Tanbark Trail, Allegheny National Forest

Many times I've driven past this old house, standing alone in the woods.  It serves as a grange hall, a church, a community center, and it even has a free little library.  It seems to be an all-around gathering place for the sparse population of Watson Township.  My name is not Watson, but that was the name of one of my grandparents, and her people are from this area.  I suppose I've probably got an old blood connection to this dark, beautiful, slightly spooky corner of the world.  Funny how you've got four grandparents, and genetically, you're equal parts of all four.  But you only get one of the four names that you're entitled to.  Watson could be my last name because I've got as much Watson DNA as that of the grandfather whose name I did get...

This is apparently the church entrance, "Tidioute Creek Chapel."  Their website is defunct, but I found them on YouTube.  A bit low-church and conservative for my tastes, but, "you do you."  A few hundred yards down the road from the grange hall, there's a roadside spring where people come to collect water for their hunting camps--many of which don't have wells.  It's called "Sand Springs" on the National Geographic map.  Right beside that spring is where the Tanbark Trail crosses the road.  The Tanbark is a great option for people who want to hike the Allegheny National Forest, but who are not interested in camping in an ugly clearcut or next to a noisy oil well.  The Allegheny National Forest is highly industrialized, with ever-increased operations in logging, and conventional drilling, and fracking.  But the Tanbark traverses some of the few protected areas within the forest: The Allegheny National Recreation Area, the Heart's Content Recreation Area (which is not a full-on "national" recreation area), and a corner of the Hickory Creek Wilderness.  That's to say, the Tanbark Trail crosses some of the wilder areas of this otherwise over-exploited national forest.  In this part of the forest, you don't see old extraction machinery rusting among the trees, and the drillers are not forever building new roads to new well pads.  The Allegheny National Forest has been poked, and prodded, and scraped, and poisoned, and scarred by all the soulless industries that still own the mineral rights beneath the trees.  But this zone is pretty wild.

The forest here is mostly level and scenic enough, if unspectacular.  It's quiet and full of birds and other wildlife.  It was in this area that I recently spotted a black bear.  The land is somewhat protected, since some of it is designated a "national recreation area" and some of it is just a regular "recreation area" of the national forest.  Neither type of designation gets as much protection as a "national wilderness area" (like the adjacent Hickory Creek), but any protection is good in these parts.  

Now, let's talk about the Tanbark Trail.  It's a slightly overgrown and seldom-used linear trail that's easy to lose in places.  It's not very consistently blazed.  But the very fact that it's a bit neglected hints at a happier truth: You probably won't see another soul out there!  The Tanbark runs about 9 miles (northwest to southeast) from the banks of the Allegheny River at US Route 62.  It passes through protected and remote areas of the national forest and all the way to its terminus at the North Country Trail, near the legendary Forest Road 119.  A few months ago, I hiked the portion from the Allegheny River to Sand Springs, near Watson Township Grange Hall.  I apparently did not include that hike on this blog--though I could have sworn I did.  Which is to say, I've section-hiked almost all of this trail, but I have no blog post to document the first segment.  Starting at Sand Springs and heading southeast--away from the river--you come upon some really cool rock formations at about 2.2 miles.  Take a look at this massive boulder!  That is a full-sized hemlock tree growing out of the fissure near the top.  The hemlock tree itself must be 25 feet tall.  I'm coming back here to camp someday.

This is not a great photo of the birds in question, but when I got to the rock city pictured above, a pair of ravens objected noisily to my presence.  They made the most agitated squawking noise while circling above the treetops and following me.  It added to the surreal quality of this place with its tall boulders, gray skies, and bare trees.  I know it was my presence that upset the ravens because they started yelling when I arrived, followed me while I was among their rocks, and stopped objecting as soon as I left the area. 

Up among the rocks, there are views like this from the craggy perches high up in the boulders.  I can see why ravens would like such a spot and want to keep it hidden from human interlopers.  In fact, I can see how anyone would like this place, and that's exactly why I'm coming back...ravens be damned.

The skies grew grayer and angrier as the day progressed.  When I reached the East Branch of Hickory Creek, inside the Hearts Content Recreation Area, I turned back and made for the car--at Sand Springs.  I did stop along the way to run my hands over the rough bark of this exquisitely textured tree... Black cherry, I think.  It feels so good to touch a tree.  It's a tactile pleasure that I never take for granted.  We live such sensorily-deprived lives.  I did about 4.6 miles on the Tanbark that day, but it was an out-and-back, so I only covered 2.3 miles of trail. 

It was a cold and extremely windy night.  Back at the house, the electricity went out at about 7:00pm and stayed out till 4:30am.  With the furnace out, I heated one room with this weird little indoor fireplace that my hoarder-wife brought home.  It burns rubbing alcohol!  This was only an emergency solution for the short-term.  When I woke up the next morning, my sinuses were filled with soot.  I've got a rusty old Franklin wood-burning stove down in the basement, waiting for renovations to be completed so that I can install it for just such occasions.  It was kind of fun, too, lighting the place with candles from the local Dollar General--Saint Jude and Mother Mary prayer candles.  The woods and skies surrounding us were darker than a coal shaft.

And on the morrow, I decided to start at the south terminus of the Tanbark Trail and hike northward to the place where I turned around the day before.  I fell just about half a mile short of that goal, but still, it was a nice hike through hemlock forests on icy trails.  This is where the Tanbark crosses Forest Road 119 and briefly enters a section of the Hickory Creek Wilderness Area.

Oh, the hemlock forests all around!  I've been hearing for years that our hemlocks are endangered because of an invasive "hemlock wooly adelgid."  But the extremely cold temperatures help to beat back the adelgids' advances, so I'm grateful for the climate-change sub-zero temps we've had.  There are few things lovelier than a hemlock forest in the winter.  Hemlocks have fewer industrial uses than pines and hardwoods, so their bark was used for tanning leather...hence the name "Tanbark." 

I was off to a late start for my second consecutive day of hiking the Tanbark Trail.  And so, at the end of the hike, when I reached Hearts Content Road, near the parking area for Hickory Creek Wilderness, I decided to do an easy road-walk back to my car.  I did this in part because I didn't want to get stuck under the dark hemlocks in the falling night.  I also wanted to get a closer look at a few of the cool hunting camps that line the road from the wilderness area to the disappeared ghost town of Dunham Siding, where I'd parked.  I mean...just look at this place!  Looks like it might have started life as a farmhouse.  Someone clearly spends a lot of time here, maybe with extended family or some kind of large sportsmen's club.

This little one-room cabin is the kind of thing I originally had in mind when I went looking for property up in the North Country.  It has no electricity, no running water, no bathroom...just a wood-burning stove and an outhouse.  You collect your water at Sand Springs, about 2 miles away.

This older camp used to be a Watson Township schoolhouse.  

This newer camp puts me in mind of places I've seen in Northern New England and the Pacific Northwest.

Back to Forest Road 116, also known as Mayburg Road.  It forks here with the legendary Forest Road 119, which goes on to form the south border of the Hickory Creek Wilderness.  Both roads were sheets of ice and very difficult to navigate with a regular Honda CRV.  The second day's hike was only about 6 miles.  

“The Angels Watch O’er You”: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

After all the passion and desire, the anger, and the boredom, and life’s transient, ephemeral joys…after all the many needs that drive you—and the demands of the ego that feel like needs—when it all draws silently to its dreaded, long-awaited close…this is enough.  Just this.  Come to rest beneath the spruce trees in a quiet, snowy place. 

Those mute wooded hills that observed so much of your living will hold you still when you return to the earth from which your substance is drawn.  Winds pass above.  Rivers freeze and thaw.  Birds seek the radiance of a Guatemalan jungle only for a season.  They’ll return well before the sun and warmth because this is where they want to be.  With all their avian hearts, they long for the hemlock and the maple and the oak.  They pine for the pine—white pine, red pine.  Though they fly away far, their mysterious birdling hearts bring them back to this place in the end.

“When the busy world is hushed, when the fever of life is o’er,” I think we return to the eternal consciousness that rests forever over the world’s silent places, like these.  Frozen streams, snowy hills, bare trees—needing nothing, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, accepting all things.  Just being.  Peacefully, wordlessly, passionlessly being.  Do we remember the turbulent, noisy, crowded, egotistical lives we left behind—with all their grasping and clinging?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  Probably.  Do we long for them like the birds long for hemlocks?  I think not.  I don’t know, but probably not… Isn’t this what we longed for all along, the freedom just to be?

Fading Glory of Oil City, Part 2: Houses

Are they "mansions," or are they just big houses?  I guess for me, a "mansion" has servants' quarters on the third floor and a back staircase down to the kitchen.  Maybe more than one living room.  Whatever they are, Oil City is full of them.  My father always said that they're evidence of the days when poor farmers would strike it rich in the oil boom and move into town to build the most ostentatious homes thy could imagine.  He claims that, despite their venerable age, these are the McMansions of the poor who tastelessly flaunted their newfound and unaccustomed wealth.  I'm not sure I agree... They're hardly ostentatious.

Farming the dense clay soil of the region didn't make many people rich.  But a lot of farmers got oil leases back in the late 1800s, and they moved into town and built grand homes.  My father, again, claims that some of these houses include fanciful features that were just for show: grand central staircases that wind in a semicircle and end at the ceiling, going nowhere; ornate double doors that open onto brick walls; fake gold chandeliers; secret passageways behind bookshelves... The point was to impress visitors with their grandeur.  I don't know...they look like normal Victorians to me.  Also, I believe that people around here prefer to downplay their wealth rather than displaying it.  If anything, all those German and Scotch-Irish farm-folk tended to frown on too much ostentation, surely even after striking it rich.  

Down in Pittsburgh, it's still fashionable to buy a decaying old mansion on the Northside or in Regent Square, set up camp in the kitchen, and slowly refurbish it.  Will that kind of thing ever happen here?  Is it currently happening?  Affordable housing is a real issue, and so a lot of these old single-family homes are now bizarrely sectioned off into dark, labyrinthine little apartments.  If you were into the old house thing, this would be a pretty affordable location to buy one and fix it up.  On one hand, there are a lot of neglected or abandoned properties around here.  On the other hand, you don't really see many houses for sale.

Someone did this place up right--juxtaposing modern features onto a traditional canvas.  The grounds are interesting, too, though I didn't want to be too conspicuous about photographing them. 

What I did not know when I bought an old house is that people who buy old houses spend all their time working on them.  I've got other hobbies; I do not want to spend my free time installing weird wallpaper and painting all this old-fashioned wooden gingerbread froo-froo.  I mean, look at this thing.  It's beautiful, but you'd have to repaint it every 10 years or so.  Vinyl siding would be out of the question.  And you couldn't install efficient windows because the old ones add so much to its aesthetic appeal.  But look, I count three upstairs porches...two on the second floor and one on the third.  And there may be more in the back.  

In Oil City, a lot of relatively plain houses, like this one, still sport a jaunty hat like the ones worn by the Kaiser's soldiers in the Great War...

Now let's journey to the Northside of Oil City--the less posh side of town.  This house sits just across the street from the one my family used to own.  As a kid, it always made me think of that Gothic children's novel, The House with the Clock in Its Walls.  All my life, it was lovingly maintained.  Today, someone still mows the lawn and leaves a light on inside, but it's pretty clearly not lived in anymore, and deferred maintenance is piling up.

This was our house, a big old place with six bedrooms, but far from mansionesque.  The front porch used to wrap around the side.  As you can see, it's rotted off.  I lived alone here when I first got back from five years in Africa.  It was still in the family, but no one wanted to live in Oil City...much less in this decaying place.  My father bought it in the mid-60s from the wife of the man who built it in the year 1900.  He owned a tavern downtown, and so there's a wine cellar beneath the basement.  I sometimes drive past just to see if there's anyone living here again, and there's typically not.

Fading Glory of Oil City, Part 1: Churches & Public Buildings

My hometown, Oil City. Take a good look at the skyline.  When you approach the town from afar, the first thing you see is St. Joe's double spires. They look just a little sinister.  Many Western Pennsylvania towns have a redbrick Catholic church presiding over them from the upper reaches of some hillside.  They're called "Mother Hens." New Bethlehem--where my other grandparents lived--had St. Charles presiding with only one tower, but in the same redbrick German style. 

Of course, the majority of the population in these old industrial towns was always Catholic--mostly Italian, Polish, Irish, and South-German.  Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were enticed to this area and fed like so much fodder to its factories and the industrial plants.  St. Joseph's Church was the original Catholic parish in Oil City, and it's located on the more working class North Side of town--which is where I'm from. 

Back in the 1970s, The Rolling Stone reported on 3 suicides in Oil City--all were young men who belonged to St. Joseph's Church, and all died within a month of each other. They all three were seeing the same therapist, too.  (This is an odd detail in the story because mental health therapy was not yet normalized in these industrial towns in the 70s--especially not for men.)  I'd hate to be the priest who had to do all three of those funerals. But back in those days, St. Joe's still had a convent attached to the church and probably had three or four priests...

And this?  This was St. Stephen's Catholic Church, on the wealthier Southside.  It got closed down in 2020, and all of its members were sent to St. Joe's.  Neither church has any parking at all, and St. Joe's is set back in a rundown residential neighborhood.  Sucks to be a Catholic in Oil City--or anyone living on one of the steep, narrow streets where all those Catholics park on Sundays.  25 years ago, a man in a long brown hooded robe, with a staff, asked me how to get to St. Stephen's.  He was making a pilgrimage to this now-abandoned church.  Why?

The Episcopalians have a tidy little Anglophilic church on the more-fashionable Southside, of course.  Their only weekly service is at 9:30 on Sundays, which makes me wonder if they're reduced to sharing a clergyperson with another parish... I've never been inside this building, but I think it would be worth a visit.  I like Episcopalianism--with its glorious Book of Common Prayer--but they will try to make you think that they're the only alternative for progressive Christians. 

This is 2nd Presbyterian Church, also on the Southside.  It was always a church for the wealthy, when I was young.  I know their current pastor and like him pretty well.  I mean, we're all inveterate dorks, you know that, right?

Prominent men in the history of the town and region--including the Seneca Chief Cornplanter.

Oil City's central post office is a pathetic little garage-like structure.  The old post office is now the Venango County Museum, pictured here.  It's got its own understated grandeur... I've never been inside!

And this?  This is the public library.  I went inside today to get a library card.  I had not been inside this building since I was about 15, when I decided that I wanted to remain a Christian but did not want to be an evangelical anymore.  I borrowed three books: one about Episcopalianism, one about Lutheranism, and one about Presbyterianism.  

Winter Scenes Along the Upper Allegheny

This is US-62, where it follows--and occasionally hugs--the Allegheny River, way up north. To think that I paddled this stretch of the river on Independence Day, when it was 2 degrees cooler than the surface of Venus.  

It could be the wintry setting for the novel Ethan Frome, or it might just be the Ice Planet of Hoth--from The Empire Strikes Back. I've had my eye on this abandoned farmhouse for years. It sits right on Route 62, just above the river. Sadly, it belongs to the US Forest Service, which is letting it fall into ruin, and it has No Trespassing signs clearly displayed. The barn that served this erstwhile farm sits across the road and very close to the river. The Forest Service seems to be using it as a bat sanctuary. I understand that the beleaguered Allegheny National Forest cannot be in the business of restoring historic buildings, but this is just such a waste. Can you imagine living in a place like this, overlooking the river and its wooded hills? 

Everything feels like it's made of snow and ice. Actually, as I recall, the village church figured prominently in Ethan Frome's tale...less so in the Star Wars Trilogy. 

My well froze up at the house up north. The friendly folks from the local well service came out and got it going again. They said that in the winter, you need to bury the opening in a mound of snow like an igloo--seen here--to keep the wind chill from reaching the warmer water below.

Here's the Allegheny River, as seen from the bridge in Tidioute. I've never seen it frozen solid like this. I was tempted to try my luck at walking out onto it, but memories of a recent backpacking trip to West Virginia prevented me. (Falling through the ice is a terrible thing.) Lake Erie is frozen solid, too, which I never would have believed. The downhill drive into Tidioute was a little harrowing on narrow, slippery roads.  

There's no shortage of abandoned farmhouses along the river. This one is visible from the bridge, and is located on the edge of Tidioute, where it sits above the river on US-62--just like Ethan Frome's house, above. I'm learning how hard it is to maintain an old house. My Pittsburgh house is currently being bat-proofed and cleansed of all guano for THOUSANDS of dollars. But truly, how could anyone have the heart to walk away from such beautiful places as these?

A Bird's Eye View

 

My younger daughter (20) is afraid of birds. She will run away if one lands near her or flies too close. It can be a weird and amusing phobia, especially now that birds are my new passion. But when I sent her this photo of a tufted titmouse at my birdfeeder in the North Country, she said, "This is not a terribly offensive bird. It has some whimsy and joy." I saw my first red-breasted nuthatches on this trip north. I wonder why you only see them in the winter? 

Most of my Christmas and birthday gifts this year were ornithological: bird books, a bird jigsaw puzzle, and of course this popular little gadget, "BirdBuddy," the voyeuristic birdfeeder that takes photos of visiting birds, and which you can even livestream to your phone.  I may never get any work done again. This is a birdfeeder that you have to charge like a cellphone. Who ever would have believed that we would see a day when you have to plug in your book (Kindles), your cigarettes (Vapes), and your birdfeeder...and when an unhinged lunatic in the White House is willing to go to war over Greenland and because he didn't get a Nobel Peace Prize?

Snowbound: Street Parking in Pittsburgh in the Snow

 

This is Highland Avenue in the Highland Park neighborhood of Pittsburgh. A snowy street scene, so what? Take a closer look, maybe click on the photo to enlarge it. People have saved their on-street parking spots with folding tables, one of which has been knocked on its side. But there's a little convertible sportscar buried in the closest snow-mound. It's buried deep, too, in heavy snow tainted with road salt.

I always think it would be nice to keep my country place up north and maybe have just a small condo in the city, probably here in the East End. But if you live in the city, you have to get off-street parking. The snowplow is like death itself; it is not impressed with your credentials. It does not discriminate, and all come to stand before it powerless in the end. The snowplow doesn't care if you drive a $50,000 sportscar or a motorized wheelbarrow; it buries all vehicles equally.