Rise Bake Shoppe & Coffee Bar, Mount Joy, PA

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Rise Bake Shoppe & Coffee Bar, Mount Joy, PA

28 Jun

Do you have summer teeth? You know, summer here, summer there?

My next dentist appointment is over a month away, and it’s already on my mind. I’ve got a lot on my mind this summer, a lot more than I thought I would when spring dawned. More issues, commitments, and concerns. A few deadlines thrown in for good measure. I’m fighting against the easy comfort of stasis and dissociation. In that spirit, I’m pushing myself out the door. Never let your horizons shrink, folks.

Summer itself is on my mind. I’m typing this a week after the summer solstice. A week since my friends on Facebook were vociferously debating whether the summer solstice is a Christian thing (St. John’s Day) or a Pagan thing (Litha). I made a post that linked to a Wikipedia article about the fascinating Megalithic origins of the solstice and how it represents a spirituality predating the debate itself. Nobody liked the post yet.

Perhaps it’s life’s absurdities I’m trying to hide from.

Travel is a good way to do that, especially when you travel to nature. It’s not cool enough to do that, so the next best thing was to attend a festival dedicated to nature: the Solstice Festival in Mount Joy, PA.

Now, the first concern regarding any festival and travel plans thereto is ascertaining the presence of victuals. Coffee certainly counts as a victual, especially when the festival starts in the morning and goes all afternoon. I checked the map to see if there was anywhere here that I hadn’t visited yet. Sure enough, Rise Bake Shoppe sounded totally unfamiliar, so I assumed it was new. As I would find out, it’s been here since 1998, and I’ve just been so absorbed with visiting locations far afield that I’ve neglected some places that are pretty much in my backyard.

Mount Joy is fairly close to Harrisburg. It’s a short jaunt down Route 283 towards Lancaster. There are two kinds of small towns in Pennsylvania: small towns and “small towns.’ Insular farming villages and nigh-abandoned coal hollers make up the former. The latter are the former that, for some reason, became havens for tourism. Mount Joy is one of these.

It was settled by Protestant Scots-Irish and named after the Mountjoy, a ship that broke the Catholic siege of Derry in 1689. Its proximity to other major early settlements in eastern Pennsylvania’s fertile southern valleys all but guaranteed the town’s success. The population is still growing, due no doubt to its being right off the ramp from a major Interstate, possessing its own railroad stop, and sitting at the junction of several other roads.

The traffic situation is kinda wild, or at least it was that day. I had to stop outside the town to check my map because I could tell early on that, especially with Main Street shut down for a festival, there would be no way I’d be able to turn around and get back out if I went the wrong way.

My recalculation point was a plaza. In that plaza sits Rise Bake Shoppe & Coffee Bar. Food is definitely the focus here. Baked goods are on display everywhere. They’re in glass cabinets. They’re on shelves. They’re on tables scattered around the room. The scent of fresh-baked bread is a dream scenario for hungry travelers on I-283. Coffee pairs well with baked goods, not only in a cultural sense, but in a practical one. I don’t know why I just typed that sentence; it seems obvious that the two go together. In fact, it’s important to remember that the first coffeehouses were in the Yemeni port town of Mokha. Sufis drank it. Traders spread it. Coffee shops have always been for people on the go.

All I needed was coffee that morning, and I found something of an overabundance. There were two brands of coffee for sale: the venerable Green Mountain coffee from Vermont and Whiff Roasters from the nearby town of Lititz. I had to get both, of course. I tried the Green Mountain breakfast blend first. It was certainly a breakfast blend with the normal characteristics. It was a bit weak for me. Oh, it was nice, and the sense that it was of craft quality was there, but the astringency was there, too, as is often the case with light roasts. Fine for parents on road trips.

The second was the Whiff Mudslide, a flavored coffee featuring double dark chocolate and Irish cream. I don’t normally do flavored coffees on this blog because I find it more interesting to let the beans speak for themselves without anything added. I’m glad I made an exception here. It was beautiful. The flavoring didn’t overwhelm the natural component. It had that dense and sumptuous quality I’d found in another recent blend. Mudslide was one of those coffees you can (or at least should) roll around in your mouth for a while to aerate and let the flavor pop.

After filling up on caffeinated goodness here, I headed into town for the Solstice Festival. It exceeded expectations. Small town festivals can sometimes be underattended. Habitual festival-goers (like me) have a preconceived vision of the ideal event. We want a small town with a big fest. A remote locale with a cosmopolitan feel. That simple idea is hard to execute. Pennsylvania’s small towns that sit near larger settlements do it best. The Philly countryside, the Poconos, Linglestown. It looks like Mount Joy deserves a spot among these.

People came in droves. Medieval bards were playing piratical instruments. There were folks on stilts walking around. Vendors lined both sides of the street, selling everything from art I can’t afford to food I can’t afford. I got exactly one cookie, but it was a good one. The spiritual aspect of the solstice was there, too. Well, let’s say it was spiritualist-coded. Nothing official. Lots of fortune tellers and other new-age folks were commemorating the metaphysical aspects of summer. A street fair with a higher meaning. Everything that matters is spiritual in a real way, though, isn’t it?

Consider: If you don’t accept a metaphysical aspect to existence, then ‘meaning’ is meaningless, and nothing has purpose; ascribed purpose is a contradiction in terms, like ‘personal truth.’ If you do accept a metaphysical component, then existence and higher meaning are inseparable. Might as well show it (and celebrate it)…if it’s a good higher meaning. And if the divine is the progenitor of ‘good,’ then any righteous purpose, purpose rooted in the nobler aspects of spirit, and the virtues upon which they rest, is logically of a higher order (and cause for celebration).

Well, that’s my position. Some of you might be throwing things at the screen right now.

Something else I’ve learned: I need to look at towns like Mount Joy more carefully. Some towns in Pennsylvania are undergoing a true Renaissance. Others never stopped being crossroads of history. Hopefully, a few more festivals will be in the offing in places like this, and I can absorb the local zeitgeists (and beverages).

Until then, stay caffeinated.