Volume 53 - Issue 2

The TheNew NewJournal Journal Volume 53, No. 2 Volume 53, No. 1

The magazine about Yale and New Haven The magazine about Yale and New Haven

October 2020 September 2020

Editors-In-Chief Helena Lyng-Olsen Candice Wang Executive Editor Elena DeBre Managing Editor Hailey Andrews Associate Editors Jack Delaney Alexandra Galloway Zachary Groz Madison Hahamy Meera Rothman Nicholas Ruiz-Huidobro Magdits

Copy Editors Nicole Dirks Anna Fleming Ella Goldblum

Members and Directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Aliyya Swaby

Creative Director Meher Hans

Advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rawbin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin

Design Editors Brian Chang Natasha Gaither Rebecca Goldberg Annli Nakayama Illustrators Alice Mao Cindy Ren Sydney Zoehrer

Senior Editors Beasie Goddu Eli Mennerick Elliot Wailoo

Friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

Dear readers, We’re writing this as dried leaves fall around us; even as the pandemic increasingly causes separation, it also drives us outdoors. Pass by Yale on an average autumn afternoon, and though the bustling dining halls of Yale’s past are at a standstill, you’ll see students spreading picnic blankets in courtyards and venturing to greenspaces in search of foliage during this beautiful time of the year.

In this issue, our writers follow suit and venture into the great outdoors. We embark on an actual goose chase in search of the deeply buried history of New Haven’s waterfowl wars, and spend a day in the fields with one of Connecticut’s most beloved organic farmers. We stroll through Edgewood Park and examine the powerful volunteer force that keeps New Haven’s parks beautiful, then move onto sidewalks to discuss the controversy surrounding historical building preservation. Then we finally go indoors to visit an iconic sweaty nightclub of months past, a secretive Yale corporation boardroom, and Yalies’ love lives during the pandemic.

We hope you enjoy the fresh air.

Yours, Candice and Helena

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520.

Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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The New Journal October 2020

FEATURES Nancy Walecki

22

SALT OF THE EARTH A ninety-year-old organic farmer in Shelton, Connecticut returns to his roots.

Zachary Groz

27

FOWL PLAY A dusty history book sends the author on a wild goose chase.

STANDARDS Kapp Singer

4

critical angle: YALE’S MOST SECRET SOCIETY

Serena Lin

8

Kat Paton

11

LOVE UNDER QUARANTINE

creative: THE ELMHURST

Jack Tripp

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snapshot: THE POLITICS OF PRESERVATION

Meg Buzbee

15

A NEED FOR GREEN

Candice Wang

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personal essay: THE PALACE WITHIN

Natasha Gaither

21

art: QUARANTINE SUMMER

Ivy Fan

32

art: SKETCHES

Julia Hornstein

33

endnote: TOADS IS CLOSED

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CRITICAL ANGLE

A severe lack of transparency shrouds the Yale corporation’s meeting minutes.

By Kapp Singer

“A

fifty-year embargo is indefensible,” Victor Ashe ’67 proclaimed to me over the phone. You would think he was rehashing a debate over some obscure piece of legislation enacted during his tenure as U.S. Ambassador to Poland. But the septuagenarian was actually referring to rule 4.II.A of the Yale Corporation’s regulations: “Minutes of the Yale Corporation and its committees are closed for fifty years.”

Over the course of their five annual meetings, the Corporation’s members—a potpourri of sixteen corporate execs, venture capitalists, public officials, nonprofit directors, and academics—discuss and vote on high-level decisions regarding Yale’s budget, faculty leadership appointments, and large capital projects. Ashe is currently vying for a spot on the Corporation and running on a platform that emphasizes transparency. “I’m hop-

4

ing to convince my colleagues, if I’m elected, that they need to let the sun shine in,” he told me, his thick Ssouthern accent serving as a reminder of his past; he was the longest-serving mayor of Knoxville and a Tennessee state representative.

To emphasize his point, Ashe offered up a joke: “What’s more secret than a senior society at Yale?” he asked me, followed by an excruciatingly awkward pause. “The answer is the Yale Corporation.”

Ashe’s campaign website outlines his stance more eloquently: “a more transparent and democratic Yale Corporation would strengthen the University’s decision-making ability, alumni/ae engagement, and connection with all of its stakeholders, including students and faculty.” In both casual humor over the phone and prepared prose on his website, Ashe’s belief is clear: the Corporation’s

Design by Brian Chang

50-year sealing of meeting minutes is excessive and a hindrance to progress.

Ashe’s ambitions for openness will not be easily realized. To change Corporation bylaws, he will need to convince a supermajority of two-thirds of his colleagues to vote in favor of amending or overturning 4.II.A. His hurdle lies not only in the sheer number of trustees he’ll need to convince, but in the fact that the proposed changes buck the trend of a notoriously closed-off board composed of members who cherish this secrecy.

Catharine “Cappy” Bond Hill Ph.D ‘57, an economist, director of an education non-profit, and a senior trustee on the Corporation, thinks the fifty 50-year policy is vital. Sealing rules, she said, is are “a way of helping people who are on any board speak honestly and forthrightly and not worry about it entering the public domain at some point and coming back and haunting them.” All of Hill’s institutional affiliations—as a current YaleNUS board member, and previously as the president at Vassar College and provost of Williams College—had some version of long-term minute sealing, between thirty 30 and fifty 50 years; this is a common practice at private universities.

Before even beginning to reach out to Corporation members—a time-consuming, secretary-ridden process, given that Yale doesn’t list any emails or phone numbers for any of the trustees—I anticipated Hill’s answer to my question of why Yale’s minutes are sealed for half a century. After a 2017 push from students to make the Corporation’s discussions more open, Peter Salovey offered a facsimile of her statement, explaining in a Yale Daily News DN interview that “a certain level of confidentiality and protection from short-term considerations is necessary to allow [trustees] to do their work.” Ostensibly to placate student complaints at this time, specifically with regard to discussions around building renaming, the board unveiled a few transparency measures, such as listing meeting times online and encouraging meetings with student groups. But many felt these changes were worthless and “largely cosmetic,” according to the News YDN. To emphasize the openness-effectiveness

tradeoff, Hill suggested I look into how public boards function. “Often what happens there is essentially nothing,” she told me with a chuckle.

She added that these boards gather an array of talented and committed people, and when there is pressure from the public record to censor oneself, “decisions and conversations get pushed someplace else, which I think is really unfortunate.”

The debate about whose voices should play a larger role in a board’s decision making process— those of a small, chosen group of individuals, or those of the students, faculty and greater university community—is at the heart of the disagreement between Ashe and Hill.

However, the origins of Yale’s decision to seal meeting minutes comes from a much less rational place. Ex-university secretary Sam Chauncey ’57 told me that the rule’s hasty adoption, which came sometime between 1979 and 1982, according to the university archivist, was based largely on administrators’ personal fears rather than sound reasoning. Chauncey explained that when he became university secretary in 1971 under president Kingman Brewster, Yale Corporation records were publicly accessible after a shorter time of fifteen years post-meeting. But after A. Bartlett Giamatti became president in 1978, the heavy wooden doors of Woodbridge Hall slammed shut.

“Bart had been a beloved faculty member,” Chauncey said, admired by students and professors alike. But when he became president, financial troubles necessitated Giamatti cut the university’s budget. “Many of his faculty friends turned on him and he became excessively sensitive… he had very thin skin.”

Giamatti’s assistant, Henry Broude, had intense paranoia of his own. According to Chauncey, whose sister was Broude’s secretary, Broude would burn messages left on his desk at the end of the day and never let his own handwriting be seen.

Chauncey surmised that Broude’s behavior augmented Giamatti’s worries, eventually pushing the president to such an intense state of paranoia that he requested to be driven around campus accompanied by armed guards. The biggest outcome of this anxiety, though, was Giamatti’s decision to

extend the fifteen-year-rule to fifty years, according to Chauncey. We’ll have to take his word for it— he wrote me in an email, “I am afraid anyone I can think of who could comment on Bart’s paranoia is dead.”

“Paranoia is not a rational reason to adopt any policy,” Ashe said, reacting to the story about Giamatti, which Chauncey had recounted to him on a previous occasion. “What happened is all the more reason to change it.” Hill, on the other hand, doesn’t think that the motivations behind the creation of the fifty 50-year -seal impact the rule’s efficacy.

In a 2006 report on openness in public university administration published in The Journal of Higher

“If the minutes are opened by the time I have grandkids, what does it matter what the Yale Corporation talked about this year? At that point, you might as well seal them forever.”

Education, the authors reiterate Hill’s claims, writing that transparency mandates, often referred to as sunshine laws, can cause board members to become “reluctant to discuss controversial issues” in the setting of a full and open board, with individual conversations happening instead. However, they conclude that, “though sometimes these laws are perceived as time-consuming and a hindrance to quick action, we detected substantial consensus in the belief that, on average, the benefits of mandated openness,” namely as increased democracy of a board and accountability of its members “outweigh the costs.” A 2017 brief from the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges echoes this, conceding that open boards may be inefficient but “voice is to be valued in all democratic settings, and one could argue that it is especially needed in the current landscape of higher education.”

Maggie Thomas YSE’15, who is on the May 2021 ballot alongside Ashe for a Corporation seat, also embraces the value of voice, and has championed transparency as an important step towards the university’s fight against climate change. Thomas, who served as Elizabeth Warren’s climate policy advisor 6

during the 2020 democratic primary, is running via the Yale Forward campaign, a joint effort with the Cambridge-based group Harvard Forward to elect climate advocates to the Ivy League juggernauts’ respective governing bodies.

An email from Thomas’s campaign expressed distaste for the Corporation’s secrecy, writing that “the Yale Corporation’s 50 year embargo on its meeting minutes is nothing short of shameful, and Yale alumni deserve better.” She specifically cites the Corporation’s 2014 decision to remain invested in fossil fuels. When a vote was held on this issue at the time, two Corporation members, one of whom oxymoronically sat on the Committee for Investor Relations, held high-profile positions in the fossil fuel industry, including board seats at Anadarko Petroleum and Exelon, two multibillion-dollar multi-billion dollar energy companies. “It will not be until 2064 that we will learn whether Yale’s own trustees chose to put a finger on the scale when the outcome could have directly affected their personal or professional financial interests,” wrote Thomas. The half-century delay is particularly frightening when considering the immediate and near-future effects of climate change from fossil fuels— environmental experts predict twenty inches of sea level rise in coastal Connecticut by 2050.

A large part of Thomas’s campaign is predicated on accessibility within the Corporation, beyond simply opening minutes—she dedicates an entire section of her website to “Inclusive Governance,” providing a scrupulous thirteen-page document which explains the benefits of open governance and the steps needed to achieve it. In addition to making meeting minutes more readily available to the public, she believes the Corporation needs to eliminate barriers to entry for young alumni by reducing petition requirements to appear on the ballot and providing ample opportunities for students, faculty, and staff to share their perspectives with Corporation members.

Many of these additional objectives are also reflected in Ashe’s platform.

But with respect to the planet, Thomas breaks from Ashe, who never mentioned fossil fuel divestment or climate change issues in our original phone interview or on his campaign website. Though focused mainly on environmental change, Thomas

more broadly endorses “socially responsible investment guidelines” and “endowment justice” in her platform—a theme Ashe is hesitant to give a stark “yes” or “no” to, citing lack of enough information to make an informed call. He did tell me, though, that “investments should be along lines that promote a good return” because of the financial importance of the endowment to the university’s operations, and these investments should be “consistent with efforts to promote a clean environment and climate for the world.”

In explaining why he doesn’t prioritize divestment as Thomas does, Ashe enumerated his belief that one can only affect so much change at a time, and the issue of transparency is paramount for him.

He differentiated himself from Thomas, saying “she takes positions on ten or fifteen different issues… I don’t think any of the others can occur until we have transparency and a new system of electing alumni fellows.” Politically, the two alumni are split as well: Ashe is a Rrepublican, while Thomas’s work for Senator Warren places her solidly on the left.

But however each decides to push their policy goal(s), the two certainly share a strong belief in public accessibility and accountability—and they think the current rules are frankly ridiculous.

Thomas wrote to me, “There is nothing in the scope of the Yale Corporation’s meetings that requires, or deserves, such secrecy. Even secret meetings of the United States House and Senate pertaining to sensitive topics such as national security are typically released to the public within 30 years.” Ashe summed things up more pithily, drawing a similar contrast to federal agencies: “It defies any logic. It makes no sense… This is not the CIA or the FBI.” My conversation with the two Corporation hopefuls fired me up to scream “open up the minutes!”, but Hill’s rationale also rang true. I’m torn. First, Ashe lamented to me that the board’s secrecy discourages “robust discussion,” but Hill then suggested that the only way to have productive and honest conversation is behind closed doors.

After the conclusion of my second conversation with Ashe, though, where I recounted to him some of Hill’s points, I began to be more and more convinced that the secrecy is truly over- the- top. “I’ve served on many public boards,” Ashe said, “I don’t

recall a time when the immediate release [of minutes]or being televised has inhibited discussion.” He called Hill’s point that openness results in self-censorship “a very weak excuse.” And furthermore, he pointed out to me that at the present moment, the Corporation does not even release meeting agendas or the resolutions passed. What do either of these have to do with protecting the careers or personal lives of the group’s members?

Even if the fifty50-year rule were repealed or substantially reduced, Corporation meetings still would not be fully public. The boardroom within Woodbridge Hall, likely replete with glamorously upholstered chairs, a long wooden table, and those Yale-branded single-use water bottles, will remain a figment of students’ imaginations. Releasing meeting minutes is a relatively small change in the larger context of wholly open meetings. Yes, the belief of Corporation members that the sanctity of Woodbridge Hall allows for ideological freedom is accurate and perhaps holds some water. But the way Ashe and Thomas discuss the policies of secrecy—as outrageously excessive—feels salient. Because if the minutes are opened by the time I have grandkids, what does it matter what the Yale Corporation talked about this year? At that point, you might as well seal them forever.

As morbid as it is, many of today’s Corporation members will be dead, or nearing it, in fifty 50 years.

Perhaps decisions as grave as backing fossil fuels ought to come back to haunt those who made these calls, exactly as Hill worries they could. Because public pressure originates for a reason, and in the context of cataclysmic issues like greenhouse gas emissions, a very good one: our future.

- Kapp Singer is a junior in Grace Hopper College

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Love Under Quarantine Love at Yale will find its way.

By Serena Lin All names marked with an asterisk are pseudonyms

F

reshly ousted from campus amid a global pandemic, junior Anna Albright returned home for the summer and fell for an old friend. We were speaking over Zoom from our respective apartments in New Haven, both back for a remote, distanced semester. The grainy video quality made it difficult to gauge exactly how she was feeling, but she was willing to reflect openly about her love life—both during lockdown and at Yale.

In Albright’s experience, it’s difficult to create and maintain a relationship at Yale, and she has had little success doing so on campus. “We have this go-getter attitude [with] club positions and internships, where we think that if we just work hard and have confidence, we’ll get what we want,” Albright said. “We take that approach, also, when it comes to our love lives. But that’s not how love works.”

The relaxed environment of lockdown allowed for Albright to organically develop a relationship with an old high school friend of hers, Noah*. When they found themselves back at home in mid-March, away from their respective colleges and usual busy schedules, their relationship bloomed. They took up running together and spent weeks training for a half-marathon together. During their practice, they realized that they had developed feelings for one another. But, in line with the slow-paced life of quarantine, Albright and Noah felt no need to rush into things too quickly.

When asked about love on campus under normal circumstances, Albright said she noticed many romantic relationships here at Yale to be “transactional.” Students, she thought, tended to immediately weigh whether a new person would be a viable partner. This also leads students to leap into relationships relatively quickly. She had observed a culture of seeing a romantic relationship as another achievement or accomplishment in “having your life together.”

When Albright returned to New Haven for the fall, the relationship didn’t quite fit into the picture and she broke

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it off. Although she thinks fondly of Noah, it became stressful to maintain the same closeness that they had enjoyed at home.

“I preferred to be single and fully present with my people here [at Yale], rather than caught up with someone who was far away,” she told me.

The COVID-19 pandemic has predictably disrupted the ebb and flow of love and dating at Yale, usually so fastpaced and chaotic. The unexpected departure from campus and uncertainty of the future has upset even our bestlaid plans. But love is not at all put on pause; it’s found ways to flourish and shift in unanticipated ways. While distance has proved to be the breaking point for some, others found solace in love or reached for new, creative ways to forge connections. *** Will*, a sophomore living on campus this semester, felt as though the pandemic had dampened his usually carefree approach to dating and hook-ups. He was an expressive and lively speaker, even over Zoom. “I’ve always been a promiscuous person,” he told me. “But the rising number of [COVID-19] cases is inversely related to promiscuity.”

Before the pandemic, he had been meeting people, mostly casually, through dating apps like Grindr. He was largely unrestrained by the Yale bubble in his romantic exploits, having dated students from colleges all over the Greater New Haven area. He was—and still is—keeping his mind open to the possibility of a romantic spark, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Back on campus for the year, he described feeling a newfound pressure to be more cautious when meeting up with matches. Will expressed a desire to adhere to public health precautions and consider the safety of his suitemates and himself. His rule is now “Yalies only,” which he feels is less risky given the strict on-campus social distancing guidelines and twice weekly testing.

Will’s willingness to explore beyond Yale was rare among students I spoke to for this article, and he has mourned giving up his usually open-minded approach to dating. Due to the pandemic, many have avoided meeting new people, a mindset which Will characterized as “fearing the stranger.” Although he recognizes that it is a necessity for public health, it’s still a difficult thing to come to terms with. *** At the beginning of quarantine, Kayla*, a sophomore, explored options to recreate a campus experience online.

She was invited to join a Discord server—an online chatting platform that allows people to create private communities, or “servers”—for another university (which Kayla requested go unnamed to preserve anonymity). Discord

Design by Natasha Gaither

began largely as a platform for gamers, but has grown, especially during the pandemic, to host a variety of communities. Within a server, it’s possible to see which users are online and then initiate voice or video calls, which allows for spontaneous interactions. “It’s the closest you can get to running into someone on campus,” Kayla told me. We were speaking over FaceTime. Home for the semester, Kayla had been missing Yale.

This server had around a thousand members, most of them students at this university, and hosted virtual events.

Kayla participated in an online dating competition that mimicked the style of the popular reality television show The Bachelor. The titular bachelor, a student on the server, picked between contestants as they vied for his attention through a series of virtual activities. Although Kayla didn’t win and the competition didn’t exactly go according to plan (the bachelor ended up bowing out of the dating aspect of the contest), her involvement won her some suitors.

“A lot of people on the Discord platform tended to be sad, lonely gamer boys,” Kayla said, half-jokingly. She found herself the object of their affections and realized, somewhat incidentally, that these boys were willing and eager to send her small gifts. She would casually mention wanting a particular video game or craving something from Uber Eats, and someone would offer to order it for her. “It’s a symbiotic relationship.”

None of these interactions, however, led to more long-term relationships, or even friendships. Most of the boys she spoke to over Discord lived across the country, and she never seriously considered dating someone she couldn’t easily meet in person. It was also difficult to develop an emotional connection with someone who was just “another face on Zoom.” *** Kira*, a sophomore, found that the forced distance away from Yale proved to be just the thing she needed to venture into her first committed relationship. She met her boyfriend on Bumble shortly after coming home for spring break. Kira surprised herself by agreeing to get coffee with him, a first date that lasted for seven hours.

They went on a second date the next day — stargazing on the beach — right before lockdown was enacted and they decided to “move the entire relationship onto Zoom.”

Kira attributed her relationship to the pandemic. She admitted that if Yale hadn’t shut down, she never would have given someone on Bumble real consideration. And somewhat counterintuitively, she told me that, “During COVID, I was more bold on dating apps and more willing to meet up with people.”

Kira explained that, deprived of the wealth of romantic opportunities that being on campus offered, she began to

take dating apps more seriously, especially at the beginning of the pandemic in March. Once lockdown was enacted, she and her now-boyfriend became exclusive.

Kira thought that distance from campus life helped her “reconsider all these expectations people had for [her],” including the pressure to have casual sex. In her experience at Yale, she felt that boys she met often wanted to have sex immediately and weren’t willing to commit to a relationship without first getting intimate. Because of the pandemic, she and her boyfriend were forced to take things slowly, something that Kira found refreshing. She attributes the strong foundation of their relationship to the long online period, which forced them to “slow down and become willing to commit.”

For the fall semester, she plans to stay in her hometown, where her boyfriend also lives. But when Kira returns to Yale in the spring, she will have to weather a bicoastal, long-distance relationship. *** Emma*, a sophomore, met her girlfriend on a very unconventional platform — Librex, an anonymous discussion forum restricted to those with an Ivy League email address. At the beginning of lockdown, Emma posted in Librex’s general Ivy League thread asking, “Are there any queer women on here?” She received a variety of responses and matched with some commenters, which allowed her to direct message them.

For Emma, who is politically conservative, it’s been difficult to navigate the queer dating scene at Yale. She told me, “When I posted [on Librex], I just wanted to find someone to talk to about being a queer woman. I wasn’t

“The COVID-19 pandemic has predictably disrupted the ebb and flow of love and dating at Yale...But love is not at all put on pause; it’s found ways to flourish and shift in unanticipated ways.” looking for a relationship.”

But one commenter stood out. When Emma first spoke to her now-girlfriend, they were both anonymous users on Librex. They connected over a shared sense of loneliness at Yale, stemming from uncommon political opinions and not fitting into the student body. They also had similar professional and academic interests.

They revealed their identities to each other after a day of talking on the app and moved into texting. At first, the conversation remained largely platonic, mostly focused on schoolwork and career goals. There was also the con-

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sideration of the five-year age difference between Emma and her girlfriend, who is a graduate student at Yale.

Once Emma arrived in New Haven, having moved here for the school year, she met up with her now-girlfriend. She was initially nervous about how their relationship would translate to being in-person and explicitly romantic, but Emma told me that she feels that it has only strengthened since meeting up. They have been dating since. *** Quinn*, a junior, felt that the pandemic placed a newfound pressure on her relationship, which had already survived periods of long-distance.

She met her boyfriend on move-in day her first year at Yale. It’s disputed where exactly they first bumped into each other — either at the beginning or the end of a tour of their residential college. They lived in adjoined suites, but didn’t start dating until the following spring. It was her first “adult relationship” and her first time falling in love. They went through their fair share of difficulties — they had been long distance the summer before their sophomore year and planned to be apart last spring because Quinn was studying abroad (though once the pandemic worsened globally, all Yale students were called back to the States).

“The summer, bizarrely, was the happiest time in the relationship,” she said. We were speaking over Zoom, and she seemed wistful. “We got to be fully present because there aren’t a billion other things on your mind.”

They were in the same state over the summer, so it was possible to see each other over weekends. It wasn’t as hard being long-distance during lockdown because “life was on pause.” They had seemingly endless amounts of time to devote to talking to each other. “During a pandemic, all the benefits of being in a relationship are amplified — the convenience, the companionship, the safety of having a dedicated partner,” Quinn told me.

But when it came time for the fall semester, Quinn’s boyfriend left the States to be at home with his family and Quinn came to New Haven. As life creeped back to normalcy and school started back up, Quinn said, “It seemed as though our lives were resuming [after lockdown], but very much separately.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, this was the period of long-distance that the relationship could not survive. It was difficult to conceive of a concrete future together because it was unclear when Quinn’s boyfriend would be able to return to New Haven. They struggled with the question of: “What does a relationship mean when you don’t know the next time you can see that person, and you don’t have

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a date to peg your hopes on?”

Quinn and her boyfriend broke up during the fall semester, over the phone. When I spoke to Quinn, she was still trying to figure out how to recover from the conclusion of a long-term relationship during a period of reduced social contact.

“It’s very strange because life is a lot quieter these days, so it’s a tough time to go through a loss like that,” Quinn told me. She added, laughing, “But maybe it’s also good, because otherwise I would have gone to Woads and done something stupid.” *** Despite the unprecedented nature of this semester, students I’ve spoken to have all tried to regain a sense of normalcy, whether it be through discovering new communities or forging romantic relationships. They’ve embraced, wholeheartedly, the imperfect forms that love takes during these strange times. Most Yalies seem to have taken this opportunity to learn new lessons about themselves. Something I learned, personally, is that we get so caught up in relationships at Yale to somewhat relieve the pressure we feel to make the most of our time here. This is meant to be the prime of our lives, but we are pulled in so many directions, all the time, beholden to academic responsibilities, extracurricular pursuits, and social endeavors. The pandemic and its mandated social isolation has distilled life into its essential elements, challenging us to decide what really matters in the end.

I thought back to my interview with Quinn and how she perfectly encapsulated what many of us are feeling right now: “I am learning that it’s okay that there are times when life doesn’t feel so glowing and ecstatic, which we are told that every moment of college should be like.”

-- Serena Lin is a sophomore in Branford College.

The Elmhurst

By Kat Paton

Illustration by Cindy Ren Design by Annli Nakayama

I

live in a first-floor apartment in New Haven, Connecticut.

Our living room looks onto Elm Street, just east of its intersection with Howe. This is the Elmhurst.

A mix of businesses and apartments surround us.

Jane Jacobs would be proud. Our eastern neighbor is the Coop, which advertises on Craigslist and mandates 75% consensus for accepting new members. It houses at least one talented trombonist, an elderly man who enjoys reading on the front steps, and a skinny woman with a relaxed smile who smokes cigarettes (my roommate and I like to imagine she is our elder queer icon). More non-student “real people” live across the street at 364. Our landlord owns another, nicer building at 366. Their residents, like us, are mostly undergraduates. I once visited 366 to kill a friend’s spider. It looked like the dorms I used to live in.

West of 366 is Three Sheets, perhaps the only bar in New Haven that stayed open during the pandemic, courtesy of its outdoor patio. West of Three Sheets—Main Garden, a cheap Chinese restaurant with apartments on top; I bought a skateboard off Facebook from one resident.

Across from Main Garden is Alpha Delta Pizza. They stay open until 3 AM all week. Zach’s, a homey liquor store, is on the corner.

That’s just the microneighborhood. Further west, more single family homes and townhouses pepper the road to Stop and Shop; the road passes at least one funeral home and a behavioral health center. Further east, and the university begins to dominate. The Bank of America parking lot attracts skittish white kids buying weed. A large Episcopalian church shields us from the Broadway shopping district. A few fraternity houses sit across from it.

Only one of our front windows has a screen. I like to sit in the other and watch. Especially when the sun is overhead in the late morning, I like to slouch against the frame and let one leg dangle out. One time an older man

walked up and tried to ask me out for a drink, but I am mostly left alone. I never feel unsafe. I like to watch the staff open Three Sheets.

When I finish my rice or tea and biscuit, I leave the window. The sound remains hard to ignore. Our stretch of Elm Street is a two-way parade on an otherwise mostly one-way street: pedestrians, dirt bikes, motorcycles, what can only be described as electric tricycles, skateboards, commuting and recreational bicycles (kids do wheelies on the latter), obnoxious “peddle pubs,” and variously luxurious or decrepit cars screech or slide by at all hours of the day and night. One vaguely cursed-looking, washedout ice cream truck parks outside Alpha Delta and never seems to be open. It looks so clearly like a drug front that it probably isn’t. City officials have tried for years to prosecute the dirt bikers they claim “terrorize” residents with reckless stunt driving. Call-in complaints have helped various sting operations. A new ordinance would increase the fine from $99 to $2000.

Last night, somebody threw purple Downy detergent out an Elmhurst window. The thumping bass of a small but exuberant party kept other building residents up until one or two. A homeless, alcoholic man who often sits on our front steps was arrested. I haven’t seen him since.

A Coop denizen who maintains the front garden swept up some glass, but a purple stain remains. It is thick and sticky, almost gelatinous.

-- Kat Paton is a senior in Berkeley College.

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The Politics of Preservation

Jack Tripp

Historical preservation and Yale’s continuous expansion can neglect voiceless, marginalized communities.

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ntil just a few months ago, a 1948 art moderne bank stood at 80 Elm Street in downtown New Haven: a sparse stone monument to the cold simplicity of mid-twentieth century architecture. As the bank was torn down piece by piece in early 2020, the remnants of an Episcopal church built a century before were revealed and, likewise, demolished. Today, there is an empty lot. Plans for the construction of a Hilton Garden Inn have halted due to COVID-19.

The Yale tour groups ogling at campus buildings, admiring the statuaries on Harkness’ face, taking pictures of the cathedral-like grandeur of Sterling—it’s a familiar sight for current students. But beyond Yale, the Elm City is perhaps even more remarkable for the history embodied in its structures and spaces. Consider that the sixteen acres of the New Haven Green bordering Old Campus began in 1641 as a marketplace for Puritan colonists. The John Cook House, on Elm Street, is one of the country’s oldest surviving stone structures.

And New Haven’s Union Station was designed by the same architect who planned the U.S. Supreme Court building. Remnants of New Haven’s past linger in many of the buildings lining the streets of the Elm City, even as other aging edifices are threatened by degradation or new development. And tensions often arise between those who wish to preserve physical structures evocative of the past, those who make up existing communities that inhabit those places, and those who look to economize, modernize, and create spaces according to their own imaginings.

Critics often condemn historic preservation for

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advocating unattainable and illogical standards, such as banning solar panels or dictating which sort of columns should be allowed. In January 2020, Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of The New York Times editorial board, wrote flatly that preservation “obstructs change for the better.” He was speaking specifically in the context of Washington, DC, but it is a sentiment many Americans would echo. In New Haven, although many of the best cases of preservation have been cooperative, a multiplicity of unequal voices can result in inequitable decision-making. There is no cohesive system of checks and balances, no single method to ensure the democratization of either development or preservation, which can at times leave parties feeling ignored or unheard.

In New Haven alone, there are a total of twenty-seven historic districts. At Yale itself, however, there are relatively few buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of buildings which require preservation for their historical significance. Most of them lie within the relatively small Hillhouse Historic District. Professor Alan Plattus, a scholar in the Yale School of Architecture, explained that the University has traditionally been opposed to placing more buildings on the register, due to the restrictions such a designation might impose. He said, “Yale is totally within their right” in their desire to keep their buildings off the register. When a building is registered or a historic district created, property owners have to approve the new designation. This is one of the challenges that an organization like the New Haven Preservation Trust (NHPT) seeks to address. A private non-profit organization dedicated to “preserving New Haven’s archi-

Design by Brian Chang

tectural heritage,” the NHPT was founded in 1961 in opposition to Yale’s plans to demolish the historic home of James Dwight Dana, a significant Yale geologist, at 34 Hillhouse Ave. The Trust was successful, and the house was registered in 1966. Today, it holds Yale’s Department of Statistics and Data Science.

Plattus described Yale’s frequent expansion as an attempt to control the edge of campus—and not always in a manner respectful of the preferences of New Haven residents. As a sprawling presence in New Haven, Yale historically has played a complicated role when it comes to preservation. Plattus pointed me to Associate Professor of Urbanism Elihu Rubin and filmmaker Elena Oxman’s half-hour documentary, “On Broadway: A New Haven Streetscape,” which reported on Yale’s purchase and subsequent renovation of properties on Broadway.

Produced when Rubin and Oxman were students at the School of Architecture, the circa 2000 documentary has an indie feel. It features many Yale figures, including Plattus himself and the renowned art historian and Yale professor Vincent Scully. Between interviews, the film includes clips of Broadway that would be unrecognizable to today’s Yale students. Many storefronts belonged to small, multigenerational family-run businesses. Some of the changes are due to unavoidable economic trends; it seems unlikely that the typewriter repair store or Cutler’s Records and Tapes could possibly remain afloat today. But many residents and business owners additionally felt that Yale was marking the neighborhood with its own brand.

At one point in the documentary, Joe Fahey, then director of operations for University Properties, describes Yale’s vision for Broadway, one in which chain stores would exist alongside and help to support businesses run by New Haveners. Seated at a conference table, he concludes, “That’s how Broadway’s gonna work.” Rubin aptly characterized Fahey’s comment as reflective of “the hubris of a lot of city planners”—the idea that such a broad swath of city can be planned and shaped according to a single vision. Peter Spodick of York Square Cinema objected to this notion in the context of downtown New Haven: “All these components of downtown were not things that were planted, they evolved over hundreds of years.” The owners of Cutler Records and Quality Wines both described the sudden changes as equivalent to losing a family. Yale’s determination to homogenize and strategize with their property on Broadway impacted not only the business but also the lives of those already there.

When working on smaller-scale development projects, Andrew MacPartland of Elm City Architects

consciously tries to respond to both the needs of the area and the expectations of preservationists. A practicing architect, MacPartland was hired to gain approval from the local historic district commission for a project in Wooster Square. In designing a new home he, like Yale, left his mark on a New Haven neighborhood.

MacPartland, however, had a personal connection to the Wooster Square neighborhood, where his grandfather settled after emigrating from Italy. He said that this link was central to enforcing a sense of responsibility not only to his client but also to the surrounding neighborhood. He advocates for architects to be “humble enough [to] get a consensus of opinion”—from preservation organizations but also by seeking out input from those in the community. That humility stands in stark contrast to Yale’s confidence regarding the future of Broadway.

Yale’s desire for expansion and emphasis on efficiency can clash with the priorities of New Haveners.

Susan Godshall, who has long-standing connections to both Yale and the city of New Haven, spoke to the complexity of the problem. Godshall is a graduate of the School of Architecture and Yale Law School and serves as the treasurer of the NHPT. She has also held various positions in the Chamber of Commerce and the Counsel’s office for the City of New Haven, and was Assistant Secretary of Yale for almost a decade. Godshall speaks in the classic vocabulary of preservationists—referring to the “character” of a neighborhood or the success of the NHPT’s date plaque initiative. Like Professor Plattus, she described areas of tension being especially “around the edges” of Yale. But Godshall also explicitly emphasized that “it doesn’t serve anyone to have a permanent adversarial relationship.” Although the NHPT was initially founded in opposition to a Yale project, it has also operated as a partner and consultant to the University. As MacPartland recognized with respect to his project in Wooster Square, collaboration is essential to preservation.

In historic cities across the United States, one of the largest obstacles to preservation is a chronic lack of resources. MacPartland admitted that to design and construct a historic-grade building from scratch—as he and his client did in Wooster Square— “comes with a price tag.” In New Haven, where more than 25% of residents live in poverty, the initial capital needed to begin such a project is often hard to come by. For those who own historic structures and lack the financial resources to renovate, the channels available are present but limited, as Godshall explained. Owners who complete a major renovation can receive tax credit from the state; for those looking to make modest repairs, the NHPT

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offers grants from their Historic Structures Fund. These grants range only from $1,000 to $4,000, however, and are made on a one-to-one matching basis. This means that whether residents are making a larger renovation or are looking to apply for financial support, they will need to start with at least some capital.

The prevailing critique of preservation organizations concerns this difficulty: that it is unrealistic to expect the vast majority of Americans to have the financial flexibility and time required to make historically accurate renovations. As Rubin put it, there is often a trade-off between the desire to “preserve the building but [a failure to] preserve the people.” When practiced to the extreme, Rubin worries that historic preservation can “change a city into a museum of itself.” An extensively preserved city may become a static relic, prevented from evolving by the high-value placed on structures of the past. He cited European cities like Venice, which rely heavily on tourism for revenue. But even when preservation is more limited, he pointed out that gentrification is still a legitimate and growing concern, threatening the existing residents. Plattus admitted that in many successful case studies—such as past preservation efforts in Providence, Rhode Island, or Havana, Cuba—gentrification may be inevitable. College Hill in Providence is now a relatively upscale neighborhood near Brown University, where preservationists used an entrepreneurial model to put profits from successful renovations into additional projects in the area. Plattus believes this could be viable in areas of New Haven, where affiliates of the University may be looking for historic homes. He also said, however, that it is possible, if at times challenging, to preserve without gentrifying. He pointed to Pittsburgh as a model, where he said that certain inner-city neighborhoods successfully preserved historical structures while also retaining a significant portion of the existing population.

Organizations like the NHPT work to protect history throughout cities nationwide, but Abby Roth, representative of Ward 7 on the Board of Alders, also hopes that preservation might be an endeavor supported by independent citizens from the ground up. Roth told me that there are many New Haveners who want to share their voices when it comes to the changes in their neighborhoods, even when there might not be existing channels. Roth grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and says that her passionate advocacy for preservation stemmed from growing up in historic cities in New England. As an Alder, Roth has a direct say in New Haven governance, but not everyone has this privilege. For individuals who want to participate, she emphasized Community Management Teams as possible channels. These public meetings consist of presentations on major events in a neighborhood, information which is voluntarily shared by the city of New Haven,

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police, or developers. Yet Roth still worries that there’s a silent subset of residents who don’t, won’t, or can’t have a voice in these matters due to the self-selecting nature of these forums.

When it comes to preservation, concerns about resources and representation mirror worries about who gets to decide how and where New Haveners live. Yale has the wealth and influence to rival that of the city government. And as Plattus commented, even the NHPT may be outmatched in a direct confrontation with Yale or other developers, which generally have more extensive resources. At the same time, many New Haveners may chafe against both Yale’s infringement on their neighborhoods and a historic district commission’s regulations on their homes, but won’t have the means to respond.

Historic preservation is easily simplified and reduced by critics. But we all know that “place” matters. The spaces in which we work, study, and live impact what we do and how we feel. The predominant risk of both preservation and development is that those who actually inhabit these spaces are ignored. Both Rubin and Plattus clarified that preservation is not only about preserving histories, but also about perpetuating a community. Appearances are important, but only so far as they affect, as Godshall described it, the “integrity” of the area. As I understood it, Godshall meant physical, historical integrity. But as MacPartland first emphasized, that integrity is also directly tied to the neighborhoods in which buildings stand and the people who walk past them every day. As students, we live at Yale but also in New Haven. Plattus described how it often takes a catastrophic loss—such as the demolition of Old Penn Station in New York—to motivate meaningful support for preservation. But whether by taking a long walk to get to know the city better, attending a Community Management Team meeting, or directly advocating for the salvation of a historic Yale building, there are so many unexplored avenues for students to conscientiously engage. Even if only for four years, the Elm City is our home and a place which we can engage with and influence for the better, starting with the physical places that matter to us most.

--Jack Tripp is a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College

A Need For Green A vibrant volunteer community keeps New Haven’s greenspaces afloat during the pandemic.

MEG BUZBEE

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n the summer of 2019, six goats took up residence at Edgewood Park. They spent months munching their way through the park’s poison ivy and Japanese knotweed — both invasive species. The goats were brought to the city in a collaboration between Green Goats and the Friends of Edgewood Park, a volunteer-led group that keeps Edgewood Park afloat.

Friends of Edgewood Park are just one example of the vital role these volunteer-led organizations have taken on in maintaining and beautifying the parks that , especially in a time when New Haven’s city government has not had the capacity to do so.

In his proposed budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker moved to eliminate the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees and merge its duties with the Department of Public Works and the Department of Youth Services in order to make the departments more efficient and prevent repetitive programs. The Board of Alders voted to approve the proposal on May 26.

On July 1, the New Haven Parks Department ceased to exist, and two new departments, Youth Services and Recreation and Parks and Public Works, took its place. The maintenance side of parks, including trash pick-up and tree removal, is now handled by Parks and Public Works, while recreation and outdoor activities fall under Youth Services and Recreation.

As the three departments converted into two new ones, the budgets shifted as well. The combined budget of the three departments dropped by $86,295 between 2019 and 2020 as they realigned into two. The City’s overall budget, on the other hand, increased by $11,349,022 between 2019 and 2020.

The long-term effects of the merger remain unclear, especially because most youth programs were cancelled this summer due to the pandemic.

Initiatives like the one that brought goats to Edgewood won’t be affected because they operate separately from the government. But still, even with the new and supposedly more efficient alignment, maintenance of the parks is no easy feat. “I know how hard [our maintenance staff] works to keep the city clean,” said William Dixon, Deputy Desk Director of Recreation. “Every day getting up for work is a challenge, figuring out who dumped what on a Monday morning and where the trash is at.”

Dixon has worked with the Parks Department for 19 years, although he now reports to the Youth Services Department. In this position, he runs recreational programs, manages permits, and plans events. Day to day, he spends much of his time in the park. “I’m an outdoors guy,” he said. After work, he drives through the park, seeing who’s around.

“I see what’s going on, I see who’s using the park.”

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This year, Dixon only worked from home for about six days. The rest of the time, even in March and April at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Connecticut, Dixon was in his office or in the parks. “No one was here anyways,” he said. “When the weather gets warm, people want to be in the parks.”

COVID-19 complicated the restructuring of the parks management system, as emergency management became the city’s top priority. By the summer, however, parks had become crucial as people coped with isolation and spent more time outdoors.

According to Rebecca Bombero, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer for the City of New Haven, parks had a “huge increase in usage” that began as early as March. The city closed Farnham Drive and English Drive to cars in order to accommodate pedestrian congestion in East Rock Park and give people more room to spread out. They also began issuing permits for people to use certain fields across the city. To get the permit, however, “people need to have a COVID plan,” Dixon said. “And they need to stick to that plan, particularly if it’s a large group.”

Across the country, the pandemic has highlighted the need for public spaces, especially parks. The Project for Public Spaces, a New York-based nonprofit that consults on the design and planning of public spaces, has been working since the 1970s to make communal spaces more accessible and innovative. “I’m thinking about mental health, for example,” said Priti Patel, the nonprofit’s Senior Project Manager. “During this time of isolation with everybody fearful and scared to leave their house, public spaces have been able to provide some sort of mental escape or mental health opportunity.”

Yale students, as well, have made more use of the parks this school year since returning to campus.

Yale Outdoors, which usually leads camping and hiking trips outside of the city, has frequented East and West Rock to take in sunsets and hike beneath the bright orange trees.

The increase in park usage, however, coupled with underfunding and behavior such as littering and graffiti, continues to put strain on the newly formed Department of Parks and Public Works.

“As with most sectors of city government, unfortunately, there’s never enough resources to do everything you want to do,” said Bombero. As a result, the city relies heavily on volunteer and private organizations, such as the Friends of Edgewood Park, to plant new trees, maintain gardens, and push for

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new projects.

Edgewood Park sits between West River Memorial Park to the south and West Rock to the north.

Entering from Edgewood Avenue, a steep road leads down to the duck pond, where people bring their own boats to canoe or kayak. By the pond, don’t expect much company apart from the birds. A walkway surrounded by dense bushes leads around the edge and under a bridge.

The Friends of Edgewood Park organizes many different programs and groups that lead efforts to maintain and beautify the park, including man-

“But no one understands the need for parks more than the communities they belong to.”

aging gardens, clearing trails, and planting trees.

Every fall, they also teach community members how to tap the maple trees for sap, and one member explains how to process it. The organization has existed for over one hundred years and was created originally to supplement the work of the Parks Department. “The Parks Department, they don’t have the capacity to do a lot more than to take down huge trees and to mow and to pick up trash twice a week,” said Stephanie Fitzgerald, a ten-year member of Friends of Edgewood Park. “They can’t take care of gardens. So we fill in that part.”

Each end of the long and narrow park features ponds, playgrounds, and a skate park. A pedestrian path cuts through the center underneath a canopy of trees. Since the two ends of the park are almost a mile apart, however, Fitzgerald said at times they can feel disconnected. So the group is planting trees and a garden in the center with the “vision that people will come together … and really get to know one another.”

The Urban Resources Initiative (URI), a nonprofit partnered with the Yale School of the Environment, also works closely with the City of New Haven to promote green areas throughout the city.

The group began working in New Haven in 2007, and has since planted over 9,000 trees throughout the city. “There are so many different benefits of trees,” said Anna Pickett, Development and Outreach Director at the Urban Resources Initiative.

Trees of course provide shade and reduce carbon dioxide in the air, but Pickett also pointed out lesser known benefits of trees such as filtering out soil pollutants and flood reduction.

Through URI, citizens of New Haven can request a tree for their neighborhood. The group delivers and plants the tree, and the citizens are expected to water and maintain it. “The people who live near the trees are committed to caring for them,” said Pickett. “There’s some ownership, there’s a relationship they have with their tree that helps keep them alive. And our survival rates are higher because of that.” Despite the work of the community, however, it’s still hard to maintain trees. URI helps to plant around 500 trees in the city every year, just enough to replace the ones lost to disease or old age.

Overall, there are around 30,000 street trees in New Haven, and many more in the parks, although those have never been officially surveyed.

The Urban Resources Initiative compiled a map measuring New Haven’s urban tree canopy in 2010, and released an updated version in 2016. According to the Urban Resources Initiative, the urban tree canopy is the “layer of leaves, branches, and stems of trees that cover the ground when viewed from above.” Unsurprisingly, West Rock and its surrounding area has the most tree cover of any neighborhood in New Haven, followed closely by Westville and Fair Haven Heights.

The aesthetic value of trees is apparent — especially in the New Haven fall — but, as Pickett said, they’re much more than eye candy. A study by Austin Troy, J. Morgan Grove, and Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne published in 2012 linked a 10 percent increase in tree canopy cover to a 12 percent decrease in crime in Baltimore. The research is far from conclusive, but the point stands — trees are indispensable. Parks are indispensable. With New Haven and the rest of the country reeling from the pandemic, this is when we need green space the most.

Since the restructuring of the Parks Department, the city government appears to still be catching up to the change — according to the city website, the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Trees still exists. But the parks aren’t going anywhere.

The community groups who watch over them continue to pick up trash and clear trails, even during the pandemic. The park rangers, with extra time on their hands because of cancelled programs, recently removed five trees from the West River, which runs through Edgewood Park, to clear the

way for kayaks.

But no one understands the need for parks more than the communities they belong to. Volunteer groups, dedicated civil servants, and the goats who munch on knotweed are looking out for the New Haven. Amidst future budget turmoil and an ongoing pandemic, the parks will have many people in their corner.

-- Meg Buzbee is a first-year in Pierson College

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The Palace Within

By Candice Wang

B

efore I learned the word uterus, I knew all about the baby palace. That’s what my mama called it, placing her palms over the soft lower region of her stomach.

I’d stare down at my naked abdomen and wonder—how could there be a whole palace built within me? Was I that cavernous?

To me, the uterus wasn’t a mass of delicate tissue, arching fallopian tubes, and pulsing blood vessels. It was a glittering hall carved directly into the skeleton of my body—something akin to the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, with gothic arches galore. All built into me. It’s fragile, my mama would repeat to me, again and again, throughout my childhood. It’s something precious, something to be cultivated and held gently between my fingers. Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

Years later, when I was eleven, my snarky-mouthed health education teacher slapped two freshly photocopied diagrams on my desk. The Male Reproductive System.

The Female Reproductive System. There it was, that palace from my dreams, reduced to hazy lines and arrows and the bitter scent of ink. According to my teacher, the female reproductive system was like a machine. Each month, she said, the uterus discarded its lining, which had been thickening in preparation for a fertilized egg—resulting in the flow of menstrual blood and tissue out of the cervix.

I stared, confused, at the diagram, realizing that I didn’t know how to fill it in. Was that the cervix?

As I used my favorite purple mechanical pencil to fill in the diagram, my friend leaned over to whisper in my ear, “I got it. Two months ago.” She drew a dot on my paper—a period. I gaped at her, in absolute awe. “But I hate it so

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Design by Natasha Gaither Illustration by CIndy Ren

much,” she divulged with a sigh. “The first time I had it, I couldn’t get out of bed. It hurt that much.”

Over a lunch of dumplings (mine), and chocolate milk (hers) in the cafeteria, she told me horror stories.

She had worn white pants to school and heard snickering behind her in the hall before she realized her fatal mistake. Over the summer, she had snuck her bloodied bedsheets into the washer before her little brothers saw.

She whispered the secrets of supposed womanhood to me—how much chocolate she’d eaten the night before, how much Advil she’d downed, and her first time trying out a tampon. My eyes grew wide with each parcel of new information I tucked into my pocket, until menstruation morphed into a bloody monster, out to ravage my innards and turn me into a mass of vessels and flesh and pain.

At home, my mama kept repeating the phrase to me.

Baby palace. I stared at the small collection of pads we kept under the sink for my sister—overnight, winged, extra-long, daily, liners, tampons—like a buffet of cotton and plastic and adhesive. It was coming for me, I thought. Watch out.

When it finally came, one day before the start of eighth grade, I was shocked at how anticlimactic it all was. I simply grabbed a pad from under the sink and went about my day as usual. But I knew it wouldn’t always be as simple as that. Decades, maybe even centuries, of knowledge that my mama’s mama had passed onto her—an unbroken chain of wisdom—had now fallen onto me. *** My mama grew up in a stone-floored house in Taichung, Taiwan with a blood-red-tiled bathroom that overlooked humid rice fields. As a child, she used to perch on a chair near the kitchen and watch her mama cook—congee, soy sauce marinated roasted tofu, tea-boiled eggs, and braised tofu skin, her favorites. While inhaling the smells of her mama’s cooking, she absorbed everything she needed to know about the body beneath her fingertips—its simultaneous eggshell fragility and frightening resilience. All this, without uttering a single scientific term. When her stomach ached, her mama would massage the soft webby flesh between her thumb and index finger to relieve the pain, and bring her a cup of steaming ginger tea.

When she succumbed to nausea and sweats from heat stroke, her mama would scrape a porcelain spoon down the back of her neck to release the boiling heat within her body. After showering, she religiously dried her short bobbed hair each night—wet hair invited in cold winds, or qi, the enemy personified when it comes to the baby palace. Every part of the body could be beau-

tified and cared for in some way—whether it was taking spoonfuls of sesame oil to make her boobs bigger or eating cold foods like grapefruit to cure breakouts. That way, my mama’s mama continued to care for her, even after she passed away when my mama was seventeen.

To her, this wasn’t just Traditional Chinese Medicine, or, in the colder, impersonal terms that American scholars use, TCM. This was just her way of balancing along with the precarity of being alive—of catering to both sides of nature, one fiery, hot, and flashy, and the other, cucumber-cold. Of holding hands with your own qi, or life spirit, instead of scolding it, rejecting it. Of living and breathing her mama’s memory.

Twenty-five years later, in a lavender-walled kitchen in Connecticut, my mama told me, aged eight, about the imbalance I harbored within me. Each winter, I’d fall victim to long, unquenchable bouts of asthma-induced sinus infections—months of wet coughs and shortness of breath that forced me to carry around tissue boxes in my backpack, much to the delight of my friends. But, at the same time, I’d break out in hot flashes and flush easily, or get rashes on my skin.

They’re both such strong forces within you, she said.

The hot and cold qi. You’re just like your dad. We need to find a way to balance these within you, or you’ll always be like this.

So when my period made its appearance several years later, my mama brewed up a strong-smelling, maroon-hued herbal chicken soup, and watched carefully as I drank an entire bowlful. I might’ve pretended to make a face at the taste, but I secretly loved it—the woody bitterness of it, the impossibly dark hue. After I finished every drop of that broth, she introduced me to what I then saw as yellow-tape restrictions.

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No jumping into bed or leaving the house with wet hair. No raw vegetables and fruits, specifically cucumbers, mung beans, oranges, and watermelons—save them for five days later. Green tea and ice cream are big no-nos. Lifting heavy objects, and heavy labor in general, should also be avoided at all costs.

I stumbled upon each of these transgressions during my thirteenth year. One autumn night, I showered late, around ten o’clock. I crept into my room, trying to slip directly into my warm bed, my hair still dripping. But my mama was there, next to me, ushering me into the bathroom, where she blasted the hair dryer on full heat over my head for a full fifteen minutes. When I whined with exhaustion, she turned off the blow dryer and looked me directly in the eye with the badassery only mothers have. “You’ll regret it if you go to bed with wet hair.” After my cross country meet, I ran to the sink, parched and overheated, to inhale a glassful of cold water, which my mama promptly replaced with steaming hot water straight from the kettle. I set the hot water down on the counter, claiming I’d rather die of thirst than drink something hot right now. On one of the hottest days of July, my best friend and I brought chocolate froyo from Costco, and I took one nervous bite of it.

As a syrupy chocolate mouthful melted on my tongue, I felt an instinctual psychosomatic ache in my lower stomach, as if I’d committed a tiny rebellion against myself. I imagined my baby palace within me shrinking, cracks forming in its magnificent pillars. Shuddering, I handed the sticky container to my friend, who happily finished off the rest.

The public enemies I listed above supposedly chip and wear away at the baby palace, just like acid rain on the sculpted marble face of a statue. The consequences involve irregular cycles, aching cramps, nausea, or even the eventual disappearance of your period—all foreboding, telltale signs that your qi is now working against you.

One January morning of my junior year of high school, I walked to school with my friend in fifteen-degree weather. The saliva froze on my tongue each time I opened my mouth to laugh. My friend’s dark curly brown hair was dripping wet from the shower, and froze to a crunch by the time we entered our school’s parking lot. Between my fingertips, the curls had solidified. Before I could stop myself, I told her that she shouldn’t go out with wet hair. It’ll make your period cramps worse, I said. She looked at me straight in the eye with a hint of defiance and said, “Well, do you have scientific proof?”

We parted ways a little frostily that morning. *** A few years later, as a third-year student at Yale, I flit-

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ted from one corner of campus to another in my oversized, secondhand beige jacket, warming my hands in my pockets. I felt myself mired in a freedom almost too loose to be true—like a pair of baggy tights that sagged in all the wrong places. In the dining hall, I could grab myself an entire plate of sliced raw cucumbers any time I wanted. I could even pour myself a brimming ice cold coke, and finish off my exceedingly cold meal with some ice cream. I could wash my hair at 2 a.m. and jump straight into bed after an exhausting night of pretending to listen to a boy rant passionately about his physics research. I could enjoy a cup of matcha tea in between my two seminars alone in my room, watching the steam rise, in this peaceful, tea-leaf-scented moment of rebellion.

“Was it the generations of knowledge not just falling upon me, but also enveloping me?”

College, for many, is synonymous with freedom.

Breaking free. But for me, I drew my own practice of my mama’s and her mama’s beliefs like a quilted throw blanket around me—a refuge from the chilling open air of being one small girl with a soft, low voice in an enormous college campus filled with go-getters and big talkers.

The more I dried my hair after late-night showers, the more I drank hot cups of steaming water in the dining hall (I’ve survived endless strange looks from friends and strangers), the more I avoided the salad bar during my time of month, the more I danced the complicated dance with my own qi, the more my body thanked me.

The more my mind and heart thanked me.

For the first time in my life, I felt a warmth within me rising—a new strength, a new kick in my stride as I bounded down the stairs of Berkeley College North Court in my new white Fila sneakers. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what made me feel suddenly so spirited, so healthy, so joyous. Was it the generations of knowledge not just falling upon me, but also enveloping me?

Taking me in? Or was it the warm, callused hand of the grandmother I’ve never met suddenly holding onto mine?

—Candice Wang is a senior in Berkeley College and Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

Quarantine Summer by Natasha Gaither

Celia (top), Twilight (bottom) —design by Natasha Gaither

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Design by Rebecca Goldberg

PROFILE

SALT of the EARTH A ninety-year-old organic farmer in Shelton, Connecticut returns to his roots

BY NANCY WALECKI

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Birds get drunk on blueberries,” Guy Beardsley says.

We’re idling on his John Deere Gator next to a row of scarlet-colored blueberry bushes. It’s a warm October morning in 2019, humid enough that dew still clings to the blueberry leaves in spite of the heat. The image of drunken birds makes me laugh, but Guy’s matter-of-fact.

“We cover the blueberries up with bird netting, because otherwise the birds really do become inebriated,” he says, cornflower eyes peering at me over his glasses. His voice is gravelly and warm, like a 1920s radio announcer coming in through the static.

If anyone knows about blueberries and birds, it’s Guy Beardsley, who has been an organic farmer in Shelton, Connecticut, for almost thirty years. He can tell you why white clover is superior to pink clover (it puts nitrogen back into the soil and the bees love it), why corn silk is vital to an ear of corn (it pollinates each kernel), and why cows shouldn’t eat too many apples (like birds, the sugar overwhelms their fiber-inclined systems and they get drunk).

Guy is the only 90-year-old I’d bet could beat me in an arm-wrestling match, mostly because he still splits his own firewood in the winter. He can also tell you exactly what the planting season weather was like two years ago. The only sign he’s in his nineties are his turnip-shaped knuckles, swollen from years of weeding. He has wrinkles that only a kind person could have—crinkles around his eyes from smiling and forehead ridges

from raising his eyebrows when he tells the best part of a story.

He’s so kind that he didn’t even question a stranger like me calling last fall to ask if he would spend three months teaching her about farming. My grandfather was a rancher in northern Nevada, so I knew about working with animals, but I didn’t know the first thing about working with soil. I wanted to learn. He agreed to help me without skipping a beat. “So when ya coming by?” he asked. * Twelve miles west of New Haven, the signs along Route 34 become handmade. By the time you pass Maltby Lakes, glossy billboards for personal injury attorneys surrender to hand-painted ads for milk and hay.

The space between houses begins to widen so that by the time you reach the town of Shelton, the trees appear to outnumber the people. Brick smokestacks along the Housatonic River add an early industrial grit to what otherwise would be another quaint Connecticut town.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Shelton’s factories made everything from razor strops to bicycle forgings. These days, the main relic of the town’s industrial past is the WIFFLE ball headquarters on the edge of town.

Guy’s Eco-Garden (or “the farm” as the family calls it) is technically located in White Hills, four miles north of the former industrial hub. This is the most rural part

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of Shelton, where rabbits aren’t afraid of people and poison ivy climbs the trunks of fall-colored trees.

Sometime between its construction in 1749 and now, Guy’s house learned to relax. Its right angles have softened with age. In the summer, the boards swell up with humidity, but come November, they contract in the dry winter air. This back and forth has left the farmhouse with a charming, slightly bloated silhouette. Guy grew up here, and so did his father and grandfather. His great-grandfather, a man “as wide as he was tall,” bought the property in 1849.

Guy’s main patch of land is the four-acre lot around his farmhouse. It hosts: a bakery, a vineyard, a lavender patch, thirteen turkeys, a tractor-sized compost pile, Brussels sprouts (“The English eat them for breakfast, but that’s sort of a stretch,” Guy says), blackberries, elderberries, okra, five types of kale, a hoop-house, a greenhouse, a drying house for the garlic, a sign marking the “Chapel of Saint James of the White Hills” that his son-in-law planned (but never managed) to build, a fleet of barking Chihuahuas that surround visitors like angry flagella, and a fridge containing exclusively clams.

The world was windless and blue, the earth still cold from the night before.

To one of the barn swallows flying overhead, Guy’s farm probably looks like nothing more than a green blip between his brother’s brown cider mill and red apple orchard. The farm is bordered at the front by Route 110, and in the back, by a row of McMansions with family names embossed on their stone veneer siding in Edwardian Script. All of it—Route 110, the McMansions, even the apple orchards—was hayfields for most of Guy’s life.

Guy was born five miles away from the farm at Griffin Hospital in October of 1930. He was a child of the Depression, when the farm’s philosophy was “use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Socks were darned, holes were patched, and nothing was wasted.

Guy still can’t bring himself to waste much now. He won’t even compost scapes, the bright green, spaghetti-shaped shoots that grow out of the tops of his garlic plants. He grinds them into garlic scape pesto instead.

Guy grew up in a pre-automated world, when horses, not tractors, drew plows and Model T pick-ups had hand cranks. He went to a one-room schoolhouse down the road, but he wasn’t assigned homework

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until high school. His teacher knew that farm kids were too busy—by age seven Guy was raking behind the hay cart, and by age ten, he was milking, weeding, hoeing, fixing roofs, fixing fences, and feeding cows. He started his days at nautical dawn, when it was still dark enough to see the stars, but light enough to make out the horizon. The world was windless and blue, the earth still cold from the night before. Guy began his days silently like this, walking from the farmhouse to the barn and milking the cows before the world was awake.

He went to Norwich University, a military college in Vermont, as World War II came to a close. “It was more than just ROTC. We had tanks,” he informed me. Guy’s military uncle was the one who inspired him to join the service. He taught Guy to shoot in the aptly named “Shooting Lot,” which is now an apple orchard belonging to Guy’s brother. Walking through the field today, you can still find shell casings as big as your thumbs.

Guy was home from college the first time his father used DDT. The senior Mr. Beardsley composted before it was trendy and avoided using pesticides outside of his orchard. But in 1950, everyone was talking about the magical compound that WWII soldiers sprinkled in their sleeping bags to ward off pests. The other farmers in White Hills raved that DDT kept their crops clear of pests and weeds. Curious what the fuss was about, Mr. Beardsley and Guy waded through his three acres of corn with a 2 ½ gallon-sized sprayer full of the chemical. When he and Guy returned to the field ten days later, the corn was free of weeds, but Mr. Beardsley was convinced there was something unnatural about it.

Twelve years before Rachel Carson would confirm it in her seminal book, Silent Spring, Mr. Beardsley knew DDT was bad news. “If it’s doing this to the weeds,” he said to Guy, “what’s it doing to us?” That was the first and last time DDT touched Beardsley land.

Guy graduated from Norwich two years later and entered the Army as a Second Lieutenant. Over the next 28 years, his assignments took him everywhere from Italy to Korea to Vietnam to Texas.

He headed a tank unit in the Korean War and served as a pilot and Air Cavalry troop commander in Vietnam.

By the time Guy left the service, he was a Lieutenant Colonel, a husband, and a father. He and his wife, Pat, moved 27 times throughout his military career, but they spent most of their time in Killeen, Texas, the sleepy, dusty town next to Fort Hood. They decided to move back to Connecticut after a particularly tumultuous two years during which Pat was diagnosed with cancer, her mother died, and both of Guy’s parents passed away. By 1984, Killeen felt too far from home.

Guy had no intention to farm even after they moved

“If [DDT] is doing this to the weeds, what’s it doing to us?”

back to the Shelton farmhouse. It was just nice to be back with the maple trees he tapped for syrup as a child and the fence that Winner the Bull once broke through in pursuit of a man in a red coup. However, in 1987, after quitting his manager job at the nearby Petrol Plus to help Pat with her new antique business, Guy started planting vegetables in his spare time. With Pat undergoing chemotherapy, Guy wanted everything he grew to be completely safe and natural for her to eat. In 1988, together they started an organic farm. * Organic farmers preserve the essentials. Unlike automated, pesticide-laden conventional farming, organic farming keeps it simple. Farmers focus on the ultimate fundamental: soil. Building off the premise that the earth is a closed system, organic farmers return everything they take from the earth. If Guy plants a vegetable like Brussels sprouts that take nitrogen from the soil, the next year he’ll plant something like clover to replenish the spot with nitrogen. Organic farmers don’t take short-

cuts, even though it would be easier just to spray some pesticides and chemical fertilizers and call it a day. In the long run however, their steady principles don’t let them down.

Take the story of the diamondback moth, for instance.

With wings closed, it resembles a brown, curled-up leaf, or a Praying Mantis’s friendlier cousin. But as larvae, they’re disturbingly wriggly caterpillars, gorging themselves on the undersides of leaves. Diamondback moths (DBMs for short) target cruciferous crops like kale or cabbage, sucking the juice from their leaves until they resemble a frosted windowpane. DBMs don’t contaminate the produce, but in an age of Grapples (grape-flavored apples) and rectangular watermelons, when appearances are paramount, any cosmetic damage could render a vegetable unsellable.

If Guy was a conventional farmer, he could exterminate the diamondback moth with an insecticide like Lannat LV or Voliam Xpress, but that might also kill the farm’s pollinators and contaminate the groundwater.

This would throw off the entire soil-produce-compost

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cycle that a healthy ecosystem needs, and even then, the diamondback moths might not be gone. DBMs have been outsmarting farmers and chemists since at least 1953, when they became the first insects to develop a resistance to DDT. Since then, DBMs have become resistant to over 95 insecticides, which is pretty much all of them. A short-term solution like pesticides can’t solve a long-term problem like pesticide-resistant pests.

Guy goes back to the basics to combat DBMs. Healthy plants better withstand pests, and for that, they need good soil. A steady method like crop rotation is the surest path to lasting pest prevention. By changing the crops and locations he plants every year, he alternates the nutrients removed from the soil, and bewilders the pests who wait for last year’s crop in last year’s field. Ask a conventional farmer about his DBM problem and he might mention a new pesticide he’s trying, but more often than not, he’ll tell you about crop rotation, a technique that farmers have been using for millenia. Even conventional growers have learned to value simple, organic solutions.

Farmers tormented by DBMs haven’t been the only ones turning to organic methods. Around the same time Guy was flying fixed-wing Otters over Vietnam in the 1960s, a group of young anti-war protestors was learn-

ing to farm in the northeast. Scared straight by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and inspired by the early environmental movement, they started the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), hoping to bring about a collective return to the soil. Most of NOFA’s early members were academics, not farmers. NOFA’s founder, Samuel Kaymen, grew up assuming that food was assembled in the back of the grocery store. He and his wife Louisa left mainstream society in 1964 to start a self-sufficient farm in upstate New York. However, he quickly realized that library books about farming weren’t going to cut it: Samuel, and others like him, needed practical experience and help. He founded NOFA to fill their knowledge gaps. The association designated farms as “Certified Organic,” but most importantly, it was a way for northeastern farmers to educate one another.

Bill Duesing, a Yale graduate and organic activist, was among the shaggy-haired farmers gathered in a Vermont field for NOFA’s first meeting in 1971. It was an informal affair—to an outside observer, the meeting probably looked like nothing more than a bunch of “sixties kids” (as Guy calls them) crouching in weeds.

Despite NOFA’s humble beginnings, state chapters quickly sprang up around the northeast, and in 1982,

“What God created there are the life forces. Life forces. Very important.”

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Bill decided to start a NOFA group in Connecticut. Guy and Pat met Bill a few years later, and Guy joined the NOFA board as its most unlikely member. He’d fought in the war they’d protested. Their dramatic return to the soil was just an adoption of the methods that his family had used for generations. Despite their differences, Guy, Pat, Bill, and Bill’s wife, Suzanne, worked together to establish about a dozen farmer’s markets throughout Connecticut. Guy’s dedication hasn’t gone unnoticed: even now, the Monroe Farmers Market throws him a birthday party every year. * “Not much red this year,” Guy said last October, gesturing at the thicket of trees across the street from his potato field. We’d parked the Gator and were checking to see if there were any more potatoes to dig up before November’s garlic planting season. I hadn’t noticed it before, but he was right. The fall trees were only orange and yellow around here. Guy told me that this had to do with rainfall. If the fall weather is too moist, the leaves won’t turn red. I’d never wondered why the trees changed the colors they did before. I’m from Southern California, where the only season is spring.

Guy sees no need to beat around the bush when it comes to the cycle of life. Last October, he took me to the tree where they defeather the freshly killed Thanksgiving turkeys. He pointed out the practical features of the tree that made it perfect for “processing”: it had low-hanging branches and was far enough away that the turkeys still alive in the enclosure couldn’t see their fallen comrades. Once, at his brother’s farm shop toward the end of November, Guy discussed the turkey slaughtering process—in great detail—with his brother behind the counter. The Thanksgiving shoppers were scandalized. His friend Becky reminded him that he should refer to the process in public as “preparing the turkeys for their big day,” but he thought those euphemisms were ridiculous. Turkeys are raised as farm animals—harvesting them is just another part of the fall season.

Guy gets almost as excited talking about last year’s rainfall as he does telling stories about the times that God has saved his life. Guy loves God. He particularly loves stories in which God plays a starring role. “I’m telling you, God was in complete control of that situation!

Complete control!” he said, concluding a story about the time when, mid-flight in Vietnam, an unpinned grenade miraculously failed to detonate. His mother was a devout Christian and brought him up in the church.

Some people have a “born again” moment, but Guy never did. “I always figured that God was part of my life, and God has really done a tremendous amount of work

with me in keeping me alive,” he said. “He brought me through twenty-eight years in the Army.”

God and the cosmos have a place in the day-to-day of Guy’s farm. He operates his planting season according to the Stella Natura biodynamic calendar hanging from a clipboard in the hoop-house. It’s an updated version of an astrological planting system first used by the ancient Egyptians on their farms in the Nile Delta. Using the movements of the planets and stars as a guide, the calendar can tell you the right time to plant or transplant every category of produce (root, flower, fruit, and leaf).

Guy loves that the Stella Natura connects his farm to a divine astrological system. “What God created there are the life forces. Life forces,” he repeated. “Very important.” For Guy, everything is part of a beautifully orchestrated natural system. We watched the pollinators work their magic on the squash one day. “All kinds of creatures can pollinate it,” Guy said, pointing to the beetles and bees crawling inside a squash flower’s ova.

“Some creatures like to even sleep in them,” he said. I laughed and asked if the plants minded the intrusion.

“No, they’re okay. They’re just doing their part,” he said.

“They’re doing good, they’re doing good.”

As he nears ninety-one, Guy has slowed his pace, but not by much. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Connecticut chapter of NOFA this spring, and his Eco-Garden remains a top destination for quality seedlings and specialty products like lavender and black garlic. Twice a month, Guy co-hosts “The Organic Farm Stand,” a radio show on WPKN 89.5 FM. On the first and third Thursday every month, rain or shine, Guy’s on the air, providing listeners from Connecticut to Rhode Island with farm updates and organic growing tips. Even after hip surgery last year, Guy called into the show from his sickbed.

Soon, it will be mid-November. If this year is the same as the last, Guy will spend most of his days on the tractor, harrowing the fields in preparation for garlic planting. Later in the month, when it’s so cold his fingers go numb, he’ll be in the fields with his friends and farmhands, placing garlic bulbs in the soil. In April, the scapes will break through the ground, reaching up for spring sunlight; Guy will snap them off and grind them into pesto. And come July, when the barn swallows begin their southward migration, Guy will harvest the garlic and bring it to market.

-- Nancy Walecki is a senior in Grace Hopper College

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FOWL PLAY

BY ZACHARY GROZ

A dusty history book sends the author on a wild goose chase.

Illustration

by Sydney Zoehrer

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long the main drag in East Haven, Connecticut, five miles out of range of Harkness Tower’s carillon, is what may be the largest American flag known to man, its wingspan so officious that, looking at it from below, you might easily take it for the sky itself. Further down the road is a sign for the local Hobby Lobby and directly above it another that says, “Big Lots,” the ‘L’ rubbed away by rain, likely the work of a hurricane with a keen eye for satire, if not subtlety. And further still, where small town turns to tree cover, is a yard sign with the words: “Saint Augustine: Next Left.” This does seem like a place where you might come to confess––something dark or something lovely, really anything at all––with the woods as your witness.

I wasn’t here to confess but to find what I thought were the grounds of an ignominious and odd battle in the region’s colonial history. In early August, while looking for ten-dollar Loeb Classical editions at Whitlock’s Book Barn, a farmhouse turned used bookstore in Bethany, CT, I came across a local history with a title too muscular to miss: The Republic of New Haven: A History of Municipal Evolution by Charles Herbert Levermore. The book looked ancient and I opened it slowly.

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Having skimmed the table of contents, I flipped to a section titled “The Quarrel with East Haven,” expecting a kind of civil war in miniature. What I found instead was a petty town squabble involving the Governor of the Connecticut Colony and a gaggle of geese. At the turn of the 18th century, somewhere in the Puritan wilderness, the Governor of Connecticut was unleashing an Antietam on the local waterfowl.

The people of East Haven indulged their geese, letting them waddle through town like princelings on the grounds of an Old Regime château. No farm was spared––not even Governor Gurdon Saltonstall’s. The Governor, “vexed with this invasion of his rights,” according to Levermore, “proclaimed a defensive war, attacked and routed the feathered army, making a great slaughter among them.”

In the next election, not a single vote was cast for Governor Saltonstall in East Haven. In retaliation, Saltonstall revoked the town’s newly won independence and it was resorbed into New Haven proper.

The story ended there, and I found nothing more when I researched the skirmish online. I began to suspect it was all apocryphal, nothing more than a libel or a legend gone stale. So, to settle the issue, I steeled myself to cold call the patrician scions of the Saltonstall family and contacted the estate, now a “super premium” olive oil purveyor in Petaluma, CA. The voice that answered the phone didn’t ring with the haughty timbre of old Atlantic merchants, but was gentle and sweet-toned. The conversation ranged over a thousand years of family lore, meandering with the contour of a gooseneck river––yet no mention of the geese or their massacre.

The last chance at clarity was in the colonial records.

They told a bloodless story. What I had thought was a madman’s little civil war was only the Governor of Connecticut madly scattering geese from his lawn. No matter how often he tried to eject them from the grass, the geese returned.

I paid a visit to the burned-out foundation of Governor Saltonstall’s farm on the east edge of Furnace Lake in East Haven. Perhaps centuries ago Old Light preachers howled jeremiads there and Paul Bunyan

Design by Annli Nakayama

types felled trees. But that day the leaves were crimson and it was peaceful. *** The following week, I was reading The New York Times online when I noticed a new species of advertisement pop up at the top of the page: goose control.

My weeks of digging through internet archives for the faintest honk of the geese of East Haven had led Google to suspect I had a problem and inferred I needed a prod to handle it. Another week went by and the ads didn’t stop. Soon I was inundated with them––a gaggle nesting on my digital lawn.

I couldn’t help myself. I clicked on one, an ad for Geese Peace, Inc., one of many companies that service the New Haven area. The company promised to address the goose problem “humanely and without controversy,” elaborating with words grave enough to begin a manifesto: “Canada geese and other wildlife live within or at the fringe of our landscapes and communities placing them in conflict with us.” The campaign the Governor had taken up centuries earlier was evidently still in progress and with its share of partisans.

As is often the case in partisan conflicts, the etiology of the problem is ignored and all that’s left are its symptoms. This one began when, in the 19th century, market hunters invented a cruel technique to capture wild migratory geese and harvest them for their down.

The hunters would catch a few dozen geese, clip their feathers to prevent them from flying away, and release them on a lake. Dozens of other migratory flocks would then land on the water, seduced by the appearance of safety. Once the lake was full, the market hunters would blast it with rifle fire. The geese would take off and the sky would become so crowded that day turned to night.

Anywhere the hunters aimed they struck a bird. For a moment, every hunter had the skill of Apollo.

For a century, this was the norm. Over and over, the practice proved its efficacy and the Canada goose was systematically destroyed. But as conservation came to be a fixture of American politics, the Canada goose found an unlikely ally in the federal government. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, passed by Congress in 1918, prohibited the slaughter and trade of migratory birds without a license from the Fish and Wildlife Service and mandated that market hunters release their captured stock. The geese they were releasing, however, had been bred in captivity, had their wings clipped, and couldn’t migrate. Their biology broken, they became “residents.”

Humans forced geese to live contrary to their nature.

But nature was already being remade in a way that coincidentally suited the geese. According to the Cornell

Ornithology Lab, “as lawns started to proliferate, many of these resident geese flocks began to thrive and expand their range.” The suburbs, with their manicured grass, man-made lakes, athletic fields, and golf courses, created the perfect conditions for geese––plenty of nutrients, open space, and no natural predators to evade.

Over a 40-year period, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recorded roughly a doubling in the population of migratory geese in North America––from 1,000,000 in 1970 to 1,840,000 in 2012. In contrast, during the same period, the resident goose population increased nearly 15-fold––from 250,000 to 3,850,000––eclipsing the migratory population. In Connecticut alone, between 1950 and 2009, the overall goose population increased from fewer than 500 to over 52,000. If hubris begets nemesis, humans have gotten theirs. **** A few geese here and there are unlikely to ruffle feathers. But the fantasy of suburbia––of nature pristine, tidy, and subjugated––doesn’t comport well with thousands of geese roaming free, carving out their own territory, leaving turdulent gifts in their wake. Suburbanites’ main concern is geese’s propensity for the excremental act. In a day, a single goose will deposit up to two pounds of turd––14 percent of its body weight.

The 50,000 geese in Connecticut, in a week, will produce 350 tons of turd, or, for scale, the weight of two blue whales. In 2018, the mayor’s office in Milford, CT, received “more feedback about goose poop than just about any other matter of city business.”

The problem extends beyond despoiled soccer fields.

Contamination of watersheds and lakes from Canada goose feces is well-documented. Some strains of bacteria in samples of goose feces, when hit with a host of antibiotics, showed resistance. Backyards, lawns, and playgrounds ridden with droppings pose a health risk to

Humans forced geese to live contrary to their nature. But nature was already being remade in a way that coincidentally suited the geese.

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small children.

Canada geese are “a social problem,” Min Huang, a wildlife biologist at Connecticut’s Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, told me. “The state’s implemented liberal hunting seasons in September, January, and February to reduce the numbers,” he said. “There’s been legislation on the books since 2002, allowing for goose round-ups. Not a single town has taken advantage of it to avoid the controversy. They’re spending money on harassing the birds and putting up effigies.” Mr. Huang added that the Yale golf course was a perfect example of the effigy approach gone awry––in the past, there were coyote decoys on the grounds, but the geese quickly became habituated to them and used them for shade. Scott Ramsay, who was superintendent of the golf course for 17 years and left the position this past September, kept a goose dog to haze any resident birds and establish the area as a predator’s domain. But about four years ago the geese overran the grounds,

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says Peter Palacios Jr., the new general manager of the course. Matt Golino, the master gardener, was forced to call in a goose mitigator to deal with the problem.

It seems to have proven effective: the grounds haven’t seen many geese of late.

A whole industry has grown up in the shade of coyote decoys. Among the local specialists, there’s Geese Peace, Geese Relief, No Geese Today, Connecticut Goose Solutions, Wild Goose Chase New England, and The Gooseman Cometh. Goose mitigation strategies include an arsenal of devices that could arm a small militia: chemical agent repellants, pyrotechnics and propane cannons, lasers, plastic-coated kevlar grid lines, mylar tape, automatic exploding cannons, motion sprinklers, barrier fencing, and trained goose dogs.

Harassment by dog is the industry standard, and the standard dog is the border collie. Geese Relief’s Chris Santopietro told me that the bias for the breed can be attributed to its instinct to “herd, not hurt.” Santopietro uses traditional sheepherding commands to direct the dogs, first having them stare the geese down. “The stare mesmerizes the geese and they start to move,” he said––they retreat but don’t leave. Then the dogs set off in pursuit. With repetition, the geese eventually capitulate, coming to accept that the area isn’t theirs, and they move on.

One morning in October, I accompanied Santopietro on a chase at a cemetery in New Canaan, CT. We met at the entrance––two huge stone pillars and swinging metal gates, worn from many passages to and fro. We were headed for the lake at the heart of the cemetery.

A flock of geese had set up on its banks and when we arrived on the scene, I understood why. The place was a goose’s paradise––expansive fields to graze, a pond full of shoots and stems, a forbidden feast for the taking.

Seeing us, the geese inched toward the water. Santopietro took a few minutes to survey the flock’s movements to make sure it had no injured members in its midst. His dogs typically don’t touch the geese, but there’s always the chance that an injured or sick bird, slow to flee, might get caught in the heat of herding.

Satisfied that the flock was healthy, Santopietro opened the back of his truck and unlatched a dog crate. Out bounded Chip, a black and white border collie with a rough coat and an intensity that could cut diamond.

Immediately the geese flew to the lake, all the while honking and hrinking, the female goose’s call. Santopietro barked the sheepherding commands––“Lay down, Chip!” meaning “get low to the ground and slow down”––and the operation began. Chip approached the lake on a crawl, one deliberate paw at a time, locking eyes with the flock. Santopietro called out the next

round of commands––“Walk up! Right there!”––and Chip sprinted to the edge of the lake. After several laps around, Santopietro issued the final phrase–– “Get in!”––and Chip dove into the water. The geese flew off into the sky––dozens marshalling themselves into a “V”––and disappeared beyond some clouds.

Chip strolled back to us, looked for a clear patch of dirt, and, finding one, wiggled around there until he was dry. The chase was over. *** Geese can’t be chased into oblivion, but they can certainly be shuffled around and made someone else’s problem. Thirty years ago in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik described a similar kind of transient peace with rats in New York City. The technique’s three commandments were to contain them, confine

“New Haven County is no stranger to acts of anti-goose vigilante justice.” them, and convince them to leave. The goal with both rats and geese is to get them to go––where to isn’t the point.

No one has sympathy for rats, but plenty do for geese. The ancients didn’t question their nobility.

In Rome, geese were considered sacred to Juno and kept in domestic supply for rituals. When the Gauls invaded the city in 390 BC at the Battle of Allia, the Roman historian Livy credits the geese who sounded the alarms with saving the republic. Nowadays, the defenders of geese again say these are birds of principle: they mate for life, look after their young, and care for their sick. They’ve adjusted to an environment engineered by humans and have become one of its facts. Earlier this year in the New Haven Register, Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, an international animal advocacy organization based in Darien, CT, proposed a way to coexist with resident geese: “[Canada geese] aren’t going away…the only thing to do is clean up after them.” Feral cites successful cleanup programs in Ottawa and Boston as alternatives to harassment, roundups, egg treatment, organized slaughter––even anti-goose vigilantism.

New Haven County is no stranger to acts of antigoose vigilante justice. In the last ten years, the county’s seen a string of road rage episodes targeting geese. In 2017, a driver deliberately hit and killed 13 geese in Waterbury; in 2018, a man plowed through a “multitude” of geese, killing a gosling; and in 2010,

a beloved resident goose in Meriden named Buddy was killed and a letter of intent left at the scene.

The town raised a $2,000 reward for the killer’s capture. The goose problem has all the trappings of war––its own bellicose sides, peace activists, and casualties––and bespeaks a temper in American life that, from time to time, explodes. Short of training resident geese to resume their migratory routes––a method proven successful in the late 1980s and early ‘90s––we’ll have to accept the goose’s yearround permanence in the national landscape: They’re with us now, and they like it here. These birds have an urge for staying. *** Perhaps one day, with a serious effort to reestablish migratory routes, millions more will be flying north and south, but for now on Chapel Street, the only Canada goose you’ll see migrating is a thousand-dollar parka. For the moment, the appearance and disappearance of flocks of these down coats mark the change of seasons more than geese in chevron formation. But should you ever be in the right place to see 500 geese take wing from the ground, Connecticut Goose Solutions’ Jamie North, a veteran chaser, has one word of advice: “Duck.”

-- Zachary Groz is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College

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Sketches by Ivy Fan

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TOADS IS CLOSED Wednesday nights at Toad’s are silent for the near future, but Yalies’ memories are still vibrant.

JULIA HORNSTEIN

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t about 9:45 PM on a Wednesday night, you can find Pierce Daly ‘23.5 scouring the depths of Bass Library.

And no, it’s not because he can’t figure out the last question on his econ problem set due tomorrow morning (well, maybe he should focus on his pset). Daly, procrastinating whatever homework is still on his docket, strolls around the library in search of Yalies craving a midweek adventure.

A Toad’s Place aficionado since his first Wednesday at Yale, Daly considers himself a “Woad’s (that is, W-ednesday T-oad’s) loyalist.” And Daly is the perfect candidate for the Woad’s Scholarship (a title bestowed upon Yalies who attend every Woad’s dance party of the school year). A social butterfly, Daly is a household name among the Class of 2023. “I’m the only one of my friends who makes an effort to go every week,” Daly said.

As soon as his last Wednesday class ends, Daly begins plotting his adventure. Ready to cash in nights under Bass’ fluorescent lights for Toad’s glistening disco ball, Daly begs his friends to put down their pencils, shove their dying computers into their stuffed backpacks, and make a beeline for the always reliable Farnam pregame.

After scouting the ideal group, usually composed of a few friends and a handful of randos, Daly emerges from Sterling’s main entrance — crew by his side, homework on the brink of completion. Infatuated by the thrill of post-Toad’s 2 AM homework sprees in a stupor, Daly walks down York St. with a new group of Woad’s hopefuls every Wednesday night.

Nothing can deter Daly from making the trek to Woad’s. In sickness and in health, Daly once vowed to attend every Wednesday dance party — even when midterms loom large. “I’ll do my best to drum up some business if I’m really hankering to go,” Daly said, laughing.

When Daly approaches the bouncers at the door, he’s hoping for a night “busy enough that [he’s] always

Illustration by Sydney Zoehrer

meeting new people but empty enough to prevent suffocation.”

But now, 81 miles away from York St, Daly reflects on what once was — his Wednesday night routine shared with Yalies yearning for a serendipitous break in the workweek. In a country forever changed by nearly nine million COVID-19 infections, nights standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow Yalies on Toad’s stage feel worlds away.

“Toad’s is shut down like a damn morgue,” Toad’s Place owner Brian Phelps said.

COVID-19 has decimated small businesses across the country. As of August, 163,735 U.S. businesses have closed their doors, and Connecticut’s small businesses are lobbying for $70 million in grants. According to Moody’s/CNN’s Back-to-Normal Index, Connecticut’s economy is currently operating at 88 percent of what it was prior to the COVID-19 lockdown, which began in mid-March. But the reality on the ground — a boarded-up Toad’s and a deserted York St. — feels apocalyptic.

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As we approach the end of the year, the Independent Restaurant Coalition is sounding the alarm, warning that if no progress toward a deal is made, 85 percent of local bars and restaurants will have to close their doors by 2021.

As of October 8, Connecticut transitioned to Phase 3 reopening — allowing bars, restaurants, and other businesses to increase their indoor capacity to 75 percent.

But the Toad’s Daly and his fellow Yalies remember is hinged upon closeness, which has prevented its reopening. What’s more is that the bailout Phelps is counting on shows no signs of coming: The looming federal relief bill seems distant to Phelps and other small business owners, leaving Toad’s — a bar dependent on cramped, clammy dance parties — in limbo. *** Todd Kaplan ‘86 can recall Toad’s stuffy odor like the back of his hand. “I bet it still smells like beer,” Kaplan said. “It’s as if all the furniture had been soaked in beer for the past 100 years.”

Daly saunters over to the dance floor and is acutely aware of one thing and one thing only: He probably won’t remember much about Woad’s come his 1 PM class tomorrow afternoon. While Daly can’t call to mind which cheesy throwback songs DJ Action spun from the Lilypad, he can still remember “Woad’s [being] such a hodgepodge of people.”

But it used to be even more of a mixed bag. “It was a nice blend of people from school and locals,” Kaplan, who was captain of Yale’s swim team, recalled. “While it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, it felt pretty good because I grew up there.”

Toad’s wasn’t always a haven for Yalies in search of a Wednesday night escape; Kaplan was a Toad’s regular even before his admission to Yale. Growing up in North Haven, Kaplan started hopping at Toad’s as soon as he passed the road test at age 16. “You had to work hard to get carded,” Kaplan remembered. “When I was in college, the drinking age was 18, and nobody gave a crap.”

Priyanka Jain ‘23.5 also grew up a few towns away from Toad’s. But, as Lawrence pointed out, times have changed since Kaplan, his high school buddies, and locals alike chugged penny drinks together. Unlike Kaplan, Jain wasn’t a Toad’s regular until her first-year at Yale.

“I was almost a Woad’s Scholar first semester,” Jain proudly asserted. “I missed a few during the second semester because I was a little more focused on my studies.”

But when Kaplan was a swimmer in Ezra Stiles College, Toad’s wasn’t yet famous for its hump day dance parties. Toad’s Place owner Brian Phelps isn’t quite sure

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how Wednesday nights were codified as Yale tradition, but he thinks it became routine 15 or so years ago.

Musician Rohn Lawrence, who completed a ten year residency at Toad’s, cites the drinking age increase in 1984 as the catalyst for the bar ’s collegial relevancy.

“Toad’s was always influenced by the surrounding colleges to a certain degree,” Lawrence conceded. “But the thing that put a damper on [local turnout] was when the drinking age changed.”

Raising the drinking age posed a high, but clearable, obstacle to the local hot spot. Prior to this law, local bands headlined concerts, attracting a younger crowd to Toad’s. As the drinking age increased, underage patrons were barred from attending these concerts, decimating both the local band scene and bars reliant on a younger clientele.

“The state changing the drinking age not only made it hard for a lot of businesses, but it killed a ton of local bands,” Lawrence said. “A lot of their draw was [aimed at] 19-year olds, so this forced many bands to break up.”

But Toad’s couldn’t sit idly by. In response to this new law, Toad’s began booking DJs, a cheaper alternative to bands, for dance parties. The shift toward dance parties and away from what Toad’s was initially known for — hometown music groups — ultimately drove locals out and Yalies in, Lawrence recalled.

And thus, the pinnacle dance parties Daly dreams about while banging out a ten pager in Sterling’s stacks were born.

Surprisingly, Kaplan wasn’t entranced the York St. staple’s star-studded performances. “They occasionally had music; most of it was pretty bad,” Kaplan laughed.

“Every once in a while, it was alright.”

Phelps took serious offense to Kaplan’s assertion, rattling off dozens of top chart artists that took to Toad’s stage during his tenure: Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Cardi B, Post Malone, and Kanye West, to name a few.

As Phelps recovered from knee replacement surgery last summer, he found himself reflecting upon Toad’s influence on the Elm City. Over a year later, Phelps is now teaching his own history lesson of sorts on Toad’s: With the help of New Haven Register staff reporter and columnist Randall Beach, Phelps is penning a book about Toad’s’ “vast history” that is slated for release sometime next year. “When I started working with Randy, I gave him 42,000 words to work with,” Phelps said.“My favorite part of writing is when I start thinking about all the different things that [have] happened here over the years.”

After listening to Phelps’ writing methodology, it’s safe to say he lives and breathes Toad’s Place. But had

Phelps not crossed paths with Toad’s former owner Mike Spoerndle (affectionately called “Big Mike”) 45 years ago, he would’ve never wound up in what has become the most defining adventure of his life.

One night in 1975, Phelps and his friends were playing poker in Phelps’ karate school on Broadway when someone broke down the front door and stole the studio’s sign. Immediately, Phelps and his friends ran around the corner and found their sign and the culprit in front of Toad’s.

“My buddies were gonna get in there and go after him,” Phelps remembered, but then, Spoerndle intervened and called the cops.

Although Phelps “never saw a nickel” for the damages incurred by the altercation, a lifelong friendship with Spoerndle was born that night. “We were best friends right when we met,” Phelps said.

And soon, the rest would be history: Phelps started working as Toad’s manager in October 1976.

But in January 1995, Spoerndle left Toad’s due to substance abuse issues, leaving Phelps at the bar’s helm.

Despite cutting business ties, Phelps stayed “right [by] him to the last few years.”

Spoerndle passed away after his battle with substance abuse in 2011. *** Fast forward 44 years, Phelps doesn’t think he could’ve dreamt up a reality even comparable to the one this country is grappling to understand.

“Nobody really knew what to expect,” Phelps said.

“You know, we haven’t had one of these in 100 years.

God, I thought this was gonna be shorter.”

Yalies like Daly and Jain — and alums like Kaplan— are also concerned about the bar’s uncertain future.

“I can’t imagine my Yale experience without Woad’s,” Daly said.

With no decisive end to social-distancing nor a vaccine approved for public use, Phelps had to reassess Toad’s’ future.

But after nearly half a century of penny drinks and dance parties, Phelps has every intention of keeping Toad’s afloat: Inspired by “the resiliency of humanity,” Phelps is optimistic that a vaccine, which some experts say will be rolled out to the public before the end of this year, will get the club hopping again. “I have enough reserves to go until fall 2021, and I have a tremendous amount of equity in the building,” Phelps said. “I’d like us to get to 50 years and beyond.”

With that said, a study conducted by Harvard University indicates that social distancing might be the norm through 2022.

Regardless of the uncertainty ahead, Toad’s hopes to

throw private parties in accordance with Connecticut COVID-19 guidelines until it’s safe to pack Yalies back onto its sticky dance floor. And Lawrence is hopeful that, with Phelps at the helm, the York St. classic will stay afloat. “Brian has a lot of capital: He can hold it down for a long while,” Lawrence said.

Phelps was also hoping to host sit-down concerts, but state regulations prohibit singers from performing indoors. Phelps is now thinking about doing a free virtual send-off, show for Yalies around Thanksgiving.

“Maybe people would like to dance around in their own rooms for an hour or two,” Phelps said. “This is all we can do: Nobody wants their students in large gatherings [nor] dancing around together.”

Although this is far from ideal, Phelps has found a silver lining or two: All this extra time has allowed him to focus on polishing his book and fixing up Toad’s basement.

Amidst all the ambiguity the pandemic has cast over everyone’s lives, one thing’s for sure: “Toad’s won’t change what [they’re] doing,” Phelps said.

COVID-19’s shock waves don’t just threaten Yalies’ Wednesday night escapades. Toad’s walls whisper New Haven’s very history and, by extension, Yale’s fraught yet attempted reconciliation between itself and the city it attempts to coexist with. And COVID-19 stands to sanitize the stale beer stench Kaplan so fondly recalls, put an end to Daly’s excursions to York St., and threaten Phelps’ livelihood. But only time will tell what the future holds for Toad’s Place. Until then, memories will have to suffice.

-- Julia Hornstein is a sophomore in Ezra Stiles College

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