I have said in the past that the hills encircling Northern Cambria are like...high walls...They are fortifications to keep those who live there contained and the rest of the world out.-Ashley Kay Bach
Everything that young woman wrote was so spot-on but this just amazed me. She intuitively grasped the truth of what mountains do—and what walls do. We all think: The Great Wall of China—meant to keep the Foreigner out. That was not the Center’s purpose. It was to keep the ethnic Han in. The better for control. The padi rice state so common in Asia had the same aim. Wet rice cultivation had to be done near market, Beijing, the rice would rot at distance. And you weren’t allowed to raise, say, potatoes. The tuber is a central government’s nightmare. When the Man comes you can yank your potatoes out of the ground and take them with you to replant when you’re out of the Center’s range. The extracted potatoes leave holes and ruts that maim horses—ask the British—flatten tires, break axles.
Centralized government has long conquered rivers, lakes, oceans, the air. But they have a bitch of a time with mountains. That is the land form that continuously flummoxes centralized control. We have not conquered vertical space. The Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania was a big nothing. But the colonial government heard “rumors” and sent the troops into the mountains and found...nothing, they found nothing. Where did Mao Zedong go to assemble his forces? The mountains. Where did Fidel Castro and the remnants of his decimated rag-tag band go after they were just about wiped out at the Moncada Barracks? To the Sierra Maestras.
Barnesboro is two hours from Pittsburgh. Johnstown an hour. Gallitzin a little over two hours. An hour or two or more UP from the Monongahela Valley in the Allegheny Mountains. The Allegheny Front is rightly called America’s First Frontier. It was pain in the assholes to get through the Front. The trails were inadequate so they tried corkscrewing rail track around them. They tried canals on the river ways with locks that raised the boats from level to level until they got to the top of the mountain and then used gravity to zip the boats down like on a roller coaster. That is how Charles Dickens made his way from Harrisburg over the Front, past Johnstown, and onto Pittsburgh. Dickens was appalled.
The mining economy kept the well-paid miners, risking maiming and death, inside the mountain walls just as AKB wrote. Where else were they to go? The coal was in the mountains! Without a strong government a whole mountain culture developed. Over the Front to Pittsburgh a distinct linguistic dialect emerged. The standards of good government did not run vertically over geography. The same proximate cause of the Great Flood of 1889 was replicated with exactitude in the Second Great Flood of 1977: a neglected earthen dam in the mountains above Johnstown gave way and 85 more innocent lives were lost in addition to the 2,000 in the fin de siecle flood.
Mountains keep secrets. Two years after the Great Flood the editor of the Johnstown newspaper urged residents to now forget it. Less than 90 years later when Murderess Stella Elizabeth Williamson’s five infanticides from decades ago were discovered in Gallitzin coroner John Barron from Johnstown ruled “case closed,” move on. For twenty years Jerry Sandusky’s rape of young boys in the football facility on the main campus of PSU were hidden from law enforcement in the valley beneath the mountains surrounding State College, Pennsylvania. Williamson has her grave of honor in Richland Cemetery outside Johnstown. PSU football has nearly completely recovered its prestige and success and the site of Laurel Dam No. 2 is now the Laurel Dam Park.
None of these could have occurred in cities, not in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or New York, or in horizontal space. They would have been too close to the central government. But the mountain walls kept the horrors and their perpetrators and their secrets “contained and the rest of the world out” until it was too late.
Everything that young woman wrote was so spot-on but this just amazed me. She intuitively grasped the truth of what mountains do—and what walls do. We all think: The Great Wall of China—meant to keep the Foreigner out. That was not the Center’s purpose. It was to keep the ethnic Han in. The better for control. The padi rice state so common in Asia had the same aim. Wet rice cultivation had to be done near market, Beijing, the rice would rot at distance. And you weren’t allowed to raise, say, potatoes. The tuber is a central government’s nightmare. When the Man comes you can yank your potatoes out of the ground and take them with you to replant when you’re out of the Center’s range. The extracted potatoes leave holes and ruts that maim horses—ask the British—flatten tires, break axles.
Centralized government has long conquered rivers, lakes, oceans, the air. But they have a bitch of a time with mountains. That is the land form that continuously flummoxes centralized control. We have not conquered vertical space. The Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania was a big nothing. But the colonial government heard “rumors” and sent the troops into the mountains and found...nothing, they found nothing. Where did Mao Zedong go to assemble his forces? The mountains. Where did Fidel Castro and the remnants of his decimated rag-tag band go after they were just about wiped out at the Moncada Barracks? To the Sierra Maestras.
Barnesboro is two hours from Pittsburgh. Johnstown an hour. Gallitzin a little over two hours. An hour or two or more UP from the Monongahela Valley in the Allegheny Mountains. The Allegheny Front is rightly called America’s First Frontier. It was pain in the assholes to get through the Front. The trails were inadequate so they tried corkscrewing rail track around them. They tried canals on the river ways with locks that raised the boats from level to level until they got to the top of the mountain and then used gravity to zip the boats down like on a roller coaster. That is how Charles Dickens made his way from Harrisburg over the Front, past Johnstown, and onto Pittsburgh. Dickens was appalled.
The mining economy kept the well-paid miners, risking maiming and death, inside the mountain walls just as AKB wrote. Where else were they to go? The coal was in the mountains! Without a strong government a whole mountain culture developed. Over the Front to Pittsburgh a distinct linguistic dialect emerged. The standards of good government did not run vertically over geography. The same proximate cause of the Great Flood of 1889 was replicated with exactitude in the Second Great Flood of 1977: a neglected earthen dam in the mountains above Johnstown gave way and 85 more innocent lives were lost in addition to the 2,000 in the fin de siecle flood.
Mountains keep secrets. Two years after the Great Flood the editor of the Johnstown newspaper urged residents to now forget it. Less than 90 years later when Murderess Stella Elizabeth Williamson’s five infanticides from decades ago were discovered in Gallitzin coroner John Barron from Johnstown ruled “case closed,” move on. For twenty years Jerry Sandusky’s rape of young boys in the football facility on the main campus of PSU were hidden from law enforcement in the valley beneath the mountains surrounding State College, Pennsylvania. Williamson has her grave of honor in Richland Cemetery outside Johnstown. PSU football has nearly completely recovered its prestige and success and the site of Laurel Dam No. 2 is now the Laurel Dam Park.
None of these could have occurred in cities, not in Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or New York, or in horizontal space. They would have been too close to the central government. But the mountain walls kept the horrors and their perpetrators and their secrets “contained and the rest of the world out” until it was too late.
