Trucking Hell

 I once spent a month in Scranton Pennsylvania one afternoon.

I didn’t see much of it: just a few suburbs and the inside of a dreary airport in which I was ignored by largely disinterested staff including a cop chatting up the sandwich jockey at the airport’s miniscule lunch bar. I didn’t know what to expect of Scranton, But I guess I expected more than this.

It was the town that featured in one of my favourite Harry Chapin songs—30,000 pounds of bananas—which recounts the true story of a driver of a truck “coming down the hill to Scranton Pennsylvania” losing control and crashing into a house, killing himself and spilling his load of 30,000 pounds of bananas. There was a story going around at the immediate aftermath of the crash in 1965 that the driver, Eugene P. Sesky, was decapitated; he wasn’t, but in a grim irony Harry Chapin was, 16 years later when he crashed into a truck and trailer unit.

Scranton’s only other claim to fame that I can tell was its selection as the site for the American version of The Office. Given that The Office’s creators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant selected Slough for the British original suggests what they thought of Scranton.

Despite my impressions of Scranton, I have nothing against it, and I certainly have nothing but admiration for Pennsylvania. It is a beautiful state and wonderfully hospitable. One of my sons and I spent a night at a hotel there where we were joined by a bunch of bikers; from that point neither my son nor I bought a drink and by two in the morning the bar had run out of whisky. I attended a wedding there (another of my son’s) which was a momentous and memorable occasion; I was given a lengthy lesson on how to shoot “all kinds of varmints” using all kinds of weapons by a guy who was looking forward to coming down to New Zealand to shoot bears; and I acquired a new daughter-in-law.

I was also given lessons in history, including much about the great Battle of Gettysburg, not realising beforehand that Gettysburg is in Pennsylvania and that the Confederates got that far north. I could have crossed the state border and visited another place of history—Woodstock. But I didn’t. Perhaps next time.

I drove into Pennsylvania and flew out of Scranton. Those modes of transport are entirely apt: slowly in to relish the beautiful countryside—quickly out to escape Scranton.

I would recommend it to anyone.

By the way, the line “I spent a month there one afternoon” is not mine. It’s Harry Chapin’s, and he used it to introduce his song at live performances. I am guessing he didn’t do many of those in Scranton.