Windsor Locks Canal Trail State Park

There are places you can't fully grasp until you look at them on the map. The Windsor Locks Canal Trail, which stretches 4.5 miles from Windsor Locks to Suffield, is one such place. The trail follows the old towpath of the Windsor Locks Canal, built to bypass the Connecticut River's Enfield Falls and completed in 1829. It is, essentially, a narrow road running between the river and the canal, past peculiar ghosts of industries past. And by definition it should be, apart from the beauty of fall's last burst of color and the intriguing glimpses of islands and currents on the river, pretty boring. It is, after all, nothing but a flat straight line.

But look at it on the map, and see how that narrow wisp of land stretches on and on, cut off from the world by water on both sides, and you begin to appreciate the almost eerie experience of walking it from end to end. You can go forward, or you can turn back, but you can't exit, and you can't make another choice. Until you reach the south end, with its looming textile mill buildings, or the north end, with its leafy park, you can only be here, between the still water and the flowing water, on a strip of dirt and pavement.

Is it creepy? Yes, in a way, and fall is the season for creepiness, after all. But it's also fascinating, and occasionally remarkably beautiful. 

Broken Windows and Empty Hallways

The New Haven Register has a blog called Divided Connecticut. It's about politics, and the many issues that are wrapped up therein. But anyone who pays attention to Connecticut - the way it's perceived, and the way it's described - hears a lot about all the other ways the state is carved up into opposing slices. The other day I heard someone say there are "two Connecticuts," and I thought, Two? Try four, try ten, try seventeen. Some would say there are 169 Connecticuts, or that the divisions are infinite.

I tend to chop Connecticut up too, but sometimes I realize that it's better to think of this place as a whole. Town greens and white churches, blighted streets and empty storefronts, manicured lawns and hedge funds, dairy cows and rolling hills, painted boulders and rocky beaches.

This usually occurs to me when I'm enthralled with something like these old J.R. Montgomery textile mill buildings along the canal in Windsor Locks. They're as beautiful as an ornate city hall or a wooded trail, and they're as much a part of Connecticut as either of those.

Midwesticut

I've been in Hartford County a lot recently, Windsor and South Windsor and Windsor Locks and East Windsor Hills. Something that keeps popping into my head (aside from the fact that creative place names were clearly not a 17th century British priority) is that Connecticut is sort of like the United States writ small. The Eastern part is historical and traditional and nautical. The West has the fashionably rural weekend houses, the eco-trendy neighborhoods and the high-end shopping streets. And in the middle...well, no one really knows. A few large-ish cities, where people sometimes unfortunately have to go for business purposes; some farmland, perhaps; some featureless suburban towns that blend into one another; and a number of rivers that you couldn't quite identify on a blank map. But nothing worth seeing.

And then you go there, to the Heartland of Connecticut, and you discover you had it all wrong. OK, it's not a perfect analogy. But I was in Hartford the other day, wandering along the Riverwalk, and the sense of safety even in isolation, the nearby urban center hinted at by the partially visible highway, and the meticulous upkeep of the green space and pathways, reminded me of nothing so much as Omaha. (It surprised me, as a New Yorker, that people in Omaha - and Kansas City and Pierre - didn't seem to mind a bit that they lived in Omaha - or Kansas City or Pierre. It's the same with people in Hartford.)

Those punchline cities, the places with inordinately high crime rates and memories of former importance, have cultural institutions and unexpected architecture and the quiet dignity that comes from not having to try to keep up. In the small towns, there has been no rush to tear down every house to build a bigger, uglier one. They're slower, and quieter; they almost make you forget your dislike of small towns. They might as well be in Indiana.

Here, as in the actual Midwest, it takes longer to get from place to place than you'd think it would. This is partly because people occasionally drive across the road on tractors. But it's mostly because there's just more stuff here than you thought, and that stuff - bridges, restored old schoolhouses, tobacco drying sheds, fields and rivers, wide highways and little back roads - needs a lot of space. And then you sort of understand the early settlers, because filling all that space, and appreciating its beauty, doesn't leave you much time to come up with original names for your towns.