When the out-of-town reporters streamed in three years ago to cover the Sandusky case they fed the facts – sordid crimes committed in a place that calls itself Happy Valley! – into their story-processing machines and out came the most glorious drivel.
How, the scribes asked, could such a “bucolic” or “idyllic” place (take your pick), “nestled” as it is in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania, be the scene of such foul deeds?
Here was my favorite scene-setter, published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which ought to have known better:
“The streets of State College are pristine, and the air there feels as if it has gone through some kind of natural filter…On a clear day, a sun-splashed day, with the Nittany Mountains on the horizon, the place seems as if it’s been touched by the hand of God… Open your window in State College, you hear only the sweet sounds – sparrow tweets and cricket chirps.”
Pristine streets, eh? Maybe the red maple leaves that still lay on the ground in early November camouflaged the red plastic beer cups.
Clear day? Yeah, we have some, but this is the cloudiest place I’ve ever lived.
Nittany Mountains? Uh, no such range.
Sweet sounds? The Woo people must have been sleeping.
OK, so that’s how the city slickers see us. Sounds like they ought to get out of town more often. What’s surprising is the extent to which we, who live here, buy into the Happy Valley image, including those of us who want no part of it.
Consider my composite friend, Professor Prig. Prig was destined for great things. He had to pay his dues, of course, so he accepted a position at this remote outpost of higher education, fully expecting his brilliant scholarly output to attract the attention of urban schools in New York, Boston or Philadelphia, much as a baseball phenom expects a quick call-up to the major leagues after a dazzling stint in the minors.
In the meantime, he bemoans the paucity of decent restaurants and movie offerings and sneers at the lowbrow enthusiasms of the sports-crazed rabble. Oh, he’s been to a tailgate, a football game, a Homecoming Parade, a Dance Marathon a time or two (he thought of it as research). But a little of that sort of thing goes a long way, don’t you know?
With every passing year, Prig worries that his stint in the hinterlands is becoming a permanent banishment from the world’s hippest places. If only, he says. If only there were more bookstores here, more coffeehouses, more jazz clubs, more galleries, more ethnic restaurants, fewer pizza joints, fewer T-shirt shops, fewer student hangouts, fewer drunks.
The good professor doesn’t dislike Happy Valley. Far from it. He likes it as a low-overhead base of operations that enables him to travel more than he could if he were living in the big city. But the idea is to get out of here as often as possible for as long as possible (thank heavens for academic conferences).
Were Prig to stick around a little he might see that there’s more here than meets the eye. Call it Alt-State College. It’s not any particular group of people, but a dimension of mind, like the Twilight Zone. Alt-State College is the sum of all the little sub-cultures that co-exist alongside the town’s high-profile sports and drinking culture.
It’s the folkies you see at the Acoustic Brew concerts; the film and drama buffs you see at the State Theatre, the Downtown Theatre Centre and on campus; and the literature lovers you see at readings at Webster’s and on campus.
Alt-State College is the hikers you meet in the Rothrock State Forest, the cyclists active in the Centre Region Bike Coalition and the farmers and locavores involved in Community Supported Agriculture.
Increasingly, Alt-State College is the international students and faculty members and their families whose presence gives the lie to those portrayals of Happy Valley as an insular or provincial backwater.
The above groups are a top-of-the-head list. I’m sure there are many I don’t even know about. Also, there are no boundaries separating the dominant culture from the sub-cultures. Plenty of poetry lovers, for example, also happen to be football lovers.
But some of these little groups — and the venues where they gather — could use Prig’s help. They need his dollars, but more than that, they need his energy.
Face it, Professor. You live here. So be here. This is a more interesting (and less idyllic) place than those out-of-town reporters gave it credit for being. It can be more interesting still.
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