Our drive up to the Creek has lost some of its magic.
It used to be that we’d start feeling a kind of lift when we passed the Turkey Hill on the Wertzville Road. The big highways, I-83 North, PA-581, and I-81 South, were behind us, as was the last traffic light between us and our favorite spot on earth.
Blue Mountain was now our close companion. We’d climb up to Sterrett’s Gap stealing glances at the valley to the left, feeling more like a small plane than a loaded car.
As we rolled down toward Shermans Dale, there’d be a feeling that we were traveling backwards in time. We’d cross Shermans Creek, opining on the water level. Would this be a good weekend for kayaking?
The roads would get smaller and smaller. Soon we’d be driving along the low bank of the creek, hemmed in on the right by rocky cliffs famous for timber rattlers.
We’d take Warm Springs Road–maybe not the fastest route, but certainly the most scenic. The parking lot at the Warm Springs Lodge would tell the story of a wedding, family reunion, or just another quiet weekend.
Then the road would take a sharp right turn, opening onto our own little corner of Perry County. We’d pass the Singleton’s dairy farm, slowing to wave at one of the Singletons hard at work on the land. The stubby steeple of St. Peter’s Church would be visible by now. We’d take a left onto St. Peter’s Church Road, slowing again, hoping to see our neighbors Dan and Elizabeth out in their yard with the dogs.
Then we knew we were practically home.
Since Dan was killed a few weeks ago, the drive has been very different. We no longer feel the same release when we turn off PA-850. We pass the house on Warm Springs Road where Dan was shot and find ourselves staring at the driveway, looking for some last sign of him.
When we turn onto St. Peters Church Road, we know he won’t be waving back at us from the excavation in front of his house.
Soon, the house will be empty, the yard empty of those yippy Shiba Inus.
Everything’s different now.
Some of you may have read the appreciation I wrote of Dan in these pages. You may already know something of the friend we lost.
But we’ve lost something else, too. The violent circumstance of Dan’s death has taken away one of our most cherished illusions: that when we leave Baltimore and make our way up to Perry County, we’re traveling to a simpler, kinder place.
Sitting on the porch of a summer evening, looking out at the shimmering blue hills, it’s hard to imagine anyone being moved to murderous rage. But in the four years we’ve been on St. Peters Church Road, there have been two violent crimes in the neighborhood, Dan’s killing, of course, and a vicious stabbing, also on Warm Springs Road.
Which is two more violent crimes than we’ve experienced down in Baltimore.
I know that the peace which seems to radiate from St. Peter’s Church is an illusion. A simple glance at the State Police crime log suffices to burst that bubble. Beatings, terroristic threats, sexual assaults. Perry County has it all, although in much smaller doses than a big city.
Violence along Shermans Creek isn’t new. A quick skim through H.H. Hain’s History of Perry County reveals the murderous violence that the early settlers endured—and perpetrated—in their struggle to wrest the land from Native Americans.
Ours is a violent land. We are the stewards of the most powerful military in the history of the world. We love our gangsters; we export stories of Mafiosi. Our games are violent. Most of the world is content to watch men race up and down a field, pushing a leather ball with their feet. But we need to see our athletes tackle each other with bone-crunching ferocity.
One of my favorite Americans, Mark Twain, took up this question. His masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, examines American violence—and the pastoral retreat from it—through many different prisms. Huck’s abusive father represents a cultural inheritance that dates all the way back to the early chapters of Genesis. The games that Huck and his friends play recapitulate the deadly attacks of pirates and brigands.
The thrust of the book is the curse of slavery, the near-destruction of an entire race, which continues to stain the fabric of our society to this day.
With my first book, Finn: a novel, a modern telling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I aimed to explore Twain’s epic themes in the America I knew. Rather than set the action of the story on the Mississippi River, which divided civilization from wilderness back in Twain’s day, I set it between suburb and inner city.
I asked myself: what could be more violent than an inner city?
Apparently, the peaceful byways of a rural county.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 03 September 2009
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
