Sugar Camp Hill, State Game Lands 42

At 2,910 feet elevation, Sugar Camp Hill is no slouch--for these parts.  This was my first time back in the woods since--when?--October?  It was a joy to return to the Laurel Highlands for a few hours.  Whenever you see the word "sugar" attached to a place name in the Northeast, it always means maple syrup.  There must have been a large scale maple syrup processing camp on this mountain at one time.  It would have hummed with life in February and March: sweet wood smoke, the scent of maple on the cold breeze, the lilting music of harmonicas and laughter.  It was almost 50 degrees down in the lowlands today, but a semblance of winter still reigned in the highlands east of Pittsburgh.  Of course I brought the wrong car; I had to park it along Boy Scout Road, near Boswell, and hike into State Game Lands 42 to reach the summit of Sugar Camp Hill. 

Oh how I miss winter! The generous, monochromatic, Bergmanesque winters of my childhood.  But a thin ghost of January still holds an exiled court up in the highlands east of Pittsburgh, like some grand queen who has been forced into hiding.  November's gray forces have occupied all her old domain except these remote upland holdouts.  The 21st century has seen dull November conquer everything between Halloween and Easter.  Our winters now are bland limbos, sluggish and colorless.  Instead of the snowy, cold, brilliant winters of long ago, now we have a chilly, rainy, soggy gray and brown season that lasts about five months.  Insipid November with its oatmeal skies and its 40 degrees!  I actually used to like November for its melancholy, before its expansionist tendencies overtook almost half the year.  Once-powerful winter is now reduced to guerilla tactics, issuing the occasional brutal counterattacks like the savage blast of deadly cold we saw just before Christmas.

But they are the lashings-out of a wounded animal.  At least we did have a white Christmas in 2022.  But such brutality is an act of desperation, the last refuge of the enfeebled combatant.  Like some bloodthirsty African warlord, winter comes out of hiding just long enough to lay waste to a string of villages, sparing no one, before hurrying back to its refuge in the hills.  Everyone hates the cold, I know, but I do love January, real January, which hides up in these sheltering heights.  I'd like to construct a winter retreat and call it "The Januarium."  Ponder the rare beauty of disappearing things, unfashionable things.  Consider the beauty of scarce or even persecuted things, things that are hunted and haunted and ghostly like the remains of winter.  I recall my grandfather in his woodworking shop or in his vegetable garden; my mother at her sewing; an organist at the bench, skillfully making those grand old pipes sing.  Basement woodshops, backyard vegetable gardens, maternal sewing, organ music: all of these are disappearing from the world. But they were lovely in their time, and they are especially lovely in their passing.  

These hills will soon be unequal to the task of harboring winter, the exiled queen.  They're too low.  As climate change accelerates, they'll be no match for the encroaching dullness, the sameness, the gray monoclimate.  Winter will flee from here like the elf queen Galadriel abandoning Lothlorien.  Her nearest refuge will be the higher ground of West Virginia and far upstate New York.  She will be entirely gone from here.