The road to Lisburn serpentines through rolling Pennsylvanian farm land. At its near start, it anchors a capital bedroom community etched out of GI Bill housing built after the war, what a war. At its far end, there isn’t much but a firehouse serving charity bbq chicken in the summer and a rope swing stretching out over the Yellow Breeches, also best in summer. Green grasses bathed in the smell of clipped chlorophyll, young corn just breaking to sunlight, dips that drive you into the earth and then just as quickly rise up to give you the illusion of flight: to travel Lisburn Road is to experience freedom, the soul-freeing kind of freedom, where you scream in your head that it’s great to be alive. And you’re right.
Or, at least it used to be that way.
The famous line is that you can’t go home again. That’s a lie, of course. You can always get there if you have Waze or Google Maps. If you look on one of those aps, Lisburn in all its glorious summer glow still lives. It’s just that Lisburn Road is gone: someone killed it with a rotary in the road’s rhythm.
Actually, two rotaries, one right after the other.
If you don’t know what a rotary is, you are most fortunate. As the olde Irish blessing goes, “may the road rise up to meet you and may you never encounter a rotary.” Rotaries are devil’s circles planted in place of intersections where some idiot traffic engineer or cheap politician decided they didn’t want a stop sign or a traffic light. The intent is to slow traffic, facilitating everyone to go whichever way they want to go…now and all at the same time. Sounds very democratic, all-in-all, but like contemporary democracy, the effect only seems to confuse and frustrate.
I suspect the ultimate goal was to kill Lisburn Road. That, at least, is the effect.
Kill it dead, with two rotaries. And then, far worse, the rotaries spit on old Lisburn’s grave, when the interrupting intersection roads lead to a devasting new reality: Arcona Village. Here all its streets are named Way. Seriously. Awkwardly thin three story townhouses rise from abandoned cow pastures. These plastic habitats radiate out from an equally artificial green known as the “town” center. Yes, the village sports all the pleasures of modern living.
And in that town green sits Arcona’s own brewery.
You’d think a brewery would be mercy. But oh, no… this large metal box is a cathedral to sterility. Rising too tall for giants, the entire shell shines in unrelenting stainless steel. Stainless steel tables are scattered across cold concrete. The only touch of personality in the place is a handwritten sign: “Don’t move the tables. The legs are falling off.” The bar serves perversions, strange brews like Blueberry Lemon Bellinis, Lavender Lemonade, and a Cinnamon Bun apple cider. This is not a craft beer revolution, but more an odd re-manifestation of the 1800s beer garden, now as a commercial package. The Acrona village green doesn’t rise from a growth of the soil, but falls pre-fab from the capitalist, pre-conception of community. The hollowed horror. But it gets worse.
If you know, you know that Pennsylvania is native, insular and local to the point of quirky. (Even it’s chief city is the same way, except swap urban for local, which makes Philadelphia even weirder.)
So here in the village, I am sipping my cider (you can’t drink this stuff), looking around at the paying customers. Go ahead, take in this place. There’s a table of two young families, their knockoffs blissfully obliviously running through their sanitized future, banging into glassdoors that won’t open for them. At the bar, two white collar males, knocking off work early, sip custom-made pink alcohol slurpies, a house specialty. And over there, in the corner, eight women in their thirties ignored the table warning, pulling several together in a defensive posture. They stare outward with a touch of fear.
Not at the kids or money men. Fear at me, the stranger, the non-Arconian.
I smile, fruitlessly, when it strikes me, like one recognizing being in Stepford, Summerisle, or the Villages. Yes, this village, Arcona Village, is a retirement community, gated by two rotary circles. But it’s retirement for professionals in their twenties and thirties, still working, but here safely escaping the complexities of a more multi-dimensional living, the kind one would find, perhaps ironically, even in that GI-created suburb.
Here the future is written in isolation and fear, wrapped in pre-concieved, commercial cookie-cutter steel and bad apple cider.
No, more: have we sold our soul for bland convenience? What home is left to me? What poetry remains? No, no, quarantine me please, I beg you, for I have grown old along with my remembered land. Just don’t cast me into endless circling rotaries.
Just let me drive.