Wind power turbines loom alien and mysterious over the valleys of West Pennsylvania. Slowly rotating, like crosses set into motion, they hang over the coal mines as if silent witnesses to the lives unfolding below.
Driving through, the state unfolds beautiful, rolling and strange.
The Machine Gun Preacher lives here, as do Mennonites, Mountain Men and conspiracy theorists that think the Super Bowl was fixed because the Pittsburgh Steelers lost. Self-reliant and independent, these people– many who trace their roots back to the Civil War– have been reared to think for themselves. Vigilant, perhaps even paranoid, they bury weapons and whiskey in the hills around them, waiting for the moment when they’re called to arms.
Improbable juxtapositions abound. Just past the billboard that features Jesus imploring motorists to see unborn children as future 9/11 heroes, is a dour and joyless looking sex store—built like a bunker– surrounded by four or five trailers of dubious intent.
At The Alley, a local bar in Somerset County, people of all stripes drive 30 minutes to buy a pitcher of Yuengling Beer for six dollars. At the entrance sit two young women at a table. They’re collecting the five-dollar cover charge that allows us to hear the three-piece band playing classics from the 80’s. Dead-eyed, unsmiling and wholly devoted to their text messaging, they both smoke Marlboro lights and drink Mountain Dew. The one on the left, the pretty one, I am told, is joining the military in the fall.
A man at the bar with a big, bushy grey beard and a farm machinery ball cap sits in front of his beer as if called from central casting. He beckons to Rachelle, calling her over by curling and uncurling the stump of a finger that remains from an accident on the dairy farm where he was raised. It was there where he lost his mother to a rutting bull driven mad by her menses.
A mining engineer who looked like an astronaut tells us this– as a kind of apology for the creepy vignette– adding that growing up as a boy, he would lose at least one of his fellow students to a farming accident each and every year.
In retail stores I chatted with cheerful women who without prompting, told me that they’ve never left Somerset County, and were glad of it. They were proud and sturdy, but each one had just a slight trace of melancholy in her voice as she spoke, imagining the cities and towns stretched across the globe.
For two weeks after United 93 crashed in the fields of nearby Shanksville on September 11th, residents saw apparitions, lost, wandering the still roads the curved through the state.