A Walker in the Suburbs

It’s a Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday, because Monday felt like Sunday and yesterday seemed like Monday. This happens every week we have a three-day holiday, but this time there’s something extra: a national identity crisis.

I noticed in Maine that the second Monday in October is called Indigenous People’s Day. Apparently, 17 states and D.C. acknowledge the original settlers of this great land. Many don’t want to honor colonizers in any way, including Viking ones. (There has been a movement to create a Leif Erikson Day.)

The national identity crisis affects work and vacation schedules. In my family, one daughter didn’t have the day off, another used to have it off but now has Juneteenth instead, and the third, a federal employee, was off. She observed part of the holiday here with her family. (That was the best part of Columbus Day.)

Paid holidays aren’t as important to me as they once were, but I do care about origin stories, and ours is looking shaky these days.

Still high on last week’s trip, I recalled the name of a book, How New England Happened by Christina Tree. Suddenly I wanted to read it. I believed we owned it, had acquired it when we lived in Massachusetts.

I looked upstairs and down and even in the basement, where books are double-shelved behind a small rainbow-painted table. The volume was elusive, didn’t appear in any of these places at first, but I decided to search again in the upstairs nook where most of the travel tomes are housed. And there, as if it were a magnet pulling me shelf-ward, was the very book.

I spent part of yesterday perusing it, trying to figure out the magic ingredients of this special place. Is it the architecture, the climate, the inhabitants themselves? A combination of factors, of course. For one thing it was “America’s first finished corner,” Tree writes, “with a look and a style all its own.”

And then there was this: By the end of the 17th century, Tree says, “one trait could be said to distinguish this region from other British colonies. It was a sense of belonging. People no longer talked of ‘going home’ to Britain. The first person on record to use the word ‘American’ for a colonist rather than an Indian was the Boston Puritan Cotton Mather. That was 1684.”

(Big white churches on a hill: a distinctive feature of New England.)

Our New England adventure ended a few days ago, but it left an impression. It was a rare road trip with my sister, scoring high for that reason alone. And then there was the scenery.

I’m deep into research for my thesis, thinking a lot about place and places, why we feel the way we do about a physical location. The trip reminded me that suburban sprawl is not everywhere. Pockets of the country are not paved and pureed. They are compact and walkable with narrow lanes, old houses and a palpable sense of the past.

Patterns of settlement matter. Protecting those patterns matters, too. Families built the homes, churches, villages and town squares of New England, and their modern-day descendants make sure they remain in some form. Beauty is the result, and beauty is not insignificant.

In his essay “The Beauty of Belonging,” the late British philosopher Roger Scruton says that what most inspires visitors to Venice are not the grand canals and cathedrals but the “ordinary doorways on the backwater canals, the marble-lipped bridges across them, the shrines and niches that punctuate the walls, the sense all about you of a meticulous but effortless aesthetic order, in which all the residents have willingly collaborated over centuries.”

Most American cities do not have this order, Scruton says. Americans are good neighbors, but its “sense of community stops short of taking collective decisions as to how the neighborhood should be constructed so as to belong to them all.”

Beauty matters, Scruton argues. And after spending a few days in New England, I know what he means.

(Groton, Massachusetts, viewed from Gibbet Hill.)

I flew to Chicago and back over the weekend, with the ultimate destination a family wedding in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. As it turns out, we stayed at a former gangster hideout once known as the Lake Como Inn. The hotel’s out-of-the-way location made it a favorite of Baby Face Nelson, Bugs Moran and other members of the Dillinger gang.

That this homey, sedate hostelry (now called the French Country Inn) once featured a speakeasy in the basement and crawled with mobsters reminds me that places can morph through the years.

Much of what we see is conditioned by our expectations. Once we know even a smidgen of history we see places not just as they are, but as they used to be.

Places have layers. Discerning travelers try to plumb as many of them as they can.

(The mug shot of Lester Joseph Gillis, aka Baby Face Nelson. Courtesy Wikipedia.)

Wendell Berry, the poet of place and placedness, Kentucky’s native son, died August 31st at the age of 92.

“I can’t believe it,” I told my brother Phillip, who called from Kentucky to share the news. “I was just thinking about him.” Phillip said he had just been thinking about him, too.

I imagine many people felt that way. Once you knew Wendell Berry and his work you thought about him often. He was an American original.

Berry taught Phillip freshman English at the University of Kentucky. “I don’t think he much liked my writing,” Phillip said.

I never studied with Berry. But I did study his writing. In fact, just last week I was thumbing through one of this books, Home Economics. And after hearing of his death I re-read one of my favorite Berry essays, “A Native Hill.”

As I begin the thesis-writing year of my academic program, I’m turning once again to Berry, who was both a walker and a philosopher. He, more than most contemporary writers, articulated the delicate but indelible bonds between people and place, and especially, between writers and place. Rest in peace, Wendell Berry.

Many Americans have grown up in the suburban world created after World War II, our once-vaunted frontier of prairies and mountain peaks reduced to a series of 8o x 100-foot lots with a house and a garage. For decades, home-ownership has been an essential part of the American dream, though it’s become inaccessible for many folks these days.

It’s worth considering, then, that this suburban world did not arrive by accident and there are many other ways to live.

“Nowhere in Europe was there the land, the money, or the tradition for single-family home construction,” writes Kenneth T. Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier. Postwar development n Germany, France, Denmark and Spain did not follow this course. Single-family homes are much more of a rarity in Europe.

It was a combination of ample space, low-cost loans and other federal policies that produced American suburbs. And they happened in the blink of an eye.

“By 1961, when President John F. Kennedy proclaimed his New Frontier and challenged Americans to send a man to the moon within the decade, his countrymen had already remade the nation’s metropolitan areas in the short space of sixteen years,” Jackson writes. “From Boston to Los Angeles, vast new subdivisions and virtually new towns sprawled where a generation earlier nature had held sway.”

Such a short time, 16 years, but life in these United States hasn’t been the same since.

As my thesis year approaches, I find myself thinking about sense of place, my thesis topic. It’s an interest in place that inspired this blog and continues to generate material — not only from walking through the suburbs but from reflecting on them, too.

The last two weeks we’ve been hosting a visitor from Paris, someone used to walking in a city, running errands on foot, relying chiefly on public transportation. He enjoys the green abundance of our corner of the world and appreciates our space, but he misses the walkability to which he’s accustomed.

In another, similar, vein, I recently lunched with a young acquaintance who decided to stay put in a condo rather than buy a house because she loves living in a walkable community. She would rather have less space and more mobility. My oldest daughter and her family have made a similar decision.

I see in this the small but important vanguard of a movement to value more than just space: to appreciate density and walkability — and be willing to sacrifice for them, too.

The day before Earth Day 2026, I wandered along Reston trails, no particular destination in mind. I turned left where I usually turn right and right where I usually turned left.

A chilly morning had blossomed into a spectacular spring afternoon. Recent rain filled the creeks, sent water tumbling over rocks, gurgling and singing. I stopped at a bridge and took in the scene, inhaled deeply. I have my problems with the suburbs, but I could have landed in worse.

How prescient are these paths and the woods that surround them, how lucky we are to have them, portals to the sublime.

So on this day devoted to nature and preserving the bounty of the planet, I salute my place, my tiny dot in the universe. May it thrive for many millennia.

When it rained in Bruce Springsteen’s hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, the place smelled of coffee grounds from the Nescafe factory. In his memoir Born to Run, Springsteen says that he didn’t enjoy the taste of coffee but he did like the smell.

“It’s comforting,” he wrote. “It unites the town in a common sensory experience.” To Springsteen the smell of coffee meant that there was “a place here—you can hear it, smell it—where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures…”

In Lexington, Kentucky, it was the scent of burnt peanuts wafting from the Jiff factory or the tang of drying tobacco leaves from the auction houses on Angliana Avenue.

I never smoked but I loved that autumn bouquet. And now, if I happen to catch a whiff of tobacco, it takes me back to the land of my youth, when the local television news would carry the fast-paced patois of tobacco auctioneers and downtown Lexington smelled like a cigar bar.

Burley tobacco was a livelihood, an industry, and later a pariah and an embarrassment. But for me, it was always the aroma of home.

(Circa 1930s tobacco warehouse photo courtesy Lafayette Studios, Lexington, via the Explore UK photo archives.)