of whether change is for the better or for the worse, of whether we are moving backward or forward. It takes longer, for instance, to reach the coastal cities today from our house in Connecticut than it did in the 1850s. By 1900, twelve trains a day stopped here at what was then the highest railroad station in the state. Passenger service ceased in the 1920s. The railway line was abandoned during the second World War. Today even the tracks have gone. The ridge ways and ravines and stone bridges arduously constructed over difficult terrain by Irish immigrant laborers and Italian stone masons, have become public walking tracks in Spring, and ski trails in Winter. The hill tops at the turn of the nineteenth century were denuded of trees. Today they are all heavily reforested, much as they were when the first European settlers arrived in the early eighteenth century. Wild deer are back, reintroduced in the region as forests returned in the 1930s. Wild turkeys too have returned, even though they were, like the deer, extinct for much of the nineteenth century; now they are as numerous as when Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey and not the eagle as the national symbol of the new American Republic. The snow drops, harbingers of Spring survive only because the prickly stems of the old rose bush protects them from our burgeoning herds of four-hoofed marauders.
No Indians settled up here on the mountain—they had better sense, preferring the valley bottoms where corn could be grown in the rich alluvial soil of the river plain, “Indian” corn as the first residents called it. The hardy European settlers thought they knew better, or more likely were tricked into accepting tracts of unseen rocky badland by a smooth-talking lawyer in Hartford or New Haven who had divided up the lots on a map of the far inland frontier of the colony in the early eighteenth century, at the behest of a corrupt governor. So as they arrived and faced the reality of the uplands, they had to battle a harsh climate to clear the virgin forest, move giant granite boulders to make enclosures for sheep farming, and pray by God’s grace they survived the long Winters. They built spacious wooden farm houses far larger, healthier and lighter than the dark, small cottages they had known in England, and set out village greens and lived in small rigid theocracies under the stern eye of congregational ministers. In England the Congregationalists were and remain “nonconformist”; that is, they rejected the Church of England and the centralized authority of bishops and they elected (and on occasion dismissed) their own preachers in a democratic manner. As soon as they settled down in America however, they quickly instituted their own state religion and imposed a moral code more vigorously than the Church of England was ever able to do. They were above all freeholders: they owned their land; they were free to succeed and they were also free to fail. But they were not free to avoid attendance at the Congregational Church: that was required and enforced; a nexus of capitalism and religion still reflected on the U.S. currency which, unlike the Brazilian flag with its assertion of progress, expresses the more sober hope that “in God we trust.”
Some of the early settlements in these hills in fact did fail, church attendance not withstanding. The only reminders of where they stood are overgrown stone walls and fallen chimney stacks. Other townships prospered; and as they did, new immigrants and new industry arrived, and the monopoly of the Congregational Church was broken. Charcoal to fuel smelting furnaces for iron and lime created an insatiable demand for lumber. The rushing streams, like the one that emerges from a swampy hollow on the other side of the mountain behind our house, and is appropriately called the “Mad” River, provided water power for the first industrial revolution. This hill town and its neighbors manufactured the weapons, knives, axes, and cannon shot which made the area the arsenal for the colonial revolutionaries who threw off British rule. During the war of 1812, large anchors for the U.S. Navy were made here and in the 1860s, the region provided the munitions for the North during the Civil War. By the 1880s, the famous Winchester rifles that “conquered” the Wild West were manufactured nearby.
Most of this is long gone, though elsewhere in Connecticut arms manufactures remain a potent force. So much so that the Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on most questions a firm liberal, is a vocal supporter of “Plan Colombia,” the $ 1.3 billion dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money committed to bolstering the Colombian state as it slowly disintegrates in the face of a multi-front guerrilla war, narco corruption, and endemic violence. A substantial percentage of the U.S. dollars appropriated by Congress for Plan Colombia go toward the purchase of helicopters made in Connecticut, so on the question of war in Colombia, Senator Dodd is a hawk. But the old factories in the uplands of his state are empty for the most part, or pulled down, or turned into antique shops. Industry in these hills became uncompetitive as larger, more efficient mills with cheaper labor developed first in the upper Midwest, then moved to the South. Today these smoke stack manufacturers, and textile and garment makers are based in Mexico or China. With FTAA they will arrive no doubt in Mato Grosso, for my teachers at boarding school, a place where intrepid British explorers were known to disappear, probably eaten by the natives.
Our house was built in 1903 for a Civil War hero, Major John Barclay Fassitt, who at Gettysburg led reluctant Union troops into a breach in the lines on July 2, 1863 and helped save the day during that decisive battle. Many of his books and artifacts, pushed up into the attic over the decades, remained when we moved in. Major Fassitt had been a member of the Harvard class of 1858, where his classmates had included Henry Adams, the historian and author of the classic American memoir: the Education of Henry Adams, (Major Fassitt had a first edition in his library) and William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, the son of the Confederate commander at Gettysburg, General Robert E. Lee. In the late 1880s Major Fassitt was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. decoration, for his bravery at Gettysburg. It came then and not in 1863 because the Medal of Honor was intended originally for private soldiers exclusively, not officers, a remnant of a more egalitarian spirit, which the America of Henry James evidently no longer appreciated. On the town green, a tall monument commemorates the 35 local men who as the inscription reads, “gave their lives to their country in the War of the Rebellion.”
Among Major Fassitt’s artifacts in the attic I found a copy of the booklet prepared after the consecration of the national cemetery for those who fell on the battlefield at Gettysburg, containing the first publication of President Abraham Lincoln’s magnificent evocation of democratic faith; “that the dead shall not have died in vain, that the nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Major Fassitt must have listened to Lincoln that day at Gettysburg as he delivered one of the greatest orations in the English language.
It is difficult to conceive how naked his house must have been as it stood on a treeless mountain when he built it almost a hundred years ago. But the forest once cleared is back and landscapes change, transformed like the silent factories and ruined limn kilns, and the broken river dams and silent railroad tracks, scattered over these hills, victims of previous waves of “globalization” which came and passed on, an historical archaeology of the past 250 years of American history. Not “progress” perhaps. Yet, like Spring, regenerated, with the promise of new life.
