Scocca

Dead Eagle, Aberdeen, MD: A Patriotic and Semi-Autobiographical Parable

What sort of place do you come from, in this vast and varied nation? It’s not always simple to express, especially if you grew up in a place that was

mainly unimportant

, yet also, through only some fault of its own, the object of a certain amount of

mass-media mythologizing

. But, me, personally? I will say that I come from the place where stuff like this happens:

Amtrak train kills bald eagle eating dead deer on tracks near Aberdeen

Someone who knows the physical geography, but not the spiritual landscape, of the area might say that this particular mid-Atlantic gothic incident—one federally protected symbol of America murdering another, over a meal of carrion on the rail bed—could have happened anywhere: Elkton, or Perryville, or even Wilmington, Delaware. To which I could only say: but where it

did

happen was Aberdeen.