The Ghost of the Susquehanna

The Ghost of the Susquehanna is Sal’s name for a small, impoverished old wanderer he meets on a rainy night in Pennsylvania while trying to get back to New York. Their brief walk beside the Susquehanna turns a chance roadside encounter into a revelation: wilderness is not confined to the West, but extends through the neglected roads and river valleys of the East, where national history and present-day destitution overlap.

The encounter on the road

Sal meets the old man after a long day of travel, with only a dime in his pocket and hundreds of miles still between him and home. The man carries a paper satchel and says he is walking to “Canady.” As they set out together, he talks incessantly about meals and small acts of charity: the butter and extra bread he received with pancakes, a weekend invitation from old men at a Maryland charity home, and a warm bath before he left. He also recounts finding a new hat by a Virginia roadside and visiting Red Cross offices with his First World War credentials, complaining that the Harrisburg office did not deserve its name.

The man presents himself as experienced in surviving a hard world, but Sal sees him as a semi-respectable hobo who roams the Eastern Wilderness on foot, seeking help at Red Cross offices and sometimes begging a dime on Main Street corners. Their companionship is temporary and unceremonious: as Sal puts it, they are bums together. The old man’s detailed recollections of food, shelter, and small possessions make his precarious life legible through what he has managed to obtain, lose, or remember.

The Susquehanna at night

The two walk seven miles beside the river. Sal describes the Susquehanna as terrifying: bushy cliffs loom over unknown water, and the darkness is broken when a red flare from the railway yards across the river briefly lights the cliffs. Against this setting, the old man stops to search his satchel for a belt he says he got in Frederick, Maryland. He cannot decide whether he left it on a counter in Fredericksburg, Virginia, confusing the two place names as he searches.

His confusion becomes physically dangerous. He walks in the road directly into approaching traffic and nearly gets hit several times, while Sal keeps to the ditch and fears that the old man will be struck and killed. They never find the bridge the old man had promised was ahead. At a railroad underpass, Sal leaves him to change his sweat-soaked shirt and put on two sweaters. A nearby roadhouse, a passing family, and a tenor saxophone playing blues in a Pennsylvania country house give the roadside episode a sequence of incongruous, sharply observed details; then hard rain drives Sal to accept a ride back toward Harrisburg.

The wrong road and the vanishing figure

The driver has to stop when Sal tells him the old man is heading west rather than east. Under a streetlamp, Sal sees the hobo again, his thumb out, and the driver tells him that this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago, not Canada. The man is disgusted by the correction and insists that he knows the area and is going to “Canady.” He walks away rather than accept their directions. Sal’s last glimpse is the small white bag bobbing and dissolving into the darkness of the Alleghenies.

The episode makes the title figure both concrete and elusive. He is not a supernatural apparition: he is a living man carrying a satchel, talking about meals and a misplaced belt, and walking toward a destination he cannot reliably identify. Yet Sal’s final image recasts him as a “broken ghost” of poverty, a person who seems to fade into the landscape he traverses. The old man’s confident claim to know the roads contrasts with his mistaken direction, while Sal’s own uncertainty and exhaustion keep the encounter from becoming a simple tale of a capable guide and a lost traveler.

The Eastern wilderness

Sal’s explicit conclusion is that he had mistakenly thought all American wilderness lay in the West. The Ghost of the Susquehanna shows him a different wilderness in eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia: backroads and black-tar roads curving among the Susquehanna, Monongahela, Potomac, and Monocacy rivers. The scene expands the book’s geography beyond the expansive western spaces Sal has pursued. Wilderness here is not an untouched, empty expanse, but a difficult network of roads and river country inhabited by people who move through it with little money, uncertain shelter, and no secure destination.

Sal connects this eastern landscape to the past, imagining it as the same country crossed in earlier eras by Benjamin Franklin as a postmaster, George Washington as a frontier fighter, Daniel Boone in Pennsylvania stories, and the road builders and log-cabin settlers who followed. The allusions do not erase the present-day hobo; instead, they place his walk within a longer history of travel through the region. The old man’s lonely journey becomes the occasion for Sal to recognize that the road’s hardship and historical depth are not exclusively western. The episode’s force comes from this reversal: a minor encounter on an ordinary return journey changes the map of wilderness in Sal’s imagination.