Washington County Drive-By Fall Photos

The quality of these shots is pretty bad, but it was a lovely Indian summer day, and Washington County, PA, had never been more beautiful, so I just started snapping pictures with my cell phone as I drove past.

The leaves, the green hills, the old old farms, the winding roads.  It was all too beautiful to entrust to memory.  I had to have a record of it.

That old farmhouse is a lot like mine, except that this one comes with a farm.

 This is on the road from Claysville to Ryerson, where I returned today.

Some shots turned out pretty clear.

 Others did not.  But even the glare on the windshield couldn't dim the bright oranges and reds of the maples along the way.

 I love the old houses that line the road.  When I post the drive-by shots of Greene County, there will be a lot more of them.

Beulah Baptist Church, Near Nineveh, PA

"Beulah," "Nineveh"...The Old Testament names were just part of the weird beauty of a day driving around Greene County.  This lovely little building belongs on a calendar.  Almost thou presuadest me to become a Baptist, except that I wouldn't want to get dunked in a river, like the penitents in that old movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou?  I'd be interested in documenting the religious architecture in rural Washington and Greene counties. 

An End of Roaming

I always journey into the autumn season with a poet.  Last year it was Mary Oliver; the year before that it was Robert Frost...nothing cutting edge or out-of-the-ordinary.  I'm afraid my taste in poetry is kind of basic and old-fashioned, in part due to lack of wider exposure.  And I like it to rhyme--which is sorely out of vogue.  This year, I've returned to that old cynic, A.E. Housman--some of whose poetry I memorized many years ago.  This one is beautiful if you have the patience to read all the way to the fifth verse and beyond.

When summer's end is nighing

And skies at evening cloud,

I muse on change and fortune

And all the feats I vowed

When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset

Would lose the slanted ray,

And I would climb the beacon

And look to Wales away

And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven

The hues of evening died;

Night welled through lane and hollow

And hushed the countryside,

But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall

In converse high would stand,

Late, till the west was ashen

And darkness hard at hand,

And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy

The lessening day might close,

But air of other summers

Breathed from beyond the snows,

And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not

And come no more anew;

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming

On eves when autumn nighs:

The ear too fondly listens

For summer's parting sighs,

And then the heart replies.

~A.E. Housman

A Buddhist Temple in Dormont

As recently as last summer, this rather nondescript place was known as the Dormont United Methodist Church.  But traditional churches in Dormont have been dropping fast.  The Presbyterian church recently merged with another congregation in Greentree and sold their lovely building to some band of fundamentalist pew-jumpers.  The Baptist church went belly-up about two years ago and is currently for sale; it looks like a pretty cool structure, too.  A Lutheran church remains, but who knows for how long?  And now this ugly old place seems to be getting refitted as a Buddhist temple.  The statues out front are enormous.

Blue Remembered Hills

Speaking of the poetry of A.E. Housman, here's an old melancholy favorite for a gray October day in the haunted countryside of Greene County, PA:

Into my heart an air that kills

from yon far country blows.

What are those blue remembered hills?

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain, 

the happy highways where I went

and cannot come again.

A Lonely Fall Night at Ryerson State Park

Each October, at least once and sometimes more than once, I make a short pilgrimage to the lovely, ruinous Greene County--the poorest county in Pennsylvania and the most overrun with frackers.

 Several years ago on Facebook, someone reposted an article from Martha Stewart Living Magazine that said Greene County has the best fall colors in the US.  Thus the annual trip.

 There's a heartbroken beauty to the place, with coal mines and pipelines and frackworks decimating the beautiful old farms and woods.

And I honestly know of no place in the nation with more scenic country lanes, and enormous old barns and farmhouses, tucked away in little hollows, with broad, steep lawns.  Unfortunately, I never get photos of these farms because I'd have to park in the middle of the winding roads to snap the shots.

 Ryerson Station State Park is a lesser-known gem in our PADCNR system.  Like the rest of Greene County, it's got a charming but forlorn feel to it, especially since the local coal-diggers undermined the lake, turning it into an irreparable swamp.

 Because I have Wednesdays off, I arranged with my wife to handle the kids solo for a night, and I headed down after work for a one-night camping trip.  Ryerson's campground is open year-round.

 It was a little bit spooky.  I had the entire campground to myself.  There was not another soul there.  It wouldn't really have felt so creepy except that a public road runs right past the campground, and--I don't mean to mock the rural poor--but there are ruffians aplenty in this part of the world.  

 But once I got used to having a 48-site campground all to myself, I actually kind of liked the solitude.  A young female park ranger did patrol the campground twice before going home for the night.  She seemed a little bit scared of me... When darkness fell, she stopped coming by.  I slept pretty well until 4am, when eerie noises wakened me and kept me awake.

 A couple of raccoons stalked my campsite, but soon figured out that I had nothing of interest.  Not a bad place to camp for $15 on a lonely Tuesday night in October.  These photos were taken on the Pine Box Trail--which leads to the old Chess Cemetery.  Public roads and hiking paths have the best names down in Greene County.  The poet A.E. Housman calls the way to the graveyard "the road all runners come."  We all walk the Pine Box Trail in a metaphorical sense.

 Of course, I used to be an English teacher--very briefly--and I always revisit the poetry of my earlier years in the fall--a melancholy indulgence.  Followers of my shadowy career know that I visit this cemetery every October.  Old family cemeteries are common in Greene County.  This one is now in the care of the PADCNR, our state park service.

 So many children and younglings are buried here.  Even all these years after their deaths, it makes my paternal heart ache.

 No one has been buried here since the 1920s.  Many of the graves are pre-Civil War, but none go back more than 150 years or so.

 Thomas Chess, buried here, was a Civil War veteran.  Oh, the horrors he must have seen; there is no one left to tell.  The flag rotted off his grave, or got torn off, and someone folded it military-style and wedged it into the top of his tombstone.

Finally the Fall

If not for our impending mortality, would we ever accomplish anything?  If we didn't know that we were going to die, would we even try to do great things in this world, or would we watch Netflix and eat Krispy Kremes and put everything off for one of our numberless tomorrows, procrastinating away eternity?  People want to leave their mark in the world, so they write books, and build buildings, and spawn offspring to carry on their bloodlines.  At the very least, they grasp at eternal memory with a long-lasting stone marker to attest to the fact that they once lived.  A name, some dates, perhaps even one of our life's relationships etched into the stone, "mother," "father," "beloved son."  It's how we earthbound mortals clamor for some sense of immortality.  But the lovely fall is setting in around us, reminding us of impermanence.  October is here at last, telling us that we too shall pass.  We too will go the way of all things: the leaves, the grass, the snows of winters past.  As the ancient poet Lucretius says:

Not lost, but disunited.  Life lives on!
It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.

Oh, how I love the fall.