Kennywood

Some people go to Kennywood to ride the rides, to scream, and laugh, and feel the wind on their face.  Some people go to Kennywood for the thrills, the adrenaline rush.  I go there looking for tragedy, like this.  Whenever some Kennywood roller coaster chugs "ching-ching-ching" up a slow ascent in preparation for a long, screaming drop, my rule is always to look for the grimy old town of Braddock, just across the river--sight of Pittsburgh's last steel mill and its namesake's great humiliation of 1755.  I'm looking forward to reading David Preston's new book, Braddock's Defeat.  He apparently paints the autocratic commander in a much more forgiving light than all historians before him.

Kennywood was a mindless escape after the lofty conceits of the Chautauqua Institution, the gated community where wealthy white liberals gather in retro "cottages" and lecture halls to congratulate themselves on knowing what's best for poor people.

A Place to Lay Your Bones

In the end, I suppose it doesn't much matter where you lay your bones.  You'll be dead and past care.  And yet, I must say that my maternal grandparents are buried in a lovely spot. 

This is Mount Zion Cemetery, near Oak Ridge in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.  I've been to exactly three interments in this place, and I return all too seldom to see that the graves are being tended...which they are.  Many of my ancestors lie beneath this earth, including great-grandparents and maybe some great-greats.  Isn't it odd how you're descended from complete strangers, people you can never know, but who've passed so much of what they are along to you?  

I'm not even sure if the church here is still used for regular services.  The parking lot is just a little pull-off, big enough for half a dozen cars or so.  No service times are listed.  Maybe it's one of those old country churches where there's only a minister every fifth Sunday in February--or some such thing known only to locals.  You won't find anything about this church on the Internet either.  I'm pretty sure it was one of the old United Evangelical churches, a German-speaking "peace church" that originated in the First Great Awakening of the 1760s and ended up merging with the Methodists.

 And here my grandparents and eccentric bachelor uncle lie among folks with local names like Schrecengost, and Dinger, and Doverspike...

 I'm a proponent of cremation, but there is something nice about having a place like this to return to...as long as loved ones survive to visit.  Once my siblings and I die off, who will come back to this place?  Who will even know how to find it?  Our children won't care.  They won't even wonder where their ancestors are buried--until it's too late to ask.  My own dear grandmother, buried here, tried to get me to take an interest in the family cemeteries when I was young, but what did I care?  I remember none but this one--and this one only because I've stood at so many open graves here.

But look at the clouds scuttling above, the green fields below, the tiny church in its vast graveyard.  You could do worse than to find yourself in this place when it's all said and done.  I think of this countryside as my homeplace in many ways.  I idealize it.  It's bucolic, lovely, and serene.  But living here is out of the question; it's not as idyllic as I imagine it.  There were Trump campaigns signs aplenty--a sure sign of hatred and bigotry.  These people are peace-loving farmers of German descent--just one step away from the Mennonites and two steps away from the Amish.  What kind of fear and anger causes them to support a greedy New York tycoon?