By Tyler Ayres
Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,
And in a little while our lips are dumb.
Let us alone. What is it that will last?
All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful past.
— from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters
In the early ‘90s, after the old brick primary school shut down in the village of Warriors Mark where I was raised, my little brother and I had to bump the ten country miles by bus to the Borough of Tyrone, a small industrial community nestled among the rolling mountains and valleys of Central Pennsylvania. That bus route took up to an hour in the winter, and these were pre-climate change winters, when snow swallowed cars whole and rendered smooth any sharpness in sight. Every morning we wound through that landscape, dodging deer and turkey, sometimes spying coyote and bobcat, year after year passing the same ruminating cows. For the duration of our childhood, our bus number and bus driver never changed; Central Pennsylvania is a very consistent part of the United States.
Although Tyrone can’t be called a city by any stretch, it felt downright metropolitan coming from Warriors Mark, which was founded in 1768 and derives its name from the blazes left on trees by local Native American peoples who were displaced by white colonizers. Today, its services and amenities include a bank-turned-hair-salon, a single gas station, and a Grange lodge, the function of which remains unclear to this day.
The quiet of Warriors Mark was like a sleeping spell, close and dreamlike. My Dartmouth-hippie father and Santa Cruz-hippie mother gutted and remodeled the house we lived in, which stood across from rolling pastures that could morph to wetlands depending on the weather. With midsummer came synchronous fireflies whose fairy lights charged the air with thick green magic. When conditions were right, the occasional distant train horn would haunt its way into the soundscape, and sometimes we could see the glow of Penn State University thirty miles away. Whereas Tyrone had church bells and lunch whistles to tether time, Warriors Mark had only its frogs and crickets and thunderstorms to mark the seasons. These idyllic frequencies tuned my young mind such that it still hums with a low-grade but persistent dissonance when I’m in paved and urban spaces for too long.
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With just cows and corn for company in Warriors Mark, I often found myself hanging around at a classmate’s house in Tyrone after school. My loitering typically led to invitations to stay for supper, and although I thought little of this generosity at the time, I now recognize the significance of an extra mouth to feed two or three times a week for months out of the year.
After high school and a few semesters of college, I took a break from school due to family illness and a splintering home and started working seven days a week in a car window factory just outside of Tyrone. On my way back to Warriors Mark one day, my rusty blue station wagon finally died. This was a major problem, since my mother, brother, and I were all living on my barely sufficient paychecks. No vehicle meant no work, and foreclosure on our farmhouse was suddenly imminent.
At age 19, unequipped to face this trial alone, I was bundled into the house of my best friend’s grandmother, whom folks simply called Nan. Almost without my knowing it, I was absorbed into their fold by a kind of small-town osmosis. If Nan felt any doubt or discomfort, it was shielded from me completely. It didn’t matter that Nan’s income was fixed, that her house was small and her health precarious. It didn’t matter to the dozen or so other families who extended similar kinship throughout my stormy adolescence and young adulthood. What matters more to the people of Tyrone than tight paychecks or due rent are hungry kids who need a hand.
Understandably, my mother clung to that enchanted old farmhouse in its misty valley for far too long. By the time we found a buyer, she was totally unable to work, and my brother still had two more years of high school. I moved us into a three-bedroom apartment in the heart of Tyrone whose rent was just $500 a month. The apartment was a charming dump with an enormous gingko tree that stood sentinel in the backyard, and when the sun shone through its leaves, their green glow charged the air in a way not unlike the fireflies back in Warriors Mark.
Living in that apartment allowed me to work less, which was a blessing for my body and mind, but in those years I also came to know a sicker, darker side of Tyrone. I watched as classmate after classmate fell prey to this addiction or that unplanned pregnancy. My apartment was robbed more than once, including by my downstairs neighbor, whose life I’d literally saved with an impromptu tourniquet following a suspicious episode with his wife and a kitchen knife.
These aspects of humanity—both the grace of people like Nan’s family and the perfidy of other neighbors—are not endemic to any one place. But after living all over the country and abroad, I’ve not found such altruism alongside such mean misery anywhere else. And maybe this is how lots of people feel about their home places, but when I think about Tyrone today, I am simultaneously repulsed and attracted. I feel compelled to go back and try to brighten some of its darkness, and at the same time wonder whether I could withstand another round in the ring with its demons, those born of intergenerational pain and hopelessness. It’s a complicated relationship to have with your own roots.
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Like the people who live there, the name “Tyrone” itself is complicated. On the surface, Tyrone gives up its etymology without much fuss. Similar to Pittsburgh, Danville, or Allentown, Tyrone is two-part toponym made from the Old Irish word that means “place”— Tír—and the name of a person—Eoghain, pronounced YEW-en, from which the anglicized name Owen derives. From Tír Eoghain, then, Tyrone means “Owen’s Land.” Digging a layer deeper, the British anglicization of Eoghain is Eugene, which in Greek can translate to “well-born” and is also related to the English word “eugenics.” In Old Irish, however, Eoghain translates literally to “born of the yew tree.”
The yew tree—Taxus baccata, an evergreen native to Ireland, with glossy green needles and blood-red berries—has long been entwined with Irish culture and is associated with death and mourning. In Celtic mythology, the young lover Baile dies from heartbreak caused by the loss of his betrothed, and a yew tree grows from his body. Celtic druids revered the yew and planted it in graveyards as a means of purifying the putrid earth. They held that its sprawling roots would prevent the escape of the interred.
Beyond mythology and folklore, there is a scientific basis for the yew tree’s association with death. Its bark, roots, and needles all contain a highly poisonous alkaloid called taxine. Trace exposure to taxine can cause disorientation, cyanosis, tremors, and vomiting. At large doses, taxine poisoning invariably leads to convulsions, coma, and death. But despite this lethality, the yew is also a powerful symbol for life; those same poisonous taxines are used today in complex pharmaceutical therapies to treat various metastatic cancers. Like so much else—drugs and chemicals, sunlight and darkness, persistence and acquiescence—the right amount of taxine can bring death as well as life.
Half a millennium ago, the Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus said, “All substances are poisons; there is none that is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison from a remedy.”
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Just as the yew tree is a complicated tangle of contradictions, Tyrone remains a socially complex part of the country. Hospitable though it was to me, Tyrone often meets diversity with hostility. As a white cisgender heterosexual male, I fit right into the local demography, but even still, I was bookish and preferred Scrabble and Stephen Sondheim to fishing and football. And as with most of the rest of rural America, where boys are meant to do grunty things involving sweat and injury, I remained uncool until I took to push-ups and started jumping down flights of stairs on a skateboard.
Such hard-line gender normativity is hardly unique to Tyrone, and along with such rigidity can come a robust solidarity, an ability to withstand hardship to an extent that is often mind-boggling. I benefited from this same small-town tribalism when my friend’s grandmother took me in without a second thought.
Without Tyrone’s support, my family’s situation would have gone from manageably difficult to truly abject. But I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had I not looked the part. Had I been Black or gay, would I have found such open doors or laden tables? Or if I had let leak my disdain for transphobia or American-style consumer capitalism? If I’d vocally condemned the then-raging war in Iraq? What then?
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All wood is anisotropic—a fancy way to say stronger in one direction than in another, stronger going with the grain than against it—but the wood of the yew is just about as anisotropic as wood can be. Because of the uniformity of the yew’s fibers, it is capable of miraculous flexibility. The very best wooden longbows in the world are made of yew, and it’s also favored in the making of lutes and other quaint anachronisms.
But there is no such thing as a free lunch in nature; great evolutionary advantages rarely appear without commensurate disadvantages. While the wood of the yew can bend heroically along one plane of movement, it is exceedingly brittle when faced with pressure against the grain. Prone to warping, splitting, and shattering in all but a few specific applications, the wood of the yew is the opposite of versatile. It would be a terrible idea to build a house out of yew, for instance. While such a construction might stand for thousands of years in an environment with no fluctuations in temperature or humidity, such perfect vacuums are the stuff of research labs and fairy tales. In the real world, things change.
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The geography of Tyrone—and by geography I mean the interaction of people and place rather than strictly maps and elevation—is a combination of fertile and fallow that defies easy explanation. Located among the rolling emerald foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in Blair County, Tyrone was founded in 1851 during the end of the Irish Potato Famine but had been colonized gradually since the middle of the 18th century by Irish immigrants. Today, around 16 percent of Tyrone residents claim Irish heritage.
Tyrone also lies within the Appalachian Mountain Range, a position which informs Tyrone’s culture and politics in ways that are palpable. There are counties in Appalachia where nearly 90 percent of adults are at or below 8th grade reading levels, a metric that invokes developing nations rather than the country with the world’s highest per capita GDP. These educational data are made more stark by Tyrone’s proximity to some of the best colleges in the country; Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania are all less than three hours away.
In addition to its wealth of colleges and universities, Pennsylvania is home to around five percent of the nation’s Fortune 500 companies. But while the state’s per capita income is in the nation’s top quintile, Tyrone’s per capita income is less than half of the national average. A few final figures complete this rough sketch of Tyrone: 96 percent of Tyrone’s population is white alone, not Hispanic or Latino, while the United States’ white alone population is around 59 percent. Relative to the rest of the country, these data paint a less educated, less productive, and more homogeneous portrait of the place that is at best inert and at worst floundering.
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Tyrone similarly lies within the Rust Belt, a region of the Midwestern and Northeastern United States typified by a collapsed manufacturing sector, but before unfettered international trade and globalization hamstrung American heavy industry, Tyrone and the neighboring City of Altoona were thriving regional economic centers of gravity. These communities were located along the Pennsylvania Railroad, at one time arguably the most productive rail line on the planet. Local laborers brought home wages that supported entire families, with trips to Disney World and maybe even a modest lake house besides. These positions didn’t require college diplomas or even high school educations.
The children of Tyrone have not inherited this honest work. Nearly all its family-wage industrial jobs have been outsourced to developing nations around the globe. What they did inherit were the educational legacies of their parents: just 15 percent of people in Tyrone aged 25 or older have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to more than 33 percent of Americans.
Despite these trends, it’s not impossible to find a living-wage job in Tyrone today. From 2010 to 2013 I worked one, pulling 12- or 16-hour shifts at a car window factory with other Blair County folks in a Dickensian daze. I volunteered for all the overtime I could get and spent more time in that factory than anywhere else. With piercing clarity, I can recall the oddly attractive electric acid smell of the forklift batteries, the satisfying click that a rack of auto glass makes when you manage on the first try to nest all four of its wobbly feet twenty feet up within the sooty gloom.
Yet I also recall how I and the vast majority of my coworkers were hired as “temps.” We were hired after the factory’s parent company sold its auto glass division and made just $9 an hour. For young people in Tyrone fifteen years ago, this wage wasn’t terrible. It was enough to live on, if barely. The “full-time” old guard, however, made three times that, with stock options, amazing benefits, and copious paid time off.
For me, this work was never permanent. I had planned to get in and get out, and I had the privilege and good fortune to do so. But many of my coworkers would remain temps for years. Even though I was just passing through, I burnt with them in their anger for thousands of sweaty hours, ached with them in their steel-toed boots, chafed with them in their Kevlar sleeves.
How could workers within such a stratified system not grow distrustful of the liberal economic policies and practices that led to their third-rate status? Might such a system cause folks to question the wisdom of international trade entirely? Or nod along to decontextualized sound bites about “illegals” taking all the jobs? Does looking through this window help explain why underpaid and overworked folks might feel seen and heard by a “populist” who stumps protectionist, Christian Nationalist rhetoric? And all of this in Pennsylvania, arguably the most consequential of swing states in America, full of hundreds of disenfranchised communities like Tyrone.
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For individual organisms or populations, existential crises like blight or mortal injury often lead to diaspora. The Irish Potato Famine was such a crisis, and Tyrone’s current concentration of Irish blood is the result. But today, a population as under-resourced and uneducated as Tyrone’s can’t make such a migration. Where would they go? And why should they have to go in the first place? What about the toil of their forebears? Aren’t those family-wage jobs their birthright?
At other times, imperiled organisms respond with a massive last-ditch allocation of energy toward reproduction, a sort of genetic Hail Mary. Intentional or otherwise, women in Tyrone have children at a rate nearly double the national number. Despite this abundant fertility, the people of Tyrone struggle and stagnate. Like the potato, the staple of their ancestors, their own human monoculture has been left vulnerable to unanticipated environmental effects.
At first, access to international markets allowed Tyrone and other Rust Belt communities to export huge amounts of goods along American railways, but a sustained glut of unfettered global trade—a sort of “free market overdose”—proved poisonous to communities like Tyrone. The goods they manufactured and exported for decades eventually equipped the developing world with its own industrial capacities. When Wall Street realized that selling paper from Tyrone or steel from Pittsburgh along the Pennsylvania Railroad was a suboptimal financial decision, they took their business elsewhere, without loyalty for the blue-collar communities who made them their fortunes.
In the face of such systemic disregard, populations like Tyrone’s will often seek comfort by any means. It has been said that religion is the opium of the masses, but in Tyrone, opioids have become the literal opium of the masses. Like the taxine of the yew, opioids have near-miraculous medical applications in the right context and at the right dose. But opioids are also wildly addictive and have an insidious history of incentivized over-prescription in the US. Synthetic opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil can be lethal at incredibly small doses, and their low price and ready availability have led to a surge of addiction and death such that few American lives haven’t been affected to some degree by the opioid epidemic. Adjusted for population, however, Tyrone has been ravaged more intensely by the opioid epidemic than almost any other part of the country.
At present, Blair County’s per capita overdose death rate exceeds the national average by around 44 percent—if Blair County were a state, only Delaware and West Virginia would have more overdose deaths. Blair County Coroner Patricia Ross said, “I think we are tremendously out of control.” In 1999, Ross investigated just 6 overdose deaths during her first year as Blair County coroner. In 2022, that number climbed to an unprecedented 70 deaths.
Although no one in my family has died from an opioid overdose, after my mother suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident in the early 2000’s, the resulting migraines led her to a pain management clinic. The MD in charge irresponsibly prescribed opioid painkillers of increasing strength and quantity to her for years, eventually giving her methadone. While methadone is FDA-approved for the management of severe pain, every health professional with whom I’ve shared this fact has visibly recoiled. Some have asked what kind of cancer she had and how many months she had left, because drugs like methadone are apparently rarely prescribed outside of hospice and palliative care.
Due to the side effects of these medications, my mother’s quality of life became worse than it had been before she sought help in the first place. It’s a testament to her perspicacity and willpower that she recognized the systemic medical abuse that was taking place and stopped taking her “medicine” of her own accord. As far as I know, the doctor who ran the pain clinic served a short sentence in federal prison for bribery and fraud but is now practicing again in Blair County. It would be irresponsible to claim a close connection between this anecdote and Tyrone’s opioid crisis, but when viewed alongside the region’s outsized overdose deaths, it also feels irresponsible to overlook the connection.
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Tyrone is many things, and none of them are simple. It is the rightful home of uncountable displaced Native American populations, among them the Susquehannock, the Lenape, the Iroquois Confederacy, the Shawnee, and the Nanticoke peoples. It is a rural Central Pennsylvanian community whose immigrant families hold on desperately to an outsourced American dream that was maybe only ever a figment.
Tyrone is a county in Ireland, whose families fled famine and persecution for a greener Tyrone. Those same family names—McNelis, Bradigan, Sweeney, Shields, O’Rourke—are carved into Blair County headstones, are painted on front porch plaques and mailboxes, are scrawled on my own dusty yearbook pages in middle school penmanship. Some of them are in my various DMs right now.
But Tyrone is also Tír Eoghain—Owen’s Land, he who is born of the yew tree. The yew’s symbols of life, death, and rebirth are universally human, but their connection to Tyrone and its people feels uncanny.
It’s unclear to me what the right remedy for Tyrone might be. I could be prescriptive, suggesting the cold turkey quitting of this vestigial worldview or that trans-Pacific trade agreement. What is clear, from both objective data and personal experience, is that Tyrone is not positioned to thrive into the future. Along with much of the rest of Blair County and many other gutted industrial communities across America, I believe that Tyrone is in desperate need of a rebirth.
I will always be grateful for Tyrone. It is my home in a way that nowhere else can be. And the people of Tyrone will always be my family, even with their homogeneity that borders on xenophobic and their anisotropic stubbornness that borders on self-destructive. Yet in light of these people of the yew’s resilience that feels more bred than learned, I believe there is cause yet for cautious optimism.
Like the Irish immigrants from County Tyrone across an ocean, the current population of Tyrone, Pennsylvania, might yet reinvent themselves if their native persistence can be channeled productively. But like free trade, opium, and the yew’s taxine, persistence in excess can be lethal. As ever, it’s the dose that makes the poison.
To gather source material, Tyler Ayres has been a machinist, a glass
cutter, an intelligence operator, a fine dining waiter, a translator, a
yoga instructor, and a knife peddler. He lives for the moment in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, teaching English.