You want my town? You want this one mile square piece of geography? You want this county seat? You want to take over the central business district for a one-day bacchanal of gastronomic engorgement? Go ahead, take it. I’m gone.
Today, as many of you may know, is the annual West Chester Restaurant Festival, where literally hundreds of restaurants and funnel cake vendors descend on Our Fair Borough like so many Mongol Hordes and bring with them hungry interlopers in numbers not seen since the recent Teabagger protest in Washington, D.C.
For those of us who live in West Chester, however, today is not known as Restaurant Festival Day. It’s known as Get Out Of Town Day. Rather than fight the crowds and battle with the interlopers over parking on our streets, we choose to find something else to occupy our time, someplace else to go and enjoy the wonders of late summer.
Some of us choose to replicate the experience of the restaurant festival by finding the nearest traffic jam and joining the queue. Others of us offer up hundreds of dollars of our hard earned cash for mushroom-sized appetizers at the nearest convenience store, estimating correctly that the cost is equivalent to what we would expect on Gay Street, but the wait is far less.
Me, I’m heading for the hills. More specifically, I’m going to take a nostalgic drive up Route 282 north of Downingtown into the wilds of Wallace and the Nantmeals.
Route 282 is not the most picturesque back road in Chester County, but it does crack the top ten. It meanders nicely alongside the East Branch of the Brandywine Creek for miles and miles, passing through villages like Lyndell and Glenmoore, Springton and Cornog, until it terminates at an intersection between Barneston and Huntsfield.
It is nostalgic for me because it is the scene of one of the first prime assignments I received as anew report at the Daily Local News in the late fall of 1982. The news editor saw I wasn’t busy and told me in no uncertain terms to get out to the Cornog Quarry and find out what all the fuss was about.
What the fuss was about was a state police dive team searching in the murky waters for cars that had been dumped there. I wasn’t the only one who arrived at the scene to judge their progress, and wondered why so much attention was being paid to an operation to clear and otherwise unused former quarry of dumped cars.
It was not until after I had filed my piece that I learned that what police were really searching for were the bodies of the two young Reinert children, part of the eerie criminal case surrounding teachers at Upper Merion High School. The whole thing happened under my nose without my realizing it, and now wherever I wander up Route 282 and pass by that quarry, I am reminded of how little I really know.
But the ride up Route 282 also brings back more pleasant memories, of finding out of the way people who are as friendly and as open as the fields that developers like to gobble up in northern Chester County.
On one spring Sunday after a series of hard rains, I was sent out to talk to people who now had lakes in their backyards as the Brandywine overflowed its banks. I wandered up the road and made my way to Glenmoore, stopping along the way to knock on doors and interview the flood victims. Those I spoke with were open and forthcoming, if a little quizzical about why a reporter would be so intensely interested in the water level in their basement. I suppose that in those days before cable television and incessant news hounding the sight of a person with a notebook showing up on your doorsteps was still something you would face with a sense of excitement, instead of one of ennui.
I also like to slow down as I pass through Lyndell and look up on the hillside at the gazebo that sits on the property where Jim Croce once lived, and imagine him writing those faux folk hits in the 1970s that occupied so much of my radio listening time when I was in high school. I used to be able to sing a few verses of “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blue” at the drop of a hat, and wonder always if that’s where the idea came to him, on that hill.
So if you want my town, go ahead and take it; I’m planning on invading a few places of my own. Just make sure you have it back by 7:30.
No comments:
Post a Comment