Old Philadelphia Pike

On a recent walk through the northern end of Lancaster with Andy, we came upon the overgrown collection of planks and pathways that make up the stockyards. I couldn’t believe I had never before noticed these 20-some acres of corrals and holding pens and auction arenas—then again, it was covered with vines, ailanthus peeping out from between gaps in fences and roofs. It looked like any blighted area. Andy told me it had operated until 2000—quite late in terms of American stockyards.

The next day I went to the library and checked out a history amusingly entitled “Livestock Hotels.” I was kind of surprised (and a little repulsed) by how fascinated I had suddenly become with stockyards. Briefly: stockyards (and the accompanying meat-packing plants) developed in tandem with railroads, in many cases dictating the paths of future lines by the business they promised (and delivered, for quite some time) to bring in terms of livestock shipping. This history is pretty interesting and claims responsibility for the growth of a lot of cities in the middle west, such as Kansas City and Fort Worth—cities that have been able to focus on industrial development precisely because of their proximity to railroads.

Lancaster’s stockyards, however (in some sort of rag-tag earthen road kind of way), predated the railroads by nearly 100 years. They connected the countryside to the city, providing a steady flow of creatures for consumption back to Philadelphia. Other services built up around the stockyards and the roads became more established. In fact, the first turnpike in the country was from Philadelphia to Lancaster (started I think in the 1790s). The book puts it something like this: every soul leaving or on its way to the city first made a stop in Lancaster.

It’s always strange for me to think about Lancaster’s role in American history. It falls into the vast category of city that was established because of the resources it offered: rich soils and river access along the Conestoga and Susquehanna. We are still cashing in on those rich soils today—and in fact, Lancaster County ranks #1 in terms of the percentage of its land that is permanently preserved. However, what keeps Lancaster going has become more complex. It’s not the yields from farmland and barnyards that keep people coming here—it’s the opportunity to see the working farms, i.e. this form of pastoral tourism. Like, whoa, people really grow food.

Anyway, that’s a tangent I’ll touch on later. What I wanted to get at was the statement that Lancaster was an essential stop for the city-goer. Reading something like that now struck me as ridiculous: do people heading west really need to stop here on their way? What would they get? Shoo-fly pie and root beer to last through the winter? Bonnets and muck boots for when it gets rainy? Weird agro-tourism (corn maze!) and rural-lifestyle tourism (buggy rides!) have grown up around the real agriculture industry and real rural lifestyles, so it’s hard for me to imagine anyone getting something essential out of that experience.

Fact: all of my friends live in or beside cities at least ten times the size of Lancaster, and more than a few times I have housed some of them for weekends or amidst road trips or as a final stop before moving back to the magnetic New York. And it occurred to me that maybe Lancaster could have something essential to the city-goer, given that perhaps 90% of my close friends from college have come to visit. In fact, last weekend featured five wonderful friends from Philadelphia and New York.

I would venture too that everyone (including these friends and those before them) has had a decent time—not just because we are friends (old friends even) together, but because Lancaster is kind of a wacky experience, lacking in both small town and big city characteristics and instead exceeding in...something. It was proven this weekend that an entire trip can be based on freshly made snack foods and swimming in the famous Conestoga, for example. I don’t know. Would anyone care to claim that this is not essential?

Junk Yard Sale

Memorial Day is exciting to me for primarily one reason: the yard sale. I’m sure it stems partially from my passion for reuse and this weird peasant ancestry that makes me stockpile empty glass jars and fabric scraps in my basement, etc. But I’m also pretty nosy, and I get creepy amounts of pleasure from rooting through other people’s cast-offs. When I used to stay with my grandmother in the summertime we would take walks on the evenings before trash day, and we always came home with a lamp or a footstool or something. The trash-picking didn’t have to do so much with poverty, but rather with preservation: a perfectly good kitchen table should not end up at the dump. So, thanks to my grandmother (and my grandfather, who often took me to the junk yard) I’ve inherited a disproportionate amount of Depression Era philosophies.

Living in a relatively small space has tempered my hoarding instinct a bit, though it has not done much to lessen my neighborly curiosity. So Memorial Day weekend is like going on a museum tour, where each stop contains the edited outcasts from each family’s home. And while I would have some interest in seeing the inside of the homes all put together and finalized-like, that’s just too direct for me. I guess I prefer to analyze clues and make up my own stories.

Lucky for me, Landisville, PA hosts a yearly flea market/community yard sale that is extremely worthwhile, both in terms of quantity and quality of junk to sort through. It features the expected flea market fare: Pyrex dishes, baseball cards, tea tins, flour sacks, etc. And while I’m not interested in buying any of those things, I do enjoy the parade of Americana; all the stuff that people want to obtain to give their houses some kind of character. The more local vendors will have old photo albums and quilt remnants, signage from now-abandoned factories—generally, things that make me feel like the present is a rather flimsy time period. I mean, I doubt anyone will be able to make any kind of use of my clothes 50 years from now. And will there ever be some kind of museum of early internet advertisements? Will graphic designers ever be in the same occupational category as tinsmiths? I guess my really grandiose question here is: how will the present be used in the future? The more technological, the more virtual or whatever, the less I’ll be able to dig through a box of it in someone’s front yard.

Regardless of whatever crisis/non-crisis we might be approaching, Lancaster County’s enthusiasm for the yard sale does not yet seem to be waning. People were eating hotdogs and hamburgers from the concession stand (there was a concession stand) at 9am. Zillions of cars parked in orderly fashion under the direction of bright-green-t-shirted men. Kids being pulled around in red wagons eating ice cream. I’m not sure what all these folks were buying, if anything (I bought some old woman’s hand-woven rug), but at least they were out there—some even with expressions of total ecstasy. See below.

This is Really My Job

I’ve started working on this project to bring tree seedlings and environmental education packets to Amish schoolchildren. A lot of the background work is already done—the meetings with the Amish Bishops, the Old Order Book Society and the school boards. Now I step in to work with the teachers. I have a partner for this task: her name is Sarah Fisher (she’s Amish). Today was the first day we visited teachers together.

Amish schoolteachers are women, often young and perhaps always unmarried, and therefore still live with their parents. When they get married, which they almost always do, they stop teaching in order to care for their own children. Our plan was to meet with them at home in the evening before supper. I guess there’s an interest, on the teacher’s end, in knowing that her parents know about and approve of her decisions. In some cases it doesn’t seem to matter, but in others it does.

The complicated thing about these visits is that there’s really no way to warn anyone that we’re coming. So we pull up in my car, set the dogs a-barking and give the screen door a few knocks. Most of the families know Sarah, so she’ll ask if the woman we’re looking for is home. We’re invited in and she comes to us and I explain why we’re there. The story is that we have a grant to give trees and information packets to each student. Hopefully the trees will get planted and the packets won’t get thrown away. A few years ago (before my time), this same project happened in another county and the kids were really excited. A lot of families asked for more trees. It's generally adorable.

The first teacher we see is Mattie Beiler, and she's completely not what I expected. She is nearly 50 years old and boards during the week with extended family who live next to her school. She’s interested in the project and has heard about it from her cousin, Henry, who helped write out the tree planting instructions in Pennsylvania Dutch for the youngest students who often don’t speak English yet. (The “funny” thing about that—which definitely needs explaining—is that PA Dutch is only a spoken language.) She talks about how this is her last year as a schoolteacher and how someone had said to her, “You’ve taught school for 30 years! Do you even know how to do anything else?” Then Mattie said, with an appreciable amount of sarcasm, “I told her I figured I should first learn how to boil water.” It takes me a rather long moment to understand that she’s definitely joking. She also has two cockatoos that make a tremendous amount of noise during our conversation.

Next we drive to Rachel Fisher’s house. She’s not home yet and we sit in my car and wait for her. It’s gotten suddenly cold and we talk about the rain. Her driver pulls in and Rachel unloads her things from the truck. A few minutes later, she walks over to see us. She’s concerned her school board will want to approve the project before she agrees to it. I drop the packets and chase after them in the wind. Yes, it’s suddenly much colder.

Our last stop is Priscilla Fisher’s. We knock on her door and are greeted by her father. Sarah asks for Priscilla, but her father doesn’t budge. Instead he stares at me with what I interpret to be both amusement and disapproval, and I immediately feel completely awful. Only a few times in my life has anyone ever made me feel like I spell t-r-o-u-b-l-e, and regardless of whether or not it’s true, my first response is to side temporarily with the accuser until I sort myself out. So I stand there speechless and Sarah’s face turns red as she works through some more explanations. It also becomes clear that we’ve interrupted their supper. My god, I’m a thoughtless home-wrecker.

Eventually he leaves to fetch his daughter. She comes to meet us, her mouth full of food, and Sarah starts talking as she chews and swallows. Priscilla is brown-haired, brown-eyed and completely lovely. We ask her how many students does she have and when can we drop off the trees, and I notice that she has this crazy way of answering questions that somehow seems to imply that there is a much greater meaning to the words she’s saying. She says, “I have 34 students,” and it doesn’t quite seem like that’s the end of it. I want to say, “Priscilla, please tell me what it’s like for you to have 34 students.” What is that? Intrigue I guess. All I can think for the rest of the time we’re there is: this girl is going to get married; she will not be a schoolteacher living with her sister when she’s 50. A few more minutes with her and I might have considered asking for her hand. The Fishers of Old Forge Road: a truly powerful force in their world of nonverbal communication.

Sarah and I will visit the rest of the teachers next week, and we’ll also take the first round of trees to the schoolhouses. I can’t believe that the most powerful take-home message of this experience so far was how to be marriageable. I'll probably leave that out of my final report to the Department of Environmental Protection.

Basket Bingo

I recently learned about something essential to Lancaster County culture that I've managed to miss for the last 25 years: Basket Bingo. Basket Bingos are fundraisers where attendees pay for entrance and a set number bingo cards—and they are apparently some of the wildest times to be had. Businesses or individuals sponsor baskets, which are then filled with donated items, yielding the "cleaning supplies basket," "crafter's basket," "snacks basket," etc. Each round of bingo is played with a particular basket as the prize. And people love this.

Crucial to their success are the Longaberger brand baskets, which some people really go bananas for around here. Wikipedia explains that Longaberger baskets became popular in the '80s and '90s "concurrent with 'country' decorating trends." Longaberger baskets are sold at parties, much like Tupperware or Avon products: a person offers to host a basket party and invites friends and neighbors, a sales representative shows up with some inventory and then people buy it.I'm not completely sure what the selling point is for a basket; I guess it's basically the "it" accessory of home decor.* Also probably related to their popularity is the basket party itself. What helped fuel the success of the Tupperware party in the '50s (era of widespread house-wifery) was the opportunity for women to get together with friends outside their homes. A surprising number of women in this area maintain the “full time mom” position and certainly don't “party,” and so maybe these gatherings still thrive because they offer an opportunity for friends to get together, drop $50 on a napkin holder, and basically go a little wild.

But back to the bingo. The particular event I was told of drew about 350 people on a Sunday in a snowstorm. Tickets were $15 and bought entrance to the event plus 20 bingo cards (coinciding with 20 prize baskets). Additional tickets were sold at $1 per, and there was chicken BBQ (a total draw) and donated desserts. The whole thing raised almost $10,000. Enormous! That’s about $30 per person for some small games of chance, a possibility of winning some fashionable baskets, BBQ chicken and some homemade chocolate chip cookies—plus the opportunity to experience the fervor. I think I just convinced myself that Basket Bingo is awesome.

Take that, black tie.


*When I was little my mom went to a basket party. She came home and announced, “I bought one.” She put it in just about every corner of the house in an effort to get enthused about her pseudo accomplishment of owning the thing. Finally she gave in to the fact that she didn’t really like it and gave it away.**

**There’s one thing that gets me unabashedly excited about Longaberger baskets, which is the fact that their headquarters in Ohio is shaped like a giant basket, handles and all.

To the Garden I Go

This is pretty much what I want to do, moreso than anything else: to climb to the top of something and to peer at everything below me. Imagine a hawk in a fencerow watching rabbit holes. I know it's not the most social thing I could do, but I don't so much mean for it to be exclusive. It just tends to be that way. I mean, are there ever two hawks and one rabbit in a clumsy three-way scramble? There is territory to preserve.

And so here is my oldest perch, Mount Eden. In some way I feel I should leave a mark on my old territory in hopes of understanding quite how to leave it behind. I realize this is maybe more cerebral than anything a real hunter would endeavor to do, so there goes my elegant raptor allusions. I'm more of a cultivator anyway, getting at all the stuff that happens with a bunch of garden tools. Growing it up into something sensible and useful. But, um, the fencerow can stay. Every good garden's got to have a windbreak after all.