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.

Buffalo Camp Road

This is the bridge to nowhere. The sign above it reads "Sawhill Bridge." (That's not "Sawmill," but "Sawhill.") I don't know what names might have once been tagged onto the tangled dirt lanes that pass through SGL #232, but I came upon Sawhill Bridge while following the old Buffalo Camp Road from west to east.

Sawhill Bridge connects PA221 with Buffalo Camp Road, but Buffalo Camp is gated and inaccessible to any but walkers, cyclists, and horseback riders. My guess is that the little connector lane between the two larger roads was once called Sawhill Road. Who knows? In any case, this is in Washington County, not too far from the pretty little hamlet of Taylorstown.

So, my wife and I are negotiating with each other for an iPhone, which will solve the problem of my abysmally bad photos. In the meantime, here are a few more lame-arse cell phone shots of an otherwise very scenic trek through the central/eastern portions of SGL #232.

Actually, the easternmost areas of this vast game land are mostly fields, and--strangely--they seem to be cultivated, too. I don't know if the PA Game Commission has taken to leasing out its land to farmers, though I do know that deer graze in open spaces, so fields are desirable for hunting.

Starting at the western end of Buffalo Camp Road (which is also gated), it takes about an hour to reach the covered bridge at the road's eastern end. You cross two old bridges en route, both of them constructed for vehicles, as attested by the fallen sign.

Actually, if you're walking along at a good citified clip, you'll reach a wide grassy intersection about 45 minutes into the trek. At this spot, the better graveled road (which I take to be Buffalo Camp) makes a sharp left. A lesser-used road continues straight ahead, crossing your second derelict bridge over a beautiful stream and coming to the covered bridge pictured above. The lesser-used road may be Sawhill.

The road more traveled-by leads up a hill and through a clear-cut, as seem in the last photo. It's not at all picturesque, but it does remind me very much of the road from Elat to Enongal in the South Province of Cameroon: a walk I used to make twice a day, everyday. That's why I took the picture.

A local ex-Presbyterian told me that Buffalo Camp used to be a Presbyterian church camp for kids. I'm not sure where the camp itself was located, but there is one especially large open area that I suspect might have been the site. Down in Washington County, Presbyterianism has always had a decidedly "campmeeting" feel to it. Personal conversions, rollicking tunes, the sawdust trail to salvation. It all gives me the willies. But history lingers long in these valleys.

Jacobs Creek

The Fourth of July spent in the silence of the forest. There's nothing better. You can have your fireworks, your picnics, and your watermelons. Spare me your sanctimonious shows of patriotism. I'll take the wooded valley of Jacobs Creek, a far-flung tributary of the storied Youghiogheny River, which is itself a tributary of the Monongahela.

For this trek (the first outing I've had in a month) I decided to avoid the state parks and their holiday revelers. Instead, I chose to explore State Game Lands #296 in Fayette County.

Before there were factories or mines, before anyone cared about iron ore, or coal, or oil, or natural gas, long before Marcellus Shale, there were streams and rivers: perfect avenues for the march of empires. The French and Indian War of the 1750s is the original story around which Southwestern Pennsylvania is formed. Braddock and his ill-fated band. Forbes the successful successor. Jacobs Run was used as an avenue for settlement in the 1760s, when the Treaty of Fort Stanwix reopened the western marches of Penn's Woods to white settlers.

State Game Lands #296 is divided in half by the lovely brook. This is a large, wooded expanse of land descending gradually toward the stream. There are the requisite oil derricks pumping along gravel roads, and I was surprised to find that raspberries were already ripe beside the roads. But if you trust your instincts to lead you into the more interesting parts of the forest, it's well worth a few hours leisure.

It's not very clear in the second photo, but upon descending the walls of the valley, you begin to sense a deep chasm on the other side of the trees. It's tantalizing and frustrating at once; you know that if there were only a break in the endless leafage, you would have a spectacular overlook to a steep valley above Jacob's Creek. But there is no break, no overlook. You just have to make your way along unmarked hunters' paths to the bottom.


One thing I like about hiking the state game lands is that very few others ever think to do it. And I had some trouble finding this spot despite the research I did on Google Earth and Mapquest prior to setting out.

Upon wending down to the bottom of the valley, you'll cross the requisite railroad track before reaching the streambed. And these tracks rumble with passing trains several times a day, too!

This is definitely a different region from the one where I live, though it's exactly an hour away. Plant life tends more toward sycamores, and poplars, and sassafras, trees with rounded, hand-shaped leaves. But even more different are the human settlements. The village of Jacobs Creek--at the place where the stream meets the Yawk--is nearly a Third World kind of place. There's a reason they call Fayette County "Fayette-nam." Abandoned houses, abandoned churches, a strange old general store that looks abandoned but has hand-lettered signs recently tacked to its wooden front. Many people here live in trailers, and the post office is in a rundown little house adorned with odd garden tools. I wanted to take pictures, but it felt voyeuristic...and I felt as if I was being watched.

But it was beautiful and very long overdue. Note to future self: I-70 to exit 49, Smithton. From Smithton, follow road marked Jacobs Creek (2 miles). From Jacobs Creek, follow the only full-sized road leading out of town. It bends many times, leads uphill and out into the countryside (passing a fantastic abandoned farm on the right, perhaps worth a visit) until you see the unmistakable state game lands signage at a parking area on the left.

Ryerson Station State Park

More and more, my recreational life seems to drift in the direction of Washington and Greene Counties. I love them. As overrun as they are by frackers, and industrial trucks, and greedy corporations, they still have a bucolic beauty and charm. They're truly Northern Appalachia. I might harbor a few romantic illusions about life in Appalachia, though I shouldn't. I know very well that my kind is not appreciated there. It didn't work in elementary school, and it wouldn't work still today. And yet, it sure is nice to visit.

The main attraction at Ryerson Station State Park was once its lake, which was destroyed when Consol Energy undermined the dam and refused to pay for the damages despite the state's repeated demands. Since the lake is no longer the centerpiece of the park, the PADCNR has put a little more effort into grooming and marking the hiking trails. It shows, too.

The park is divided into four main hikeable segments:

>the east, which I hiked in March

>the west, which has only one linear trail

>the north, which has a few options

>the south, which is traversed by great mazes and labyrinths of trails. I did much of the southern segment today.

The first photo is a 300-year old oak tree known as the "Wolf Tree." But alas, how the mighty are fallen! The second photo is the overlook along the Lazear Trail. There's supposed to be a lake shimmering in the distance, but alas again. I don't know which is more shocking: the fact that an ungodly rich major corporation can destroy public property with absolute impunity or the fact that there's anything left intact. When corporations are permitted to behave in this way, and the sate is either unwilling or incapable of seeking restitution, it's hard to say that we're still a "great nation."

Ah, but we were still just on the road to greatness back in the days when the Second Great Awakening shook the long hollows of Greene County. In the late 1700s, camp meetings and circuit riding preachers made the narrow valleys in the eastern "Ohio Country" sing with their strange music: plain, confident, homespun. Here's a testament to that uniquely American brand of religiosity and individualism that marked the early frontier...and that has been driving us into self-centered oblivion ever since.