Third Grade Reflection

I turn back from the age of nine.

I am in third grade, and I look back on a childhood I know I am blessed to have had. When I was two years old, my parents moved from York, Pennsylvania (where I was born) to a rural pocket of Pennsylvania called simply “The Back Mountain.” My memories begin here. The Back Mountain was a rural enclave, a hidey hole of Americana that featured only one real town to speak of, Dallas, Pennsylvania. It lay on the backside of a small Pocono mountain to the west of the dying twin coal cities of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The Back Mountain proper lay west of Wilkes-Barre, southwest of Scranton. It was here, at least a twenty-five minute drive from center city Wilkes-Barre, that Penn State has what it calls its Wilkes-Barre campus. It lies on an old family mansion and grounds that were donated to the university. It is lovely ground, a healthy walk from end to end over rolling green meadows, dotted with stonelaid houses from the 1700s. My father began his career with Penn State at its York campus, working in the then-brand-new field of Continuing Education. Wilkes-Barre had what was considered the branch campus system’s least productive CE Program in the Penn State campus system, which by then had grown to quite an impressive array of statewide offerings, nearly all within an easy commute of most of Pennsylvania’s residents. My father, a confident young area rep for York at the time, was offered Wilkes-Barre’s Director of CE position. “Don’t go there, Jim, that whole northeastern part of the state is a hole,” people told him. My dad saw the gorgeous old manse of the campus, and the rock bottom housing market of the quaint Back Mountain country hideaway, and he decided to go for it.

I grew up living in a historic home. There were dozens of them in the rural boroughs of Huntsville, south of Dallas, where we lived. The good country folk living there didn’t really embrace the whole civic unity thing so much back then (the early 1980s), so no one had yet organized a group to propose consideration for historic designations, although there was talk among old church friends at the grocery stores that someone was planning to do so someday soon.

Our house dated back to the American Revolution era. It was a bluish grey, with white trim and black window shutters. Trees sprawled all over our property’s edge, obscuring the house somewhat from the roadside view. A large backyard opened up behind the house, a yard ringed with near-century-old pine trees. The pine trees stretched high, almost thirty feet in some places, and their branches grew fat and thick towards the lower half of the tree, which closed off our back yard from view. A thin trail at the back of the yard led up a steep, short hill into the woods behind our house. In that woods there were trails, but they were hard to find and harder still to keep. As a child I got lost in that woods, turned around with no sense of where I had come from or where I was going, more times than I’d care to count. And nearly every time I got scared. We’d seen our share of beautiful deer in our yard, but we’d also seen bears, and hunters aplenty. The housewives liked to tell quiet stories about children who’d gotten lost in the woods and been shot by hunters. Like the Grimm Brothers ' had before them, those scary stories kept the kids out of the woods for the most part, unless they too were apprentice hunters, or Boy Scouts, or teenagers up to no good.

The week we moved in I was two years old. I don’t remember it. But I mention it because our house ran along a thin country road. Our mail was delivered to RR 4 Box 195, or “Rural route 4.” Country folk are often proud of their cars and like to test their prowess on the less-populated roads of the country. It wasn’t unusual to occasionally see an old Camaro rip down the hill in front of our house and tear around the corner at 55 miles an hour or more. The limit on that road was 25. The week we moved in my older brother Matthew, who was nine, was playing out by the road and was hurt. A drainage ditch ran next to the road, and Matthew fell into it. He hurt his head fairly badly, and had no idea what had happened.

When I was nine, I never played down by that road. I’d heard that story about Matthew more times than I had cared to hear it, and I was determined to be more responsible with myself. In fairness to my brother, Matthew is mentally retarded. His condition is nameless. He does not have Downs Syndrome or autism. His retardation, though, has been a definitive component of my identity my whole life, as long as I can remember. The theatre I discovered along the way, but Matthew I have always had.