Allegheny Pilgrimage: Day 4, Kane, PA

 

My wife met me on Friday because Saturday was our 17th anniversary.  She picked me up at Red Bridge, and we went back to Kane--that borough in the forest where I spent 3.5 happy years.  The place has changed a bit.  There are fashionable new restaurants on the main street, and we went to one of them for our anniversary dinner

All in all, it's still a provincial place with worn out buildings and rough characters in flannels.  But it's got a depth to it, too.  When we lived there, I used to compare it to that old TV show, Northern Exposure--a small town in the wilderness, peopled by backcountry intellectuals, and misfits, and outcasts from contemporary urban America.  Most of the people I knew there are not at all "rednecks."  They were judges, and lawyers, and dentists, and eccentrics who made biodiesel out of used cooking oil.  Kane is all of those things.  But there's something else, too.  There's a darkness, something gritty and humorless with a dark and very real undercurrent of rural poverty and Trumpism.  

Kane Manor, the home of Civil War officer Thomas Kane--for which the town is named--is now a bed and breakfast, and I highly recommend it.  It made a nice switch from sleeping on a hammock among the trees.  Even just to get a shower!

The house was built by Kane's widow after his death.  Lovely place, 18,000 square feet.  The new owners are putting a lot of energy into the place, and I hope they make a go of it.  

There's something sort of enchanting about a moldering old mansion on the edge of a haunted little town deep in the forests of the East.  Actually, the place was hopping with guests.

A reprieve from the drafty sleeping arrangements of late.  That is my only complaint about hammock camping.  The roof is sold separately, and though it protects you from the rain, it does not keep the night air out in the same way my tent does.

Ghost-chasers love the old Clay Street School, in Kane, which is two doors down from the mansion.  It's sat empty for years and there are plenty of legends about the place.  It was nice to spend a Saturday back in Kane--where my now-teenage daughters learned to walk, and speak, and use the toilet...  The place where I was ordained, where I did my first baptism, and where I first stood at the Holy Table... I miss this place.  Not badly enough to live here again, but enough to keep coming back.  I ran into so many people I used to know, and I was reminded of the joys of small town life.  Being a clergyperson in a little town in the woods gives you a position of prominence and status.  I don't have that in the suburbs.  But one of my daughters, at her suburban school, has two classmates named Viraj.  That's something small town Pennsylvania cannot offer: ethnic diversity.  (Small town New York actually does a whole lot better in that department!)