Black Rock

I once visited a beautiful wooded lake in western Connecticut, near Watertown, a few miles north of Waterbury on Highway 8. Black Rock State Park, it’s called, where my family camped while apartment hunting for me in July, 1986. I had just arrived to take my new job as Director of the Arts and Humanities Division at Mattatuck Community College. We were pulling our foldout camper, and I drove my Toyota, crammed with whatever belongings I could bring. I would be living in Connecticut on my own until my family could move up from Florida the following year. We knew it would be tough, but that was the plan. There was little choice since I had lost my job. My former college closed that spring. I would have to go, as a bachelor, wherever I could find another job in my field, and the Mattatuck job is the one that came through. I had been offered it only two days before.
We camped at a private campground acorss the road from the state park, and immediately went over to explore its beautiful lakes and rolling woods. Barb said she’d like to return in the autumn; the leaves would be spectacular. And I actually did return, alone unfortunately, to take pictures when the blaze of Autumn in New England began that October. It was evry bit as beautiful as she had imagined.
That scene, that place, became for me an icon, an idyll of New Endland life, from that moment. To think, to dream, to be suffused by the transcendent beauty of that scene, has returned to my mind so many times in the quarter-century since. Barbara mused that she would like to live there, and that became my dream as well…to get out of Florida and move to a New England wood—maybe not that particular one, being illegal in a state park to homestead, but another woods with similar beauty.
I actually found a couple of potential properties for us during the following months, and tried to buy them. My personal mission, apart from doing my duties at Mattatuck, was to be the “pathfinder” for our family, first on the scene and scouting for a future home for us. Barbara had to mind the Florida home and manage the children while she taught her final year needed to vest herself in Florida’s teacher retirement plan.
Every Sunday I scoured the realty ads and went out to neighboring villages and towns with ads in hand to check out properties. As I said, I found a couple of great places: one, a farmette of several acres in Woodbory, with rolling fields, a chicken coop and feather plucker, and picturesque stone walls bording the property, had wonderful trees and picturesque structures and vistas. I tried to buy it, and my offer was accepted. The house needed work, but the property itself was worth the price. I took many photos and flew home to try to get the financing. But in the end I couldn’t swing it. I couldn’t sell my Florida home quickly enough or find affordable loans. I had to withdraw my offer.
Later I found a nice cape cod on a lake, and its back yard abutted the Mattatuck State Forest. We would be assured natural beauty and unlimited woods forever. Again I tried to make an offer, but it was sold that very day for full asking price. Priperties in that area had risen in price 35% in one year, and sales in that part of the state were in a land rush as industry moved quickly in. Houses listed in the morning were sold that same day, sometimes before listing, even. I was crushed that I never got to move to my prized New England dream house, that year or since.
But in retrospect, perhaps it is good that I never got to move there. Later that year it became obvious to me that I couldn’t get along with my dean and my future would be too stressful at Mattatuck. After February I informed them I wouldn’t be returning that fall, and I moved back to Florida after commencement. Right career, wrong job, definitely wrong boss. In the following year I taught courses part-time for Indian River Community College and a branch campus in Stuart. I realized again how much I loved to teach. I had missed that at Mattatuck. By December I was looking again for another fulltime teaching job,
But administrative jobs were easier to find, and paid more, and I had experience.
I dound a division chairmanship plus faculty status as a full professor (almost tenure) at the College of Boca Raton in South Florida. We moved to nearby Delray Beach in July of 1989. Barb got a teaching position at Deerfield Park Elementary School, Deerfield Beach, that fall, and we settled into South Florida for several years. We bought our Coral Springs house the following March and have lived in it for fifteen years as we raised our sons in good schools and neighborhoods. They all attended Florida universities and later settled in Florida themselves. We seem likely to spend the rest of our lives in this state.
But the image of Black Rock State Park’s mystique has never left me. It still occupies my dream as the idyll of a New England life, with such rich history and such a vibrant intellectual tradition, storybook towns and village greens, rolling woods and picturesque lakes, autumn leaves and Christmas charm of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was always my goal to teach at a liberal arts college in New England. But over the next quarter-century I completed my academic career in South Florida instead. Sometimes one takes what opportunities seem at hand rather than forcing choices, and the opportunities I had seemed to be in South Florida for my family and me. I’ll probably never know how things might have been, had we moved to Connecticut. Maybe we would have been better off, maybe not.
Sometimes we drive down though Vermont and New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut on our way home from Eastern swings on our summer trips. And as I pass by my former college site and realize it’s now no longer operating, I think of how I would probably been forced to relocate to another town anyway, after a couple of years, had I remained. Waterbury was also scorned by a magazine for a couple of years as the worst place in all America to live. But I still miss it. I still think of it as my “spiritual home,” my “New England experience.”
However, I’ll probably never live in New England again. I doubt that I would want to now. Once Barbara retires in another five or ten years, we will probably move to central or northern Florida, not to New England. That would be too far from our grandchildren and sons. And there won’t be the same reasons to go, since I’m done with fulltime academic work. It was a dream. It is a dream. And it will always be a dream.