The New Yorker view of the world, so the joke goes, sees the five boroughs in great details, then a very thin New Jersey across the Hudson with a vague California somewhere out west.Having worked in New York City for nearly a decade now, I know that such a view is exaggerated, but has a small glimmer of the truth.We can only pay attention to so much and things are constantly coming at you in Gotham.I sometimes forget, now that I’m in Pennsylvania again, just how diverse my home state is.I’m not from old Pennsylvania stock—neither of my parents were born here and neither of my mother’s parents were born in the same state she was.Still, when you’re born in a place it’s natural to feel that’s where you belong.You inherit the outlook.I inherited Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is a bit unusual in being a commonwealth divided in two by a mountain range.Laid out with an horizontal orientation, it’s about 280 miles across, and once you’re over the Appalachians, you’re into a different subculture.On our way into Pittsburgh, signs for Evans City reminded me that among its many contributions to American culture, the Steel City also gave us zombies.Now from a history of religions point of view, zombies came from Caribbean religions that fused indigenous African beliefs with Catholicism.A religion that arose among people commodified as slaves.A zombie was a body with no will.It took George Romero, living in Pittsburgh, to give us the movie zombie with The Night of the Living Dead.Pittsburgh, among some, is glad to claim the title of zombie capital of the world.Its zombie walk is a thing of legend.
Ironically, the western end of the state, beyond the mountains, tends to be more conservative than the side closer to the seaboard.(Pennsylvania is the only of the original thirteen colonies not to have direct Atlantic Ocean water frontage.)Yet it has adopted the most egalitarian of monsters—the living dead.Romero tapped into the universal fear of unsettled death to make what were later to appear as “zombies” the unnamed monsters of his most famous film.Everyone has to die, and no matter our religious outlook (or lack thereof) the question of what comes after is asked on both sides of the Appalachians.And even by those across the Hudson in New York City.There may be even something between the two.
