drug war reality tour

video 1/2: http://gnn.tv/videos/viewer.php?id=16&n=1

video 2/2: http://gnn.tv/videos/viewer.php?id=16&n=4

more by text: http://kwru.org/kwru/tour/tour.html

running to the sea

My overall thrust was to the east; my sister had arranged for a video to one of my songs, and although my presence was entirely extraneous, I wanted to be there for the shoot in Manhattan. In the meantime, I had a week and a half to kill, so I decided to work my way through the northeast portions of Pennsylvania. This took me first to the coalmining regions where I had begun the project, and then into areas with somewhat more diversified economies, but ultimately similar stories. As I drove east, the monopoly of coal was gradually undermined by the appearance of cement factories and steel mills. Nevertheless, the towns mostly looked the same: desperate little affairs, doggedly clinging to the sides of darkly wooded hills. Many of these communities were dragged down with their crashing industries, and now lie in varying degrees of depressed isolation. A few found creative ways to survive and sometimes even reinvent themselves. The strange little town of Jim Thorpe is probably foremost amongst these.

Originally known as Mauch Chunk, Jim Thorpe was briefly home to the athlete of the same name. Thorpe got his start in Pennsylvania, attending college in Carlisle. He was one of those rare super-athletes who comes along perhaps once a century. The first intimations of his extraordinary talent came when he walked past Carlisle’s high jumpers with a 5’9” impromptu jump in plain clothes. He went on to be a star competitor in pentathlon, decathlon, American football, baseball, and basketball. He was a multi-Olympic medalist, and as a Sac and Fox Native American, he fought his whole life to overcome discrimination that threatened his career and family. Towards the end of his life, he descended into alcoholism and depression, and died more or less penniless. The town of Mauch Chunk, at a loss as to how to overcome the economic difficulties following the fall of the Lehigh Coal Company, struck a deal with his family to rename the town and set up an elaborate monument to him in order to attract tourism – even though he never actually lived in Mauch Chunk. The trick seemed to work; Jim Thorpe is today a bustling mountain community, a surreal contrast to its neighboring communities.

Passing further east, I came to Allentown. This is the old capital of the Pennsylvania steel industry, and while it went into a deep depression following the collapse of American steel, it remains the third biggest city in Pennsylvania after Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. After immortalizing the city in a song, Billy Joel was awarded the key to the city over the protests of some residents. Driving through, I felt like I was right back in Harrisburg. I bumbled about the town trying to find the access to 495 so I could continue further south and east, and after passing promising but somewhat ramshackle public monuments and plazas, I found myself in the ghetto. The transformation was extraordinary. After traveling for weeks through the countryside of Pennsylvania and New York and seeing almost entirely white people, the population was once again entirely black. I could have convinced myself I had just stumbled into a section of Allison Hill that I had never known existed. There were the same streets with the same houses and the same trash. There was suddenly rap on the radio and on the sidewalk, children playing on the stoop, big fat ladies with hoop earrings and shorts in plastic chairs watching them from the porch, grandfathers in hats tottering over the pedestrian crosswalks with canes, and packs of young men slouching about with game in their lope and a desperate territorialism in their eyes, leaning forward to step ahead and reaching back to pull up their pants. One looked up and pierced his menacing, carefully delinquent gaze through the windshield of my van. Our eyes locked immediately in the age-old contest that grips young men together in rivalry down every generation, igniting the jealous spirit of a mountain ram within blood long-brewed for just this purpose, ripe and ready in the razor thin margin of a single glance to spur even the most pacifistic into locking horns. I made a point of holding his gaze until my van rolled off his block. It felt familiar.

The next intersection, however, led me out of the neighborhood and into a small shopping center. A middle-aged blonde woman sat on the grass beside the parking lot screaming gibberish at the passing traffic. I doubled back to try and surreptitiously record her ranting, but when I made it back around the block, she had calmed down. Immediately after, I saw signs for 495, and was once again launched into the countryside.

I arrived that night in Philadelphia, stayed with my sister and set off the next morning into New Jersey. I wanted to hit the Jersey shore in the off-season, and I had come at the right time. The highways to the coast are satisfyingly flat and uncurving, shooting straight through the heart of the garden state to meet the sea. I was about halfway there when I realized I had left a vital piece of recording equipment at my sister’s, said a very bad word and doubled back, just in time to meet the beginning rush hour into Philadelphia. I didn’t really mind, though; it felt good to be driving. I cranked up “Sweet Child of Mine” on the radio and jostled my way through the close-packed cars, singing loudly and grinning all the way. After picking up the abandoned equipment, I turned around again and retraced my steps, now catching the other end of rush hour. By the time I was back on the straight-shooting Jersey throughway, it was dusk. The length of the highway, scores of cars passed me going the other way, but I was almost alone on the east-bound side. I drove fast and smiled into the cold wind and coming headlights, enjoying my solitary speed on the eastbound track. I drove and drove, the road never seeming to alter or waver, gunning due east as the sun burned down behind me and the night grew ahead. I finally started seeing signs for the coast after dark, and navigated my way onto Long Beach island, a long, narrow lancet of earth jousting out from the mainland into the Atlantic. It was a strip of tiny seaside resort towns, now deserted at the beginning of the off-season. I zipped over their darkened streets, all the way to Barnegat Light, the last town on the island. By this time, the night air was heavy with salt, and lights were restricted to a space only a little wider than the highway, betraying the massive, black expanse of the sea beyond. I pulled onto one of the cross streets and drove a short way until it ended in a rising sand dune. Parking the car at the edge of the asphalt, I jumped out stripped down to my boxers, leaving a trail of clothes on the street. I ran up the dune, my bare feet pounding the sand and the cold wind buffeting my skin. Just a little bit further over the rise, and there it pulled into view, the ocean. Or rather, everything else disappeared, and I knew the ocean had to be there because nothing else was. A beach extended a long way forward to end in an inconceivably huger blackness, an unexplainable bulge of void stretching the length of my vision and the extent of the horizon. It swallowed everything, even the sky, with the lights of the whole nation to my back shrieking shrilly into the night and then dissipating, losing themselves in a truer black than one can see on land, a primordial black punctuated only by bright, hard stars. I was pulled the whole way from Philadelphia by that primal thrust that drives men to the sea, which challenges, draws, confounds and drowns us. It pulls us inexorably in, perhaps with some inborn memory or lightless intimation that this wet black hole is where we came from if we look back far enough, that our furthest fathers dragged their cold bodies from its depths before they had feet to walk or minds to understand their travels. And now, grains in the sands of evolution, we are driven back, again not entirely understanding why but irresistibly pulled by the enormity of millennia, by secrets whispered and roared in wild voices we could surely comprehend if we but listened. And I was completing the last few yards of this journey on foot, running at dead sprint down the long, cool beach, the shadow before me growing and extending until I could hear it, and then feel it meet my legs with a cold splash, and suddenly I was part of a new physics, the world was swirling, indistinct, and cold, and I was at the mercy of a far, alien universe that drew me in and picked me up, sent me under and thrashed me about, churning with a vast invisible power that did not know me and yet inspired everything that was its reflection within me. I felt explosions of strength and ferocity and sadness within me with every crash of cold, buffeting water, and swam out into the void until I could not feel anything beneath my feet but water, and met the extent of the secrets she was willing to share with me. Then I returned to the shore and walked back up the beach, exhausted.

late september

Eventually, I found shelter at a 24-hour CostCutters lot and killed the engine, mist still swirling in my eyes long after I closed them.

I was getting used to van life. I took this first shorter trip in large part to make mistakes and learn from them, but I was impressed by how few mistakes I had to deal with. I was spending less money than I had expected, the traveling was almost entirely a joy, and the van itself was performing wonderfully. The only real practical obstacle remained the showering situation, which was a relatively small challenge in the grand scheme of things. I’d evolved (sort of) past my first heroic but basically inane night in the shoebox-bathtub, first acquiring what turned out to be little more than a bigger shoebox, and finally calling it quits and having an old-fashioned, outdoor shower on the side of a less active road in the Adirondacks. It was marvelously liberating after repeated attempts to twist myself into various pretzel shapes to get myself clean and keep the water off the rug at the same time. You can, however, get thrown in jail for liberating yourself from indoor showers, and I resolved to find a more sustainable solution.

This eventually took the form of a colorful inflatable kiddy pool, a mass of purple and pink plastic shaped into a butterfly, complete with goopy grinning face and flopping antennae. So far, the butterfly is the best solution, although I’m still not sure what to do with the damn thing after I’ve showered. While it deflates to store nicely in the shelves when it’s dry, I’m more often left with a large, wet, purple butterfly occupying a large part of the back of my cargo bay. We’ll see.

I'm going to jump ahead a little bit in an effort to get closer to the present. I traced the New York - Canada border, and then came down through Adirondacks to return home to Pennsylvania. There, I was faced with a disappointment: Anthony was not to accompany me. However, I was able to stack up on supplies, and soon headed east towards Lancaster, Ephrata, and the other towns of the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

I arrived in Ephrata in the very late afternoon. Main Street was closed, but people on foot were thronging past the barricades. “What’s going on?” I asked a cop as I slowly drove through the detour. “Town fair,” he replied through thick moustaches, expression masked by those dark shades that seem to be the style of choice for rural police the nation over. “Happens last weekka September every year.” It seemed a good event to check out. I pulled into a public lot manned by a boyscout unit, paid them the demanded three dollars, and set out on foot.

The Ephrata Town Fair was an attractive scene. Hot dog vendors and amusement park games lined the sidewalks, and people filled the space between. Respectable older men in khakis and dress shirts walked arm-in-arm with their short wrinkled wives. High school skateboard punks walked impatiently around them, also navigating the mothers with strollers and overweight couples. Tattered bikers loped about in Lynard Skynard tshirts, and kids begged to play the watergun game or ride on the miniature Ferris wheel at the end of the street. “Try your brawn at our test of strength,” one announcer called, and almost simultaneously, another, “everyone’s a winner! Give it a shot folks, there’s a winner every game.” Townfolk recognized and greeted each other, shaking hands, backslapping. Electronic tweedles celebrated accurate horseshoe throwers, the air was thick with fried food and funnel cakes, and everywhere you looked, people were there, moving up the street on the right and down on the left, the occasional disgruntled child cutting across with a scream.

I decided to try playing for them. I walked up to one receptive looking vendor, a tiny pizza stand with two short, older ladies cutting up the pies and talking up the customers. I walked over to the one who was smiling. “Hi, I’m a classical cellist,” I began, immediately receiving an eyebrow of suspicion. “I was wondering if I could play by your stand. I don’t need anything from you, I just –“ “No!.” she said with a nervous smile. “Oh…. I can’t play?” “No, no!” she said, scuttling back further behind the counter, “we can’t do that!” “Okay, well, thanks for your time.”

I went from vendor to vendor, smiling and getting turned down. Their reactions reminded me of the AAA employee I scared in Pottsville. Suspicion, mistrust, fear. They averted their eyes as soon as they could, saying they didn’t think they were supposed to do that, or that they’d have to ask their supervisor, who wasn’t there. When is you supervisor getting back? I don’t know. Eyes low, scampering away to sell another funnel cake. Meanwhile, “Ding! Congratulations: you win!” and the more well equipped stands played the radio. “Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar” blaring over and over again over the whack-a-mole.

I wasn’t sure what was going on. Who outside of a college theory class is afraid of J.S. Bach? I decided I’d try to do it the right way, and got directions to the fair office. I explained my situation, that I was on a grant from Princeton University, that I was offering to play. The young lady behind the desk was thin, with a huge nose and permed, frizzy blonde hair. She looked receptive, but said she couldn’t help me. A few years back, the fair had trouble with pamphleteers, and now everyone doing anything had to work from an approved stand. “See, cos you could just be out at that corner, but you might be harassing the people across the street from you, see,” she droned out through her nose. “It’s crazy, though, I have the hardest time booking music for this thing.” I offered to play inside the fair office, where there was some sort of showing of prize vegetables. A few people poked about the tables, inspecting cucumbers; cucumber competition enthusiasts, I suppose. She looked at the edge of her computer blankly for a moment. “No, sorry, I can’t let you do that. But are you going to be around on Saturday? I have no idea who to put ahead of the pumpkin eating contest.” I declined, saying I’d be out of town, thanked her, and stepped out into the street again. "Party like a rockstar, party like a rockstar.…”

Discouraged, I went back to my car and drove down to a truckstop. Please seat yourself, the sign read, so I did. They had the standard buffet set up, so I shoveled on some lasagna and mashed potatoes, adding some hamburger and veggie soup after picking some crud off the bowl. Take as much as you want, want as much as you take, please don’t waste! read the sign over the buffet. “Hey hun,” a portly waitress asked on my way back to my booth, “what’d you like to drink?” You have any beer? She smiled. “Oh no, we don’t sell that here.” I’ll just have some water, then. “DORIS!” the waitress screamed. “This young man wants a water!” I sat down and realized I was just opposite the TV. The sound was off, so I had to infer what was going on from the images and subtitles. Four well-dressed, multiethnic performers appeared to be singing or reciting quotes from famous Americans in front of a giant screen of waving grain fields. One was talking about the spirit of liberty. THE SPIRIT OF LIBERTY IS THAT WHICH SHALL ALWAY STAND FOR FREDOM , the subtitles buzzed by. Another was saying something by Ronald Reagan about what we have to do IF WE ARE TO REMAIN THE LND OF THE FREE. They smiled and performed with a glazed earnestness, passing the microphone off to one another. I couldn’t see the audience except for the people right on the side. They were only one row deep in big chairs, men sitting politely in suits.

By the end of my hamburger soup, the program had changed to shots of Bono in his huge translucent goggles with African women carrying babies. The subtitles were getting worse. I’m not sure how they make those things, but I imagined an overeducated hamster cooped up inside the television, smoking and typing furiously. Every time he made a mistake, the letters paused, backed up, and then made another mistake without stopping. BONE NO SOUNDS ALARM AIDS AND POVERTY IN AFRICA, and then a little musical note.

I paid for the buffet and drove across the street to make camp in the local Walmart parking lot. Just as I pulled in, my iPod shuffled its way to the Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. It jumped straight to the reprise of the aria from Gould’s second recording, made at the end of his life when he was quite mad, just before possibly committing suicide, generally celebrated as one of the greatest – and most eccentric – recordings of classical music ever. The performance is painfully slow and heartbreakingly beautiful. You can here him choosing, settling upon each note, moving with profound deliberation, this mad, gentle man, creating a little universe for himself and for you in every shift of tone and rhythm. And despite the best efforts of his recording engineers, you can hear him singing tonelessly, inchoately along, directing his fingers by some inner melody audible to him alone. I shut off the lights and sat in my darkened van listening, aware, as I always am when hearing Gould play Bach, that in my thoughtless digging I had stumbled into a sacred cavern. I had left the FM transmitter go for some time, and there was a popular station threatening to cut in on my frequency, but I didn’t want to stop the musical flow to adjust the channel. The static rumbled evenly, and Gould weaved his vulnerable way through it, singing hopelessly, agelessly, fending off a broadcast to millions just long enough to play me the final cadence.

first trip north (pt. 4)

[excerpts from a longer post]

I move on, and eventually I’m stuck listening to a program called Evangelizing Today’s Child, featuring a clear-voiced man urging that the best way to win the War on Terror is to convert Islamic fundamentalists to Christianity. Once he wraps up by joining me in prayer, the program cuts to another man trying to sell me a book about how Muslims all over the world are turning to Jesus. “Let us send you this gift today,” he sooths, “it will encourage you, and make you feel safer.” He turns the mic over to a clear-voiced pop singer telling me over synthesizers and drum machines why yes savior, he believes, and I turn the dial. At the next FM station Garth Brooks is sighing, “when you find yourself down on your knees, and you’re praying to God and beggin’ Him please… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory.” In the news, there’s malcontent in Anbar province, where occupying American forces have so far not been able to supply reliable electricity.

I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”

Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.

I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.

As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I'll be gone again before I have a chance to.

On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour nonstop hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp set into a little octagonal roundabout at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.

It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.

Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breath in the clear air, and reach out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers.

...

The pier somehow becomes reminiscent of the Mulberry Street Bridge, my circular little space all the way out here on the end a miniature, water-born Allison Hill. This is one beautiful night that I just won’t be able to appreciate.

Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a kid like me.

So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”

He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.

...

The road goes darkly up and down, darkly winding about, climbing steep hills of darkness and then plunging off them again. I stop at the first intersection in miles, a pair of two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch their fluorescent, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of neon green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a greek chorus of crickets hidden deep in the woods. After watching the slow, thoughtless rhythm of the colors for a few cycles, I move again, north by north. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, emerging from the highest point of the road. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again. Then it seems I'm the only rider of this road, the only soul in a hundred miles, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt, a lonely little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, housing a whole nation.

Further on, the fog grows thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, beautiful scenery that I couldn't really see in the brightest sunlight is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.

first trip north (pt. 4)

I move on, and eventually I’m stuck listening to a program called Evangelizing Today’s Child, with a man explain why the best way to win the War on Terror is to convert Islamic fundamentalists to Christianity. Once he wraps up by joining me in prayer, the program cuts to another man trying to sell me a book about how Muslims all over the world are turning to Jesus. “Let us send you this gift today,” he sooths, “it will encourage you, and make you feel safer.” He turns the mic over to a clear-voiced pop singer telling me over synthesizers and drum machines why yes savior, he believes, and I turn the dial. At the next FM station Garth Brooks is sighing, “when you find yourself down on your knees, and you’re praying to God and beggin’ Him please… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory.” In the news, there’s malcontent in Anbar province, where occupying American forces have so far not been able to supply reliable electricity.
I turn off the radio and stop at a scenic view pullover on the side of 220 to daydream. I’ve driven down off the coal mountains of Ashland and Centralia into a valley of verdant farmland, and then up into another set of hills. Below me, there’s open lowland with a barn and a road and some grass. It ends in a forest that rises up another hill perhaps half a mile away. A sign tells me that all of this is “Wrights’s View: Named in honor of former Secretary of Highways P.D. Wright.” As I sit and watch and listen and enjoy the sunshine, everything of the past days run together. The Pottsville Maroons – now all Little Leaguers – are playing in the stadium of the Wright’s View valley. Supreme General James A. Joulwan is combing the stands, shouting about the 10th Mountain Division and books about Muslim converts, peppering his pitch with intermittent calls of “yes savior, I believe!” The crowd, thousands of blades of grass and leaves and trees, is swaying together, softly singing in a sort of collective sigh, “you’ve lost that loving feeling…. when you find yourself down on your knees… that’s when you know she’s not just a memory….”
Angeline, baby, I’m sorry. The Molly Maguires hang, but somewhere out there, the Naked Thief of Carbondale steals away with a keg of Yuengling through the invisibly smoking hills.
I continue north, and soon pass in to New York. The change is evident in all sorts of ways. As evergreens become more dominant, the scenery becomes more self-consciously picturesque. The barns are cleaner, the hills less dense, the gashes of mining devastation and impromptu dumping sites disappear. Beer country is replaced by wine country, with fewer ratty highway bars and more wide, verdant vineyards. More hotels, fewer auto mechanics. More joggers, fewer diners. More bicyclists, fewer bikers. The cars become smaller; little Toyota sedans replace beat-up pickups, but the greater volume of kayaks strapped to the roof offset the difference a little. They are more aggressive, too; they zip around you when they can, and when they can’t, they tailgate invisibly, too small to be seen through my high-up rear window but big enough to plow into my cargo bay if I have to stop suddenly. Then the line turns dotted, and they too zip around, hacking into a cell phone in dark sunglasses, their cars slick, silver ferrets with beady headlight eyes scuttling all over the highway.
As I drive in deeper, the radio stations gradually change also. The hard rock and Christian programming stations begin to diminish, replaced by easy listening and oldies. R&b – absent from northern Pennsylvania – makes a strong, sudden appearance, but rap remains off the dial. As the sun sets, I stop at Seneca Lake, an upstate tourist joint, and cruise about looking for places to stay and perform. I find a Walmart some ways from the town, and park in front of what appears the humblest in a series of mostly upscale restaurants. I walk in and gulp; the cheapest thing on the menu – enchiladas – is 16 bucks. The beers are by the bottle only, and there are no wings. Nevertheless, now inside, I plunge forward and get a table for one. They’ll be more likely to think they like classical music, I guess. I sit over my enchilada, reading and feeling conspicuous. The restaurant looks out over the lake from across the highway, and the light is slowly, beautifully dimming over the water. Beside me, a table of men in business casual clink wine glasses and congratulate each other. Shortly after I get my side of hot sauce, a young man and woman sit down at the table across from me. She’s pretty, he’s nervous. A first date? They’re too old to really be new at it, but I can feel the tension from across the room. He says something and she laughs, crossing her legs and twisting a silver bracelet across her wrist, back and forth, back and forth. He’s seated forward, arms folded heavily, doggedly on the table. I finish off my enchilada and pay the bill (ouch) before I get to see what they order, so I wish them well and rise, asking to see the manager. He’s a busy, fair-looking man. I explain him my offer. He’s interested, but can’t accommodate me tonight. He’s helpful, suggesting several other establishments on the lake I should try. I smile and thank him, knowing I won’t.
On the way back, I miss the turn to Walmart and go a little further, seeing what’s in the town. “You deserve 24-hour hits. We give them to you,” the radio growls. I end up right on the lake and notice a public walking pier going some 50 feet out onto the water. It’s on the edge of what appears to be a series of hotels, wedged in just before an exit ramp. It’s dark, but there’s a blinking lighthouse lamp at the end, and it’s apparently empty. I pull into a parking lot and take out the cello.
It’s a clear temperate night, a lovely evening for a performance. The sun is long gone now, and shadows still over the water, the lights on the shore twinkling over the tiny waves, the suggestions of trees and hills looming darkly over the black expanse. Out here on the end of the pier, the din of town and highway are hushed, and I can here a loon call somewhere over the water. I respond with Bach. Somewhere into the third suite, two overweight women come up the pier, stopping disconsolately when they notice me, and then continue the rest of they way, alternately ignoring me and looking curious. I finish a movement and look up at them. They stare at me. “What’s that?” one says. “Bach!” “No, that,” she says, pointing to my instrument. “Oh, it’s a cello.” “Oh. What are you doing?” “I’m playing Bach!” “Oh.” They stare some more. “It’s a nice night,” I offer. “Okay,” she replies. They leave. I go on playing.
Eventually, I return to the allemande of the first suite for an encore, and then pack up. I realize I haven’t fully appreciated my surroundings, recalling the wild joy I could ride like a wave when surrounded by natural beauty in earlier years. I look out over the dark, lapping water, breathing in the clear air, and reaching out. The stars careen overhead, the lake murmers, and something stirs in me. I could make it to Boston in a night, I think. She’s in Boston for another few days, finishing up her training before she takes the job overseas. I’d driven overnight to see her before, and the way I drive these days, I could make it to Boston in a night, easy. I step back from the edge of the pier, realizing that this is one beautiful night that I just won’t be able to appreciate.
Back at Walmart, I’m met with new disappointment; unlike its 24-hour neighbors to the south, this store is only open until 10. This isn’t really Walmart country, I freshly realize. In Pennsylvania, the big stores pave huge, strangely uniform plots of flat into the hills, refuges of even asphalt and neatly trimmed grass among the blackly rolling forest hills. Overweight people in shorts and sweatshirts trudge in and out, pushing metal carts and melding uncannily with the packed paper shopping bags that fill them. They fall out of their SUVs with a sort of militant fatalism, killing the ignition and slamming the door, disappearing, heads down under baseball caps, behind the store’s silently swooshing doors in a rush of air conditioning and musak. Then the come out again, laden with wholesale wholesale products in brightly colored cardboard with prominent logos and tiny listings of ingredients, economy packs, bargain prices, 3-2, mass produced, overpackaged. They push their way back to their rusted heap of steel, the kachunk of doors manually opening, the crash of carts colliding, the engine turns roaring, and they’re gone, stoic, expressionless. Here in New York, there are health food stores, organic food isles, specialty groceries. They cut into Walmart’s universality. The land is flatter, and the parking lots smaller, so they seem less out of place. The people park more coolly in sleeker vehicles, step up and out, walk away, their car beeping and blinking locked without their direct attention. They return with bags full of specialty goods in their arms, free-range chicken, organic kimchee, vitamins that point out their own feature in Women & Spirituality magazine. Rather than parceling out pay to regularly maintain the stuff that keeps you living, they seem more empowered by their groceries. They buy them by choice, and the choice of them lends them an air of confidence and security. They walk out with straight backs, their sedans beeping again. Here, my van would be a conspicuous presence overnight. To these people, cargo vans in character are the exception rather than the rule; they suggest kidnapper before electrician. Small New York resort town cops, I think, probably wait all month to bust a guy like me.
So I pull out and head further North, starting my first night driving of the project. It feels good to move. I drive all the way up to Lake Ontario, and then follow the border with Canada further North. The radio whines on through the night. “Now if think someone doesn’t fully appreciate America, we can take a trip over to Africa, and take a walk around there, and see how things are there, where people have nothing. And then you can find a new appreciation for America, and see how truly God has blessed America.” NPR does another special on World War II. We were entirely unprepared at the time of Pearl Harbor, not just for the Japanese attack, but for modern war in general. The army still had a huge cavalry division, men on horses charging at a bugle call. Somehow, we rose to the challenge; the radio evokes images of good, straight-talking Kansas farmboys marching down the streets of Paris, grinning goopily under the kisses of the swarming French girls. After the special, part 4 in a series of 6 installments, the nightly news brief comes up. Blackwater, Inc. is a private contracting firm; there is an insufficient American troop presence in Iraq, but the military is already stretched to the seams and a draft is of course wildly politically untenable. So the state department hires this corporate army at $1,222 a man a day to protect diplomats and make up the difference. They work largely outside the discipline of the American military, as well as both American and Iraqi law. Yesterday, they killed 17 civilians at a busy intersection in Nisour square, spraying a rain of bullets in various directions into the sides of passenger cars that desperately tried to turn around and escape. A private review panel was determining whether Blackwater helicopters provided support fire from above. Meanwhile, Pervez Mussharraff, president of Pakistan and key ally on the war on terror, has fallen on tough times. His country is demanding that he cede command of the military while in office; he will have to decide weather to settle for simple civilian command, or to declare marshal law. Further up the dial, Alan Jackson sings “I’m just a singer of simple songs / I’m not a real political man / I watch CNN but I’m not sure I could tell you / the difference in Iraq and Iran / but I know Jesus, and I’ve talked to God….”
He’s followed by “Those Were the Days,” and then a heavily arranged rendition of “In The Sweet By and By,” an old, beautiful song. When, I wonder, did American music start looking backward so much? When did we acquire the idea of the good old days? When were hopeful, forward-looking songs, even if they looked forward to life after death, replaced by songs longing for a return to our grandparents’ generation? Back on NPR, I listen to A Prairie Home Companion, the last of a sort of old variety radio show, two hours of nostalgia for a phenomenon that, as some critics occasionally point out, probably never really existed. Garrison Keillor, the host, is delivering his celebrated monologue, 20 minutes of largely improvised “News from Lake Wobegon,” his imaginary hometown. He’s talking about an old man sitting in the 5-Spot bar during a power outage, remembering in the dark how 42 years ago a young woman from Minneapolis sat just beside where he’s sitting, and their legs brushed. She returned to the city and he never saw her again, but the memory remained powerful to him, and especially without the lights, it is real as day. There is something in this sort of story that is linked intimately to the season, Keillor suggests, to late September, when the summer is so sweet specifically because it will soon be gone.
I find the whole thing vaguely unsettling. I remember standing in a dim kitchen, my arms steeped in dishes, and then freezing, rooted to the spot, a sponge dripping off a half-cleaned plate in my hand, as Elvis began crooning over the radio. Everything about me disappeared and I was transported to a hotel bar on a Caribbean island, surrounded by cheap furniture and old women with martinis, where we convinced the lobby guitarist, a tired, balding, jaded-looking man, to sing our song as an encore before he left, because we had just arrived, dripping from the ocean, and although he was sick of the gig, he saw us and he did, and we danced close in the middle of the hotel lobby, still wet, and so much in love, and it was a dream. Now I’m driving in the dark, and I’m transported once again, remembering a memory, and wondering disconsolately if I’ll be doing this same thing 42 years from now like the man in the monologue.
If the brushing of knees in a bar as a boy can be the transportive memory for an old man in Lake Wobegon, what’s left for us, we who traveled the world, who saved it, who ruled it, who for a while rose to the challenge of a love stronger than we thought possible? How can we ever escape memories like that?

The road goes up and down, winding about, climbing steep, invisible hills and then plunging down again. I’m one of the only ones on the road, a little bubble of brightness traveling through the night, my headlights punching only a little way onto the black asphalt. Occasionally, another truck appears ahead of me, the brightness of its headlights shining off the trees before it appears, two globes of white, over the hill. I turn off the brights, and it slowly angles over the hill, coming down towards me, the bright plane of its beams moving down in a visible arc through the mist until it reaches me, and then it’s gone in a roar, and the night is black again.

I stop at the first intersection in miles, two two-lane highways converging in the woods. There is nobody coming either way, but the lights are still cycling, and I sit through a few changes to watch its colorful, forgotten rhythm. One set turns green, and another turns red; the landscape of one highway is lit solely in tints of fluorescent green, the other a lurid red, the trees brightening two-dimensionally in the respective hue for a few yards before they disappear into a more natural shadow. Then everything turns strangely yellow, and the colors reverse, the whole affair presided over by a chorus of invisible crickets.

I continue north, and the fog becomes thicker. I’ve never seen fog like it before; it stands thickly in dense patches of otherworldly marshmallow, and when I drive through it, it roils cylindrically about my windshield, giving the effect of travel through a wormhole to arrive in some strange new dimension of night. The moon looms high above me, lighting the mist with a ghostly luminescence that seems to come from somewhere within rather than from space. The black jaggedness of the road suggests I’m driving through scenic, mountainous country, but I don’t really mind. At the moment, conventionally beautiful scenery that I can’t really appreciate is much less compelling than this night drive, moving invisibly through this shadow landscape, gunning my tiny, roaring way through clouds and clouds of ghosts.

first trip north (pt. 3)

The radio stations diminish steadily as I drive North of Pottsville. The buzz drifts on as I try to zero in on the remaining channels. The Righteous Brothers sing “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Some country singer wails about how he wanted to ramble and roam, but she wanted a family and home, building to a chorus of “Angeline, baby, I’m sorry / my future’s in the past / I broke your heart in a million pieces… but Angelina baby, my whole world was you.” NPR is doing a special on the army’s 10th Mountain Division in World War II, a group of trained skiers and rock climbers that worked in altitudes of up to 13,500 feet and in temperatures as low as -20ºF. They were instrumental in the battle for Appenine Mountains in Italy, where they took Riva Ridge, a heavily armed Nazi installation amongst sheer cliffs thought entirely impenetrable. I catch the news at two o’clock. OJ Simpson, cleared of double homicide charges in the 90s, is back in court for assaulting and robbing a sports collector and making off with his own memorabilia. The news turns local, where justice is also afoot. The Naked Thief of Carbondale has been caught after sticking up a convenience store wearing only a hat. They asked him why he did it; “because,” he replied, “I was bored.”

I hadn’t been planning to stop by Centralia on this trip, but my path leads me right through next-door Ashland, and so it seems silly not to go. The most devious feature of anthracite coal is not that it is difficult to light but that once lit, it is almost impossible to put out. Centralia is the greatest testament both to this rather obscure scientific fact and to the disastrous effect it can have on a community. This place was another small, bustling coal town in the earlier part of the last century, but now it is hardly there at all. At some point a vein of coal was lit inadvertently lit, probably by a garbage fire. While the trash part of the fire was quickly doused, the coal part spread stealthily underground, invisibly following tunnels of anthracite deep below the surface. The people above were largely unaware what was happening, even as the ground grew hot in places and thick smoke began pluming from the woods on the outskirts of town. For some time, residents tried pumping dubious chemical concoctions into the abandoned mines, and then new combinations some years later when the old ones failed to stop the smoke. No record was kept of the materials used, and there was no practical way to flush old additives out, so the effort amounted to a regular meal of volatile chemical combinations for the fire.

In 1981, the first accident happened. A child playing in the backyard of a Centralia home shrieked, and his parents ran out to investigate. The ground had opened up beneath him, and he was clutching grass, his feet swaying in a dizzy vacuum at the top of a hole some eighty feet deep, plunging into darkness and ending in burning coal. By this point the fire had already crept under route 61, melting and warping the asphalt. The highway was blocked off, a detour constructed. Around the same time, the owner of a gas station situated in the middle of town measured the temperature of his underground tanks at 172ºF, and the earth thirteen feet under them at over 1,000ºF. The U.S. Bureau of Mines came in to investigate, and suggested a variety of possible solutions. Their most realistic remedy was digging an enormous trench through the town to block off the lit coal lines, but the estimated cost was wildly above what anyone in this busy but humble town could imagine spending. Meanwhile, smoke had begun to rise all over town and cave-ins were becoming an ever-greater danger. People were complaining of nausea and dizziness, probably on account of the tremendously high level of carbon dioxide in the homes and streets, but who knows what other health threats are caused by a massive underground chemical-fed coal fire. It soon became clear that evacuation was the only feasible option.

The federal government provided $42 million to get everyone out. Families left and bulldozers followed. Mindful of the danger rubble could cause in an area where the ground was liable to cave under the weight of a child, the government meticulously cleared all the big detritus left from the leveled homes. The result was a strange, sad place that goes way beyond any ordinary conception of a “ghost town.” In most conventional ghost towns, where, say, miners flocked upon the report of gold and then promptly left once they found none, there are ruins, abandoned buildings, and the like. In Centralia, there is nothing. Or rather, there is a surreally complete infrastructure with nothing to serve. Most of the town consists of suburban grids with no houses on them, a familiar element torn unsettlingly from its context, like seeing only the headlights and fenders of a car driving silently down a dark highway. These are not streets with no names; there are signposts on roads where nobody lives, and stop signs at intersections where nobody drives. Only the ghostly footprints of what was once a town remains. Here a collection of asphalt steps leading up to a front porch that no longer exists; here a driveway leading neatly into an empty lot; here, cruelly, a fire hydrant. Some of the remnants are simply bizarre. In one scraggily, overgrown patch of conspicuously open grass, a refrigerator sits on its side. Everywhere, smoke rises.

Of course, the government couldn’t force people out who wanted to stay, and some did. These are stubborn people, remember, some of them descendents of Irish sharecroppers who would wage rural peasant wars to protect their plots. Centralia’s continuing habitation is the weirdest – and the scariest – thing about the whole affair. Punctuating the eerily vacant landscape are four or five inhabited residences. They are almost all in different parts of town, mostly narrow wooden townhouses, the sort meant to be stacked in tight with identical structures to line a street, only here they are alone, standing vertical, narrow and awkward. In the driveways, neatly parked cars compliment the actual presence of a house, and seem to willfully ignore the scores of identical but pointless driveways surrounding. The houses are painted brightly but shuttered. In one intersection, a gaily-painted wreath hangs on a tree, reading “WE LOVE OUR HOME.” These are the people who keep their town on my Pennsylvania road map, who keep the post office open and demand the construction of a bright, spanking-new fire station on main street (the only two buildings on main street). I have been to Centralia many times now, however, and I have never seen one of them. I suppose if I were that committed to my hometown, I would shutter myself in and avoid poking, curiosity-seeking intruders, too. I’m not sure whether to admire or fear them. I’m not really sure what decades of carbon-dioxide inhalation does to a person, or decades or living in an abandoned town, or, for that matter, what sort of person willfully demands to stay in that sort of environment after all their neighbors have left. They may be heroes, or horrifically mutated monsters, or, for all I know, dead on the cellar floor. How long would it take somebody to find out?

Early on, Centralia became a bizarre kind of port-of-call for Arthur, Edmund, and I. We first learned of it in a book of Edmund’s called Weird Pennsylvania!, and resolved to make a visit. This was back in our senior year of high school, after applying to college and in the heat of that tense, breathless time when the letters are coming in and it feels like your whole life is being decided by the contents of your mailbox. Arthur, I think, learned of his acceptance to Georgetown the morning we left. Anyway, we went, and had lunch in a diner in Ashland where we were amazed that you could still get vanilla coke made with real vanilla syrup, and drove into the smoking town. You can walk anywhere in Centralia; the only barriers are big signs on all the main entrances to the town reading something like “DANGER. Toxic fumes and ground prone to sudden collapse. Entering this area may result in serious injury or death.” Strong stuff, but that’s all. We took pictures under them and tromped around, smelling the sulphuric fumes and weirder smells, hoping one of us wouldn’t suddenly turn a color usually seen only in oil spills and drop dead. We went out on the abandoned high way, crawled over the big cracks, traced the warped median line over strange hills and valleys of asphalt. It felt like walking on the set of some post-apocalyptic film, except it was real, and it was a contained sort of apocalypse, relegated only to the bounds of a small Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In places, the highway was streaked with a graffiti – pictures of skulls, swastikas. “kill all niggers.” “WELCOME TO HELL.” We pulled our coats tighter against a cold wind that tore at the ashen sky and hurled the smoke about. It was the perfect day to visit Centralia. We returned later, together on fall break, with college friends in the winter. In some truly strange way, the town became some sort of symbol or beacon of our friendship.

Returning this time in the van, the weather is incongruently sunny. I decide to pass-up the $8.50 Ashland coalmine ride, instead resolving to have lunch in the town of fumes. I pull in to the familiarly empty streets, but the do-not-go-here-or-die sign is gone. Its posts remain, however; I assume it has been stolen, and wonder how many times it’s stolen each year. I drive on top of a hill and look around. No smoke today it seems, but I feel confident there’s still something burning beneath my tires. One mine fire authority was quoted in an issue of Newsweek as saying that if the rate of burning held steady, Centralia would roast for a thousand years. I open the side door to the van and sit in the threshold, eating tuna fish and watching two enormous dump trucks haul slate-gray gravel up a faraway mountain. They look tiny across the valley where Centralia lays down its empty grids, and the growl of their engines and the muted boom of their falling loads echoes listlessly between the hills, quieter than the soft rush of breeze and grasshoppers. They rise up, dump the stuff, and then glide back down, trailing a cloud of dust ten times bigger than themselves. Here in Centralia, the coal is burning, but across the way, they’re still digging for more. I pull out, eager to move on while there’s still light. The trucks, still revolving in their quiet, remote clockwork, are beautiful.

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.

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.

harrisburg (pt. 3)

The total population of Harrisburg leaped from 53,000 to 71,000 during these years of reform. The Old 8th had hardly been torn down, however, when conflict racked the world with the advent of World War I. The U.S.S. Harrisburg represented the city in that fight, making four voyages to bring American troops to Europe, and then six trips to bring them home after the November 1918 Armistice. However, while the First World War shattered the societies of Europe, the United States entered late in the game, and so it was the Second World War that had the greater impact upon America and its cities. For Harrisburg, war meant business. Full engagement in a global conflict required unprecedented amounts of steel. Pearl Harbor had nudged the sleeping giant of American industry, and Harrisburg was there for its full awakening. It was the war that turned America’s steel industry into Big Steel, and the Pennsylvania railroads churned materials through Harrisburg night and day. By the 1950s, United States Steel chairman Benjamin Fairless was no doubt pleased to point out that America’s steel industry was not only the biggest of its kind in the world, it was bigger than all other such industries in the world combined.

Big Steel basked in the majesty of its success for the next thirty years. However, its management also became complacent during this period of hegemony, and its passivity spelled disaster for the industry. American steel kept chugging away with war-era machinery in cities like Harrisburg, safe and untouched by conflict. Meanwhile, the Japanese and Europeans rebuilt their own devastated urban centers – in some cases from the ground up – and built new machinery to match, experimenting with new manufacturing methods, with oxygen furnaces, electric steel and minimills. While the business awareness and creativity of Big Steel returned to sleep after the war, letting its industry run on autopilot, the market for steel slowly became a global one. Unfortunately, Big Steel slept through this realization, and only woke in time for its own spectacular, cataclysmic crash.

At the beginning of the 1980s, 320,000 workers were sent home. The once invincible American steel companies went bottoms-up, mighty corporations declared bankruptcy, plants closed left and right. Soon, 75% of all American steelworkers had lost their jobs. There were a myriad of reasons for this catastrophic failure; Richard Preston cites “greedy labor unions, bungled government policy, inflation, foreign competition – but ultimately it was a failure of management.” The heads of Big Steel came from the best business schools in America; they worked in lavish business suites in the upper floors of tall buildings, and had little in common with the men fifty stories below who actually made the steel melt and the industry move. They were leaders who could inspire their men to do little other than strike. Most damagingly, their education could not replace the experience of adversity and competition. They were native to an era of supremacy: the last innovations in their industry had occurred a generation earlier during a World War, and everything seemed to be working fine since Hitler fell. They never learned how to shrewdly invest money in technology, and it destroyed them.

The fall of Big Steel punctuated a period marked by a nation-wide deterioration of American economy, ideology, and morale. In 1975, Operation Frequent Wind had scrambled to remove foreign nationals and sympathetic Vietnamese civilians from Saigon. Helicopters zipped back and forth between the embattled city and offshore aircraft carriers, finally lifting off the embassy for the last time as the rumble of approaching North Vietnamese tanks became audible. Americans at home watched the full fiasco on TV, struggling to reconcile shameful images with the national faith instilled in them by their parents, the generation that had won the War and brought America to the fore of global politics and economy. Eventually, most found reconciliation elusive, and a generation of Americans lost faith in their government and their society. Angry vets prowled the streets, hippies toked up, Sylvester Stallone filmed Rocky, and the Harrisburg Rail Yards fell largely silent. The city’s steadily declining postwar population soon dove into a death-plummet, losing around 15,000 people in ten years. The plunge leveled off into another more gradual decline in the 80s, but Harrisburg never really recovered.

One major reason people were so eager to leave might have been radioactivity. Three Mile Island is a major nuclear power plant located just a few miles upriver from downtown Harrisburg, and at 4 AM on March 28 1979, the second unit suffered a partial meltdown. The scope of the accident was unclear at first, and the state and local government struggled to determine what exactly had happened and what scale of evacuation would be necessary. They determined the danger was minimal, and no mandatory evacuation was called, but people emptied out anyway. I remember my middle school gym teacher telling me about the accident. He was one of those who stayed, unwilling to leave home and wary of looters. He spent several days “on the couch watching TV with the porch lights on and the shotgun loaded.” When downtown failed to glow and it became clear the radiation had been contained, people quickly filtered back. The scientific community is largely in agreement that the meltdown did little or no human harm, although the areas closest to the plant have the highest radon concentrations in the country, and one recent study has suggested a link to increased lung cancer in the region.

But it seems clear the accident did the most damage culturally. TIME ran a cover story on the accident called Nuclear Nightmare. President Jimmy Carter ordered a full investigation, and the Pennsylvania House of Representatives conducted their own investigation as well. An unsurprising backlash to nuclear power followed the accident, galvanized by sometimes-unlikely lobbyists like Jane Fonda, who had just finished filming a movie decrying the dangers of the nuclear age. Aerosmith, the Clash, Alice Cooper, Midnight Oil and Jimmy Buffett all wrote songs about or referencing the accident, Saturday Night Live did a sketch alluding to it, Isaac Asimov involved it in a science fiction novel. All this attention did little to allay the growing anxieties of a society that had just lost its sons in an unpopular war driven by a suddenly undependable government lead by a President impeached for corruption. The triumphant, trusting society of the 50s had somehow devolved into a tangle of power politics and economic woes wracked with Cold War malaise, where the faith and conviction of the previous generation suddenly seemed as fragile and transparent as glass, where dreams of financial solvency and personal security fell prey to the vicissitudes of global politics and the secretive decisions of the powerful, where the very resources that lit our houses with electricity could also suddenly, silently inflict nuclear winter.

Harrisburg was hit especially hard. It had been in trouble since the war, reeling from “an economic free-fall” and steady population loss. It relied heavily on industries like Big Steel to provide materials in need of transport; this meant work for everyone when business was booming, but when things turned sour, there was little recourse. Since the war, citizens with sufficient money had been drifting to the suburbs in search of a front lawn and a white picket fence. Following new economic woes and the Three-Mile Island Accident, people positively fled the city, resulting in rapidly declining conditions and billions of dollars of loss. In the 80s, Harrisburg came to be regarded as one of the most distressed cities in the nation. This recognition fueled a cycle of urban drain and suburban encroachment, and before long pretty much everyone who had the money to leave had left, and conditions only worsened for those who were stuck inside. The city was reduced to a hotel for state workers and a prison for the poor. Crime soared and property values plummeted. The capitol grounds were kept beautiful and immaculate, but elsewhere the city became increasingly tattered, especially in ghettos like Midtown and Allison Hill.

It was during this era of distress that my current housemates and I were born. Edmund was growing up on the Hill, Arthur in nearby Lebanon, and I moved to Hershey by way of Connecticut in the early nineties. By that point, however, Harrisburg’s downtown area was already changing. Mayor Steven R. Reed, elected in 1982, had realized that aggressive steps were necessary. He declared a large swathe of downtown an “urban renewal area” and worked with the city government and nonprofit organizations to “develop key parcels of real estate.” Reed eventually helped pump 3.4 billion dollars of new investment into downtown. Strawberry Square appeared, Harrisburg’s first enclosed shopping mall. In 1983, 82 luxury apartments replaced the old City Government Center. In 1984, the city registered its first net gains in the number of businesses and private sector jobs after three decades of loss. Reed was instrumental in acquiring a minor league baseball team for the city, the Harrisburg Senators. He then developed a park surrounding their stadium on City Island. In the 90s, Second Street, once a graveyard of empty stores and vacated residences, began hopping with new restaurants, bars, and clubs. In 1995, the city realized its first net population gain. In 1999, the city unveiled the Whitaker Center for Science and the Arts, a 52.7-million dollar facility that was “the first center of its type in the United States where education, science and the performing arts take place under one roof.”

Reed’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In December 2006, the City Mayors organization awarded Reed third place in its annual World Mayors competition. He was the only American mayor to rank in the top ten. At his inauguration, they quoted a Harrisburg citizen has saying “Steven Reed has committed his very soul to public service and is a tireless and positive force for change and improvement. Over the year, he has taken our tired, grey city and filled it with life and color and he always gives the impression that he has only just begun. He is a leader and wastes no time in party politics.”

Other citizens were less enthusiastic. His disdain for party politics is permitted by his lack of political opposition, Edmund’s parents – both long-time urban reformers – point out. Steven Reed is Harrisburg’s longest-serving mayor. He is a democrat, but regularly gains support from both parties. He has won six elections, mostly unopposed. He says "the City of Harrisburg has become an example of urban resurgence at a time when many of America's cities continue to undergo further decline and serious economic stress. Harrisburg's renewal has been multi-faceted, touching virtually every area of city governmental and community endeavor." Edmund would argue vociferously that this universality is not in fact the case. Reed has developed Harrisburg by pandering to its suburbs. His “urban renewal” projects are universally focused upon downtown, near the capitol complex and away from where most city citizens live, especially the poor. The projects he has designed are universally geared towards wealthy suburban commuters who come to work in the capital and then leave. During the workday, the population of Harrisburg increases by 72.7% because the attractive new jobs Reed has brought to the city are all filled by people outside the city. And instead of returning home at 5pm, they can now stick around for dinner at a fine restaurant, see a show at the Whitaker Center, and then stroll along City Island before returning home across the river. This sort of activity invests capital in Harrisburg businesses, but only the region of the city where Reed encourages business: downtown, where the business workers and owners mostly aren’t from Harrisburg anyway. Meanwhile, other parts of the city are almost entirely ignored.

Reed has done no “urban development” in Midtown, where violence and drug trafficking continues unabated, or in Allison Hill, where Edmund makes his home and where a decades-old community “Take Back the Night” program no longer functions because the streets are simply too dangerous after dark. The net population growth in 1995 ignores a general decline of greater severity than that of the 1980s; encouraged by Reed’s policies, the suburbs continue to grow in size and power, and the inner city continues to fester. I know, because I moved into Allison Hill last June, and the broken glass strewn across the cul-de-sac at the bottom of our street still hasn’t been cleaned. We would not object so vociferously to Reed’s plan of “urban development” if it were only an opening method focusing on the most economically promising regions in order to jump-start a citywide resuscitation.

However, Reed gives no indication that he will ever turn his attention to places like Midtown and Allison Hill. Indeed, he seems largely to have given up on the rest of Harrisburg. Instead of actually developing our city – helping the neighborhoods where people live and raise their children – he has cordoned off these neighborhoods as strictly as he can, and turned downtown into a combination office space and amusement park for suburbanites. He has encouraged the ghettoification of the city’s living spaces in order to create a model of economic renaissance for the already wealthy, many of whom do not even live in the city. Most of the biggest buildings downtown are super-sized parking garages. Allison Hill has always been separated from the rest of the city by train tracks. The new restaurants largely stop at Midtown. After 1996, when both halves of the People’s Bridge were partially washed away by high floodwaters and an ice floe, only the Eastern Half was repaired. That way, people in Harrisburg can walk to City Island, which lies in the middle, but undesirables from the city proper cannot walk to the suburbs on the West Shore. Instead of fighting crime by cleaning up depressed neighborhoods and encouraging real urban development, Reed chooses largely to police them remotely. Several expensive “gunshot detectors” have recently been installed on street corners in Harrisburg’s most violent areas. These devices can distinguish the sound of gunshot from ordinary urban din, and send an alert to police dispatches in 3-5 seconds. The “acoustic Gunshot Detection System (GDS)… has been proven to… reduce calls for service by as much as 85%,” newspapers gush, ignoring both that the system itself makes automatic “calls for service,” thereby rendering conventional calls both pointless and obsolete, and more importantly, that the system allows heavily armed police to rush into distressed neighborhoods, make arrests, and exit, supposedly catching the bad guy but leaving the community no safer by leaving the root causes that create and perpetuate urban violence unaddressed.

With the hundred-thousand dollars and change that these detectors have cost the city, Reed instead could have pumped money into after-school programs, community patrol forces that stay inside distressed neighborhoods after the police leave, help encourage new businesses in places like Allison Hill, or maybe even clean off that broken glass a the bottom of the street, any one of which would probably do more permanent good than satisfyingly newspaper-friendly but ultimately insubstantial arrests. Instead, inner city misery continues. Property values stay low, the rate of murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults continues at over double the national average, and the median household income continues to grind some $15,000 below the national average. A quarter of the city continues to live under the poverty line, and over a tenth lives below half the poverty line. It’s no wonder then that Harrisburg Public High School’s senior class is almost half the size of its freshman class; the rest of the students, disillusioned with the opportunities they see around them, drop out in favor of the much more palpable rewards of Harrisburg’s burgeoning gang culture. In Harrisburg, neighborhood kids can make far more money selling drugs than trying to find a job not already custom-fit for someone from the West Shore, at least until they run into trouble and get picked up by a gunshot detector.

Harrisburg still needs help, but it is less likely to get it than in the 80s, when it was still being considered one of the most distressed cities in the nation. It is still distressed, but its injuries are set away in the ghettos and the neighborhoods, avoided as much as possible, policed as minimally as necessary, and generally ignored. The cultural inheritors of the Old 8th Ward do not need to be paved for new capital grounds; they’re too far across the train tracks. The Susquehanna River, typifying the mobility that has always granted Harrisburg its purpose and its character, also serves to separate the communities that are truly on the move from those that have simply gotten stuck. Trains still cross the bridges that link the gaps, but people, by and large, do not.

In the days following the shooting, the character of the slain comes to light. The Patriot runs another article; he was a “loyal man,” his friends said. He loved to fish. He had been down on his luck, and had been mixed up with the wrong crowd for a while, but was getting back on his feet, before the wrong crowd pulled him back down. I have come to feel very close to Harrisburg. I hope people realize the unique potential that lies in its neglected corners. I hope more people move to Allison Hill, and write about it, and live there, and raise their children there, and resuscitate the Take Back the Night movement, and don’t leave at the end of the workday. This will take a great deal of time, however, and I am not confident that midstaters will have the vision or the care to give Harrisburg the attention it deserves. More likely, Harrisburg will remain a city of bridges a while longer, a city where wide veins of river, rail, and highway separate the place from its identity and the reality from its potential. This loyal man, in his silence, reminds me that I cannot be a part of that effort at this point in my life. The bridges of Harrisburg, along with the rivers and rails, move people through as well as separate them. They are intersections and crossroads, and the city’s main claim to fame is still moving people between places of greater significance. It’s no place to get back on your feet. At the end of the summer, I too will cross a bridge, and like hunters and trappers, canal workers and railroad men, soldiers and presidents, state bureaucrats and city workers before me, I will leave.



Material on the rise and fall of the steel industry comes from:
Preston, Richard. American Steel: Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1991.

Material on health implications of the Three Mile Island meltdown comes from:
Field, William R. Three Mile Island epidemiologic radiation dose assessment revisited: 25 years after the accident. . Radiation Protection Dosimetry Volume 113, No. 2 (2005): 214-217.

Material on gunshot detectors comes from:
Barrett, Sophie. Secures® Gunshot Detection System Selected for Deployment in Harrisburg, PA. E.E. Times Online. 12.54 March 27 2007:


Material on Harrisburg Public Schools comes from the Local School Directory online at:


Material on the World Mayor Competition comes from:
Vom Hove, Tann. John So, Lord Mayor of Melbourne wins the 2006 World Mayor Award. Worldmayor.com. 2006:


Material on the Old 8th Ward comes from Harrisburg’s Old 8th Ward online at:


Other material from the Harrisburg Patriot News, city-data.com, and of course, every amateur researcher’s best friend, wikipedia.org.