Familiarity and Sunlight

I was sitting in the banker's office when I realized I had forgotten my wallet -- my big trip to the county seat for the week, estate matters to settle and funds to juggle and affidavits to sign, and me with no I.D.

But this is a small town, and the bank is locally owned, everybody smiling and helpful and asking about the grandkids. All sums were handled and papers notarized without a break in talk about family and friends. I wouldn't call it small.

The sun was shining. When I got home, the dogs were elated to see me, the grass was greener, and coltsfoot was blooming in the berms. Even the tracks in the corn stubble made by the farmer's spreader going over the hill looked good, pleasing me more than raked sand in a Zen garden.

The woman at the trust office had told me how happy she was to have moved back into the old family farmhouse in Upper Turkeyfoot, home for her clan for five generations. "Isn't this a great place to live?" she said. And it is.

A visit to the bank is not famous for lifting your spirits, but this one did. Thing is, it's not even my bank. But it will be.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Isler's Run

The cold makes your bones ache, but you have to do it.

You have to plunge your hand into the clear, powerful water coming off the mountain over big stones still with the winter in them.

Isler's Run charges under the Great Allegheny Passage near Markleton (MP 50) not long before it empties into the Casselman River. You can see it from the bridge where the hard road crosses next to the post office.

The Casselman empties into the Youghiogheny River at Confluence (MP 62). The Youghiogheny empties into the Monongahela River at McKeesport (MP 132). And the Monongahela joins the Allegheny to form the Ohio River at Point State Park (MP149) in Pittsburgh. When the last few miles of the GAP are finished, you'll be able to hike or ride your bike the whole way, usually with the water in sight. For now, the continuous trail ends in Duquesne (MP 135) in the heart of the Mon Valley, once world famous as the Valley of Steel.

A footpath through native hemlocks leads from the Markleton trailhead parking lot to Isler's Run. At the end of March it stampedes through the rhododendron like wild horses, muscular, shaking the ground, manes flying.

In any month, it takes your breath away.

copyright 2010 J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Days Away from Ramps

A cold, fine rain slants in from the northeast, laving dormancy. It blackens the woods where the crowns show ruddy now with budding. The maples are about to bloom.

We're in the seam, the cloth of the year where the seasons are stitched together: ice on the stones in the morning and coltsfoot opening by noon; robins spearing worms in the grass, and juncos as yet with no immediate intention of heading for the Arctic Circle.

Mountain streams run strong in April. The cold, clean water just right for native brook trout. We are blessed with a few such streams in Upper Turkeyfoot, sought out by purest anglers who's biggest thrill is to drop a hand-tied fly onto a small, clear pool and watch the slender brookie rise with intent.

In the woods, heart-shaped leaves of violets are greening the path, and I find myself looking for the first rolled spears of ramps, the wild leeks of the Appalachians, pushing up through the leafmat (none yet, shown above on 4/11/09).

One of the first edible plants in the woods each spring, the emergence of ramps touches off small, scattered celebrations all over the mountains.  Folks around here love to pack up a few cold ones and plunk themselves down where the ramps grow, pulling the slender, pungent white bulb out of the dark loam, wiping it clean, and biting it off up to the red, followed by a deep swig. It is mandatory when ramps are eaten, all partake. With ramps on everyone's breath, no one is offended.

Some towns stage ramp festivals. Decades ago, one enterprising newspaper editor in West Virginia made himself famous with the U.S. Postal Service by have a chemist friend concoct an ink additive that mimicked the smell, and printed his paper with it.

His idea was that the odor, offensive to some, would be a nostalgic reminder for readers who had left the mountains to seek their fortune. It was, but it also touched off a paroxysm of indignation in reeking mailrooms all over the country. The editor, to keep his mailing priviledges, was forced to sign a legal document promising not to do that again. "We are the only newspaper in the free world legally obligated not to stink," he liked to say.

So, I don't mind the 30-degree rain. I'm thinking of ramps, an acquired taste, perhaps. But I've acquired it, and it won't be long.

copyright 2010, J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

What the River Says

The river runs just behind the post office. You hear it over all else, an envelope of sound that scrubs the senses and awakens the spirit.

Markleton is a string of a dozen houses on one side of the tracks or the other, either between the river and the rails or the rails and the mountain. There are few houses and sheds, too, on the other side of the bridge. That would be Greater Markleton. Everything is linear in the Casselman River gorge.

There used to be a railroad on both sides of the water. But the tracks across the way were abandoned decades ago, and now that is the Great Allegheny Passage, and you can park your truck near the boat ramp, unload your bike, and pedal all the way to D.C.

Georgetown is a world away. Especially with the water sound over stones that leaves you listening to your own thoughts.

Poetry does that, too, if we give it a chance, give it the time we need to absorb it, those few lines where every syllable counts, a chance to see if they touch something in us, stir some memory, become something only we can understand. That's what makes it art.

A few lines of William Stafford's come to mind, altered slightly for our purposes:

ASK ME
Sometimes when the river is fast ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life...
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the river and wait. There
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the moment exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Deeper than Expected

I'll make this brief. I've been riding in old, thick snow, and I am psychologically damaged. More than before, I mean.

I had a plan. I am goal oriented. I gave up.

Yesterday, close to the Eastern Continental Divide, the highest point on the Great Allegheny Passage, the trail was good, mostly firm, with a few remnants of the deepest drifts still lying about, but easily avoided, or plunged through for the fun of it. We opened the Big Savage Tunnel yesterday and considered the thru-trekking season officially underway.

But today I hopped onto the trail in Markleton and headed east toward Rockwood. Between MP 46 and 45, my shoes full of wet ice and my thighs numb, I turned around. You can see why. Note the bike standing without assistance.

To me, this should come as no surprise. The day I moved in to Somerset County decades ago I carried my few possessions in cardboard boxes through waist-deep snow. That was in March. And Marches have keep me guessing every since. The picture at right, taken last week, is typical. I used both machines on the same day.

Yet it might surprise you to know winter is my favorite season. There's a tranquility to winter in the mountains, a spareness missing in balmier days.

And even though I had to cut my ride short, there were these uplifting scenes from the last of the season. What's left of it continues to melt. Even between Markleton and Rockwood, the trail should be passable this weekend.

There will likely be another snowfall here before the middle of April, and I plan to enjoy it while I can. I'm in no rush for the seasons to change. One winter closer to our last, you know? Besides, a guy can get spoiled having the trail to himself. Peace heals.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Men Open Big Savage Tunnel

They took off their work gloves and sat on the benches they had carried out of the tunnel to the edge of the trail, enjoying the view.

"Cumberland lies behind the gap there," one said to grunts of affirmation. "And behind that is West Virginia. You can see three states from here."

These half dozen men in a spring ritual had just opened both ends of the 3,300-foot Big Savage Tunnel, one of the wonders of the Great Allegheny Passage that runs uninterrupted from Duquesne, PA, just outside of Pittsburgh, to Cumberland, MD, where it connects to the C&O Canal Towpath and takes you all the way to Georgetown.

The tunnel is closed each December with an ingenious system of aluminum doors to protect the portals from freezing, a precaution. As one trail builder often says, "We don't have another $12 million to do it again."

A cool wind blew through the mountain. Turkey vultures rode thermals across the Mason-Dixon Line.

"When the train (Western Maryland Scenic Railroad) steams up to Frostburg," says one. "You can watch its smoke the whole way up the valley." Nods all around.

"Ride your bike all the way to D.C.," says another, marveling.

They all know that. But they can't get over it.

...and in a matter of minutes: Kurt Detwiler of Frostburg, first rider through in 2010.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Moon on the Ground

The stones remain. I piled them where I stood to remind me.

I had been writing at the cabin in the woods, struggling for hours with a few simple lines, putting in a comma, taking it out again, like that. When you believe in an economy of words, every mark on the page counts. I had stopped for the day, packed up my notebooks, and was headed back to the house in the dusk, preoccupied. And there it was: the moon on the ground.

What had stopped me in my tracks was a reflection on a vernal pool. The moon had just cleared the treetops. But eyes down, I saw it on the water first, and for an instant, this was the moon, there was no other.

For a moment I had entered a different reality. It took no effort. I stood for a moment looking back and forth from the moon in the sky to the moon in the pool, and I tried to recapture the belief in the reflection, the acceptance of the abstract, but could not. I had come to my senses. But I marked the spot with a field stone cairn to remind me of what is possible.

I passed that spot again today. A soft rain walked across the hill, more seen against the black trees than felt. There was no moon. But there was.

           Proof

Moon on the ground

after the icicle days

after the sugar snow

after the organ pipes

fall from the eaves

moon on the ground

after the feathers of hoarfrost

drop from the stems

after the wreckage of birds

after the voles and the thaw

moon on the ground

after the commonplace doubt

after the atman lies pooled

after the rain on the fields

moon on the ground.

                 copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Early Spring Passage of Thrills

There were two other tracks besides the ones I was making, so I knew I wasn't the first person bicycling this stretch of the Great Allegheny Passage since the snow melted. Most of it, that is.

One of those riders was brave enough to pedal through the occasional island of what I would describe as snowcone base. He had made it easier for me. But mostly, the trail was firm, fun, and easy.

Or it was until I turned around after nine miles to head back to the Subaru and realized I had been riding with a tailwind. Nothing like the wind on your chest to make a little softness and the slightest grade feel like you're pushing through modeling clay.

But once I crossed Pinkerton High Bridge and hit the bypass around the horn, the going was sweet.The shoofly was resurfaced last year with crushed Loyalhanna limestone, ideal for a trail surface as it packs hard and drains well. You notice the difference immediately when you roll onto the bypass at either end. It's called the by-pass, by the way, because it goes

around the slowly-collapsing, dangerous, $5-million-to-fix-and-therefore-closed Pinkerton Tunnel, an 800 foot shortcut through the mountain. In this setting, who wants a shortcut, anyway? The 1.45-mile round-about seems just right to me.

I am the adoptive uncle of this stretch of the GAP, from Markleton to Fort Hill, site of two increasingly famous New Age vortexes, a mysterious blending of natural and some like to think supernatural forces creating positive energy and good will for all who visit. Tea Baggers should do a bus trip, but nevermind.

I am here to report my section of trail is fair to good, and eminently passable if you're willing to duck under a huge fallen poplar with steep banks on both sides, one up and one down toward the green-and-white torrent that is the Casselman River in March. I'll call the county in the morning, and I'm sure they'll bring a lumberjack chain saw and clear the way very soon. Only once in nine miles did I have to walk my bike through a few yards of deep snow, and that should be gone by Wednesday.

I also wish to report I saw a black squirrel,
a big deer with a chest like Bruno Sammartino that ran straight at me for a startling instant, and I saw an osprey.

First I found what is surely the osprey's favorite perch on the hand railing of High Bridge over the river where it's not hard to tell she rests often and looks upstream with her tail over the deck.

Then I saw the fish hawk herself, first as a shadow across me, then as a white-breasted, eye-lined, long-winged, glider complete with the necklace that distinguishes the female -- another thrilling encounter, before she disappeared behind the wooded hill, following the water.

And finally I saw what I would identify as three new-agers with great puffs of humidified hair, loose blanket-like clothing, and tall walking sticks, making a pilgrimage to the nearest vortex in varying states of bliss.

Back at the gravel parking lot, a Toyota with Delaware plates sat reassuringly close to the Soob.

Didn't I tell you we're becoming famous?

Just wait until May. We'll need a translator.

Is this Allegheny Passage Great, or what?

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Our Sanest Hours

We wake up one morning in March to a soft rain and birdsong and the greener grass, and we don't need CNN to tell us a new era has come.

There is life in the withered field and the bare twigs, and the days shall not be as they have been.

It's been happening by degrees, of course -- the florets of goldenrod and asters alive under the snow, the fiddleheads of ferns rolled tight in their sheaths under a mache of last year's leaves ready to rise (shown in May), buds on the trees waiting to swell -- yet it seems sudden, and we realize that is because we haven't been paying attention: change never stops.

Scattered islands of snow remain in these mountains, especially on the north-facing slopes of woods, and against them where the drifts were deepest. Steam rises there, seen against the wet black trunks. We hear the robins peep (they do not arrive with song) and the blackbirds gurglee, and most thrilling of all, the bluebirds trill, and it makes the world more habitable.

Music encourages life. Thoreau imagined birdsong awakens the green world.

"These notes of the earliest birds seem to invite forth vegetation," he wrote in his journal in 1858. "No doubt the plants concealed in the earth hear them and rejoice. They wait for this assurance."

It is as if we never heard them before.

"Each new year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence... reminiscences of our sanest hours.

"The voice of nature is always encouraging."

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Emergence into Festival

A ride to Meyersdale for the Pennsylvania Maple Festival is a spring rite.

Conducted by the citizens of this quiet mountain town along the Great Allegheny Passage near the Maryland border for four generations, it starts gently and picks up steam, reaching a full boil by the second weekend.

Folks are happy to leave their hibernaculums and stand blinking in the sunshine on the flattened grass.

I walked around doing a little blinking myself, ate a stack of pancakes sweetened with the local product, and drove back over the mountain to tend to my own operation. In the process I learned that maple water should be boiled to a temperature of 219 degrees to make it syrup that won't spoil. Either that or to a weight of 11 pounds/gallon.

I tap a few trees every March, using a 3/8" bit (at a slight upward angle) and pushing in a spile cut from an elderberry bush with the pith pushed out. I also learned that the tree heals itself within six weeks after you pull out the spile.

And I learned that I could have picked up a handful of walnuts that the red squirrels hadn't plucked from the yard, entered them on a picnic plate, and maybe won second prize.

If you like Americana, old-time music, and maple syrup, visit. You'll talk about it all week.

Click on any of the pictures for a little better view.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Well, it's a 'Boom,' afterall

Running after sunset, venus in its place above the indigo ridge, I hear geese arriving, but I can't see them.

No traffic sounds from the hard road behind the hill. A Saturday evening lull. I hear the sounds of my own breathing. Deep in the valley two miles away, I hear the rush of the creek.

I cherish the quiet. Sometimes when my son leaves, I'll sit at the top of the field and wait to hear him crossing the steel grate over the Laurel Hill Creek -- the singing bridge, some call it.

Sound travels a long way on a still country night, better when there's vapor in the air. When I hear the train whistle from the next valley over, for example, I know rain is coming tomorrow.

It may not always be so. Last summer, a few weeks after the "thumper"

trucks paraded down the roads and the first gas well was drilled on a neighboring farm a mile to the east as the crow flies, I could hear the drone of engines rise and fall, and I could hear the clanging, like a long chain slapping against a steel pipe -- none of it loud enough to keep me awake, really, but I knew it was there, and I'd listen for it. Nights here, you understand, are so quiet you can hear the surge of your own pulse.

On the front page of the local paper today, it appears staffers had been invited on a tour of a showcase drilling site -- good PR, I'm sure Chief Oil & Gas of Dallas, Texas, had figured, and maybe it was, until nearby residents stopped to complain.

"You hear the yelling and the clanging," said a woman who lives a few hundred yards away and stopped to talk to the reporter. "It just gets louder and louder all night long."

A neighbor, who had signed a lease, said she had so many vibrations she had to take pictures off the walls.

"It's been miserable," she said. "It wears you down. The saddest thing is that it turns neighbors against neighbors."

Yet the drilling is temporary. The hydraulic fracturing, called "fracking," comes next, and that's louder still -- three to five million gallons of water trucked in, mixed with toxic fracturing solution (containing benzene and hydrochloric acid, among other frights) and sand, and pumped two miles into the ground, then a mile out horizontally in several directions to open up the shale and release the gas. Only 600,000 gallons or so comes back out of the well, deadly stuff, and is stored in temporary ponds until it can be trucked out to authorized treatment plants, some of which have yet to be built.

The noise and the truck traffic and the general hubbub are short-term, even if all that lasts for years, and it could. The real worry is the poisons that stay in the ground. They cannot be deep enough to ease my mind. But then, I'm the guy who stays awake listening to his own heart.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Blue Highway

Driving the two-lane is a good way to think. Especially if you have been conducting business all day by phone and by Internet, worshiping at the feet of Plutus by wire and by satellite.

A shower and a clean shirt order the mind. And when you pull out between the hemlocks and pick up speed on the hard road, casting a long, fast shadow over the reviving land, the piebald hills streaming past you on either side, it feels celebratory.

You pop a CD into the player, and scene after scene plays out around you in the low, strong light to the thumping groove of The Kings of Leon, the soaring tenor, the brave chorus, the youthful American angst. Life is good with spring so near, even sweet, as you glide the 15 miles into town in a flow without interruption, one of the blessings of rural living.

The sun has dropped behind the ridge, and the icy lights of the resort bristle on the darkening slope. But here along the state road, fields and woods, houses and the barns that remain are awash in a golden glow. Two pairs of ducks head north in silhouette, a parallelogram of fluttering tenpins against Wedgewood blue. Neighbors neaten their yards, picking up windfall and carrying it to the fire, a good time to burn now, with the ground still wet and last year's leaves just beginning to lift. Plumes of smoke rise in the cool calm of Daylight Saved, standing on the landscape like giant seahorses with their tails in a circle of stones and their heads in the sky.

No matter how many times we see it, sundown always fills us with wonder. Even a dying man, it is said, will admire the beauty of sunset, perhaps having all the more reason to do so.

Yes, we are one sunset closer to our last. But there is this one, and we are in it, driving through it on our way to town, and to good company, and a warm meal, and a few pleasant, sunstruck faces we know well, all the more grateful for being.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

Ridge to Ridge

Down into the shadowed valley,
the creek still high and fast with melt,
the big oak by the bridge
dragging its hand in brown water,
and up the other side, steep enough
that we drive into the evening sky,
clear and glowing from its base,
a Maxfield Parrish twilight,
nature imitating art, clear
but for the trails of jets crossing
under the cradle of the moon
and shaded round by the pinks
of sunset on their bottoms
and on their backs the blues
of an ageless universe,
long tubes of exhaust in a grid
where men have flown,
speeding to do business
and speeding home
to what matters most,
while some us have never left,
traveling the same road
we traveled yesterday,
living in a deeper channel,
happy to think so.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved

In a Rush of Light and Song

The cloudsheet that has covered these hills through the longest nights has been dragged off to sea by the path of the planet, uncovering the snowy woods and the buried fields to the influences of sun and birdsong.

Peace may come dropping slow, to quote Yeats the day after St. Patrick's Day, but in these mountains, spring comes rising fast.

Snow slid off the corrugated roof of the garage last week like the down comforter off the bed. The drifts reduced, and we could see where the rabbits have fed on bark and be reminded all summer just how deep it was.

The snow pack slinks off into the woods where it will lie about for another week or so. Water purls bright in the ditches. The sugar maples are tapped, and the drip of "magic water" into the keelers lifts the spirits almost as much as the liquid notes of bluebirds.

Just as the leaves fall in ordered succession each fall, so, too, do the birds return in their cycles. First we see the killdeer contour-flying over the corn stubble with so much snow still on the ground you wonder what they will eat. Then we hear red-winged blackbirds gurgleeing from the highest branches. Then the robins landing in flocks where the fields first open. Always in that order, and often in the same week.

And today the surest sign of spring of all, though perhaps not the most romantic: turkey vultures up from Virginia, wheeling on the first thermals of the season as the neighboring farmer hauls his manure spreader across the warming hillside. Ah, the homely comforts of the season.

And if there remains any doubt that the winter's stranglehold has eased, the dogs have dragged their thrift-shop afghans out of their boxes and are content to lie on their sides in the petunia beds. On the next trip to town, I'll return with onion sets in a paper sack.

So, the routines of spring play out in Upper Turkeyfoot. They are as old as agriculture. And there is a new sign of the season noticed just last year: The chrome-stacked trucks with the Texas and Oklahoma plates of the gas well drillers are running the dirt roads, preparing for profit. It is spring on the surface over Marcellus shale.

I'll keep you posted.

copyright 2010 by J. O'Brien, all rights reserved