The Last Great Place
The Bitter and the Sweet
By Michael Capuzzo

Have you heard the presidential candidates paying Pennsylvania’s rural counties wonderful unintentional compliments lately? You can hear it most any moment on the airwaves, sounding across the hills and lakes we call home, beaming through the cool nights and warm days of new bloom. I won’t wallow in Barack Obama’s unfortunate comments, to a swanky San Francisco audience, that small-town Pennsylvanians’ lives are dominated by  “bitter” feelings stemming from economic failure that cause them to embrace guns and God and reject people unlike them.

It’s simply the kind of election-year slander typical of politicians and journalists who broadly “analyze” whole regions and groups of people in ways that a good Pennsylvanian knows bear no relation to reality, or decency. “Spin” is inherently national and regional, while life itself is local, in ways we small-town folk in the Twin Tiers are daily blessed to live and to know.

How, exactly, is this a compliment? Well, let’s try the comments of syndicated columnist and Washington insider Mark Shields, who wrote, “Change has been no friend to Pennsylvania.” Deploring the state’s loss of 207,400 manufacturing jobs during the Bush years (but failing to note the 189,000 overall jobs gained in the last five Rendell years), he lays on the bad news that “the state is now the nation’s third oldest—43rd in percentage of population under the age of 18 and 46th in growth.” It’s been all downhill, he says, since Ben Franklin.

Hah! Sure, we face challenges, but so do people in Shields’ Washington, D.C. and Obama’s Chicago. Meanwhile, the pols and pundits pay us the highest compliment, which they know in their hearts but don’t say: “Tradition has been very good to Pennsylvania.” It’s been good in those small towns where mothers and sons have Sunday dinner with their fathers and grandfathers and grandchildren and uncles altogether; where the surnames on town council are the same as those in the cemetery; where a mother stands on the banks of Kelsey Creek in Wellsboro watching her children frolic in the shallows while a young woman splashes up-creek with a black dog and the soft moss-green shining creek is a burbling song; where life is a story, whole and connected, because it hasn’t been forced to become a statistic. We live, more so than most, in timeless and seasonal rhythms still connected to earth and to each other and to God or spirituality, because it’s hard not to be that way hereabouts. Hard not to be natural and authentic, in other words, those virtues the city folk and the pols and journalists say they prize the most because they’re gone, all gone, in the cities, in the 21 Century, and they can’t seem to find them. Pennsylvania, they’ve unintentionally, wonderfully, reminded us, is the quiet, last great place, not a big talker, the “Show-You” state. Come visit and we’ll show you what you already know in your heart. We’ll show you what life’s about.

Please feel free to call me at (570) 723-3503 or e-mail me at johnf@mountainhomemag.com. Thank you and I hope to hear from you soon.