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On homecoming weekend, I went home for the first time in many, many years.
When people ask me where I’m from, I usually tell them I’m from State College. Sometimes they need assistance figuring out just where that is, so I use my open left hand as a map of Pennsylvania and point to the root knuckle of my middle finger.
State College is a neat little town. It’s clean, it’s friendly, it’s vibrant. It’s filled with hustle and bustle, color and life, fun and smart people. It’s got a few too many fraternity types wandering around drunk at three in the morning, but beyond that it’s generally pretty safe, too.
I moved to State College when I was fourteen, and it wasn’t long before it felt like home. It was a better fit for me. A lot of who I was fit in there better than it did where I grew up. The nerd in me, the artist in me, the performer in me, the thinker in me, and even the football fan in me all fit in better in that town.
I grew up in the sticks. When people think of northeastern Pennsylvania they generally think of coal mines, flooding disasters, the Pocono Mountains, and not much else. I grew up about twenty minutes west of Wilkes-Barre in a little hollowed-out patch called the Back Mountain. Dallas, Pennsylvania is the only real town to speak of in the Back Mountain, and the rest of the area there is pretty rural: two-lane roads zig-zag between rows of forests, hills and creeks. The terrain is steep and claustrophobic, and where it isn’t there’s basically nothing but farms.
Rural America is often gorgeous. Even when it seems dirty or broken, the haunting charms of Americana can infiltrate one’s soul. The people in the country are almost always a little extra: the friendly folks are extra friendly, the tough guys are extra tough, the mean kids are extra mean, etc.
I found, as I got older, that the Back Mountain wasn’t going to support me as an artist, as a performer, as a nerd. I couldn’t be myself there, not fully, anyhow. Country strong doesn’t leave a lot of room for intellectual or artistic pursuits. Lucky for me, we moved.
I miss the beauty of my childhood home, though. I miss the jaw-dropping autumn colors; only two hours south, it’s just not the same. I miss the wind in the trees. It just sounds different in those mountains. I miss the haunted feeling of our two-hundred-year-old country house as it breathed and creaked in the winter. I miss the loneliness of the country, that feeling of space and time just to oneself that is so easy to find there, and so hard to find anywhere else.
The last time I’d visited was about five years ago. My wife (we were just dating then) and I went up to Scranton for a minor league baseball game. We know one of the coaches. It was a nice visit. On the way home, I detoured through the Back Mountain and showed her some of my favorite old familiar sights. Memories get more powerful with age. The ghosts of that place hadn’t gone anywhere; they were still there, and I could feel them tugging at me.
In the interim, some of my best friends had discovered Ricketts Glen. It’s an incredible place to hike and swim and camp. Ricketts Glen is one of the more gorgeous state parks in Pennsylvania, and probably one of the more underrated gems of all America’s state parks. It’s a short distance from the house I grew up in, nestled in the hills and hollers of the Back Mountain. Two robust creeks run down the middle face of a steep rock mountain, and every couple hundred yards these streams drop off a steep slate cliff, creating a powerful waterfall vista. There are more falls in Ricketts than I can recall; one after another they come, each unique, each powerful, each gorgeous. In autumn, Ricketts Glen is on fire with oranges and browns, yellows and reds. The hiking there can be treacherous, and it’s a heck of a workout, but the payoff is phenomenal.
These friends had always invited me to come along to Ricketts Glen, and I’d always been busy and had to say no. This weekend, I could go. They were all excited about the gorgeous place and the gorgeous hike. As for me, I was mired in old anxieties and nostalgia, part sadness and part joy, at the prospects of going back home.
I think I cling to my past more than most. I’m not sure why. Revisiting the past, though, always puts a strange taste in my mouth. That was then, and now it’s different, I suppose. Going home is a wistful, bittersweet experience.
That day we got up early, rode two hours north, and hit the hiking trails before ten in the morning. The first hour or so was rough. I was reminded just how out of shape I am. Eventually, though, my lungs adjusted and I found a steady pace. The falls were stunning. Ricketts Glen was in all its Tolkien-esque finery. The water rolled over those slate falls and my childhood flooded over in my mind. It had been too long.
We can’t escape our pasts. They will always creep up when we least expect it, for better or worse. It’s best to just go toward the nostalgia, to shake off the dust and embrace it again. As we crested the mountain, I got my second wind. Maybe I finally felt country strong.
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One week later, I woke up next to Alexis and she mumbled something about meeting up with her sister Brianna and some friends to go for a run at Wildwood. “It’s about a 5k,” she murmured, half-asleep.
Wildwood is my favorite place to hike around here. It’s no Ricketts Glen, but it’s a special place, an accidental gem of a park around an old public works drainage spout that collects stream runoff. American lotuses flower and flourish there, a rare find in this part of the country. It has brackish swampy spots and steep hillsides, wooded coves, wooden walkways, birds everywhere, and teeming plant life.
“I want to go with you,” I said.
They all jogged one direction, and I walked the other. My wife and friends are training for a 10-mile run for the arts this spring. I like to walk.
I popped in my ipod earbuds and rambled into the swampy side passages, raised wood platforms weaving through the dense swampland in a serpentine twist. The Indigo Girls sang “Galileo” and I thought about my mother-in-law’s fat dead cat with the same name. He was such a sweet boy. The walk was some kind of weird nineties retrospective, replete with Weezer, Luscious Jackson, and Nirvana. When I turned around to head back, I felt lighter at first, then for a brief moment I felt something like fear crawling up behind me.
I thought of Emerson and Thoreau, and realized I was about to teach them, albeit briefly, in my American Literature course. I got the idea for this project with the fresh cold air of fall in my lungs, walking in the tamed wilderness of modern America.
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