October's Last Trek

 Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

And lo, it is ended.

 The leaves are all dead on the ground,

Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

When others are sleeping.

 And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

~Robert Frost

1913

Braddock Cemetery, Greene County, PA

(Not to be confused with Braddock's Grave in Fayette County or the uber-cool borough of Braddock in the Monongahela Valley in Allegheny County.)

Return to Ryerson

 The hauntingly beautiful country of Greene County was calling to me again.  The autumn season is fading fast, and so I chose to travel down to Ryerson again, but this time on the back roads.  The once and future Duke Lake is supposed to be the centerpiece of this view.

 Sometimes two roads really do diverge in a yellow wood, and you always wonder if you took the right one.

 It was a sunny, blustery day.  Chilly and bright.  The perfect day for a fall trek, though I seemed to have the whole beautiful park to myself, aside from two romantic picnickers.

 It was a rare joy to have the trails all to myself on a Saturday.  No entitled suburbanites letting their dogs run off the leash...

 For the first time ever, I hiked the Sawdust Trail, a linear path that ends at a rural road outside the park.  The trail also offers some nice overlooks that will be even nicer after the dam is rebuilt to restore Duke Lake...a project that is reportedly in the works.  

 In the very center of this photo, there's a mysterious clapboard farmhouse that I noticed from the border of the park, where the Sawdust Trail ends.  There's nothing exceptional about the place, but I'm intrigued by all the many large farmhouses on the back lanes in Greene and Washington counties.  Many are beautifully maintained, and others--like this place--seem abandoned until you get up close.

 The village of Graysville is just short of quaint, though the Presbyterian church and many of the houses have their charms.  

Somehow, the place is just a little too real for quaintness.  The general store had bare wooden floors with the finish long since worn off and taxidermied animals staring down from the walls.

Chess Cemetery, Greene County, PA

 Mother and daughter rest side by side.  Little Susanna Grim--the smaller stone--died at just five years of age back in the spring of 1859.  Her mother, Elizabeth Grim, died in 1873, I think at the age of 36, though the year on her stone is very hard to read.  At first, my paternal heart wept for little Susanna...all these years after her death.
  

 But then I began to piece together an eerie mystery surrounding Susanna's death.  She's not the only Grim child who died before reaching his or her sixth birthday.  In fact, Isaac and Elizabeth Grim lost at least three children between 1859 and 1865.  My soul ached for them.

 Of the ones buried here, Susanna died first, but the inscription on her headstone would suggest that other children in the family had already died, for it says: "Our sweet little children have gone to mansions above yonder sky to gaze on the beautiful throne of Him who is seated on high."  

 Priscilla Grim died at four years of age in 1860.  Her stone, too, is decorated with a dove holding an olive branch in its beak.

 And then, there's little William Grim, who also died as a four-year-old in 1865.  I know that it was very common in centuries past for children to die before reaching their tenth birthday.  Whooping cough, and pneumonia, and dysentery were all common killers of children.  And I don't mean to malign Isaac and Elizabeth Grim, their parents, God rest their souls.  The pain of losing three or more children is unthinkable. 

And yet, we don't know if these children died of illnesses or cracked heads.  We modern folks are conditioned to ask whether children who die might have been abused or neglected.  Of course, it is probably "telling" that all three died during cold weather influenza season: Susanna in April, Priscilla in May, and William in February.  The three of them also have beautiful headstones, each inscribed with a poem, though only one of those is legible.  The children's stones have weathered the years better than their mother's.  Such headstones were surely expensive; their fine workmanship and durability would argue that the kids were greatly loved, not neglected.

Their mother's grave is just beside them, though nearly illegible with age.  The constantly bereaved mother died young and perhaps with no surviving children.  Did she die a lonely, embittered widow, having lost all her little ones before they reached their tenth year, or did she have surviving children?  Did Elizabeth go mad, perhaps take her own life?  Why are a mother and her three children the only Grims in this far-flung cemetery; had she and her children returned to live with her birth family; was her maiden name Chess, or possibly Parson?  Poor Elizabeth Grim.  She got pregnant with Susanna when she was only 18 and lost the girl when she (the mother) was 22.  Isaac, the children's father, isn't buried in this cemetery.  Perhaps he fell on some battlefield down South?  Or maybe, after his wife and children all died, he moved out West to flee his sorrow, remarried, and had children with another woman?  There is no one left who remembers their story, no one who can speak their woes.  You won't find them on FaceBook, or LinkedIn, or even Ancestry.com.  What was little Priscilla's first word?  Did they call William "Willy," and did he hide his carrots in his pockets so he wouldn't have to eat them?  And little Susanna, did she cling to her rag-doll when the fever racked her small frame?  All of it is past knowing.  

Ryerson Station State Park

The old Chess Cemetery sits on a lonely hilltop deep in the woods of Ryerson Station State Park, in Greene County.  Most of the graves are pre-Civil War.  The trails at Ryerson have great names: Pine Box Trail leads to the graveyard.  Today I hiked a loop-trail called The Three Mitten, but I had time afterward to revisit this patch of hallowed ground.

 Ryerson is a gem of a park.  At 1,164 acres, it's not enormous, but it's got a decent campground with two cabins that can be rented, a good network of hiking trails, and a soon-to-be-restored lake.  

 Apparently Martha Stewart Living Magazine once named Greene County, PA, one of the best places in the country for fall foliage.  It is a pretty place, with undulating green hills, idyllic little farms, tin-roofed old farmhouses sitting back away from the road with steep valleys opening up just behind them, the wooded hills rising up behind their shuttered facades.  It's a mysterious place of winding back roads that skirt the hills and descend into dark hollows.

 But it's no fun to drive in rural Greene County because the pretty hills and 18th century farms are crawling with great convoys of frack-trucks--many with Texas plates.  The frackers do one of two things: They will either get in front of you and roll as slowly as a herd of elephants, or they will come careening down those narrow country lanes, going around blind corners at deadly speed.  One road I traveled was blocked by a guy in a pickup trying to pull an SUV out of a deep hollow by the roadside.  I don't know if it was leaf-peeping gone awry or if a frack-truck forced the SUV off the road.  

 This is deep in the coalfields and the gasfields.  I would go to Ryerson more often; Waynesburg is just a little over half an hour away.  But once you arrive in Waynesburg, you've still got half an hour of wending through the scenic, semi-industrialized countryside before you get to the park.  

The best and the brightest scenery was along the narrowest, most winding of lanes, where it was impossible to stop to take photos.  I always enjoy coming to Greene County.  It's so tragically lovely: torn apart by the coal industry, in the process of being torn apart again by the natural gas industry, with pipelines being spread out in every direction, devastating forest and field.  And yet, despite it all, each time I come here I think to myself, "Look at these beautiful old houses, these enormous barns, these quaint village churches.  I wonder how much a little place down here would cost."

Happy, Unambitious, or Both

 I think about a third of the people I know...

 are struggling with the collapse of their dreams.

 Another third are struggling with the fulfillment of their dreams.

And the rest of us?  Well, maybe the rest of us are happy...or unambitious...or both....

North Country Trail, Moraine State Park, Part III

 Welcome, October!  A weary world collapses gratefully once again into your cool embrace.  Today was my third consecutive trip up to the North Country Trail to pick up my hike where I left off last time.  Heading east from PA-528 (where the last trek ended) was risky.  I could tell from the maps, and I knew it from the outset.  The best part of the trek is a nice overlook above Lake Arthur, about half a mile in.  

But then the NCT begins to meander through patches of scrappy woods, overgrown fields, and farmers' woodlots that were clearly purchased by Moraine State Park in order to move the trail from off the margins of the state highways and country roads.  This is technically still state parkland, but in reality, the park is far behind you.

On the bright side, it is nice that the trail does not share space with public roads here.  Unfortunately,  it does run directly on the sides of roads in many--even most--places west of Moraine and McConnell's Mill, where the North Country Trail enters Ohio and the flatter, less wooded Midwestern states. 

Here in the northeasternmost neck of Moraine, the park is just a bony finger of woodland between homes, and farms, and public thoroughfares.  The trail crosses these small rural roads just a little too frequently for my liking.  It makes me feel exposed.

This sinister quadrant of the forest is noisy with vehicles and overgrown with poison ivy and choking vines.  The maples--literally every single one of them--are blighted by some fungus that makes them drop their leaves early.  

I keep this blog for mainly one reason: On those occasions when I find myself stranded at my desk, stressed or bored out of my mind, fighting the urge to stick a pencil in my eye, this blog allows me to slip away to the forest (or some other scenic, historic, or forgotten place) for just a few minutes at a time.  It's all about escape.  I look forward to my day off all week long.  But when I go to the forest, as I did today, and find the trees all blighted, it actually sends me home with less peace of mind than when I set out.

I've been to this part of the forest before.  When we lived in Grove City, I found myself so desperate for a day in the woods, and the name "North Country Trail" sounded so appealing, that I came to this place to trek.  I didn't like it then either, but the compulsion to continue my eastward trek along the NCT brought me back.  I think I'll return to kayaking next week.  These diseased trees are so depressing.