The Burgs

Fifteen thousand years ago, the retreating glaciers clawed a south pointing thumb into the shale of eastern Pennsylvania providing a jagged course for the Delaware River through the Water Gap and  beyond.  If the Dutch and Germans who settled here had not been refugees from generations of desperate slavery and starvation, they may have simply kept moving west rather than trying to coax crops from its rocky soil. Abandoned stone fence rows in the new growth forests stand in cold testament to the labor required to clear even a single field for planting. Then again, maybe those settlers stopped here because travel was difficult and perilous without highways. America still had frontiers. This was a frontier which became a gateway to the frontier. Now, it’s another highway turnstile called the burgs.

The burgs was the kind of place where people lived generation after unquestioning generation, at least until interstate highways began to rope themselves across America, slicing apart and erasing places like the burgs. Pre-interstate maps showed only a few spidery threads behind the colorful names of local hills and streams, a land alive with uniqueness and character. As the interstates expanded, local landmarks began to fade behind a dull background of pastels divided by bold red, blue, green and yellow lines. One of those lines coiled itself around three sides of the burgs. The only remaining opening faces north.

Both highways and drug dealers promise escape to a better life. Highways represent energetic commerce and easy travel, but at the price of cultural decline and economic stagnation as better paying jobs lure away the best and brightest. At first, newcomers saw the region’s culture as quaint, even somewhat appealing, but eventually the local younger generation was shamed by their sophisticated new friends into abandoning customs. The burgs lost their innocence to false dream and now lie as weathered addicts, backs pressed against the stony hills, dependent on the thing that is sucking out their lives.

In this land, I am a newcomer, untethered by family or history, here by circumstance not choice. I am often asked by lifers–those who have lived here all their lives or for generations–if I like it here. I say that everywhere I have lived I found things I like to do and people with whom I like to spend time. Otherwise I would be a miserable person. I think the deeper question they want to ask is if they have made the right choice by spending a lifetime in one place. That question I cannot answer. I cannot say what is right or good for them. Moving always exacts steep price, lost relationships and unrealized opportunities. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been had I grown from child to adulthood in the same town.  In many ways I admire the continuity in their lives and the core of knowledge and friendships that grows from deep roots in a community. I don’t have that. Friends have faded in the distance or simply vanished over the years and there is no single place I think of as home. The places I have lived in the past hold no particular attraction for me as they are now without the friends who once make them special, or tolerable.