A Report from Pennsylvania

On a recent Sunday morning when the streets in my neighborhood were dark and still and the sky overcast, I drove three miles north of Bloomsburg up to Buckhorn, a cluster of gas stations and restaurants just off I-80, and pulled into the Wal-Mart parking lot. Before I got out, I reached over to the passenger seat for the clump of plastic grocery bags — a gray ball the size of the hornets’ nest that buzzed in the forsythia next to my garage two summers ago. I shoved the keys in my front pocket and walked toward the entrance. In the next row of vehicles a chunky young man wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and a tan cap slammed the door of his black pickup. In the lower right corner of his back window, stark in the grayish light of dawn, he’d stuck his humble Christian decree for the Sabbath: “Trump that bitch!”

This is eastern Pennsylvania, where the wide Susquehanna River winds through the Appalachians, runs parallel to U.S. 11 on the south edge of Bloomsburg, swells with creek water on its way down to Harrisburg, and bends southeast before pouring into Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore. Utility lines criss-cross above Iron Street like a cat’s cradle and steam rises from two nuclear power plant towers a few miles upriver. This is where State Highway 487, a two-laner with a passing lane on the long climbs, winds through town and into the dense green hollows and hills around Orangeville, Catawissa, and Elysburg. Yellow signs warn truckers to gear down before descending the 8% grade to Roaring Creek. Deer carcasses rot on the black asphalt near guardrails, and dead possums lay curled on the shoulder in a gray and red confederacy of hair, entrails, and stench. And this is where I’ve lived for the past eight years and where I want to believe that the guy outside Wal-Mart isn’t a typical local. But I have my doubts.

Last fall I walked a picket line at the north entrance to Bloomsburg University just off of 487. The last collective bargaining agreement had expired a year earlier, and negotiations between the union and the state university system had collapsed. On a Wednesday in October the faculty at all fourteen state campuses around Pennsylvania went on strike. For three days students, who were probably grateful to have the warm fall days off, honked, waved, and smiled as they drove by, and most truckers blew their horn and raised a fist — likely because they were unionized, too. Others, however, were less supportive. Several men in their thirties and forties behind the wheel of pickups and small trucks, glared as they drove by, gave us the finger, and yelled, “Get the fuck back to work!”

I expected some abuse. To them we were probably just a bunch of well-to-do academics who never had a callus or broke a sweat at work, who spent no more than fifteen hours each week in the classroom, and who were already paid too much just to read books and sip lattes. But odds are they didn’t know that I was a temporary employee, that I had been for seven years, and that I carried a picket sign across the grass mostly because I opposed the chancellor’s proposal to increase the course load for temporary full-time faculty by 20% — from four classes per semester to five — with no increase in pay. Just how many of those people who gave us the finger do you suppose would stay on their full-time job if suddenly they had to work another 400 hours each year for free?

But what we were subjected to while on the picket line was mild compared to the hatred sometimes spewed at BU students, especially those who don’t look like they’re from around here. Fewer than 15,000 people live in Bloomsburg, but in the fall the influx of university students pushes the town’s population over 24,000. This is both a boon and a bone of contention for locals who benefit financially but resent the increased traffic, the parties, the drunkenness, and — if the truth be told — people who don’t look like them.

A couple of years ago a polite young woman from Philly who enrolled in one of my composition classes wrote a narrative about what happened when she walked down the hill from the dorms toward downtown Bloomsburg. As she waited for the light to change on the corner next to the police station on Lightstreet Road, a pickup gunned past and the driver yelled out the window at her, “Nigger! We don’t want your kind here!”

Another student — Reyes her last name — described a similar experience this past spring. While she and her friend Briel walked west through downtown, a car full of young men cruised by the Episcopal Church and Bloomin’ Bagels and approached the young women from behind. Their windows were down, and as they pulled alongside, one of the guys pointed at them, and yelled, “Whores!” The girls were so stunned that at first they didn’t realize this was directed at them.

Times and people have changed since I arrived here from Wyoming nearly eight years ago, and the shouting has gotten louder, more obnoxious, and seemingly more frequent. However, I stay for the kindnesses in the classroom, the solitude at home, and the consolation in the countryside. A few days ago I drove south to Lancaster County and stood inside the crumbling stone wall of Stern Cemetery where distant relatives of a friend in Minnesota were buried. The place had been neglected: tall grass bending under the weight of seed heads, sow thistles standing knee high, and several headstones face down in the dirt or leaning at tired angles. Then, the rhythmic click of hooves on asphalt filtered through the trees and little by little grew louder. Eventually, a sleek chestnut horse with a black mane and harness drawing a buggy rolled past the opening in the wall. A bonneted Amish woman wearing glasses peered out the side of the enclosed carriage, spotted me, and smiled. And this, thankfully, is also Pennsylvania.