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…”