Monument to the Unknown Sailor

At first I thought it was a Navy-issue headstone for a sailor buried at sea. And honestly, though it might turn out to be something far less dramatic, that's still my best guess. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

An anchor is engraved near the dead center of the slab, but it sits a little crookedly, as if it was stamped into the cement by some primitive machine.

Also, the wording seems to be stenciled onto the slab almost haphazardly. It runs downhill, and all I can make out is "Bridgeville, PA," which is a town nearby. The characters seem distinctly military. Most of the words are long gone, which causes me to think that this stone has spent much of its life outdoors.

It's very hard to make out, but there seems to be some sort of serial number running along the left edge of the slab. Like the anchor, this number is "engraved" or stamped into the cement.

I've done a little research online and can't find a clear answer as to whether the military even issues--or ever issued--headstones for sea burials.

Alas, some long-forgotten great uncle of the Hickman clan perished in the Pacific Theater, or got exploded in his submarine during WWII. The dead sailor's brother inherited the stone eventually, along with the farmhouse. His wife didn't like the gloomy cement slab out among her flowerbeds, so when her own husband died, she packed it off to the attic. All earthly memory of one man's life, relegated to a corner of the attic, there to be shat upon by bats for a few decades. The widow-sister-in-law eventually sells the farm and moves into a nursing home. The farm is divided up and resold a few times. Who's going to take that stone out of the attic now?

Or maybe the Bridgeville Garden Club used to give these weird slabs to its members? Any thoughts?

The Veil Is Thin

Blood is sweet, the veil is thin
Let your wreckage cleanse my skin

Never give up, never say die
To the long surrender
When the red tail dives




~Over the Rhine

The Bleakscape

An uncharacteristic pine tree, of a sort that's usually planted on lawns around here. A dying yew tree. An old holly bush gone wild. All of these on the edge of a scrubby clearing.

Was it once someone's home? It stands at the end of a long-ago road, now little more than a deerpath. And there's a heap of cut stones at the edge of the glade; whether they once composed a foundation, or whether they were simply gathered and tossed from a field, I cannot tell. None of it was enough to convince me until I found the little shard of an earthenware plate--bottom photo. I really need to get a better camera, but even in this poor photo, you can make out the unusual thickness of the plate, the anachronistic raised design around the edge. (I think the technical word for that is "frou-frou.") This little piece of plate tells me someone lived here once.

I'm essentially a Norway rat: a once-wild creature who discovered, with the destruction of its habitat, that there's also life in the long shadow of humankind. The rats are resourceful. At one time, they hibernated like dormice and ate seeds and berries; now they live at the edges of society, making a living off human waste.

Once I went to the woods for the three Ss: Silence. Solitude. Stillness. I trekked the wild places in search of freedom, beauty, and the occasional adventure. I was a woodland archaeologist, sometimes searching the wild places for traces of forgotten humanity: old town sites, abandoned roads, perhaps the fragment of an old green bottle. Today, instead, I sift through the wreckage of human blight in search of anything wild. Mostly it's a bleakscape, a worn-down, tired-out country, just trying to recover. Everything here is an overgrown stripmine, awaiting the next stage in its degradation by the Marcellus shale drillers--old cronies of our newly elected Republican governor.

But it's a joy to hear birds in the forest again. Their low, sweet song sounds through the still-bare branches as if they're glad to be home. It's a good time to be a forest bird. Not too cold. The snow is melting, leaving puddles to drink. There are delicious poison ivy berries still on the vine.

Maybe in Summer

This old farmhouse sits in a wooded depression just off PA978. The house itself is not highly visible from the road, but anyone who rushed past the many "No Trespassing" signs to approach the place--alas--would be highly visible. This road stays busy, and there are three or four occupied homes nearby.

Most disturbingly, the signs that ward off all the would-be-trespassers (I prefer the terms "local archaeologist" or "historical re-envisioner") are identical to the signs that forbid entry on the inhabited farming complex across the road. This makes me think that it's all part of the same blamed farm. I surmise that the people who own this place simply moved aross the street when the old house started to get too hard to maintain. That means the actual owners might see you ducking off the road and down into the wooded lot.


It was probably grandpa's house. It's probably been in the family for years. Around here, you often see a stately old farmhouse returning to its elements and, in the yard nearby, a mobile home.

I've been wanting to get inside this place ever since I first noticed it in the fall. But summer will be the time to come back. By mid-June, the trees will be in full leaf, hiding the house from view. Tall weeds will make access less visible, too.

Not that there's anything spectacular about this house. It's certainly not stately. Never was. The style is all too common in Southwest Pennsylvania and Northeast Ohio. It's not especially big. As far as I can tell, there's only one chimney and the attic is a crawl-space. This was a farm of modest means.

You gotta love those old shingle-sided houses that are made to look like fake brick. I'll be coming back here when the vegetation is high.

Ruined Spring House

It's curious what remains when all else is gone. Consider this ruined spring house, the last surviving vestige of some long ago farm. Is there anyone left who remembers where the barn once stood? The farmhouse? Was it a dairy farm or grain? Only the spring house remains, guarding its secrets fast.

Once, long ago, you developed behaviors and attitudes to help you deal with situations in your life--threats or factors both real and imagined. Those "situations" have long since resolved themselves or simply fled, but the behaviors have remained; they've become "postures" for living. They derive their identity and usefulness from long-vanished threats--real or imagined. Like the spring house, there they sit. Unlike the spring house, you visit them each day, and they're as comfortable as an old boot.

Cross Creek Lake: The Poisoned Park

There's a kind of beauty in it, but I'm a melancholic who always finds sad things beautiful. Cross Creek Lake is a big, semi-wild park owned and operated by Washington County. There's a nice lake there, and at this time of year, the frozen surface is crisscrossed by ice-fishers' trails running from the beach to the little tarp huts where they spend their winters. [Indent] Winter has its many charms, and one of them is the silence of a deserted world. The solitude, too. I love the muffled quiet of an empty landscape. And the winter birds. And the animal tracks in the snow. [Indent] Many acres of land surround the lake. Some woods, a nice playground, a large picnic area. Most of the park seems to be hayfields, strangely enough. At least I think they're hayfields. They're vast expanses of contour-plowed fields alternating between fallow and harvested segments. I'm sure they look like a strange quilt from the sky. And it's fun to explore the lonely landscape. [Indent]

But this is Washington County--ever the slut for mineral extraction. There are exactly 14 marcellus shale gas wells being dug on the park lands. Fourteen! At 15 acres each, not to mention the many access roads being cut through the area, this once pleasant park will soon be another industrial wasteland. The diggers have already spilled massive quantities of their noxious chemicals, resulting in fish kills in the lake. It's nothing compared to what lies ahead. [Indent] But someone recommended this lake for ice skating and--come summer--kayaking, so I came to check it out. I liked it okay. There was a kind of windblown sanctity out there on those snowy fields. But mostly, I don't think I'll be coming back here much. The whole marcellus shale thing is such a depressingly shortsighted grasp. [Indent]

In this final shot, you can see the lake off in the distance. There's a kind of beauty here, but touched with the sorrow of impending ruin. The silence will be broken by endless convoys of trucks and the pounding of the "frack" drills. The beauty will be destroyed by access roads and tall wells. The air will be destroyed and toxic to anything that needs to breathe it. And the water will be poisoned for generations to come. It's all a grab for shortsighted gain. [Indent] I had a solitary winter picnic at the pavillion in the top picture. I love pretending that winter isn't real, treating January just like July.

Greer Road

You've got to love an abandoned farm. In terms of abandoned places, today's hike was a waking dream.

Greer Road, in Collier Township (Allegheny County), was once a public thoroughfare. When the county bought up the strip-mined land around here to form a park, the southern end of the road was closed to vehicles. Nevertheless, tracks in the snow prove that people still ski and walk their dogs along the route.

The old road rises away from Pinkerton Run Road just behind one enticing abandoned house and across the street from another. The old guard rails still stand rusting at the edge of a steep drop into the valley below. There's broken pavement beneath the snow. This road's been out of commission for at least two decades, probably three.

There's no longer a green and white street sign at the entrance to Greer Road, so you just have to look for it. Where Pinkerton Run Road strikes north off Noblestown Road, there's an empty house that's pictured in the last post. Immediately behind that house, Greer Road climbs up into the snowy woods along a steep hillside. It's little more than a wide trail passing along steep drops. It hugs a deep valley and snakes through empty forest.

The best part comes when the old road emerges from wooded country to pass through an abandoned farmstead. I couldn't believe my luck. Nothing stirred here except two blood-red cardinals in the bare branches and a fat black cat in the tumbledown garage. The cat bolted when it saw me.

The barn isn't used, and it's boarded up tight. The garage is standing wide open, but I didn't go in for two reasons: I didn't want make life any harder on that poor feral cat by invading its home, and the floor didn't look safe to walk on. There's nothing inside but a huge stack of rotting storm windows, which I assume got taken off the farmhouse and stored there one May afternoon about thirty years ago. Come November, there they remained. Then the next November. Then the next. Isn't that how decline happens?

The farmhouse itself is a little disappointing. For one thing, it's not a proper kind of farmhouse. (I hate to brag, but I own one of the last truly spectacular farmhouses in Allegheny County.) I imagine the original house burned down and they put this thing up in about 1920. It's just a regular town-style house typical of the region: one gable, big front porch, yellow bricks. In industrial towns and mining towns, these places were built for middle managers. Maybe the farmer's wife had citified tastes, urbane for the day but relatively banal today.

The farmhouse stands there all enticing and wearing its neglect like an invitation, but upon closer inspection I discovered that it houses the park office. That's the most disappointing thing about the place. Ah, but for my purposes, it was abandoned. The whole farm site is a ghost of its former self. The road leading to it is a ghost. And on a Sunday afternoon in 24 degrees and two inches of snow, this place might as well be one of those derelict hamlets on the plains of Eastern New Mexico.

On the bright side, very close to this place, I did scout out two thoroughly abandoned houses for future winter treks. Actually, after reading the novel "American Rust," I'd been working up my nerve for a trip to the Monongahela Valley in order to go ghost-towning in the derelict neighborhoods of those old steel towns (Brownsville, Duquesne, Braddock). Who knew there'd be this much abandon so close to home?

Still, don't tell my wife, but I have got to spend more time exploring the Mon Valley...