Mere Eagles

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One of our summertime jaunts was to the small town of Eagles Mere in the Endless Mountains region, north of the Poconos.  Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I often heard of the mysterious Poconos out east, and now that we live just south of them in the Lehigh Valley, they are weekend-getawayable.  As are points north.  Eagles Mere was an early resort town built on the second highest natural lake (“mere”) in Pennsylvania.  In the early days it was accessible mainly by a slow moving train that took visitors up the mountain.  Today, of course, everyone drives.  It’s a town of about 150 people but the population increases to 3,000 in the summer.  It’s also known for its winter sporting opportunities.  It’s fully dependent on tourism.  I got the sense from walking around that it’s the kind of place you need to stay in to appreciate fully.  Once there were four major historic hotels, all of them gone now, so visitors stay in more modest accommodations, or like us, far enough away to be affordable.

I often wonder what it must be like to live full-time in such a place.  I mean, the rest of us slog away at daily jobs until we can get away for a few days, perhaps to Eagles Mere.  I can’t imagine having to draw in your entire income during a summer with lesser business in the winter, and a smattering of visitors in the fall.  What must life be like in the off-season?  Is it better than the 9-2-5 sitting in front of a computer screen?  At least they have a beautiful, clear lake.  And peace and quiet.  One of the things that struck me—we were there on a drizzly, somewhat chilly August day—is just how silent things can be when we get away from the sounds of civilization.  Perhaps this is the pay-off to not getting year-long pay.

Such places exist because the rest of us need to escape what is it we normally do.  Work, at times, seems mainly to be dealing with other people’s frustrations.  These build up over time until we need to forget about it for a while.  In other words, getaways are interludes of fantasy.  Imagining how it must be to live with so much money that you could afford not to work, but just to paddle out on the lake, watching for eagles, and listening to silence.  Every time I visit a resort town I wonder what it must be like to live in one.  The docent at the museum said many of the 150 are descendants of those who ran the grand hotels.  Even in, perhaps especially in, the off-season this is home to dreamers.

Preserving Culture

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When I travel (remember travel?) I try to visit the places of famous writers.  It doesn’t matter much whether I’ve read a lot of their material; I know kindred spirits when I feel them.  Last summer—the one before the pandemic—I had to make a business trip to Oxford.  Now Oxford has a long, long list of literary illuminati, and I didn’t have much free time.  My hotel, however, turned out to be just a couple of blocks from the house of J. R. R. Tolkien.  One patch between meetings, I wandered over to the house.  It’s behind a high wall, so you can’t see much.  Like most European private homes, it isn’t ostentatious—over here we like to make it obvious when we’re wealthy.  In any case, I stood as long as a stranger can comfortably stand outside someone else’s house and tried to commune with the spirit of the former occupant.

Just the other day I noticed a New York Times headline that stated a movement is afoot in merry old England to purchase Tolkien’s house to make it a museum.  Although there’s no scientific way to prove it, people are somehow connected to the places they live.  There’s no other sensation like returning to your home town.  If, for some strange reason, anyone wishes to recall me after I’m gone (perhaps my pen name will take off someday), they’ll find precious little.  Not one of my pre-college homes still stands.  Not that that’s that unusual in the low rent district.  Still, when I visit my hometown, small as it is, almost nothing of me remains but it still feels like I belong.

I can’t say that I felt much other than my own awe at standing outside Tolkien’s house.  It’s on a residential street, and people were driving and walking by.  I was the only one who seemed to be hanging about.  Probably a bit suspicious-looking wearing a tweed jacket and in general appearing like a displaced academic.  Much of the tourism industry, however, is based on the draw of certain locations because someone famous lived there.  We want to be in touch with them.  Show our respects, perhaps.  If visiting Oxford weren’t always a work occasion for me, I could quite enjoy wandering its literary haunts and ending up for a leisurely afternoon spent in Blackwells.  We congregate in such places for a reason.  I’ve lost track of all the authors’ homes I’ve visited over the years.  Each time, I’m compelled to say, I’m glad someone thought to preserve them.

Religion in the City

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It’s 5 a.m., so what are all these people doing here?  On the highway.  It’s still dark and I’m on my way to the choice of public transit that will take me to New York City.  You see, telecommuting is never 100% city-free.  Somehow I’d been thinking that once we’d gotten away from New York things would be quieter.  Then I remembered that in two decades, if current trends and models continue, nearly half of the US population will live in just eight states.  New York and Pennsylvania are two of them.  Those of us who’ve moved here to get out of the rat race have made our own little mouse race, I guess.

Being in the city after an absence of almost three weeks was a shock to the system.  The first things I noticed were how loud and crowded it was.  In the summer Manhattan has, I was forcefully reminded, lots more tourists than the winter months when it feels like, as one comrade says, Leningrad.  As always when I’m in the masses on the streets, I think about how religious New York City is.  And how secular.  It is, I suspect, a cross-section of American (and international) beliefs.  People come here looking for something transcendent.  Otherwise, why leave home?  Tourism can be a sacred industry.  It brings people from different places together and, in the best of circumstances, forces them to get along with one another.

There are plenty who seek to convert those who are different.  On my way to Penn Station last night, as the light was beginning to fade in Herald Square, I woman had set up a portable mic and speakers.  She was preaching, ignored, to the evening crowds.  Among the strangers are those who believe differently.  Those who are ripe for conversion.  It’s all part of New York’s background hymn.  Then on the sidewalk I spied, scrawled in chalk, “Repent and obey Jesus — Heb 5:9;” the writing on the walk.  “And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” the selected verse reads.  We can overlook that it says nothing about repenting.  This is, after all, the melting pot where religions encounter, mingle, and blend.  Even the Fundamentalists must feel it from time to time.  The traffic home at 10:30 p.m. is quieter.  The day, I will learn, is not over yet.  Such is religion in the city.