Abandoned Farm in Greene County

Park near the now-defunct dam on the now-defunct lake at Ryerson Station State Park, and follow the Sawdust Trail up the hill and into the woods.  The trail runs about half a mile steeply uphill and comes out where the park ends on the side of a little country lane known as McClellan Avenue.  Standing there on the side of the narrow farm road, you'll see a mysterious old farmhouse nesting among the trees at the top of the valley.  Click on this photo to get a better look.

I'd done the brief hike several times over the years, and each time I've wondered about the old house on the hill.  Is it occupied?  Is it abandoned?  Is it one of the many old houses in this area that's been purchased by the frackers or the coaldiggers and left to fester along the side of the road, a forlorn ghost of happier times before unbridled capitalism began consuming everything?  This time, instead of peering up at the old farm from the edge of the woods, I decided to emerge from the forest and stroll up the little lane to take a look.  

It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and the city was on lock down for the COVID-19 quarantine, but I'd been hearing that the parks closest to Pittsburgh were crowded.  Where to go?  Ryerson Station, of course!  It's less than an hour's drive through scenic countryside to one of the least-visited parks in our region.  During our time there, on such a beautiful spring day when everyone had cabin fever, I saw only three or four other cars.

And yes, this pleasant old homestead has been sitting empty at least ten years, I would guess.  The farmhouse presides vacantly over a green valley of dairy farms.  Its barn, and tractor shed, and garage all sit around facing the house as if waiting to be told what to do, expectant, obedient, hoping for some instruction or occupation.  What an idyllic little settlement this place once was!  Look at the deep front porch, with its stone columns, overlooking the valley.   And the kitchen porch, facing the yard and fields.  See the broad, sloping lawns, the shade trees--not too close to the house.  The hilltop isolation with its hints of monarchical grandeur, as if to say, "This is my valley.  I am the king of this hill."

Here's the view from a bit higher on the same hill.  If this were in Allegheny County, I could look up the address and see who owns it, and how much it's worth, and what it costs in taxes, and when it was last sold, and how many bedrooms the house has, and how many acres the farm is, and what kind of condition the house is in.  Here in Greene County, I'm not sure if such information is available to the public.  I feel a real sense of wistfulness when I see such a lovely old place returning to its elements.  As the years pass, little gaps between shingles will develop into full-blown leaks.  Gutters will clog.  Cracks in the foundations will get bigger.  And in time, someone's once-upon-a-time home will be no more.   It could still be a dream property for anyone willing to undertake the back-breaking task of farming--and willing to live in frack country.

Sacred Spaces, Downtown Pittsburgh

First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh is a majestic old building.  The church has a storied past, too.  It's the oldest religious congregation in the city, with roots going back to General John Forbes' capture of the French Fort Duquesne in 1758.  Forbes was a Scotsman, so his chaplain was naturally a Presbyterian.  The chaplain conducted services, and a small congregation grew out of it.

Click on this photo to enlarge it.  The wooden wall behind the high altar opens when the pipe organ begins to blare at the start of the Sunday service, revealing a large choir area that otherwise remains hidden.

This view is from the chancel area, looking toward the main entrance on Sixth Avenue.  The great old organ is in the loft above the door.

These are all Tiffany windows.  That's what the building is most known for.  I'm glad that they keep it open on weekdays.  I do drop in whenever I've got time to spare downtown.  You often find the odd urbanite sleeping in a pew, or resting, or praying.  It's an island of serenity amid the bustle of the city.  Stillness, solitude, silence, reverence.  Where do you find these things?  I know them best in the forest, but beautiful sacred buildings are a nice second-best.

A very old cemetery--Pittsburgh's first--stands between the Presbyterian church and the Episcopal cathedral.  This is the headstone of a certain Red Pole, a Shawnee chief who is buried among the white settlers.  

The Shawnee moved around a lot.  I believe they were originally from the area that we now know as Kentucky and Tennessee.  But by the 18th century, there were many in Western Pennsylvania.  Click on this photo to read about old Red Pole.

The oldest grave I found here belonged to one Samuel Dawson, who died in 1779.  I've heard that there are older ones.

And here they lie still, in their long-rotted tails and gowns and wigs, with a 21st century downtown swirling about their mute repose--the forebears of a now declining empire.

This is the interior of the Episcopal cathedral, which shares the churchyard with First Presbyterian.  You see how early America worked?  The Church of England and the Church of Scotland side-by-side, presiding over the dead.  It's a cathedral in name, but far less grand than many other Episcopal and Presbyterian churches in the city.  It's far humbler than its next door neighbor, too--less original, less grand, considerably smaller.

South Airport Trail at Hillman State Park

A cold, bright Wednesday beckoned me out again to Hillman State Park--which is truly one of the least of the Commonwealth's many great parks.  But it's close by, and I couldn't spend the whole day in the woods.  It was a surprisingly pleasant drive down country lanes in the full light of the winter sun.  It's been so, so rainy and gray that even melancholy souls like me are so happy for a little light.

Streaming as it does through the pine needles at Hillman, I don't know how I ever tired of it.  But I do recall a drought when I muttered profanities about "All that goddamn light, it's enough to make a parson curse."  (Quite truly.)  But the forest floor was soft with years of pine needles.  The forest was cold and fragrant.  And my spirit sang to have just a few hours alone among the trees.

Hillman is mainly a series of shoddily reclaimed strip mines.  That's why mountain bikers love the place; it's got twists and curves and crazy descents like this one.  What would you do if you broke yourself out here on a hill like that?  I've seen mountain bikers out here alone many times.  They surely couldn't get an ambulance back in here.  Ah, but people get broken in far more remote places than this, I suppose.

I don't often think of coming here because I wrote this place off as a brier patch years ago, a spooky place with strangling vines and poison ivy and labyrinthine trails where you might get lost for hours.  And it is definitely all of those things.  I hated this place because I moved down here from the Allegheny National Forest, and "Comparison is the thief of joy."  But today, I left here contented.

Just as a historical footnote, I named this blog "Snow and Jaggers" because when I had an earlier blog up in the Great North Woods.  It was called "The Allegheny Journal," and it explored public lands in and around the national forest.  But when I tried to hike down here in the Pittsburgh area, all I ever saw was snow and jaggers (thorns).  Now, in these days of rainy winters, I ought to just call the blog "Jaggers."  But that's no fun.

This pleasant path among the evergreens bears the unfortunate name of "Airport Trail."  That's because it runs around a little "airport" for model airplanes.  The road to the airport is closed for the season, but I walked out there just to see if everything was much the same as the last time I was there.  And it was.  It's not worth photographing.

These pleasant little red pines in their grassy meadow are appealing in the winter.  In summer, this place would be filthy with biting ants, and poison ivy, and ticks.  I must remember that I like this place better in the winter.

It was a joy just to see the sunlight glinting off the rippling waters of a little brook.  It's been such a dark time here--literally dark, but metaphorically dark, too.  It's all of a piece.  We get these endless rains because of climate change, and climate change is due to the same human greed that rules these times.  Darkness begets darkness.

"To each their own," I guess.  Not sure why anyone would want to fly a toy airplane when there are trees to walk amongst.  In any case, I can see that someone is putting some effort into making Hillman a more user-friendly kind of place.  Many of the trails now have names, and some are blazed.  It's still a strange place though.  It's both things: a park with no facilities and a state game land with stuff like an airport for toy planes and mountain biking trails.  At 3,000+ acres, it's worth exploring.

Forbes State Forest

With all the snow melted and the rain finally letting up (for a time), I headed off to the lovely ridge just east of Uniontown where the westernmost of the mountains begins.  Its actual name is Chestnut Ridge, and it is there in its shadowy hollows that a young George Washington ambushed a French military unit in a move that would probably be deemed a war crime by the Geneva Convention.

But I did not go to Jumonville Glen to listen for the ghosts of Frenchmen being murdered in their sleep.  Leaving the National Road, US 40, at the very crest of the ridgeline, I headed south on the smaller road that runs all the way to the Mason Dixon Line, passing through the Forbes State Forest en route.  I thought I'd turn onto the small forest road that leads to the rocky overlook that commands a view westward over Uniontown and environs. 

The little forest road was open, but too muddy for my car to travel on.  So I walked until I turned off onto an even smaller road, pictured here.  This is all in the state forest and entirely open to camping.  However, I'm not sure I'd want to do it.  Empty beer cans and bottles told me that kids ride their ATVs out here and get drunk. 

I decided to explore the more easterly flanks of the ridge, where I came upon this old furnace.

As well as this little cabin with a "for sale" sign out front.  Nine acres, $50,000.  It's a dream place, though the nearest neighbors are a little too close.  It looks like there's no sewage, no running water, and no electricity--entirely off the grid.  That would be fine, fun even.  But I don't see a stovepipe either, which tells me that the place is only used in summer and probably not very well insulated.

Ah, but how happy I would be to have a little place like this all to myself.

The forest map shows an area called "Hull Cemetery."  As far as I can tell there's only one person buried here, one Jacob Hull, a 49-year old veteran of the Civil War who died in the 1880s.  You do see the rebel flag in some parts of rural Pennsylvania--which offends and angers me to no end.  Young Pennsylvanians were sent off to give their lives in opposition to that flag, which is a symbol of bigotry, hatred, and oppression.  Thank God they knew not to put one on this fellow's grave.

A Cold Night on Tracy Run, Allegheny National Forest

The snow was melting away as we trekked into the northernmost reaches of the Allegheny National Forest in the area of Willow Bay and Tracy Ridge in order to mark my 50th birthday there in my sacred place. The warmth was eerie and surely a harbinger of ills to come.  But the place was lovely as always, and so wild in these brief blue and gray days of late January.  

I've never been much of one too celebrate my birthdays.  I don't mind getting older, and I don't judge anyone who does make a big deal of their own birthdays.  But I just don't like a lot of attention called to myself.  But 50?  Fifty is a big one.  Let's not say that I "celebrated" it.  Let's say instead that I "held a half-century birthday observance."  Now at last I begin to feel old, my friends.  Since my wife was going to be out of the country anyway, and I was free to celebrate however I pleased, I decided to do a winter overnight in one of the remoter parts of the ANF.

I'd wanted to go back to the Standing Stone Trail, but massive amounts of rain were in the forecast.  In fact, the only place within a 2.5 hour drive of Pittsburgh that did not call for rain was Bradford, Pennsylvania--which is 16 miles due east of Willow Bay Campground, one of the few campgrounds in the ANF that's open all winter and which just happens to have cabins for rent year round.  I booked a cabin just as a weather contingency, hoping I wouldn't have to use it, then headed north into uncertain weather.  And guess what?  It rained...and rained, and rained.  This interesting cairn was probably erected by boaters who camp along the remote shoreline in summer.

The muddy trail made travel slow.  Our ambitious goal was to take the North Country Trail out of Willow Bay and head south as far as the Handsome Lake Campground--a primitive and remote little camp right on the banks of the reservoir; it can only be reached on foot or by boat.  When we got as far as Tracy Run (what, four miles?), we found that little body of water so swollen with snowmelt and rainfall that we couldn't get across without getting soaked, which would not be a wise thing to do in the winter chill, so far from the car.

We did not turn back, but instead set up camp on the banks of the Kinzua Reservoir near Tracy Run.  I say "we" because I was not alone on this trek.  A talkative old college friend came up from Oklahoma City to join me.  He thought the ANF was beautiful, and he never believed that there was so much open land in an eastern state.  

The guy in this picture isn't me; it's my hiking companion.  Even at the end of a sopping wet day, my sometimes-annoying friend was able to start a roaring fire with the saturated twigs and branches we collected off the muddy ground.  It was an immense amount of work to coax fire from such wet tinder, but he knew exactly how to get the job done.  I must say, I was impressed.

A beautiful fire it was, and very nice to have on that warmish evening where the silence and the solitude were so deep.  It burned late into the wee hours, keeping us warm despite the constant drizzle and the chilling breezes of the night.  By "wee hours" I mean by hikers' standards, 10:00 or 10:30pm.

During the night, I thought I heard the soft, uncertain sound of snow touching down on the roof of the tent, gentle, furtive, as if uncertain of the welcome it would receive.  The night temps dipped low into the 20s.  And so, I awoke on the morning of my 50th birthday to the kind of winter's day we had when I was young.  See how the forest is transfigured by the snow.  Getting out of the sleeping bag was an act of courage, cold and daunting, but also invigorating and somehow joyful.

I miss winter, real winter.  I miss the days when the snow came around Christmastime and lingered until late March.  I miss the days when there was a "January thaw" that rose above freezing for two or three days, maybe up into the high 30s, but never enough to challenge winter's sure domain.  The endless rain is not right.  The 70-degree days in January are not right.  America's greed-driven refusal to address the issue is not right.  The biggest, wealthiest polluters have purchased state and federal governments so that they can continue to rake in the cash and poison the planet.  Capitalism has at last undermined the very democracy that gave it life.  The greed of the 1% is unbridled, and it cannot be stopped, not anymore.  They will continue to render the planet unlivable in order to engorge themselves with far, far more riches than anyone needs--leaving the poor ever poorer.  And worse, they dupe the poor into supporting their cause with such red herrings as the the old abortion debate, and xenophobia, and a racism disguised as opposition to the "welfare state."

My heart aches for this forest, for my love of it, for my anxiety about its future--and all future.  My heart aches for the world we're handing to our children.  But the winter forest gave me a gift for my half-century observance: assurance.  The gentle snowfall, the frozen lake, my water bottles gathering ice.  Yes, I found assurance in the forest, as I so often have.  After all, this is my sacred place.  Come what will, all will be well--or well enough.  We pass one by one into the silent mystery that created us, that creates us still, that claims us and all things in the end.  We go beyond worries and cares into the silence of the winter woods, where there is neither greed, nor time, nor frigid toes.  And whether the transience of life be in its mere extinction--its passing into oblivion--or in some other life beyond, it does not matter.  We come.  We do our part.  We live for things that matter.  We die and pass again, like these primordial water molecules that cover the earth, into something else.  There is no fear in it.  Waking to a sight like this is good for the soul.

The Pennsylvania / New York Border: a Forest Crossing

I rarely write anything on this blog these days.  I’m too overworked and too tired.  But for my 50th birthday, I returned to my sacred place, the Allegheny National Forest, and found things more or less as I left them 10 years ago.  Crossing the border into New York State still felt like a an act of resistance to the right-wing nut jobs that are discarding democracy in favor of unbridled capitalism.  Sneaking across the border into a bluer state.  It’s a lovely crossing even if your political convictions tend toward the hateful.  Borders are arbitrary human conventions.  Here in the forest, the only thing that designates them is a sign—with no one standing guard.

Millions of displaced people roam the globe today.  These are not gangs of roving bandits, murderers, and thugs, but ordinary people who flee the violence and the chaos of their native places, nations that now exist only on maps: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador...  I do not argue for open borders (as fool Republicans claim).  I only argue for the humane treatment of people who look to us for refuge, as people have been doing for centuries.  In any case, the border here is easy to cross for anyone who’s willing to brave the slippery melting snow.

Cornplanter’s Cemetery

When I lived up there in that glorious place, I’d heard for years that the old Seneca chief Cornplanter was buried in the northernmost reaches of the Allegheny National Forest.  Cornplanter lived a long and storied life—to approximately 100 years of age.  He first appeared on the scene in the French and Indian War of the 1750s, remained prominent during the Revolution, and settled into happy obscurity till his death in the early 1800s.

Family legend once had it that we were part Seneca Indian.  I liked that belief.  It was somehow comforting.  It made me believe that my love of the great North Woods of Pennsylvania was somehow an element of racial memory.  But my wife got me a DNA test for Christmas, 2019, and it showed no Native American ancestry at all.  The Seneca People, whose remaining reservation land is just a few feet across the border in New York State, have decorated the old chief’s grave in traditional relics.

Here’s how the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania describes Cornplanter on the official grave marker.  I’d always thought that the USA had broken its treaty with the Seneca by confiscating their lands in Pennsylvania and flooding their settlement to create Kinzua Dam and reservoir—in the 1960s.  But documents I’ve read on this excursion state that the treaty granted this land not to the Seneca People, but only to the descendants of Cornplanter, all of whom had died off by the mid-1950s.  (Most were killed by the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918.).  And so, the US was justified in its decision to move the old Cornplanter Cemetery to higher ground and to flood his settlement.  Is this a lot of white supremacist hooey, or is it right?

“The Rev. Asher Bliss.”  What a great name.  He was a white missionary to the Cornplanter settlement.  Many of the Seneca People on the Pennsylvania side of the line converted to Presbyterianism, despite the best efforts of Cornplanter’s older brother, Handsome Lake—a revivalist and reformer of Seneca religion.  If I’d had a son, Asher might have been a good name for him.  But I’ve been blessed with daughters only, and their names are good, too.

Oh, Chief Cornplanter, the snow is melting on your grave.  It’s 45 degrees in northernmost Pennsylvania in late January!  What we white folk have done to this world is yet to be discovered.  It’ll be unwrapped not like a present, but like a grisly mummy’s bandages, like the rotting wooden caskets that were moved up from your now-flooded valley.  I wish it could be otherwise.  But you, too, lived in trying times, times when the world you knew was drawing to its close.  Visit us with wisdom and with poise to face the days ahead!