The Geographer's Library

The Geographer’ s Library
things you give up when you get a day job. (And sex, I had been discovering
to my increasing dismay, is one of those things you give up when you move to
a tiny town in New England where you’re younger than the average citizen’s
children.)
I headed east through the old industrial cities of Connecticut that had
turned bleak, broke, and half scrapped. By the time I joined the interstate, I
could have reached Wickenden with my eyes shut; I had driven up and back
from New York seventy or eighty times. I knew the distances and vistas as
well as I knew the inside of my house: the way the pavement gets rougher as
soon as you cross into Rhode Island; the forest on either side of the highway
that seems somehow out of place in the Ocean State; the anonymous 1970svintage
concrete office blocks, truckyards, and bus stations in Staunton and
Eastwick. As you approach Wickenden, fifty years drop away. Pastel-colored
three-story clapboard houses with balconies on every level crowd the highways,
teetering unsteadily above it. Then comes the redbrick industrial section,
once abandoned and now gussied up with art galleries and cafés where
$5.50 gets you a geographically precise cup of coffee in a wide ceramic mug
hand-made by a friend of the café’s owner; and a downtown stuffed to bursting
with rickety old buildings, steel-and-glass new ones that shine obnoxiously
like a made-it-big uncle at a family reunion; quirky streets that started
in a parking lot and dead-ended at the side of a building: America’s grandmother’s
attic. I loved it, everything about it, with a possessiveness one
reserves for indefensible (or semidefensible) loves: anyone could move to
New York or San Francisco or Los Angeles, shed his past and join the nativist
chorus, but this place offered little except its strangeness and ramshackle
charm, and it ruined those it charmed for anyplace else.
i pulled off the interstate on Firwell Street, just down the hill from the
university. Wickenden’s buildings sprawled over a few square miles on a hill
overlooking the city’s east side: it was isolated enough, geographically and
culturally, so that unadventurous students never had to venture into the big,
bad (in fact, midsize and friendly) city below, and close enough so that when
older students started to get cabin fever, they had somewhere to escape. I
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