When I heard that an explosive had been found in a passenger’s luggage my first thought was not: I bet it was at Lehigh Valley International Airport. The airport is situated at the edge of Pennsylvania Dutch country, in what John Updike once called “the soft doughy heart of America.” It is not a region one associates with terrorism. About the only time I’d see mention of the airport was when Updike wrote in the New Yorker about going home to visit his mother in Shillington, and I always thrilled to see the name in those august pages because it was the same airport I flew into to visit my mother in nearby Nazareth. I didn’t have much in common with the great writer, but we both used Lehigh Valley airport – formerly known as ABE, for Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton (city of my birth) – as the gateway for our filial returns.
