Penn's Woods

Before I left New Zealand my impending departure would often become a talking point, even with people I had only slight contact with.  Reactions were mixed.  Many people weren't sure where Pennsylvania was, and said as much; far more amusing - or perhaps worrying - were the people (more than one) who were excited that I was going where the vampires come from.

I assume (unless there's something they haven't told me here...maybe that's the reason we keep so much garlic in the house) that they were getting confused with Transylvania, the region of Romania where Bram Stoker set Dracula.  I laughed to myself but the joke was eventually on me because when I finally got here the extent of my own ignorance became clear.

It wasn't only ignorance.  There were plenty of things that I didn't know about the US and life here (there still are, and they pop up every so often to confound me), but there were also things that in a way I did know but nevertheless didn't expect.

Take that confusion between Pennsylvania and Transylvania, for instance.  They both end in -sylvania, Latin for "woods".  Transylvania is "on the other side of the woods" and Pennsylvania is the name Charles II gave to the vast region of woods that he granted to William Penn - "Penn's woods".  That should have tipped me off that there would be some trees here.  I'd also read Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, recording his hiking of the Appalachian Trail through several eastern states, including Pennsylvania.  Again, just the title should have been a sufficient hint.

And yet it came as a great surprise to find that vast tracts of Pennsylvania are covered in trees instead of, oh I don't know, rolling hills or something.  Maybe this comes partly from growing up in Central Otago, where forests are something you visit in the car.  New Zealand, too, was once largely covered in trees until farmers turned up.  Here, though, even after the farmers took their share the trees are everywhere.  There is a stand of them in the back yard and visible beyond the next row of houses are woods which stretch on and on out of sight.

These aren't evergreen forests as you find in New Zealand, either, but largely full of deciduous maples, oaks, hickories and dozens of others. I'm used to these trees as interesting ornamental plantings in parks and gardens, and I think that the very idea of millions of them growing in the wild didn't quite register before I came here.

It's not just Pennsylvania, by the way, but most of the eastern part of the US that's this way.  Outside the towns the trees generally rule unless beaten back by humans.

That's one of the reasons I'm writing this blog - to draw attention to the unexpected things about America.  Some are like the woods: the evidence was all there but I never joined the dots.  Mostly, though, it's things that Americans only rarely refer to in books, movies and TV, presumably because they are considered too mundane to mention. They can't be blamed for that: when you're so close to the action it's easy not to see the wood for the trees.