Stream of Consciousness

Walking the Susquehanna, September 2005

As part of the funding that the Army Corps of Engineers received to (finally) raise the height of the dikes (now known as the Susquehanna Levee system) after the disastrous Agnes 1972, a network of recreation trails was created, essentially asphalt paths laid down on top of each dike. This trip back to Plymouth to see family I was saved by these trails. The Plymouth Passage, as it is known, runs pretty much the length of the town from just below the old Carey Avenue bridge site to the levee across from the National Guard Armory down on Flat Road. The markers erected at the various entry points into the trail do a great job talking about the history and the system of trails itself but they don't detail mileage so, truth to tell, I never know how far I walked. But most days I did the entire loop and it seemed to take 75 minutes or so. I'm sure there's some well-known algorithm for how many miles per hour that is.

You Can Go Home Again

I'm finally back in western Oregon after nearly three weeks in the Northeast, visiting with family in northeastern Pennsylvania; two nights and three days up in Ithaca, meals with friends, a haircut, and seeing the wreck of Ithaca's small town spirit in the short seven years since we left; two trips to New York to help C. pack up, drive his possessions back to Plymouth to box and ship; then finally a rental car drive with C. to Washington DC to see M. and march in the September 24th anti-war march before flying back to Portland on Sunday.

Nut hatches, chickadees, stellar jays zoom from tree branches to the feeder to the green ceramic bird bath hanging on the stunted pear tree. Organic beef and bean chili simmering since this morning in the crockpot. Flowers on the deck still blooming, The afternoon still sunny and warm and the night, coming more quickly, cooler, half days of light and night, it's definitely autumn.

There were many more moments on this too-long trip than I can count that were grueling, nearly pushing me to the edge of tolerance. Some had to do with family and family relationships, others with the mean-spirited ugliness of visiting in a place that is definitely on more than a slippery slide down, down, down. And all this with the backdrop melodrama of the Katrina disaster in the Gulf Coast, the flooding in New Orleans, the abandonment of its citizens.

At least I've now had my fill of east coast pizza! And read five Kinky Friedman comic detective mysteries. But mostly being back there made me sad. It's a world that's in decline, with too-long waits at traffic light, too many people lured into debt for too-large SUVs and cars. There's not enough silence, there are people who spend too much time meddling in one another's business or watching the world go by on the screen of a T.V. The price of gasoline was a recurring, worrying topic. Home heating oil and natural gas also appeared on the radar as the bodies were recovered from nursing homes, hospitals, ramshackle shacks masquerading as houses in New Orlean's 9th ward.

Overall, I could not wait to get back to Oregon. To get back to green and light rail and space and fewer people and people who care about the words sustainable and organic, a place where flowers grow ten months out of the year. So much early on in the trip became me--as so often happens when I go back to Pennsylvania, to home, ancient invocation of that word--putting my life, what I do, who I am on a kind of hold. By last weekend, in spite of the energy of the anti-war protest, I was ready to get on that plane and BE home.

So here, even with the changes of C.'s move and presence, remains better than anything there. Oregon has become home. It's a good feeling to have this astonishing clarity around that.

Gotta Get My Act Together

An old high school friend sends clippings, reminders of all I'm missing, all I could be covering if I lived back home, in the Valley with a Heart instead of here, the heart of the valley.

I have a semi-novel semi-written. There's definitely something I know I can make out of all that. The new, improved, 49-year-old productive me ought to be able to fashion, at the very least, a chapbook of prose poems out of the material that won that 1993 James Jones award. Think: product. Think: recycling. Think: your talent is far greater than your angst. Think: just do it. Think: what have I lived, done, been through that makes story that would sell, sell, sell? Think: chapbook of poems or prose poems about G. that you can then submit to the endless contests advertised in Poets & Writers that seem to have contests for unpublished poets with unpublished chapbooks. Think -- and remember -- this IS what I do.

Poetry: That Second Eden

I wrote this last year as part of a Corvallis/Benton County Public Library exhibition honoring the late William Stafford on his January birthday. Writers were asked to respond to Stafford's poem, A Valley Like This.

--NF

That Second Eden

I don’t come from a valley like this.

My valley is piles of coal—anthracite waste from the 19th century,
mines with names like Auchincloss, Babylon, and the Harry L.

Plucky birches fight for life on streets where houses slump,
desperate to right themselves by dawn.
Twenty miles of twenty towns crowding both banks
of the Susquehanna:misshapen pearls best viewed from above,
I-81 at night.

In 1962, Lillian’s grandmother, hanging clothes in her back yard,
sank into the hollow sarcophagus of an abandoned shaft.
The hose company sent a fire truck, men in black rubber suits and boots.
Mr. Maltby threw Lillian’s grandmother a twist of rope and yanked.
After the rescue, sipping tea in the parlor,
she told us her fall was stopped by the wide-open arms of God,
flinging her back.

Once upon a time, a forgotten Scottish poet called my valley a second Eden,
where the pen of the Muse is ever busy in singing of its charms.

Back there now, the riffraff (as my mother calls them) have arrived,
refugees from Philadelphia and New York fleeing impossible rents,
and plywood has replaced glass as the medium of choice
for broken windows and doors.

Walking along the river on a sunny November day,
I’m persuaded to believe in the ripple and flow of optimism.
The way it resurrects home, changing it to a place that’s
cheerier, brighter—that second Eden—
where everything is possible, where we all want to go,
the ones who stayed as well as the rest of us in exile,
tugged back to what we can’t ever shake from our systems,
even if we are lucky to linger, for the moment, in

a valley like this.

Essay: Comfort

Combing through my archives of writing today and found this. Thought it would be good to post it here in Anthracite Diaries...It's a brief essay about being in my hometown on September 11, 2001 after being in New York City visiting my adult son the day before, September 10th. I guess everyone has their stories of where they were that day. Maybe writers moreso. Here's one of mine.

--NF

COMFORT

I grew up in Plymouth, a town of 6500 on the Susquehanna River in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The only person in my immediate family who’s ever left, I lived two hours “up the road” in Ithaca, New York for nineteen years before moving across the country to the Pacific Northwest in 1998.

Whenever I go home, I draw the curtain on the person I am the rest of the time in the rest of my life—fretting, churning, striving—and try my best to enter into Plymouth’s small town pace: more 19th century than 21st, a place where everyone seems to know everyone else. Church bells chime the hour every day of the week not just Sundays, a comfort more than an aural reminder that I’m wasting my day, or my life. Few things are considered urgent or done with more than a single motivation or purpose. A walk along the dike is a walk along the dike, not the requisite twenty-minutes-three-times-a-week so you’ll have a healthy heart. The blue plastic tarp roped to a hole in the side of a restaurant damaged by fire ten years before is part of the landscape instead of an eyesore. When I ask why the tarp’s still there, everyone knows the story—how the owner never got the insurance money, if he never fixes it, maybe he’ll get a HUD grant instead.

I was home, visiting family, when four hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and a field in southwestern Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Plymouth is barely 100 miles as the crow flies from New York City, where I’d been until the night before helping my 24-year old college student son set up his new apartment in Staten Island. I’d planned to stay until the 11th but we’d finished our chores ahead of schedule, my son had schoolwork to do, and it was muggy and hot. I said goodbye, knowing I’d see my son the following week on my way home to Oregon, and pointed my rental car toward the Jersey turnpike. I missed rush hour but not the storm that made the next day cool and clear.

That Tuesday morning I woke up early. My parents were out of town, visiting my mother’s sister in southern New Jersey so I had the house to myself. I was having my second cup of coffee when one of my sisters called from work to tell me to turn on the T.V. The first tower had just been hit.
The calm of my life one second before metamorphosed into an urgency of smoke, fire, and dread, seeping out of the television into my parent’s living room, spilling blood on the floor, pouring into the streets of Plymouth like the ’72 Agnes flood. My first call was to my still-sleeping husband in Oregon. Then I dialed my son in New York on my parents’ rotary phone. I dialed over and over, 20, 30, 40 times and heard “all circuits busy” again and again and again. I finally got through to my son’s girlfriend and left a message with her before all lines into the city went dead.

My other sister had the day off. She and her four year old son drove over from where they live, across the river in south Wilkes-Barre. They picked up tuna hoagies from Red’s Subs and we ate lunch soldered to the news. The bottom edge of every local station crawled with emergency information: I-80 and I-81 closed to all traffic; the whereabouts of the Martz Bus commuters who left Public Square every weekday before dawn for Wall Street; classes at the community college cancelled, the YMCA day care letting out early, no evening novenas for the St. Ignatius Ladies Sodality. My nephew played with the only toy he could find in my parents’ house: a set of wooden blocks that used to belong to my son. He built a tower out of the blue squares and orange rectangles, balanced an unstable red arch on top, then sat back and waited for blocks to fall.

Eventually my sister left and I took a break from the relentlessness of the news on T.V. I got in my rental car, the idea being to fill the gas tank just in case I had to drive somewhere in the next day or two. But where? To New York City to rescue my son, stranded now by a moat of closed bridges and roads? The 2400 miles back to Oregon, my speedy getaway from the crazy, targeted East?
The few stores still in business on Plymouth’s Main Street had closed for the day, including the state-run store that sells liquor and wine. I got gas and kept driving, through town and south down US Route 11. Piles of wasted coal and dirt bike trails filled the land between the highway and the river. I passed a front lawn used car lot, the National Guard Armory built on the site where anthracite was first mined in 1807, the boarded-up Stoney’s Tavern, a repair shop called Mister Brakes.

Right before the junction with PA 29, I decided to turn around. I pulled off the road at the spot where a blue and gold Pennsylvania historical marker commemorating the Avondale Mine disaster had been planted in the coal and ash that serves as road shoulder in that part of the world. Even though the marker was easy to read from the front seat of the car, I got out anyway.
“ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1869, A FIRE BROKE OUT AT THE NEARBY AVONDALE COLLIERY,
TRAPPING THE MINERS. THE EVENTUAL DEATH TOLL WAS 110. THIS INCLUDED FIVE
BOYS BETWEEN THE AGES OF TWELVE AND SEVENTEEN, AND TWO VOLUNTEERS WHO WERE
SUFFOCATED WHILE ATTEMPTING RESCUE. AS A RESULT OF THIS DISASTER,
PENNSYLVANIA’S GENERAL ASSEMBLY ENACTED LEGISLATION IN 1870 WHICH WAS
DESIGNED TO ENFORCE GREATER SAFETY IN THE INDUSTRY.”

What the marker didn’t say—what I knew from research for a novel I was once writing—was that the Avondale fire was the first and only time Plymouth made the international news. Avondale was considered the anthracite industry’s first major disaster. It had been the first day back to work for the miners after a long, bitterly feuded strike. Headlines claimed that the civilized world woke up that morning and was shocked by news of the conflagration. There was public outrage at the danger the miners had been put in by the coal breaker’s faulty design. Harper’s published a long article complete with lithographed renderings of the grisly scene. People from all over the world sent money to the relief fund for victims’ families, over $150,000. I think someone even wrote a song to memorialize the catastrophic event.

Amazing as it seems, they recovered all the bodies. Passageways were flooded and many of the openings to the undamaged chambers in the mine’s convoluted maze were blocked by fallen timber and smoldering debris. When rescuers could finally descend the shaft, they found the bodies of old men with young boys by their feet, nesting like lambs, and others, heads bent, their hands clasped, the tips of their fingers black. One newspaper told how two miners, David Williams and his cousin Eddie, looked like they were boxing. They were brought to the surface as they’d been found, stiff, with both arms raised and fists clenched, asphyxiated while they swung at the air.
I stood in front of the historical marker, a September day 132 years later, and stared at the words “Avondale Hill” painted in hasty, yellow letters on a cement wall across the highway. Below the words, a white arrow pointed in the direction of a one-lane road that snaked up to what surely was the old breaker site.

I thought about my son in New York, my stepdaughter who’d just moved to D.C., my parents driving back from New Jersey hurtling toward shut down roads. I thought about David and Eddie Williams, wondered if their mothers saw when they lifted their bodies out of the shaft. And I thought about what I’d seen on television earlier in the day, footage—captured unexpectedly and shown only once—of people leaping from the Trade Center windows, their bodies falling, weighted feathers, and how more than a few were two people holding hands.
I got back into the car, pulled into the right lane, and followed the arrow, a sharp, angled left. The sun was high in the sky when I opened the car door and tiptoed into a flat, grassy field on the top of Avondale Hill. There were many hours of church bells to go before that day would reach its end.

I Come From...

I come from...

A small town in the anthracite coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania (the northern edge of Appalachia), a place few people leave—three, four generations in the same town, family members on the same street, even next door—and only poor people move to.

A Welsh grandmother who baked cookies on a black cast iron griddle and made tiny Jackie Kennedy suits for my 1959 Barbie with the platinum bubble cut and Irish great-grandparents who fled County Mayo to run a pub in London where my Irish grandmother was born.

One grandfather who was a stone mason and the other (who died before I was born) was a coal miner and a drunk. A grandmother who worked as a switchboard operator for a utility company after her husband, the drunken coal-miner, died.

Relatives who lived together in a single-family house—at one time, my grandmother and her husband and children, her mother, her spinster sister, her retarded brother, relatives who still had outhouses in the 1970s.

A father who was spared a Catholic upbringing when his mother, my grandmother, insisted he and my aunt attend her church and a mother who never learned to ride a bike, hates to use public bathrooms, and refuses to drive a car. Parents who met in church and married at the ages of 21 and 19.

A family where everyone talks at the same time during holiday dinner.

Culm banks, mine fires, underground tunnels, cave-ins.

The smell of sulfur and the headache you got because of coal burning round-the-clock in the furnace, October until May.

Coal ashes used to break up ice on sidewalks, give car tires traction in the snow.

Rag rugs, pulley clotheslines, clothes sewn at home and of course handed down.

The Susquehanna River, too polluted to fish or swim.

Easter bonnets and velvet Christmas dresses, wrist-length gloves that smothered each finger, fur muffs, black patent leather shoes with slippery soles and straps.

Piano lessons at Wyoming Seminary School of Music and recitals with the Easter bonnets and white gloves.

Reading books as escape from family fighting and the ever-present television—Ed Sullivan, Disney and the Hallmark Hall of Fame, Dark Shadows and the Dialing for Dollars movie after school.

Christian summer camp in the Endless Mountains where my first kiss was a black boy from Philadelphia who taught me to dance the Bump.

A flood the summer before my senior year that washed away holiday ornaments, family photos, all our childhood board games because we forgot to take them upstairs.

Transformation thanks to a college in hill-free Ohio where I fell in with vegetarians and organic farmers, with pot heads and ne’er do wells, many of whom had trust fund safety nets.

Love with a boy who looked like a girl and couldn’t love me back until eighteen years later because way back then he had decided he could only love boys.

Dropping out of college to trail the boy who preferred boys.

Living like a character and as if life were a novel —lost weekends, wild, howling-at-the-moon nights, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Unplanned pregnancy and then marriage to the father and having a baby—born the month I was supposed to graduate college, then divorce two years later, at 24.

Welfare and food stamps, WIC vouchers and rusted-out cars that barely work, scholarships and loans to finish college, welfare and the Ivy League, in Ithaca, New York.

Cornell University where close to twenty yeras I worked at jobs I mostly hated and where I learned to have nothing but disdain for incompetence, bureaucracy and overpaid self-promoting nincompoops.

The Coast Range woods of western Oregon where I live below the dominant culture's radar, blessed by liberation from the 9 to 5. Where I remain, as always, motivated by the desire to live an authentic and compassionate life.