It is the green of hope, a color that Benjamin West captures in his iconic painting of the glade beside the Delaware, where Penn and other tricorned Quakers are striking a treaty with the Lenape Indians. His green suggests both utopian ambition and the kind of nostalgia for a nonexistent perfect past that Gatsby feels, gazing at Daisy’s green light. Let every house be placed in the middle of its plot, so that there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome.
I recognize it at once, when in a history text I first read William Penn’s dreamy yet transpicuous instructions for the layout of Philadelphia: Only the Keystone State-a charmless architectural nickname that also has a certain whimsy-is the proper pastoral shade. To me, Maine and Virginia are also green, but the former is a dour Nordic spruce and the latter suggests pea soup. Pennsylvania is green-not because of its forests or its ecological virtue but because that’s the color with which my synesthetic mind defines that particular state. Hey, you guys! Hey! The children’s voices, ringing through woods and vineyards where Roman legions and Napoleonic troops once passed, bring back my own childhood evenings in a Philadelphia suburb, where our shouts had an edge of Arcadian freedom to them, and, as we scrambled through the bushes, the earth leaking shadow into the sky, we always had a sense of territory behind us, all that leaf-colored outback. Late one May afternoon, my son stands in the garden of our house outside Turin and yells over to the American kids who have moved in across the valley, three anarchic towheads, whose family comes-it seems significant to me-from my home state. When I hear the children hollering between hillsides, I suddenly get Pennsylvania back in my life.
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