What We Lose, & Gain, In U‑Haul Season

A young couple held a tag sale in East Rock that stopped this bargain hunter in his tracks.

This was because I presumed that these front-yard vendors were participants in New Haven’s annual International Festival of U‑Haul Trucks, Trailers and Pods and a Penske or Two. 

As so many students who finished their work at one of the Elm City’s diploma factories, with their apartment leases up, they were peddling items they didn’t need before heading off to the more commercial capitals of Boston or Los Angeles or New York, I figured.

Pity, I thought. We need to keep our young folks around, and to halt the brain drain. 

But I was wrong about these two, who were holding this tag sale several summers ago. They said they had just signed a long-term lease on a house rental. 

They had both received graduate degrees from the Yale School of Environmental Studies, and they told me they had fallen in love with the New Haven environment. The woman told me, ​“This city is a great place to live, so much to do. So we’re not going anywhere.”

I think of them each summer as the U‑Haul trucks and trailers clutter the streets, and as I lament the loss of neighbors who have given our ​‘hood its diversity of interests, expertise and backgrounds. This year, the exchange of new faces for old ones has hit us particularly hard.

The sweet young woman who lived next door, a post-doc who can tell us everything we ever want to know about the lives and struggles of dragonflies (they, like elephants and humans, are endangered), went off to Washington, D.C., on a fellowship and to get married. 

Another post-doc down the street was, I have surmised, the neighborhood’s only expert on 19th century Afro-Cuban art. She told me she is heading off to Havana to do more research. 

Two dog walkers (and runners) who have fled in recent weeks seemed overqualified to tend to our pup, Lucca, as they both earned their medical degrees in the spring.

And there is the heartbreaking move of the couple down the street who are experts, respectively, in Eastern European languages and Islamic studies. I say heartbreaking because Lucca has had their little pup, Copper, as his best canine pal. 

Every morning when I take him out for his early walk, he looks longingly toward their house, awaiting the chance to play yet again their favorite game, Chase Me and Then Roll Me Over and Then Take a Whiff of My Butt. Alas, now a dream of the past.

Others have moved away, too. The neighbors who once found Lucca after he had gone astray and brought him safely home. The experts in Babylonian archeology. And the young woman from Tibet who worked so hard and with good results to resettle immigrants from the Middle East to America. 

Certain advantages, of course, crop up when an exodus occurs. For the bargain hunter, there is a chance to pick up good books, set outside in cardboard boxes, for free. It was in this way -– inspecting estate leftovers -– that I recently became the owner of an almost new pair of size 11 Johnson & Murphy dress shoes that I’ll never wear. 

And there’s this inevitability: Just as I was feeling sorry for those of us left in the hot summer’s dust, I saw another moving truck in East Rock that wasn’t being loaded. Instead, two young people were bringing their stuff into a rental apartment. Theirs was a big rental vehicle filled with furnishings.

At that moment, a friend and I had been walking back from a fine cheeseburger lunch at Contois. Just prior to our spotting the van, we agreed that one of the advantages of life in this city is that you can meet interesting people on the street, so of course we intruded. 

We learned that the young woman and man had lived in Cambridge. The young woman is focused on climate change in her graduate studies, a subject of pertinence only to the entire globe. And I thought, who knows? She might one day be the savior of our planet. 

I reminded myself that, with the annual brain drain, there is an equal brain gain. More than that, actually, as New Haven is one of only two Connecticut cities that grew in population over the last decade, Stamford the other.

Just today, as I write this, I nosed in on another couple toting their household goods from a U‑Haul, in this case to a third-floor walkup across the street from our house.

Verity Hill and Zack Abrams had just moved to our city from Edinburgh, Scotland. They are two – you guessed it by now – PhDs. Her expertise is in biology, and she has a new job at Yale studying mosquitoes that carry viruses. Zack’s focus is literature, and will be looking for a teaching position.

Without a pecan pie as a welcome gift, I at least wished them well in their new environs. And, with all due respect to the fine services offered by U‑Haul and Penske, I hoped that our new neighbors would flourish and stay in an exceptional city.