Summer's End

           These searing hot late summer days, they begin and end with a chill.  The day starts out at 50 degrees, and it's 90 by 3pm.  The morning mist out on the grass still calls to mind the diesel fumes and the metallic grind of long-ago school buses, the twinge of nerves (because I was always the new kid), the strange first days in an unfamiliar school.  These late summer days remind me of over-ripe tomatoes gathered in brown paper bags on the kitchen floor.  It's a bittersweet time.  Good-bye, summer.  I had so many plans and expectations for you, and most of them went unmet.  I was going to scrape and paint the shutters, build a stone casing around the old well, erect a fence to keep suburbia out.  I was going to be young again, if only for the summer.  I was going to be like a child, care-free, uninhibited, full of ideas.  I was hoping to see mythological green men in wild grapevines, the way I did long ago.  Something familiar was going to stir inside of me: that primal, almost sexual drive toward discovery and adventure.  It's the thrill of life that nowadays comes too infrequently and fades too rapidly.  I was counting on this summer to accomplish so many things.   Now I know damn well the lawn furniture will sit out until after Thanksgiving, as if waiting for one last bright day.

          And yet, this has been a good summer for me.  I hate dry conditions and heat waves, but in this blazing summer I got to go to Cambridge Springs, Chautauqua, and the Southern Tier of New York State.  I got to go paddling on French Creek, hiking the mountains at Blue Knob, and there were many excursions into the city.  These are the things that make a life, and it's from these things that we are left to build: A trail through patchy woods, a broad view on a clear day, a campfire with my three ladies, a picnic, a day at the office.  I can't escape the strange, persistent notion that time is somehow short.  It's not a Mayan calendar thing.  I don't believe in that stuff.  Maybe it's nothing more than that perennial autumnal wistfulness that afflicts me every year...but this year I think there's more.

East Liberty Presbyterian Church

          This fine old church is now a beacon of freethinking, progressive religion.  But its construction was funded by the ungodly rich Mellon Family in the 1930s.  At the time, they were the richest family in the world.  Locals used to call the church "Mellon's Fire Escape," assuming that it was the Mellons' attempt to atone for their unscrupulous business practices and lavish lifestyles... Who knows?  In Pittsburgh, even hallowed ground is rife with old, old secrets.

 Above the main entrance is Jesus' statement in the Gospel of St. Matthew: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."  

 Behind the balcony, in the very back of the church, highlights from the Book of Revelation are depicted in the stained glass.  Revelation is a crazy-ass book, but it makes for a magnificent window with angels, and devils, and dragons, and monsters, and mythological beasts.  

East Liberty Church is an architectural marvel.  Pure artistry.  I like the way their lofty, European space makes a counterpoint to their gay-friendly, woman-friendly, social-justice friendly ethos.  It's like a hippy with a conservative haircut.  The congregation is much older than its current building--dating back to the late 1700s--but this place is a welcome departure from the traditional ecclesiastical architecture of the region.  

An Urban Ghost

           It would be pretty cool to have a second home in the city.  My parents had two homes.  There was our primary residence in town, where we spent most of our time.  Then there was our vacation home on a lake in the country, where we spent weekends and holidays.  The two-home thing isn't a bad system.  It echoes the lifestyle of the landed gentry of Edwardian England, except that the lords of old tended to have their main residence in the countryside and their secondary home in the city...which is how I would have to do it, too.

           I'm always telling my wife that we need a place in the city.  That way, if a benefit dinner, a play, or a concert kept us in town after dark, we could simply crash at our townhouse.  It wouldn't be our main residence, since Pittsburgh city schools are pretty rough.  But it would be our place in town...to be used on--perhaps--ten or twelve occasions per year...  I know it's not practical, but sometimes I just want to rescue a crumbling old townhouse, built at the turn of the century.

          You'd have to be crazy to take on maintenance responsibilities for a second home.  But you could get a pretty cool old house in Pittsburgh for less than $20,000.  This is 312 North Sheridan, in the East Liberty neighborhood.  It's an old townhouse that stands isolated on a once-crowded block, like the one surviving tooth in an empty mouth.  This part of town was genteel enough in its day, and many people who owned homes here could have also kept larger places in the surrounding counties.  I like the gangly, distorted feel of these old city houses; like skyscrapers, they strive to gain space by pushing upward from as small a patch of earth as possible.  Unlike my farmhouse, which could be described as "rambling," these places are lofty and narrow.  They stare vacantly at the street like gaunt widows, tall as Swedes.  I've been visiting a website that promotes the preservation of historic architecture like this.

Hillman State Park, Haul Road

           I've never before hit Raccoon Creek and Hillman both in the same day, but today was special.  My wife made me go to a formal "benefit dinner" in the city with her on Thursday evening, so she was especially generous with this weekend's hiking time.  After the early morning trek through Raccoon, I set off to explore the back roads connecting that park to its nearby neighbor, Hillman State Park.  

          Only about 10 miles separate the two parks, but they feel like separate planets.  Because most of Hillman was strip mined, it will take Nature several millennia to restore the place to the rich vegetative state you find at Raccoon.  As a recovering strip mine, there are areas that are entirely without topsoil.  In other places, the soil is so thin that the trees remain stunted, and they dry out by the end of the summer.

          There are enormous anthills--as in this photo--like I've never seen outside the African plains.  The scrubby grasses and twisted bushes add to the savanna-like feel.  Today I discovered a large marsh with a pretty good sized buck and a doe hiding among the reeds.

          And yet, there's a melancholy loveliness to the place.  Theodore Roosevelt wisely said, "Comparison is the thief of joy."  And he's right.  I could compare this scrubby waste to Blue Knob and be forever dissatisfied with my weekly treks.  Or I could take it for what it is and find beauty, silence, and solitude even here.  In the 50s and early 60s, strip mining upset the balance of this land.  But balance returns eventually.  It will never be exactly as it was before, but it will find its new equilibrium.  How long it takes to get back to a place of balance!  By the time our spirits discover balance, our bodies have lost it.  Whenever something comes along to upset our state of orientation, we always want to work backward toward what was.  But that's unwise.  The steps go from orientation...to disorientation...to reorientation.  Reorientation is never the same as the original state, but it is its own thing, and also good in its way.  Too bad I won't live long enough to see the new thing that Hillman will become.

Raccoon Creek State Park, Heritage Trail

           Raccoon Creek is a nice enough park.  The PADCNR lists it among the "Top 20 Must See Parks" in the state, which I think is a little ambitious.  As far as scenery goes, it's typical Western Pennsylvania: picturesque, but nothing spectacular.  Compared to Blue Knob (which did not make the "Top 20"), Raccoon Creek is a dive.  But a hiker living in Pittsburgh eventually learns not to compare.  Raccoon is what I have available within a half hour's drive, and it's good enough.  

          I was on the Heritage Trail today at 7:30am, so the forest was dark, misty, and cool.  I got to see the sun rising through the trees.  I also ran into some unexpected wildlife.  As I rounded a bend, I heard something rooting around in a snarl of fallen trees.  I smacked my walking stick against a small tree to announce my presence, and a dog-like animal raised its head at me.  The thing had the coloration of a black bear: tan / brown muzzle and black fur everyplace else.  And yet, it's face was distinctly canine.  I wonder if coyotes can be black?  When it raised its head, about 20 feet away from me, I hissed at it and waved my stick.  It disappeared, and I heard scrambling on the forest floor, but I didn't hear it retreat...which troubled me a little.

         It's possible to backpack in a loop all the way around the park, and I've been thinking about doing it.  You're only allowed to camp in designated sites, which are quite primitive, but it might make a nice activity in the fall.

Blue Knob State Park, Part Two

           There's very little online about Blue Knob State Park, my new-found love.  (Find a fuller description of the park in the blog post just below.)  Ever since coming home from there yesterday, I can't stop thinking about the place.  It's vast.  It's beautiful.  It's remote, and quiet, and lush.  It's everything my life needs more of.  Why is it virtually unknown?

             Since the campground checkout time isn't until 3pm, I was free to hike much of the morning, leaving plenty of time to pack after lunch.  I headed toward the group cabin area in search of the Pavia Run Trail, which I never found--despite the fact that most trails here are well marked.  Instead, I ended up wandering around among the cabins, feeling very much as if I'd stumbled into a lost Alpine village.  The place is in good repair, and it seems to get used.  At least the dumpsters were full to overflowing from a recently departed group.

           The cabins look so easy to build.  I bet I could do it myself...if only I owned a patch of ground in the mountains to build on.  O, when the places in my life grow tired, when the gutters are too high to clean out, and the yards are too big to mow, just give me this.  A single-room cabin with a view, a sufficiently comfortable bed, some shelves for my books.  When the places in my life begin to weigh on me--this 4,000 square foot farmhouse with its mortgage, its plumbing, its damned appearances--let me come here.  Just a place to shelter from the weather, a little wildness and beauty in my fading years.

          I've often thought that if I ever became homeless, I would spend my winters in the remote cabins at Raccoon Creek State Park, which is close to Pittsburgh.  I could go nocturnal so that nobody found me: sleep all day and light wood fires in the fireplace at night, when no one is around to follow the smoke to my hideout.  But, reveries of homelessness aside, the cabin village at Blue Knob was way cool.  It felt like a Swiss village clinging to the wall of a steep valley, with mists obscuring the heights above.  There's a private pool for groups to use, a nice refectory, some trailheads to remoter regions of the park, and this cool metal ring (about five feet in diameter) to clang as a dinner bell.  I find myself thinking, "Hmm, surely I belong to some 'group' that I can cajole into renting this place for a retreat or something..."

Blue Knob State Park

           Late summer comes like an October breeze in the mountains near Bedford, PA.  I came to the hills mostly seeking beauty, as always.  Solitude and silence usually take second and third place in my quest.  But this was a family camping trip, wife and kids in tow.  Summer's last hurrah.  And Blue Knob State Park made the perfect spot to celebrate the last few days of the season.  At 3,100 feet, there was already a hint of winter in the air.  Some trees were already changing.  Here is the lowest mountainside vista at a place known as Chappell's Field, near the campground.  

           This photo--and the one just beneath--were taken a little further up the mountainside at a spot called Pavia Overlook.  There's very solitary, rugged hiking on this side of the mountain, and these southward views are worth the trek.  It was gray and chilly up on the heights, with a wistful feeling in the air.  It reminded me of "Boys of Summer," that old 80s song that crooned, "Feel it in the air, the summer's out of reach."  In terms of beauty, this place isn't Vermont...but it's comparable.  And it's only two hours from Pittsburgh.

           This, too, is a view from the Pavia Overlook.  The map showed another scenic lookout known as "Queen Overlook" in this part of the park, but I wasn't able to find it.  I think I will have to come back to Blue Knob because I left a lot of hiking business unfinished.  The two-night camping trip was very nearly perfect, despite several mountain rain showers, but it wasn't nearly enough time to explore the park's 18 miles of wilderness trails.  

           Here is the view looking west from the summit of Blue Knob Mountain, which is the second highest point of land in the state...and much more appealing than our high point.  The parkland at the peak is leased to a ski resort.  That explains the many lifts.  The place looked a little decrepit to me, but ski resorts always have a forlorn air in the off-seasons.

           Again, looking west from the summit.  I like the way the clouds gather near the crest.  It reminds me of a mountain city in Africa that I will probably never see again.  I had a vacation home there consisting of a single rented room in a student ghetto.  I called it my "mountain condo."

          This is the summit of Blue Knob itself from halfway up the mountainside, at Chappell's Field.  It's possible to get better photos of the whole mountain from PA869, near the interesting hamlet of Osterburg.  As state parks go, this is one of the best I've discovered.  It's got a wild, solitary feel...which is really all I need for happiness.  The swimming pool and surrounding areas are a little shabby--at the lowest end of the park.  But the higher you go up the mountainside, the woodsier and lovelier it gets.  The campground was well maintained, quiet, nicely laid out, with a variety of shaded and sunny lots.  And since I'm trying to drum up business for this little-known state park, I'll let you in on a little secret: the best campsite is # 22.  Hands down.  I did some research on Google Earth before our trip, then reserved the site.  When we pulled in, a neighbor commented that she hoped we wouldn't show up.  She wanted to take the "reserved" sign off the post and steal our spot.  Site # 22 is deeply wooded, semi-secluded with neighbors on only one side, and dog-friendly.  It has electricity, if that matters to you (as it does to my wife), and several trailheads begin about 20 feet away (which matters to me).  I really love this place.

The Lost Children of the Alleghenies

          A tragic tale from the mountains south of Altoona.  What the placard doesn't tell you is that George and Joseph's parents (Samuel and Susannah Cox) had just moved back to this region after a failed attempt at homesteading out in Indiana.  They had many more children after these first two were lost here in the woods.  Soon after the event described here, George fought for the Union cause in the Civil War.  Click on photos to enlarge them.  

          There was no way to get a decent photographic angle on this monument that stands on the spot where the two boys' bodies were found.  It's enclosed in chain link due to past vandalism.  If you read the sign in the above photo: I don't know what I believe about the power of dreams, but I do know that stories get conflated over time.  Things that people thought, or imagined, or hoped can become cold, hard fact.  And yet, this sad event did inspire Allison Krauss’s hauntingly sad song “Jacob’s Dream.”  You should look it up and listen to it.

          Imagine a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old lost in this place.  Even today, this part of the Appalachian Mountains is a dense wilderness.  The Lost Children Monument sits in a lonely hollow in the woods of State Game Land #26, just outside the gorgeous and remote Blue Knob State Park.  The little-traveled Lost Turkey Trail meanders right past the solitary spot on its 26-mile run through the mountains.

French Creek

           A young George Washington named the stream "French Creek" in 1753 when he canoed upriver to warn the French at Fort Le Boeuf---present day Waterford, PA---that they were trespassing on British territory. Actually, he didn't care so much about British interests; he was claiming the so-called "Ohio Country" for Virginia.  Enlist the great Washington into your patriotic rhetoric however you like, but he remained an old Tidewater aristocrat who would have had little patience with his modern-day devotees.  And his primary commitment was never to America, but to Virginia.

          Washington's mission was a resounding failure.  But my own paddle against the current of French Creek was fantastic.  It's the perfect stream for paddling: deep, still, and little-traveled.  In many western states, it might qualify as a river instead of a creek.  But though it's a large and navigable body of water, it only travels 117 miles, meandering lazily from Chautauqua County, New York, to Franklin, PA, where it empties into the Allegheny River.  (There are blog entries about both those places below.)

          I saw some beautiful wildlife.  A majestic blue heron, a turtle, a red tail hawk, and many birds and fish.  As always, it's the domestic animals whose presence I didn't particularly enjoy.  The top photo is a sandy beach where I stopped to rest my shoulders.  As I was wading out into the water, I thought to myself, "This place smells like horses, and there are hoof-prints in the sand."  At that moment, I heard galloping, and a herd of horses came bounding into the water.  I'm scared of horses, and you never saw a guy scramble so fast to get into his kayak and push out into midstream.  In the lower photo, you can barely see the horses standing at the water's edge.  It's a bad picture because I wasn't about to turn around and fumble with my camera until I got way, way away from those beasts...

Riverside Inn, Cambridge Springs

ALAS: The post below was written in August of 2012.  Now, in May of 2017, I sadly report that the Riverside Inn did indeed burn to the ground early this morning.  Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

           While I'm not exactly "eating crow," I did happen to spend two nights at a very cool old wooden hotel up in the most northerly reaches of Crawford County, PA.  Of course, it was covered in vinyl siding, but in the Keystone State, it never hurts to drop your standards a notch or two.  I say this as a native son who both loves and hates this place: The lower your expectations, the less disappointed you'll be when things turn out to be way cool and hopelessly backward at the same time.

           The Riverside Inn sits on the banks of French Creek, surrounded by formal gardens in the partly quaint, partly decrepit borough of Cambridge Springs.  (See above observation on the Keystone State.)  Mineral springs used to be the attraction that drew people to this town; now the hotel itself is the attraction.  They're mostly known for their medieval dinner theater, but it's also a popular place to have weddings.  I was there for a wedding myself.

           The hotel is a little faded, but that adds to its mystique.  You've got to love a historic old resort that's a little past its prime.  (The British colonial "Mountain Hotel" in Buea, Cameroon, was one of my favorite places during  the Africa years.  It's closed now, but the last time I stayed there, my wife and I were the only guests, and they had to look for fifteen minutes to find us a room where the bed was made.)  I don't think business is great at the Riverside.  The guestrooms, while furnished with interesting antiques, are cramped and not exactly spotless.  There's no internet.  The only TV is in the main lobby.  But it did make a nice backdrop for a wedding ceremony.  I really loved the deep, wraparound porches.

          While kayaking down French Creek, I came across a local guy who was hanging out with his dog by the water, drinking beer and playing a harmonica.  He told me the hotel is haunted...which someone was bound to do.  Despite a few incidents of hysteria, I'm not a big believer in the paranormal...  He said it's a "rite of passage" when you're a teen in Cambridge Springs to get a summer job at the inn.