Each October, at least once and sometimes more than once, I make a short pilgrimage to the lovely, ruinous Greene County--the poorest county in Pennsylvania and the most overrun with frackers.
Several years ago on Facebook, someone reposted an article from Martha Stewart Living Magazine that said Greene County has the best fall colors in the US. Thus the annual trip.
There's a heartbroken beauty to the place, with coal mines and pipelines and frackworks decimating the beautiful old farms and woods.
And I honestly know of no place in the nation with more scenic country lanes, and enormous old barns and farmhouses, tucked away in little hollows, with broad, steep lawns. Unfortunately, I never get photos of these farms because I'd have to park in the middle of the winding roads to snap the shots.
Ryerson Station State Park is a lesser-known gem in our PADCNR system. Like the rest of Greene County, it's got a charming but forlorn feel to it, especially since the local coal-diggers undermined the lake, turning it into an irreparable swamp.
Because I have Wednesdays off, I arranged with my wife to handle the kids solo for a night, and I headed down after work for a one-night camping trip. Ryerson's campground is open year-round.
It was a little bit spooky. I had the entire campground to myself. There was not another soul there. It wouldn't really have felt so creepy except that a public road runs right past the campground, and--I don't mean to mock the rural poor--but there are ruffians aplenty in this part of the world.
But once I got used to having a 48-site campground all to myself, I actually kind of liked the solitude. A young female park ranger did patrol the campground twice before going home for the night. She seemed a little bit scared of me... When darkness fell, she stopped coming by. I slept pretty well until 4am, when eerie noises wakened me and kept me awake.
A couple of raccoons stalked my campsite, but soon figured out that I had nothing of interest. Not a bad place to camp for $15 on a lonely Tuesday night in October. These photos were taken on the Pine Box Trail--which leads to the old Chess Cemetery. Public roads and hiking paths have the best names down in Greene County. The poet A.E. Housman calls the way to the graveyard "the road all runners come." We all walk the Pine Box Trail in a metaphorical sense.
Of course, I used to be an English teacher--very briefly--and I always revisit the poetry of my earlier years in the fall--a melancholy indulgence. Followers of my shadowy career know that I visit this cemetery every October. Old family cemeteries are common in Greene County. This one is now in the care of the PADCNR, our state park service.
So many children and younglings are buried here. Even all these years after their deaths, it makes my paternal heart ache.
No one has been buried here since the 1920s. Many of the graves are pre-Civil War, but none go back more than 150 years or so.
Thomas Chess, buried here, was a Civil War veteran. Oh, the horrors he must have seen; there is no one left to tell. The flag rotted off his grave, or got torn off, and someone folded it military-style and wedged it into the top of his tombstone.
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