The Road to Good Intent

The road to hell--if there is one--might be paved with good intentions, but the road to Good Intent is not paved with hellions.

Good Intent is a tiny hamlet in Washington County. It's known to a few old timers, and obscurantists, and snoops. And since I'm two of the three, of course I've been hoping that I would someday venture out that far just to see what's there.

As recently as last year, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported on the community's decline, which is undeniable. But I like the way the little town sits in a pleasant valley, on the banks of a brook, at the edge of the westernmost quadrant of SGL #245. (Notice the signage in the middle picture.)

State Game Lands #245 was actually my destination, and I came across Good Intent Road by mistake...but I always find that wandering the roads of Washington County is full of serendipity. Although the last time I made SGL #245 my destination, I found it more or less banal, I decided to return there today to see if the berries and apples had ripened. Indeed they had. And I picked about a pound of elderberries before hurrying off to explore the environs.

Due to family issues, Wednesday is going to become my new day off and trekking day. On the one hand it's nice because it's a time when few others head to the woods. On the other hand, unlike Sunday, Wednesday is not hunting-free.

The most uncool part about trekking on Wednesdays is that it gives me less time. From the time I put the younger kid on the school bus to the time I arrive home to greet them both at the school bus's return, it's only three and a half hours. That means that if I want to do a trek that's an hour away, the actual excursion has to be done in an hour and fifteen minutes. And there better not be traffic or car trouble.

Ah, but it's more time than some overly domesticated family / career men in the suburbs get, and I'm grateful for it.

In any case, I mostly wanted to discover Good Intent because I like the name. "Well, you know, we really had the best of intentions for that place. We meant to have a full-service borough there on the banks of Robinson Fork. Yessiree, we had big plans for the town of Good Intent, and that's why we named it that." The third photo is the village itself. Click on the photos to enlarge them. To be fair, there are some mobile homes hidden in the trees to the right and a house immediately to the left of the camera. The Studebaker-garage-place featured in the Post-Gazette article is further down this same road as it makes its way back up the valley and away from the village. Very intriguing place.

At August's End

Oh, the beauty of these late summer days, when all the living world takes part in the change. There's a cool mist in the morning air and a hint of autumn at evening. All the world is yellowing. The grass is growing pale and blanched. The world-weary leaves hang limp on long-suffering trees. Their work is done, their short season spent. All they want is to drop back to the earth they came from, and there with time they will return to the soil and be reborn again as leaves.

Transience itself is the maker of such beauty, and I could almost weep for the infernal sadness of it all. Like all the fleeting sons of time, the summer passes in fiery splendor. At last there comes a day of ripening gardens and tart apples growing wild in an abandoned farmyard. But in the ending of one beauty, there comes new beauty, new life.

I can't get enough of SGL #232 these days. It's vast and crisscrossed by old country lanes--some of which can still be traveled by car--and it's a nice mix of woods and fields, and streams, and hills, and steep ravines.

Up to this point I'd been exploring the northern arm of the game lands, along the old Buffalo Camp Road, which is no longer open to public traffic, and along Polecat Hollow Road, which hasn't been traveled by a private vehicle since I was in high school.

But this time around, I ventured into the southern arm of the game lands and followed Buck Run Road southeast and the entire length of the valley of Buck Run.

The side roads are the best hiking options. They strike off to the left and lead up to a broad ridge that mostly served as a hay field in recent memory. Buck Run Road itself follows a scenic stream, and in places it's skirted with some interesting rock formations.

Up in the high meadow above the road, I sat in the grass of an abandoned farmyard (top photo) and meditated on the changefulness of things. It's beautiful, wild country, but even there in its embrace I felt a sense of imminent destruction. The feeling is irrational. It's almost hysterical. But the fragility of the trees, and of the fading grass, and of the very earth around me felt so real. Mother Pennsylvania has always been a slut, and she's prostituting her children to the shale drillers: our state forests, our state parks, our state game lands. The DEP is in the hands of the very people who benefit from the wanton squandering of our resources. The EPA is being dismantled and incapacitated on a massive scale. I can't escape the bleak suspicion that everything is threatened and beauty's time is short. It doesn't take a morose doomsday prophet to see that life cannot go on forever in the way that we're living it, so far removed from the earth that sustains us, so wasteful, and destructive, and self-indulgent.

But transience and the possibility of loss are part of what makes beauty beautiful. And here at August's end, it was good to sit at the edge of a grassy field, high above the valley below, and to dwell in the moment at hand, then to wonder for a time who used to call this lonesome place home...and what tomorrow will hold.

The Kane Woods

No, not the vast and wild Kane woods of my former years. Strangely enough, the Scott Township Conservancy names its 72 remnant acres of woodlands "The Kane Woods," in honor of the nearby Kane Hospital, I think.

Upon first moving down to the Pittsburgh Area, I took refuge in the Kane Woods every day on my lunch break, wandering its well-marked trails, feeling secretly superior to its ragged canopy, its scant wildlife, and all the many noisome incursions that the city makes into its green domain: the traffic sounds, the electric lines, the sewage pipes, the very aircraft overhead.

And yet, I must admit that the Kane Woods has been a beautiful escape for me: the single, lonesome patch of protected and undeveloped forest within easy reach of my suburban office. I've sought refuge here often. And even though it's not the "forest primeval" that I forever seek, at least I've come away from this place at times with a greater sense of clarity and strength.

Some of the trails run along the brows of cliffs or embankments, giving them low overlooks, as in the bottom photo. The valley floor below might be thirty feet or more.

Scrubgrass Road, where the best trailhead is located, is one of the last truly rural enclaves in Scott Township (Allegheny County). It remains, I suspect, because the land on either side of the lane is too steep to develop. You can be sure that if they did move in with bulldozers and blueprints, the first thing to go would be the not-sufficiently-anglophile name "Scrubgrass Road." It would be renamed after a character in a Dickens novel: Murdstone Court, Havisham Commons, Trotwood Place.

Yesterday's trek was down the long-abandoned Polecat Hollow Road through the state game lands in Washington County. As I was snapping cheap cell phone shots with my old technological dinosaur, little did I know that my wife was in Robinson purchasing me an iPhone. By the time I got home, my Verizon account had been entirely switched over to the iPhone, and the photos of Polecat Hollow Road lost forever.

That's alright. Polecat Hollow Road is a pleasant enough place with some overlooks to a pretty stream valley. It's worth another visit at a season when the mosquitoes are less active and the poison ivy is tucked away under snow.

I wonder what the developers will rename Polecat Hollow Road if--God forbid--the concrete just keeps stretching further and further out that direction. I'm not an anglophile, but I must admit, that the name doesn't draw me.

Enough

What would it take to make you happy? I mean truly happy, so that there would be no more longings, no more yearnings, no more jealousy or discontent? What would it take to alleviate that slow ache that wells up in nearly every human being who's ever lived, that dissatisfaction deep in the recesses of the spirit?

Our implacable hunger for "something else" can be a good thing in its way. Does a contented soul dream or pursue drives or visions?

No, at my time and place in life, it's not the personal successes or failures that make contentment so elusive; it's the responsibilities, the unending worries for those others whose well-being depends on me.

But if there were no responsibilities, I wonder if this would be enough. A cabin in a clearing, a sunny patch where you could plant some corn and squash. A gray light on winter afternoons, filtering through bare branches. A warm fire. Happiness doesn't require a lot of things. All it requires is an absence of worry.

Of course, if this cabin were my world, I'd worry about deer getting into the corn. I'd worry about running out of firewood. My worries would be pretty much ingrown. Hell, I survived the school bus and elementary school. They will, too.

Buffalo Camp Road

This is the bridge to nowhere. The sign above it reads "Sawhill Bridge." (That's not "Sawmill," but "Sawhill.") I don't know what names might have once been tagged onto the tangled dirt lanes that pass through SGL #232, but I came upon Sawhill Bridge while following the old Buffalo Camp Road from west to east.

Sawhill Bridge connects PA221 with Buffalo Camp Road, but Buffalo Camp is gated and inaccessible to any but walkers, cyclists, and horseback riders. My guess is that the little connector lane between the two larger roads was once called Sawhill Road. Who knows? In any case, this is in Washington County, not too far from the pretty little hamlet of Taylorstown.

So, my wife and I are negotiating with each other for an iPhone, which will solve the problem of my abysmally bad photos. In the meantime, here are a few more lame-arse cell phone shots of an otherwise very scenic trek through the central/eastern portions of SGL #232.

Actually, the easternmost areas of this vast game land are mostly fields, and--strangely--they seem to be cultivated, too. I don't know if the PA Game Commission has taken to leasing out its land to farmers, though I do know that deer graze in open spaces, so fields are desirable for hunting.

Starting at the western end of Buffalo Camp Road (which is also gated), it takes about an hour to reach the covered bridge at the road's eastern end. You cross two old bridges en route, both of them constructed for vehicles, as attested by the fallen sign.

Actually, if you're walking along at a good citified clip, you'll reach a wide grassy intersection about 45 minutes into the trek. At this spot, the better graveled road (which I take to be Buffalo Camp) makes a sharp left. A lesser-used road continues straight ahead, crossing your second derelict bridge over a beautiful stream and coming to the covered bridge pictured above. The lesser-used road may be Sawhill.

The road more traveled-by leads up a hill and through a clear-cut, as seem in the last photo. It's not at all picturesque, but it does remind me very much of the road from Elat to Enongal in the South Province of Cameroon: a walk I used to make twice a day, everyday. That's why I took the picture.

A local ex-Presbyterian told me that Buffalo Camp used to be a Presbyterian church camp for kids. I'm not sure where the camp itself was located, but there is one especially large open area that I suspect might have been the site. Down in Washington County, Presbyterianism has always had a decidedly "campmeeting" feel to it. Personal conversions, rollicking tunes, the sawdust trail to salvation. It all gives me the willies. But history lingers long in these valleys.