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COMMENTS:
Julia Kasdorf
August 30, 2002 Episode no. 552
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The Media and the Middle of Nowhere
by Julia Kasdorf
Twice this past year reporters have swarmed into Somerset County. Shanksville and Sipesville are in the middle of nowhere -- part of that vast swath of Pennsylvania that is intimate with neither Pittsburgh nor Philadelphia, the part you never think of but that makes this state claim the largest rural population of any in the nation. I grew up one county west, and when I think of Somerset, I think of maple syrup, coal, hardscrabble dairy farms, and mountains. At the county seat -- also called Somerset -- sits a sandstone courthouse with a gorgeous, baroque dome. Once, my boyfriend drove 60 miles through the mountains just to show me that building lit up at night -- which, I now realize, says something about what there is for teenagers to do in southwestern PA. There's a slow, silent drain out of places like this. It's territory people fly over or drive through. If snow is going to fall anywhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, it will fall on Somerset. But there was no snow in September when a plane fell out of the sky, and none in July when 150 gathered at the Sipesville Voluntary Fire Department Hall to wait for news of their men trapped in the mine -- wait and pray.
It strikes me that in some places, prayer acts as an alternative to the news media; it quietly broadcasts other stories, imagines alternative endings, and connects people to one another and to the big event in small ways. Last fall, for instance, my mom told me to pray for her good friend's son -- whom I could only recall as the scrawny younger brother of someone I knew in grade school -- because he was among the state troopers stationed at Shanksville to guard the wreckage. He was there nearly around the clock for weeks, making good overtime pay, but Mom was certain that was why his marriage was busting up.
Or there's Todd Beamer. In late September when I flew to Chicago, the only other passengers on my flight out of State College were a couple of fearless senior citizens with nothing to lose, heading for the beach in San Diego. At O'Hare, the airport was eerily empty, and at Wheaton College, people talked about their graduate who helped take Flight 93 down. They laid claim to that handsome young hero by praying for his pregnant wife and children. As inured as people become to the news, prayer remains an intimate means of narrating other stories, of writing outside the printed margins and making the unimaginable their own. The concrete connections people trace through the language of prayer finally help them to feel.
Nevertheless, an NPR report from Quecreek Mine left me tearful driving home that Saturday night in July. I'd grown up hearing about mine disasters and miners' strikes, but the news from Somerset struck hard. God, they're still going down like that, into the cold and dark and wet, doing it the way they always have, I thought, as if the world could have changed so much in the 20 years since I left my hometown, two weeks after high school graduation. Then I had to wonder what men do for money in Somerset: farm and drive a school bus, mine and farm part time. And, with the unreliable old mine company maps, that work can be even more dangerous now than it once was. Among the trapped men was a father-in-law and son-in-law, predictably, and as I listened for family names I might recognize, I named my desire that all nine would come up, alive, to see the light.
And they did the next morning -- in an uncanny counterbalance to the lives that fell from the sky about ten miles away less than one year earlier. News reports called the rescue a "miracle" and made easy references to prayer and personal faith, as if they were quaint features of the local landscape. But believers will insist that God was as present at Shanksville as Sipesville, that God is present anyplace people find words for their need.
The last bit of news we got on the miners was that the men sold their stories to Disney for $150,000 each. The average annual income of an employed worker in Somerset is about $28,000, so that's more than five years of full-time work in exchange for a story that lasted three days.
Not bad, but I wonder what would be the price for a prayer in the middle of nowhere.
Poet Julia Kasdorf directs the graduate creative writing program and teaches poetry at Penn State University. Her most recent book is THE BODY AND THE BOOK: WRITING FROM A MENNONITE LIFE.
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