This begins with a Philip Roth novel, with a minor character, a rookie State Policeman who loved patrol, who loved being “alone in the car, cruising, just driving the roads”, who “knew the area, all the roads, the woods, knew the businesses in town” and “found an enormous … satisfaction in driving by at night and checking them out ….” As best I can tell, from 1938 to 1940, when he was stationed in Elverson (see 3 trooper photo, father on the right), my father drove the roads I have traveled for over 40 years, the back roads through all of northern Chester County, then a wholly rural 
landscape of farms and factory workers’ cottages and occasional vast estates held by industrialists of great wealth. He wandered all the roads around the big hill on the Ridge Pike, which became the campus of Owen J Roberts High and Middle school, but then was a hay field. He drove past the one room school house where we now live, then 8 years vacant and treeless. On hot summer days, he would sometimes park beneath a tree somewhere along the French Creek and eat lunch hoping for a breeze. When I make all the developments vanish, scrub these 100 square miles of all buildings constructed in the past 70 years, bring back dirt-packed back roads, erase the sky of jet contrails and satellites’ lines of light, make modernity itself disappear, imagine enormous flocks of birds and a spring song array of volume and breadth, conjure silence, conjure his black and white, radio-free, his silhouette in the driver’s seat, 25 years old, all the old yearning to simply reconnect comes back and the wonder at how this strange life unfolds where before he could have imagined me, he went back and forth across valleys and ridgelines I know so intimately that I could close my eyes and follow turns and straightaways and tell you where we have landed. What he surveyed, I can now see, as if my eyes can fuse with his knowledge of this terrain. In this country, no matter where my winding gaze comes to rest, wherever “memory holds a seat”, spirits arise.
