I recently had the joy of walking through unfamiliar trees when a line from a Robert Frost poem returned to me: "Whose woods these are I think I know." The answer came like an angels' song: Mine! These woods are mine. This is Venango Villa, alternately known as the dacha, the cabin, or just "camp." I have finally achieved my lifelong goal to have a place in the forest and to own a little bit of woods. It's very close to MY forest, the Allegheny National Forest. It's also within the bounds of the county of my birth and very near to a little town where my father's family is originally from. The two times that I backpacked in the immediate vicinity of this location, I heard wood thrushes in the evening and owls at night. This is a beautiful place. It feels strangely satisfying and appropriate to own 1.8 acres of the Fatherland, though I'd have bought a getaway in almost any stretch of woods within a 2.5 hour drive of Pittsburgh. The humble house in this photo came available, and I did not buy it because of historical connections to the area, though those are cool. I bought it just because I wanted a place in the woods. Venango Villa is 2 hours away if I drive as fast as most people--which I only do when headed for the forest.
This little mobile home popped up last September on a Facebook group where people advertise hunting camps for sale in the "Pennsylvania Wilds." The Wilds is a vaguely-defined region where there are few people and lots of black bears. There are vast expanses of woodlands and some elk, too. This is at the westernmost edge of the Wilds, but it is truly wild around here...and a little spooky at night. Here's a shot of the villa at sunset. (Of course, I'm being ironic when I call it that.) A widow lady used to live here alone. It was her year-round home, and she died somewhere on the premises. I intend to ask the nearest neighbors about her after I get to know them better. I don't believe in ghosts or cryptids, but click on this photo to enlarge it. Do you not see a greenish orb in the trees just in front of the house?
Most of the old clapboard churches, like this one, sit empty but maintained. You can rent this church for events like concerts or family reunions. I have seen the hunting camps come and go on the Facebook page where I found the Venango Villa. They get snapped up so fast that I never even thought I had a chance of getting one. Everyone seems to be looking for camps and second homes these days. But this place felt different. It called to me. My wife was so supportive and totally on board with buying it--although she had never even seen it. Her dad is a contractor, so I took him up to look it over. The place was crawling with potential buyers on a Sunday afternoon. My father-in-law gave it the thumbs up, and after a lot of negotiating and nearly walking away from the purchase, it's finally ours.
It was really cheap. No one wants those old mobile homes anymore, even when they come with almost 2 acres of woods. Mine has a porch and mudroom built on and a full basement! The basement is what sold me. How many hunting camps have those? It's got a well and a septic system--of some kind. My wife still hasn't been up there to see it yet, but her willingness to buy the place "sight-unseen" has earned her MAJOR points. (That could have been part of her plan, but it worked. We've all got our price, right?) The whole family is going up Thanksgiving night. I spent Friday night and all-day Saturday up there cleaning, putting up curtains, fixing things, raking leaves, and doing odd jobs around the place. I also spent a lot of time exploring the environs, where there are many seldom-visited second homes and hunting camps, like this place. Of course, this is what I originally had in mind--a log cabin with an outhouse and a big front porch, sitting on a dirt road with no neighbors for miles. It's probably heated with a wood stove and has a hand pump for water. But my wife never would have agreed to that kind of primitive camp. Relationships entail compromise.
This is the Allegheny River as seen from the lookout above Tidioute, a picturesque but hardscrabble village on the river. The dirt-road drive from the villa down to Tidioute is beautiful and lonely, mostly downhill, passing through deep forests on steep grades. I know some Pittsburghers who built a second home up here in the 1970s, and they always call this place "the mountains." They spend their summers "up at the mountains." I always want to correct them. These are not the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains are a long range of ridges that stand well to the east of this place--many miles from here. But these do feel like mountains when you're driving through them. They're steep and rugged and covered in trees, with rare but occasional long views. Many of the ridges are above 1,000 feet, so they are technically mountains. But how? They're far from any mountain range. These hills just stand around wherever they want in total disorder all over the northern part of the state.
Here are the northern reaches of the town of Tidioute. My grandfather used to say that in the 1700s a trapper here had a Seneca wife who went around topless, and that's why they called the town Tidioute. Like a lot of these old hill country villages, Tidioute is both scenic and grimy, with grand old mansions in varying degrees of disrepair and ornate churches sitting empty. Tidioute also has the river.
The villa sits in the hills above Tidioute, where the land levels out a little bit, but remains almost entirely wooded. Here's one open spot along one of the many, many dirt back roads in the area. Like I said, there's something almost eerie about being closed in by endless trees. I love the company of trees, but an open place like this has a real appeal when you've been surrounded by gray trunks and bare branches for a few days. Most of the woods around here have No Trespassing signs on the trees, which might indicate that they belong to city folk who only come up here on occasion to hunt and get away from their crowded lives. These folks didn't even need to build a cabin; they settled for a camper.
Now, I want to get this on the record: I told the real estate agent that I did not want to buy this house if someone needed it as a place to live. For me, it's just a place to go and play, but if someone needed it for a home, then I wanted them to have it, not me. Housing is expensive these days, and I don't know how rural people get by. If you live out here, a car is a necessity--with insurance, and gas, and maintenance, and all the unexpected expenses that come with vehicle-ownership. Grocery stores are few and far between, though there's a Dollar General in every village. You can buy groceries at Dollar General, but not of a healthy variety. For fresh produce or meat, you've got to drive into one of the bigger towns or else grow it yourself. Housing prices are an issue out here, too--though far less expensive than in urban areas. It doesn't help that suburbanites like me would come up here and buy all the affordable property. But the real estate agent assured me that no one who needed a home would be able to make a cash offer, which the seller required, so my conscience could rest easy. Here is one of the many single-lane dirt roads runs through the trees, sometimes growing so rutted and narrow that I'm afraid to travel on them.
My hometown of Oil City, as seen from above. Seen here is the site of the now-defunct Pennzoil refinery, along Oil Creek. My grandfather--of Tidioute fame--used to work here loading barrels onto trucks. They were always poor, my Oil City grandparents. Grandma never worked outside the home...and honestly, not much inside the home either. She never learned how to drive, so after work grandpa would have to drive her to the grocery store, where he would wait in the car while she bought cartons of Kraft macaroni and cheese. Grandma was an unhappy woman with bad religion to make her misery complete. She spent her days watching soap operas and feeling guilty about it because her preacher said that was a sin. When she wasn't watching daytime television, she was talking to her sister on the phone. She was a hypochondriac who famously caught hepatitis over the phone. I think she hated us, but our other grandma ADORED us, and she felt the need to keep up. She did the bare minimum that's expected of a grandma: birthday cards containing $5 bills, clip-on ties for Christmas. That's it. My cousins here mostly died young. I have no one left here except one cousin, an aunt and an uncle. I haven't seen them in many years, but I expect that will change now.
It's weird to be back within the orbit of this town.
