Notes from the Exurbs - An Introduction

Some of you have read this before, some of of you might even live it, but for those of you new to this -

Notes from the Exurbs

Life inside Boston’s easternmost ring road but west of its massive suburban mosaic is more than the meets the eye of Google earth. This outer ring of habitation, tucked inside the burly bark of the interstate, is the next woody circle out from suburbia - exurbia – an as yet unsung layer in the tree rings of the great trunk of metropolitan American life. Here, west of Boston and east of Worcester, tumbled grey stone walls still trace roads without sidewalks and the big yellow school buses lumber picturesquely past the odd apple orchard. Here is where middle-class New England families hunt acreage and the faded fantasy of small town community. Let me sing you the song of this exurban ring – some notes soar and others plummet. As Julie Andrews taught us, when you sing you begin with do re mi . . . .

Do: Unless you live in a cul de sac or 70s-style serpentine swirl of streets that seem to connect only to each other, you likely live in the splendid isolation of a single-family house built on a long undulating line of road, proximity to your neighbor buffered by the requisite minimum 1 ½ acres zoned into the town master plan. Evidence of life predominates in the garbage cans and recycling boxes that appear weekly in front of each house, seemingly without human hand. Monday night they’re not there – Tuesday morning they are – remarkable and sometimes revealing cairns of detritus that signal and suggest the invisible inhabitants. What you know about your neighbor often begins and ends in the shopping bags that hold their recycled newspaper, or the giant cardboard boxes that reveal store emblems of choice. I see Trader Joe’s bags on my road - lots of Target and Wal-Mart logos down the street. The big boxes range from Mattel to L.L. Bean, depending on whether or not the real estate has yet turned over to families with young children. Each housing development in the exurbs has a mini-demographic and some streets have more subcultures than others. Older developments range from empty-nesters and more expensive wine bottles on glass and plastic days, to families with older teens and Hollister bags filled with diet coke bottles. The McMansion neighborhoods have an awful lot of golf and tennis paraphernalia, Limited Too packaging, and DSW shoe warehouse bags. Go figure.

Re: The limited evidence of these neighbors by their refuse is sometimes coupled by their armored emergence from garages, clad in their commute car or more capacious family transport. There are typically two garages per house, though three is becoming de rigueur. (New construction (not “green” – exurbia is not there yet) has not reckoned with the statement of excessive consumption that three-plus garages makes. Multiple garage doors are big curb appeal markers.) The cars coming out of those garages are not yet hybrid – that would be more likely in, say, Lexington. Here we have an unabashed fleet of SUVs. To be fair, we also have a smattering of Subarus, usually in the houses with the Trader Joe’s bags.

Mi: When the cars back out and turn, drivers geared up with sunglasses and insulated beverage cups peel out and disappear into the exurban day. School runs start, early band practice calls. Here is the close race to the nearest commuter rail station to stake early claim to limited parking, and there is the daily drag down exurban arteries. The cars head out to chrome-packed highways or on to local roads once solely residential and now redefined by the surfeit of single-passenger commuter cars pushing the 35 mph speed limit to 45. The inexorable flow begins, only to slow at some still extant train crossings or the periodic inconvenient traffic lights, just as they were getting their morning drive-time groove on around that last wooded bend. If we could hear the sounds in those cars? Ah –there the low reasonable tones of NPR’s Morning Edition; there – the rapid glib bile of Kiss 108’s shock jock “Mattie in the Morning;” there – the latest John Grisham audio book read in a gummy drawl; there – booming orchestral assertions blotting out the latest numbing tragedy; and there – blissful silence and an unguarded face with thoughts heading anywhere but to a high rise in Boston (or maybe that office park in Waltham, if they’re lucky).

Fa: But those left behind after the morning exurban exodus? Small children not yet fated to ride the yellow bus; parents – mostly mothers – who reign in absentia; and our elders who, often untended, tend to the business left to them, caring for each other and remembering. One vestigial institutional good of New England exurbia is the Council on Aging, whose vans to the grocery store and men’s breakfast and casino runs make movement possible for those whose garages are empty, if they have garages any more. The Council maintains a communal infrastructure for seniors in these towns, one of the few community-building organizations left in most exurbs. Some towns might also have community theater, or Democratic and Republican clubs of varying vitality, or the local library might host playgroups for disconnected mothers and their pre-schoolers. Most exurbs have the vast, obligatory soccer fiefdoms, which set social standards and define hierarchies for a mass of exurban schoolchildren. But largely community life in exurbia is a mosaic of activity described by fragmented sports and social interests and demographics. The whole is no longer a sum of its parts and certainly not greater than – it is a motley amalgam of people who know each other mainly inside their chosen subculture. Exurban daily imperatives leave little time for those outside your fragment. Without a functional community sense shaped by widely shared interests or a common civic goal (besides snowplowing and sufficient recreational fields funded by high real estate taxes), exurbanites rarely relate outside the realities defined by their activities. In the old days, when exurbs were small, rural enclaves, allied reality might have been farming and feeding your family. The harvesting was shared and the local marketing of goods and services created interdependencies and a feel for the common good. Exurbia has supermarkets and the shopping mall is never more than twenty minutes away. (Developers are so smart.)

So: Even in this age of two-income couples, and so far in this economic cyclone in the drain, lthere is sometimes an adult at home in the exurbs, whether full-time parenting or part-time income earning, and she is usually a woman. During the day, the stores and restaurants and libraries and doctors’ offices are filled up with women, with or without children in tow. In fact, it is odd to actually see a man in one of these daily places. Some days this single gender adult world is startling, a kind of science fiction scenario where all the men have somehow been eaten. If you do see a man shopping or chauffeuring children, you might wonder what biotech firm or engineering division has been laying off that week. You watch with interest what unemployment trends might be nudging the sociology of the town. Will there be fathers yet in the playgroups? In practical fact, it generally means that there are more cyclists and runners out on the nice days, but with no appreciable change in gender of those buying the groceries. (Men apparently like to be on the roads, even without their cars.)

La: Aside from the roads, what infrastructure serves the exurbs? Typically, the towns have at least one gas station and a convenience store. There is likely a library, a police and fire station, and more than one church. The ratio of churches to congregants is rather skewed these days: big buildings, small congregations. It is notable to see how that central religious institution around which town life and government once coalesced has been marginalized. Cars in church parking lots now usually signal a really great rummage sale or antique market, with or without local pies, or a musical event. The Congregational source of New England town meeting-style democracy gets honored at the ballot box but not so much in the pews. Here, where the stake was driven for religious freedom and its passionate practice, church-going is supplanted in the exurbs by school soccer and football games on Sunday morning, limited morning leisure time allocated to sleep, pre work-week shopping, or maybe that really great Sopranos episode you Tivoed to watch without the commercials. All very interesting in this much-touted religious country of ours.

Ti: Salvaging us from total anomie, however, there is a community value still fostered by a quaint and grand exurban vestige: the Community Chest. I once knew it only as a card pile in Monopoly, but out here there are yard signs adjuring yearly local support that get planted like bulbs each fall. Town worthies with real care for the town’s needs unfilled by local, state, or federal tax policies, hold up this civic onus. The understated, old-fashioned signs remind us around each corner that there is real need along these treed roads (hidden foreclosures, silent bankruptcies, healthcare costs that trump food and utility bills), and the quiet giving that results is a kind of human mortar which still holds together the bricks and boards of a reconfigured and new-build exurban construct.

Do: We somehow coexist out here with historical outlines and generations that are yearly redrawn and newly repopulated. The old stone wall boundaries get pillaged for patio borders and subdivided property lines. What many come for in the exurbs is innocence – what parents hunger to guard in their kids and whose architectural sentiment is built into the stylized farmer’s porches attached to those three-car garages. The good that comes with small town oversight, however, is getting redefined by the growing serial enclaves of exurban insulation. The big yards and big houses that are meant to buffer the occupants from the dangers of the age, end up privatizing their lives and fracturing the community they came to benefit from. The trill of the exurbs is often plaintive. Oh, there are notes of genuine birdsong around the ponds that remain on the migratory path in the many conservation preserves, and there are choruses of community when the town comes together on a spring morning to decide a common good at the polls, and there are intergenerational harmonies when the good folks of the village do meet and do greet one another. But the minor chords and the audible cognitive dissonance of this part of metro west Boston should be loud enough to register on some civic sound system. You don’t have to strain too hard to hear – like their trees, the exurbs are veritably ringing. Take note.