The Regular

There is something about a smoky bar.

Found in old row buildings crammed tightly together, they share common walls with laundry mats and drug stores. In the old days, they rented rooms to the rail workers and day laborers by the month, day, or hour. Men’s hotels.

In the sticks, they live out on the crossroads in the middle of gravel parking lots miles from nowhere. Servicing loggers and drag line operators. Waiting for something to happen.

They are the places where a pool table is sacred, the darts have steel tips (you keep score by marking a slate bard with chalk) and there’s a shuffleboard that runs the length of the back wall. It is where you would find old men nursing whiskey at 10 in the morning on a Sunday—left over from the ‘lock in’ the night before. They were the regulars

In the small towns where I grew up, these establishments are still part of the fabric. They house local history and refuse to be gentrified.

In Columbia my two favorites are Dietz’s and the Fairview. I frequent them when I go home. My sisters have regular status. We pay for every other.

The Hotel Locust was another. Favored by my late uncle Paul and the boys, late evenings during the holidays led to Christmas carols at my grandmother’s house at 2 a.m. But it has changed hands recently and appears to have lost some of its gritty charm.

Outside of Moshannon there was the roadhouse at the crossroads. I never knew it to have a name. They only served bottles and cans—poured into plastic cups after 8 p.m. Great cheeseburgers for lunch. It’s strip joint now.

The Star Garden is a memory.

At the edge of Karthus there’s a cinder block shack that sits 50 feet from the train tracks. As I kid, my dad and uncle would stop there to pick up a six-pack for the canoe ride from Miller’s Landing to the iron bridge. I’ve always wanted to give it a try.

Bellefonte has the Dodie and the Omar, but the Big Trout is gone.

My step-father and his brother have a family bar in my home town. It’s an old two-story row house hotel with a small sign outside—Smith’s. When I was a kid the rail was populated by old men with names like Beanbelly, Buzz, and Double-dip. The long bar has since been cut in half to make room for seating to accommodate the steak shop the blossomed out of the back kitchen 20 years ago. They still rent rooms upstairs.

My regular bar is Zeno’s—located directly above the center of the earth—and even after my 9 years in Seattle (where I never did find the right bar), it was as though I had never left. Dave still tends five nights a week. And on Friday nights I lose two out of three on the pool table to this guy from Staten Island. Every once in a while, I'm there when the lights come on.

Remnants

One of the things I like about central Pennsylvania is the uneasy relationship between old industry and the wild. Foundries beside trout streams and dusty limestone plants nestled in tight to mountainsides—all are remnants of an earlier time in our history when small towns boomed around coal, timber, and limestone.


Outside of Bellefonte there are several limestone plants—juggernauts of industry where mountains are crushed to grade. Piles of stone sit next to the road, covered in the white dust that cakes the surrounding buildings. Mercury-vapor lights illuminate the process late into the summer evenings. When I was a kid, I wanted to slide down those piles and run back up again.

Farther north are shale fields where the vegetation and topsoil was stripped away. Stretches of forest—already denuded several times over—were put to the not so gentle touch of draglines in search of coal. As a teenager, my cousins and I would comb through these fields for fossils, and practice our marksmanship with .22s on old cans of PBR and Genesee that littered the dirt roads.

Several of these old strip mines to the north of Snow Shoe are now being reclaimed. I passed by one late last summer on my way to a back-country trout stream that runs late into the season. Once the weather clears I’ll ride up there again and see how it looks.