Essays

Author: Jeremy Hauck

Jeremy Eldon Hauck edits books for Fox Chapel Publishing and teaches writing at Harrisburg Area Community College. He has an MFA in creative writing from Temple University, where he also served as Managing Editor of TINGE Magazine, alongside his now wife (see above). His literary interests include gothic, pastoral, and adventure writing. In 2010 he completed a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.

And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene


And the Rust Shall Rule and the Dust Shall Rule: Reading/Living the Anthropocene

It was June, 1992. My sister and I were out of school and our grandparents took us on an epic road trip out west, to see the same places they had seen on road trips in the 1950s and 1960s. They had bought a motorhome, a Tioga, not a big one but still a proper motorhome, with its own bathroom and two beds, one of which folded back into the kitchen table by day. We set off from southwest Ohio and headed south.

First was Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, then Texarkana, Waffle Houses, KOA campgrounds, the desert, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, where the bats swarmed at dusk, the Petrified Forest, Painted Desert, McKittrick Canyon, Gila National Forest. Between hiking through caves or woods or desert during the day and playing UNO in the evening, we would hit the open road, advancing along the meticulous itinerary Grandpa had typed up. I sat up front with the road atlas—the little copilot. Between cactus, canyon, and sand dune, we would encounter the abandoned settlements of lost civilizations, even as the Anthropocene was taking flower.

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Hiking the Urban Ruins of One of America’s Oldest Railways


Hiking the Urban Ruins of One of America’s Oldest Railways

Back in the winter of this year, I was poking around on Google maps looking for unexplored green space in Lancaster city, where we currently live. Zooming into the Northeast Quadrant, our corner of town, I found something that fit the bill (and then some). Little more than three blocks from our house was the terminus of a curved line of green, bending like a long crooked finger into the densely urban 6th Ward. I’d never noticed it before, and no label proclaimed it as a park. But its uneven color and raggedy edges all but confirmed a continuous tree canopy.

Aerial shot of the green curve.

I studied the screen for a long time. It didn’t make sense that this much unused green space would be allowed to exist here, and nowhere else, under the radar. But from the satellite’s-eye view, it was perfect.

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Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock


Hear us, great Pan!: Valentine’s Day, Lupercalia, and Picnic at Hanging Rock

When I first saw Peter Weir’s  Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), I must have been somewhere between 17 and 21 years old, living in rural Southwest Ohio, where I was born and raised and which was, like Weir’s 1900 south Australia, an ostensibly free yet inwardly straightjacketed province. I recall being excited by the subtext that Sara’s affection for Miranda, and then Mademoiselle de Poitier’s appreciation of Miranda’s beauty, suggested, not to mention the visuals of the key scenes that I get into here shortly. Above this impact, though, something haunting embedded in the film has made me ever since consider Hanging Rock part of my personal worldview, across multiple phases of my life, despite having seen it only once or twice until recently, when I brought it into the classroom as a case study of the Gothic.

The film is subversive, defiant, confounding, haunting, and impressionistic, which is probably why I liked it. What makes it even more appealing to me now, after reading the scholarship on the film, is seeing how the veinery circulating these impressions is the pagan god Pan—god of the Wild, and inspiration of the horror/sublime sensations brought on by finding oneself in the grip of the unthinkable mysteriousness of the universe, beyond the walls of normal experience.

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