Hillman State Park Revisited

 The website of "The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources" has the gall to run the headline "Governor Corbett Issues Executive Order Protecting State Forests, Parks."  That's creative packaging of a far uglier truth.  He's striking down protections established by his predecessor's administration.  Corbett's latest attack on our public lands drew me out to Hillman State Park, the redheaded stepchild of the PADCNR.  Hillman makes a decent hiking destination if you don't mind unblazed trails, unmapped territory, and reclaimed stripmines.  All these factors actually add to this neglected park's strange appeal...not to mention the fact that the place just creeps some folks right the hell out.

 Over the holiday weekend, when he thought nobody was looking, Corbett lifted former Governor Ed Rendell's moratorium on fracking our state parks.  In other words, he's opened the parks themselves to fracking--as well as the remainder of our state forests.  A movement is afoot to oppose it, but there's not much hope of success.  Part of that push includes taking "selfies" in front of state park signs while holding up a small paper sign calling for an end to fracking on state forests and parks.  I almost can't believe I've been reduced to taking selfies, like some kind of 17-year old with narcissistic personality disorder.  But I'm passionate about the anti-fracking cause, and because I was sure nobody else would bother to do a selfie in front of the Hillman sign, I decided to make a run out there.

I wouldn't want Hillman to get left out, even though it has no park office, no restrooms, no camping, nor even any trail names.  This is the raging Raccoon Creek as it passes through the park, swollen by recent rains and highly navigable for a skilled kayaker...but no time for it today.  The trails of the park are abloom with honeysuckle, and the wet woods so inviting and green, leafy and deep.  We camped at Raccoon Creek State Park for Memorial Day weekend, and it was great.  But I need to make a serious effort to get back to Hillman soon when I can spend some time.

Swamp Run Road, Butler County

 "Beyond the farm machinery and toys, the hillside sloped toward pastureland, the broad valley, the basswood-shaded farther hill.

 The basswoods were yellow-green where the sun struck them, its light breaking in wide shafts through glodes in the overcast sky.

 It was beautiful, sad and unreal, where the light struck.

 You felt as though life would be different there, the air lighter and cooler, the silence more profound."

~John Gardner

The Sunlight Dialogues

The Frank Preston Conservation Area, Moraine State Park

The capacity for awe and wonder comes at an early stage in human development, and we lose it all too quickly. The jadedness of the world seeps in with time and teaches us to take things for granted. It woos people away from their wide-eyed wonder, teaches them to gaze on life and its marvels more disinterestedly. A sunset, a distant star, the joy of fellowship with others, the spine-tingling awareness of Life and breath within our bodies, the familiar tune of a half-forgotten song, the homelike comfort of a smell or a sound: these things touch us less profoundly as the years pass. It's not until we're old that they come to us again to speak as they did when we were small.

Wonder, if we can cultivate it in our adult spirits, makes us to know that we are small, that we don't have all the answers, that we don't have things under control, but that it doesn't matter, because we don't need all the answers, and we don't need to be in control.  

The somber springtime countryside was almost too dark to photograph.  This is Lake Arthur as seen through the forested hills in the east end of Moraine State Park, in a mostly equestrian stretch of parkland called the Frank Preston Conservation Area.  Old public roads meander in and out of private farms before dead-ending at woodlots or overgrown hayfields.  I saw some magnificent birds out here, including one pheasant and four bright yellow birds with black crowns.  There's a haunting beauty to this place, eerie and serene.  And yet, for all the darkness, it's a season of new life.

A few years ago, we used to hear the military expression “shock-and-awe.” Our way of life nowadays leaves us dealing with a lot of shock and too little awe. Our human systems are shocked by the long hours we work, by the isolation we feel, by the lack of physicality in our daily routine. Our systems are shocked by the flood of information that constantly barrages us, by deadlines, and by bills. Our tendency is to numb ourselves to the shock of life, to seek escape by means of our televisions, and radios, and computers.  We turn to addictions or anything that keeps us from seeing the rapid passage of time.  We don't want to see the fact of our smallness, the fact that mortality is our lot. But numbing ourselves to life's shocks also numbs us to its awe.  And we need to stand in awe every once in a while just to get life in perspective.

A View from the Attic

 Living in a 150-year-old farmhouse is a costly joy.  There's always something that needs fixed, dug up, cleaned, replaced, or ignored until I've got the time and emotional strength to deal with it.  But unlike most new houses, an old house loves you back by bestowing strange and unexpected gifts.  While checking for bats in the attic today, I came across something a lot more pleasant.

 It'll be a three-story drop if these baby robins hatch and fall.  But here on a high windowsill, at least they're safe from that nasty yellow cat--Grimalkin--who lives in the basement of my summer kitchen (top photo).  It sure will be cool to watch from inside the attic window as the baby birds break out of their sky-blue eggs and grow.  I hope they all three survive into adulthood, then take flight someday, and go off to build nests of their own.  

 Isn't that the risk?  You can invest your time, and your energy, and your heart in a nestful of little blue promises, only to see the day when their possibility is wasted, when they drop from a high ledge like pebbles into a pond.  Is loving worth the risk?  Is it wise to place all our eggs in a single precarious basket?  Or do the wise flee the possibility of loss and fly away to live for themselves?  Most creatures invest their lives in the future and in other creatures--their offspring.  All life is about hope, isn't it, Momma Robin?  Birds and humans live for hope...no matter how small.  Happily, a new steel roof seems to have solved the bat problems in the attic.