The Veil Is Thin

Blood is sweet, the veil is thin
Let your wreckage cleanse my skin

Never give up, never say die
To the long surrender
When the red tail dives




~Over the Rhine

The Bleakscape

An uncharacteristic pine tree, of a sort that's usually planted on lawns around here. A dying yew tree. An old holly bush gone wild. All of these on the edge of a scrubby clearing.

Was it once someone's home? It stands at the end of a long-ago road, now little more than a deerpath. And there's a heap of cut stones at the edge of the glade; whether they once composed a foundation, or whether they were simply gathered and tossed from a field, I cannot tell. None of it was enough to convince me until I found the little shard of an earthenware plate--bottom photo. I really need to get a better camera, but even in this poor photo, you can make out the unusual thickness of the plate, the anachronistic raised design around the edge. (I think the technical word for that is "frou-frou.") This little piece of plate tells me someone lived here once.

I'm essentially a Norway rat: a once-wild creature who discovered, with the destruction of its habitat, that there's also life in the long shadow of humankind. The rats are resourceful. At one time, they hibernated like dormice and ate seeds and berries; now they live at the edges of society, making a living off human waste.

Once I went to the woods for the three Ss: Silence. Solitude. Stillness. I trekked the wild places in search of freedom, beauty, and the occasional adventure. I was a woodland archaeologist, sometimes searching the wild places for traces of forgotten humanity: old town sites, abandoned roads, perhaps the fragment of an old green bottle. Today, instead, I sift through the wreckage of human blight in search of anything wild. Mostly it's a bleakscape, a worn-down, tired-out country, just trying to recover. Everything here is an overgrown stripmine, awaiting the next stage in its degradation by the Marcellus shale drillers--old cronies of our newly elected Republican governor.

But it's a joy to hear birds in the forest again. Their low, sweet song sounds through the still-bare branches as if they're glad to be home. It's a good time to be a forest bird. Not too cold. The snow is melting, leaving puddles to drink. There are delicious poison ivy berries still on the vine.

Maybe in Summer

This old farmhouse sits in a wooded depression just off PA978. The house itself is not highly visible from the road, but anyone who rushed past the many "No Trespassing" signs to approach the place--alas--would be highly visible. This road stays busy, and there are three or four occupied homes nearby.

Most disturbingly, the signs that ward off all the would-be-trespassers (I prefer the terms "local archaeologist" or "historical re-envisioner") are identical to the signs that forbid entry on the inhabited farming complex across the road. This makes me think that it's all part of the same blamed farm. I surmise that the people who own this place simply moved aross the street when the old house started to get too hard to maintain. That means the actual owners might see you ducking off the road and down into the wooded lot.


It was probably grandpa's house. It's probably been in the family for years. Around here, you often see a stately old farmhouse returning to its elements and, in the yard nearby, a mobile home.

I've been wanting to get inside this place ever since I first noticed it in the fall. But summer will be the time to come back. By mid-June, the trees will be in full leaf, hiding the house from view. Tall weeds will make access less visible, too.

Not that there's anything spectacular about this house. It's certainly not stately. Never was. The style is all too common in Southwest Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio. It's not especially big. As far as I can tell, there's only one chimney and the attic is a crawl-space. This was a farm of modest means.

You gotta love those old shingle-sided houses that are made to look like fake brick. I'll be coming back here when the vegetation is high.

Ruined Spring House

It's curious what remains when all else is gone. Consider this ruined spring house, the last surviving vestige of some long ago farm. Is there anyone left who remembers where the barn once stood? The farmhouse? Was it a dairy farm or grain? Only the spring house remains, guarding its secrets fast.

Once, long ago, you developed behaviors and attitudes to help you deal with situations in your life--threats or factors both real and imagined. Those "situations" have long since resolved themselves or simply fled, but the behaviors have remained; they've become "postures" for living. They derive their identity and usefulness from long-vanished threats--real or imagined. Like the spring house, there they sit. Unlike the spring house, you visit them each day, and they're as comfortable as an old boot.