|
|
John Sheirer
Going Home
Part 3
Previous
When I told my friends in Connecticut that I was going to Pennsylvania for vacation, they smiled and nodded. "Ahhh," they said, "Pennsylvania," and I could almost read their minds. But this trip to Pennsylvania is not really what they imagine. I'm on my way to my childhood home, a small farm in southern Bedford County. I didn't even mention this fact because it would only have produced blank stares.
At the western edge of this chunk of southern New York, Route 84 descends to the Delaware River, well north of George Washington's famous crossing, and passes into Pennsylvania. I've always liked the huge "Pennsylvania Welcomes You" sign here at the border. It looks so bright and cheerful with its friendly bright blue and yellow. The license plates here used to say "You've got a friend in Pennsylvania." That's better than what the welcome sign used to say back in the early 1970s: "Welcome to Pennsylvania: Where America Starts." I guess the states I've just driven through didn't count for much back then.
I'm barely three hours from my departure, but I would be fooling myself if I took comfort from being in the same state as my destination. People driving from one end of Pennsylvania to the other have just one word for the sate: wide. Punch your time clock when you enter the New York side of Pennsylvania, drive the speed limit, then punch your time clock when you reach Ohio on the other end--you've worked a full day.
Take a moment to think of all the places in Pennsylvania that might sound familiar to you: Philadelphia--with the Liberty Bell and the "Founding Fathers" of this nation. Pittsburgh--with its football team and steel industry. Harrisburg--home of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown. (I was there that day, by the way, but it wasn't my fault. More on all that later.) Getteysburg--pivotal battlefield of the Civil War. Lancaster--Amish country. Penn State University--home of the Nittany Lions football team. How about Titusville--home of the first oil well in the world.
Pennsylvania is such a big state that my trip won't take me near any of them except Penn State, which I'll miss by a few miles about six hours into my trip.
But I will pass within fifteen miles of the curiously named town of Centralia--not a landmark most people will have heard of, but a place as symbolic of modern America as could possibly exist. Centralia is located in eastern Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region. Anthracite is the hard, long-burning kind of coal, as opposed to the more common, softer bauxite coal. In 1962, an underground vein of anthracite coal ignited due to a fire in a trash dump in Centralia. And here's the amazing part: It has been burning ever since.
Anthracite coal is apparently very difficult to extinguish once it gets burning. People tried to stop the underground fire, but nothing worked. So they just let it burn, figuring that it was deep enough in the Earth that it couldn't cause an real problems. Then in the late 1970s, around the time I was getting ready to graduate from high school a few hours to the southwest, people in Centralia noticed that the ground was hot ... interesting. Then people began smelling vile fumes ... worrisome. Then huge holes began appearing in the town, swallowing chunks of roads and buildings ... evacuation time.
Why Centralia is not in every school curriculum in the world, I have no idea. In its own way, it is as stunning an example of how human beings can mess things up in our quest to dominate the environment as is the Titanic, Chernobyl, Ozone, Challenger, and Columbia. The really interesting thing about Centralia is that some people chose not to evacuate the town. Hard as it is to believe, they are still living and walking and breathing (sort of, considering the fumes) over top of a forty-year underground fire.
My sister Tam and her husband Dale live only a short drive from Centralia. They actually visited there once, and Tam describes it as a place right out of the Twilight Zone. Many of the houses were tall, skinny, hillside row houses popular in Pennsylvania towns and cities. When the sane people left town, their houses were demolished. Some of the houses owned by the not-quite-so-sane people who remain in town are row houses that Tam says look weird and stark with the rest of their row torn down and missing from around them--like a gaping mouth with only one or two teeth left rising from the gums in a crazy smile. She says there's even an enormous, beautiful Catholic church sitting abandoned in the middle of town, streets collapsed around it, shimmering in the fumes.
Recent Pennsylvania history has made famous two spots that are actually very close to my destination. Do you remember the nine coal miners trapped in their mine? Like me, did you figure there was no way they could be rescued alive? Did you breathe out a soft "I'll be damned" when they were miraculously, joyfully rescued? That happened in Somerset County, about an hour away from where I grew up.
And on September 11, 2001, if Flight 93 had stayed in the air on its flight path another five minutes, it might have crashed into the side of Wills Mountain overlooking our little farm.
I don't mind the inconvenience of explaining where Bedford County is, repeating again and again that my neighbors were not Amish, that I've never seen the Liberty Bell or even an oil well. That's much better than hearing, "Oh, god, I saw that on CNN."
* * *
I enter Pennsylvania just in time for Bill Bryson to inform me that my home state contains what is widely considered the worst section of Appalachian Trail. He writes in A Walk in the Woods that this part of the trail has no history, the worst views, and misses the state's most scenic mountains--including Tussey Mountain, just half an hour east of Wills Mountain. For hikers, like drivers, Pennsylvania is just one incredibly long and somewhat featureless state.
The most distinctive feature of the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania is its felsenmeer, the never-ending chunks of rock that poke up through the ground. It seems Pennsylvania was just on the border of glacial advancement during the last ice age, so the ground here went through a long series of freezing and thawing, over and over again, until much of the rock was crushed and broken into little bits and strewn everywhere.
I shoveled and scooped through thousands of these rocks when digging fence post holes with my father around our farm. The blisters on my hands left scars that took months to fade. It was like digging into the rocky bed of a creek. And I tripped over millions of these rocks in the woods. Felsenmeer is not the huge erratic boulders or delicate and charming mica of the New England woods. It's just lots of clunky gray rocks that always seem to be exactly where you want to put your foot for your next step--the place where healthy ankles go to die.
* * *
After an hour or so in Pennsylvania, I approach Scranton, the unofficial half-way point of my trip. Here I have to leave Route 84 and catch Route 81 south down the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre corridor for an hour.
Scranton is the setting for the Harry Chapin song, "Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas," detailing the adventures of a banana-hauling truck crashing into town. It's easy to imagine why the truck crashed because this is one of the worst places in the world to drive. There's a big electric sign that reads, "accident ahead" in blinking neon. I think it's always on. The weather here is always bad--even if it's beautiful everywhere else. When you get within ten miles of Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, it turns ugly. The place is always shrouded in fog, and the roads seem icy even in summer. The signs are confusing, and the highway twists and turns up and down the mountains. More than once, I've experienced vertigo from the road hanging out on the edge of a cliff or claustrophobia where it cuts between two towering slabs of rock face.
Route 81 has about ten lanes in some places, with left and right exits and double exits stacked on top of one another. There are thousands of trucks and millions of cars, all speeding or going thirty miles an hour under the limit. The huge trucks that pass you generate their own gravitational field that tries to suck you under their wheels. And the trucks always do their mysterious light flicking when they pass each other. Does anyone know what this ritual means? I honestly think they're just trying to confuse me. I live just a few miles from the New England Tractor Trailer Training School in Somers, Connecticut, so I know for a fact that some of the people driving these huge trucks are beginners--and that scares me.
* * *
Thankfully, this treacherous section of Route 81 quickly connects with Route 80--but that's no picnic to drive either. There are lots of signs on Route 80 that read, "Uneven Pavement." These signs bypass the merely obvious and fall into the category of the incredibly obvious.
Route 80 in Pennsylvania has probably driven more than a few people crazy. Not only is it long, spanning some three hundred miles from east to west, but it makes its own characteristic noise that implants itself in your brain and stays there. You can't have those "lost time" moments of driving on Route 80 because it's impossible to be lulled by that abrasive noise. The whole road is one endless rumblestrip in slow motion.
Tonight my dreams will have the Route 80 soundtrack: "tha-thunk, tha-thunk, tha-thunk, tha-thunk." Judging from past trips here, the sound won't completely go away for a week.
* * *
I'm tempted to stop the car several times during my drive through the center of Pennsylvania. The hills seem to pop straight up from the edge of the highway, sometimes barely one hundred feet, sometimes closer to one thousand. With all the leaves off the trees and snow covering the ground, I can see lots of detail in each hillside--fallen trees, rock outcroppings, ridges, crude roads, even footpaths. They look so inviting that I just want to pull over and climb each of these hills to see what the world looks like from the top.
Does each hill have its own story, just as Wills Mountain has a story I need to tell?
Want to respond to this work of prose? Do it here!
Return to Going Home
|
|
|
|
