Here and There - Bill Conlogue

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mother heated our Wayne County farmhouse with anthracite until January 2004, when her old Van Wert stoker gave out and she switched to oil. Until then, she had long been in the minority, hanging on to the fuel she grew up knowing. Today, her heating oil is trucked from where she grocery-shops, Forest City, about ten miles away, just below the headwaters of the Lackawanna. In June 2008, my mother, a native of Carbondale, taught me a lesson about the power of place: “I’ve been here [on the farm] forty-five years, and I have no interest in Wayne County; only Lackawanna County. That’s why I get the Scranton paper.” To write about the farm I must write about mining, which is to write about U.S. industrialization, which is to write about the end of farming.

      I grew up on a Wayne County dairy farm, lived in Scranton for a time as an undergraduate, and spent four years living as a graduate student near Washington, D.C. My experiences in these different places gave me different contexts for understanding the relationships between human work and the land. Farm life engrained in me an awareness of nature’s rhythms and whims, my familiarity with Scranton taught me that some work can irreparably damage a place, and my time within the Beltway showed me that distant decision makers can thoughtlessly alter local lives and lands.

      A renewed sense of home will be increasingly important to us all as more and more local cultures—family farm networks, urban neighborhoods, and native peoples—disappear into the global industrial economy’s regimentation and homogenization. If we do not remember the remnants, our connections with one another will wither. If we do not keep varied communities and healthy places, how can we be decent to one another in a world that is ever more uncertain, claustrophobic, and hostile? And if we cannot be decent to one another as human beings, what hope is there that we can be decent to the rest of life?

      At work, I’m a generalist, a professor who teaches in a small English department at a comprehensive Catholic university. I still wonder that I have a job doing what I enjoy: studying language and literature, explaining poems and plays, interpreting novels and films. Sometimes I think that the world around me values these activities less and less. Teaching undergraduates, writing essays, and thinking about where I am and the work that I do here and there are the main threads that make up my life; they’re not separate parts of a “career.” The literature and history I profess tell stories about what it means to be human; each explores the narrative of our connection, alienation, combativeness, and generosity. In asking questions about good and evil and right and wrong, they matter—and the humanities in general matter—because our lived experience demands that we each think carefully about our answers to this question: How am I at work in the world?

      The best literature teaches us that other people are people. Inviting us to see with others’ eyes, it increases our capacity for empathy and mercy, and reminds us that human lives are bound up with and dependent on a living earth that predates us and will outlast us. Within this context, we realize that we are keepers of a shared gift that we hold for only a little while. In Here and There, I practice what Wendell Berry calls “practical reading,” a phrase he uses to remind us that literature teaches us something about the world; it’s not simply a display of verbal virtuosity.11 Is it really possible to read The Grapes of Wrath, for example, and not think through the social and economic dilemmas its characters confront?

      Practical reading empowers us to think critically and carefully about ourselves, our relationships with others, and our connections to the world beyond us. Reading fine writing gives us the courage to confront the paradox at the heart of a liberal arts education: to be free is to understand—never fully, never completely—one’s dependence on others, living and dead, human and nonhuman.

      Each chapter here begins at home, journeys elsewhere, and returns to northeastern Pennsylvania. A thoughtful coming and going is, I believe, the essence of knowing where one stands. For example, what has my teaching to do with what happens in the world around me? How do everyday issues within these places help me to understand what’s at stake in larger debates about land use, the value of the humanities, and the role of the teacher/scholar? How does the story of my home ground contribute to the human story? If we don’t look around us, I keep telling myself, we won’t see what’s beyond us.

      At Home

      In the Anthracite Museum hangs a map of the Lackawanna Valley, dated 1886. Depicting land from Scranton to Forest City, the map traces in red the valley’s underground mines. Particularly striking is the sinuous circulatory system that overlays Scranton’s street grid, which is almost invisible. Although many maps divide land into counties, states, and nations, this map marks company property; the usual political divisions compete with blocks of corporate control. The map reminds me that the region’s geology holds hostage its geography, even its urban geography. The city of Scranton, like most cities and towns in the Anthracite Region, has its doppelganger in a city below, a dark Atlantis peopled by the ghosts of the men and mules who worked both into existence. Today’s visible city rests on the crumbling pillars of the buried one, a fact expressed in every mine subsidence.

      Bridget and I live within that tangle of red, in an old Scranton suburb, on a quiet street, in a shingle-style, balloon-frame house nestled between a home owned by a banker and one owned by a casket salesman. In the three houses across the street live a social studies teacher, a widow, and a retired couple, the man a former composing room worker at the Scranton Times. Educators, lawyers, and businessmen live up and down the block. Shaded by two silver maples, our house has a wide front porch, a white picket fence around the back yard, and uneven bluestone sidewalks. Like much of the valley, though, our home sits on hollowed ground.

      Developers added Richmont Park to the more exclusive Green Ridge section in the early 1900s. Hoping to take advantage of the valley’s increasing wealth, the cachet of Green Ridge, and middle-class people’s desire to leave the industrial city center, investors Jordan, Hannah, and Jordan purchased the ground in 1893 from the Pennsylvania Coal Company. As a condition of sale, Pennsylvania Coal stipulated that subsequent land purchasers could not stop the company or its heirs from mining under the development. Homeowners here, Bridget and I included, own no mineral rights. Deeds also note that Pennsylvania Coal has already mined beneath Richmont Park, and that neither the company nor its heirs are to be held liable for later injuries or damages as a result of this prior work. This would include, I imagine, mine water flooding one’s basement, one’s house disappearing into a mine subsidence, or coal gas killing a family member. These things have happened.

      The house has had eight owners in its hundred-plus year history. Carpenter William Erhardt and builder Ernest Latham purchased the lot in 1906; they constructed the house the following spring and summer, when the first people to occupy it, the Reinhardts, moved in. Designed to appeal to people of a certain income, the house included a finished attic room, a servant’s quarters with fixtures that combined gas and electric lighting.

      A mine foreman, John Reinhardt owned the house until 1913, when George Llewellyn, a superintendent for Prudential Insurance, bought the place. By 1915, Llewellyn had moved to Clay Avenue, but he kept the house until 1919, when he sold the property to George Vasey, who manufactured diamond tools.12 Vasey soon sold the house and land to Fred Frederickson, who lost the property in 1935 due to delinquent taxes. The bank held the house in trust between 1935 and 1946, when George and Elizabeth Simms bought it. They, in turn, sold it in 1948 to the Harrises, Dorothy and her husband, Luther, who worked for Scranton Lace Company. They occupied the house for the longest time, forty-six years, the years of Scranton’s steep economic decline. In 1994, the widowed Mrs. Harris sold the property to William Conway, whose grandfather happened to be Fred Frederickson. We purchased it from Conway in 2001, two months before 9/11. At the closing, he gave us a box of tools, which we accepted with appreciation—and apprehension.

      Stonework

      Going home began with understanding the rock at my feet.

      The bone structure of this region accumulated slowly, horizon upon horizon. Despite epochs of ice and mountain building, ages of deposition and erosion, millennia of migration and extinction, this land has never stopped working. A thousand million years ago, time immemorial, a continent ripped apart and formed the sea Iapetus, approximately where the Atlantic is now, and lasted longer than today’s ocean. In the Paleozoic era, Iapetus, named

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