Closer to Home

Exploring Place Identity from Appalachia to Atlantic Canada

This fog bank on the Minas Basin at low tide was spectacular! This is one of my favorite photos from my time in Nova Scotia last month.

Twice recently my longing for Canada’s Maritimes has brought me closer to home. And why shouldn't it have? As different as the two areas seem to be, the Appalachians extend into Atlantic Canada, and with the range, at least some of the culture.

The first instance (let’s call them connections) was while flipping through James Deahl’s Traveling the Lost Highway. Kathi and I often stop into libraries while traveling. I picked up this collection in Sackville, New Brunswick last month. In skimming the book last week, one of the first poems I read was set in Pittsburgh. “Blue Steel Cafe, Pittsburgh” is set in my Pittsburgh neighborhood in the 1960s or early 1970s (as best as I can tell). It’s a poem that marks a moment in time: “It was a hot evening during the last summer J&L poured steel.” I was flabbergasted that a book I picked up in rural New Brunswick (roughly a thousand miles from home!) included a poem set in my own neighborhood. Deahl grew up in Pittsburgh before moving to Canada, but still! Also, why did I decide to look through the book that night, a week following the Clairton Coke Works explosion? For those of you who don’t live in western Pennsylvania, there are only a few steel operations in the area these days, but the Clairton explosion reminded us and the world that it continues to be dangerous work.

The second connection occurred last week when I was reading a short story collection I bought in Nova Scotia. As I told a friend, I’m only three stories in and Alistair MacLeod’s Island is already breaking my heart. I’ve read a story about a fisherman’s son, one about a Cape Breton coal miner’s son, and one about a boy whose family emigrated from Kentucky to the Midwest, part of the larger Great Migration. As for the third story, here’s a fascinating deep dive into Appalachian outmigration. MacLeod’s story, “The Golden Gift of Grey” (1971), speaks to the feeling of being torn between two places that’s referenced in the article, one that’s felt by people everywhere who move someplace and continue to miss home.

It was another of MacLeod’s stories, though, that had me marveling at how a story about a boy leaving a Cape Breton coal patch brought me right back to PA. As the character is leaving town, his grandmother hands him a stack of postcards. “Your father was under the ground in all those places,” she says.

From the story:

“Springhill, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Yellowknife, Britannia Beach, Butte, Virginia City, Escanaba, Sudbury, Whitehorse, Drumheller, Harlan, Ky., Elkins, W. Va., Fernie, B.C., Trinidad, Colo. - coal and gold, copper and lead, gold and iron, nickel and gold and coal. East and West and North and South. Mementoes and messages from places that I so young and my grandmother so old have never seen.”

And so there I was…reading a story about Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and in an instant I was back here in PA…and Alberta, Michigan, West Virginia, and so many other places connected by the thread of extraction and taking, of coming and going, and of survival. The story wrestles with the topic of whether to stay or go, and whether to go home again. “It’s the only way you’ll be content,” his grandfather says. All the while, the coal seams were soon to be depleted.

I talk a lot about place identity in my work. Responsible conversations about trails, tourism, and the outdoor economy ought to include consideration about culture and heritage and what makes our places what they are. With rail trails in particular, most of them are built along lines that hauled coal from places like Scranton and Harlan to other places like Pittsburgh and Sydney to make steel.* It’s our heritage. Or part of it, anyway. We don’t have to celebrate everything about it, but we should contemplate it at the very least. And in this moment, I’m grateful for the Canadian literature I’ve encountered this summer that’s given me the opportunity to do so.

*I’m using these as examples…these were not the actual routes (just getting out ahead of any corrections!).

I found this old postcard (printed in Scranton) while in Beckley, WV last year. It was titled “Miners equipped with electric safety lamps.”

This PA/OH state line postcard speaks to me. It includes my hometown of New Brighton as well as Aliquippa, where my grandma was born with the help of a midwife while her father and uncles labored in J&L’s Aliquippa Works.

For all my fine print readers, did this event actually happen? And in the South Side? Was there a Blue Steel Cafe here? Harry Truman did campaign for Democratic candidates in Pittsburgh in the 1960s, but he died before the last steel was poured.

Just for fun! Spotted at the Wheeling Artisan Center recently. More recently, I thought a deer was jumping in front of my car last week until I took a closer look and realized it was a massive coyote!

Coming Soon: Resources!

I’m hoping to get into the rhythm of sharing a resources section at the end of my posts sometime soon. In the meantime, check out Cycle Forward’s Facebook page for recent posts about PA’s new Statewide Comprehensive Outdoor Recreation Plan, Pennsylvania Environmental Council’s new Trail Maintenance Toolkit, the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable’s Trail Map for Rural Development in America, and more!

Still Here?

Here’s a post I wrote about Pittsburgh’s place identity when Franco Harris died. It’s one of my favorites.