Mount Davis: The Anticlimactic Climax

           This is the view from the summit of Mt. Davis, the highest point in the state.  Actually, from the summit itself, you can't see anything except the trees that surround you.  It doesn't feel like a ridgeline at all.  This photo was taken from the top of the tower that rises above the treetops.

          It's a pleasant, wooded area.  The pinnacle itself is protected in a "natural area" within a segment of the Forbes State Forest.  There's a good network of trails and some decent views in places.  Here's a shot of the well-known Deer Valley Lake as well as High Point Lake--both to the west of the mountain.  You can't really call Mt. Davis a mountain, as such.  It's just a patch of woods that stands at 3,213 feet above sea level.  It's actually part of a meandering stretch of highlands known locally as Negro Mountain.  Geography is frequently so racial in its epithets.

The Cathedral of Learning

          This is one of my favorite buildings in Pittsburgh.  Its name has an almost Soviet ring to it: The Cathedral of Learning.  It's one of the older skyscrapers around here, towering above the Oakland neighborhood on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh.  The Cathedral has an intentionally Gothic feel to it, with that old 1930s flair.  It's spooky and stately at the same time. It's taken me so long to really embrace this city again...

Fort Pitt Blockhouse

          Constructed in 1764, the Fort Pitt Blockhouse is the oldest building in Pittsburgh.  By 1893, long after the rest of the fort had been torn down, this old outbuilding was being used as a house.  It stands in the Point State Park, which is Pittsburgh's answer to Manhattan's Central Park.  It's a pleasant riverside patch of greenery, park benches, paved walkways, and broad lawns: one of the only truly flat places in town.  It's also where the city got started, with two museums to show for it, as well as the outlines where the old French and English forts once stood.  But alas, it's been undergoing massive renovations, and most of the park has been closed for a long time.  

Points of View

           The view of downtown Pittsburgh from the summit of Mt. Washington is so common around here that it's almost cliche.  After living here a few years, you stop seeing it.  And yet, it really is remarkable.

           A lesser known vista is the lonely Ohio River as it pursues its westward course, also seen from the peak of Mt. Washington.  So many things around here are named "Washington" because the guy spent a lot of time out in these parts--speculating for Virginia Colony and for his own personal interests.  Years ago, I saw tourist literature claiming that for Washington, crossing the Delaware was easy, but the Allegheny almost killed him.  It refers to an unplanned December swim he took in the half-frozen river in 1753.

          This larger-than-life sculpture depicts a 1770 meeting that took place between Washington and Guyasutha (known to us upstaters as "Kiasutha"), the Seneca Indian who led young Washington on his first trek up the Allegheny on a failed diplomatic mission to the French.  Though they originally met in 1753, the statues represent an encounter that took place 17 years later, when they sat on the banks of the Ohio and debated the future of the region.  Though they disagreed, they supposedly parted on friendly terms.  The name of the piece is "Points of View."  I think it should be named "Kiss the Girl."

Along Slippery Rock Creek

           Spent a few days of solitude at a little-known retreat center deep in the countryside along Slippery Rock Creek recently.  It was a place of quiet beauty.

           The whole point was to get a chapter of my dissertation written without all the distractions, but alas woods, and fields, and streams, and remodeled barns hold their own distractions for the likes of me...

           It did prove to be a good place to write, especially since my dissertation is about beauty---a painfully esoteric study in the field of aesthetics, as it relates to my equally esoteric line of work.

          There's a near-flatness to the northwest corner of Butler County, and the little back roads wend on for miles and miles between fields and pastures, woods and streams.  In a way, nothing special.  In another way, extraordinary.  The wildflowers are all in bloom.

Venango and Fort Machault

On November 30, 1753, a young George Washington described "Venango" [Franklin, PA] 

in his no-nonsense journal:  

"This is an old Indian Town, fituated at the Mouth of French Creek on Ohio [the Allegheny]... We found French Colours hoifted at a Houfe which they drove Mr. John Frazier, an English Subject, from; I immediately repaired to it.... Captain Joncaire invited us to fup with them and treated us with great Complaifance.  The Wine, as they dofed themselves pretty plentifully with it, foon banifhed the Reftraint which at firft appear'd in their Converfation, and gave a Licenfe to their Tongues to reveal their Sentiments..."  

Of course, in the mid-1700s, they used the letter "F" in many places where we now use an "S."  The John Fraser mentioned here was a Pennsylvania man who had a trading post on this spot until the French evicted him, laying claim to the entire region.  Three years after George Washington's errand into the French-occupied wilderness of Western Pennsylvania, Fort Machault was constructed to guard Paris's claims to the lands west of the Allegheny Mountains.  The below photo shows the spot where French Creek empties into the Allegheny River.  It's a mini-Pittsburgh in that it was a strategic meeting place of two important, navigable waterways into the interior of the continent.  There was a large Delaware Indian village at the point where the two waterways meet.  The French had a fort here.  Then the English had one.  Then, in the 1790s, the Americans had another one.  

I'm from a much younger town just a few miles up the river from Franklin, the straw-fire boomtown that is Oil City.  Some parts of Oil City are still nice, but it was always an industrial town.  Franklin is older, classier, and much prettier, with a charming main street and one of the most interesting old courthouses I've ever seen.  I was back in the area today for a family birthday and had a chance to paddle around the historic confluence in  my kayak. The current was nearly impossible to fight, as I tried to travel upriver from the site of old French Fort Machault to the site of the English Fort Venango.  In the second photo, see the little point of land that probably looks much today as it did in the 1750s--except that virgin forest in the region was largely hemlock and beech.  French Creek is the leftward stream.  It's hard to believe that the mightiest empires of Europe once vied for this spot.  

Super Moon

At 11:30pm on May 5, 2012, I stayed up to see the so-called "Super Moon."  It's said to be 14% bigger and 30% brighter than an average full moon, as it makes its closest pass to the earth this year.