My Old New Jersey Home

A follow-up for the first entry in my new column!

I had my first full American Diary column in Discourse Magazine the other day! I’ve got another piece coming out in a new magazine sort of related to the same theme, too: that small-town life in many ways lets you live as if you’re in an adventure/RPG video game.

I explored this idea way back around the time I started this newsletter, based on an idea my best friend and I had had for a very long time:

Relatedly, for almost as long as I can remember, my friend and I had this idea of likening our parents’ houses and our old childhood main street to the starting screen of a video game. Think of the screen where you begin a game of Harvest Moon, or the Pokémon Gameboy games, or really most adventure games or RPGs. They have massive worlds you can explore, and various ways to grow or “level up” your character, but you can usually wander back to that beginning screen. In Pokémon, for example, it’s the town and the house where you were given your first pocket monster. In a game you really like and have invested hours and hours of gameplay in, it can be comforting to go back to the beginning, and think about where you started. No matter how far you progress, it’s always still there.

I had not, in fact, reread that piece before writing my column. Here’s my updated version of that old analogy. I’m struck by how it feels like the same idea but refined. I guess that’s what happens when you’re a writer:

All of that is a long way of introducing what my reader’s comment crystallized for me: A classic small town operates in many ways as a real-life overworld for its residents. The other parts of the map—the nearby neighborhoods and outlying areas—share some connection to the town. There’s this physical, geographic center that exerts a force on its little region. The old town is a social and economic lodestone.

Growing up this way, it was difficult to perceive what was happening. We have a tendency to think that our circumstances are the same thing as our choices. When I noticed even as a kid how spread out some things were, my mother used to say you make your own community. She’d rattle off all the people we knew: Ben at the post office, Mrs. Karen and Mrs. Monahan (at two different library branches), Sal the pizzeria owner and his son Joe, our church friends (we even ran into our pastor at the gym once), and many others. These are the relationships sociologists call “weak ties,” which is not at all to say “unimportant.”

This, however, is probably the key in the column, and it’s a completely new element compared to that first newsletter piece:

When I noticed even as a kid how spread out some things were, my mother used to say you make your own community. She’d rattle off all the people we knew: Ben at the post office, Mrs. Karen and Mrs. Monahan (at two different library branches), Sal the pizzeria owner and his son Joe, our church friends (we even ran into our pastor at the gym once), and many others. These are the relationships sociologists call “weak ties,” which is not at all to say “unimportant.”

Yes, we made our own community. And you can fail to do that in any type of setting. But if all of those people and places were another 5 or 10 miles away or apart, spread out among even wider and less pleasant roads, in strip plazas instead of along country roads or on Main Streets, would we really have made those rounds so often, run into those people so frequently, felt the leisure to strike up conversations and slowly turn strangers into acquaintances and then friends, instead of anxiously getting into the car for the next visually and physically undistinguished stop? In other words, maybe we thought we were building our own community, not understanding how much the physical context of our lives was contributing to—rather than frustrating—that intention.

It’s not a stretch to say that for me, that’s what urbanism is all about. That’s what urbanism is. It’s the interplay of our humanity with a built environment that works with it and not against it.

I think our tendency towards individualism in America can make this hard for us to discern. We experience our lives as a series of our decisions and their payoffs, but it’s a lot harder to see how our circumstances are shaping those outcomes. Economic circumstances, sure. But the way density and proximity just of lower the stakes of doing things and make things happen? We don’t even really have the language for that concept.

Say this the wrong way, and it can sound sort of…commie. Or it can sound like “You didn’t build that,” which is a thing I still hear people quote sometimes. Well, there’s a conservatism in there somewhere: we didn’t build the world we inherited; it is entrusted to us. For a brief moment, we are its stewards. This isn’t a statement on economic policy; it’s a call to humility.

I also want to emphasize this bit from the column: “There’s this physical, geographic center that exerts a force on its little region. The old town is a social and economic lodestone.”

I write about how “suburbia” isn’t one thing: the older suburbia of the Northeast is ordered by the presence of all these old towns. I think of it almost like Catholic parishes; you belong to one because of where you live, even if you’re not that close to it. It’s a sort of real and sort of intellectual way of ordering physical space. You could say all these little old small towns have a penumbra around them; there is no no man’s land. Even the strip malls and subdivisions “belong” to a place.

I would never have thought about this, at least not this way, had I stayed in New Jersey, or if I had not become interested in urbanism. But as much as I love Northern Virginia, I do find that it lacks this deep sense of place and local identity:

The landscape here is simply newer, most of it having been built up originally around and after World War II. There isn’t all that much of an older, pre-car, pre-war landscape that Northern Virginia suburbia fits into. The region was largely agricultural, as were most regions in the East, but there were fewer fully formed small towns and cities here. (Arlington County has a few urban areas and streetcar suburbs; Leesburg and Fairfax City are the only really sizable legacy small towns reasonably close to D.C.)

So I don’t really know what or where my “overworld” is here. There isn’t a specific place I belong to by virtue of living in the development I live in, where I can pop into a store and say, “I’m from here. I see you guys just opened up. How’s business so far?”—or any of the other bits of chitchat that simply being in a place makes available to you. And those bits of chitchat will statistically, at some percentage, lead to more.

In other words, there’s a manner in which spreading things out throws up friction, raises the psychological and time cost of doing things. Physical density and proximity allow you to densely pack your day with actual activities and interactions. To build places that are dense with delight and whimsy and serendipity.

We’ve so greatly lost touch with this way of living that simply describing it sounds like a fairytale. But that is the life of small towns and urban neighborhoods. Some of us, perhaps, don’t know what we have. Most of us, I think, don’t know—or can’t put into words—what we’re missing.

Read the whole thing!

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Related Reading:

The Screen Where You Started

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

The Ice House

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