A Dark Wood I always wanted to move back to New England. My wife and I both grew up in Connecticut: Abby in a green town just far enough from New York to count as the country, me in the rust and brick and Gothic of New Haven. My mother's family were Maine Yankees from Puritan stock with a solid three-century history of staying put in chilly soil. My wife's ancestors were from Newfoundland and Ireland, cold seacoasts and autumnal skies. As kids, we both made the long drive to Maine in the summers--in my case to the coastline where my grandparents lived and my uncle and cousins worked as lobstermen, in her case to a Girl Scout camp way up in the North Woods, cabins speckling the shores of a deep-blue lake under the shadow of Katahdin, the highest mountain in the state. So living in the humid marshland of Washington, D.C., where we ended up together and married in our twenties, always felt like a mistake. The Mid-Atlantic was almost like the Northeast, but just slightly different in its temperature and color schemes--more sweltering in the summer and less vivid in the fall, with more winter rain and June warmth than our remembered childhood worlds. I would have preferred a stark contrast, the prairie or the Rockies or the Californian chaparral. Instead the resemblance just reinforced our mutual homesickness for deep woods and colonial houses, birches and evergreens, old stone walls and blizzards. Then we had children, two daughters two years apart, and the drives back to see our families became harder, the nostalgia more intense. We lived in Capitol Hill, ten blocks from the Capitol dome, in a small row house in a gentrifying neighborhood. But once we had the kids the house felt tiny, the frequent terror alerts exhausting, the Beltway traffic between Ikea and Buy Buy Baby grueling. When we looked to the future, to more children and more space, the local school environment seemed punishingly competitive, an enemy of childhood. And the prices in the D.C. suburbs, for houses that we didn't even like, were utterly insane. I had a romantic idea of the alternative. My own parents had grown up in beautiful places, my mother in a farmhouse on a saltwater cove and my dad near the beach in Santa Monica, but when I was young they ended up living in a blue-collar corner of New Haven, in a ranch-house neighborhood that didn't measure up to their memories of natural beauty. My mother pined for rocky coasts and spruce trees and high blue skies. My father missed the smell of eucalyptus. So I inherited an idea about land, beautiful land, as something intimately connected to the good life, yet always tantalizingly out of reach. But by the time I turned thirty-five, it wasn't out of reach anymore. Our row house, bought after the financial crisis, had appreciated absurdly in four years. I had a job as a New York Times columnist--a lucky opportunity, a dream job--that basically allowed me to live anywhere, so long as there was an internet connection and a way to fly or ride to Washington and New York. Many of the young families we knew talked about fleeing D.C. for their hometowns, or settling in some small, livable city, or even buying a Virginia farm. But for us the temptation was particularly sharp. We wanted to have another baby; my wife had just left her magazine job to write her first book. Why shouldn't we blaze the trail, make the fantasy real? So we began taking the possibility seriously. We followed Connecticut real estate listings with an increasing obsessiveness, and whenever we headed north to visit our families, we made time for long drives through the country, letting our girls nap while we scoped out likely-seeming towns and random open houses. Eventually we took a more consistent approach with an actual realtor--although we were still haphazard enough in our visits that the agent, a polished Englishwoman whose daughters rode horses, regarded our intentions with a certain suspicion, as though she'd seen dreamers like us before. Abby tried to keep us grounded. We wanted the same general things, but she was a little less romantic about rural life. "It's way too uncanny to imagine actually living there," she said to me after a day trip through small towns in the northern part of the state, outposts of New York City for their summer residents, farm towns in the winter. "There's nobody there half the year, who knows what the schools are like, we'd be two hours from New York, forty minutes from our parents . . . and you're going to leave me alone in the country with the kids while you go traveling for work?" Honestly that was, in a way, my treasured plan. I had a vision of myself going out into the world, flying around to various Babylons for important meetings and interviews, and then coming home on a summer evening, down a winding road, up a drive lined with oak trees, to find my two--no, make it three; no, make it four--kids waiting for me, playing on swings in the July dusk in front of a big white colonial, my wife behind them, the whole scene an Arcadia . . . Not surprisingly, Abby wasn't sold on this idyll, or the alleged bargains I kept finding--the snowbound spread on six acres with a leaking roof and a huge artist's studio attached; the "farmhouse" built into a hillside like a hobbit's hole, if a hobbit had an investment banker's taste. The first Connecticut house that she actually liked was far more sensible: a recent build in a more populated area, a four-bedroom house from the 1950s, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac near a commuter rail station, walkable to a playground and a small downtown. It was lovely, livable, convenient, a good size for a growing family. I hated it. "It looks like Tony Soprano's house!" I groused. "You can see McMansions from the kitchen window! What's the point of going to Connecticut for something we can get in"--I let the contempt flow through me--"suburban Virginia?" Eventually, like a good husband, I started to talk myself into the sensible house. But by then, like a generous wife, she had talked herself out of it. Fortunately, there was an area where our ideas converged, which happened to be her childhood hometown. It was just ninety minutes from Manhattan, in between the Gold Coast of greater Greenwich and the small blue-collar cities and real country to the north. It was near enough to train lines to be accessible to the city, far enough to be relatively affordable. It had a rural expanse but a thriving downtown with a bookstore and restaurants and even a small movie theater. It had excellent public schools and a lovely little Catholic church, where we had been married. Moving there with our children, buying a big house, and making ourselves comfortable with Little League games and dance lessons felt like a way to rewrite the story of Abby's childhood as well. She had lived in a big house once: Her father had been a Wall Street numbers guy who descended into bankruptcy and ruin after the junk-bond era collapsed. He died suddenly when she was thirteen, leaving her schoolteacher mother to raise Abby and her sister alone. So her hometown had been for her a place of downward mobility, of childhood happiness succeeded by teenage sorrow. And it seemed (maybe more to me than to her) that to return in prosperity and triumph would give her the happy ending she deserved. "Unless you lose your job," she said. "Or we lose all our money." "That could happen in D.C., too," I countered. "And in Connecticut we'll have our family to help us, public schools . . . We'll raise chickens and join Costco." So her doubts gradually yielded to my optimism, and then in the winter of 2015 we endured a sequence of what seemed at the time like hardships--the teacher at my older daughter's local public pre-K quit suddenly, our basement flooded when frozen pipes exploded, my wife and a friend were mugged while they strolled a baby in the nearby park--that felt almost like providential pushes to sell, just sell, to take the money and flee north. For Abby, the decisive tribulation happened just outside our home. We had to parallel-park our SUV on the street outside our front door, and every once in a while a car would come barreling down the mostly quiet street when we were hauling our girls, four and two, out of their car seats to the safety of the sidewalk. One slushy March day, when the piles of unmelted snow farther shrank the narrow street, one of these cars veered within inches of my wife as she fumbled with a car seat, almost dinging the open door behind her, and then slammed to a halt ten yards on, disgorging a furious driver who yelled at Abby for being so inconveniently available to be mowed down. "Right then and there, I thought, I don't want to die on this stupid street," she said to me afterward, as we huddled over my laptop and the real estate listings in her once and future hometown. Excerpted from The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery by Ross Douthat All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
