Pennsylvania [antikvár]

A young Amish gentleman takes his courting buggy out on a rainy Sunday near Strasburg. In the Pennsylvania Dutch region of Berks County, six miles west of the Schuylkill River and just off Interstate 78, surrounded by tall corn and tawny wheat, is an ancient German town called Shartlesville. On its one main street is an old inn with a weathered facade. The inn has a rickety front porch with peeling dark green paint, whitewashed plaster walls, dark green trim around the window frames and eaves, and a neon beer sign hanging in the tavern window on the left side of the porch. On the right side of the porch is a dining room which serves "all-you-can-eat" country breakfasts for about $5. The size and astonishing beauty of these breakfasts is hard to believe. A traveler is less apt to spend the $5 for a breakfast there than are the local laborers and farmhands, who really need the food for sustenance. They enter in their faded work clothes and muddy boots, greet the waitress as an old friend, and then the four of them sit down in creaking chairs to a long rectangular wooden table dark with age. In the next ten or fifteen minutes, the waitress covers the entire table with huge steaming platters of scrambled eggs, pancakes, sausage, bacon, ham, scrapple, fried potatoes, coffeecake, and toast; bowls of applesauce and relish; jugs of coffee, orange juice, ice water, and milk, as well as syrup, butler, and jams. The men begin to eat a breakfast that could easily feed a crowd of 20. The platter of scrambled eggs alone must be a foot and a half long and eight or ten inches deep, the eggs bright yellow against the dark wood of the table and the white of the plate. The orange juice being poured from the tin jug beaded with moisture looks like the most refreshing orange juice ever served. The whole abundant scene is straight out of a T6th century Flemish painting. The breakfast being served in Shartlesville is only one small isolated scene out of millions of different scenes taking place at the same hour across the vast expanse of this diversified state. A few hours from now, 250 miles away in downtown Pittsburgh, a fashionably dressed luncheon crowd will be dining under exotic indoor trees at an unusual modern shopping mall created inside a 19th century bank, where one of the shops is a jewelry store built inside the bank's original vault. In the same city, steelworkers at U.S. Steel or aluminum workers at Alcoa will be eating sandwiches out of lunch pails. In downtown Lancaster, a varied crowd of Amish and Mennonite farmers and suburban housewives will be selecting vegetables and meats from the stalls at the Lancaster Farmers Market for their evening meals. Players on the Pittsburgh Pirates or Philadelphia Phillies baseball teams may be heading out to their respective modern parks for afternoon or evening games. Meanwhile, ships will be loading and unloading their cargoes, coming and going from such busy ports as Erie, on the Great Lakes, Pittsburgh at the fork of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers, and Philadelphia on the Delaware and Schuykill rivers, receiving iron ore from Minnesota or South America and shipping steel, coal, oil, and thousands of other goods and products to near and far parts of the world. It is virtually impossible to condense the atmosphere of Pennsylvania into one convenient scene. To depict all of it would require a huge mural or an epic poem such as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Crass. The state is possibly the most intriguingly diversified of all the states. Its industry is phenomenal. The statistics one can muster to convince the sceptic of its wealth are overwhelming. Pittsburgh alone produces more manufactured goods in a year than 36 separate states. It offers everything from fine lace to atomic engines. Its ships carry more tonnage each year than all the ships passing through the Panama Canal. But it is really Pennsylvania's people, from the farmhands eating breakfast in Shartlesville, to the Amish farmer plowing his fields with mules and smoking a cigar, to the persistent residents of Johnstown, stubbornly determined to rebuild their city after the third disastrous flood there in less than 90 years—Pennsylvania's men, women, and children of various national origins, the dwellings they inhabit and the regions they call home, which