Chapter 1: Section 7: Page 59: Line 41 (1022)

 So despite days and nights of traveling, Merle had an eerie sense of not having left Connecticut—same plain gable-front houses, white Congregational church steeples, even stone fences—more Connecticut, just shifted west, was all.

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Even though the Connecticut land ceded to Pennsylvania had happened about one hundred years ago, the Connecticut settlers who had not been killed in the Pennamite-Yankee Wars were granted Pennsylvania citizenship and allowed to keep their lands. Which means Northern Pennsylvania has its roots in Connecticut culture.

"So despite days and nights of traveling"
Movement without movement. Like the vortex Heino Vanderjuice mentions earlier. Or like a pinwheel where movement and stasis are somehow combined. Lack of change means lack of movement, lack of advancement. What does this mean for Merle?

"an eerie sense"
This feels a bit paranormal, something akin to the opposite of unheimlich (un-unheimlich?), where Merle is feeling a sense of home but in a strange place (not heimlich because it is eerie and, so, un-unheimlich!). It's as if, as a person from Connecticut, the frontier does not exist for Merle because it's Connecticut all the way down.

"just shifted west"
Perhaps a reference to light and how it retains the same speed (or, in the analogy, the same architecture of Connecticut) but shifts from red to blue or blue to red depending on the viewer's relationship to the light's movement. This land looks like Connecticut but shifted west, or viewed from the future (Merle) looking into the past (or is it the opposite being that the land Merle has arrived in is newer than the land he came from?). Being that light is our major theme at the moment, the usage of "shifted" has to be referencing the properties of light, especially since this shift is based on what Merle is seeing around him. He's moving west, toward the future, but looking into the east, the past. I guess that's kind of a property of light too! That whatever we see is already past due to how long it takes light to hit our optical organs.