New York City Life Escaping the city jangle By Bob Yampolsky	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
都会生活から避難する 毎年夏、週末になると、大勢のニューヨーカーが車に乗り込み、せわしない都会を抜け出して、東のロングアイランド島、南のニュージャージー州の海岸、北西部の山地など、四方八方に散らばります。筆者もそんな移動者の一人です。荷物と子供と食料を車に積み、コネチカット州の別荘を目指します。

On Friday afternoons in the summer, there is a great migration out of New York as people flee the city for the country. Some go east to the sand and surf of Long Island, or the Hamptons, which is by far the most exclusive of New York's summer getaways. Others go south to the Jersey shore, which with its amusement parks, boardwalks and casinos, has a far more plebeian air. Others head to the mountains west and north, or to the farmland up the Hudson Valley.

Those lucky enough to get off work early leave quickly. They pile up the car with luggage, kids, pets, food and head off round in the early afternoon before the roads start to clog up. If you leave during rush hour, it's an ordeal. Everyone seems desperate to get away, and there is much horn-honking and cheating on lines and kids asking how much longer it will take. But then you pass a certain point, the traffic eases and you are in a car speeding along a highway to your refuge away from the city.

I am one of these migrants, thanks to my grandparents, who many years ago bought a little farmhouse in Connecticut, about two hours north of the city by car and made it into a country home.

This section of Connecticut has always had a fairly large summer population. But in the past 20 years or so, there has been a tremendous explosion as the stock market booms of the '80s and '90s created a whole new class of young New Yorkers with great amounts of money to spend.

Land prices shot up, and new houses sprang up everywhere. When I was a kid, there were four houses on our road, which is about three miles (4.8km) long. Whenever a car drove by, everyone dropped what they were doing to look and see who was passing. Today, I cannot count the number of houses on the road, and cars pass so often that we barely notice them anymore.

Inevitably, there are tensions between the locals and the New Yorkers. Much of it is simply due to the fact that the two groups of people lead very different types of lives. For example, my neighbors up the road sometimes take their teenage girls into the city, where they say hello to the people they pass on the street, as is natural for them. And these girls cannot understand why no one Manhattan ever says hello back.

Conversely, when New Yorkers become complaining, sarcastic and argumentative, as is natural for them, they do not understand why people here become sullen and withdrawn instead of being complaining, sarcastic and argumentative back. Today at the town's transfer station where we bring our trash, I heard an argument between a New Yorker, who drove a Mercedes SUV, and a station attendant, who was a local man about 50 years old.

"You can't dump bulk waste on Sundays." "Why not?" "It's the rule." "Yes, but why is it the rule? If you could give me a logical reason why ..." The attendant's face tightened, and he said sternly, "You can't dump bulk waste on Sundays. Come back on Tuesday." Then the guy in the SUV snickered and said to his companion,"Yeah, take a day off Tuesday to throw your garbage away."

At the general store in town they cheer for the Red Sox, the Yankees' great rival. The other day a fellow said to me about a piece of land adjoining our property, "And the worst thing that could happen is some New Yorker would buy the place." Then, realizing who he was talking to, he added, "Not like you, of course."

For many of the new New Yorkers up here, the weekend is still largely a social event: Friends are invited up from the city and there are dinner parties and cocktails. A nearby town, with two farms and one stoplight, has virtually been taken over by restaurants, cafes, art galleries and boutiques catering to New Yorkers. The latest addition is "Wasabi," a Japanese restaurant offering sushi to anyone brave enough to try it. It's on the edge of a cornfield.

For me, though, the whole point of going to the country is to get as far away from the city as possible and sink myself into nature; I put on work clothes and boots and do chores, handling tools, such as chain saws and axes, that in New York would be viewed as weapons. I do not think I could stay completely sane in New York, if I were not able to escape to the country whenever I wanted. It is just too intense, too artificial an environment, and the perfect antidote is the calm, quiet countryside.

Of course, when Sunday afternoon rolls around and it's time to leave, you have to clean up, pack your bags, gather all the fresh vegetables you harvested and the groceries you bought at the much cheaper local supermarket, shut off the water, pile into the car, yell at the kids, and make that reverse migration back into the city.

Out on the highways, it's like a great race: People drive with the same intensity as they did on Friday, escaping. When I reach the city unscathed, I always feel as if I have survived a perilous journey. I put the car away in the garage and take the subway back to my apartment. After all that quiet and greenery, the jangle of the city is certainly a shock. But in a way, it's a relief: I am back in my true element. Personally, I like the country better, but I feel at home in New York.

Shukan ST: Aug. 30, 2002

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