Yellow September

   

Yellow September with your changeful moods and your misty sunrises.  If I sat here very still, very quiet, unflinching in the face of impending nightfall and coyote song, how long would it take for the outside world to discover me?  How long till I gave up and went scrambling through the early dark of the autumn scented forest, searching for my car?  At last, at long last, my soul is quiet.  September the golden, seven years ago you did your best to kill me, and now you bring me life?

When I first moved south to the Pittsburgh region, I decided to claim for my weekly treks the little-known and much neglected Hillman State Park, an undeveloped area visited mainly by mountain bike enthusiasts and hunters.  It's administered as a tag-on to the much more popular Raccoon Creek State Park, which is just a few miles to the north of it.  However, I tried hiking there and quickly became disenchanted.  It wasn't the vast woodland that I'd had further north. Although there's a good mix of forest and open fields, most of the park is very old mining country, just trying to recover.  It's been sitting fallow since the 1950s, so those who don't know the telltale signs of old strip mines would never know that this isn't just some scrubby but geologically unique terrain. In any case, I wasn't satisfied with it.  I was used to wilder country.  But when I went back yesterday--after nearly one year away--I loved it.  Vast, diverse, crisscrossed by old roads and unmapped trails.  It's a fantastic place to hike, and only half an hour away.  It's amazing how much you can enjoy life if you lower your expectations...