The Ducks, Unsolicited

 We moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania when I was 7 and we lived in the outskirts in a tiny coal town called Windber, the backwards of Berwin, the Coal Company

And the mines were still open - at least two of them, and my friends at school had fathers who were miners, and the mountains were cut in deep purple ridges you could see when the sun set and there was a loud motor speedway and the religion was high school football and the water in the creek ran yellow.

You didn't touch it: The Water

No ducks in it. No fish. No crayfish. No oysters.

And the smell was Sulphur and it smelled like houses

Houses were places for Ouija boards and sleepovers and dares to run naked down 10th Street

We learned about global warming and acid rain in the third grade

I rode my mountain bike down the coal slag

I stayed away from The Water

In 10th grade I moved closer to Johnstown Proper after the mill closed

I read in the paper we were the #1 most depressed city in the nation

But the football games stayed the same and there was money for uniforms

And the band played

And you could rent an instrument

The 1970's carpet in the high school looked like all the other schools I knew about, maybe nicer

I did forensics and swim team

The YMCA was dirty but massive

I smell chlorine like the Sulphur and I smell the slush in the winter and it mingles with the radiator heating in the living room and we grill out in summer and we wade in a creek now and then - not so yellow but no one has a job now and my friend who wanted to be a doctor settled for driving the UPS van and the mall was bulldozed to make room for Walmart.

I remember it used to have a merry-go-round and a pinball machine where I had the high score for three weeks

I couldn't wait to leave it

Escaping was the purpose of everyone pushing their kids into education and 98% of us went to college because our parents knew - they knew that grilled cheese and a can of Campbell's wasn't comfort food, it was poverty, but we ate hot dogs and macaroni and cheese from boxes and played in the backyard in hand-me-downs and we drank from the hose and we washed our cars in the driveway and learned the value of working hard because that was life, 

it was life and everybody did it - 

right?

I got a degree elsewhere and I left it because of the memories that stung -

(the stolen parking lot kiss and the backseat make out and the time we stole Jackie Pepe's mother's concrete goose that she dressed in a yellow raincoat and the time we tic-tacked the neighbors and egged the science teachers house and trick or treated in the "rich" neighborhood to get whole Hershey bars)

not the money;

When I drove past the places it made my heart crinkle in a way that made me know I had to leave it.

I went back for Christmas and all the mines were closed.

And the next year The Water ran brown.

And the next year The Water ran clear.

And the next year 

The Ducks came,

 Unsolicited.