The Best Place
For years, it seems, I’ve been trying to escape at least some part of a Texas summer. And now, for a few days, I have.
Greetings to everyone from the best place on earth.
Certainly this year with half the country stunned by 100 degree-plus weather, almost anyone would find where I am pretty fabulous.
The people who live here think it’s a little warm with the sun out (80s), but they call the extra warmth “humid.” As in, it’s a little “humid” today, when the sun is beating down on you and the thermometer registers, oh, eighty-three.
Ha-ha-ha-ha! They don’t understand why I’m laughing.
They’ve had a lot of rain, so yes, there is some damp. And a lot of brilliant green. Thick grass for a few scattered cows.
Rural western Connecticut is hilly, thickly forested and dotted with charming villages and “farms” or estates worthy of Architectural Digest. The roads are so twisty that thirty m.p.h. feels almost dangerous on account of the curves.
This region is about two hours from Manhattan. Longer from lower Manhattan. It gained almost double the population when prosperous New York City residents evacuated during the pandemic.
The rise in population, though, brought a rise in property values. Houses around me now seem to start at $1 million-plus and go up.And up. Way up. Often, they’re second homes.
I mention this because it’s happening around us in Fayette County, too. It creates a financial leveling upwards of the people who can live there or here.
You remember milk bottles you could see through? Where the cream floated to the top couple of inches?
Here, outside those villages I mentioned, it’s all cream.
Or maybe butter. Because the people I’ve met who can afford these long green lawns and over-powered cars do appear to work all the time. Six or seven days a week, at all hours, under the tyranny of the job-by-phone and Zoom call. Oh, and one or two days of cross-country flying, as needed.
Granted that’s vastly different from the physical and mental work of running a farm or ranch and home along with a couple of second jobs—like many of our neighbors in Fayette County do.
But I couldn’t have sustained the level of intensity required by either occupation for a week, even when I was thirtyfive.
I know how lucky I am to be here now for a few days. Sitting in a pretty room in a handsome inn for an absurd price by night.
Such a contrast to my normal life in that old frame farmhouse in central Texas that I share with spiders, scorpions, dirt daubers and one dear dog. It means, however, that I can look on all this CT luxury as an outsider.
And I can’t help wondering whether the people who live here realize that they have risen as high as anyone can in today’s world. This represents the pinnacle of achievement for the upwardly mobile—comfort, beauty, safety. The American Dream realized.
Do they find that it’s enough? What would be?
Yesterday those green mountains were veiled in thick smoke, pooling in the valleys. The radar maps show that the smoke originates in fires burning a continent away in the Pacific Northwest of Canada.
Like the African desert dust that dims our Texas skies from time to time, this dangerous smoke travels to us on currents of the air we have to breathe.
Enough, like escape, may be concepts that have lost all meaning in the real world we live in now.
Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com