Oppaymolleah's Curse

McKenzie Road is a public thoroughfare that becomes a disused trail where it enters the state park and begins to wend down from the hills toward Raccoon Lake.  I love hiking on eroded tarmac.  It may be one of the disused roadways that they used in the filming of the movie "The Road," which was partially filmed in the park.

          Traveling through the ragged countryside around the western edges of Raccoon Creek State Park yesterday, I was scoping out a good spot for my next hike.  Nichols Road is a gated gravel lane that enters the wild western end of the park from PA168.  It looks like a promising point of entry next time I set out to discover new territory.  I don't often make it out that far toward the westernmost marches of the Keystone State, within a few miles of the West Virginia line.  As a child, I lived for a while in the borderlands between Ohio and Pennsylvania--on both sides.  And there's a vaguely creepy quality to the whole area.  Some storied wastelands exist, especially in the bleak flats of Lawrence County, in that indistinct area where the last straggling dregs of Pennsylvania bleed into Ohio, where the great Northeast withers with a sigh at the Midwest's uninspiring debut.  There's Zombie Land, just off Route 224.  And Murder Swamp, near West Pittsburgh, which is just south of Newcastle.  These places are magnates for teenage thrill-seekers and ghost-chasers.  The whole borderland has a sad, neglected, almost criminal look to it.  Lawrence and Beaver Counties, on the Pennsylvania side, and Mahoning and Columbiana Counties, on the Ohio side, are mostly level terrain where strip mining and heavy industry have long since laid waste to much of the countryside.  There are large expanses of weed-choked land, no good for farming, foresting, or living.  The few inhabited houses you see in some areas are mainly single-wide trailers and terribly neglected farmhouses.  There are pockets of real poverty out there, a kind of poverty that's neither quite Appalachian (which is rooted in certain traditions) nor Midwestern (which is more plugged in to the ways of the monoculture).  It's a unique kind of poverty that strikes the outsiders as--well--just creepy.
          Sometimes, the hardscrabble eeriness of far western Pennsylvania reminds me of a legendary curse that an Indian chief named Oppaymolleah supposedly placed on the land back in 1751--as the whites were steadily advancing.  Local legend has it that Oppaymolleah said:

The gold will be turned to iron,

and the iron turned to gold.

The waters will run red with blood,

and the blood will turn to water.

It will never know peace, only vague fear.  

           Of course, all the talk about iron, and gold, and water, and blood sounds like a lot of hooey to me.  But the thing about "vague fear" somehow rings true.   

Raccoon Lake

It can be a crazy busy place in the summer, but in the winter, Raccoon Lake is peaceful enough.  I only chanced across two other hikers today.  There's a 20-mile backpacking loop that runs the full length of the park, circling the lake in the hills above.  In places, the backpacking trail runs pretty close to the public roads outside the park, but still, not bad for a state park.  

Ash Wednesday

THE HEMLOCKS SPEAK TO ME LIKE NO OTHER TREE.  SO DELICATE, SO REFINED, SO GRACEFUL AND STRAIGHT.  ALL I NEED IS THIS, AND I'M CONTENTED: A BIG STAND OF HEMLOCKS, WITH THE AFTERNOON SUN FILTERING THROUGH THEIR LACEY BRANCHES, A BOTTLE OF WATER, A STICK, AND A BLANKET OF SNOW ON THE GROUND.  

          Even now in late winter, the light is growing, coming earlier and disappearing later.  It’s a season of increasing light.  Ash Wednesday usually entails ashes, which are meant to remind people that they’re going to die someday.  In a way, you could say that the ashes are an attempt to scare people into leading more penitent lives.  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Yes, we are dust.  We’re all made up of carbon and water.  But it’s not just any old dust.  It’s the dust of the heavens—the dust of the “Big Bang,” the very dust of the stars.  Remember that you are stardust.  Light is your source, and to the light you will return.  

Allegheny National Forest, Hiking Culture

 There's a whole hiking culture that I sometimes forget, living so far from true hiking destinations.  

 Like the trail etiquette of leaving your walking stick at the trailhead for the next visitor to use.  

 The thrill of surveying the map before you strike off into new territory, and signing the visitor's notebook, mostly just to prove to the authorities that, yes, this trail is used, and so it deserves funding and upkeep.  

The preparatory rush of planning your route and then seeing how the various junctures actually appear "on the ground."  Hiking in the state game lands of Southwest Pennsylvania is good enough, but there's a whole hiking underworld in the best parts of the nation's public lands.  It's a civilization with its own rules, and tools, and assumptions.  It's something that I always love to rediscover.  

Allegheny National Forest, Twin Lakes

           My first day back in the Allegheny National Forest was spent discovering new territory.  My second (and shorter) day was spent revisiting old haunts--much beloved spots from days gone-by.  Just to reassure myself that they were still there.  Just to dance a while with ghosts.

           Twin Lakes is one of those holy places for me, and so I made my wintry pilgrimage on Sunday.  An old hike that I often did in past years was to park the car along Forest Road 138 where it intersects the Twin Lakes Trail, then follow the trail all the way east to Twin Lake for a swim.  It takes about 45 minutes or an hour going one direction on a snowy day when the ground is so slick.

          It's as ironically named as any spot in the ANF; there's a single large pond at "Twin Lakes."  Some call the pond "Twin Lake," dropping the 's'.  Here the beach can be seen across the frozen water, with its old CCC-rustic-style bathhouse and pavilion.

           Most people probably don't think there's anything all that special about the place, but this little corner of the ANF represents something immensely freeing to me.  In the early days, when the forest had just begun to work its transformative magic in my soul, Twin Lakes kept appearing through the trees.  So many of my early hikes landed me there, as if accidentally.  In many ways, it became my central hub in the forest.  We camped here, and picked apples, and berries.  I brought my kids to swim in its frigid water.

          I saw my first wild black bears here at Twin Lakes, a little too close for comfort.  I came here in all the seasons, and especially loved coming in October--when the camp hosts and all the campers were gone--to set up my laptop in the pavilion and write stuff for work.  I loved nothing more than having this place to myself.  When I left the forest to move to the suburbs (in a successful bid to placate an unhappy wife), friends gave me a local artist's depiction of the above scene.  It's hanging over the mantel in the sitting room of my house in suburban Pittsburgh: a simple pavilion in the trees, a symbol of wholeness and well-being.

          Twin Lakes was lovely and haunting in the recent solitude of wintertime, even though there were two families there playing on the ice and strolling along the frozen beach.  About five years ago, the forest began a healing process in my life, and much of the beauty and power of that period I associate with Twin Lakes.  The surrounding southeastern quarter of the ANF can be a disturbingly eerie place.  The industrial incursions are many; two separate suicides took place in the scrubby "experimental forest" very nearby; the police have been looking for a certain Johnsonburg woman's body in this part of the woods for a long time--a drug related crime.  There's a flat, brushy quality to this section of the forest that makes it seem like a great place for lurking villains.  And I'm not scared of bears, but they're abundant in this area, and plenty cocky.  Even as far back as the 1930s, photos of Twin Lakes always show the resident bears.  And yet, Twin Lakes is one of those sacred places in my life.  To most people, it's a pleasant place.  To me it's beautiful, holy.

Allegheny National Forest

            The vast tracts of unpeopled land!  The dense forests pushing up against lonely roads!  The water, the snow, the sky!  The Allegheny National Forest is a sacred place to me.  When I lived up there, I mainly explored its southern marches because I lived in the south and hiked on a strict schedule--usually four hours every Sunday afternoon.  Time in the woods seemed better than time in the car, traveling to some faraway quadrant.  But the more northerly stretches of the forest are so much wilder.  It's only now that I'm beginning to discover them.

           Some of the more southerly reaches of the ANF can be a little depressing; the industrial incursions into the forest are frequent and so ugly: clear-cuts, oil wells, gas wells, logging, new dirt roads being cut haphazardly through the trees.  But PA 321 from Marshburg northward to the New York State line is like 20 miles of Alaska, right within reach.  Also, since this stretch is designated a "national recreation area," it's more protected than the tattered southern fringes of the forest.

          A national recreation area, yes.  Well-known and much-visited?  No.  I spent a full six hours on the Johnnycake and North Country Trails up there on Saturday and saw not another soul.  I was aiming for the Handsome Lake campground, an ANF camp site that can only be reached by boat or by one long-arse walk in the woods.  "Handsome Lake" doesn't refer to the body of water; it was the name of the famous Seneca Chief Cornplanter's brother.  Handsome Lake was a powerful medicine man and statesman.

          Actually, it was a nine-mile loop hike that should have taken four hours, but took me six because I lost the trail at mile-marker 6 and had to turn back.  An erratically blazed but well established trail gets less and less visible the further you go; finally, all blazes disappear, and it just peters out three miles short of its destination.  It was frustrating, but such a beautiful way to spend a day, alone in true wilderness, miles from the nearest human being, on snowy mountainsides overlooking a frozen lake.
       
         So apparently Johnnycake Run is a body of water named after "johnnycakes," those dense biscuits that our pioneering ancestors used to take with them on long journeys.  They were originally called "journey cakes."  I think this is going to become our new annual pre-Lenten tradition, to travel back to the ANF for some concentrated winter hiking before my life starts to get crazy busy.

The Horror, the Horror

          Who lives in these featureless houses that edge ever outward, away from the city, consuming forest and field in their destructive march?  Who plans them, and builds them, and buys them?  What hapless child of the Universe will have the misfortune to call these boxes home?  Who will play in their tiny backyards, and how will all the suburban dads know which blades of grass fall under the domain of whose riding mower?  They all run together.  It's not just suburbia encroaching; it's the flat, utilitarian monoculture, assimilating everything into itself.  This is the new norm, until the madness can no longer sustain itself.  Then...it all falls down.

          This is the valley of Chartiers Creek.  These damnable eyesores are newly constructed on the cusp of the western wall of the valley, and the hill in the distance is the eastern wall.  If it flowed through most any Midwestern or Western state, Chartiers Creek would be called a river.  It's a good sized body of water that runs up from the coalfields of Washington County and joins the Ohio River just west of downtown Pittsburgh.  Chartiers Creek makes a nice kayaking trip on its northward trek through a wooded valley, passing through the dumpy towns of Canonsburg  and Bridgeville.  I've seen many a blue heron on the water.  The creek was named for Pierre Chartiers, the tattooed Frenchman who had a fur trading post at the mouth of the creek in 1743.  Chartiers' mother was a Shawnee, and no one ever really knew where his loyalties lay; he mounted attacks against English settlers in this region and disappeared west shortly before the French and Indian War broke out.

          As one character in The Heart of Darkness says, while looking out over the Thames in London, and thinking of the far-off Congo, "This too was a place of darkness."  The savagery, the bloodshed, the wilderness.  I wonder which darkness is worse: the one Pierre Chartiers knew and negotiated, or the one that settles over his valley today?

From Mt. Washington

I got a little misty-eyed when I saw it in the rear-view, just eight years ago.  I knew I would long for this city like the Diaspora longs for a Jerusalem they've never seen.  "Next year in Pittsburgh," I would say.  Back in those days, there was a lot of talk about Karbala and Najaf, the "holy cities" of Iraq, so I took to calling Pittsburgh "the holy city."  But life brought me here rarely, and on the occasions that I did return here, I found that I'd forgotten the ways of urbanity.  Much of the city's appeal faded down through the years of living in far-flung places.  I still only halfheartedly admit that there are things I like about being back.  Oh, but all my life I've specialized in being the outsider, the "come-from-away," as they call non-natives on the Maine coast.  All my life I've been best at being an outsider trying to fit in: Oklahoma, Africa, New York, the North Woods. Being a resident alien explained my eccentricities.  Now that I'm back here, there's no excuse.  And it's taking me forever to make this transition.  But oh, those city lights on a winter's night from the crest of Mount Washington!

Exile

I'll be returning to the North Woods next weekend to spend Saturday and Sunday hiking.  I almost can't believe it.  It's been so long.  I don't know if I should revisit old haunts or set off to discover new ground; there are a few quadrants of the Allegheny National Forest that I never quite "got to" in my years up there.

Life is mostly good down here in the suburbs.  I find enough silence, and solitude, and discovery in the overgrown strip mines and the hilly woodlots that form a ring around the desolate outer edges of the city.  I explore the state game lands, and every once in a while, I trek out as far as a state park.  Raccoon Creek.  Ryerson. Moraine.  Occasionally I come across a truly beautiful spot, too.  My great goal down here in the Southwest is to do some back country camping in the Quebec Run Wild Area of Forbes State Forest.  But when I lived up in the North Woods, there was none of this dreary poking around old strip mines and abandoned buildings.  There was never any coal in that region, which left the topography gloriously intact.  No, up there, I wasn't a ghoulish little man nosing around the dark corners of abandoned sheds.  Quite the contrary, I made spectacular weekly discoveries of truly wild places.

Southwestern Pennsylvania is where I own land, and that connects me to it deeply.  My first memories of the world are set in this area.  This is where my children are in school, and I don't believe in changing schools if it can be avoided.  Here, my wife and I have careers that are going well, and work that we truly love.  It's here that the city-of-our-life is located--along with all the memories of being young, and adventurous, and starting our life together as a family.  I can't drive down any street in the city without thinking, "Oh, yeah, that's where we went for our first anniversary," or, "This is the neighborhood our favorite professor lived in," or, "That's the corner where I was walking home, falling down drunk, and I asked a black guy for a cigarette."

I can see now that I will almost certainly live and die in the Southwest corner of the state. But sometimes I feel like an exile here from the Great North Woods.  I can't wait to go back...

A Single Note

Your life is a single note, played by a single instrument, in a single song of an eternal symphony.  All your life is a single note in a complex aria, but the concert never ends.  Like other notes, it rises up, almost uncertainly at first, then reaches a point of clearness---almost confidence---and finally fades away as if in its prime.  It all happens so rapidly; the note fades at that very moment when it seemed to be coming into its fullness.  And all your living, all your loving, all your hoping, and dreaming, and despairing; all your life is expressed and made manifest in the bittersweet tone of that one note.  All the joy and heartache of a human life is given full voice in the richness of a transitory note, in a never-ending symphony.  All your words, all your learning, all your myriad thoughts come to this: one brief note in an eternal performance.  All the many words that could never capture "truth," in the end, are captured fully by one ephemeral note.  Then there is nothing more,  except the symphony itself...which never ends.  Our only task is to live joyful, hope-filled lives until our music fades.  We must sound our note strong and clear before it falls silent and recedes into the Mystery from which it came.  The journey is from Mystery into Mystery, but there is no fear, for we ourselves are Mystery.  It is our home.  

And after your note fades out, slipping mutely back into the continuing opus of life, it is swallowed up again into the measureless swell of music that "bears all its sons away."  The beauty of it is that no note functions in isolation.  In the great concerto of the spheres, notes rise up and fade away, they appear and disappear, but they all take part in an inestimable drama that never ends.  All your life is a single note in a vast, unknowable but infinitely beautiful symphony that is the very life of God.  And there will always be life somewhere. 

PA State Game Land 117

Pennsylvania State Game Land # 117 is as bleak and destitute a place as you'll find to hike.  It conjures images of the Australian Outback, except that there are no interesting rock formations here.  No aborigines or dingoes or wombats.  No, this place is all brown grass and sky, with an occasional stand of malnourished trees.  Like most of the countryside around Burgettstown--in Washington County--it was strip mined long ago and left for dead.  Its barren, almost lunar landscape is the scarification of a bygone day, when coal companies weren't even required to make a pretense of cleaning up their mess.  Nowadays, they're at least made to regrade the land, replace some measure of topsoil, and plant trees and grasses.

Although this place is relatively close to where I live, I've avoided it for two reasons.  First, recovering strip mines sometimes depress me; they remind me of a witchy kind of place where I once lived as a child, just across the line in Ohio.  (Most things about the Buckeye State make me a little sad.)  And secondly, I've avoided this patch of open country because evil things have happened here--and I don't mean the paranormal. In recent years, two separate murder victims have been discovered here in SGL 117.  Cops speculate that the murders were actually committed at First Niagara Pavilion, the region's biggest concert venue, which is just a few miles away. Doesn't matter too much to me where they were murdered; SGL 117 is clearly an ideal dumping ground.  Chancing across a dead body would ruin any hike.  Also, a large marijuana plantation was discovered deep inside this game land back in 2009.  It's just a place where weird stuff goes on. It's the kind of place where you find yourself glancing over your shoulder...

My brothers and I used to play in the strip mines as kids.  A voracious reader, I romantically called those eerie, shelterless wastelands "the moors."  To me, the strip mines were the mysterious, shrubby uplands of The Hound of the Baskervilles and certain hopeless domains that Frodo and Sam had to traverse in The Lord of the Rings--which I read when I was 10.  It will be centuries before these barren wastes return to any kind of rich, generative state natural to the region.  All the same, a shadowy kind of life-as-usual does go on here.  Whole generations of wispy grasses and trees will have to live, and die, and collapse into the earth in order to replenish the area's topsoil.  That's the thing about normality.  It returns in time, but it can take a very long time, and it may never look quite like it did before.  We can torture the earth, and abuse it, and poison it, and tear it to pieces, and plant toxic waste deep in its crust, but we cannot kill it.  Only the sun can determine Earth's final fate.  The sun can incinerate the earth with a sudden flare, or the sun can burn out and leave the earth without orbit, or atmosphere, or gravity, or heat, or light.  Either way, humanity may destroy itself, but it will never fully destroy the planet.  (That doesn't stop Governor Corbett from trying.)

There's a strange loveliness to the sad, open country.  It seems to be saying, "Here I am.  There's no hiding here.  Discover me or pass me by."   And there is enough to discover, and I get the impression that the sparse vegetation hides plenty--corpses notwithstanding.  I bushwhacked away from the old road to discover a steep valley with a very large pond at the bottom--third photo.  There's a little gated road that runs all the way across the game land, two and three quarter miles from a parking lot on Bavington Road, just north of Burgettstown High School, all the way to PA18.  In places, you can hear US-22 screaming to the north.  It's a surreal sort of trek.