Small Town America

Another expedition into unfamiliar territory, this time in the form of Clarion, a quiet little college town settled in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, where this half of the field crew is to live. Our first late morning explorations the Sunday after arriving turned up a main street that, with some adjustment for modernity, could have been designed by Norman Rockwell, or maybe Sinclair Lewis. Rows of small, mostly mom & pop looking shops lined either side of the street, nearly all closed for Sunday. Only a few eateries were open, two sub shops and a lone diner-style cafe, catering to small groups casually munching on Sunday brunch or picking up take out sandwiches. Outside  a closed hardware store, a slightly dour middle-aged woman, clearly in her springtime Sunday best florals and probably fresh from morning church services, perused a brochure, accompanied by a man in a Hawaiian shirt likely chosen when his wife demanded something more dignified than a t-shirt to face the pastor.

Nearly everything was eerily quiet. Enough cars passed by Main Street to keep me from wandering down the center of the road, but on the leafy green side streets bordered by neatly trimmed lawns, nothing moved.  Clarion appeared nearly empty.  I had begun our stroll with the feeling that this town, like Altoona, was alien to me in its feel: neat, midwestern, and peaceful. Yet the more I wandered, the more vague similarities I begin to see to other towns in other places.  The modest houses, faded but well maintained, with their moderate yards partially shaded by large old trees; the scruffy apartments clustered around a few blocks nearest the center of town, paltry rentals in a place where nearly everybody aspires to own; the obligatory defunct artillery gracing a small park in the center of town... Clarion felt like New England if one left out the whitewash and the unavoidable chunks of granite rising up from the lawn, like Scranton's satellite suburbs without the empty feel of economic depression, like central Minnesota and like Ohio... In fact without any identifiable quirks to call its own, it seemed more and more – and perhaps more and more eerily – like this town could be absolutely anywhere.