By STEPHEN METCALF

Just past the giant industrial vats of New Haven, tucked between two tony shoreline exurbs, there's a sweet little seaside curio known as Stony Creek, Conn. Entirely unlike its posh surroundings, Stony Creek looks more like a breakaway from the coast of Maine. It's rocky, with its own small and thoroughly peculiar pink granite archipelago, the Thimble Islands, lying just offshore. And nobody, it's been said, ends up there by accident: The only road through town is effectively a cul-de-sac, and no inviting signs guide you to it once you're off the highway. You're as likely to get pleasantly lost in a leafy maze of big houses, salt marshes, and glimpses of the Long Island Sound as you are to find Stony Creek itself—which is how locals, known as Creekers, would prefer it. For Stony Creek is a small community (maybe 1,600 Creekers) with large reserves of Yankee suspicion. The town auto mechanic, also the local real-estate magnate and, as it happens, a dead ringer for Mr. Chips, pretty much summed up native sentiment. Looking at me with something shy of an avuncular twinkle, he said, "Go ahead. Write an article about what a nice place Stony Creek is. And tell all the tourists to please stay away."

My fellow tourists, I cannot urge you to stay away from Stony Creek. But if you do go, try to fit in with the Creeker Zen, so thoroughly violated by the community's first, and thus far only, McMansion, and the tour buses that hover down the main street. When I first went to Stony Creek to paint a house a few years ago, the downshifted pace and scale hit me immediately: Everything seems smaller, older, closer, and slower. A green heron perches matter-of-factly on a dock railing. Old buoys are strung like necklaces across the balcony of a worn-in shingle-style apartment house. There's a rusted-out Evinrude sign, a Marine and Tackle shop, and, next to the wood-decked Stony Creek Market and antique shop, an impeccably restored Victorian with a mauve paint job and gingerbread trimmings so intricate as to suggest a retirement home for Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The town has its own Fife and Drum Corps ("FREE Family Entertainment," announces a flyer, "Patriotic Aires and Marching Songs") and the Puppet Theatre, featuring 19th- century life-size Sicilian-made marionettes.

Going to Stony Creek? Read our travel guide.

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