June 11

 Right now I'm sitting in a hotel room in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania half-watching Man With No Name after about twelve hours of driving and four hours of sleep. Getting into G'ner tomorrow about noon to scope out this sketchballer landlord (upon seeing his photo my dad suggested I invest in some "small arms training") and my new digs in his attic.

  Anyway, the far more interesting part of this day was the drive and the weird stuff along the way. Knoxville was the first and only major city we passed, and so far VA, WV, MD, and PA have been one long stretch of unremarkable rurality with varying degrees of hilliness and occasionally outright mountains. On a good patch, you'd have maybe one deer carcass every five miles; on a bad one, half a deer carcass every other mile, interspersed with a surprising number of exploded possums. Also passed innumerable caverns and caves and a Pentecostal Holiness church, which means only one thing in the state of West Virginia: snake handlers. WV is the only state to not have a law against snake handling. Despite being from the town that brought Pentecostal snake handling to the southern mountains, I have unfortunately never witnessed a Sign Followers service, for various reasons explained in my sophomore HIST 200 mini-thesis that cemented my status as hillbilly of the department. Sadly, it was only Saturday morning and I doubt they would've whipped out any serpents or mixed up some strychnine just to impress me.

  From the man made scenery of I-81 North, I've learned two important things: one, that every town needs a giant cross made out of hollow pipes and steel beams, and two, that it is possible in the South to emblazon the outside of your store or home with signs that say both "GUNS!" and "JESUS IS LORD", without a trace of irony.

         
    This is either WV or VA... at some point, trying to distinguish between them became useless. If you can't see it or don't want to, it's basically 30 seconds of grainy footage of the hills shot from the window of the car, apparently through a screen of wax paper.

  We stopped in Hagerstown, MD for dinner, which is where serious disorientation set in. Technically, Maryland is still the South, as defined by its U.S. Census region, its position below the Mason-Dixon line, the fact that every single person from the age of 18-85 in that Shoney's had at least one visible tattoo, and the abundance of homemade signs along the highway advertising for a cage fight that night. But they don't sound Southern. Hearing southernisms like "ornery" and "favor" (to mean "looks like") spoken with northern accents pretty much kicked off the pilot episode of Twilight Zone: Dixie Edition that I think is going to rerun until we get into New York state.

  I like Pennsylvania a lot so far -- the buildings are old and beautiful, 81 N runs through pretty farmland, and, best of all, the Amish drive cars. Well, maybe just the one. We passed another car speeding out of Maryland with PA tags and I saw that the guy driving it was decked out in checkered shirt, suspenders, flat hat, and full-on beard. He was either Amish or a member of The Westbound Rangers that missed the exit to Nashville. Could go either way, but as my dad commented, "There's nothing worse than a speeding Amish in a Honda!"

  The adventure continues tomorrow with checking out the Archives in Mt. Kisco and moving in. If the past few days are any indication of the rest of the summer, things can only get weirder from here.