Not much going on in Strawburg, Pennsylvania, down in the river valley. It's a town--more of a village, really--with less than 500 people. It has one traffic light and nine stop signs, all of which are stationed along the main drag, on High Street. It used to have eleven stop signs, but in October of 2004 the township removed two of them, the first one and the last one, saying that the intersections didn't have enough traffic to warrant them, and nobody argued because both cross streets were dead ends anyway. Now there's only nine stop signs.
The traffic light in town is where a fast-food restaurant stands, Pink Burger, across from the gas station. Old Ralph Staub used to eat lunch there at noon. Almost every day he would sit in the corner booth, "Ralph's Booth," as the locals called it. He always has the same thing, a double Pink Burger with cheese, a side of onion rings, and a cup of ice. No drink, he only ever ordered a cup of ice with his Pink Burger. After a while of doing this on a regular basis, the workers would see him coming and start getting his order ready when they saw him begin the long shuffle across the parking lot. The senior crew members would pass the word down to the new hires, and the tradition would continue that way for years. And he did it his whole retirement for 25 years, he'd shuffle down and sit in the same booth and order the same thing prepared the same way. The locals miss Old Ralph there now. They say it's not the same without him.
The gas station across the street, right next to the beer distributor and the state-owned liquor store, also contains a small grocery store where the locals shop. Todd Livelsberger owned the place last time I checked. It's usually staffed by high schoolers from the Catholic school a short walk away, just two blocks behind the Pink Burger. The school building from this angle is an ancient stone monolith that you'd swear was a prison if it didn't have a sign out front with letters that spell out "GO STINKBUGS".
This was Strawburg Catholic High School's mascot, the stink bug, ever since 1998 when an alumnus donated a large sum of money to furnish the school's sports department with new equipment and uniforms, but this was all under the condition that the mascot be changed from the Knights to the Stink Bugs. People tried to tell the principal at the time that it was a bad idea, but she insisted that it was too good a donation to pass up and that it would solidify the sports legacy of the school for generations to come. So, they took the money and changed the mascot. The old three-color mural of a medieval knight on horseback that was painted on the football announcer's box was done over with a giant "SB" in a graffiti art style by a senior for his class project. It wasn't a typical stylistic choice, but the art teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, she didn't wish to suppress the creativity of her top AP art student, so she let him go for it. It turned out well, thankfully. The initials on their own eventually became the default name of the team. "Let's go SB," fans would shout in the stands. It was as though the school itself was a great towering monument to the immensely powerful constructive and creative potential of pure unadaulterated shame, so much so that in order to cheer on the sports teams you had to shoulder a burden of shame yourself, either by shouting "STINKBUGS," or by admitting your shame and using a humble "SB" like a good Catholic.
Anyway, walking toward Strawburg Catholic from the Pink Burger, you can only see the oldest part of the building at first, and it looks very old and intimidating and prison-like with its aging and rusted iron window frames that don't open all the way anymore, and its dirty, miscolored bricks from who knows when that were probably laid by hand in some age gone past. From the other side of the school you can see the addition to the building that was built in the 1980s after a student died in a car accident, so his parents donated his college fund to build an addition onto the school, and the name of their late son was affixed right there in big brass letters permanently stuck onto the side of the building: "GAYLORD HUDSON III MEMORIAL". If someone did try to bring up the fact that it might eventually prove to be an odd decision to emblazon that permanently onto the side of a building full of smirking young teenage boys, they probably wouldn't have gotten very far. It was too good a donation to pass up, after all, and who wouldn't want to solidify a legacy like that?
When I attended Strawburg Catholic back in the 2000s, the boys would use gel in our hair for no reason, not to spike it or style it, just use gel for the sake of it and keep the hair more or less in the position it was going to be in anyway. Every time we had a rare no-uniform day, the girls wore hip-hugging bellbottom jeans which were in style at the time. A few of the stoners also wore bellbottoms on dress-down days, even though they weren't really made for men, but they didn't care, they wore women's bell bottoms because it looked like they were from the 70s, man, and that was cool. They couldn't grow their hair out, though, because if your hair touched your collar you would get detention, and that was the worst of all fates, so they all had a similar thick, shaggy, greasy hair style that was cropped just short enough to get by the rules.
In the lunchroom, sometimes a bunch of the art kids would sit at the table, and they'd unroll a large sheet of paper and lay it out. They'd all start to doodle on the paper, and slowly it would grow into an orgiastic amalgam of various styles and doodles, playing off one another, vandalizing one another, and blending into a mush of free creativity. Some of those kids sell their art now. I think one of them might be in jail, but I'm not sure. That's what I heard.
The music nerds would sometimes sing something at lunch, loudly and unashamedly, complete with harmonies and impressive backing vocals. Occasionally, maybe twice a month or so, someone would drop their lunch tray, and the ceramic plate would smash on the floor with earth-shattering volume, and the entire lunchroom would immediately stop whatever they're saying or doing and erupt into raucous applause and cheers. It happened every single time, and everyone always loved it, except for the tray droppers, but it wasn't really about them.
I remember exploring a little stream out past the train tracks in the woods, it was a little creek that leaked down from a big, full dam somewhere. The trees around it always looked so magical, almost out of place in Pennsylvania with their big, exposed roots nestled into the pebbles and rocks of the stream delta. Sometimes I would sit under one of those magical trees and meditate. I never attained enlightenment there, but I did take a girl out for a walk to the stream bed once. It was a frenzied haze of youth, and I remember dropping her off later that evening, then driving home with the windows down, blasting FM rock radio, and feeling like a new man. I was alive, I was sixteen, and nothing could stop me.
~[MD]