Selinsgrove

The criticism stung a little, coming from a friend of mine while we were discussing an issue involving an employment contract.

"One other thing--I read what you wrote about Pennsylvania the other day. I don't think that was fair. You decided to take a day trip to Wilkes-Barre. No one takes a day trip to Wilkes-Barre. The rest of the state isn't like that. I grew up there. You ought to go see the nice parts, like around Selinsgrove where my family had a farm."

I had, in fact, ripped a little on Pennsylvania the other day. It's a bad habit of mine, making fun of a place for its seeming backwardness. Peg and I had made two trips into the Keystone State, just a few miles down the road from here, both disconcerting in their own way. The first was to Jim Thorpe, formerly Mauch Chunk, the town where my great great grandmother's older brother was hanged with several other accused Mollie McGuires in the 1870s. The election hadn't happened yet, and we drove through countryside festooned with Trump flags to a community that dripped with an evil so manifest that P and I decided by midday to get the hell out of there and never return.

Then there was our ill-advised venture to Wilkes-Barre a couple weeks back, on what began as a leaf-viewing trip but soon turned into a quest for a red brick sports bar we'd created in our imagination but, alas, did not exist in Wilkes-Barre or anywhere near there. And the Trump flags were still everywhere. We figured these two snapshots told us what we needed to know about rural PA.

But at some level I knew that was an incomplete picture. My grandmother was born in Harrisburg, and if you've run into any Gallaghers, Brennans, or Campbells down that way, they were probably kin to me. I haven't seen them in a half-century, but my memories are of nice folks with verdant backyards. And lots of brown water flowing. We're Irish, you know.

And just north of Harrisburg was Chris's hometown of Selinsgrove, by all appearances the sort of tidy little town the north has in abundance, but you have to look a little to find down our way.

So Saturday would be the day we planned to make our way south along the Tioga, through Williamsport, and on to Selinsgrove.

We read up a little on the history of the place. Ostensibly founded in 1782 by Anthony Selin, a foreign mercenary who fought on our side in the Revolution, the place had long been the site of a trading post where Penn's Creek cut off a small body of land called the Isle of Que along the banks of the Susquehanna. The prior residents appear to have been either murdered or carted off by Indians maybe three decades before, which explains why the town isn't named for one of them.

In its heyday, Selinsgrove was a busy stopping point on the Pennsylvania Canal, an ill-timed public works project that connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (and, along its northern path, this area when it teed into the Chemung River) just as the advent of the railroads would render the canals that criss-crossed the area between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard obsolete.

So the town got smaller, but then drew an educational venture of the missionary movement that arose between the Second and Third Great Awakenings. The school eventually became Susquehanna University, now the biggest employer in town.

We later learned the hard way that a campus built around a big, ugly nondenominational sanctuary won't have a decent sports bar perched along its fringes. Go figure.

But all that was ahead of us as we wound south on I-99 until it dumped us off in Williamsport where we picked up US 15 for the forty miles or so toward our goal.

That's Williamsport down there in the valley along the Susquehanna. Home of the Little League World Series and one of P's favorite locums gigs, the place glows with good karma.

Traffic started picking up as we approached Lewisburg, site of Bucknell University, one of those little schools I'd seen as a child in the Sunday college football scores posted a few pages into the sports section of the AJC, playing someone like Lehigh or Colgate. The campus was lovely, but it all soon gave way to generic urban sprawl as we made our way south toward Shamokin Dam. Every chain store and restaurant you'd find in Lynn Haven or North Charleston or Alpharetta lined the side of the crowded highway. We started thinking that perhaps Chris hadn't been home in a while, because it was all pretty unlovely.

Rather abruptly, however, we found ourselves back in a sylvan landscape dotted with tidy farms as we left the sprawl and a couple miles later entered Selinsgrove.

The town was spotless, and starting to fill with day-trippers like us. Folks were raising tents (or lowering--I couldn't quite tell) for a farmer's market in the town center. The VFW advertised a veterans' breakfast with a huge Bud Light banner.

Hey, that's not a bad idea! Let's find a glass of wine and a plate of wings, I suggested. In the back of my mind I knew the Dawgs had just kicked off against the Missouri Tigers, and I figured I could look surprised to find them playing on a big screen somewhere.

But this was the home of Susquehanna University, and, alas, Jesus does not abide wings and a cocktail on a crisp fall afternoon. So we kept driving.

Just down the hill from town we crossed the old bridge onto the Isle of Que.

An adventurer named Conrad Weiser bought the place from the local Native American chief, Shikellamy, trading the land for a rifle after the chief told Weiser he'd dreamed he should get the rifle, and Weiser responded that he'd likewise had a dream that Shikellamy should deed him the island.

That bit of real estate law was never on any bar exam I've encountered.

As for the name, although "Que" is a French word it doesn't seem to lend itself to a place-name, which here would be translated as "Isle of What." More likely it's from the Mohawk word for the dead, making this the Isle of the Dead. They have, in fact, found Indian burial sites on the island.

Setting aside all that creepiness, the Isle of Que is spectacular, stretching along the western bank of the Susquehanna, a couple miles of vacation homes giving way to tidy old farms along its southern tip.

P and I were so taken with the place we fantasized aloud about having a getaway here one day, if we can just pare down a property or two.

But by now we were growing a little peckish and in need of sustenance. There were no sports bars in Selinsgrove, and no businesses at all on the Isle of Death. I found a promising riverfront lunch spot on my phone, Penn's Tavern, which had been there since the early 18th century.

There was just one catch--the tavern was on the eastern shore of the river, and the bridge was back up there in that suburban sprawl we'd just left. We gritted our teeth and made our way back through the crawling traffic, crossing the river just below Sunbury.

The eastern side of the Susquehanna feels a lot different, with steep cliff faces shading the road and farms tucked into narrow valleys. And Trump flags. This is rural Pennsylvania, after all.

Penn's Tavern sits between the railroad tracks and the river, on a little grassy bluff lined with tall trees still mostly green in early November.

One walks through the very old main restaurant to arrive at the pub section and deck on the river.

Check out those floors.

The pub is a later, ugly, contractor-grade addition. But the wine was passable, the Hog Wings (basically small pork chops fried like chicken wings) delightful, and the football on the television made it feel like a fall Saturday.

Somewhat sated, we decided to take in a little different scenery on our way home by traveling up the east side of the river back to Williamsport. That mean driving into Sunbury, the biggest town in the area.

Sunbury is a pretty little town, but has obviously seen better days. The streets are lined with old working class houses with big, generous porches and a sullen, diverse crowd standing on those porches smoking and looking a little menacing to the two Floridians trying to find the road out of town. The northside has its share of abandoned industrial buildings, although on the southern fringes of Sunbury the Weis grocery store chain maintains its headquarters and distribution center. We decide we should come back one day when we have time to stay the night and look around a little.

The ride back home was uneventful, with the sun swinging around behind us to light up the hills in a spectacular show of browns and yellows. Not much red this year because there wasn't really a frost. Still, it's pretty lovely.

So, we'll (okay, "I'll") take Chris's criticism as well taken. Middle Pennsylvania's farm country is a feast for the eyes, full of nice (although a little Trumpy) people, and definitely worth the day trip. Maybe next time we'll wander a little further south, and try to find my Irish-Catholic kinsmen down around Harrisburg.