The Websters New World Dictionary describes a suburb as a district, esp. a residential district, on or near the outskirts of a city and often a separately incorporated city or town.
The above definition carries no subtext, and makes no judgments. It simply defines a suburb by its location and in some cases its classification. But too often the American suburb is defined by outsiders in a way that also attempts to classify the people who live there. The suburbs are where you go when you find you can no longer make it in the city. (When you can no longer make it in the suburbs, you go to Florida.)
To many people (especially those who can be found at this very minute dressed all in black and wearing ridiculously small, and tinted, reading glasses) those of us who live in the suburbs are the human equivalent of veal. It is a place to become soft, to lose all sense of creativity, to shut out all stimulation. We venture out of our homes only to go to work or to cut the grass, and maybe for an evening barbecue over martinis. Inside our houses you will find expensive television and video game systems, but the only books will be written by John Grisham, the magazines will feature inane decorating tips and the cuisine will be macaroni and cheese. Any sense of taste we might have has been purchased at the mall. We have walk-in closets and Jacuzzi tubs, but have lost most of the attributes that might classify us as a higher life form.
As a resident of the American suburbs I fled the city ten years ago and have not looked back I can tell you that in some cases this may be true. But the suburbs, like most things in life (except perhaps the collected works of Andrew Lloyd Webber and, obviously, Martha Stewart), prove to be more complicated and fascinating than originally thought.
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If you are trying to describe the American suburbs to people who have never experienced them first hand, its probably a good idea to determine what preconceived notions people may already have. For most of the world, those notions have been formed by US popular culture. In fact, popular culture has become one of our countrys most important exports. We no longer produce electronics, heavy machinery or even agricultural goods for export. Instead we export images of American life, packaged into 30- or 60-minute segments. As I write this, there are people in the remotest jungles of the most underdeveloped countries who, through the miracle of cheap electronics, have seen every episode of Friends. I once tramped through a Colombian jungle at night, believing that I had reached the very end of the world, and came upon a group of men gathered around a shack to watch I Love Lucy (dubbed in Spanish) on a battery-powered television.
What impression, then, is the world getting of the American suburbs from our electronic exports? I come home from a day at the office, selling insurance. My wife, outfitted in dress and pearls, hands me a martini and directs me to my favorite chair, where I page through the evening paper (my only reading material) while she finishes dinner. Our two sons come in from the yard, where theyve been playing catch, and we all sit down to dinner of pork chops. After the meal is done, the boys retire to their room to do their homework, my wife sits in the living room to catch up on her knitting, and I, still in my tie but now wearing a cardigan, retire to my study to page through papers. Later, we will go to bed, secure in the knowledge that we have not been exposed to anything new or different. The pattern is repeated until the weekend, when I mix things up by cutting the grass and washing the sedan well-ordered, calm and utterly devoid of surprises.
Beyond the cutting edge
One of the most common arguments for avoiding the suburbs is that it is a place where all intellectual stimulation ends. Cutting edge literature and drama never make it out here, and entertainment is provided almost exclusively via cable television. There are no artists, no writers, no poets, no musicians to be found among the manicured lawns and picket fences.
But just as one occasionally finds wildlife wandering in the cities, the arts manage to take root and even survive in the suburbs. A man who lives around the corner from me, a business writer by day, works as a jazz musician in the evenings. His wife has been working on a series of novels. The woman across the street from us is a dancer. The guy who walks his dog past my house every night right after dinner is a world-renowned law professor.
We looked at a house for sale a few blocks away, and found that the walls were decorated with the artwork of one of the women who lived there. It was so cutting edge, in fact, that it took me at least fifteen minutes to realize that the subject matters of most of the paintings were, in fact, huge, swollen, multi-colored reproductive organs. (The house did not sell very quickly.)
You do have to look a little harder out here in the burbs to find some variety. Our theatre is largely made up of road shows of the most successful (meaning commercial) plays from New York. And truly independent films often stop by for only one night, at only one theatre, before blowing through town. We do okay, though. If we watch the papers, we can usually get to the films we want to see. And the advantage of having 567 channels on our digital cable is that we can usually find something interesting to watch if we cant get out.
I have to say that truly cutting edge culture is one thing I can probably do without. I once attended a downtown art show where the art consisted of a huge white plywood box, set on an angle, which crushed the head of a rag doll. On the rag dolls face were projections of the faces of very anxious looking people. Next to the rag doll was a tape recorder, which periodically issued whiny statements such as I am a good person or Why dont you like me? I find that life is too short to spend on such stuff.
Hipness or authenticity?
Most urbanites believe that city living provides the most advanced form of living. Nowhere but within the confines of the city can you get such a variety of cuisine from such a mix of cultures. For the most part, all those foods are available to the residents of the suburbs.
I live in a bedroom community in the heart of America, but within ten minutes, I can be seated at some of the best Indonesian or Indian restaurants Ive ever found. Five minutes away is an Italian market that will match any in Manhattan. Not far from there is an authentic German bar and restaurant, nestled into the base of a brewery. There are a number of Irish bars here where one can hear old songs and drink pints so dark they look like you ought to go at them with a knife and fork. There may be some areas of the world that go unrepresented (I have no place to go for Argentine grill) but there is a surprisingly wide selection.
The cities clearly have many more restaurants, but only a few of them are in at any one moment. Years ago, living in Manhattan, I took my young son to breakfast. We went to a place a few blocks from our house, had a very decent meal, and started to walk home. A few doors down, we found a crowd of young people, some with children, shivering outside a similar restaurant. My son asked why these people would stand out in the cold when we were able to get a table down the street without waiting.
Is the food better? he asked.
No, I said.
Is it a nicer place to eat?
No, I said.
He looked up at me in confusion.
Look, I said, sighing. Theyre desperate to get in only because everyone else wants to get in. Its a hip place.
My son mulled it over.
Thats stupid, he said.
Some people, I told him, would stand in line for a punch in the nose if everyone else was doing it.
A compromise with nature
Perhaps the most important aspect of living in the suburbs, however, is that it is a place where one can remain in touch with the natural world. As I write this, a huge maple tree waves outside my window. Two rabbits are wandering across my front lawn, grazing. Past my neighbors house, I can see the outline of a wooded ridge where I know deer can be found. I am a five-minute drive from a stream thick with trout. I am not exactly living in a remote cabin in the Rockies, but I am a lot closer to Mother Nature than I would be in a two bedroom flat in the center of the city.
For perhaps 95 percent of his time on this earth, man has lived up to his neck in nature. We obtained our sustenance by either planting it or hunting it down, and we slept under the stars. While there have been established cities and towns for ages (ancient Mayans may not have had streetcars, but most likely lived their entire lives choking on the dust from city streets) the idea that man should live completely cut off from the natural world is a relatively new, and odd, notion.
I recently visited a zoo, where I saw polar bears pacing back and forth in their cages. A friend who was an animal lover told me that this was not natural polar bear behavior, and was instead displaying signs of stress. Polar bears are meant to cover large expanses of territory, hunting for food, climbing rocky hillsides, ripping the heads off salmon, and charging at Eskimos. When deprived of their natural habitat, they go a bit off the deep end, and spend hours on end pacing the same little patch of ground. When we lived in the city, my wife and I did much the same thing (except, of course, the parts about the salmon and Eskimos), taking walks over the same streets, riding our bikes in endless circles around Central Park in Manhattan.
City dwellers will counter, Im sure, that they have nature at their fingertips. They will tell you about the lovely park just down the street, where there might be a pond with some ducks, and even a few trees. But it is not the same. You can walk your child in the park, but you cant let them wander by themselves. You can sit and look at the pond, but you cannot wade in. On a walk once in Central Park with my young son, he asked why the squirrels had such bony tails. I had to tell him that they were of a different species, and were known as rats.
The suburbs could be argued to offer the perfect compromise for modern man. We yearn to satisfy that primal need to be in touch with nature, to get earth on our hands, and to hear the noises of the forest. But we also, unfortunately, must work and feed our children. To do so, most of us have to be within commuting distance of a city.
While a suburb might be a compromise, it is not the one people assume it is. Rather than a stand-in for the city, a dumping ground for those who could not make it in the urban jungle, the suburbs might be thought of as the closest thing we can get to living out in the wild.
While our more intellectual side feels a need to wake up in the morning to a well-written paper and imported coffee, our more primitive side yearns to hear the noise of the forest, to feel the breeze through the trees, and to smell the fields. We want to breathe air that has not just exited from the lungs of the fellow next us. In the suburbs we can do just that. And we can still get into work at a decent hour.
Excitement or plenitude?
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On a recent visit to New York, I wandered the streets between business meetings, taking in the noise, the activity, and sheer excitement of the place. If I slowed down, I could hear snippets of conversation as businessmen, delivery people, tourists, the homeless, and just about every other sort of human being you could think of pushed past me. It was thrilling, all that humanity pouring down a single sidewalk. And straining my neck, I could see that the stream of people went on and on, until it disappeared into the haze, a continual thread of desires, fears, anxiety, and laughter.
It was thrilling, but at the same time it was overwhelming. I felt a sudden yearning for the quiet of my tree-lined suburban avenue, listening the crickets begin to sing as the sun sets, waving to the fellow who walks his dog, and wondering whether it is time to cut my grass again. A place where on the surface very few things seem to be happening, but where more things occur than you might expect. The suburbs may not have everything one could want. But they do seem to have everything I want.
