At August's End

Oh, the beauty of these late summer days, when all the living world takes part in the change. There's a cool mist in the morning air and a hint of autumn at evening. All the world is yellowing. The grass is growing pale and blanched. The world-weary leaves hang limp on long-suffering trees. Their work is done, their short season spent. All they want is to drop back to the earth they came from, and there with time they will return to the soil and be reborn again as leaves.

Transience itself is the maker of such beauty, and I could almost weep for the infernal sadness of it all. Like all the fleeting sons of time, the summer passes in fiery splendor. At last there comes a day of ripening gardens and tart apples growing wild in an abandoned farmyard. But in the ending of one beauty, there comes new beauty, new life.

I can't get enough of SGL #232 these days. It's vast and crisscrossed by old country lanes--some of which can still be traveled by car--and it's a nice mix of woods and fields, and streams, and hills, and steep ravines.

Up to this point I'd been exploring the northern arm of the game lands, along the old Buffalo Camp Road, which is no longer open to public traffic, and along Polecat Hollow Road, which hasn't been traveled by a private vehicle since I was in high school.

But this time around, I ventured into the southern arm of the game lands and followed Buck Run Road southeast and the entire length of the valley of Buck Run.

The side roads are the best hiking options. They strike off to the left and lead up to a broad ridge that mostly served as a hay field in recent memory. Buck Run Road itself follows a scenic stream, and in places it's skirted with some interesting rock formations.

Up in the high meadow above the road, I sat in the grass of an abandoned farmyard (top photo) and meditated on the changefulness of things. It's beautiful, wild country, but even there in its embrace I felt a sense of imminent destruction. The feeling is irrational. It's almost hysterical. But the fragility of the trees, and of the fading grass, and of the very earth around me felt so real. Mother Pennsylvania has always been a slut, and she's prostituting her children to the shale drillers: our state forests, our state parks, our state game lands. The DEP is in the hands of the very people who benefit from the wanton squandering of our resources. The EPA is being dismantled and incapacitated on a massive scale. I can't escape the bleak suspicion that everything is threatened and beauty's time is short. It doesn't take a morose doomsday prophet to see that life cannot go on forever in the way that we're living it, so far removed from the earth that sustains us, so wasteful, and destructive, and self-indulgent.

But transience and the possibility of loss are part of what makes beauty beautiful. And here at August's end, it was good to sit at the edge of a grassy field, high above the valley below, and to dwell in the moment at hand, then to wonder for a time who used to call this lonesome place home...and what tomorrow will hold.

A Midsummer Day's Trek

This bucolic scene is the valley of Buffalo Creek in Washington County. State Game Lands #232 is a large tract of wooded land along neglected country lanes that used to be public thoroughfares.

Once again, photos are taken with my lame-arse cell phone. Although this is the notoriously polluted country of coal and shale, there were many fish in the stream, darting in deep pools dappled with the afternoon sun. I tried to imagine a day in their lives, their world, but I couldn't.

The solitude is glorious in the game lands in midsummer. I was a little dismayed to find that the goldenrod are already in bloom, since I associate them with the ripening season of late August and early September.

This trek had a wild feel to it, almost like being back up in the North Country. The road wends through dense forest, occasionally running along the edge of a long-fallow field and frequently running parallel to the creek. In the meadow stretches, the scent of clover lingers in the air.

The old road passing through this segment of the game lands is called Buffalo Camp Road. There are side roads that meet up with it at certain intervals, and they're all worth exploring.

I wanted to stay out there till darkness fell, to immerse myself in the wild lands and the clover smell, to construct a sleeping hut out of grasses and limbs, to swim in moonlit pools with those living fishes.

But tomorrow calls, with its duties and demands. Tomorrow beckons, with its formalities and its rites. Funny how, when the summer is in full swing, you forget what winter was really like.

The Uneventful Things

It's typically the uneventful things that make a life full and happy. Or at least that's what I tell myself in the absence of anything more interesting.

As one who has newly discovered the wonders of hiking the state game lands, I've taken to planning my excursions mostly in the counties to the south: Washington, Greene, Fayette. I usually go for Washington County. It's the closest, and it's a place where history looms in every hollow and around each bend. It's a mysterious place of beautiful hills and valleys, old, old houses, almost-quaint-but-slightly-seedy villages, cemeteries with weathered brown headstones.


This past Sunday's trek took me to State Game Lands #245, just south of Claysville on PA231. The excursion was low key. The gamelands there are pleasant enough. There's a grassy green road that runs up a valley wall. My old digital has finally given up the ghost, so these are cheapo cell phone shots. Not much to see. At the top of the valley, there's a lot of industrial noise from some Consol Energy site located within the gamelands, but down near the valley floor, silence and solitude could be found. Also, note to future self: there's a free shooting range at SGL 245, so if I ever want to practice with the .22, this is the place. Also, I liked the series of fields joined by grassy roadlets. There was a murky pond, and come August, the place will be overrun with apples and elderberries.

The best thing about this excursion is that on the route home I took PA231 north through the intriguing village of Claysville (might be worth an hour's visit someday). I was avoiding I-70 because of outrageous construction delays, and along the minor roadway, I discovered the fabled SGL 232: the wonderland in the valley of Buffalo Creek. With all the creeks and streams, the place looks spectacular.

Moraine State Park

Alas, the water tower that handily rebuffed my advances! It measures exactly sixty feet high, and on my two attempts to climb it, I got no higher than forty-five feet. Have I really grown so fearful in my middle age? I who used to scramble over boulders and up the ragged flanks of the Wichita Mountains so long ago? But these two decades later, a sixty foot long ladder gives me the willies. On a high summit near Lake Arthur--Moraine State Park--I'm sure the top of the tower commands the best view around. But its lofty crown remains inviolable...

The problem with Moraine is that it never really gives you a feeling of remoteness. The unmarked trail up to the water tower is the only exception that I know; at a certain point, you do get beyond earshot of all humanity when you're en route to the tower. Beyond the tower, the trail continues to a silent hay field that the farmer has very effectively blocked with great piles of woodland debris. He doesn't want hikers in his fields. (You can't trust a man who goes to the woods without a gun.)

A "moraine" is a deposit of stones and rocks left by a glacier. I don't know if this park comes by its name honestly, but I do know that much of this land used to be strip mines. One lakeside trail bypasses a private residence right on a distant stretch of beach. It's just a little redbrick farmhouse guarded by a seemingly deaf German Shepherd. In the second photo, you can see the gables rising out of the forest, with the lake in the distance. It would be a placid setting to fritter away your life.

Lake Arthur itself is beautiful, wide and serene. One of the nicer trails ends right here in the water. You've got to love a little-used path that ends at a hidden beach.

I didn't expect to find such lovely silence there at Moraine, since my last visit to the park, five years ago, was so disappointing. I've been avoiding the place ever since. But on the summit near the water tower, not a sound could be heard. No cars, no planes, no motorboats. Only flies, and plenty of them. And the breeze stirring the leaves. And the rich, melodic trilling of the birds. The forest echoed with thier songs. Nothing more. This place is overrun with poison ivy and jaggers.

Perspective

The world just looks better from this angle, with the water lapping gently against the side of the kayak, the birdsong in the trees, a light breeze on the lake.

This is Cross Creek Lake, looking more festive than it looked the last time it was featured on this obscure blog. And it was my new kayak's maiden voyage. The lake was busier than I would have liked, and I was just about the only person there without an engine and a fishing pole. I'm thinking we'll look into some alternative destinations next time around. But it's still beautiful to be out on the water. Paddle into a quiet cove, explore the shoreline, pull out a book and a bag of almonds, glare at all the fishers in order to make them think you're a little weird and dangerous, because if they think you're creepy, then they won't steer their noisy-engined lazyman watercraft into your cove and ruin your idyll.

There's nothing like accessing a woodland spot that can only be reached by boat. There are no trails through much of this park, since trails require walking, and the people who use this park don't want to put that much work into it. So the kayak is a great way to reach parts of the forest that can't be reached on foot unless you're willing to bushwack through some thick backcountry.

Actually, the best place I know to boat across the lake to a pristine sylvan haven is at Elk State Park, up north. You begin on the narrow shoreline of the very lame-arse state park, then cross the water to the opposite shore, where you find yorself in the immense and nearly unvisited Elk State Forest. I must make it back up there someday.

Picnic Table at the End of the World

It seems like the end of the world, though it's right here in crowded Allegheny County. Behind the abandoned farmhouse described below, there's a long-disused parking lot. Dead weeds rattle in the wind, pushing through cracks in the pavement. Old lamp posts lie in the snow like felled trees.

At the far end of this bleak expanse, there's a sharp descent into the wooded valley of Pinkerton Run. And here at the cusp of the valley, just at the edge of the old parking lot, sits this lonely picnic table. It's almost inviting.

Nothing says "Merry Christmas" like a frozen pond in the intense silence of winter. Despite a popular wave pool and a few blazed trails, Settler's Cabin Park is 1,610 acres of mostly untamed woods. It's called a "park," which conjures images of fountains and statues. But it's really more of a woodland reserve. Many unmarked trails traverse the area.

You can follow the steeply descending ridgeline down away from the picnic table, into the deep valley. At the valley floor, there's a trail that follows the brook upstream into the snowy woods toward the pond. You have to ford the run. I hadn't walked across a frozen stream in a long, long time. Made me feel younger than I am. It also made me feel daring, since the only other set of footprints were made by someone who didn't have the nerve to cross on the ice.

I can't decide what kind of sylvan creature forded the stream on this fallen log. They're cat-like paws, but my guess is a porcupine. Whatever it is, I'm kind of jealous. I often think about spending the night alone in the forest in the winter, huddling for warmth in a debris hut beneath the snow. Everything is so still, so quiet, so solitary. I always forget how beautiful the winter is until I find myself out in it.