Abandoned Church for Sale

I wonder what the story is here?  This old church sits in the small town of Centerville, on the road from Titusville to Erie.  Looks like it’s been abandoned for 30 years or more…and it’s been for sale for quite a while, too.  The For Sale sign out front has a panel missing.  No one’s ever gonna buy this place.  What would you even do with a rundown old church in a small community like this?  There’s a very active-looking Baptist church across the street.

I like old churches, but not this one.  It’s got a bad energy about it.  I stopped to take a picture for a brochure that I’m working on…. From the looks of the place, I’d say it was Methodist.  They probably just had the wrong personalities in charge at some crucial juncture and couldn’t survive.

 

North Country Cryptids

This is the Allegheny River with Babylon Hill to the right…

A few weeks ago, just as dark was setting in, I saw a red fox in these trees behind the house, staring back at me. Such a sleek, beautiful creature. I’ve been hoping to see it again, so I go out every evening and stare into the woods, but it hasn’t returned.

Red foxes are cool…but can we talk about cryptids?  I know it sounds ridiculous, and I truly am a rational person. But there’s something in the woods behind my house up north—something other than a fox.  And while I mostly don’t mind it, I do sometimes find it a little eerie at night.  The forest is why I bought this place.  Living on the edge of the woods is my joy and my drug.  But when night falls, I sense a presence that troubles me.  Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather deal with cryptids than Pittsburgh traffic. (Not that the drivers in the North Country are any better; they’re equally bad in different ways. Up here, people go the speed limit minus 15. You have to give yourself an extra 15 minutes to get anywhere because there WILL be someone in front of you driving 15 miles below the speed limit.)  But when I shone my flashlight into the trees behind the house last night—taking that damned, accursed dog out to pee—a large, single orange eye reflected back at me, then disappeared. It makes me think back on the night a few months ago when I heard loud, eerie noises coming from these same trees—trees that I adore by day.

Of course I don’t believe in cryptids.  Wendigos, dogmen, bigfeet.  The archeological record simply doesn’t account for their existence.  However, I picked up a horror novella at Barnes & Noble that was set in Northern Pennsylvania: Cold Snap, by Lindy Ryan.  It’s definitely an amateur piece of fiction—too much description and too little story.  It deals with questions of grief, and loss, and guilt.  It’s about a newly widowed woman who goes with her sulky teenage son to a cabin in Northern PA to deal with her grief over Christmas.  But a creature that seems to be a moose turns out to be a wendigo.  (There hasn’t been a regular moose population in PA since the early 1800s, though a few do occasionally wander in from more northerly climes.)  Wendigos are Native American spirits who haunt the living.  They look like deer or moose…until they don’t.  They’re specifically Native American.  I often wonder about the Erie Indians who got genocided by the Iroquois in the 1600s.  (White people perfected the heinous art of genocide, but it has been practiced by other races, too—contrary to popular belief.)  You never hear much about the Erie, but they were the original inhabitants of Northwest Pennsylvania. It would make sense for their unhappy ghosts to roam these darkling forests… I don’t believe in such things, but it’s fun to think about when night is falling in the trees…

Huntin’ Season

 

I sometimes walk this road from end to end, especially in the early evenings.  I do it for exercise...and also to see the trees in the changing light of different times and seasons.  It's uncanny how many different places a single place can be.  The woods on either side are marked with No Trespassing signs, so I stick to the gravel.  On a recent evening, I was walking this road at dusk.  Things were beginning to take on an eerie glint--the darkening sky, the gloomy trees, the utter isolation.  In all the many times I've walked this road, I've never encountered a vehicle of any kind.  But that evening, I saw a pair of headlights coming at me.  No big deal.  A 20-year old American-made sedan headed toward me slowly, suspiciously.  Then, when the car got close, the driver hit the gas.  I assume they were creeped out to see a solitary pedestrian in a hoodie walking this lonesome road at dusk.  Dirt road, fading light, solitary walker with an unseen face...that's the stuff of horror movies or true crime documentaries.  By the time I made it back to my car--about a mile away--there was an expensive pickup parked in front of me.  I didn't like the way the driver was sitting with his windows open, staring at me in from the dark interior.  He seemed to be waiting for me.  As I passed by his truck, he called out "Hi there.  You out here huntin'?"  I said, "No, just gettin' in some cardio."  This answer gave him pause, as if the word "cardio" was known to him, but not commonplace.  Then he looked relieved.  I wasn't carrying a rifle, so he thought I just might be telling the truth.  He told me he'd come out to change the batteries in his hunting cameras in the woods.  The hell he did...  Who waits till dark to go into the forest to change camera batteries?  I'll tell you what actually happened.  The driver of that first car saw me and thought I was hunting illegally on private land.  They called the guy who owns the land--or leases it--and he came out here as fast as he could to catch me.  Walking a lonely public road just for the sake of walking?  Who would do a thing like that?     

November Thoughts

Look at the austere perfection of this scene.  It's like living in a painting by Corot.  Just as there's a stark beauty in barrenness, there's an ironic freedom in loss---as when the trees lose their leaves to stand bare and show their true forms.  It's lovely in a monochromatic way: gray branches stretched out against a gray sky.  If things weren't taken from us, would we ever let them go?  And if we never let anything go, could there be growth and life?  November teaches us to let go of things that can no longer serve us...like last summer's greenery.

November strips the trees of their leaves, and the skies of their light, and the air of its warmth, and our lives of their illusions.  Remember all the unmet goals of the bright, scorching summer?  Gone, irretrievable, half-forgotten.  Remember how you were gonna get that fence painted, and that door repaired, and that phone call made, and that article written?  Remember how you had all the time in the world, and you were gonna be young forever?  

Back in September, I collected about 65 wild black walnuts in their pungent green husks, but I put off husking them till a few days ago.  By that time the majority of them had gone bad.  Once you've broken them out of their green outer shells, you toss them in water to see if they float.  It turns the water inky black.  If they do float--which most did--they're no longer any good.  I was able to salvage only 20.  They'll be ready for cracking by January.

I do love country churches.  This is the Presbyterian church in Plumer, founded in 1823.  They should have celebrated their 200th anniversary just two years ago, but their fading sign--which clearly has not been touched in a very long time--says some weird thing about "Happy 151 years."  Were they celebrating their building's birthday?  Not much happening here these days.  It's a perfect November scene--dormancy, decline, a normal death.  All things must run their course, in time.  Someday, in the brilliance and warmth of some future summer day, I'll explore their old cemetery...

Actually, I may yet do it this winter.  This church never really had a glory day.  It has struggled along since the 1860s, when the minister struck it rich in the oil boom and went off to live the high life in some more glamorous place.  (Funny how wealth reveals a person's true character, just like November reveals a tree's true form.)  Last I heard, they had 4 aged church members left, no minister, and no Sunday services.  The sign unironically declares, "Christ is alive.  The church is alive."  But things are always getting gone from the world, aren't they?  Even things of goodness, truth, and beauty are forever disappearing.  You just have to let them go and hope that something equally good or better will step in to fill the void.

The November full moon was a beauteous thing to behold.  It felt like some kind of weird midday, shining its eerily brilliant light over our old farmhouse near Pittsburgh.

Here's Pittsburgh from the slightly spooky elevator at Mercy Hospital.  You definitely want to take the stairs if you're scared of heights.  I like the quiet decay of November, the sweet smell of moldering leaves, the hunkering down indoors, the refuge taken in small comforts (fires, music, candles, coffee, books).  I like November for the hush that it seems to bring over everything.  The soft grays and browns are a joy to weary eyes that have been burned by too much summer sun.  The cool temperatures are a relief.  I'm considering getting trained and certified as a "forest therapy practitioner."  Not to replace my current career, only to expand it...

 

East End Pittsburgh, with a Link to Hoye-Crest

 

How colorful the east end of Pittsburgh appeared from the roof of Shadyside Hospital on Halloween morning.

For a link to my most recent mountaineering adventure at Hoye-Crest, in Maryland, click HERE. 

North Country Trail: Minister Road to Minister Creek, Allegheny National Forest

                                       

On a recent visit to the Allegheny National Forest, I found a spot on a map that looked intriguing, then drove there and found that it was, in fact, not at all intriguing.  But en route to that place, I came across the old remains of the original CCC camp that was located in the national forest in the 1930s.  This place was used as a prisoner-of-war camp during World War II.

What was an American POW camp for German soldiers like, I wonder?  All I can picture is Hogan's Heroes.

This is not the loveliest fall we've seen in recent years, but it is the longest lasting.  I've never before seen so many trees keeping their leaves past Halloween.

A female hairy woodpecker.  (Who names these things?)

Abandoning my original plan, I cut south on Minister Road and decided to catch the North County Trail all the way to the Minister Creek Trail. I wonder who this minister was that got a creek and a road and a campground and a trail all named after him...or at least named after his occupation.

Where the NCT meets the Minister Creek Trail, there's an abundance of beautiful back-country campsites, like this one...with an old folding chair sitting by the fire ring.  

Don't you hate it when folding chairs appear in unexpected places?  I've found folding chairs in many a far-flung woodland spot.  I think hunters sometimes carry them into the woods and leave them.  And back in the 1980s, when my uncle would come home from work and collapse into his recliner to watch professional wrestling, someone would inevitably produce a folding chair to clobber their opponent.  How did folding chairs get so...ubiquitous?

It was a beautiful, golden autumn day to be among the trees.

This photo was meant to capture the rock cliffs behind the trees.  This is close to a rock formation called Sleeping Giant, which is only known to locals, and which I've covered once on this blog and once on the old blog.  Lots of big rock cities in the woods here.

The caves that you see beneath the boulders could offer shelter in a pinch, but they're not the deep caves that remain 50 degrees year-round.  These are "tectonic caves," basically nothing more than crags beneath and between the rocks.  This tall rocky ledge runs for a long distance parallel to the trail. 

And the forest was lovely in the yellow light of late October.  

A few weeks ago, I hiked to the Minister Creek Trail (North Loop) from the west along the North Country Trail.  There were Scouts from Ohio building a bridge.  Looks like they finished the task.