We needed a saucepan to heat water for coffee so we hit the flea market in Leeper, a town near Cook Forest State Park, where we were camping last weekend.
This was my second visit to Cook Forest, a two-hour drive northwest of State College. The first time I camped there I forgot the sleeping bags and the coffee and it rained so hard there were puddles in the tent.
This trip went better. It poured while we were kayaking on the Clarion River, but it is much better to get wet when you are splashing around in water than when you are trying to sleep.
Aside from the saucepan, we could have used a clothesline. As it was, we packed more gear into our car for a two-day camping trip than we carried on our backs for a month in Greece and Ukraine. Of course, we did not haul a tent, pillows, mattresses, lanterns, cook stoves, folding chairs or an ice chest around southeastern Europe.
At the Leeper Flea Market we found a saucepan for $6.50, and also bought a glass lemon juicer because our old plastic one broke. We did not buy any of the unwelcome mats on offer, though there were plenty to choose from. Many displayed pictures of guns. Some examples:
- Welcome. Door locked for your protection, not mine.
- Nothing inside is worth dying for.
- I’m gonna give you to the count of 10 to get off my property before I pump your guts full of lead.
- Never mind the dog, beware of owner.
One could surmise that crime is rampant in places like Leeper, but I doubt this is true. What worries those who display these “greetings” is not that they might have to use their guns some day, but that they might not have guns to use if gun control advocates have their way.
Maybe. It seems reasonable to infer from a half-hour circuit of the Leeper Flea Market that the locals love their country but hate the federal government, love freedom and hate handouts, love veterans and hate President Obama. But it is unsound practice, anthropologically speaking.
For one thing, the threatening messages are probably supposed to be funny, even though the humor, as is so often the case, has a hostile edge.
For another, there might be more to the joke than the idleness of the threat. Redneck humor, if that’s what this is, mocks the redneck stereotype by embracing it: Yep, we country folk are just as ignorant as you city folk think we are. Proud of it, too.
A case in point is candidate Barack Obama’s indiscreet comment about rural Pennsylvanians getting “bitter” and clinging to guns and religion. Seven years later, one can still find a bumper sticker like this one at the Leeper Flea Market:
“Bitter Rural American. Proud to cling to my guns and religion.”
I did not come away from the Leeper Flea Market thinking that I was visiting a strange land. I came away thinking that I live in a strange land. State College is no hotbed of liberalism, but it is surely an exception to Clinton crony James Carville’s famous formulation that “Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in the middle.”
OK, so Carville probably overstated things for rhetorical effect. For that matter, he undoubtedly paints Alabama with an overly broad brush, but he gets away with it because he’s a southern boy himself.
We cloistered academics need to visit “Alabama” for reasons best articulated (in verse, and without apostrophes) by the poet David Antin:
“youre not only speakers of the same language and dialect/ youre practically sitting in each others laps/ and its not exactly a reasonable human situation/ for adults to spend so much time sitting in each others laps/ which suggests that its a little more reasonable to go out/ where you cant talk shop”
All that said, I did not go to Cook Forest to escape the Ivory Tower or to study rural culture. I went to hike in the woods, play in the river, sleep in a tent and cook on a wood fire.
So a few words about all that: If you camp, do not leave your cooler out overnight, even if you pile a bunch of stuff on it. Raccoons are resourceful creatures, as the folks in the campsite next to ours learned, to their sorrow.
And if you plan to float down the Clarion River, be forewarned that on a midsummer weekend, the Clarion looks like Fifth Avenue at Christmastime. It’s a merry scene, with water worshipers of every shape and size clinging unbitterly to their tubes and paddles.
But if you crave quieter communion with the natural world, try to go on a weekday.
