Behind closed doors

I spent Sunday pedaling through the hilly terrain in the Harlem River valley 100 or so miles north of New York City and enjoying the great outdoors. Too bad hardly anyone who actually lives up there seemed to want anything to do with it—we rode for miles past manicured lawns without seeing a single soul poke his or her biped cranium out of its sealed environment.

You have to wonder what has made small-town and suburban Americans so disinclined to interact with their environment considering how much they put up with to live out there and stay clear of our mean, urban streets. I mean, who would choose to get in the car and drive five miles every time you want to buy an apple, look at a store or have a bit of random human interaction? Where do people in Millerton and Amenia go to work these days given that no one manufactures or grows anything to speak of? They must have commutes at least as disagreeable as most of us city folk.

In short, given the crude winters afflicting these northern parts, why don’t people burst out of their caves with joy and hop up and down on one leg as soon as the growing season is upon them?

After a long time in Latin America, the contrast is particularly stark given that in the Hispanic world people tend to adopt the Moorish-Iberian habit of enclosing the domicile behind fences, hedges and walls. You are not likely to pass by a Peruvian’s or Argentine’s home and observe their familial affairs through a ‘picture window’. At home, they are ostensibly much more closed to the prying, public eye, but—perhaps for that very reason—much more likely to set out into public spaces at specified moments.

One easy answer involves the comforting electronic bubble-worlds created by iPods, computerized alternative realities and 600 satellite TV channels, and no doubt they increase the creepy attraction of the hermetic life.

Another might be fear: after a few episodes of America’s Most Wanted, who can comfortably send their children out to play in backyards where child-snatching sex maniacs may lurk?

It is also curious to note the proliferation of American flags in these increasingly autarkous zones as if the idea of solidarity and interlinkage emerges with greater force as other social connections decline. That is hardly an original thought, but getting out and seeing how very peculiar heartland America is does partly explain the vaudevillian ravings of Glen Beck.