Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania

 Selinsgrove is a pretty college town on the banks of the Susquehanna River.  I've been meaning to visit the place for well over twenty years, but the opportunity never really presented itself until today.

I've got my own strange reasons for keeping Selinsgrove on my travel wish list for two decades.  They're not reasons that I'm free to divulge to the Internet.  And yet, I'd recommend the place to anyone.  As a college town and county seat, it's got a degree of erudition not found in most isolated boroughs in the center of the state.

Antique stores.  Used book stores.  And much to my surprise, art galleries and fashionable restaurants.  The people have a different look in this region; they're less Eastern European and more distinctly German.  They look cool.  Unkempt and stylish at the same time, sandy blonde, solid.

 Much like Jim Thorpe, Selinsgrove has a lot of stores catering to that trendy mix of New Age and occult tastes.  But more than that, it has traditional old Mennonites, and Amish, and Lutherans.  Like all the best churches on my big trip through the eastern half of the Keystone State, this one is Episcopal.

Governor Simon Snyder was the third governor of the state after the Revolution.  He was also a Pennsylvania German and the first non-English governor.  This is his "mansion," which is really just a large house.  It's the main reason I wanted to come to Selinsgrove.

Today, the governor's house has a brewery / restaurant in the basement, a chiropractor's office on the main floor, and a private residence on the second and third floors.  I did poke around the brew pub and even managed to stick my nose into the chiropractor's rooms--which were grandiose with enormously heavy doors, high ceilings, and massive woodwork.  I snapped a few interior shots while suspicious patients gawked.

 This plaque is located on the wall of the chiropractor's waiting room.  It seems a shame to have something as sterile as a medical facility in such a lovely old house, but there was very soothing, meditative music playing in all the rooms.

 And this state historical marker stands just outside the house.

 I do like this area.  It has huge stone barns, big farmhouses, many made of stone, and little 18th century towns with brick-faced buildings and tree-lined streets.  The Susquehanna River here is wide and flanked by wooded ridges.  I can see why people from the German Palatinate chose to settle here.  It reminded them of home.

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Jim Thorpe is a scenic town set in a deep valley among the mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania.  It's a weekend tourist attraction filled with curiosity shops selling old-fashioned or unusual merchandise.  Although I promised my wife a quaint shopping destination, unfortunately, most of the groovy art stores, bookstores, and boutiques were closed on a Tuesday.  The town is picturesque but compact, dense, and totally unphotographable with an iPhone.

 The place is known for its wonderful old architecture.  Mansions.  Churches.  Townhouses.  Public buildings.  Everything here is ornately designed and built on a slope.  After some years of decline, the town tried to recreate itself in the 1950s by changing its name from Mauch Chunk ("Bear Mountain") to Jim Thorpe.  It was a publicity stunt in honor of the once-famous Native American athlete from Oklahoma.  On the edge of town, there's an unremarkable monument to the eponymous Indian.  Truly, almost any name would be better than Mauch Chunk.

 Jim Thorpe is a witchy kind of place.  The few stores that were open sold Wiccan and neo-pagan religious items...and kitschy St. Patrick's Day hats and decorations.  Voodoo dolls.  Books of spells.  Evil-looking statues.  There are also lots of alternative religious items, like figurines of the goddess Ganesh.  One strange shopkeeper said to my wife: "I'm a universal minister...and by that I mean a medium."  Ah, but who can resist the martial charms of a castellated Episcopal church?  It's defensible, like some medieval fortress, presumably to ward off an attack by the neo-pagans and fashion zombies.

Centralia, Pennsylvania

Centralia is the the most famous ghost town in the Keystone State.  Its sinister acclaim is a regular draw for thrill seekers and ghoulish tourists from New York, New Jersey, and even further afield.  Most people today know the place merely as an abandoned townsite with graffiti on the streets and noxious gases seeping from the ground.  Few people remember that this ill-fated place first gained the national spotlight in 1948 when United Airlines Flight # 624 crashed into the ridge above town, killing all forty-three people aboard.  Long before the now-forgotten plane crash and the ongoing mine fire (which ended up putting an end to this borough), the bloodthirsty Molly Maguires are known to have terrorized the place.  I say this with all sympathy for those who mourn its passing, but Centralia seems like accursed ground.

 There's really not all that much to see in Centralia: empty streets that once were lined with homes and businesses.  Whole city blocks stand empty, the buildings long ago demolished.  But oddly enough, the derelict streets are completely cleared of snow.  It seems like a curious use of taxpayers' dollars.

Centralia is located in the grimmest stretches of coal country.  The area might actually have a kind of beauty to it--enclosed and claustrophobic between wooded peaks--except that so much land is torn up with strip mines and bleak little mining towns.  Pickup trucks.  Rundown houses.  Vacant storefronts.  The many onion dome churches attest to the presence of Eastern European settlers in these dark valleys.  This small church seems to be the last functional public building left in Centralia.

Since 1963, a hellish coal fire has been raging in the labyrinth of old mines beneath Centralia.  Smoke is said to billow from the ground in certain spots, though I didn't see any.  Sinkholes have opened up and nearly swallowed people.  The state began forcing evacuation of the town in the mid-2000s, though a few hangers-on remain.  I refrained from photographing the three or four occupied houses...out of respect for their die-hard occupants.  This last photo is old PA 61, where it was melted by the fires beneath and rerouted.

Weiser State Forest

The Weiser State Forest--like many of our state forests--is lovingly tended with good trails that are well marked and maintained.  Evil Governor Corbett is trying to open the rest of our public lands to fracking, which would utterly destroy our state forest system.  As Corbett faces the looming possibility of being voted out of office very soon, I think he's adopted a "devil-may-care" attitude toward public opinion, and he's giving everything he can to his fossil fuel cronies.  But for now, 60% of our public forest lands are off limits to the gas drillers.  State forests are a particular kind of animal.  Like federal lands, they're open to primitive camping with only few regulations.  You can hike in and set up camp almost anywhere, as long as you're 200 feet from any stream and out-of-sight from the trails.  

I hiked the "Penn Forest Tract" of the Weiser Forest mostly because I collect hiking destinations, but I could tell from the map that this tract was really just a large woodlot on level territory.  It was pretty unremarkable: no bodies of water, no vistas, no interesting topography.  But it's a good place for solitude and silence.  At the trailhead, there was an office-printed pamphlet on folded A4 paper.  It had a map of the forest with short descriptions of recreational activities--very short descriptions, since there are so few things to do there.  And yet, I liked the place for its monotony.  There's a trancelike sensation that descends on you when you're walking a long loop in a forest with little to no visual variation.  It lulls the hiker into a pleasant kind of emptiness.  It reminds you, somehow, that all things are transient. 

The Weiser Forest is well cared for, but I do have to say that the map was wrong.  I intended to make a long loop out of a trail that existed on the map but not on the ground.  As the late winter sun was setting fast, I finished out my hike with a nearly panicked run down the ugly length of a powerline swath, hoping (correctly) that it would lead me back to the road I'd parked on.  Our state forests are really just large geographic regions in which state-owned tracts of forestland exist.  Some of those tracts are quite big, but others--like this one--are merely a few hundred acres.  The Weiser is named after a fascinating but now shadowy historical figure named Conrad Weiser, an 18th century German immigrant who served as a cultural interpreter and sort-of ambassador to the Indians.

The Poconos

 This is the Lehigh River as it passes through the westernmost reaches of the Pocono Mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  The Poconos are one of those illusive mountain ranges that rise up gradually, taking you by surprise if you approach them from the wrong angle.  You can really only tell that they are a unique "range" of hills if you approach from the south and east--which most folks do.

 In fact, I think the so-called "mountains" are really little more than a vaguely defined highland area within easy driving distance of New York City--and so it's billed as a weekend getaway destination: "The Poconos."  In some ways, the Poconos appear to be a poor man's Vermont.  SUVs with New Jersey plates go screaming past at 70 MPH on rural mountain roads.  The resorts are decent, if a little faded, and frequented by all manner of recent immigrant.

 And yet, it's a pretty area.  I spent a long, pleasant day exploring Hickory Run State Park, which I had mostly to myself on a Saturday in early March.

 This is Hickory Run Lake--which is ambitiously named, since it's nothing more than a pond.  I liked the pond because it was more than a mile from the paved road and completely inaccessible except by snowmobile or foot.  It's one of many small lakes in the region.  There were several others within the state park, one with a swimming beach. 

  Unless I'm mistaken, I logged about ten miles on foot.  In that time, I encountered not another hiker, though a gang of snowmobilers did come zooming up behind me at one point.  This is the spot where the snowmobile trail (which is an unpaved road in summer) passes under busy I-476.

The highlight of Hickory Run State Park is its boulder field, pictured here, which is a "national natural landmark."  It didn't occur to me when I decided to make the long trek out to the boulder field that the oddity would be hidden beneath a blanket of snow.  But it was a good trek and so nice to be back in the woods again--real woods, the kind a person could get lost in. 

Christ Church, Philadelphia

 Christ Church was founded in 1695, and it has been in continual use as an Episcopal parish church ever since.  The current building dates back to 1754.  Its spire was once the defining feature of Philadelphia's skyline--a skyline that remained quite humble until about thirty years ago, when it hit a growth spurt that continues to this day.

 I first visited the church in 1990, and of course it hasn't changed in the slightest.  One of the jobs of a historic religious edifice is to remain the same, I suppose.  Benjamin Franklin was a member here, and both Washington and Jefferson frequently attended services.

 It's a beautiful example of an English urban parish church, right here in the US.

 I was a little surprised to discover a member of the Penn Family interred beneath the floor.  This is the only Penn who got buried on this side of the Pond.

 The discovery was surprising because I supposed that the Penns had all been Quakers.  Pennsylvania was a much kinder and more progressive place when it was run by Quakers--peace-loving people who treated the Indians with respect and tolerated immigrants from many religious and cultural backgrounds.

Apparently even the Penns ended up converting to the national Church of England eventually.  Aesthetically, the Church of England runs circles around the Quakers.  Just look at the beauty of this place.  It evokes feelings of The Numinous.  It's so much more inspiring than the plain meetinghouses used by William Penn's lot.  But ethically, well, let's just say that the world could use a few Quakers in high places nowadays.  Except Richard Nixon.  That was one bastardly Quaker....

Old City, Philadelphia

 I truly haven't had a day off for a month, but my wife's work was taking her to Eastern Pennsylvania, so it made a nice opportunity to reacquaint myself with one of my favorite cities.

I love all the architecture from the late Stuart and early Georgian eras.  Elegant, symmetrical, airy, with lots of natural light.

 With the wife and kids in tow, we stuck to the historic sites in Old City, which is admittedly a pretty cool part of town: the juxtaposition of old on new is what I like.

 We saw the typical attractions, most of which I'd seen before: Independence Hall, The Liberty Bell, the Betsy Ross House, Christ Church, and of course City Tavern, the 1773 alehouse and restaurant pictured just below, where so many of the Founding Fathers used to gather.  We had lunch there; the menu is all 18th century and it includes some unexpected items--even if it's nothing to write home about.

Philly is a great town with that whole East-Coast-hurried-feel to it.  It's got a gleaming glass and steel skyline to the west and lots of interesting neighborhoods.  Even on a Sunday morning, the sidewalks here in Center City are abuzz with fashionably dressed WASPs rushing from place to place and looking very concentrated.  Philly has an international flare found nowhere else in the Commonwealth, even though most tourists never see anything but Old City.   

In the 1700s, Philly was the largest and richest city in North America.  Not only was it bigger than New York, but after London, it was the largest city in the English-speaking world.  It remains the only "World Class City" in Pennsylvania--which is to say, a city with more than one million inhabitants.  And Philly is growing again!  Although most of the historic old cities in the Northeast are losing their populations to the suburbs, Philly's city population has been increasing for about a decade.

I love my country, of course, but I'm embarrassed by patriotism.  And yet, I've got to admit that there's something kind of moving about these ancient buildings where our nation was forged.

Independence Hall is shown in the top photo.  It was originally the seat of government for the Colony of Pennsylvania, and it's more than 280 years old.  This bottom picture is the room in "Congress Hall" where the US Congress used to meet during the ten years when Philadelphia was the capital of the nation.  I gotta say, the tour guides around here really seem to love their jobs.