Great Place continued from page 5
July 26 was a day I’d carefully planned. I’d agreed to host three undergrads from Goucher College in Baltimore. Megan Cole, Joey Fink, and Kathryn Walker were traveling the East Coast as college ambassadors, interviewing alumni for their blog. Decades after I graduated from Northwestern University, I recently went back to college at Goucher, rooted for the Goucher Gophers, and received a Masters in Fine Arts in nonfiction writing. The trio was eager to interview me, but as we piled into their white Gopher-emblazoned van to drive to the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon, I could sense their disappointment. This was their exciting “Bright Lights, Big Cities” tour, with stops in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, and…Wellsboro. The day before, in our nation’s capital, my classmate and friend Jesse Holland had wowed them discussing his job covering the U.S. Supreme Court for the Associated Press. The Gophers even got a private tour of the hallowed chambers, saw the chief justice’s leather chair. I gulped. What could I possibly do to match that? I decided to show them local nature at its most spectacular. In mid-afternoon, I took them to the Leonard Harrison state park overlook and the grand view. I sure showed ’em, alright. We were taking in the heart-filling vistas of the Pine Creek Gorge, until suddenly we were alone on the balcony except for a man wearing a park uniform, a panicked face, and a walky-talky into which he was blurting words hard to make out as he ran away. In fact, all I heard was out of here and tornado. Oh, hell, someone said (possibly me). Instantly, the winds leaped from zero to sixty. The hazy blue sky over Pine Creek turned pea soup green. The forest thundered and spun in fury. I floored the Gopher van, racing on the only road out through the whipping trees. A fifty-foot oak suddenly crashed across the road, blocking our way. I floored it in reverse. In the rear-view mirror I saw another fifty-footer crashing across the road, trapping us. Somehow we made it back to the state park building, and shelter. Then, suddenly, it was over. The sky was calm again. Megan was the planner of the trio. She didn’t expect a young mother to climb up the from canyon, having survived the brutal winds on the side of the mountain huddled under a rock shelf with her baby. She didn’t expect the baby to lunge from mom’s hands into hers, and it startled Megan. But she took the infant in her arms, and smiled, calm baby, bluing skies, smiles all around, order from chaos, a blessed summer moment—the whole point of the dry deliberations of the justices in their leather chairs.
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