My backpacking friend had time for just a single night in the woods. And because time was short, he did not want to travel more than 2.5 hours from home--which is a fair request, right? My immediate thought was a certain unnamed rock city along the Tanbark Trail in the Allegheny National Forest, Watson Township. Click on this photo to see how big this boulder is with the tents beneath it for scale.
At dusk, just after we'd gotten a fire going, I pulled out my pan flute and serenaded the trees with sad medieval hymns. "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence." "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers." The pan flute is a forest instrument, which is part of the reason I chose it as my own. Pan--its most famous instrumentalist--is the god of the forest. But otherwise, I've never met another soul who plays the pan flute, and I do like having things to myself.
The first note on the pan flute at dusk sent the local coyotes a-howling! There were A LOT of them, and they were close-by! Unlike a lot of coyote choirs, in which each voice will take up a slightly different phrase, these guys just howled. They must have a den up in these rocks somewhere. They occasionally wakened us in the night to sing their doleful songs.
We didn't do much hiking except to follow the Tanbark northward to Sand Springs and the "free little lending library" at Watson Grange. Most of the books in their little glass cabinet were old, out-of-print novels by lowbrow popular writers of the last century. But I did find exactly one book that I'd consider reading. In fact, it's one that I'd been thinking about reading: Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. (Ever since my days in Africa, I've read colonial literature--mostly things about white people coming to tragic ends in tropical places.) My friend asked me to read it aloud as we hiked back to camp at the rock city, which was hard to do because the Tanbark Trail is pretty overgrown in places. I'm considering becoming a trail volunteer and asking for the whole 9 miles of the Tanbark to maintain. It passes through some undisturbed--if unspectacular--sections of the Allegheny National Forest.
