Misspent Youth #3: Race to the Bottom

Though my favorite toys as a child were action figures I did have my share of cars. Matchbox cars and Hot Wheels primarily. They were relatively cheap, so I’m sure they were Mom’s default when I wanted something. But there were a lot of them. I had the Hot Wheels track with the loop and the jump ramp that I would stretch from the kitchen table out into the living room. I don’t have any of these left and have no idea what happened to them.

There was one toy car that stands out more because I do remember what happened to it. It wasn’t one of the small cars, but a larger one called an SSP Racer. SSP stood for Super Sonic Power. Each car had a large wheel in the center of its body. You would insert the ‟t-stick” and then pull, making the wheel spin and create sound, then let it go.

Mine was called the Laker Special. It was bright orange and I thought it was the coolest model they made. The others all looked like cars. The Laker Special looked like a Sci Fi rocket car. When it raced along the floor it looked like it was floating slightly above the ground. I have often thought that Luke’s landspeeder in Star Wars was influenced by this.

Living in the country I didn’t have lot of places where I could really take advantage of the full Super Sonic Power. The space in my house wasn’t really big enough for it to play out it’s full potential. There were no sidewalks, and even with very little traffic back then playing in the road was a no-no. But, I took it outside and made the best of it.

One day after a hard rain I was in a nearby wooded lot. Crews from the telephone company had been working in the area, digging holes to bury the phone lines that up to that point had been stretched between poles. It was an overall upgrade to the system at the time. There was a large hole in the ground, filled with muddy water. That’s when inspiration hit. I yanked the t-stick and put the car in the water. Just as I thought, the spinning wheel revved and sprayed filthy water everywhere, soaking me in an instant.

Pretty cool.

The Laker Special immediately sank out of sight into the brown mud. The hole was a lot deeper than I thought it would be. I sank my arm into it, but couldn’t reach the bottom. I got a shovel from our garage and poked around with it, but no matter what I did I couldn’t find my racer. I didn’t tell my Mom because I think I was afraid of getting in trouble for losing this slightly more expensive toy. Within a day or two the work crews were back and filled in the hole. Unlike the happy ending of my previous story about Geronimo, the Laker Special was lost forever.

To this day I can go to that spot. Somewhere, six feet or so under the ground, like an ancient artifact of the past, my SSP sleeps.

Libraries

I've been thinking about libraries recently, and how grateful I am that they exist. Reading and books are such a major part of my life that I simply can't imagine a world where they weren't readily available.

I grew up in the country. The grade schools I went to in first through third grade (in Nineveh and Rogersville, PA respectively), were small community schools. In Nineveh there were only three classrooms and three teachers for six grades. First and second grade kids shared a room and a teacher, as did third and fourth, and fifth and sixth. Neither of these two schools were big enough for an actual library. One day a week the Bookmobile would show up. This was the traveling library for the entire school district and I assume it spent the rest of the week at other grade schools. It was essentially a large motor home lined with bookshelves and books.

The librarian was a wonderful woman by the name of Mary Berryman. She was small built, with gray hair, catseye glasses, and a sweater held on by clasps. I know how amazingly cliché this description sounds, but it is the truth. When I was six I thought she was old, but she continued as the district grade school librarian well past the time I graduated college, so my perceptions are a little skewed.

As I've said elsewhere on this blog, I learned to read, mostly from comic books, well before I began first grade. Mom is an avid reader and instilled her love of books in me very early. Library day was my favorite day of the week.

I'm not exactly sure of the chronology of this, but I also remember the Library came to our community during the summer months as well, for a summer reading program. It's possible I went to the Bookmobile before I actually started school. Mom tells me that once when she took me I chose the books I wanted and when I took them to check out Mrs. Berryman asked my Mom if they weren't a little too advanced for me. Mom said they were what I wanted, and if they were too advanced, well then, there was something for me to learn from them. She continues the story that when we returned the books I couldn't wait to tell Mrs. Berryman all about them.

Mrs. Berryman guided thousands of students through the hallowed shelves of her library over the years, but I think it's accurate to say I was one of her favorite kids. Mom instilled my love of books. Mrs. Berryman and the school library facilitated my access to them in a way my family could never have afforded. I was voracious (still am).

Oddly enough, the first three real books (chapter books instead of stuff written primarily for kids), did not come from the library. Mom bought me a copy of the Howard Pyle version of The Adventures of Robin Hood. I inherited copies of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn from my older brother. I had read all of these by the time I finished third grade.

By the time I entered fourth grade the school district had built a brand new school building in Graysville, PA and consolidated several of the smaller grade schools in this new location. Mrs. Berryman finally had a permanent home for her library, and for the first time I had access to one every day. I couldn't begin to tell you the number of books I read there.

In addition to the library we were periodically given a catalog from Scholastic (or the 1970's equivalent) that we could order books from. I remember getting several in this fashion, including my first copy of All In Color For A Dime, a collection of essays about comics of the Golden Age. This was probably my first, conscious knowledge of comic book history, and definitely my first exposure to the concept of comics scholarship (just as an aside... I loaned my copy of this to the Chatham student I'm advising this semester because one of the essays ties in specifically with the topic she is writing about for her thesis.)

My original copy, with this cover, is long gone.
A revised edition came out a few years ago.

In seventh grade I went to the West Greene High School building (there was no separate middle school then; grades seven through twelve all wandered the same halls and used the same facilities). Of course I very quickly made myself at home in the library there and became a very familiar face to the new librarian, Mrs. Hildreth. The books housed there were aimed at an older audience of course.

During my teen years, in addition to the books I read from the library, I began to buy a lot of cheap paperbacks: Westerns, spy novels, and men's adventure stories with guns and girls. They were the kind of books that were probably inappropriate for my age and certainly not available at the school library. Eventually I discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy and was somewhat redeemed.

During my last year in high school there was a day when the seniors went to work as an assistant with one of the grade school teachers and help with their classes. I couldn't think of anyone back at Graysville I would rather spend the day with than Mrs. Berryman. She proudly introduced me to her classes as someone she was proud of and who had a bright future, because as she told them, I had always read books.

Mary Berryman did eventually retire and lived a long life. She's gone now but shines in my memory as the absolute Platonic ideal of a Librarian.

During college and grad school I had access to libraries of course. I used them primarily for research and class projects, but there was always the reading for pleasure aspect of it. I read a lot of Hesse, Henry Miller, Proust, and Kerouac while at Edinboro.

Somehow though, once I was out of school, I simply didn't go to a library very frequently. I still read, but I was buying most of my material by that time. I felt like I needed to own everything I read. One of my high school teachers, Will Hinerman (more on him in another post), had a large library of books in his home. There were always books around when I was growing up, but I don't think the idea of a personal library ever crossed my mind until I saw his. It became a goal. To supplement the books I bought at the big chain stores and local book stores I haunted used book stores and flea markets. I suppose I have a little bit of the hoarder in me.

So over time I accumulated a lot of books, a fact that was brought home to me a couple of years ago when, for the first time in many years, I needed to move them.

I started going back to the library regularly when I started working in Oakland. The main branch of the Carnegie Library is around the corner from my store. Over time I have realized I don't need to own everything I read (I would already be out of room in my house if that were the case). I'm there frequently and take advantage of many of their services. I have come to know many of the librarians there, and they are all exemplars of the Berryman credo.

There are two people in my life who I consider close, dear friends who are librarians, one at the Carnegie and one at a university library far away. One of them tells me that every day in the stacks she hears the books sing to her and feels it is a sacred duty to take care of them. The other one refers to the library as a “Temple for the Secular Soul.” I love that they both use the language of the sacred to refer to what they do.

For most of recorded history the ability to read was reserved to a special few. It was one of the things only the very privileged ever learned. The idea of archiving the collected knowledge of the world, its history and its stories, is one of the greatest ideas in our history. Today, when the skill of reading is taught to everyone, I fear it is all too often taken for granted. The ability to read was kept from the lower classes, slaves specifically, in an effort to keep people uninformed and more easily controlled. Ideas can be dangerous things, especially to the status quo. Today, when information is at our fingertips, when the wisdom of the ages is readily available, far too many people choose to remain willfully illiterate. Books are gateways to other worlds, to other ways of thinking, to knowledge and wisdom, to entertainment and enlightenment and empowerment.

In a recent conversation with one of my librarian friends she told me that someone had accused her of reading too much. My immediate response was to say that there's no such thing as reading too much. This was based on my own belief that there are far more books I want to read than I will ever be able to read in my lifetime. After giving it some more thought I do want to amend my initial kneejerk reaction. It is possible to read too much if you never actually go out and have a life as well. Your life is your story; you are writing your own book every day. It should be filled with something other than reading. But reading provides guideposts and maps for the kind of life you want to live.

In spite of the pages I devour, I don't think I live to read.

I read to live.

Fountain of Youth

I just got off the phone with Mom. She called to tell me that our little backwoods hollow in Greene County was swarming with work crews who are widening the road there to allow access for the giant trucks that travel to and from the Bailey Mine and all of the coal-mining, gas-drilling, and other environment-destroying folderol that goes with it. It's the latest in a long string of events that makes it more and more difficult to go home.

I grew up in Union Valley, the middle of nowhere in the northwest corner of Greene County. It's right on the other side of Time (the actual name of a small village you won't find on any current maps, though we old-timers still call it Dogtown). Incredibly rural. My family had 70 to 80 acres of land, mostly woods. We've been in that valley since the 1800's. The adjoining property was 90 acres. Behind my house there was a tract of land we called the CharMar Ranch (named after the original owners, I presume, and I could probably find out pretty easily). This was roughly 3000 acres of farmland, used mostly for cattle. It was covered in woods and meadows and streams. This was essentially my back yard and I grew up like Robin Hood. By the time I was 7 I was allowed to traipse all over this area on my own (much to the chagrin f some other kids parents when they were sure I had gotten everyone lost on my seventh birthday... but that's another story).

Sometime in the 80's this land was bought by Consol and they opened the Bailey Mine. Things began to change immediately. It is a very prosperous mine, and the first thing that needed to happen to tap its resources was train tracks that allowed them to haul the coal out. They built a railroad right through the middle of some of my very favorite places on the planet. Now, luckily, I was away at grad school at the time, so I missed most of the day-to-day work that went into changing the landscape. But every time I came home for a visit more and more of my childhood lay buried under tons of dirt and rock. The lower end of three very specific small hollows had to be filled in order to lay the tracks. Few people who live in the area now could even name the hollows but they're still in my memory: Limestone Hollow, Coal Bank, and The Church Hollow.

I spent time in the woods in all of these, but it was the loss of Church Hollow that pained me the most. The Union Valley Methodist Church stood at the mouth of the hollow, and was, pretty much, in my back yard. This was the church I grew up in. It was built in 1879.

Union Valley Methodist Church circa 1929

I don't know if there is any paperwork to back this up or not, and there certainly isn't anyone left alive to know for sure, but I was told by my grandmother that the land the church stood on was donated by my great grandfather, Lon Wise.

Lon and Maggie Wise

There are so many memories associated with Church Hollow I can't possibly recount them all here. Wading and playing in the small stream that ran through it. Playing with my Johnny West Marx action figures at the rock outcropping that hung over the stream. My Mom stepping on a thorn when I was 5 or 6 and sending me on my own to get help from the neighbor lady, Dora Clutter. Shooting my first (and last) deer there and discovering that in spite of my upbringing I simply wasn't a hunter. Hanging out with friends that one time when we were just old enough to be having different thoughts about the girls with us without really realizing why.

There was one spot, a bare rock face in the hillside where natural spring water oozed out, trickled and then fell onto a flat rock surface. Thousands of years of dripping had formed a natural bowl-shaped depression where the water gathered. Over the fall and winter it would fill with dirt and leaves. Every spring I would clean it out and keep it clear all summer long. It was my job. The water was clean and cold and completely drinkable.

The railroad filled the mouth of Church Hollow, burying the rock outcropping and the small cove where Mom stepped on the thorn. There is a large culvert pipe that passes through the mound of dirt, allowing the stream to run through. It's dark and claustrophobic and just big enough for a person to walk through if you don't mind snakes and getting your feet wet. If you're hardy enough you can also scale the mound, cross the tracks and drop into the upper part of the Hollow. I did this a few times, just to see, though I suppose it was technically trespassing (that's still a hard concept for me to swallow with a place that was always open to me in the past).

The upper part of the hollow, at that time, was pretty much the same as it always had been. On every one of my few trips I cleaned out the natural water bowl and drank.

I haven't been back in over a decade. I'm told that the hollow is now filled with the run-off and unusable materials that have been pulled out of the ground; slate and shale and dirt. I don't want to see it. It would probably kill me to drink the water now. Most of the natural wells that people have used there for decades have been spoiled. The actual shape of the hillside and the horizon has been changed as piles of waste material have been stacked and shaped as coal continues to pour out of the earth. Now, they have started drilling for natural gas.

This isn't entirely new. Most of the eastern half of Greene County has been mined for decades. My grandfather (maternal, this time) made his living tending natural gas wells near our home. I don't want this to turn into an environmental or political rant. There's a ton of that out there if you're interested in the details. It brings money into the county, but destroys the community and the environment. It creates jobs at the expense of history. I'm simply not well-informed enough to debate the issue in any way other than my own emotional response to it.

Consol is buying out every home and farm they can. People who have lived there for years are making more money off their property than they ever dreamed of, at least it seems that way until the reality of moving and buying something else sets in. I have cousins who are heartbroken. They planned on spending their lives on the tracts of land their parents and grandparents lived on. It was a dream that they never really questioned. Now the future they envisioned is gone, and once they leave, the very land that holds their memories will be changed as well.

I realized a long time ago I would never live there again. As much as I love my childhood home my current life is elsewhere. For whatever reasons that area simply doesn't offer what I need out of life. That's not a judgement on those who have stayed behind, just a recognition of my own truth. I will miss the opportunity to “go home” and walk the land that holds my family's history, but I'm not losing the same things they are.

And I see this as a natural progression that has happened before. We weren't the first people to live in the Valley. On the Clutter farm next door there was one garden on a hill that, every time it was plowed, would turn up handfuls of arrowheads. There are maybe a dozen people left who know or remember this. The arrowheads were all that was left of other peoples lives and histories there. No one knows their stories at all, and I'm sure they spent more generations there than my family has.

So the wheel turns and history moves inexorably forward. Real life becomes memory and memory becomes story.

Keep telling your stories.