Up Toward Ohio Pyle Park

Last Friday we took a long, long drive up toward Ohio Pyle Park so Martin could purchase his Rock-Collecting Permit. Ten tons of rocks from State Forests for five dollars a ton! Not a bad price, really, if you love collecting rocks. More about that later.

The drive started beautifully, dipped into Ugly and stayed Ugly for a while. But then Beauty rewarded us for enduring dreariness as we climbed in altitude--hills lush with rhododendron, ornamental pear trees still blazing orange, running fences and horse farms.

After a brief stop at the Park Office, where Martin obtained his rock-collecting permit (first one ever issued) and the girls flirted with a huge statue of Smoky the Bear, we drove a short way to Lynn State Park where we piled out of the car for our mile hike past Lynn Falls. Seemed as if it would be a simple hike until we realized that the thick carpet of leaves hid jagged rocks. We held the two little ones, since every time they began running they fell flat on their faces. Near the end of our hike, Elspeth chanted from my hip: "Stumble, trip! Stumble, trip! Stone man! Stone man!" I joggled over and around all the hidden rocks. As we hiked the light shifted through Canadian hemlocks, delicate fans of needles like frost patterns. The light began to take on a wintry quality as the sun fell. Underneath the leaves and among the rocks we saw thousands of acorns with hats lying askew. What lazy squirrels had missed these riches?

Occasionally, a crashing in the brush would make me look up for another human or a deer, but a little striped back would disappear over a rock--all that noise from a chipmunk! I wanted the children to see the little chaps but they moved too quickly and the children were too loud.

Night was falling quickly as we drove back toward home. Running colonial-style fences, constructed of crudely hewn black lumber, fenced in a field of dun colored sheep. On the hill behind them, black cows grazed; behind them hills rose, covered in bare armed trees against a the bright pink streaks of sunset. Trees arched over the dipping roads as we passed old stone farmhouses, bright red barns. A man outside his door stretched his arms out as if he were welcoming the warm evening.

And then we were back to Ugly again--bars and roadhouses forced us to stop at Wendy's, where we grudgingly ate our junky food under blue and red balloons given to our children by a clown dressed up with fake eyebrows and perky braids as Wendy. I glanced up from my bacon cheeseburger to see a giant cheeseburger passing by the window on the side of a semi.

Ugly shook us into Eerie as we drove by the powerplant with its huge towers white against the night sky, billows of white steam chugging from gaping mouths. We looked at a city of lights and electric spikes so close we could have tossed our giant Wendy's diet coke cup over the fence.

Ugly, Beautiful, Eerie, Exhilarating and Sad. That's our piece of America, rural coal mining country. Today as Martin collected ancient rocks covered in moss, he listened to the sounds of mining across the street, looked up to see the twisted stumps of recently felled trees and the deep tire tracks of excavators that bare mountains to dirt.

Post script:
That Friday night a magnet from the Forestry office, discarded on Martin's bedside table, advised me to "Get My Smoky On." What does this mean?