I begin with an 8:15 a.m. coffee stop in South Hadley (Mount Holyoke College), which has the usual college town businesses, but not (at this hour) any evidence of students. Enlightenment won't come soon enough, so best to move on.
I drive south to Middletown, Conn., home to Wesleyan University. Middletown -- what a great name for a college town, suggesting the center between heady academic life and grounded daily existence. The bulletin board at Brew Bakers, a Main Street cafe, seems to confirm this mix. I find postings on arts, politics, and commerce, the latter including ads for acupuncture and water heaters. But it's possible the bulletin board misleads.
''It's strange to hear Middletown referred to as a college town," says Ben Michael, a self-described ''townie" and general manager of WESU, Wesleyan's FM radio station. ''Our students have a hard time crossing Washington Street" into downtown's ''unfamiliar territory."
Michael says that one of the few places ''deemed a cool place to go" is Gatekeepers Tavern on Ferry Street, off Main -- ''one of the shadier parts of town." Students are lured there, he says, by ''super-cheap beer" and a different crowd.
I check out Gatekeepers, which at 11:30 a.m. has seven customers and a lingering cigarette smell. Soon after, I decline a sidewalk entrepreneur's pitch for $6 watches and learn how attempts at art have mixed results. Outside a bank, four men stop at a metal sculpture that looks like the offspring of a giant snail and a shovel.
''I'm trying to figure out what it is," says one of them. A young woman passing by calls out, ''It's art." ''They ought to label it," the man says.
