Hannah Roller
I spent the beginning of my life loving trees and fearing the city. The Berkshires span the western highland region of Massachusetts. Here, this place that I have always called home, the trees morph into forests which blend into mountains which roll into each other, divided at random by rivers or lakes or the occasional town. The rurality of this place has gained appeal each year that I get older. Growing up in the company of nature forces you to examine yourself as part of the broader uncultivated world. The rawness of the seasons, the quiet darkness of the woods, the fire red auburn of the fall foliage, the cold white of the snow, the clarity of the Green River, all telescoping to create a place where one becomes a person as naturally as the seasons change. To grow up in the woods is to become oneself undistracted by preconceived notions of humanity. It is to live as you are.
In a rural setting, there is no guarantee of city convenience. No Instacart or Uber or public transportation or a 24-hour convenience store at the street corner. Instead, my childhood was marked by twenty-minute drives to the local library, leaf piles, snow-blown sled paths, muddy rain boots, fresh corn from the farmstand on the drive home and a nightly harmony of peeper frogs and crickets.
Being a kid in a rural area was challenging. I was completely at the mercy of my mother and her willingness to drive me twenty, thirty, forty minutes to see a friend or to the movies or out to dinner for a first date. My independence was limited by the geographical distance, and my town was tiny, so small that there wasn’t a single traffic light. But then I got my car keys.
The last two years I spent at home were soaked in independence. Hours spent in the car blaring music, late night drives, bonfires deep in the woods, freezing hands filling the gas tank, picking friends up, dropping them off, and hour-long conversations in driveways with the engine off. Being able to drive was revolutionary. The time spent in the car, staring out at the mountains and the trees and the rivers, made me appreciate it more. And the final rotation of the seasons leading up to my leaving for college really made me take it in. I love living in the woods, I loved that my school was surrounded on both sides by a range of mountains, I love the foliage and the snow and the animals and the sunsets and the raw aliveness of it all. And for that reason I didn’t want the city. It was the one thing about Yale that made me hesitate.
To me, home has always felt serene and simple and rhythmic and natural. Cities, in comparison, always felt messy, overcrowded, overpolluted, laced with desperation, depression, and intensity. New Haven, while a comparably small city to the hometowns of other students, feels huge. On campus there is no open air and no complete silence. There is a constant rush and flow of people, events, cars, scooters, voices, emotions, work and bikes. You don’t ever really hear birds here. I walk everywhere. The squirrels are weird, they’re unfazed by people. The nature is squished between buildings instead of the other way around. Businesses stay open past 10pm. And you don’t hear frogs and crickets at night, you hear car tires and music and laughter.
Three weeks ago I was standing at the intersection of Trumbull and Prospect, the light had just turned red and the crosswalk indicator white and there was the blur of people and the hum of waiting engines and among it the thrum of lives diverging and intersecting. A moment of collectively heading the same, the opposite, the tangent direction. It brought me back to the essay I was working on for a class, centered on the Ancient Confucian Analects. In Analect 4.1 Confucius states “It is beautiful to live amidst humanity. To choose a dwelling place destitute of humanity is hardly wise.” That segment, when I had initially read it, made me pause. I have spent the majority of the past few years with the stubborn belief that it is far more beautiful to live in nature, away from the complicated convoluted mess of desire and convenience and ease. The rurality of the Berkshires — the peace, air, trees, and calm — always felt like a more accurate representation of what life is, what it is meant to be. But New Haven has led me to realize that the city also holds a true, albeit different, version of life. The city holds humanity in all its riches, poverty, emptiness and depth.
I won’t stop loving trees, but I have stopped fearing the city. As rurality reminds us of the responsibility we have to the Earth, urbanity reminds us of the responsibility we must and necessarily do have to each other. The city is now one of the things I love most about Yale. I find myself feeling as though I have found home in both of the polar opposites.
I went back to the woods over break. I don’t know if this is universal, but the first time coming home made the past months at Yale feel like an illusion, a hazy summer camp-like day dream. Weirdly, the Berkshires also felt slightly foreign. Nights quiet and sleepy, travel long and mundane, the sky open and empty. Home felt strangely solitary, since at school we are constantly witnessed by each other. You are rarely alone, rarely with yourself.
At home it felt like it was just the woods and me. I missed that feeling, but I also started to miss being witnessed. And while I have loved being submerged in the apple orchard, the hikes, and the long winding roads, I found myself missing New Haven itself. It seems I now hold the city, right there along with the trees.