Dumbest Cop I Ever Knew

I traveled to Savannah, Georgia recently to visit some friends. It’s a truly beautiful city, and I had a great time, but the politics down there is Flannery O’Connor meets Franz Kafka these days.  Governor Deal, a name straight out of Dickens, signed the nation’s most permissive (or aggressive) gun law recently. Peach state residents can now pack heat when they go to bars or churches. Apparently, Georgia legislators think it’s a good idea to escalate barroom brawls to saloon shootouts.

While the gun law is interesting, another legislative marvel caught my eye down there. A driver who impedes another vehicle by moving too slowly is now breaking the law. This is where it gets weird.

I grew up in the small town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania population at the time about 18,000 and plummeting. One day in the early 80s a cow got loose from a local farm and wandered into town. A town cop, Officer Kaiser, was dispatched to corral the wayward bovine. He located the cow, unholstered his weapon, and called out “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Not surprisingly, the cow did not heed the warning and Officer Kaiser blew away the cow in a stunning piece of police work.

A few weeks later, Officer Kaiser stopped in for a coffee break at a restaurant I frequented. As the caffeine kicked in, he pontificated. “If a car is going the speed limit, it is denying me my right to drive the speed I want to drive.” The irony of a policeman arguing he had a right to break the law was lost on “the dumbest cop I ever knew.” Little did I imagine that thirty years later enough people to constitute a legislative majority would think such a concept would make a good law.

Traveling

I’m blogging from a small restaurant in Willow Hill, just off the Turnpike in Path Valley. Franklin County. Although I’ve worked as a reporter in Harrisburg for many years, I grew up in Franklin County near Chambersburg. Either for work or pleasure, I’ve traveled to many of Pennsylvania’s small towns. They often fill me with a nameless  dread.

Those dark Pennsylvania mountains we see in Harrisburg from our perch on the piedmont, epitomize the boom and bust cycles of a state so tied to its mineral wealth. Because so much of life along these ridges is lived in the present, education and other foundations for the future are given little emphasis. You’ve gotta work that coal vein while it is there. Tomorrow it may be gone. Little changes in those hills.

At the end of the Great Gatsby, the narrator, Carraway, speaks of the America where “the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.” But Carraway, like Fitzgerald, was a Midwesterner, a flatlander. His dark fields outran the light. He no doubt never wandered the Appalachian valleys where a cloying brand of darkness roams the ridges with a presence so palpable it almost creates its own gravity.

As I sit here in Path Valley, I recall a conversation I once had with a local historian. He noted that the crest of Sidling Hill, the mountain forming Path Valley’s eastern border was the Proclamation Line of 1763. As part of the peace treaty ending the French and Indian War, the English King agreed to keep English settlers east of that line to avoid provoking the French and their allies. Ten English families had already settled in Path Valley and were evacuated by English soldiers enforcing the treaty. He noted that nine of the ten names were still common names in the valley. The darkness pulled them in and has held them here for two hundred and fifty years.