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.