Tobacco Roads

An Amish farm in Lancaster County above Mount Joy.

Wednesday evening, after dinner, my friend Scott Stultz and I drove out through the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania countryside so that I could photograph the tobacco fields at dusk.

Winding lanes, one-lane covered bridges, and stone houses dotted the route we took north from Marietta. In some forested creek bottoms, the old oak canopies were so thick overhead to make it seem like night was scouting the terrain.

The route we traversed took us out beyond Mount Joy. I wondered– as we took one hairpin curve after another, winding over and around drumlin hills and ridges–if we would reach our destination before the twilight vanished.

“This is one my biking routes,” Scott said. “Isn’t it gorgeous?”

Since I left the wild reaches of Wyoming’s Rocky Mountains decades ago, I have been unaccustomed to seeing landscapes so picturesque as to conjure empty lumps in my chest, but heartbreakingly beautiful scenes unwound before me with every turn.

When the August sun’s haunches squat to the horizon line, the late evening light crawls and drips. Serrated cornstalk leaves were so tall and thick as to make greenish-gold canyons through which we drove. I’ve never seen forbidding corn before. Moses may have parted the Red Sea, but he would never have been able to part that corn.

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Harvests

Hands of burley tobaccos hang tightly packed in a tobacco barn during air curing.I’ve been here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania on business the last couple of days, reveling in Autumn’s onset and the days of harvest.

Yesterday, mid-afternoon, driving back from a business confernece, Scott Stultz and I came upon a Mennonite tobacco farm along one of the backroads. We stopped, hopeful, that the tobacco farmer might consent to let me explore his barns to take pictures of the harvest.

Scott found and brought back two young men–the owner’s sons–and they consented to let me take pictures of their harvest. They were lean and wiry boys, good-looking in that way that comes from hard work, sunshine, a good heart.

They accompanied Scott and me through the barns, talking about this year’s crop, about how too much rain has made it tough this year.

They couldn’t do enough to help me. There was a muscular breeze so the tightly packed, butt-tied hanging hands of curing tobacco were flapping and slapping from their woody mid-rib veins, making it hard for me to capture detail. The older of the two Mennonite boys, Kenneth, suggested we walk uphill to bigger barn where they could close the doors to keep the wind down.

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