Aaron McCollough

I ENDURE

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The Rustbelts of Saturn

Posted on June 14, 2007 - Filed Under | 2 Comments

My wife and I drove to western Pennsylvania this weekend. I had been there the previous weekend with Lewis to see a Pittsburgh Pirates game and had been so excited about the overall experience that Suzanne thought she’d like to make a similar road trip. The Pirates were on a road trip to New York, so we just spent our time following our noses around Pittsburgh. Downtown was swarming with people, unexpectedly, due to a Kenny Chesney concert in Heinz Field.

The streets were fairly gridlocked. Entire families were tailgating for hours in advance of the show. It was somewhat alarming. Country music (or new country, more specifically), which we had endured with very little patience growing up in Tennessee and Georgia, seems to be even more popular in the midwest than in the states of its origin. Somehow the thought of this squared uneasily with other, more romantic notions about the place where so many generations of my own family had been born, raised, and died (two of my great grandfathers fought for the Union in the Civil War, and both were imprisoned at Andersonville).

We fled the country music fans, and curled up into the hills towards the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. This is a beautiful part of the city. The Carnegie architecture is magisterial, and we couldn’t help thinking that Pittsburgh resembles what Detroit might be if the latter weren’t interminably devastated by the industry on which it was built. There are, of course, many parallels. Pittsburgh has faired much better in the late-20th/early-21st centuries. The old edifices speak of their gotham-like shared history, but Pittsburgh for sundry reasons has remained somewhat vital. The universities help, no doubt. The neighborhoods around the schools are beautiful. We stopped at a gas station to buy a map of western pa and headed north to Butler and then to Chicora, where practically everyone in my family was born and lived before the second half of the 20th Century.

My memories of Pittsburgh and Chicora are very intense and positive. As strange as it may seem to people from either coast, I imagined this part of the country to be the most beautiful and enlightened place on earth. Having no siblings and living in the heart of the south, having never been to any large American city besides Atlanta, I imagined Pennsylvania to be preserve of tolerance, kindness, and enlightenment. This is somewhat amusing to me now, knowing that Pennsylvania (especially the western part) is a powerfully conservative state. As a child, however, it was the place where my grandparents lived, where the sports teams I loved played, where my cousins (whom I adored) were always hilarious and cool, listening to music I’d never heard of, speaking with beautiful (I thought and still do) allegheny accents (eliding diphthongs so that “downtown,” for example, sounds more like “dah’n tah’n”; and ending direct statements with a rise that suggests everything is marginally interrogative). Most of all, it was the place my parents (the two people I clung to as my best friends in the world) had come from, out of some past unfathomably preceding my existence. I always felt, and in some irrational way still do, that the catastrophic awkwardnesses of my life could be puzzled out there or that there they would somehow register as normal.

This was my first visit back to Chicora in about 7 years. I had visited in 2000 with my parents when my grandfather died (he had been living in Florida, but a service was held in Chicora, where we would bury his ashes, also). Suzanne had never been here. In any case, I was anxious driving into town, and the experience of driving around was pretty deflating. There is not much life left. The same buildings are there, but all the people I knew are dead. When I visited with my parents in 2000, I think, their presence helped shield me from what I experienced this time. Without their constant narration of what had been, I had to look at what was. Everything seemed compressed. Not merely smaller (as the world always looks smaller through adult eyes trained on childhood places) but bowed or warped. The topography of the place is extremely hilly. It is almost appalachia (in every sense). These topographic features seemed to have grown far more pronounced in my absence. My father’s parents’ house, which had always been next to a Methodist Church, seemed almost to be under that church. I could not have walked between them. I remember my grandfather mowing that lawn with a flywheel mower. I’ve seen him cutting the grass between the two buildings, but that would be impossible now. The earth has pushed them together. They are becoming one building now that my folks are gone.

We passed a porch where 6 or 8 young men, boys really, sat shirtless, drinking beer and rough housing. They were ominously aggressive. We got gas at the gas station my Uncle Al’s parents had owned (where Al’s father had been killed, while pumping gas), climbed up past the gas station my father’s parents had owned, took a right at “the point” where people drank, swept down past the site of the gas station my mother’s parents had owned and stopped at the graveyard there. We parked in the lot of an ice cream stand adjoining. We bury our dead and then have ice cream, I said. Hundreds of McColloughs. How perverse and yet oddly comforting that there is a place where one’s history (at least in the genetic sense) is documented and memorialized so inexorably in stone. Suzanne and I walked around looking for the right stones. My memory of the layout was almost right, but I had a moment of panic amid all those McColloughs, when I couldn’t find the right ones. When we found Charles and Aleen, I cried some. Partially, because I’d thought they were lost and partially, of course, because they are. I kissed them. I went over to Charles and Helen. I kissed them. Suz asked why I wasn’t named Charles. Why, she might have asked, don’t we own a gas station? Maybe we will. Maybe I will be.

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