My fondness for Autumn is tempered by my knowledge of what happens next, not because of anything Autumn, itself, has ever done to or for me. In New England, we pride ourselves on the 'leaf peeping' weekends (which are just about over for this season), where excursions travel throughout the region, oohing and ahhing at the multitude of colors adorning the branches of the deciduous trees as their leaves die.
Sorry. That's what they do, hell, it's what we all do. I'm not planning on taking a dirt nap for a while longer yet, but I'll concede I don't have that color thing going on for me unless grey is the color you're talking about and the only part of me thinning is the hair covering my scalp.
Industry left New England in the first decade after World War II. We didn't know it at the time, but the Age of Greed triumphed over the Age of Need, and those who owned factories that made things got tired of paying the folks who worked in them a living wage and benefits and shifted everything South by 900 miles and only had to pay a fraction of what their labor costs had been.
Mills that had been in Massachusetts for generations were shuttered as their doppelgangers opened in one of the Carolinas (it all sounds like banjo music to me), and then a generation later, lather, rinse, repeat as the new location is somewhere it takes you ten minutes to find on the map, all in the name of value to shareholders. The business of America is business; don't forget your receipt.
The offshoot in Norwich is there tracts of land, monuments to Mammon, sprawling factories in every corner of the city that have lain fallow for forty years and often longer, slowly disintegrating, releasing toxins into the air and poisons into the earth so that, like the salt Rome plowed into Carthage to kill it, nothing will grow. No neighborhood is immune.
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| Ruins of Capehart Mill by Lacey Raymond |
There's the Capehart, the gun maker in the middle of downtown, and small ruins that ring the approaches to the city-reminders of what once was, once upon a time. But this time of year, in the early morning, hours before dawn, when stepping outside, the stars seem so bright and so near you can touch them, you remember there's no ground light to dissipate their glow or make them seem as far away as they really are.
It's nearly Halloween and colder than a witch's teat, and you know which way the mercury is heading. Dress warmly and mind the shadows.
-bill kenny
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