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.