There's nothing inherently arousing about Pennsylvania. For me, I'll own up to an aroused nostalgia which seems to show up as I drive across this boxy commonwealth. I choose I-476 out of Philadelphia to get to Laura. The turnpike is equally practical, but I enjoy the innate sense of time travel which comes with passing Nanticoke and Mahoning Valley before I get intercepted by Route 80.
It's when I get out to this sweet spot I happen to theorize: upon which farm acre was it possible to find that teenager from '68 picking summer tomatoes at fifty cents an hour?
Such memories confined within this alteration of time and place are not my own. They are a byproduct of childhood stories as told by my father. It is as if his own memories, been aired in such sure-footed accounts, have become ingrained so soundly in my psyche they lend to this augmented sense of belonging and identity.
In the summer of 1972 a flood swept through Luzerne County, reducing my grandparents to a government trailer alongside of what once passed for a home. The flood prevailed so drastically to the extent it caused the local cemetery to let loose its idle inhabitants; another summer project for my father--to carry greening cadavers back into the holes. I always wonder how he knew where to place them all, while that bespectacled twenty-year-old version of him warded off urges to heave on the spot.
Tuning in to such thoughts is to substitute my father for myself, approximating that day of life at work in the graveyard as a result. I imagine getting dropped off in my grandfather's landscaping truck, joining a troupe of like-age guys with toothy smiles and tousled shag cuts scrounging for beer dollars. Charcoal-colored wheelbarrows get rolled out of a public works truck, and then we're off to collect the dead, decked in steel-toe boots and rubber gloves.
There's always the other tangent. My father's high school commute: I see him out here a ways ahead of me, standing in the highway shoulder, hitchhiker's thumb dipping out into the northbound lane. That sixteen-year-old varsity letter man, dressed in his parochial school best, thinking nothing of hailing a ride from an inebriate motorist. The smell from an unconcealed brown bag fills the car, forcing him to jump from a moving vehicle, a destination for the next pub overriding Kingston Catholic.
This mindful participation within pieces of Dad's history is replaced with curiosity and intrigue by the time I'm passing exits for Harrisburg. With the familiar nuances of the greater Wilkes-Barre area at my back, I face what I perceive to be Pennsyltucky.
'Tucky had long resided in my mind as being an Amish utopia; a pastoral expanse where buggies share slimmer roads with the anomaly of an automobile. Any land left unoccupied by such groups would be shrouded in a black forest of anonymity, and any advancing civilization could only be found in a distant burg bearing three rivers.
The radio frequencies floating in and out of range tell me there is more out here than I'd gathered--evangelical rants encouraging me to turn my back on pleasures of the flesh, country rock stations airing re-recorded oddities like Roxette's "The Look." Such examples are the stand-ins for more conventional ideas of road trip listening, inevitable when operating a backdated Explorer without the 'AUX' capability.
My perceptions of a theoretical black forest enveloping the west Pennsylvania limits are further dismantled by Bucknell and Penn State, institutions where cultures commune on top of cultures. There are important things happening out here. Even Exit 78 for Punxsutawney served its purpose, having been filming grounds for one of Mr. Murray's finest.
