As the Tinker in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory says,
Up the airy mountain, down the rushy glen, we daren't go a hunting, for fear of little men. You see, nobody ever goes in . . . and nobody ever comes out.
When the factory whistle blew, you could hear it from First Street to the elementary school a mile away.
Hulking metal sedans carrying dads and young bucks clogged Liberty Street in front of Tony Young’s house.
Frisbee-tossing and bike-wrangling kids, just home from school, cleared to the sidewalk.
Occasionally apples dropped from the skies and thudded on hoods, causing drivers to cuss and delinquents to retreat into steep back yards.
Once a car halted abruptly before an invisible rope held taut across the street, an imaginary barrier held by two skinny boys pantomiming grunts, arms outstretched into the air.
The Zenith plant workers were guys you’d run away from for fear of getting caught in your tomfoolery. They knew your dad.
These guys weren’t elusive Oompa Loompa, though, even if very few civilians breached the gates of the factory.
You’d see them bending over hamburgers and cokes at the lunch counter at Murray’s Ice Cream store after an eight hour shift.
They created cabinetry for America’s mid-century obsession: televisions, the same boxes they’d doze in front of before dinner as their wives fried up ham on a Sears range and baked mac ‘n cheese down below.
Next to them sat foundry workers, their unwashed faces smeared with soot. The boys snickered at what looked like blackface. These guys swam through dust in dimly lit chambers, partially open to the air, packing dark sand and poring molten metal.
The sense was, or at least the memory is, of a town steeped in permeability.
W-town breathed with the receiving of wages, the making of TVs, the playing of kids, and the shopping of products at Levan’s newsstand, Becker’s Ben Franklin, and Swope’s Pharmacy.
News spread fast. It was analog living, a place to know and be known, whether you wanted it or not.
The 1967 Bicentennial Committee produced a commemorative booklet showcasing a staggering amount of personal “buy-in” from individuals, businesses, and civic organizations for its celebration.
Those kind of “thick” places still function at times in dense neighborhoods, small towns, dorms, nursing homes, and prisons.
But the general American culture has become siloed and increasingly lonesome, especially among younger people.1
Perhaps the Zenith factory was too good to be true, a windfall, a wave ridden by many families that eventually broke on the shores of the late 1970s.
Seen from the air, the former Philco buildings still take up most of Watsontown’s torso, now part of a warehousing empire whose motto is
Whatever it takes
and whose front page boasts
Just minutes from U.S. Route 15 and Interstate 80, our Watsontown, PA logistics campus features over 1.5 million square feet of premier warehousing solutions.
It’s now a fenced-off compound with very few workers needed and a lot of forklifts scurrying within and just as many tractor trailers shuttling without.
In a way, the mystery is greater now.
Who actually works in there?
Who sees them come and go?
And is it true Mr. Warehouse flies into work in a helicopter?
Before the fences went up, the massive Zenith parking lot served as public space after hours.
This explains how Tony and Tom slammed into a parking stop, throwing them off a single bike into a dark frenzy of arms and legs skidding across the macadam as a Jerry-rigged flashlight spun on the pavement in front of them.
A fence might’ve saved Tony from a host of bruises and contusions, but it also would’ve robbed his parents of a great story!
The fences are emblematic of Watsontown’s loss of permeability with its own life force, but that’s nothing new.
The brick plants, tanneries, and factories set up shop there as most of the virgin hardwoods were scalped from Penn’s Woods and floated down the Susquehanna to fuel The Industrial Revolution.
Then came heedless nuclear reactors, gas fracking, auto-driven sprawl, and large industrial projects like the one that made Watsontown a post-boom town, twice.
What could be next? Entire towns converted into Amazon warehouse districts?
In his famous speech “It All Turns On Affection,” Wendell Berry reflects on two terms his teacher Wallace Stenger taught him that sum up two American approaches to the land:
He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.”
Watsontonians and the rest of us are beneficiaries of both sticking and booming, and on this side of glory, those two inclinations are co-mingled and inescapable.
Berry would commend the virtue of sticking as a means to deep happiness.
But none of us do it perfectly. In fact, it’s easy to become grumpy, nostalgic, and depressed when a land you love gets run over by opportunists booming their way to profit.
The Advent season reminds us that the God of the land is also the God who sticks to us perfectly.
He welcomes us into the righteous robes of heaven by first robing himself in tenuous flesh, in a body that got sore, tired, and hungry.
--Hannah Williamson2
Glory and permeability wrapped up in one. This is quite possibly what the Oompa Loompa understood all along.
Oompa loompa doompety da If you're not greedy, you will go far You will live in happiness too Like the Oompa Loompa Doompety do
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The pandemic only made it worse. See https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/young-adults-teens-loneliness-mental-health-coronavirus-covid-pandemic/.
From the online Advent project developed by Biola University, 15 December 2022.