Scene on the Road

I'm on U.S. Highway 322, passing though upper Lancaster County as I drive from West Chester to Hershey. Since I spent a week exploring "Pennsylvania Dutch" country for the newspaper last summer, I am avoiding most of the Amish-themed tourist sites on this Week 7 Road Trip.



But the religious heritage of the area is impossible to ignore. Thanks to William Penn's tolerance, many sects having trouble with authorities in their own homeland found their way to Pennsylvania. I end up in one of the oldest of those communities - the Ephrata Cloister.

After being banished from Germany. Pietist Johann Conrad Beissel also ended up here, where - after first settling in Germantown - he founded the Cloister in 1732. At it's peak, some 300 celibate Brothers and Sisters and married local farm families awaited the second coming, living simply at the Cloister, instead of seeking earthly rewards. That's Beissel's home on the right. Above is Saron, the Sisters House, constructed in 1743.

But a monastic life didn't mesh well with the pioneer spirit of our new nation, and even Beissel's successor could see the writing on the wall, telling Benjamin Franklin: “The mind of Americans is bent another way.” By 1813 the last of the celibate members had died.

The smell of ancient wood is all around and the temperature feels like it's dropped ten degrees as I step into the old-tree shade and walk among the surviving original structures, now restored and administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The sound of a worker's power saw is the only intrusion I encounter as I make still life photographs of the old European-styled buildings.

Just as in areas of wonderful natural beauty, I am torn between waiting for another visitor to walk through the scene - giving it some scale and human interest - or just making photographs of the details. As is often the case, patience loses out as I attempt to capture visually what I feel and experience at the site.

Less than a mile up Ephrata's Main Street I encounter another religious community in a traditional religious setting - the church fundraising car wash. Colorful sign and balloon-holding teenagers are waving down passing cars, inviting them to the Bethany Slavic Church parking lot.

Fourteen year-old Valentina Zaytsev (she's on the right, in the photo below) and Lily Danilyuk, 15, (next to her) along with members of the church's youth group are collecting money for orphans in Russia. Zaytsev's family, who immigrated in 1991, will travel back to their hometown of Lipetsk outside Moscow later this summer on a church mission.

They just got their own church three years ago. The Pentecostal congregation was founded by pastor Mikhail Khoklan in in 1989, and over the years had been renting space at a big Mennonite church in East Earl Township. "It was, like, surrounded by cornfields," Zaytsev tells me. "All the other Russian churches called us the Corn Church," Danilyuk adds.

The division of labor: the teenage girls out front on Main Street, the twenty-something men of the congregation doing the wet rag heavy lifting in the parking lot behind the church, and the teenage boys counting the money on the steps.




Lancaster County is home to about a half dozen other Russian churches, most started by families of émigrés who arrived during the time of glasnost, when the Soviet government allowed evangelical Christians, many fleeing religious persecution, to leave for the U.S.

I'm on one of the country's original numbered highways from the 1920's. Signs and most of the addresses along U.S. 322 call it the 28th Division Highway, in honor of the 28th Infantry, the oldest division in the U.S. armed forces. It remains in service today as part of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. The 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team based in Northeast Philadelphia is a part of it.





Heading toward Lancaster County, I first notice an unusual number of trash trucks on the highway, and before I can even wonder to myself, I see the sign for the Lanchester Sanitary Landfill, the Chester County Solid Waste Authority's 160 acres landfill. A smaller attached sign raises still another question, as it reads: "Scenic Overlook. Sundays 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., open to the public." It's not Sunday, but compliance officer Terry Devine says she'll take me up. I can never resist a scenic spot. The scenic overlook was opened six years ago and provides a panoramic view of the Conestoga and Brandywine valleys for both turkey vultures and visitors. That's Struble Lake 4.2 miles off in the distance.

The overlook area includes four picnic tables, a hitching post for horse drawn carriages and two binocular stations. It was used as a municipal waste before it was capped and closed. At 1100 feet above sea level, it's one of the highest points around. In a few years it'll close temporarily, and the valley between it and the current waste site will be filled to make one big mountain - 60 feet higher.

"Don't take a picture of that," Devine says, almost reading my mind as I break one of my Rules of the Road, again, and jump out of her truck to photograph - the sign. "It's really ugly," she says, "we're getting new ones." The site is very clean - they even have a station where recycled water washes the mud off departing trucks - before they return to Route 322. It doesn't even smell.

In my previous post I mentioned avoiding the Amish part of Lancaster County, because I had already photographed it last summer for the newspaper. That's only half of it. One of the most difficult things for photographers just starting out, and the question I am most often asked when I speak to camera clubs and student photographers - "how do you take pictures of people?" It's not always easy - that's why you see so much still life or landscape photography.

But as a newspaper photographer, it's one of the most important parts of my job, and over the years, I have become comfortable photographing people. Except for people who object to being photographed for personal reasons. Not like convicted felons walking out of the courthouse. I mean real reasons, like religion, like the Amish.

Here's the other half of it. Last summer's road trip wasn't my last time photographing here. I was part of the team of Inquirer photographers who covered the Amish school shooting. I also mentioned Susan Sontag in a previous post. She wrote in one of her On Photography essays: "..to photograph people is to violate them...it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed." I like people, and like photographing them. And except for the felons, I believe most people like being photographed.

I remember taking a cross country trip with my family to California in 1967 and visiting relatives in San Francisco. All of the cousins piled into the back of my uncle's station wagon so we could drive down to the Haight-Ashbury district to "look at all the hippies." I can't recall whether I compounded my teenage embarrassment by taking photos with my Kodak Instamatic 104.

I make a few stops at some of the busier farm stands, where I avoid taking photos of the (mostly) kids on duty to collect the money from the shoppers. I shoot them - the shoppers - and the fruit and vegetables, while stocking up on corn, cantaloupes and tomatoes for myself.

Just outside Blue Ball, I notice an Amish schoolhouse on Weaverland Road, and make a right, just to look. By the time I pass it, and find a safe place to turn around, I spot the wagon wheel farm-stand, where it appears the young worker is playing a Gameboy or other electronic game. He's actually reading a book - Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls. Is that for school? I ask him. "This," replies ten year-old Jonas Lee Nolt, "it's for fun."

Diana Keat with the Delaware County Camera Club sent me some photos of Lancaster County life she shot this past spring. Below is one she describes as her "favorite picture...it freezes all sorts of things in time, the weather, the plowing, the farmer." She continues, "This is an important shot to me because who knows how long into the future we will be able to witness something like. It's just a segue from the industrial revolution, I suppose. Very peaceful and tranquil, the exact reason for visiting this small part of our world."

I'm still looking for your photos and comments to share with readers and other photographers. I'll be driving up Route 309 past the Eagles training camp toward Bethlehem where Musikfest begins this weekend. Send me your photos from previous years - or even this year's - as email attachments to roadtrip@phillynews.com.

My Week 7 Road Trip ends in Hershey in the dark. As it's evening, and I'm saving carnival rides for a future journey, I head instead to the "short term" parking lot. You can save the $8.00 daily parking fee - if you plan to stay less than two hours - by going to the Chocolate World parking lot. Mostly a shopping area, it's where park visitors have to pass before they can leave the grounds. I'm amazed at how much chocolate is being purchased, and how many people are posing for photos outside. That's eight year-old Michael Salva at left, from Groveland, Mass., visiting Sesame Place, Hershey and the Crayola Factory with his little sister and parents Jen and Orlando.