Leaving New York for Fairfield County
When you leave New York City for New Jersey, you enter a malarial swamp of highways and cloverleafs. When you leave New York City for Long Island, you enter a bottle that is a hundred miles deep, full of strip malls and muscleheads. But when you leave New York City for Fairfield County, taking I-95 or the Saw Mill River Parkway through Westchester, you enter America as you imagine it used to be, a Martha Stewart land of rolling hills, green valleys, and blue forests. It’s possible in summer, while standing on a cliff in the northern part of the county—amid the ruins of the composer Charles Ives’s estate on Pine Mountain in Ridgefield, say, which is just over 1,000 feet—to look clear to the Long Island Sound and see nothing but trees between, as if this were old-growth forest, Connecticut as known by the Ramapough, when, in fact, the land beneath the oak and elm is lousy with roads, estates, playhouses, and stores. Though it looks like wilderness, this is a carefully manicured garden.