I have been searching out the mystery of my mother and father for over a decade. Let me say it melodramatically – I have been reaching out to touch ghosts, and in traveling to Donaldson PA, my father’s ghost. In 1941 as a 24-year-old Pennsylvania State Trooper, he was the first officer present at a confrontation between several thousand ‘bootleg’ miners and their wives and children and a coterie of coal police.
If I can come close to knowing what happened, I can imagine something new about him. ‘I was there’ is impossible, but ‘I can imagine it’ is possible. This is the closest I can come to bringing him back, that most fruitless, absurd quest.
The past is gone but goes on in a landscape depleted, honeycombed with abandoned mine shafts, poisoned, poor, forgotten. The land is the only tangible clue that is left, so I traveled to see it, stand in it and by the alchemy of transference try to persuade it to give up the dead.
We came up past Bernville and Bethel and through Pine Grove, Ravine and Tremont and into the thick of the coal regions. In contrast with Pine Grove, which seems to be holding its own, Donaldson is a disheveled strip of homes; some houses look close to collapse. Many have tattered or missing siding, multiple dish antennas screwed onto roof’s or haphazardly on the sides of leaning porches. No surface has been painted in a long time.
We drove through the village and west along Middle Creek Road. On both sides we looked at devastated landscapes. Even the reclaimed land looked unnatural with shriveled trees all of the same species, big-tooth aspen and sweet birch. Large open pit mines lined the area to the south of the Road where various companies are still taking aggregate out for roadways and fill, and some coal mines are still operating. I stopped at one point to take a leak and stumbled across a remnant of the Schuylkill Canal which gave off a vile odor – not sulfurous or that of sewage, just heavy and chemically dense and very unpleasant. The streams ran red brown with heavy metals and iron. The inside of the toilets had the same kind of hard water stains.
We drove up Fountain Road past the Donaldson Community cemetery where I looked for the name Gosselin, the one coal policeman’s name I had from Dad’s incident involving the “riot” in 1941. Lots of Hatters and Morgans and Kimmels and Crones. No Gosselin. We drove as far north as Hegins where they conducted pigeon shoots years ago.
We drove to the Northeast on Fountain Road, an ‘up and over road’, and came to the cemetery and then to a mountaintop of partially reclaimed land. Hummocks of debris piles, long, long ½ acre wide strips of clover, a pit still being worked for gravel, a DER sign from the governorship of Tom Ridge describing these acres as reclaimed and Posted/Private Property signs everywhere plus blank purple metal plates. On all of the ‘reclaimed land’ we saw and walked through, none of the trees was thicker around than my thigh and none taller than 20 feet or so.
We went back out onto Middle Creek Road, driving west and stopped in Good Springs, a treeless huddle of a few homes, one large twin which might have been a store or inn at one point and one dilapidated structure now housing a body-shop. My father found out about the bombing of Pearl Harbor when he stopped at this crossroads because a tin flag on the side of the store had been raised indicating that his Station had an official message for him. Their patrol cars did not carry radios. It was not possible to figure out which of these structures he might have been called to. The building may no longer be standing.
The closest we got to him was when a Township official spoke of his father, 17 in 1941, who worked part time as a ‘greaser’ for Bucyrus, the big coal shovel used in stripping coal at the Donaldson site. Perhaps he was present during the confrontation. Perhaps he saw my father with the miners or even heard him speak or watched him make the arrests of the coal police. What a microscopic thread of ifs and maybes, on which to hang time travel or resurrection.
The Donaldson site itself is gone, either covered by a massive warehouse or the scrubby trees of reclaimed land. The shovel is gone, the miners dead, the Correale Coal Company appears to have been dissolved, and my father died in 2004 without telling us what happened that day.
I am not finished. I have more ideas. I might yet reach out and tomorrow find the right current that will sweep me into knowing what it was like that day.
