first trip north (pt. 1)

Bidding farewell to Avdo and Steve and Will, to my parents and the turtles and the acorns, I started north. What a true joy to be on the road at last! I planned to go as far up as I wanted, and then loop back down and return to Hershey in about a week. There, I would resupply, install any gear I had overlooked, and pick up my first copilot! Anthony Cheng is my oldest friend. He was trying to figure out what to do with a free year between college and medical school, and agreed to come with me for the first few months. I welcomed his company, but wanted to first get the hang of things on my own.

I headed up 81 in beautiful sunlight, but soon ran into traffic in the mountains. I resolved to get off at the next exit before things got really hairy, and so found myself in the tiny town of Ravine. It’s just that; one street wedged by a creek in between high hills, its most distinguishing feature being a lot of school buses. I pulled off at a gas station to orient myself, and found a card my family had stowed away in the van. “They died so we might live,” the cover read, with a picture of chicken wings. Inside: “let us dance to their memory,” and the chicken dance came tinnily bouncing from a little battery-powered gizmo. We hope you find these EVERYWHERE! The inscription read. I have the best family in the world.

I continued on, driving deep into the coalmining region of Pennsylvania. This is a beautiful, grim place, strange and half-forgotten, filled with hard people and the husks of towns. It was victim to an inhumane industry that oppressed its workers and scored the land with strip mines and coal fires. Though it sat on one of the richest coal deposits in the world, northern Pennsylvania did not give of its treasures easily. The stuff was discovered 1790 by a hunter named Necho Allen. According to legend, Allen was woken from his slumber at the base of Broad Mountain – on the south end of present-day Pottsville – by a raging conflagration. He had inadvertently ignited an outcropping of coal with his campfire. This is a good story, but it’s probably not true; it would have been almost impossible for Allen to set fire to Pennsylvania’s most stubbornly adverse resource with a mere campfire. His contemporaries immediately realized that the land offered coal almost beyond imagination, but it was anthracite coal, hard, unforgiving stuff, difficult to light and immune to conventional mining tactics. They didn’t figure out how to access it until 1828, when an ingenious Scottish immigrant named James Neilson replaced cold air in the furnace with directly bellows-injecting heated, and at last found success. The process became known as blasting, and ravenous for the riches that had teased them for decades, the men took into the land with a vengeance, using scorched-earth tactics and producing some 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world combined.

Rural Pennsylvania enjoyed a colossal heyday for about a half a century, aided by the extraordinary additional discovery of oil in the region. The slash-and-burn approach of the big companies brought unimaginable wealth to a few entrepreneurs but wrecked the land and the poor immigrants who worked it. They paid their miners by the ton, which both upped production and encouraged a deadly rabid zeal as hundreds of hungry, dirt-poor men hacked at the coal veins with hammers and pickaxes without regard to safety or sustainability. Bill Bryson notes that “mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century.” The miners saw little of the wealth that flowed from their work, and the 22,0000 who worked in Schuylkill County alone might have called the period something other than a “heyday.” Their words, however, would probably not be in English; they were mostly fresh immigrants, lured to America by promises of work and fortune. Their lack of familiarity with the local language and culture made them thoroughly exploitable, and exploited they were. They were herded onto freight trains and shoveled into dangerous mines where they struggled to learn the ropes of deadly job on-site. Differences in language often separated the workers from each other, and almost always made the English safety signs inscrutable. Deaths and serious injuries were measured by the hundreds each year. 5,500 of the workers were children between seven and sixteen years old. They worked the simplest jobs, mostly separating slate from coal. Although they might have been two young to see it, this grinding task gave them a good sense of their future: the task was shared by the “breakers,” the broken and the injured, whitebeards too old to work the trickier jobs, finishing their careers as they’d begun them as children. The mines themselves were dark, dank, claustrophobic affairs. Imagine yourself wedged into a dank rock tunnel barely as wide as your own body, surrounded by black mud and trickling water, blanketed by underground shadow far darker than any equivalent on the surface and pierced only by the dim light of your gas lamp, breathing coal dust and powder smoke, incapable of understanding the words of anyone around you, and separated from your family and world by tons of black, caving rock. It was not an easy life.

But these were tough, tough folk. Many of them were Irish, hated in America and hailing from a long, crushing history of small-scale potato farming. They had worked their plots for centuries, starving through the winters and fighting each other when land became scarce. They were accustomed to backbreaking labor and developed a wiry, barbed resilience. When pushed, they would destroy fences, plow cropland by night, kill livestock, and even kill people who oppressed them. To defend their interests, they formed secret societies like the Whiteboys and the Peep O’Day Boys, which were armed and quick to dispense retributive justice “to correct transgressions against traditional moral and social codes.” In the words of sociologist Kevin Kenny, they believed they were following “a just law of their own in opposition to the inequities of landlord law, the police and court system, and the transgressions of land-grabbers.”

This sort of thorny hardiness permitted them to survive Pennsylvania’s coalmines, but it’s unclear to what degree their militancy accompanied them over the Atlantic. The very rumor of secret societies, especially the notorious Molly Maguires, was sufficient to provoke harsh retribution from industrial overlords. To be sure, violence and crime among the mineworkers was common, but whether or not this unrest was organized in part by a secret society is still a fundamentally debated question. James D. Horan and Howard Swiggett, writing sympathetically to the justice leveled against the Mollies, nevertheless admit, “the difficulty of achieving strict and fair accuracy in relation to the Molly Maguires is very great. Sensible men have held there never even was such an organization.” Regardless, the primary historical function of the secret society – whether it existed or not – was undoubtedly to provide an excuse for the coal industry to persecute its own workers, and especially to discourage the budding union that increasingly provided them with real organization.

The union became popular as workers sought outlets for their unrest. A string of mining disasters – including an 1869 fire at the Avondale Mine in Luzerne County that took the lives of 110 men – underlined the need for workers to organize in self-protection. The Avondale project resembled coalmines across the region: the company had refused to supply ventilation or pumping systems, sound scaffolding, or emergency exits. In fact, the mine was only a single, glorified tunnel with no secondary entrance, so when flames blocked the way to surface, the workers were trapped, impounded to a dark, fiery death. As charred bodies were dragged from the pit over the next few days, thousands of miners arrived in solidarity from surrounding communities. At some point, John Siney, the head of the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, climbed onto a wagon and spoke to the crowd: “Men, if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do not longer consent to die, like rats in a trap, for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with.” He urged his fellows to join the union, and thousands immediately did.

The smoldering malcontent was brought to a boil by the depression of the 1870s, when one-fifth of the nation’s workers lost their jobs to reckless speculation and stock watering. It was in this desperate climate that the union became most popular, swelling to 85 percent of Pennsylvania’s total anthracite miners. If they existed, this was also presumably when the Molly Maguires, who had already supposedly supplied fifty “inexplicable murders” between 1863 and 1867, struck out most fiercely against their oppressors. After coal operators announced a twenty percent pay cut in 1974, the union decided to strike, and on January 1, 1875, thousands of workers laid down their picks. Corporate leaders, unaccustomed to insolence and determined to crush resistance, quickly struck back. Franklin B. Gowen, president of both the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the Reading Coal and Iron Company – called “the wealthiest anthracite coal mine owner in the world” – hired Alan Pinkerton to address the problem.

Pinkerton’s detective agency was famed across the land. Their name had became commonplace after successfully foiling an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, and they were also employed to track western outlaws including Jesse James, the Reno brothers and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Most of their expertise and livelihood, however, was in union breaking, where they often employing violence to crush the will of striking workers. A popular song in 1892 wailed, “hear the poor orphans tell their sad story / Father was killed by a Pinkerton man.” Although the coalminer’s union was adamantly opposed to violence, a continuing stream of killings attributed to the Mollies permitted the Pinkertons and even more shadowy groups thugs to intimidate miners more or less indiscriminately. A gang of armed vigilantes named the Modocs joined the corporation-owned Coal and Iron Police in ambushing and killing militant miners. The slash-and-burn tactics of the corporate response led to some detractors within the anti-Molly forces. James McParlan, the Pinkerton agent originally hired to infiltrate the Mollies, resigned after he realized that masked men were committing the “murder of women and children.” Nevertheless, the backlash continued, union leaders were imprisoned, and after six months, the strike collapsed and miners returned to work, accepting the pay cut.

Some especially ornery elements continued to resist, providing the coal companies with an opportunity to make further example. After a sensational trial, six “Mollies” were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four more at Mauch Chunk in Carbon County. A Carbon County judge later described the episode in the following terms:
“The Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows.”
An industrial spokesman at the time painted a different picture:
“Peace once more reigns in the anthracite coal regions. Mollie Maguireism is practically dead. The inhabitants of the anthracite coal regions are now enjoying the blessed peace which has recently come to them. God rules, justice must reign, and right must triumph.”

The union, as is often case, lost in attaining its goals in the short term and won in the long-term, sort of. Reforms were eventually introduced, but mining continued to be a dark, dangerous affair, left to men who could find work nowhere else. More generally, miners and the wider coalmining region were pretty much always losers. By the 1950s, the industry was in steep decline, and the Knox Mine Disaster of 1959 – where 10 billion gallons of water flooded a riverside dig, killing 12 people – essentially ended deep mining in Pennsylvania. The area suffered heavily from the decline of the industry, with “patch towns,” small communities of 500 people or less tied to a specific mine, left high and dry. Some opened mining museums like the Pioneer Tunnel and Steel Train in Ashland and others survived under the protection of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Most were less lucky, reduced to ghost towns or forced to suffer extreme rural poverty. Driving through them is a depressing affair. From the highway, miles of low, gray green mountains thickly filled with dense forests suddenly give way to ravaged holes or burnt-out timbers overgrown with scrappy, tan undergrowth, the quiet, ravaged testimony of strip mines and coal fires. The names of the towns make their history and purpose clear – Minersville, Carbondale, Slatedale, Ashland. Some of them hunker down, waving flags and crouching courageously on the black soil. Others are simply stacks of loosely shingled shacks crowding each other in little hamlets huddled between the oppressive hills. It’s hard for people to get out of these towns. Many young men join the army to escape, others take over small businesses from their fathers, but the region as a whole wallows in the hopelessness of its economic situation. Harvey’s Diner still serves vanilla coke with real vanilla syrup. The water in its bathroom is scalding. Here a ravaged old man stands vacantly, watering his driveway. He raises his thin, grizzled face to identify my roaring van with an unfocused gaze of hard-learned, tired terror. Our eyes meet, and I briefly feel myself gazing into an endless, icy, hole. Coalmining country.

departure

All told, I took about two weeks to amass supplies, outfit the van, and hang out with Will, Steve, and Avdo & sons. Towards mid-September, the weather took a sudden turn for the cooler, and the acorns began falling with even greater frequency and violence. Once, while walking across the front yard, a particularly malicious nut came crashing down onto the edge of one of my mother’s turtle enclosures, ricocheting off the side with a sharp clang and beaming straight for my head. I ducked to the side, narrowly escaping sudden murder. I did not, I resolved, intend to be offed just before setting out on my great adventure, and certainly not in so inglorious a fashion. I could see the Patriot News headlines; Brief Respite from Harrisburg Shootings; Hershey Native Slain By Acorn. Suspected killer, held in police custody, boasts “I’m not sorry! I’d do it again!” Distraught squirrel offers bail, but is denied.

I had become too excited by the prospects of travel to submit myself to the violence of the acorns, although the nature of the project still seemed supremely abstract. I had occupied myself more or less full-time with buying car supplies and recording equipment. The former I successfully learned how to install and operate with Steve’s expert guidance, while I mostly scratched my head in solitude over the latter. This very prosaic day-to-day filling of to-do lists fended off any real sense of the extraordinary nature or real closeness of my journey. My awareness was jogged only by the downturn of the temperature – Fall was on the way, and that meant launch –by a photograph, and by the generally lackluster 80s band Whitesnake.

I looked out over the hilly fields of Strite’s Orchards, contemplating the coming of Autumn and my approaching departure, hoping my new 5-gallon water jug was sufficient. I was on an errand to pick up a raspberry pie for my mother. The scene was so Pennsylvanian, so familiar, and so beautiful; I hoped I would find lots of places like this on the road. I decided to take a picture. I ran across the street, lined up with the “STRITES” water tanker, and snapped a shot. With the click of the camera, some similar gear turned in my brain. Creating a representation of what I was seeing suddenly brought the project into reality. I felt a new wave of excitement. Launch was soon.

Driving back, I sat with the pie on my lap, fiddling with the radio. A very familiar opening came slouching over the airwaves, tired synthesizers and uninspired lyrics. “I don’t know where I’m going,” a man sang, “but I sure know where I’ve been.” Boy, it was bad. But I didn’t change the channel. I knew it was worthwhile to stay, my newfound enthusiasm growing, because that dreadful opening, locked firmly in the 80s, was only a slow build. It was itself an acorn of sorts, one that would grow quickly into an absurdly huge but satisfyingly robust tree of a chorus, a refrain that – for all its exuberant pop-rock silliness – briefly plumbed its roots into something deeper and transcended its decade to a wider era and emotion. “I’ve made up my mind,” the vocals grew in tension, “I ain’t wasting no more time….” I grinned and turned the volume way up. The guitars came in. The lead singer started shrieking, and I shrieked along with him. “Here I go again on my oowwwwn!” Dada dadum, dadum, “going down the only road I’ve ever known!” God, it was great. I pulled in to my parent’s house with the windows down, blasting the music and headbanging. My mother, feeding the turtle in the front lawn where I had recently almost departed to meet that great turtle in the sky, expecting only a pie and not an 80s rocker in a cargo van, looked up blankly. She didn’t understand: Whitesnake had spoken. It was time to go.

the van of destiny (pt. 2)

I drove back from Huffle’s in my new used van more numb than excited. I was satisfied with the price; unbeknownst to Mr Huffle, I had stopped at an AAA office on the way back from the mechanic to crosscheck the price with their notary. Her estimate of the van’s model, mileage, features and service record came in at some three thousand dollars above the sticker. So I felt good. Of course, good is just what Ol’ Bill intended to make me to feel upon leaving his lot, so that’s partly a testament to his abilities as a salesman. But I also felt good about our bargaining, In the United States, price haggling is a dying art; I had to go to China and Africa to learn the basics. At the end of the day, I’m acquiring a fairly ideal vehicle for about $3.500 below its estimated value, so I feel I have little to be ashamed of.

And what a magnificent vehicle it is! I had at last moved out of Harrisburg, waving goodbye to Mrs. Rodriguez and the hedgehogs and Allison Hill to stay with my parents in Hershey while I made my preparations. This process – outfitting the van, buying supplies, making plans – was more than a little daunting. There’s little precedent for my project. While the roadtrip is of course a time-honored American tradition, there are few Americans who move into a cargo van and roadtrip non-stop for a whole year. There are, however, plenty of Americans out on the road. Driving back and forth between home and Kmart to get supplies, I peer curiously down into windows, wondering who these people are and where they are going.

What, I reflect, could be more American than the car? Every morning, this country steps into its 207.8 million passenger vehicles and drives to work, to drop the kids off for school, to have a good time, whatever. We zip along a thin black streak, each of us enclosed within our little air-conditioned bubble of designer metal. In our cars, we buy ourselves complete individualism in motion; the comfort of choosing our own seat position, music, and atmosphere, each passively reveling in the luxury of not having to interact with anyone else except through turn signals. We are at liberty to drive just as fast we want within a law that we break and that the state expects us to break. We cruise high over the speed limit, jockeying for position, and then slow down when we see the cop, and just enough of us get busted to fill the local police department’s monthly quota.

We all in some part define others and ourselves by our cars, making public statements about our own identity and priorities, and regarding those of others. We pick our cars carefully, weighing what we want and what we can afford, choosing our identity from a palette of options supplied by Toyata. I’m in a Hummer, don’t fuck with me. I’m a socially and environmentally conscious citizen, observe my Hybrid. We cannot see each other except in a brief, moving flash obscured by windshield, but we can easily recognize and understand the declarations of our vehicles.

The real status distinctions made by cars, however, are much more unconscious, threads worked so widely and deeply into the fabric of lives that we see them every day and do not recognize them. We build our society around cars. A fifth of America’s gross domestic product is reliant on the auto industry. 2.3 million Americans are employed by either General Motors, Chrysler or Ford. One out of every six American workers makes a living in an auto-related industry. Our biggest corporations are Auto and Oil companies, and the latter largely decides our country’s foreign policy.

In this car-ruled society, those who cannot drive lose. We shovel our old into nursing homes, set safely away from the violence of the highway and from participation in communities, spending the golden years playing bingo and begging for a visit from the grandchildren. Similarly, Americans under 16 are reduced to total dependency, relying on their parents to ferry them to soccer practice and piano lessons and the mall, hamstringing their own developing independence and self-reliance – until, of course, they get a car of their own.
Besides the young and the old, many are kept from participation in the modern car society by – you guessed it – money. As the example of Harrisburg shows, we give choice jobs to those who can already drive to work, sequestering those too poor into ghettos hedged by rail or highway and accessible only by bridge. These people may even be able to afford buying a vehicle, but to drive one each day is wildly expensive, some 9,000 to 11,000 dollars each year in internal and external costs like insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, and depreciation. Meanwhile, We concentrate our products in huge department stores on the edge of town, accompanied by massive parking lots and connected by separate highway exits, accessible only by car, leaving those who cannot reach them to fend for themselves with inner city groceries and minimarts on streets sometimes too dangerous to walk by night. Having limiting road access to those wealthy enough to afford riding those roads, we then spend all our government revenue on expansion and upkeep of this gated resource, tacitly subsidizing the driver. The Natural Resources Defense Council estimates that 1.2 to 1.6 trillion is spent annually on passenger ground transportation, numbers far “greater than our total national expenditure on either education or health.” Everyone pays equally for these resources, though only some can use them. In any ratio of utility, a poor single mother riding home on a bus pays far more than the governor to surface the road he rides on his BMW. A welfare state indeed, but who is subsidizing whom?

Author Jane Holtz Kay notes “70% of all state and local law enforcement activities are expended on traffic management issues.” Another man was shot several weeks ago on the exact same intersection at which Jonas Strunk died. The police, presumably paged by a gunshot sensor, arrived quickly, stringing off his little balloon-and-flower makeshift memorial with crime scene tape. The investigation continues, but so will the violence. Simply slowing the volume of shootings– leaving aside any inquiry into their root causes – would require a much heavier round-the-clock police presence. Currently, the police are too busy managing traffic into and out of the suburbs to be able to do more than zip in and put up tape. This suburban traffic, however, generates revenue for a poor city; revenue that will subsequently be spent on building more parking garages in downtown Harrisburg to attract more drivers.

This is a municipal cycle of generating revenue and then spending it to generate more, all within a system that only privileges a certain class of people. This vortex is replicated on the personal level, and the poor are not the only victims. The car does not quite translate into the rich man’s gun, but cars kill as many kids in the suburbs as guns do in the city. The cost of car ownership is high even for those who can afford it. Ivan Illich, writing in Energy and Equity some 30 years ago, reports “the typical American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car…. He sits in it while it goes and while it is idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for petrol, tolls, insurance, taxes, and traffic tickets. He spends four out of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it.” If anything, Illich’s estimates are conservative, since they do not take into account time “consumed by other activities dictated by transport; time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages: time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer meetings to improve the quality of the next buy.”

The vast freedom the automobile appears to offer is misleading. We are free to define ourselves in any form car companies decide for us. The powerful speed of the automobile offers to dramatically increase our efficiency and leisure time. However, we will spend 8 billion hours each year stuck in traffic, costing us between 43 and 168 billion dollars of lost productivity. We are free to come and go at high speeds whenever we want, although our days will mainly be structured by work time spent financing our cars. As Illich, points out “the model American puts in 16,000 hours to get 7500 miles; less than 5 miles an hour.” We drive to work and then work to drive.

Given all this, the Manchester Guardian determined “the private car is an environmental, fiscal and social disaster which would not pass any value-for-money test.” The total impact of the car from production to disposal, “is a state subsidy equivalent to giving each car user a free pass for the whole year for all public transport, a new bike every five years and 15,000 kilometers of first-class rail travel.” Nevertheless, the car is not going anywhere. We are, as I mentioned, a society built on cars, and to substantively address the problem would be to substantively change the very structure of our society. Our economy and our nation is reliant on the automobile, but as the above article suggests, they are also probably dying under its weight. One half of the oil and one third of the automobiles sold in the United States are imported. We spend 50 billion dollars combating the health effects of air pollution, and lose 176.5 billion to motor vehicle fatalities. Equally devastatingly, we destroy our environment for the car. We funnel our creativity and productivity into paying for the car. We sequester the poor to riding on the bus in Allison Hill. We put the northernmost point of Confederate progress during the Civil War under pavement. We cannot resist the car. From Steinbeck to Kerouac, from On the Road Again to Road Runner, from Lost Highway to Highway One Revisited, from the journals of Louis and Clark to Thelma and Loise, our culture is steeped in travel, in roads, and in cars. The roadtrip – that most American adventure that entered me into this inquiry – is most often a journey to “find oneself,” that other American project. Either that, or to “find America.” And what, after all, am I doing this year?

I think of that strange moment when Ol’ Bill softened just after agreeing to sell me the van. That nostalgic, almost fatherly look. Maybe he knew what he was doing. He clearly knew, in his excitement, his vociferous involvement, and most of all, that last, bittersweet softness, that he was officiating over one of the great rituals of our contemporary society. The moment when a young man gets his first car. The debate over the cost, as if it was something that could be tabulated on a sticker. The transfer of the check, and then of the keys, from the salesman to the new driver; the two shake hands, and the father is left at the desk, looking on silently, inscrutably. I think he knew, on some level, that he was handing me the keys to America, or rather the keys to find America, a nation scored by highways too wide to ever cross, filled with riders like me, driving into a long sunset from a Western to find a proud, desperate frontier country. They rode over it by the thousands on half a ton of metal each, mile by burning mile.


Materials on America's car culture is from:

Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Kay, Jane Holtz. Asphalt Nation. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997.

and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics at:
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/

running in circles and loving every step

So, having finally figured out how to get music on this blog, I thought I'd post something. This recording of Enso is still a working file; it's pretty rough in places, is missing a cello part, and occasionally clips a syllable off voices. Nevertheless, it's the first song I've written specifically for this project, so I thought I'd put it up so you could see what I've been up to. A more complete file should be up soon.

My mom has this theory that everybody eventually loops back to who they were when they were 10 years old. This summer, I found myself reconnecting to various former selves as college became less of a year-by-year culmination of what came before it, and more a coherent four-year section of a larger continuum, a discrete period included in and contextualized by a continuing story. This led me to suspect that not only did mom know best, but that our lives may in fact be marked by all sorts of interior circles and loops of various sorts and sizes, and that the horizontal through-line of living is punctuated by other stranger geometries as new events inform old ones, old friends reappear, and new appearances echo memory.

All this circling seemed kind of grand, and also very reminiscent of a topic covered in the incomparable Thomas Hare's course on Zen in Performance. Enso is a Zen performance art like archery, shakuhachi, or tea ceremony, except that it's a form of calligraphy. It involves drawing circles - in fact, that's pretty much all it is. Drawing circles as a form of self-knowledge, self-effacement, religious exercise, spiritual diary, and who knows what else. Point is, for practitioners of Enso, all the various heavens and hells of Buddhist cosmology could be expressed within a single, cyclical stroke of a brush.

Thinking of life circles and the art of Enso led me to consider all the various similar shapes that help me fall asleep at night. There were of course all those darker orbs with which I was already well acquainted; the downward spiral of urban poverty, the escalating vortex of the security dilemma. In the face of these, however, were other deeper circles like breathing, aging, and Enso. They were refreshingly new to me, and also, surprise surprise, largely once-familiar wisdom from younger days. They would make, I thought, good music.

Thus, Enso, the song. It's written for cello quartet, guitar, and voices. The voices are of the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (who talks a lot about breathing), Beatrice Wyatt (who mostly tells us to move along), myself (who talks some repeating blather about Rzewski's Attica), my father (who discusses ring composition in the Iliad and the Odyssey), and my mother (who talks about the things she has forgotten and remembers). The piece is constructed in two opposing circles of fifths; we start in A, then go down the circle of fifths till we arrive back at A, and then we go back up again. Each key area gets a set amount of measures, and every three key areas, the time signature gains an eighth note. We start in 4/8, then go to 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, until finally, at the same time the key arrives in A, the time arrives in 4/4 (8/8): double or, with a little theoretical scoojing, roughly the same as where we started. Once this 4/4 A Major section has played itself out, Beatrice Wyatt tells us to come along, and the process rolls back, the eighth notes steadily vanishing at the same rate they appeared.

Various textural details also suggest circles; the pizzicato cello's cyclic arpeggios are in concentric opposition to one of the arco cello's slurred figures (not yet recorded), which together literally make graphic circles upon the score. Similarly, the guitar ostinato goes down chromatically and returns up throughout the piece. The only bump in this regularity is at the very middle of everything, when we arrive back at A in 4/4. Here, although all the structural restrictions are maintained, the allotted measures are spent in a brief, quiet, groovy little song that is wholly unique to this single, interior segment. At the heart of all these circles, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, we may find peace, and pleasure.



Enso was first performed at the Crimson Frog Coffeehouse in Camp Hill on Aug. 7.

THE VAN OF DESTINY (pt. 1)

September arrives abruptly, knocking me free from these thoughts. Acorns fall with crashing reports like military salutes around my parents’ house in the wooded hills between Hershey and Hummelstown. Somehow, they jolt me from my complacency even more than the very real gunshots that slew Jonas Strunk. Before I know it, Arthur has left for Japan, vowing to teach a class of elementary English students the wonders of Sir Mixalot, and Julian has departed for Azerbaijan without a word, but after leaving a South Allison Hill Civic Association t-shirt neatly folded on my bed. I curse myself; I had meant to take him for a trip in the van before he left. Instead, I’m still looking for a van, wearing his tshirt.

I’ve spent the latter part of the summer researching cars, looking up prices, occasionally visiting a dealer to check out a vehicle. This one’s in Maryland, and I can’t find a mechanic to crosscheck it. This one’s closer, but they won’t let me take it to a mechanic. This one gets lousy gas mileage. This one’s too small.

At last, I find a handful that seem to fit. One is at a dealer in Palmyra, and two are at William Huffle’s Used Cars in Mechanicsburg. At the latter, a well-groomed, slightly pudgy young man named Eric shuttles me around the inventory, answering questions and opening doors. He’s polite, collected but not suave, and encouraging but not pushy. He generally disproves all the bad rap on car salesmen. One of the vehicles I’m looking at is a 2004 Chevrolet G1500 Express cargo van. I decide it makes more sense than a similar Ford I’m eyeing, and ask to drive it to a mechanic in Hershey to get it checked out. Eric agrees, and hands me the keys.

It’s something of a shock after the little Toyata Prius I arrived in. Cargo vans, I think, have crossed the invisible divide that separates cars from 18-wheelers. The thing is enormous. At first, it’s like I’m steering a boat down the middle of 322. I can imagine the rudder shifting with the steering wheel, watery asphalt grinding away in a rough charcoal wake. When I go up hills, the engine sounds like a jet intake, and when it gathers momentum, I have the vague sensation of riding an asteroid on an Earth-skimming near miss. In my old cars – the current Prius and a much-beloved old 1991 Honda Civic hatchback – the headlights of minivans and SUVs blasted bothersomely through my rear window. Now, I look down with perverse satisfaction at the drivers of these once towering behemoths as they lean anxiously forward in their now-absurd little buggies. SUVs, I hear, don’t do very well in crashes. Just before I give myself a mental smack on the hand, I imagine my craft cruising serenely, sublimely through a twisted pond of Hummer metal.

The company that previously owned the van installed a system of shelves and grates in the cargo bay. Many of them would serve me well – I was planning on installing something similar anyway – but in their current empty superfluousness, they’re nothing but noise pollution. When I hit a bump or break, the vibrations travel through the whole vehicle ending in the metal-frame shelves, which then shake, rattle and roll, making a truly ungodly racket. Strauss’s Alpine Symphony includes scoring for a Thunder Machine. This usually takes the form of a large, thin metal sheet that some sturdy young percussionist draws out and shakes like hell to cut through a 123-piece orchestra. If he could have heard it, Strauss may have preferred to simply use a Chevrolet.

But on some level, I like the din. I felt real disappointment in many aspects of the Prius, which displays gas mileage on a little onboard computer screen, runs silent as a ghost but repeatedly emits a small, civil beep to remind you when you’re backing up and chirps wildly at you when you don’t buckle your seatbelt. Compare this rather aggravatingly civil personality to the van, which roars and rattles but somehow stays in one piece and chugs gasoline like a frat boy sloppily chugging Beast in a keg stand. It’s like leaving your elementary school librarian to go out and play in the parking lot with a Hell’s Angel.

And as it happens, the gas mileage isn’t actually so bad (for a van). Its large frame is built on a 1/2-ton chassis – as opposed to the one-ton chasses supporting vans designed to haul huge amounts of cargo – so it achieves the same level of efficiency as a smaller vehicle. This is important to me, both because I have trouble ethically justifying an automobile that guzzles more gas than necessary, and because gas will be my biggest regular expense on the trip, pretty much replacing rent and utilities evenly.

My mechanic gives it the go, more or less, and I drive back to Huffle’s with my father, who knows less about cars than I do, but comes along for support. I’ve settled into the feel of it, the lower pickup and greater momentum, the larger turning axis and the rear-well drive. It’s really surprisingly maneuverable. There’s a light whistle in through one of the windows. “So, are you going to take me across the country so I can listen to all the sounds out there?” I silently ask the steering wheel. I hit a bump. “GragragrakukukukukakakakakakaCHUNKgaDUNKabrrrRUNKKKUKNKNKKkkk!” the van replies. Yes. This is it: the Van of Destiny.

Back at Huffle’s, Eric abruptly disappears once it becomes clear that I’m buying. Out of nowhere pops a stout grey leprechaun. He’s short but compact and dense; one would imagine that if he curled up tight, he’d do well as a bowling ball. His gray hair is flattened desperately under a snugly fitting baseball cap, and wild gray moustaches stick out every which way like tumbleweed. Glittering, squinty blue eyes twinkle out from his behind thick glasses. “Hi!” he shouts gruffly, gripping the syllable in his stomach before launching it out like the bolt of a trebuchet. “I’m Bill,” He thrusts forward his hand. I take it; he shakes firmly, someone spastically, and then hollers “siddown!,” thumbing the chair in front of his desk. “Now lemme tell you something about cars, son….” The cavalry has arrived.

Bill, the human foghorn. Bill, the Used Car Philosopher. Good old Bill, your best friend when buying a used car. Bill goes on for about five minutes about the glories of used cars before he gets it that I’m not considering getting a new one. There’s a fresh Prius outside; I guess he figured I was thinking on a classier level. I explain that I received a grant to buy the van, and so am working in a very strict price range, and ask if the price negotiable. “Is the price negotiable!” he shouts, abruptly leaning back in his chair, hands over his head. He drawls the words with weary familiarity. Then, suddenly, he’s leaning forward again, hands on the desk before him. “Now that’s a good question. Is the price negotiable. Now, you see, at this establishment, we don’t have a whole lot of window dressing. You see this office? Now, I could get myself my own room, get Eric over there a nice little cubicle, get leather chairs for us to relax in, but I don’t. Why? Because that would make your van more expensive. Now, here at Huffle’s, I need to be competitive. That highway out there is nothing but used car lots, and I need to be competitive. So I don’t put in a whole lot of this and that, so that the price on that sticker there can be as low as it can be.” I apologize and tell him that the price on the sticker is out of my range, and ask if he could lower it. “You ever bought a house, son? How old are you?” I’m twenty-two. “See, you don’t understand. I built this house. Now I’ve got to choose between selling these vans for a certain price and keeping this house. You see where I’m coming from? I’ve got a house to maintain. That’s where I’m coming from.” The age question riled me a little. I say that I understand where’s he’s coming from, but since I’m working on a budget for all my expenses next year, I have to choose between his van price and eating. That’s where I’m coming from. “Now you looked at a lot of other cars,” he draws leadingly. I nod. He changes tactics again. “Okay, well you’re not going to get a better deal in the midstate. Why don’t we try and make something work, here. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me a price that you think you’d be able to pay, and I’ll tell you if it stacks up with where I’m coming from.” I quote him a price, knocking a thousand dollars off the sticker. He blinks at me, then leans back again and shakes his head. “Now, you see, what you’re telling me, the question you’re giving me here is, do I want to do business with you, or do I want to make money? You know, do I want to make a profit? Now don’t get me wrong here, I’d love to give you this deal, but that’s just out of my range of consideration. Now I know you’ve got your own concerns, but I don’t think, see, that I can make that number square with my concerns.” I ask him to make a counter-offer. “You see, if I give you this van for your number, you can just drive off. But then when you want another car, you might come back here, and you know what? Ol’ Bill will be plain gone. See, I got to be competitive. And if I’m giving away vans like that – if I’m not thinking about my business, well I’m just gonna disappear and you won’t be able to come back to Ol’ Bill for a new used car.” I ask him to make a counteroffer. “Now lemme ask you a question here,” he says instead, leaning forward more, peering out at me over his glasses, squinting further, little slits of eyes twinking. “Lemme ask you a question, real straight-forward, yes or no. Okay?” Okay. “Real straight-forward.” Okay. “Is there any way I’m going to sell you that van for the number on the sticker?” No. He leans back with expression of a parental disappointment. “Fellowship for what?” he drawls. Music, I reply. “What kind of music?” but then, just as I’m trying to think how to answer, he blurts out a number almost under his breath, adding 800 dollars to my offer. “That’s only two hundred dollars away from the sticker price,” I reply, “so it’s still out of my range. But I tell you what, I understand where you’re coming from, so I’ll meet you in the middle.” I give him a number 500 off. He squints at me. “Excuse me a moment,” he says, launching out of his chair and going to a back room, talking and laughing loudly at another employee, leaving me to sit quietly at an empty desk with my father, who looks at me inscrutably. Eventually Bill returns. “Excuse me,” he says again. He has papers in his hand. “Now look at this,” thrusting them at me, “these are complete records for everything that’s happened to this car since it got bought. Everything. Now, this car has been serviced religiously every three thousand miles since day one. Now, you’re not going to find a record like that on a car like this anywhere in the midstate. So what do you say to this number right here?” He says, pointing with his pen to his last offer. No, I’ll meet you halfway. He leans back again, giving me that same disappointed look. “What kind of music?” he asks again. I’ll send you a CD if you give me the car. Suddenly he’s shouting again. “Eric! Eric, whaddya think? Should we sell him this car? I think he got a fellowship from his dad. He’s gonna send us a CD.” Eric looks uncomfortable, and mumbles something. Bill doesn’t listen. “Fine!” He barks. “It’s a deal,” he is suddenly soft, fatherly. “It has been a true pleasure doing business with you.” The hard twinkle promptly returns. “Now you can clear up the details with Eric, like whether you’ll be paying in one check or multiple installments?” And just as suddenly as he appeared, he’s gone.

life in a city of bridges (pt. 2)

Material on Cornel West and Ralph Ellison is from:
West, Cornel. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

life in a city of bridges (pt. 1)

last line, obscured by concrete: "these rivers must be crossed"

Some places are walkable from our location on Allison Hill, and most are bikeable. When we want food supplies, we can either go to the Corner Grocery, or, in the other direction, to a large Vietnamese grocery store on Cameron Street where a boy told me he had the power to turn into a snake at will. He was sitting on the beige tiles by the noodles, doing his homework, and asked his mother how to spell “activity.” She moved her lips indecisively, emitting some non-committal m-sounds, and then looked around for backup, and there I was, white and presumably fully fluent in English. I knelt down and dictated the letters as he scrawled them in magic marker on a purple sheet of construction paper. Then, as if in thanks, he promptly informed me of his unusual abilities in the sort of matter-of-fact declamation employed by six-year olds around the world. Yeah, I have special powers, he said. I can turn into a big, yellow-spotted snake. And when I’m a snake, I know karate.

Despite the proximity and colorfulness of local stores, we most often pile in to a car and head to Giant’s, where the apples are redder and the prices are lower. Generally, Arthur and I go together and leave Edmund to fend for himself. He prefers it that way; he uses his own ingredients and cooks his own dishes and encourages us to do the same. “It really works much better if we all just do our own thing.” He usually hits the stove first, frequently conjuring delicious, achingly tantalizing aromas that waft through the house, summoning us hungrily down to flit impatiently around the kitchen until he finishes. Then there’s the changing of the guards. Edmund clears out, dish in hand, to eat and to watch an episode of Oz or Lost, and Arthur and I stomp in, cracking rude jokes, tossing the garlic and dropping the onions.

Sometimes, however, paths align, especially when we all need groceries. Then it’s a straight shot to Giant’s for the whole group.

We leave our house, set the alarm, lock the door, and argue over the vehicle for the day. We decide on Arthur’s car; it’s small, but it’ll burn less fuel than my parents’ SUV. We walk up our broken little street to meet the machine. Harrisburg is reeling from a heat wave, and Mrs. Rodriguez is on her front porch, rocking back and forth and waving a fan with a firm grip. We pause to greet her; she smiles widely back at us, her brown face crinkling into kind, dry folds. We struggle to understand her through her toothless, heavily accented vowels. Edmund has of course known her by far the longest and understands her the best. They discuss the latest on the hedgehogs. There is a family of the furry pests living on the wooded slope behind our houses. They emerge by night to chew up the vegetables Mrs. Rodriguez still grows in her tiny back yard, and Edmund is trying to catch them. The bit of chivalry in this project charms me, but I could be imagining it. He succeeded in trapping one a few days ago, but it was small. “Naw duh bi’ mawmmuh,” drawls Knight Edmund’s lady fair, nodding, rocking. “Stiw haffuh cachah bi’ mawmmuh.” But she seems content with this progress.

As a young woman, Mrs. Rodriguez fled Puerto Rico and an abusive husband with her six children, raising them all in the Bronx before moving to Harrisburg thirty-odd years ago. Now her children are all grown. Some have moved away, some have stayed in central Pennsylvania, and each pursues a different career. She lives alone but enjoys frequent visits from her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. From the relatively little I’ve seen of her, it’s clear that she shares the ineffable serenity of many women in her generation, lives spent facing down adversity and mostly winning, working, moving, grinding through setback and oppression with little pause for reflection, trusting themselves and teaching their children to do the same. Now the hardest years are behind her, and she spends her time swinging on her front porch, greeting her neighbors and tending her vegetables, fanning herself through the heat and tolerating the hedgehogs.

She recognizes Arthur from his presence at Edmund’s birthday parties in elementary school, and meets me with the same measured, genial tranquility with which she seems to regard everything from her high, creaking seat. Neighborhood solidarity against the furry intruders established, we wave our goodbyes and continue on to the car.

We wait at the stop sign for the man who lives at the end of the street to cross. I still haven’t met him; he’s black and middle-aged, and looks out of it. “He’s been here forever,” Edmund explains, “he’s weird.” The man turns and waves to us as he steps onto the curb, and promptly collides head-on with the stop sign. I see his glasses squirm up and then back down his face as he negotiates his cheek off the metal pole. He removes them, holds his forehead and stumbles away, leaving me to wonder if they’re broken or just bent.

We drive up Mulberry, away from the bridge and deeper into Allison Hill, past its V with Derry and then right onto 13th Street to catch the ramp onto 322. The familiar scenes of the neighborhood drift past through the windows. There’s a crowd in front of the Corner Grocery as always. A young man in baggy jeans and a basketball jersey is gesticulating wildly, probably for the benefit of three or four women, most of whom share some resemblance to the inflatable trampoline we set up in the driveway for my nephews, only with some of the air let out. His bill of his brightly colored baseball hat bobs up and down as he ducks and bounces. On the edges of the crowd, a particularly flabby white woman in shorts and a wife-beater seems unsure what to do with her feet. Further down, a middle-aged man with a hard looking face and a muscle shirt dances in front of a house with a tiny, hopping puppy. A compact old Asian lady steps out the door carrying plastic bags in either hands, and sets them down to lock up, her squat body slowly rotating on an invisible hinge. Her face is inscrutable, like the mask of some lost native tribe behind glass in an art museum. A few stoops away, a group of women are sitting about, talking, fanning themselves. A young couple walks past. She’s stunningly beautiful, strutting in denim shorts that seem more like twistable caps gripping her thighs than clothing. The man is thinly mustachioed, Hispanic, beady eyes set within a long thin face ending in a wicked curve of a mouth. Thin, grim lips. His bare arms look like the blades of a Saracen.

Driving through the Hill is quickly becoming a routine, but it’s still loaded with subtext. For Arthur and me, it remains a cultural experience. The people who crowd these streets are in many ways from a very different country than us. We can talk to Mrs. Rodriguez about the hedgehogs, but it’s hard to know how to interact with the man who runs into stop signs. On these streets, there are those who stagger down the sidewalk, spitting thickly into the gutter, and there are those who parade with a militant dignity, head held high and eyes immutably fixed before them as you pass. Neither stops to talk or even really notice, and I’m not sure what I’d have to say to them if I did. There is always a crowd of young people at the door to the Corner Grocery, and I’m always wildly uncomfortable with my self-consciousness as I pass through them to pick up a cold cut of chicken.

A large aspect of the division, of course, is racial. Harrisburg is too small a city for its poor people to self-segregate, so Allison Hill is a potpourri of colors and tongues, although its public face is probably black. The wider city is 55% black, has a healthy Hispanic population and a small but significant community of more recent Korean immigrants. The Hill largely reflects these numbers, although white people are a smaller minority, black people are much more predominant, and almost all of the Hispanics or Koreans live here, in Midtown, or in similar neighborhoods to the South and East. The racial tensions frequently implicit or relegated to border streets in larger cities are everywhere and every day. Nevertheless, The neighborhood is still considered from the outside as a “black neighborhood,” and while this characterization is misleading and mostly harmful, it can also be a helpful device if we assume a more nuanced idea of blackness. Ralph Ellison, writing on assertions of black identity as a means for demarcating the extent of social status and Americanism, observed that
“…White Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of Black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the ‘outsider.’”
Nevertheless, “whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.” True Americanism, in other words, inherently involves an element of the outsider, of the other. In this sense, Allison Hill is certainly a “black” neighborhood; it is just the community that “white” America would use as a foil for its own Americanism, and, according to Ellison, is also therefore a most quintessentially American place.

This close-packed diversity – and poverty – make the Hill the clear cultural inheritor of the Old 8th Ward. As the scenes roll by, I try to imagine them a hundred years ago. In some places, it isn’t a terrible stretch; almost all the houses on our own street are at least a century old, and still retain the original floor plans. There’s even little protrusions in the walls where the fuel would run out to light the kerosene lamps. Nevertheless, the comparison doesn’t really work. In my imagination, the Old 8th is seedy but alive, dangerous but exciting, full of desperate and colorful visiting characters, shot through with a nervous electric energy. Where is that crackling vitality today? There are certainly still characters here, but the ones who would arrive, tear the house down, and leave the next morning are gone. The heroes of Allison Hill are instead marked by their stationary rootedness. They grew up in the neighborhood, lived in it and worked in it, and not infrequently died before their time in it. They do not so much revel in the energy of their environment as churn under its weight, hoping some day to get out. They are sometimes depraved with the poison of their streets, sometimes militantly noble in their resistance, and most often, just trying to get by despite the odds. Exciting danger is replaced by just plain danger, and the fear it engenders replaces a raucous nightlife with empty, shadow-crossed streets. Similarly, the breed of despair that increasingly pervades the neighborhood seems a more recent addition. It is what Cornel West calls a new sort of nihilism, “a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructing disposition toward the world.” The Old 8th Ward surely had its fair share of misery, but it could not compare in cold numbers to modern Allison Hill’s violence and crime, or, in my own analysis, to the modern urban center’s sense of ennui. As West notes, right up until the 1970s black Americans – the most populous residents of the Hill and similar neighborhoods – had the lowest suicide rate in the United States. “Now young black people lead the nation in suicides…. What went wrong?”

At the heart of the Old 8th was, of course, the canal. Allison Hill is higher up and further south. The site of the old canal runs by the train tracks. Many of these rails have in turn been lifted, and the gash that runs between the Capital complex and Allison Hill is largely empty. Cameron Street boasts a number of mechanics, the Vietnamese grocery store (which has a terrifyingly sketchy club on its second floor), and a number of small businesses including the Appalachian Brewing Company, where Arthur and me frequently retreat for beer and wings. There is the post office, there is the train station, and then there are storage spaces, and then there are parking lots, and then there are barren lots, zoning unclear, nature dubious. They’re overgrown with weeds and shaded by the Mulberry Street Bridge. There are no houses, no shops, but cars sometimes still park there, and when they do, you pretend not to see them. In the middle of it all, the old canal sits fetid and still, and the water does not move.

Harrisburg is a city robbed of its movement. Settled by the Indians for the running water of the Susquehanna, founded by white men as a rough-and-tumble outpost on the frontier of their known world, as long as Harrisburg retained an element of the frontier, it was alive. Even after the frontier moved North and West, Harrisburg remained in motion, sending people, supplies, and vitality from the big urban centers to the edge of things and back. The river, the canal, the railroads, the highways; these were the blood of the city, and as they ran, they brought life to the streets, and the heart of the city beat. Now, there is no frontier. The long, coursing motions of border expansions and westward migration have birthed, and been necessarily, inevitably consumed by the tick-tock cycles of the modern workday. The natural, inexorable flow of the river has been rendered pointless by the narrow bridges that allow people to cross it, back and forth, back and forth. The wide, proud channels of commerce and travel have been replaced by suburban grids and endless exit/entrance ramps to nausea. And when its residents fail to lock into even this weak simulacrum of true movement, they, like the canal, simply sit still. They get stuck, they get clogged up in Allison Hill, they find themselves at the bottom of a cul-de-sac with broken glass.

Meanwhile, the powerful cultural battlements that fended off nihilism for generations are increasingly threatened. Their new, more devious enemies are economic pressures and mass culture. West writes, “the recent market-driven shattering of black civil society – black families, neighborhoods, schools, churches, mosques – leaves more and more black people vulnerable to daily lives endured with little sense of self and fragile existential moorings.” While West is using a conventionally racial definition for blackness, I think his words also apply in Ellison’s more inclusive terms. The social mechanisms that once led the oppressed to band together and overcome are muted and fragmented by a nationally driven impetus to acquire pleasure. Success, the market mentality reads, means acquiring things. It means bling. It means showing off your house on MTV’s Cribs. It means paving anyone who gets in your way, and increasingly viewing even your friends and loved ones as devices towards furthering your own pursuit as pleasure. It is not a frontier, it is a grid; it is not movement outwards, it is a stultifying inner system of exit and entrance ramps. It does not serve to ennoble and move the human spirit, it seeks to get it stuck.

However, they tell me Harrisburg is on the rebound. Jobs downtown are up 75%. The mall at Strawberry Square is booming. There are gunshot detectors on the streetlights.