Prompt Entry #2: My Riparian Home

The adopted son of a divorced couple, I always felt rootless. I’m not saying that I had a bad childhood by any means, or wanted to find my birth parents. I was well-loved, provided a nurturing environment, yet I never felt as if I settled into the earth like my mom, who lived only a mile from my grandparents, had. Maybe it was because I didn’t have a relationship with my dad, didn’t get to know his family (my family) who lived 3,000 miles away on the West Coast. Maybe it was because I lived more in books, not in Halifax, and I dreamed of places conjured out of words. Whatever the reason, I felt as if I were rootless: a seed  capable of roots, but one that has yet to find suitable soil.

My idealism and fantastic bent led me to believe that I was a dandelion seed or a fungi spore: light, easily caught by the wind to travel across vast landscapes before taking hold, colonizing new lands. I imagined that I would have been a Neolithic hunter, following the ice sheets across the northern Atlantic to America. Or one of Leif Erikson’s band, wintering on Newfoundland’s shores. Or a frontiersman, a hunter or trapper or subsistence farmer settling further West.

Little did I know that I was really only a maple seed, falling not far from my homeland, taking root in common soil. I have not lived anywhere other than central Pennsylvania; it’s pastoral rolling Appalachians proving too difficult for me to cross permanently, though I have wandered beyond. Yet, I have come to realize that, in a way, I am still nomad, Viking, and settler. All of these peoples lived on the borderlands of their existence. They edged upon the wild, yet clung to and fed off their connections to the small, fringe communities.

For me, each place that I have called home—Halifax, Lock Haven, McAlisterville—have been the fringe of my existence. There are no more true frontiers but a country life, past the frontiers of our suburban civilization. I live in a riparian zone, of sorts. Along the line between rural and wooded lands. A place where people still toil an existence out of the earth, where they find recreation under the shade of a hillside of trees. This has been the type of soil I have found best suited for me, though the particular place has changed.  It is this blurring of boundaries that has made me who I am.

Such land has circumscribed my life. My childhood home sat at the end of a line of ranchers and split-levels, the vestiges of small development boom in Halifax. Beyond our yard lay field after field, rotated yearly between corn and beans and hay, dissected by lines of feral trees and thickets. Beyond the fields: Peter’s Mountain, wooded and seemingly ancient and wild. When you crossed over it in the fall, you could see hints of an old stone retention wall that had once held up the dirt wagon road that lead to the city markets in Harrisburg.

But if you stayed within the valley—Powell’s Valley—you would travel along Peter’s Mountain in land much like that behind my house. Fields, hollows, a vein of trees crowded around the banks of Powell’s Creek. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the valley narrowed—the fields hemmed into smaller plots, the farm houses becoming trailers, becoming hunting cabins—until you were entirely in the woods where the folds of two or three mountains knotted together.

Our land was a microcosm of the larger landscape. A triangular wedge of farmland abutted one of our property boundaries. White pines defined another, planted by my dad before the divorce as a wind and noise barrier. These two defining features intersected at the most distant corner of our two acres, where we dumped brush, dead leaves, and grass clippings. Right by this convergence, a path opened up in one of the field’s tree-lines, where the farmer moved his equipment from one crop to the next. It was a gate, an invitation, into the wildest place we knew.

My brother, Jared, and I learned to bike in the tractor ruts left behind in dried-up mud. We climbed those trees—sugar maples, chestnut oak, birch—swung from the vines that clung to them with the grasp of desperate beggars.  We monkey crawled under rusted barbed-wire fence. In the summer, we dared each other to eat the husks of cicada nymphs that hung to the bark; in winter, we tracked the prints of “wild game”: rabbits, grouse, the neighbors’ cats.

Once, when I was playing basketball up on our driveway court, Jared came running up to fetch me.

“Come on, I’ve got something to show you in the woods,” he said.

I ran to follow him, but his excitement drove him past the first tree-line behind our house, through the next field, and down into a smaller hollow of trees beyond where we only occasionally went to swing from vines. I saw him dive under a net of intertwining green briar. I followed, ripping my shorts on the needle sharp branches. In a small opening, my brother huddled over something with a stick in hand. When I finally crawled back to him, I could see it was a small animal trap, a perfect circle of teeth with a tongue-like trigger protruding from the center.

“Watch this.” His eyes gleamed, but his hand didn’t shake. He touched the tongue of the trap with the sick and it instantly snapped down, splintering the twig into a thousand pieces. As he tried to reset the trap, the spring jerked it loose from his grip, the teeth chattered shut.

I thought he had lost a finger, but he felt around, counting each knuckle and nail. No blood, he looked over his shoulder and just grinned at me: “What do you think we can catch?”

Looking back now, I realize that this borderland playground was like a basic training for us. Literally for Jared, who would eventually sign up with the Army to become a Ranger. But for me, it taught me that I had to dig my fingers into the dirt of life—to feel it, to smell and even taste it—in order to have an intimate knowledge of it.

The fields and woods were also a window into a world I couldn’t completely understand. I couldn’t understand the divorce; I was too young. I couldn’t put a name on the nausea I felt in my stomach when my dad came around. For my older, more conscious brother, I’m sure it was rage. But for me, it was a mixture of absence and longing. So when my brother and I were running mazes through the corn, I would veer off path, move to the edge of the field, when my dad came to visit our younger sister. I was angry, but it wasn’t until years later when I finally reconciled with my dad that I realized I was more angry at my sister (or more accurately at my sister’s innocence). I was angry that she didn’t remember the court rooms, the psychologists, the years of holidays where we tried to meet on middle grounds that eventually turned into battle grounds. Yet, I also peered out my window frame of corn stalks wishing that I could be back in the yard there with them, learning to ride my bike again, learning to throw a Frisbee again, learning to hit a baseball again, with the help of my dad.

This riparian zone of my life, though, was not just school yard and retreat, it ended up being salvation. Along another fringe—the hinterlands of industrialization of Lock Haven, which juxtaposed Sproul, Tiadaghton, and Tioga State Forests—I explored a deeper wood. I learned an ethic, the Bubba and Buddha of Leave No Trace. I learned that I could stay longer, carry my life with me into the woods. And that if I tread softly, earth could rebound gracefully, pardoning each step with time.  I studied ecosystems as a hobby, words as a profession. I became part of the pattern of insect, fish, and water, and found out that no matter how gorged a trout became on mayflies (or cicadas! which I never had the guts to eat myself), there were thousands more to produce thousands more. I found a wholeness and a forgiveness that I didn’t know before, which led me back to my dad.

We reconciled during a late winter hike down a switchback in the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. And as a forester by profession, he took me deeper into the understanding of my world—on more hikes, kayak trips, or fishing excursions. Yet, our growing bond reminded me to always come back to the world of humanity, because while trees and fish were valuable to the world inherently, what value did they have to the spirit if you couldn’t weigh their lessons against the measure of human relationships.

I live in another borderland now. A field of beans in my backyard last summer. The view of a wooded ridge on all sides of the horizon. I hope that by landing here, taking root, my own seed—my two daughters—can find the beauty of both worlds. The world without and within; the wild and the cultivated. Much to the chagrin of my wife, I believe it’s taking hold in my oldest, now three. As she will slosh through a stream, or make mudpies with bare hands, or (as she did last night) flop into a fresh, slushy snow in just canvas shoes, leggings, and a winter coat that exposes her belly, just to make a snow angel.

While I haven’t fallen far from my parental limbs, I have found suitable ground to dig in my roots. I have found a home that was always there, and that I know is elsewhere, too, anywhere there are the edges of field and forest.

Place Post # 2: Why a Lost Creek?

When I first moved to Juniata County Pennsylvania, I was a little disheartened. While there was plenty of warm water fishing on the Juniata River ten minutes away, I had no quick access to a good trout stream.

My passion for the previous decade had been fly fishing. Each of the places I had lived in for those ten years were near good trout waters. I had lived in my hometown of Halifax for two years before this move, which was near an oasis in the midst of Harrisburg’s suburban sprawl: Clark’s Creek. Clark’s, in Dauphin, was a trout haven because of man’s encroachment; the small reservoir formed by Dehart Dam stayed chilled in its lower strata, and then the bottom-released effluent kept the creek a consistent 50-55 degrees for a couple of miles downstream, in the hottest summer months or the during the coldest winter freeze.

Before that, when I lived in Clinton County, I was 15 to 30 minutes away from the best limestone streams in the state. Fishing Creek and Spring Creek both bounded out of the ground from springs in the spongy limestone topography. Limestone was formed from the shells of ancient crustaceans that swam in the shallow sea that covered much of the eastern US before the Appalachians were formed from the slamming of our continent into Africa, Spain, and the British Isles. Ironically, this rock born from the sea is water solvent. So in a landscape of limestone, streams often disappear into sinkholes only to reappear out of springs or caves at full force. This water is also kept at a consistent 50-55 degrees because it is insulated by the earth, much like the artificial “spring” made by Dehart Dam and the insulation of the top strata of water.

So during my time in Lock Haven and Halifax, I learned that these cold water ecosystems are the best environment for trout, and consequently the best environment for fly fishing. The consistent temperatures that didn’t fluctuate allowed microscopic plants to thrive, which feeds the aquatic invertebrates like mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies, as well as small minnows and crayfish: i.e. trout food! Also, these types of environments seemed to be free of pollution because limestone often negates the effects of acidity and nutrient super-saturation (the worst pollutants of PA), or because we humans don’t want pollution in our drinking water supply. Truly, I was in trout heaven for the past ten years.

So when I moved to Juniata County, I repeat, I was disheartened. Again, there was bass fishing, and a number of stocked trout streams, but stocked streams are stocked for a reason: fish can’t survive in those streams year round. This is usually because of temperature flux, which means that there are fewer flies native to the streams, which means that even what trout fishing I could find would not be good fly fishing. But I held on to hope, which lay within a thin green line of a Class A Wild Trout Stream on the Fish and Boat online county map: Lost Creek.

As soon as I moved to McAlisterville, the town nearest Lost Creek, I became fascinated with the possibility of a “Lost Creek”. Why was it “lost”? I wondered. Could it be limestone? Did it duck into some sinkhole as it came out of the mountain, lost to the world until it popped up from some hidden spring? I studied maps, which supported my theory. The Fish and Boat Commission maps highlighted the creek with a broken line. It appeared to skip down off of the side of Shade Mountain, get “lost” around Rt. 235, but again reappear near Mountain Road. Also, a map from the PA Geological Survey showed that my valley was partially formed with limestone bedrock. Potential.

Yet, the few times that I could get out to fish it, Lost Creek lost my interests. I only caught a few small (4 inches or less) wild brown trout and one larger stocked brownie. Other than that it was chub water, and I made a killing on chubs. (For those of you who know nothing about fishing, chubs are a creek minnow of little game value, even for the catch and release fisherman like myself.) Plus, one temperature reading I took in the meadow I fished read near 80 degrees in midsummer. Not really hospitable for trout.

Yet, I still had hope. With the recent cold snap in the northeast, most of our waterways have seized up with ice. Even the mighty Susquehanna had parts frozen from bank to bank. But the fact that I saw moving water in last week’s excursion so far downstream led me to believe that there was some spring influence. All I had to do was follow the length of the creek and find a place where the it flowed free of ice, most likely a deep hole, still and wide, where springs could seep up into the main steam.

So, in my Jeep, I headed out along Mountain Road, along that gap in the map. It was 17 degrees, snow and ice clung to everything. A crust had coagulated on the still fields of white. Here, I don’t even find tracks of animals; every living thing seems to have retired to winter dens. The road doesn’t follow right along the creek, so I have to zig-zag on a couple of side roads to cross over bridges. Unfortunately, what I do find is ice covered currents, even thicker that I saw last week. If there was spring influence, it was below the four mile stretch of creek I pseudo-explored this week by car.

So, I am lost. Still unsure about this creek, my home—wondering where I’ll find a refuge from the stresses of my life. I do have hope, but lies in a stocking truck and the stubby-finned raceway trout. Unless, that is, I find something between Mountain and Ridge Roads that is miraculous.

Prompt Entry #1: Borders

Prompt #1:

The landscape that birthed me, nurtured me: a borderland. Halifax. We were at the upper limits of drivable distance to Harrisburg, the State Capital, so we were a commuter town. Yet, we were not suburbs. My own home also sat along the edge of a border: we were the last house in a chain of houses built between the 60’s and the 80’s. The unfinished development hooked in an “L” shape around the front edge of a farm. It was in these fields that I grew up. Following my brother into the fields and the trees and gullies that formed barriers between corn and beans and wheat, we played war, swung from vines, picked wild black cherries that were more of a novelty than a treat due to their sourness.

As we got older, though, our landscape became the macadam. Living in a rural area, we had to drive to see friends or go to practices or to just get out of the house—the yard and the fields were no longer big enough for us. We drove out to the Ponds: either the Wertz’s pond where we played euchre until early morning or the Laudenslager’s, a farm drainage pond dyed aqua-marine by chemicals to kill the bacteria washing in from the fields, where we’d jump off of their 20 ft.-high platform.

My neighbors, and everyone in the valley was a neighbor, were pleasant people. They knew your name, your parents’ names, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and distant relatives that were married to their brother’s cousin’s uncle. “Oh yeah,” they’d say, “she was a Fetterhof before she married your great-uncle Harry.” I, a prodigal son from birth, was horrible at names and forgot most of what was said to me, and often even the person’s name with whom I was speaking. They were walled within the valley, knew everything about their home. I wanted to push beyond those borders.

Eventually, the valleys and those people were not enough for us (and us was no longer just big brother and me, but a tight-knit group of friends that I still keep in contact with today). We left the valleys and headed up into the mountains. It wasn’t much of a wilderness, but it was a world away for us. Mostly driving, we pushed our borders further, higher into the mountains, as high as the dwarfed Pennsylvanian Appalachians can go. We blurred the lines of intellect and experience, mostly with beer, but also with conversation and exploration into the “backcountry” if you could call it that. We found dirt roads that we imagined were blazed by frontiersmen or natives. We waded through springs to find lost keys, not realizing that we were being baptized in the name of the land.

We had to drift apart, however, which, finally breaking my dependency on friends for experience, is when I really began to have “a genuine experience” with nature. At Lock Haven, I mountain biked throughout Bald Eagle and Sproul State Forests, I canoed and kayaked down through Pine Creek (the PA Grand Canyon), I learned to fly fish and plucked planks of trout from beneath Hemlock in limestone valleys or in the hollows of tiny mountain streams. It was alone, in the woods or stream, where I formed new bonds—with myself—grew confident in my own voice, and spoke (for the first time) not just to prove that I had something worthy of attention. I circumscribed my own boundaries. I let my silent words echo in my skull as I waded upstream or hiked the next ridge, sometimes releasing them into the wind or water.

*             *             *

Once, I fished on Slate Run with my father (which is like being alone because he, as one who spent his life in the woods as a forester, is a quiet and solitary man when among trees). This is a fairly wild area, and a doe stumbled straight down stream toward us. She lost her footing in the hole that we were fishing, and swam directly toward me. I sat quietly on a log on the north bank, and the deer swam within two feet of my dangling boots before looking me squarely in the eyes. She then turned around and swam toward my dad, who was sitting on the hill opposite the creek from me, trying on a fly. The doe must not have seen him because she ran within inches of his legs before tearing off, 45 degrees to his left, up the hill.

We never really talk about that moment, and what it meant to us, though I know it meant as much to him as it does to me. It’s not really one of those experiences I talk about when describing my adventures in the wild either because everything else seems less weighty to me. It's a border I've crossed, into a spiritual territory I don't completely understand.

Every now and then, though, I will say to my dad, “Remember that deer on Slate Run…”

He just replies, “Never in all my years…”

Place Entry #1: Finding Lost Creek

I turn off Jericho Road onto Ridge Road in Fermanagh Township, Juniata County. The road—mud and rock, pockmarked and rutted out by truck tires—winds along the edge of a field on my right, which is clipped short like the spikey hair of a Caucasian flattop. On my left, a hedgerow. Barbed-wire weaves through the vegetation, is tied to posts camouflaged by the brush.  Trees, once saplings scraping the edge of the fence’s claw, have now completely swallowed steel. More threatening than man’s barbs, thickets of green briar, now burgundy with loss of chlorophyll, seems to add highlights of blood to the landscape. Between the hedgerow and a gently arching hill, a small tributary creek meanders through sporadic cattail reeds and deciduous trees that I can’t identify when leafless. The trib, as I am, works its way down to Lost Creek.

Ice clings to the banks of the creek proper, and at some of the slowest pools, it seizes the entire flow. Yet, the current runs freely through the riffles and, at times, down the middle of the creek. The water is clear enough to see down to the cobbled bottom; nothing moves. Anchor ice is forming on the rocks beneath, choking the creek from top and bottom.

This is what I came here expecting to find. I came looking for death. Trying to force its presence out of nature’s metaphor like so many people before me, trying to fashion my own mythology: the barren tree, frozen water. I hoped to trace the cycle of life of this creek in the year to come, explore the symbolism of its name, as I walk its banks throughout the seasons. But it isn’t that clear cut.

Throughout the field, down to the creek and across the ice: tracks. Deer, rabbit, a myriad of birds, raccoons (maybe), and the possibility of tracks I can’t identify like coyote and bobcat. Here or there, the snow is dug up, a snout having rooted for seeds or grubs. Beyond the creek, I see rabbit tracks zig-zagging in what must have been evasive maneuvers, but I can’t distinguish any tracks that would have chased it. And then I can’t deny the signs of human life: a road is plowed and treaded by tires, an SUV is parked at a cabin that overlooks the creek.

I park at a pull around and get out to walk along the edge of the ice. I follow some tracks until they run out of land and across ice of the creek (or turn around, lost in the collage of other tracks). Here the creek bends easterly, running into a mass of land that is not quite cliff yet steeper than bank. The cabin’s deck reaches out to the edge of land overhead. Hemlocks sharply contrast the other leafless trees with its bluish-green winter foliage. This grove shades the creek, which, here, is fully iced. I place a foot on the ice, and it creaks under my weight. I don’t go further and draw back, knowing that another step could be disastrous.

As I retreat back to my car, I realize that’s what I’ve found on Lost Creek today. This landscape, this season, is not death, but life in retreat, a response of life to potential death. Everything—the trees, the wildlife—the creek pulls back, holds its breath, in one communal sucking in of life.

I too pull back: back to my car, my house, my life. Right now, I have to retreat within to survive the wintry responsibilities of work and school. I can’t stay out now, but can’t wait to return.