The Real Carnegie Hall

 So there are at least five "Carnegie Music Halls" in the United States.  The most famous one is in New York, of course.  But there are lesser ones in many of the larger towns where Andrew Carnegie (to soothe his aching conscience) constructed libraries.  In fact, his music halls are usually attached to his libraries.  That's the case in Pittsburgh, Homestead, Braddock, and in this place: Carnegie, PA.  This is the Carnegie Free Library and Carnegie Music Hall in Carnegie, PA...one of the many old industrial satellite cities of Pittsburgh.

If you go around to the side of the big library building, the Carnegie Music Hall has a separate entrance, pictured here.  I got into the library easily enough but couldn't get into the music hall.  However, I do know that it is still an active venue for the performing arts.  Online photos make the interior appear fairly humble, but it is cool that an old manufacturing borough like Carnegie got such an artistic and architectural gem.

 The library's collection is laughable: only two short aisles of non-fiction books, most of which are celebrity and political biographies.  The remainder of the collection is largely pop-fiction from the 1990s: Danielle Steele, Sue Grafton, John Grisham... And yet, the town of Carnegie is cool.  The once-fashionable part of town, including the library and music hall, is built on a hill overlooking the rest of the city.  The lawns around the library are parklike and command a good view when the leaves are off.  This is also a neighborhood of quiet, tree-lined streets and grand old houses.

 Click on this photo to see the two onion-domed churches in the distance, one gold and one blue.  Carnegie is one of those gritty old Western Pennsylvania boroughs that I used to dream about when I was exiled out west.  It's hilly with a nice little river running through it--Chartiers Creek.  It has lots of bridges and wooded hillsides too steep to build on.  It's got ornate old buildings and stately mansions in varying states of decay.  You can imagine being young here, with lots of places to hide, and smoke cigarettes, and meet up with friends.  I know their music is considerably older than I am, but places like this remind me of the sad ballads of Simon and Garfunkel.  "The Sound of Silence."  "The Boxer."  "I Am a Rock."  All of those songs seem to echo the sadness and antiquated beauty of places like this.

Also, like all of Pittsburgh's satellite cities, it's got train tracks.  The long, mournful cry of the trains would provide part of the soundtrack to your life in a place like Carnegie, not to mention the low rumbling of the trains' passing.  It would rattle windows and bring traffic to a halt.  I tried to hike today, but the woods just wasn't doing anything for me.  I'm not sure what's happening...

Downtown Churches, Pittsburgh

 Pittsburgh has a pretty cool downtown.  It's got three grandiose performance venues--Heinz Hall, the Benedum, and the Byham, not to mention numerous other theaters that are nice but less splendid, like the O'Reilly and the August Wilson.  The banks, and post offices, and train stations, and other public buildings all have airy, marble-pillared lobbies.  There are statues looking down from above and dark little parks tucked away between the Gothic facades of 19th century office buildings.  But one thing our downtown does not have in great number is grand churches.  This stands in contrast to most other Eastern cities.

 The city's Episcopal cathedral and its first Presbyterian church both date back to the 1750s, when the English took the Point from the French and established a town here.  Of course, the original buildings were small, and humble, and replaced long ago. One church was for the English; the other was for the Scots.  The churchyard between the two is the oldest in Pittsburgh.  This is the interior of the Episcopal cathedral.  It's nice enough, but dim and unremarkable.

 The two towers stand side by side, standing guard over a shared graveyard where homeless people sleep on the marble slabs that name the dead who sleep below.

 The Presbyterian church, shown below, is slightly more interesting, with its dark woodwork and two full galleries of Tiffany stained glass.  In both of these buildings, it makes all the difference in the world when a glimmer of sun makes its way between the skyscrapers and filters momentarily through the somber stained glass.  

 But Pittsburgh is one of those strange towns where the best public buildings are in the outlying neighborhoods, like Oakland, East Liberty, and Shadyside.  The big museums, the main library, and all the universities are two or three miles east of downtown.  The old mansions are out that direction, too--the handful that remains.  These business district churches have their charms, but their edifices are much smaller and less extravagant than their sister parishes in the East End of the city.

There were homeless people sleeping in the pews of both of these churches.  Stained glass saints preside over their slumber.  Strangely enough, both churches also decorate their naves with foreign flags.  What's that about?

The Andy Warhol Museum

 The woods didn't call to me to day, which seems strange.  I've been getting pretty good at meeting my psycho-spiritual needs without hiking, which I never even thought possible three years ago.  Instead, I wanted to go downtown to check out a used bookstore on Liberty Avenue.  Cool place.  But I had lots of time leftover to make my first visit to the Andy Warhol Museum, just across the Allegheny River on the North Side.  Warhol is a native son of Pittsburgh, though he never looked back after leaving for New York.  I often drive past the cemetery where he's buried in the "South Hills" of Pittsburgh.  Most people don't know about his grave, but truly, I think Warhol will be all but forgotten in two more generations.  He's just not a great artist.

No photography is allowed inside the Warhol except in the lobby, where the artist's funkadelic couch is on display.  No worries.  There's not much that's worth photographing.  Either Warhol's genius is wasted on me or else there's nothing to waste.  My guess is that Warhol was a hack who managed to attract attention to himself.  The museum is seven stories of silkscreened Campbell Soup cans.  They probably don't want you taking pictures because they don't want people going home and figuring out how easy it would be to counterfeit Warhol's work.  I wasn't particularly interested in photographing the guy's tattered and besmudged couch either, much less imagining the horrors it has seen.  

Honestly, I did like some of the stuff that's on display on the museum's seventh floor.  They keep his earliest art up there--paintings and drawings that he did as a kid before leaving Pittsburgh.  There's a painting of his family's living room that's very good, reminds me a little bit of Van Gogh.  But I think I saw all seven floors in a matter of thirty minutes.

"Cliffs Near Dieppe," by Claude Monet

I don't care if it is mostly baby-blue; it calls to me.  It's both troubled and serene at once.  It reminds me of the summer of 1990 when I found myself homeless on the beach in Northern France, living off the kindness of German tourists and one Franco-Arab immigrant girl from Egypt, who fed me and gave me a butter knife that I still have.  She said to me one day out of the blue, "Tu vas m'oublier."  And it's true.  I can't even remember her name.

Showcase of the Gods

I've been to Thailand, where slender Theravada-style Buddhas grace cities, and villages, and forest shrines, some of them plated in gold and standing several stories tall.  I've been to Hawaii, where stoic-looking Japanese Buddhas recline in splendid temples.  And yet, just today I came across the most beautiful Buddha statue I've ever seen.  This Buddha was probably crafted in the 3rd century CE in Pakistan, where all ancient Hindu and Buddhist statuary is now in danger of being destroyed by extremist Muslim iconoclasts.

 Because the weather today was miserable, gray and rainy, I decided not to go hiking and went alone to the Carnegie museums in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  It was so nice to look at the art exhibits without impatient children tugging at my sleeve.  I discovered whole rooms, and large displays, and in fact a whole wing to the art museum that I'd never had an opportunity to visit before...because I never went alone.  The newly-discovered "wing" was American furniture, so it didn't hold my attention for long, but whether it's in the forest or in a marble-halled museum, there's nothing like finding new places.  

I also had the occasion to linger longer over all the old medieval devotional art that wives and children cannot endure.  Seeing images of Jesus and the Buddha in near proximity always causes me to wonder.  I comprehend the ancient European wisdom of "Eostre," the understanding that light and life can only rise out of darkness and death, that everything good must come to an end, only to be born anew in fresh manifestations of wonder and power.  It's the parable of springtime.  I get that.  There's great beauty to it.  But it seems almost a shame that Western representations of divinity are so sorrowful.  In contrast, just look at that Pakistani Buddha.  So serene.  So imperturbable.  So damn virile.  Could it be that I have a little man-crush on the Buddha?

Hiking is always my drug of choice, but I've got to say that a rainy day wandering alone among statues and paintings is almost as good.  On the drive in, a girly of about 20 cut me off in traffic and stared at me arrogantly as she did it.  When she turned into the museum parking lot, I'm sure it creeped her out that I turned in right behind her.  She probably thought I was following her to avenge myself.  It turned out that she was an employee, and I loved the way she hid her face embarrassedly each time I walked past the little showcase that she was guarding.

Gettysburg

It was a long drive out to Gettysburg from Lancaster, but everyone ought to visit the site of the famous battle at least once in a lifetime.

Like most battlefields, a kind of hush falls over this one.  It's silent, still, set apart.  One hundred and fifty years ago, these broad fields were the scene of three full days of unspeakable violence.  Somehow that history makes this corner of the world exempt from all future chaos and clamor.  It's a place of peace forevermore.

It would take hours, perhaps days, to do a trip to Gettysburg right.  I only had a few hours to give it, again with two little girls in tow.  There's something deeply moving about the place.  It's not pretty.  It's not really all that interesting; you hear the same events described over and over.  It's the solemnity of Gettysburg that speaks to visitors.  Is it possible that the human spirit craves moments of solemnity?

This is the Brian farmhouse; the barn is shown in the previous photo.  One of the striking things about Gettysburg is seeing how the war spilled over into the most intimate and personal spaces of standersby: homes, stables, gardens, orchards.  War is always a violation of civilian space, I'm sure, but the invasiveness of it seems all the more shocking when the countryside and farms look so much like the ones I knew in childhood.

Recounting the Battle of Gettysburg is beyond the scope of this blog.  Our task is mainly just to explore scenic, forgotten, or historic sites.  Skip the organized tours and walk around the battlefield on foot.  The visitor's center and museum is inexpensive and well worth a visit.  In one of the exhibits, I came across this 1850s drawing of John Brown, the militant white abolitionist who started a slave uprising and was later hanged for it.  He's got a rifle in one hand and a Bible in the other.  The old stone chapel at Penn State Mount Alto--just across the mountain from Gettysburg--is where John Brown taught Sunday school while he was living in the region and planning the uprising at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).  

The Appalachian Trail at Caledonia State Park

In Bill Bryson's book about the Appalachian Trail, A Walk in the Woods, he is exceedingly critical of the Pennsylvania portion of the long path from Georgia to Maine.  Never mind that he gave up actually walking the trail by the time he got to the Keystone State.  Never mind that what little walking he did was in short, disjointed segments.  Never mind that he mostly just drove around in the vicinity of the trail and complained about how disappointed he was.  He really didn't give it a fair shake at all.  And yet, one of the few areas where he actually walked the trail in Pennsylvania was right here at Caledonia State Park--which is on the northernmost outcroppings of the Blue Ridge Mountains, just west of Gettysburg. 

I walked the trail here with my daughters, and he's right.  It's very rocky.

Indian Echo Caverns and the Pennsylvania Hermit

 Caves are always fun, and I've collected a modest number of them.  My first was the humble Alabaster Caverns in northwest Oklahoma, about twenty-five years ago.  Then I visited a certain cave known as "Le Trou des Fantômes," in the South Province of Cameroon.  It was little more than a tunnel.  Up in the Allegheny National Forest, I discovered many "tectonic caves," which are merely hollows between boulders and barely worthy of the name "cave."  After that, I visited a spectacular cave in Arkansas called Blanchard Springs Caverns.  Truly, though I'd never heard of it before, it was the coolest cave yet.  Just last summer, I did several tours of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and even it didn't compare to the one in Arkansas in terms of shock value and visual grandeur.  I know there are several decent caves in Pennsylvania.  There's one near State College and another on Chestnut Ridge, in the mountains east of Uniontown.  But I've never heard much about either of them.

But Indian Echo Caverns, near Hummelstown, is worth a visit.  It's got some interesting geological features, some large rooms with strangely shaped rocks and 150-year-old graffiti.  It's got all the darkness, and mystery, and unsounded depths of any good cave.  But the main reason I liked it is because the Pennsylvania Hermit once lived there.  In fact, the tour ends in the very room of the cavern where the hermit is known to have lived and where his body and journal--later published as "The Sweets of Solitude"--were discovered.

The hermit's tale is one of tragedy that is better recounted elsewhere.  In brief: He had only one sibling, a sister two years younger than himself, and he adored her.  She was accused of murdering her "illegitimate" twin sons and sentenced to hang.  The hermit believed that she was innocent and fought to secure a pardon for her.  He obtained the pardon, but she was hanged before he could arrive with the document.  In 1785, just after the execution, he wandered westward into the foothills of the mountains and settled in the cave, where he lived a life of religious seclusion, disillusioned by the wickedness of humanity.  His journal is a kind of metaphysical philosophy mingled with earthy transcendentalism.  At the end of the tour, the guide shows you the ledge on which he slept, the crag in which his journal was discovered, and the fire-ring where he cooked.

Ephrata Cloister, Lancaster County

Ephrata Cloister ought to be very cool.  It's a large compound constructed in the 1730s for a Utopian religious community of German immigrants.  At the time, Lancaster County was on the western frontier, and the pious came to these remote parts to flee the pressures and distractions of contemporary life.  I love places like this...but I did not love Ephrata Cloister.  My kids like history, but one of them texted their mother to tell her, "The monk place was a total bust."

Their website said they would be open, but in reality they were not.  They collected our money and let us inside, but because some kind of class was taking place in the visitor's center, they were not offering guided tours...and all the buildings were locked up tight.  They encouraged us to do a cell phone tour, standing in the cold outside the buildings and listening to an automated voice tell its story.  I might have done it if I'd been alone, but the kids were with me, and it was too chilly.  On the way out, we stopped at the gift shop, which had a big "open" sign out front, but it was locked up, too.  I'm sorry to say that the Ephrata Cloister is shoddily run.  Definitely call first if you decide to visit.

Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania

 Selinsgrove is a pretty college town on the banks of the Susquehanna River.  I've been meaning to visit the place for well over twenty years, but the opportunity never really presented itself until today.

I've got my own strange reasons for keeping Selinsgrove on my travel wish list for two decades.  They're not reasons that I'm free to divulge to the Internet.  And yet, I'd recommend the place to anyone.  As a college town and county seat, it's got a degree of erudition not found in most isolated boroughs in the center of the state.

Antique stores.  Used book stores.  And much to my surprise, art galleries and fashionable restaurants.  The people have a different look in this region; they're less Eastern European and more distinctly German.  They look cool.  Unkempt and stylish at the same time, sandy blonde, solid.

 Much like Jim Thorpe, Selinsgrove has a lot of stores catering to that trendy mix of New Age and occult tastes.  But more than that, it has traditional old Mennonites, and Amish, and Lutherans.  Like all the best churches on my big trip through the eastern half of the Keystone State, this one is Episcopal.

Governor Simon Snyder was the third governor of the state after the Revolution.  He was also a Pennsylvania German and the first non-English governor.  This is his "mansion," which is really just a large house.  It's the main reason I wanted to come to Selinsgrove.

Today, the governor's house has a brewery / restaurant in the basement, a chiropractor's office on the main floor, and a private residence on the second and third floors.  I did poke around the brew pub and even managed to stick my nose into the chiropractor's rooms--which were grandiose with enormously heavy doors, high ceilings, and massive woodwork.  I snapped a few interior shots while suspicious patients gawked.

 This plaque is located on the wall of the chiropractor's waiting room.  It seems a shame to have something as sterile as a medical facility in such a lovely old house, but there was very soothing, meditative music playing in all the rooms.

 And this state historical marker stands just outside the house.

 I do like this area.  It has huge stone barns, big farmhouses, many made of stone, and little 18th century towns with brick-faced buildings and tree-lined streets.  The Susquehanna River here is wide and flanked by wooded ridges.  I can see why people from the German Palatinate chose to settle here.  It reminded them of home.

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Jim Thorpe is a scenic town set in a deep valley among the mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania.  It's a weekend tourist attraction filled with curiosity shops selling old-fashioned or unusual merchandise.  Although I promised my wife a quaint shopping destination, unfortunately, most of the groovy art stores, bookstores, and boutiques were closed on a Tuesday.  The town is picturesque but compact, dense, and totally unphotographable with an iPhone.

 The place is known for its wonderful old architecture.  Mansions.  Churches.  Townhouses.  Public buildings.  Everything here is ornately designed and built on a slope.  After some years of decline, the town tried to recreate itself in the 1950s by changing its name from Mauch Chunk ("Bear Mountain") to Jim Thorpe.  It was a publicity stunt in honor of the once-famous Native American athlete from Oklahoma.  On the edge of town, there's an unremarkable monument to the eponymous Indian.  Truly, almost any name would be better than Mauch Chunk.

 Jim Thorpe is a witchy kind of place.  The few stores that were open sold Wiccan and neo-pagan religious items...and kitschy St. Patrick's Day hats and decorations.  Voodoo dolls.  Books of spells.  Evil-looking statues.  There are also lots of alternative religious items, like figurines of the goddess Ganesh.  One strange shopkeeper said to my wife: "I'm a universal minister...and by that I mean a medium."  Ah, but who can resist the martial charms of a castellated Episcopal church?  It's defensible, like some medieval fortress, presumably to ward off an attack by the neo-pagans and fashion zombies.

Centralia, Pennsylvania

Centralia is the the most famous ghost town in the Keystone State.  Its sinister acclaim is a regular draw for thrill seekers and ghoulish tourists from New York, New Jersey, and even further afield.  Most people today know the place merely as an abandoned townsite with graffiti on the streets and noxious gases seeping from the ground.  Few people remember that this ill-fated place first gained the national spotlight in 1948 when United Airlines Flight # 624 crashed into the ridge above town, killing all forty-three people aboard.  Long before the now-forgotten plane crash and the ongoing mine fire (which ended up putting an end to this borough), the bloodthirsty Molly Maguires are known to have terrorized the place.  I say this with all sympathy for those who mourn its passing, but Centralia seems like accursed ground.

 There's really not all that much to see in Centralia: empty streets that once were lined with homes and businesses.  Whole city blocks stand empty, the buildings long ago demolished.  But oddly enough, the derelict streets are completely cleared of snow.  It seems like a curious use of taxpayers' dollars.

Centralia is located in the grimmest stretches of coal country.  The area might actually have a kind of beauty to it--enclosed and claustrophobic between wooded peaks--except that so much land is torn up with strip mines and bleak little mining towns.  Pickup trucks.  Rundown houses.  Vacant storefronts.  The many onion dome churches attest to the presence of Eastern European settlers in these dark valleys.  This small church seems to be the last functional public building left in Centralia.

Since 1963, a hellish coal fire has been raging in the labyrinth of old mines beneath Centralia.  Smoke is said to billow from the ground in certain spots, though I didn't see any.  Sinkholes have opened up and nearly swallowed people.  The state began forcing evacuation of the town in the mid-2000s, though a few hangers-on remain.  I refrained from photographing the three or four occupied houses...out of respect for their die-hard occupants.  This last photo is old PA 61, where it was melted by the fires beneath and rerouted.

Weiser State Forest

The Weiser State Forest--like many of our state forests--is lovingly tended with good trails that are well marked and maintained.  Evil Governor Corbett is trying to open the rest of our public lands to fracking, which would utterly destroy our state forest system.  As Corbett faces the looming possibility of being voted out of office very soon, I think he's adopted a "devil-may-care" attitude toward public opinion, and he's giving everything he can to his fossil fuel cronies.  But for now, 60% of our public forest lands are off limits to the gas drillers.  State forests are a particular kind of animal.  Like federal lands, they're open to primitive camping with only few regulations.  You can hike in and set up camp almost anywhere, as long as you're 200 feet from any stream and out-of-sight from the trails.  

I hiked the "Penn Forest Tract" of the Weiser Forest mostly because I collect hiking destinations, but I could tell from the map that this tract was really just a large woodlot on level territory.  It was pretty unremarkable: no bodies of water, no vistas, no interesting topography.  But it's a good place for solitude and silence.  At the trailhead, there was an office-printed pamphlet on folded A4 paper.  It had a map of the forest with short descriptions of recreational activities--very short descriptions, since there are so few things to do there.  And yet, I liked the place for its monotony.  There's a trancelike sensation that descends on you when you're walking a long loop in a forest with little to no visual variation.  It lulls the hiker into a pleasant kind of emptiness.  It reminds you, somehow, that all things are transient. 

The Weiser Forest is well cared for, but I do have to say that the map was wrong.  I intended to make a long loop out of a trail that existed on the map but not on the ground.  As the late winter sun was setting fast, I finished out my hike with a nearly panicked run down the ugly length of a powerline swath, hoping (correctly) that it would lead me back to the road I'd parked on.  Our state forests are really just large geographic regions in which state-owned tracts of forestland exist.  Some of those tracts are quite big, but others--like this one--are merely a few hundred acres.  The Weiser is named after a fascinating but now shadowy historical figure named Conrad Weiser, an 18th century German immigrant who served as a cultural interpreter and sort-of ambassador to the Indians.

The Poconos

 This is the Lehigh River as it passes through the westernmost reaches of the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  The Poconos are one of those illusive mountain ranges that rise up gradually, taking you by surprise if you approach them from the wrong angle.  You can really only tell that they are a unique "range" of hills if you approach from the south and east--which most folks do.

 In fact, I think the so-called "mountains" are really little more than a vaguely defined highland area within easy driving distance of New York City--and so it's billed as a weekend getaway destination: "The Poconos."  In some ways, the Poconos appear to be a poor man's Vermont.  SUVs with New Jersey plates go screaming past at 70 MPH on rural mountain roads.  The resorts are decent, if a little faded, and frequented by all manner of recent immigrant.

 And yet, it's a pretty area.  I spent a long, pleasant day exploring Hickory Run State Park, which I had mostly to myself on a Saturday in early March.

 This is Hickory Run Lake--which is ambitiously named, since it's nothing more than a pond.  I liked the pond because it was more than a mile from the paved road and completely inaccessible except by snowmobile or foot.  It's one of many small lakes in the region.  There were several others within the state park, one with a swimming beach. 

  Unless I'm mistaken, I logged about ten miles on foot.  In that time, I encountered not another hiker, though a gang of snowmobilers did come zooming up behind me at one point.  This is the spot where the snowmobile trail (which is an unpaved road in summer) passes under busy I-476.

The highlight of Hickory Run State Park is its boulder field, pictured here, which is a "national natural landmark."  It didn't occur to me when I decided to make the long trek out to the boulder field that the oddity would be hidden beneath a blanket of snow.  But it was a good trek and so nice to be back in the woods again--real woods, the kind a person could get lost in.