The Drive Home, Part IV: The Scab

In the late 1750s, British General John Forbes led an expedition to capture the French Fort Duquesne, located at a strategically critical confluence of three rivers in western Pennsylvania. Forbes' effort, employing a more northerly route, succeeded where General Braddock's doomed party had spectacularly failed. On top of securing what would become Pittsburgh for the English, forever changing the trajectory of European rule over the North American continent, their course also had the byproduct of opening an area known as "The Glades" to white settlement.

The Glades consisted of a high plateau of rolling hills between the Allegheny Front and the final barrier to The West posed by the twin ridges of Laurel and Chestnut. Within these few hundred square miles arise the headwaters to a multitude of streams and creeks, flowing forth to join four major river systems—the Allegheny, the Monongahela, the Potomac, and the Susquehanna—and thence into both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico. It must have truly felt like the top of the world to those early homesteaders, and they would not have been entirely wrong; our friend Berlin, for example, can boast of being Pennsylvania's highest incorporated place with over 100 permanent residents.

By the close of the 18th century, the County of Somerset had been officially demarcated (borrowing the name of an English shire despite Germans comprising the largest influx to the region, to say nothing of the Iroquois and Lenape peoples who had already long been occupying these lands).

Due to its relative inaccessibility, it managed to avoid the most acute manifestations of the industrial frenzy that swept the nation for a century-plus, with the exception of sporadic coal mines that pock hillsides across the county. It even weathered the shale-drilling craze of the 21st-century: Fracking wells are comparatively few and far between within the borders of the county, even as they have spread like locusts throughout the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania.

The result is a place that never really boomed, but also never had to cope with a subsequent bust, continuing to subsist on mining, farming, and the latter-day supplement of tourism in the form of two ski resorts and a state park atop Laurel Ridge. The county's population holds steady in the mid seventy thousands, down only slightly from its 1940s peak of roughly 85,000.

One gets the impression Somerset County is content to slumber on in relative obscurity, though two successive 21st-century tragedies briefly thrust it into the international spotlight. United Flight 93 crashed in a Somerset field on September 11, 2001, the site now occupied by a somber and moving memorial. Eleven months later, the harrowing plight of nine coal miners who found themselves trapped in the flooding Quecreek Mine and their against-all-odds rescue became headline news.

The eponymous Borough is a prototypical sleepy rural county seat, crowned by the impressive Classical Revival courthouse on a rise in the middle of town. Its copper dome is visible from most directions, including mine as I trundle in from Berlin. The sight is my cue to cut over to the proliferation of brand-name travel services that has cropped up like a bad rash surrounding Somerset County's only interchange with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Then I can strap in and crush the 50-odd miles of tolled novocaine between here and home.

Or . . .

Or, I'm still not ready to be home. Even with the sky now a navy blue velvet blanket draped over the land, there is more distance to be driven on oxygenated roads where leisure is the only capital I need to breathe in the night air. Almost as if by natural magnetic repulsion, I'm pushed away from the fluorescent oases of McDonald's and Holiday Inn and up into downtown Somerset, locked in quiet repose on a Sunday evening.

Then it's on down Main Street, lined with trees and early-20th-century houses which give way to the standard small town outskirt flotsam and jetsam of used car lots and miniature strip malls. The two lanes then open up to dictionary-perfect rolling farmland, sporadically interspersed with an old-timey inn, tavern, or country store. Soon the forest wall closes in, commencing the ascent up and over Laurel Ridge toward the hamlet of Donegal, twenty miles to the west.

The road initially established by the Forbes expedition bore the General’s name and would go on to form part of the Lincoln Highway, one of the first coast-to-coast automobile trails (and, later, U.S. Route 30). A decade or so after Forbes’ march, a more direct route through the Somerset highlands was hewed, a bit further south. This was christened the Glades Pike, and today it makes up part of Pennsylvania Route 31. It is my most brazen affront to the Turnpike, for it closely parallels the tolled highway for a sixty-mile stretch. In some spots it passes near enough the Turnpike to be able to see the whites of the eyes of the poor souls hurtling along it, and I count myself blessed that I am not among them.

The Glades Pike has yet to let me down as a respite from the cattle call of the Interstate. There was the time a ferocious storm crawled across the area just as I was reaching Somerset on my usual trek home from the Capital. From the distant heights of PA 160 and Berlin I could see the malevolent anvil hanging ominously in the sky and the bombflashes of lightning dancing within. It was going to be rough, and at this juncture there was no way around it.

Sitting at the red light beyond which beckoned the entrance to the Turnpike, it occurred to me that I had no faith in the ability of the Turnpike—or, more accurately, the ability of any of the people who mindlessly drive on it—to handle a severe thunderstorm. On the other hand, as silly as it sounds, I’ve always trusted the Glades Pike, older, smaller and ostensibly more time-consuming though it may be. Even the very name of the road lends me peace: To my mind, the word "glade" is an ineffably pleasant marriage of "glen" and "shade."

The tempest hit, fierce gusts rocking my car to brag about the dismembered branches and downed trunks left in its wake. It was intense sledding for a while, but sure enough, I felt confident moving at a safe, consistent speed on Route 31. Meanwhile, the navigation app on my phone relayed notice of aggravating slowdowns on the Turnpike westbound from Somerset. In the end, I may have actually saved myself time by opting for the “slower” road. Even if I didn’t, avoiding the stop-start stress of being swallowed in the Turnpike’s sea of brake lights made the detour well worth it.

Presently there are no storms. The air has cooled sufficiently to proceed with windows down, left arm extended, idly buffeting on the breeze. Donegal materializes, home to the next Turnpike exit to the west and with it, another small flowering of commercialization that your run of the mill modern-day American traveler would evidently be lost without: Subway, Days Inn, Dairy Queen.

Fortunately, Donegal passes quickly and within a few minutes the road climbs to the top of Chestnut Ridge. It marks the ultimate hurdle presented by the Appalachian orogeny before the continent opens up to over 1,300 miles of relatively easy footing until the Rockies rise imperially from the Great Plains.

Cresting the ridge, for a few moments the western horizon sprawls out into infinity, the day’s last gasps of Technicolor straining to flee the black hole at the edge of the earth. Amazingly, from this spot, still nearly forty miles from Pittsburgh as the crow flies, the crowning towers of the city’s skyline are distinctly visible when conditions are clear. It’s another reminder of how close to home I am.

The gravity-aided glide down the mountain is halted only by a rare traffic signal at a lonely crossroads. It’s nighttime now. The gauzy glow from the off-brand gas station just about infiltrates my car, casting abstract, Escherian layers of shadows upon shadows. I switch the radio off, instead choosing to be serenaded by the comforting chorus of nocturnal insects. Their timeless sound never fails to make me think fondly of childhood summers coming to a close.

My wistfulness is exacerbated by the turn-off that leads to an old Mennonite retreat center. Throughout my single-digit years I often spent an October weekend there with my family, always when the reds, oranges, and yellows were at their most vivid and the apple cider at its sweetest. I would return as a teen for a different sort of formative experience, a gathering of co-ed youth groups during those muddy lost days between fall and winter. The road there is ringed with trees, their canopies creating a tunnel effect that for all I know may constitute a wormhole to the past; I dare not enter. The acknowledgment that my southwestern Pennsylvania roots run inexorably deep is enough for tonight.

This ephemeral reverie buoys me as I pass through Mount Pleasant, if nothing else visually memorable for the doughboy statue situated squarely in the middle of the town’s focal intersection. Usually this is where I finally succumb to the pneumatic tube of the freeway, whooshing past the massive plant where Volkswagens were once assembled, then Sony televisions. Since Sony's pullout in the late aughts, enterprising folks have sub-divided the facility and attracted the kind of smaller-scale manufacturing that can still be found stateside: envelopes, bar codes, acid-free batteries. It's a fortunate band-aid in an epoch of misfortune.

However, if I want it, there is still one more alternative to the Turnpike, an option that requires confronting head-on the post-industrial malaise that is readily apparent in this part of the country.

Onwards it is, then. At this hour the knobby no-man’s land takes on a presence of its own, watching my every move, muttering its concern, voyeuristic titters it thinks I can’t hear. The descent comes suddenly, a spectral parade of mid-century bungalows, clapboard Victorians, squat brick domiciles from even earlier generations. They usher me down the funnel into a worn business district, rudely bisected by the train tracks that some time ago would have been the lifeblood here, now just a conspicuous gash in the street wall. I am greeted only by the restive spirits of faded-out advertisements astride hollow buildings.

“This stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace . . . It looked at you with a vengeful aspect,” Joseph Conrad wrote of a nefarious jungle river, though it very well could have been penned to describe this sluggish waterway and the dilapidated burg skulking around its banks well over a hundred years later, in this land of milk and honey.

Before there was a bridge here there was first a crude ferry, proffered by a man named Simeral. Tonight he’s nowhere to be found, scarcely remembered, drowned in history’s excess. In his place it may as well be Charon escorting me across the Youghiogheny, further into our own, self-wrought heart of darkness.