Haven Springs

Growing up in Haven Springs had seemed to me, as a boy, to be the cruelest imaginable trick the fates could ever have played on a helpless mortal child. That town was, I believed, the original, the one and only, God-forsaken place. Oh, yes, I was chock-full of that voluble despair so peculiar to the young. Haven Springs, my home town, was an egregiously misnamed patch-town in the played-out minefields of mountainous northeastern Pennsylvania. A black culm bank loomed over the house I grew up in-something like a lunar landscape it seemed to me, or the land of Mordor in my own back yard. The black dust from that embankment tinged our daily sky. The coal of course was all gone before ever I came on the scene, and the town was a shadow of its former self. It was as if the breath of doomed had passed over Towamensing Valley–sometime previous to my arrival, and probably in preparation for my coming–draining all life and hope and color from the place. Even the Christmas ornaments strung across our winding Main Street each December seemed disheveled and colorless. Oh, I was full of romantic despair for my homeplace in those days. All my ambition, all my boyish dreams, had only to do with getting out.