Hillman State Park, Lower Pond

 There were three Canada geese on this quiet pond when I returned here Sunday afternoon.  Otherwise, all was still and bright.  At the upper pond, seen in an earlier post, there were at least five cars parked.  It was strange to see so many people at Hillman.  Must be a Sunday thing.  I was there both Saturday and Sunday, and the park was nearly empty on Saturday.

 I'm glad I ventured back here several days ago and discovered a whole quadrant of this park that I never knew existed.  It's got beautiful, grassy meadows, like this, and piney ridges overlooking the ponds.  I sat on one of those shady ridgetops and allowed the silence of the place to speak its peace to my spirit.

These green hills stretch on for miles, and I saw people strolling through the springy grass with their dogs.  So maybe the despicable, haunted forest has captured my heart.  But remember that it's not a maintained park with facilities and an office.  There are no restrooms, or campsites, or picnic areas.  Just 3,000 plus acres of scrappy countryside.  Hillman is the only state park in the PA park system that doesn't even have a website.  It's just a neglected annex to Raccoon Creek State Park, but a very different hiking experience.  Of course, I'm not promoting any illegal behavior, but I bet you could take a backpack out into Hillman and spend a few nights--if it weren't so damned spooky.

Hillman Again (But a Little Less Haunted)

I revisited Hillman State Park again today, and in some ways, it was just as haunted as last time.

There were eerie white hazes that disappeared as quickly as they came, lingering fogs, twisted trees writhing in the wind, being pulled toward the earth by sinister vines that look like witches' arms, knotted and hairy. 

Much of Hillman's eeriness comes from the fact that it's poorly reclaimed strip mines, with thin, weak soil to support only thin, weak trees, the kind that make brittle creaking noises in the slightest gust and whose canopy never becomes dense enough to prevent the growth of vines.

Today I discovered a whole huge quadrant of the Blair Witch Forest that I never knew was there. The winding, unmarked, unmapped trails just kept calling me forward and forward, and like a siren-stricken fool I just followed, entrusting my way to the beguiling trees.

Ah, but while I was lost I came upon some nice meadowlands and two lovely woodland ponds, all nameless and placid. The pond in this picture is lower and smaller, but the one below is very close to the road.  How have I never found these things before?  I was just trudging along a little anxiously, lost on Hillman's labyrinthine trails once again, when I saw two bodies of water shimmering in the distance below me.

The forest was somehow deeper and taller. Perhaps it's in the nature of hellish places to become beautiful in certain lights and at certain times. Though evidence of mountain bikers is everywhere here, I had the place entirely to myself even on a Saturday. 

The one mountain biker I chanced upon appeared just as I was answering the noisy crows with a throaty caw. The woods were rich with the resinous scent of evergreen, like those parched forests of the West.  And the brilliant white cherries are still abloom.  By the time I made it home and noticed the yellowish powder all over my hiking boots, I realized that the "eerie white hazes" were nothing more than pollen from the evergreen trees.  We're talking clouds of pollen--which to an allergy sufferer is just as scary as any ghost and way more believable.

Rev. Elisha McCurdy and Florence Presbyterian Church Cemetery

 An old-time Calvinist revivalist who helped to spread the Second Great Awakening to the far reaches of the Ohio River Valley was the Rev. Elisha McCurdy.  He's buried in this very old cemetery whose church is long gone.  The oldest grave here is supposedly from 1799.  McCurdy led a sort of campmeeting-style evangelistic crusade at the now-very-quiet Upper Buffalo Presbyterian Church in Washington County, and it attracted several thousand frontier penitents.  Here's some biographical info I pulled off the website of a church he founded in the West Virginia Northern Panhandle.

In his youth McCurdy was a merchant of sorts, transporting goods the pioneers needed across the mountains from the coastal cities. He was converted while attending a prayer meeting west of the mountains and, at the age of 29, felt called upon to become a minister. Legend has it, though, that Mc Curdy was insulted by his salary — 10 pounds a year in cash, another 10 in grain and produce.

It was under McCurdy’s watchful eye that “The Great Revival” began here...back in 1802— a rebirth of [religion] that soon spread throughout the country. In its wake it brought Sunday schools, prayer meetings, the missionary movement, and the crusade against slavery as well as the campaign against strong drink, a vice McCurdy particularly abhorred. A teetotaler all his life, McCurdy once refused to give thanks for a funeral feast because whiskey was being served and, rather than deliver a funeral sermon that day, he instead preached on the evil of strong drink. When McCurdy set his mind to some thing he usually got his way, and it wasn’t long before the church members stopped serving spirits.

I couldn't find McCurdy's grave here, but I found a pretty cool one.  The shapely headstone in this picture bears the following inscription, entirely without punctuation:

Sacred to the memory of David Walker
who died on the 6th day of November 1833
in the 49th year of his age
Hush tis the last lone resting place
Where David sleeps a dreamless sleep
Let silence oer the sacred spot
Her sternest vigil keep
The sweet the loved the beautiful
Whose heart was gentle as a dove
Whose placid smile was calm as heaven
Whose radiant eyes were love
Sleep on thou sweet one calmly sleep

Unbroken noiseless rest is thine
Yet for the glowing realms of bliss
Thy spirit all divine
And pure and spotless as at first
The fetter of the grave shall burst
~A. Pruden

Haunted Hillman State Park

One of the worst scourges of climate change thus far is the dry Aprils. We get lots of rain annually, but only in torrents and mostly outside the growing seasons. The woods is dry as tinder. On a fluke, I came back to Hillman and to a part that I haven't hiked in years, a place where--today--the mayapples are wilting where they stand.

It's an ugly, scraggly stretch of scrubland, and each time I come here, I'm reminded why I stopped.  Nearly half the trees are strangled by wicked looking vines.  The horse riders and mountain bike riders tear up the unmarked trails so bad that any rain at all makes them unhikeable.  There's a spooky dreariness about the place.  And yet, it's got several sweet spots if you know where to look.  

One nice thing about Hillman is how suddenly and dramatically the countryside can change--which is why the mountain bikers like it.  You'll be slogging through briers and brambles beneath a sparse canopy of dying trees when, off to your left, you spot a big, alluring swath of green.  And voila!  You've got this pleasant open meadow.  These do look like Japanese honeysuckle, an invasive species, but a pretty one.  And this place is surely rife with deer ticks.  But it's still so inviting, with its blue skies, butterflies, gentle breezes, and birdsong.  Ridges and cliffs appear unexpectedly at Hillman, too.

And the scrappy, viny patchlands can turn into rich, dark forest just as suddenly, all earthy with the scent of evergreen.  Many of the trails I thought I recalled through here are either gone or never were. I've gotten lost nearly every time I've ventured very far into this dismal place.  It's an eerie feeling, but my biggest worry is not spooks or toothy animals; it's getting home in time to meet my kids off the bus.  And did I mention the strange, unidentified noises, and the enormous anthills, and crows, and jaggers fit for a Golgotha coronation?

Just look at these angry sumnabitches!  And despite it all, it was such a peaceful, perfect day to be alone in the woods--even this Blair Witch Forest.

Speaking of crowns of thorns, here's the only sort-of happy poem by my favorite poet, A.E. Housman.  It's appropriate for all the cherry trees in bloom.

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

is hung with bloom along the bough,

and stands about the woodland ride

wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

twenty will not come again,

and take from seventy springs a score,

it leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

fifty springs are little room,

about the woodlands I will go

to see the cherry hung with snow.

My ten-year old daughter loves all the poems I've memorized--like this one.  When I told her it was Housman's only happy poem, she said, "Yeah, but it's not really happy either."  We just got back from a cruise to Bermuda.  Each time I go to the beach, I'm reminded again that though I like it, I'm really more of a riverine creature, a lover of forests.  But Bermuda was beautiful.  Here are some pics.