While Town Shuts for Storm, Sledders, Plow Drivers, and Cooks Keep Going

Ethan and Bella Guy show off their rainbow-colored snow tube. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTOS

The schools? Closed. Town Hall? Closed. The Library, YMCA, Calendar House, Community Services? All closed. 15 to 20 inches of snow – the totals vary depending on who you ask – will do that.

But that doesn’t mean everything in Southington was shut down, or that no one was out and about.

Take the sledders on the hill at Camp Sloper off East Street. Late Monday afternoon, the tracks leading down the slope near the power lines were packed from the dozens of kiddos who had come out with their snow tubes for some wintertime thrills.

As Kevin Guy watched his children trudge up the slope, he reflected that there weren’t as many good places to sled in town as their used to be, what with all the new development. Maybe Oak Hill by Flanders Street? (Online commenters recommended Panthorn Park.)

His son Ethan suddenly raced down the hill at top speed, hoping to hit the jump fast enough to go airborne for a moment. Ethan’s older sister Bella preferred a more leisurely pace, steering and turning over the bumps.

Snowtubes seem to be the way to go on Monday – a pair of toboggans and sleds sat unused in the frigid snow pack. Yet Guy, thinking again of the past, recalled another, more more creative alternative: “My buddies and I once went sledding using an weightlifting bench we turned over. It was fast – you’d be surprised.”

Ethan hits the ramp at the bottom of the hill.

Meanwhile, downtown, the walls of piled snow had turned the sidewalks into icy trenches. Highway Department employees plowed all night to keep the streets passable, while landlords and contractors cleared the walks with snowblowers.

During the worst of the storm Sunday, most local businesses were shut down – but not Taqueria la Juquilita at 190 Main Street. The owners, Israel Hernandez and Flor Reyes, live nearby, so for them, coming in to work was no big deal. “We were open yesterday. I live close, a five minute walk. You work in the kitchen, you always have to work,” Israel said.

Asked how business was during the middle of the storm, he answered, “A lot of workers came in the store,” most of them plow drivers. Their favorite food? “Everything,” he smiled. “Memelas, they really like memelas.” Memelas consist of a corn flour pancake topped with meat, cheese, beans, and salsa – an essential part of the Oaxacan cuisine that Taqueria la Juquilita specializes in.

“It’s authentic, it’s what we make at home. Memelas, tortillas, quesidillas, tacos. Nobody has it like this,” he said. He and his staff proudly showed off a Google award from last summer declaring their shop ‘best Mexican in Southington.'

The warm restaurant stood in contrast to the icy parking lot outside. Workmen, some running on minimal sleep, kept coming in from the cold to grab their take-out. Once fortified by memelas and energy drinks, they set out to finish the remaining driveways and parking lots on their lists.

Israel Hernandez and his wife Flor, who run Taqueria la Juquilita.

The taqueria's storefront.

The Anxious Generation, Part I: The Problem

CREATIVE COMMONS STOCK PHOTO

“Young people today are different.” Yes, it seems every older generation always says that. We also like to say, “when I was a kid, we walked to school, carried our lunch, were always outside…” While all of this may be a cliché, the harsh reality is that we are experiencing a dramatic increase in social, emotional, and mental health issues, as well as substance abuse and suicide, compared to previous generations. Should we be concerned about this? What has caused it? Is there anything we can really do about it? 

Jonathan Haidt, in his recent book The Anxious Generation, addresses many of the questions mentioned above. Members our Southington school system read his book a year ago, and it warrants a public airing. I have already discussed the issues raised in Haidt’s book at our Southington public library class on January 17.

Haidt points out that around 2009 some dramatic changes started appearing in young people, changes that can be tied to internet technology: cell phones, social media, and video games. I was still teaching at SHS then, and I saw changes in how students interacted with each other and with me – as well as an increase in suicide attempts, substance abuse, and mental health challenges. Haidt also cites evidence for physical changes in the developing brains of young people as a result of these technologies.

Technological progress makes our lives easier, enhances communication and connection in the world, and vastly increases the availability of information. Yet it also produces negative impacts. Tech companies study how to deliver quick rewards to young people, dopamine hits that keep them hooked. Many for-profit companies intentionally seek to hook young people, thus altering brain and cognitive development, and increasing rates of anti-social behavior.

While many parents were thrilled to find that smartphones or tablets could keep a child happily engaged and quiet for hours, few understood the mental health, developmental and socialization damage that was being done. The frontal cortex of our brains, essential for self-control, delaying gratification and resisting temptation, is not fully developed until the mid-20s, and preteens are particularly vulnerable. Gen Z became the first generation ever to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and often unsuitable for children and adolescents. 

The average young person today spends five hours a day on the internet. COVID isolation did not help, either. No wonder that student self-reports of feeling isolated or lonely have escalated.

When studies started to show this, many parents and adults went into defensive denial. Few realized that the developing brains of impressionable young people were being rewired. Social media inflicted damage on girls, while video games, porn, and gambling damaged boys. In-person physical play and socialization were replaced by addictive internet content.

In addition to the Great Rewiring of Childhood, as Haidt describes it, parents have also became overprotective of their children, restricting their autonomy in the real world. Fears of kidnappers and sex offenders reduced free, unsupervised outdoor play. As a phone-based childhood replaced a play-based childhood, more young people prefer to stay indoors and play online. There some wandered into adult internet content with little adult supervision. Some even looked for emotional support in AI or online, with some shockingly negative consequences. The indoors is not much safer than the outdoors.

Haidt describes a grim situation. A law passed in 1998 called COPPA was supposed to protect children by requiring consent, and 13 became the “internet age” as a result, but it is easy to bypass this barrier.

Still, Haidt also suggests some other specific actions we as a society can do to counter this. I will talk about some of these ideas in my next column.

A Visit To Southington’s Great Unconformity

Paul Sulzicki inspecting Southington's Great Unconformity ERICA BOVINO PHOTO

There is no path to Southington’s Great Unconformity. Instead, visitors must tread carefully over boulders and through stands of oak and mountain laurel until they come to the edge of a steep ravine. There the ground drops away to reveal Roaring Brook splashing over mossy rocks, forming a series of small waterfalls on its way to the valley below.

One cold Saturday morning in late December, a group from the Southington Land Trust made a journey to this ravine. The view and the hypnotic trickle of the water were charming enough - yet that was not all they had come to see. On the far side of the stream rises a rock formation that looks like two different types of cake stacked on top of each other. The upper layer is more rusty in color with horizontal bands, while the lower one is grey and juts up vertically like a row of blunt teeth.

This rock formation, the Great Unconformity, was the goal of their visit.

Many residents know that Southington has an ‘unconformity’ – it is even mentioned on the town’s Wikipedia page. But what is it, exactly?

A Short History of a Long Past

An ‘unconformity’ is any place where two masses of bedrock that differ radically in age and origin touch, without any layers from the time in between. Most unconformities lie deep underground, covered by topsoil. They only become visible when some natural force, like Roaring Brook, cuts a channel to expose them.

These junctions have a story to tell about earth’s deep past. The story of our town's unconformity begins with the lower layer of rock, which is the older of the two. It dates to a time about 400 million years ago when the highest forms of life on earth were fish and plants. At that time, all seven of the earth’s current continents formed a single giant landmass called Pangaea. A massive mountain range stretched across its northern parts as tall as the Alps and twice as long – a range that survives to this day, in diminished form, as the Appalachian Mountains.

WIKIPEDIA CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE

The land that today we call Connecticut was located just south of the center of that range. The grey rock one finds in the Unconformity and elsewhere on Southington Mountain once belonged to these mountains. For the most part it is a mix of whitish quartz and glittering mica:

PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

Now the next chapter in our story unfolds. About 200 million years ago, just as dinosaurs were beginning to take over the earth, an enormous crack developed in the middle of Pangaea, just east of the mountain range. It grew and filled with seawater, splitting Pangaea into the separate continents of North America and Africa. Eventually that gap would expand to become what we now call the Atlantic Ocean.

WIKIPEDIA CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE

Around the same time, a set of smaller cracks opened in the middle of future Connecticut. There the earth sank down to form the Connecticut River Valley, which stretches through the middle of the state from New Haven to Windsor Locks, and includes most of Southington. What started as a marine inlet eventually filled in with sediment washed down from the surrounding mountains.

In time, this sediment was compressed into a soft, rust-colored sandstone known as arkose. Most of the bedrock in the middle of Southington is a layer of arkose resting on the grey rock below, like a mud pie in a stone bowl.

Over the next hundred million years, the floor of the valley slowly tilted, with the western half rising and the eastern half sinking. (You can still see this tilt when you are driving on I-691 in Meriden, in the slanted cliffs under Castle Craig.)

When the western part rose it lifted the valley floor. The rock formation at the Unconformity is a part of that floor - a place where a piece of mud pie touches the bowl. In short: compacted marine sediment above, and the remnants of an ancient mountain range below.

The Unconformity And The Southington Land Trust

Southington’s Unconformity is a rare natural wonder, not unlike the dinosaur footprints that are the pride of Rocky Hill’s Dinosaur State Park. However, rock masses are not quite as universally beloved as dinosaurs, and for most of the town’s history, no serious effort was made to promote or protect the site.

In 1972 the question of preservation became an urgent one when a developer named Gerald Griffin purchased the land near Roaring Brook in order to build there. The members of Southington’s newly-formed Conservation Commission tried to see what they could do to protect the site. Griffin, while unwilling to donate the land outright, was lured by the promise of tax incentives to grant an easement for the lot containing the Unconformity. Under the terms of this easement, the stream and the rocks would remain untouched in perpetuity.

All that was needed to seal the deal was an entity to hold the easement. And so one was formed: a nonprofit corporation called the Southington Land Conservation Trust. The trust was headed by Luis Lozano, the Commission's chair, and officially recognized by the IRS in 1974.

Today the Unconformity lies on private property; a chain-link fence, dense shrubs, and ‘no trespassing’ signs serve to discourage unannounced visitors. However, the Trust continues to be responsible for inspecting the property, to make sure it remains undeveloped and has no issues with trash or invasive species. To fulfill this obligation, members visit the site twice a year.

Land Trust member Theo Smigelski and President Val Guarino look over the ravine. PHILIP THIBODEAU PHOTO

A Family At The Rocks

On the day of the visit, Paul Sulzicki, a Land Trust member who lives on Mt. Vernon Road, brought his whole family – wife Erica Bovino, father-in-law Severino, and their children Jack, Stella, and Hazel - to enjoy this rare opportunity.

“We were here many years ago, before the kids, and we thought this was a great opportunity for them as well to learn about history and nature, so we can protect it and be a good steward. Here we all are, from seven years old to eighty – what is it, Dad?”

“82,” said the elder Severino, smiling.

“Seven to 82. Just so appreciative of what’s around us. The monumental forces at play, that created this, are just amazing.”

Severino Bovino pointing out the rock formation. ERICA BOVINO PHOTOS

Erica noted that there is more to the site than geological history: “When we first came through here years ago with the owner’s permission, we saw a bobcat lurking in the shadows over there. There are plenty of bears too - and deer, and turkeys.”

The family spent their visit inspecting the stream and the rocks, sharing recollections of wildlife (including flying squirrels that they spotted in their own back yard), and taking it all in.

Seven-year old Hazel summed up the experience: “It’s really cool. I like the rock, it’s amazing. The waterfall too.”

Stella, Jack, Hazel, Erica, Severino, and Paul