It's Getting Ugly Out There

I’m trying to figure out the best adjective for Plymouth: trying to come up with one term that sums up the look and the feel of life in this community, today.
Everybody’s talking about what the town used to be like, or what they think the town could be, tomorrow – but I am not sure we have a clear sense of what Plymouth is like, right now.
According to Bucci’s List of Civic Stereotypes – the bible of travel writers, a town can be Scary, One-Horse, Rustic, Sleepy, Picturesque, Out of the Way, Rural, Quaint, Provincial, Ugly, Charming, Tony, Bustling, or Weymouth-like.
I know that there quite a few people in town who aspire to ‘Weymouth-like, but I haven’t made a final decision.
Right now I’m leaning toward Ugly.
Ugly is a great word, a powerful word – a word that has somehow maintained its ragged, rusty, nasty edge in this age of the dull and the pointless.
Ugly is just short of profanity – just shy of offensive, and if properly expressed, contains trace amounts of grudging appreciation: you know, the kind of appreciation you express when someone lands a great belly flop in the backyard pool.
“Oooh,” the onlookers exclaim, as the sound of that belly slapping the water reverberates around them, “that was ugly!”
There is even another definition of ugly –according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a definition peculiar to New England: ugly, as in ‘Unmanageable: applied to animals, especially cows or horses.’
In this case I am not applying it to cows or horses, but to the town as a whole.
Plymouth is a great big, unmanageable, out of control belly-flop of a community.
How’s that sound?
Again, I don’t mean to imply that Plymouth is ugly to look at. Plymouth is in fact, still pretty, in places. Ugly, according to Bucci’s, refers to that state of socio-economic being that falls somewhere between ‘quaint’ and ‘bustling’.
Some towns manage to skip over ugly entirely. Some towns go from ‘one-horse’, to ‘charming’ in one easy step.
Duxbury started off like Plymouth – with a few pilgrims, some boat building, farmers, and tradesman, but seems to have gone straight to charming. Then again, I’ve heard other adjectives applied to Duxbury.
For most communities though, the changes are painful, and there is no skipping over any of the stages.
In terms of these stages, I believe that the progression goes something like this:
Most towns start off as Scary. A Scary town is usually comprised of a few, apparently abandoned homes that rumor suggests were built by unknown individuals who made pacts with the devil, but perished nonetheless. In some cases these abandoned buildings have become video rental stores.
Carver is an example of a Scary town.
The next stage is often called the ‘One-Horse’, or its updated version, the ‘One Traffic Light’ town.
If a town persists too long in the one-horse state, it often moves involuntarily into ‘rustic’. Rustic is a dangerous condition. A town that is said to be rustic, is in a kind of holding pattern. A rustic town can only go in one of two ways – toward decrepit, or toward picturesque.
According to my sources, Plympton is an officially ‘Rustic’ community.
Plymouth itself was once officially rustic, in the late 1700’s, but owing largely to its historical significance, moved into a picturesque phase somewhere around 1805.
Most towns however – Plymouth included, are unable to hold on to the picturesque phase for very long. When a town is known to be picturesque otherwise well-meaning people move into town, build authentic imitation salt boxes and/or California Ranch-style homes, and become town meeting members.
At this point I think we need to differentiate between two civic phases that are often lumped together, but are in fact worlds apart: quaint and charming.
Quaint, is a classic ‘damn with faint praise’ adjective. By calling a town quaint we are suggesting that, though at one time it was picturesque, most of the older homes have been converted to funeral homes, real estate offices, or pizza parlors, mainly through the addition of colorful awnings. The dictionary definition of quaint is, “having an old-fashioned attractiveness or charm; oddly picturesque”. The emphasis here, I would say, should be on the odd. And the oddness is derived, I would further suggest, from the illusion that we are referring to a small town. You wouldn’t call Boston or Providence quaint, but oftentimes a large town or small city insists that it still qualifies for quaint-ness.
A quaint old town is actually a fairly heavily populated town, with most of the growth occurring outside the old town center – creating a built-in conflict between the image and reality of the community, and between the newcomers and the townies. To be quaint, I believe, is to be confused.
Kingston is very quaint.
The charming community is very different indeed.
The charming community is one that has, in large part, evolved as a whole. It need not be picturesque. It need not be well-to-do. It need only have a certain, undeniable charm.
According to recent census data, there are only three officially charming towns in all of Massachusetts: Woods Hole, Cummington, and Sterling.
There are however, 87 towns in Massachusetts that think they are charming.
When a quaint town thinks it is a charming town, and holds fast to that illusion, it is official designated ‘provincial’ – that is, ‘having or showing the manners, viewpoints, etc., considered characteristic of unsophisticated inhabitants of a province.’
Believing that you are charming, when you are not, is like believing that you are ‘good looking’ when you are not: like the middle-aged guy at the bar who, after a few drinks, starts to flirt with the waitresses. Pretty soon, things start to get Ugly.
And it’s only a 30 minute drive from Ugly to Weymouth.
Next week: The Ugliest Buildings in Town!