Fall is here at last...visiting like a ghost in its transient, autumnal way. It'll be gone in no time. We've endured the dullest, ugliest, hottest, most summerlike October I've ever experienced--aside from the Africa years. I wanted to enjoy the belated autumn as much as possible, so a friend and I decided to do a quick two-night trek on the Laurel Highlands Trail.
Work has been stressful. The endless heatwave summer has been frustrating. The woods beckoned. We stayed at the shelter area close to PA Route 31 for a rainy Thursday and Friday night. October is one of the busy seasons for the trail, but no one else was willing to brave the wet weather, so we had the small, primitive campground to ourselves.
Actually, the reason we chose the Laurel Highlands Trail--despite my blogging a lot about it recently--is because it was going to be chilly and wet, and our tents would have provided too little shelter from the weather. But the LHHT has Adirondack shelters with fireplaces!
The remote shelter # 5 was perfect. We saw not another soul on the trails in the two days of damp hiking that we enjoyed. A ranger did come by the first night to see that no one was squatting in any of the cozy shelters. I saw his headlights through the gathering gloom and went down to meet him at his white forest service pickup. As soon as he got out he called my name and told me that the whole park, which stretches 70 miles from the Johnstown area to Ohiopyle, had only 5 registered campers that night.
Yes, you do have to reserve these shelters online. And you're not [technically] allowed to stay two consecutive nights in any one camping area.... Isn't this a beautiful setup? The first night was windy, and there are large openings on either side of the chimney. Fortunately, my friend thought to bring a tarp to close the gap on one side, and he found an old, singed tarp in the garbage bin that we used to close up the other side at night.
The colors were so lovely and bright, with intermittent moments of sun and lots of clouds and rain. But not so much rain that we couldn't put on our raincoats and hit the trails.
The LHHT and environs are beautiful, but I must say, if you're looking for silence, pick a more remote trail! From many of the shelter areas on this trail, you can hear trucks, and cars, and construction vehicles from early morning and into the night. There are better trails in the state for silence and solitude, but let's just be honest...life in the Keystone State is LOUD.
The Roaring Run Natural Area was scenic if unexceptional. And one noise I did not hear was a roaring "run"--which means "arroyo" in most places, but which means "stream" in parts of PA, WV, and OH.
It's the silence that I love the most--maybe even more than the beauty of the forest, I come here for silence. The best thing about Roaring Run is that at a certain point you do get out of earshot from all the clamorous traffic. Its ugly screams and drones are silenced, and all you hear is the gentle breeze.
I used to take a volume of A.E. Housman into the woods with me in October to memorize a different poem or two each fall. I haven't done that for a few years, and so I find myself mentally revisiting the poems I memorized in years past. It's one of those things where I tell myself that it's just what I do: "I memorize Housman in the fall. It speaks to my natural melancholia." But if I go without doing it for two pandemic falls, will it still be a tradition by the time the leaves turn yellow for the third turn since the pandemic struck? We're losing so much...and not even noticing what we've lost because we promise ourselves that we'll get back around to it next year. But I fear that we will not.
What will life be if this pandemic ends, if the selfish, shortsighted θ-damned Republicans ever deem to get vaccinated and stop visiting new variants on the world? Bigger picture, come to me! God, let me see the bigger picture out onto history, and life, and the living world! There were few real vistas in the area we visited. I wanted to take my friend to see one or two of them, but time didn't allow.
One of my joys, as I walked through the woods, was simply to look at the leaf-mess on the ground. So colorful, such vivid tints and tones, so easy to miss.
It's been about 10 years since I'd been back to the Roaring Run Natural Area--where no camping is allowed and where interesting trees try (a little unsuccessfully) to make up for the absence of long views.
You can almost see a bit of a vista through these trees. The hillside opposite is bedecked in its fading rusty hues.
The beeches still clung to their brilliant yellows and their rapidly fading greens--now so yellowed as to be more acid-green than forest-green.
I know it's a lot to ask, but why can't I just have the month of October off--the way French people all take the whole month of August? Of course, this climate change October was the worst, and I imagine November will be the new October moving forward. But this is what I love, what I need--trees still in leaf, bidding their glorious farewells to the summer, casting their earthy scents out into the chilly air, creating an inimitable living tableau for the eyes! There's not a stained glass cathedral in all of France that can match the beauties of October (or maybe soon, November) in a Pennsylvania woodlot.
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