Oppaymolleah's Curse

McKenzie Road is a public thoroughfare that becomes a disused trail where it enters the state park and begins to wend down from the hills toward Raccoon Lake.  I love hiking on eroded tarmac.  It may be one of the disused roadways that they used in the filming of the movie "The Road," which was partially filmed in the park.

          Traveling through the ragged countryside around the western edges of Raccoon Creek State Park yesterday, I was scoping out a good spot for my next hike.  Nichols Road is a gated gravel lane that enters the wild western end of the park from PA168.  It looks like a promising point of entry next time I set out to discover new territory.  I don't often make it out that far toward the westernmost marches of the Keystone State, within a few miles of the West Virginia line.  As a child, I lived for a while in the borderlands between Ohio and Pennsylvania--on both sides.  And there's a vaguely creepy quality to the whole area.  Some storied wastelands exist, especially in the bleak flats of Lawrence County, in that indistinct area where the last straggling dregs of Pennsylvania bleed into Ohio, where the great Northeast withers with a sigh at the Midwest's uninspiring debut.  There's Zombie Land, just off Route 224.  And Murder Swamp, near West Pittsburgh, which is just south of Newcastle.  These places are magnates for teenage thrill-seekers and ghost-chasers.  The whole borderland has a sad, neglected, almost criminal look to it.  Lawrence and Beaver Counties, on the Pennsylvania side, and Mahoning and Columbiana Counties, on the Ohio side, are mostly level terrain where strip mining and heavy industry have long since laid waste to much of the countryside.  There are large expanses of weed-choked land, no good for farming, foresting, or living.  The few inhabited houses you see in some areas are mainly single-wide trailers and terribly neglected farmhouses.  There are pockets of real poverty out there, a kind of poverty that's neither quite Appalachian (which is rooted in certain traditions) nor Midwestern (which is more plugged in to the ways of the monoculture).  It's a unique kind of poverty that strikes the outsiders as--well--just creepy.
          Sometimes, the hardscrabble eeriness of far western Pennsylvania reminds me of a legendary curse that an Indian chief named Oppaymolleah supposedly placed on the land back in 1751--as the whites were steadily advancing.  Local legend has it that Oppaymolleah said:

The gold will be turned to iron,

and the iron turned to gold.

The waters will run red with blood,

and the blood will turn to water.

It will never know peace, only vague fear.  

           Of course, all the talk about iron, and gold, and water, and blood sounds like a lot of hooey to me.  But the thing about "vague fear" somehow rings true.