40°15’N 76°00’W

There is a town in Pennsylvania that shares my last name. In fact, it is a mere thirty minutes from the town in which both of my parents grew up. While it is not a particularly large town – I cannot conceive any practical reason to go to this town – I find it odd that I have never been there. I have known of it since I could first read the map during trips to visit my grandparents. So why, in the course of all of those trips, have I never been to this town? You would have thought that at some point I could have convinced my parents to sidetrack just that little bit, or that during my travels as an adult to visit relatives, or on one of the many trips through the area, I would have made the detour myself.

At this point, some twenty-seven years after I first became aware of this town, there has developed a slightly sinister sense surrounding Knauers, PA. The originally benign question of why I have never been there has developed a vaguely foreboding tinge: Why have I never been there? It seems unlikely that such a small distance should be so insurmountable for so many years, that I should have never seen the one town in the country that so improbably shares my name. I have begun to wonder what questionable past may be hidden there, why my parents may have secreted this spot away from me and my prying eyes all through my childhood and adolescence. I have passed nearby Knauers at least a dozen times since I graduated from college and not once have I made the slight turn north off of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Have there been subliminal warnings implanted deep within my psyche concerning this town? Or perhaps I just have a precognitive understanding that I should stay away, that I would be risking dangers akin to those of meeting my doppelganger should I draw near to the town?

I may have blown the whole Knauers, PA thing out of proportion over the years – I suppose I don’t really think there is a conspiracy of deception keeping me away. But, it does seem strange to me that I have never been there; it is just the sort of road trip I would normally plan. I must admit, though, that a certain allure has grown up around not going to Knauers, mythologizing the town – or village, or hamlet, or whatever it is – as an absent site in my family tree. I really do not know much about my family; it just never seems to come up. Somehow Knauers, PA gives me a locus, an unknown geography, on which to project a narrative – though it is a narrative I have never actually given form. I suppose I just like knowing – or perhaps more accurately, believing – that that narrative is there and having a place where those stories, unformed as they are, can reside.