Now we were over Somers. Hadden pointed to a knoll smothered with the elegant, earth-colored units of an adult condominium called Heritage Hills of Westchester. Each unit faced at a s]ightly different angle, and on each patio, gripping the armrests of their sun deck chairs and taking in the view, sat a motion]ess elderly couple. Still in the northern part of the county, we were beyond the gravitational pull of New York City.  Ninety-five per cent of the land, it seemed, was woods. The rest was open, with a few farms and orchards. To the east, in a distant meadow somewhere in South Salem, three riders in velvet helmets were taking a succession of jumps. Horses are to the Salems what sailboats are to the Hamptons. To the west, in Yorktown Heights and Baldwin Place, the landscape was more democratic: there were vast shopping malls and new subdivisions, with grass still coming in between rows of iden tical houses.

        The valley beneath us bifurcated and became two valleys. The one to the right was filled with water-the long, shimmering crescent of the New Croton I{eservoir, held back by a mighty dam, which took fifteen years to build and upon its completion, in 1907, was the second-largest piece of hand-hewn masonry in the world. Thousands of Italians were imported for the job. Today, one out of every three of Westchester's eight hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants is likely to have Italian blood, and many are descended from people whose first home in America was a shack beneath the Croton Dam.

        We took the left-hand valley and followed it to Katonah, which looked like a quiet upstate town. South of Katonah, homing in now on north-central Westchester, we could no longer claim to be in the country. We were getting into that transitional area between the suburbs and the country for which the late A. C. Spectorsky invented the term "exurbia."  It is, to use Senator William Proxmire's characterization of his native Lake Forest, Illinois, "a very, very fortunate environment." We could see signs of affluence everywhere: big houses, lush gardens, swimming pools, tennis and paddletennis courts. There was nothing garish about it. The pattern was quiet good taste.

        "Look at this mansion coming up!" Hadden called, pointing to an approaching hilltop. The slate-tiled stone building below, with a long greenhouse, a squash court, and an indoor pool and tennis court, had been designed, I happened to know, by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who designed Central Park. It is one of the best of the big houses, put up by one of the great turn-of-the-century fortunes. But, like many of the other big houses, it lies empty. Nobody lives like that anymore, with flocks of servants and fleets of cars.

        From the air, we could see how the social strata of the exurbs conformed to the geological strata. This is a fairly common phenomenon in the United States. One finds it also, for example, in Los Angeles and its foothills. Down in the valley is blue-collar Mount Kisco, with light industry, highrise apartments, housing projects, and mini-ghettos occupied by blacks and the more recent immigrants-Argentines, Greeks, and others in lower socioeconomic circumstances. They do things like clean houses and work in factories. On the hillsides, the petit bourgeois have collected in subdivisions. They are immigrants with more seniority Italians and Irish who have been around for a generation or two and run a grocery store or have cornered a service like plumbing. As you get higher, the people get fewer and richer. They belong to what sociologists sometimes call the lower upper class. The richest and most aloof live in big hilltop houses. They are known in the local nomenclature as hilltoppers.

        Chappaqua. We were getting into the hard-core suburbs, the bedroom communities that form the image most people have of Westchester: Pleasantville, Thornwood, Greenburgh, Mamaroneck, New Rochelle. This is the realm of civic-minded wives and nononsense houses-one-third for living, one-third for sleeping, one-third for the car. But Chappaqua itself is an older, more gracious suburb. There is enough land-an acre or two per residence-to support a riotous biota and to provide privacy. A certain amount of eccentricity is tolerated. One doesn't have to mow the lawn every week if one doesn't feel like it. Trees are still the major component. We were still in the great forest north of the city. The development was still well adjusted. There was still wild land around Chappaqua-woodland lakes near Twin Ridges which could as well have been in the Adirondacks.

        Below the Cross-Westchester Expressway, Route 287, the dividing lint between the northern and southern parts of the county, rashes of dots, each one representing a dwelling, began to get serious. "The land's running out," Hadden shouted back. But it was still surprisingly open-maybe forty-five per cent-considering that one-ttnth of the people in the United States lived within fifty miles of where We were. Only at the very lower edge of the county-Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Pelham-did it seem to be all concrete and houses. Here and there, we could see the cancer of urban decay and nice old neighborhoods going to seed. A few last patches of green asserted themselves along Hillview Reservoir and Yonkers Raceway; then it was all swallowed up by the dismal sprawl of the Bronx.

        Having by now overflown Westchester, Hadden turned the Champ around and headed north above the Hudson River. We saw long barges plowing tediously upstream through muddy-brown water, the big General Motors plant in Tarrytown along the river, the sweeping curve of the Tappan Zee Bridge, an apple orchard, an osprey, a forest fire in progress across the river, side streams meandering through vast reedy marshes, swarms of seagulls at the Croton Point Dump. The Hudson Gorge, where the river narrows at Bear Mountain, was superb. Few people realize it, but the Hudson is a true fjord-a river canyon deepened below sea level by glacialaction. The Hudson is tidal as far north as Troy. The only other fjord in the northeast is in Maine. Before I knew it, the little airfield in Dutchess Contry had come into view, and, having got permission to land, we started to come in low over the Green Haven Correctional Facility. The last thing we saw from the air was some of the inmates out in the yard, playing basketball.
 

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