Out of the tourist trap

RUSCOMBMANOR, Pennsylvania. Nature-tripping that started on the way to and from the Niagara Falls continues here.
No freeways, no heavy volume of vehicles – so, no smog. Just the smooth two-lane country road winding through green-and-gold cornfields, emerald forests of oaks, maples and pines, and – again, quaint little villages with their ubiquitous ever-red barns. With the eponymous Blue Mountains forming a backdrop against the light, light azure skies speckled with white cotton-candy wisps of clouds.
Ah, couldn’t help but feel romantic here. Driving all alone with the wife, in the embrace of soothing jazz in my sis-in-law Agnes’ Subaru Impreza. A sentimental journey, indeed, to young, young love: of first kiss bliss, of floating on cloud nine while HHWWPSSP – that’s holding hands while walking pa-sway-sway pa, for you cold-hearted cad.
So a pot of gold is promised at the end of a rainbow, so a slice of Eden is delivered at our journey’s end – a log cabin atop a slope of green, green grass by a forest of ash, birch, pine, and locust trees whence emerge foxes, rabbits and squirrels scurrying for food and play in the early morning.
In the evening, comes a sweet, sweet symphony of the whistling wind, rustling leaves, the hum of cicadas and the buzz of crickets.
God’s own little acre is home to Steve and Yolanda Spohn, nee Sanchez, the wife’s cousin. Tibo is a retired US Navyman and is now a computer systems analyst while Yolly used to play lead guitar in an all-female band that once gigged in Angeles City under the moniker Sweet Earth. City baby boomers will remember them as the top draw at the then Hawaii Five-O Club in Balibago. She now plays only occasionally – as in the Mass at the reunion of the Colegio del Sagrado Corazon de Jesus alumnae in New York City – as she has a full-time bank job in Boyertown, one more small pleasantville in good old USA 30 minutes from here.
In the country, in a log cabin – something melds the rustic with the romantic effecting – yeah, here I go again – a thoroughly uplifting and at once profound spiritual sense: Of Creator and creation as kindred essences. God is good. Allahu akbar!
I don’t wonder now why all the best, and more charismatic, preachers in America were born and bred in the country; the firebrands, mostly in the inner cities. Think here of Martin Luther King vis-à-vis Malcolm X.
So do presidents. The guy from Plains, Georgia – Jimmy Carter – while graded by the American electorate as a “fair” president is hailed the world over as an exceptional ex-president, impacting his character in the field of human rights and in the propagation of the democratic system of governance – heading election monitors in trouble spots in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and in his advocacy for human dignity so manifest in the Habitat for Humanity.
The log cabin stands too on revered ground in the annals of American political history. A number of American presidents, notably the great Andrew Jackson and the greatest, Abraham Lincoln, as well as a greater number of pretenders to the presidency used the born-in-a-log-cabin campaign spins. Of course, the election results were not always to their favor.
God, nature, democracy – essential America – in my contemplation of a log cabin by the woods. Truly, the best of this land of the free and home of the brave is not in your usual tourist brochures. No matter their glossiness.
I got out of the cities, got to the country, and found myself in the very heart and soul of America.