No camera

Bad planning meant I lacked my camera for the nicest minor league stadium we saw: Municipal Stadium, home of the Hagerstown Suns, who beat the West Virginia Power 3-2 on Friday night. As it happens, we attended the game on Faith Night (or, as JW aptly called it, "Leave Before They Find Out Fasman's a Jew Night" -- I think we actually had a few of those nights): fireworks and a Christian rock concert followed the game. Strangely, Holiday Inn Express sponsored a kissing contest on that same night, in which three alarmingly open couples engaged in gratuitous and frankly ghastly PDs of A along the third base line in order to see which of them "most needed to get a room." For all that, though, the stadium really was lovely, low, and charming, with advertising-covered outfield walls and a basic hand-operated scoreboard in front of which a cowboy danced to the ubiquitous techno version of "Cotton-Eyed Joe" between the third and fourth innings.

Hagerstown itself was pretty enough in a low-key sort of way, and the surrounding countryside, especially to the west toward Pittsburgh and the Alleghenies, was craggy, verdant, and seemed well worth exploring. We stopped for about an hour at a coffee shop downtown, and when we asked directions to the stadium ended up speaking over the phone to a friend of the owner's, after both the owner and her (present) friend apologized for being unable to direct us.

The trip has had twin themes, I think: one of them is best summarized in JW's idea for a book about the trip, which would be called "Scary America: On the Road and in Fear of Our Lives" -- this country encompasses some deeply worrisome places, especially for an east coast Jewboy like me. Fortunately, this theme is mostly of our own making, and the product of imagination more than circumstance: in actual fact, we found over and over -- in Gratiot, Lima, Hagerstown, as well as in Chicago (though I almost had my head chewed off for not stating outright that I preferred Chicago to New York) -- that people went out of their ways to be friendly. Not in one of those soppy, invite-you-into-their-home ways that travel writers rhapsodize over in hot places without toilets, but in a low-key manner just on the warm side of courtesy. As wanderlusty as I am, it's a terrific country to come home to. -JF