Exotic

from happening here. It has all that joyous and life-affirming character.”

Connecticut’s problem may just be that it’s a bit too much New England: too much taciturn reserve, too powerful a tendency for people to withdraw into their private lives, too focused on work (or the search for work). Once, after a highly gregarious trip through Cajun bayou country, I came home desperately seeking some Connecticut counterpart to Louisiana’s “Laissez les bon temps roulez!” Then I realized it was right in front of me, in the dependable, but joyless, “Land of Steady Habits.”

Gem Treasures From The Far East

Rubies, Emeralds, Sapphires, and more

Like his great-great-great-grandfather, (a clipper ship sea captain), Keith travels every two years to the Orient to acquire gems at the source and then he makes the jewelry.

The Clipper Ship Trade Wind Jewelry Collection is again in the port of Portland for Summer 2016. Over one-hundred pieces of luscious blue sapphire, ruby, and emerald jewelry. Sneak peak preview on-line Call or click to buy, or to experience the real thing, visit us this summer in downtown Portland

There is, however, one thing that draws us together, defines us, and also connects us inextricably to the rest of New England: the water. Partly I mean the coastline. Let’s call it 100 miles from Greenwich to Stonington, or 618 miles if you go by the federal system of measuring nooks and crannies, and I can tell you that the nooks and crannies definitely count: Take a boat tour among the raw granite ledges and outcrops of the Thimble Islands in Branford’s Stony Creek Harbor. Or eat a lobster roll at Abbott’s Lobster in the Rough in Noank. They’re almost— almost —the equal of Five Islands in Maine. (Our beaches are better—sand, not rock. But enjoying them, on the other hand, can be difficult. Eighty percent of the coast is privately owned.)

More than the coast, though, it’s the rivers that make us who we are: the Housatonic, the Naugatuck, the Farmington, the Quinnipiac, the Willimantic, the Quinebaug, the Thames. Together with countless tributaries, they drove the early agricultural mills, and later the first factories, obliging us to create and endlessly improve new products, in the process inventing Yankee ingenuity itself. The Connecticut River in particular gives Connecticut its name, raises it to the level of a great American place, and makes it the real heart of New England (or anyway, the aorta).

The river rises just below the Canadian border and travels through 410 miles, and four New England states, missing just Maine and Rhode Island. But it earns its name, an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “long tidal river,” only as it leaves Massachusetts and begins to feel the rhythms of its destination in Long Island Sound. From the Connecticut border south, the river’s footprint broadens into a 20-mile-wide rift valley, with some of the best farmland in the region (any region). Then, somewhere north of Middletown, a spirit of Yankee independence (or ancient geology) seizes hold of the river, and it abandons its own valley, veering southeast for 30 spectacularly scenic miles down to the Sound. This stretch of the river is why I live in Connecticut, and love it here. (The old valley bed, incidentally, ends up 32 miles away in New Haven, with the Quinnipiac now running there.)

One recent summer day, I was canoeing at the mouth of the Connecticut and was struck, as I’ve often been, by the way shifting sandbars have kept this estuary looking much as it did a century or two ago: unindustrialized, with the white steeple of Old Lyme’s First Congregational Church rising above the treetops. I was interested that day in ospreys. My guide, Paul Spitzer, an ornithologist who grew up in Old Lyme, described the species as a very Connecticut bird, “a bird of steady habits.” It migrates each fall to South America but remains loyal year after year to its North American summer nest site and to its mate. Both male and female are industrious at the business of catching fish to feed the young, and they share the work more or less equally.

Spitzer and other birders started working with ospreys here in the 1960s—another recent thread of history worth picking up—after the population plummeted from 200 nests to a few dwindling holdouts. Under the guidance of Barbara and Roger Tory Peterson, the bird artist, volunteers established the first 10-foot-high osprey nesting platforms on a place called Great Island, mainly to rule out the possibility that nest-raiding predators might be the real problem.

The platforms were an old New England idea updated. Someone remembered that Connecticut farmers used to put wagon wheels on poles to attract ospreys, with the idea that the fish eaters would keep the chicken hawks and redtail hawks away from their poultry. The problem for ospreys in the 1960s turned out to be not predators, of course, but the inadvertent eggshell-thinning effect of the widely misused pesticide DDT, abetted by dieldrin in the river from the woolen mills upstream. Even so, the ospreys took to the platforms on Great Island, especially as the population recovered after the banning of DDT and dieldrin in 1972. The platform idea soon spread along the East and West Coasts, and across to Europe. It was a bit of Yankee ingenuity, still at large in the world.

Great Island is now a kind of osprey garden, with more than 20 platforms, and on an earlier visit, Spitzer had peered into a nest to check on progress with the help of an old bicycle mirror attached to one end of a bamboo pole. Now, though, the young had fledged, and they were in the sky all around us, a male and female “jagging and flaring,” as Spitzer put it, in some sort of display, and others winging out to fish, and back again with their catch slung underneath, face forward, bright blood streaming down from where the talons gripped each fish’s flanks.

There’s an older sort of Yankee ingenuity at work here. Some of it is built in: Ospreys can, for instance, dislocate their shoulders to get their wings out of the way as they plunge beneath the surface to pick flatfish off the bottom. And some of it is just an extraordinary ability to spot shifting resource possibilities: An osprey will fly long distances to hit a fish hatchery, for instance, or pluck an expensive meal from an ornamental koi pond.

Mostly, though, their food comes, as it always has, from the river and the Sound. One osprey turned to run off a black-backed gull trying to steal its catch, and the gull, plainly outnumbered here, soon fled. Across the river, a “kettle” of ospreys—23 of them—wheeled over South Cove in Old Saybrook. I breathed in the salt air, glad to be apart from the rest of humanity for a while—something still highly possible in a state that remains more than 60 percent forested. The fledglings splashed down feet first to the water with a kind of childish exuberance, missing the fish much of the time, but hitting often enough to be happy.

You could call this place Connecticut, you could call it New England. The birds didn’t give a damn. On this gorgeous morning, it was simply a very fine place to live.