Kinzua Bridge, part two

Kinzua Bridge State Park is usually the domain of railroad buffs, nostalgic old-timers, and Harley dudes. And yet, there's some rugged and scenic back country here to discover, too. You have to be willing to bushwack, and I don't know how passable the terrain would be in high summer, with all the brambles that surely cover the valley floor. It's hard enough to climb over all the fallen trees; rose cane and thorn bushes would make it well nigh impossible.

So, I think this is best as a winter hike. Besides, this is a scene of waste and desolation, and I always find that destruction is best served with a bleak season to bring out its full flavor. Winter complements this place beautifully: the silence, the cold, the absence of greenery. It all goes very well with the twisted metal, the tumbled bridge, and the vast swath of mangled forest. In fact, when I was here, a flock of crows circled above me most of the time, calling out in their almost human voices, as if waiting for me to expire like everything else in sight. (Isn't a flock of crows called a "murder"?) This is a February outing, or early March.


From the parking area, there's a broad, grassy walkway labeled "General Kane Trail." This leads eventually to an electric line that it follows for some distance. Where the electric line and the path make a clear turn to the right, the bushwacker goes straight, past a gated sapling plantation and down, down onto the valley floor.

Here at the bottom of the valley, you're standing right in the tornado's path, and it's awe-inspiring to see the things the wind destroyed and the things it left. It seems so random. Consider the sheer power of that storm! What was it doing so far east?

There's a lane here that follows the valley back toward the bridge. Seeing the bridge from the underside is tempting, but that's an adventure for some other day. A lone bushwacker would rather cut across the tornado valley, strewn with tree trunks, and make for the rock city on the opposite wall. It would be pretty easy to twist an ankle or even break a leg bushwacking through such a big blowdown under the snow. That's why I located a nice set of deer tracks to follow. Deer are heavy and sure-footed. Following deer tracks saves you from getting your foot caught in the crotch of some long-dead tree, hidden beneath the snow.

From down here, there's a nice long line of boulders visible on the opposite wall of the valley. That's the destination: a place of wonders, a good place to spend two hours exploring. Here, too, there are great views of the ruined forest below, distant scenes of the remains of the bridge, and access to deeper woods at the crest of the hill. Up under the overhang of a huge boulder, I found the most beautiful sheet of ice I've ever seen. It looked like pure glass. It was perfectly smooth, five feet tall, and almost a foot thick in places, but perfectly translucent. This photo doesn't do it justice.

It might be rewarding to follow this summit back to the side of the Kinzua Bridge that no one ever visits.

Kinzua Bridge State Park

I'm not as taken with the Kinzua Bridge as many folks around here are. I don't have fond childhood memories of it. I never rode my motorcycle across it drunkenly, as so many citizens of Kane and Mt. Jewett did back in the 70s and 80s. No one ever dared me to walk across its railroad ties, 300 feet above the valley below. To me, it's always been a colossal railroad bridge laying half in ruins on the floor of an equally ruined forest...in perhaps the lamest PADCNR "state park" in an otherwise outstanding system.

Now, I'm all about ruination and the sad, jagged remains of bygone industry. (To my knowledge, I'm the only person documenting the ghost towns of the Allegheny.) So you might think I would have always liked Kinzua Bridge. I do admit that there's a stark beauty about the half-fallen structure, like the skeleton of some oversized dinosaur, sprawling where it collapsed, spread across a tornado-ravaged landscape. It speaks to my sense of human tragedy and my deep, abiding conviction that everything we raise will eventually fall. And there's something riveting about ruination on such a massive scale. It's hard to take your eyes off the spot where the remaining portion of the bridge meets thin air, as if daring you to take that last step, as if saying, "Here, I'll take you this far, and after that, you're on your own." As Bugs Bunny used to say, "That last step's a doozy." All of those things are admittedly lovely.

Kinzua Bridge is the only state park in McKean County, and for that reason I've been trying to make myself like the place for a few years. I mean, it is at least an outpost of the awesome PADCNR, right? And yet, I never did like it for a variety of reasons: 1) In the summer, there are always swarms of loud Harleys there; 2) in every season, there are always two or three colonies of trailers and modern industrial equipment all over the place, as if they're going to get right to work rebuilding the bridge; 3) the "General Kane Trail" is a short loop that follows an ugly utility swath through an uninteresting woodlot; 4) much of the forest there is tree carnage from the same 2003 tornado that destroyed the bridge.

And yet, today I was surprised and happy to discover that there are things at Kinzua Bridge State Park to enjoy. You have to go in the dead of winter, when the post-tornado jaggers are buried under the snow and the Harley dudes are all gone. And you have to bushwack out away from the bridge, crossing the awesome path of the tornado's wreckage, and into the rock cities on the opposite wall of the valley. That trek will be described in the next posting. For now, here's a photo of the fallen bridge. (As always, click on any photo to enlarge it.)

Winter Sun

Oh that winter sun, when it decides to shine
after long days of featureless gray!
It's like forgiveness,
like a long overdue reunion,
like a state of grace.

February's a hopeful time,
as the days begin to lengthen,
and the sunlight comes in at new angles,
penetrating those long-dark corners,
chasing away old shadows,
casting the same old world
in a whole new light.

The light of late winter touches old situations with fresh, new perspectives. It can even help you to re-see the old-seeming people and the same old places of your life. The woodlands of Northwestern Pennsylvania have their beauty in any season, but they take on a haunted feel after months of glowering gray and bitter cold. February is here, with its new radiance and new vision.

It's still winter, as it will be for a good long while. But the world is rolling back around to the light. Ah, light! You can turn your face away from it. You can avoid it, deny it, glory in its absence. But it always comes rolling back around, in time. This is the way of the world: new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline, death, new life, stasis, decline... Why is the old, eternal cycle always so surprising?

Longhouse Scenic Byway

Discovered--much to my disappointment--that the Longhouse Scenic Byway is only passable to snowmobiles and really tough 4WDs during the winter months. I always knew that there was "no winter maintenance" on the road, but I somehow imagined that a '99 Corolla could handle a treacherous, narrow, curvy road that passes over high drops...as long as there was a nice layer of tightly packed snow to drive on.

I shouldn't be allowed to drive.

When I ended up going to Cornplanter's Bridge on Saturday, it was "Plan B" after a failed attempt to get to Dewdrop, which is just one of many remote and huber-cool locations that can only be reached by traveling the Longhouse, or else by boat, or else by walking across the ice of Kinzua Bay. And now in midwinter, when the Longhouse is essentially closed to the masses, that whole vast section of the forest stands abandoned by humanity: Dewdrop, Kiasutha, Elijah Run, old Camp Cornplanter, and all the many backroads, and the dark little valleys of the streams that trail off into the Kinzua Bay.

The west bank of Kinzua Bay is one of the most scenic and rugged parts of the ANF. Oh, and it's tantalizing...all that woodland sitting devoid of noisy humankind. If only I had a nice, loud snowmobile to get me into that part of the forest....

In an unrelated thought, I visited a nursing home today (part of the job). The chaplain's wife was sitting at an electric piano playing old, old tunes from the residents' youth: "Let Me Call You Sweetheart," "By the Light of the Moon," "In the Good Old Summertime." It made me wonder: when I'm old and sitting in a nursing home, will a chaplain's wife come in an play songs from my youth on an electric piano? Songs by Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, and The Red Hots? Just a little old lady playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit"? "Crazy Mary." "Here They Come to Snuff the Rooster." It's a nice thought.

January Thaw

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Charles Dickens' worst novel is A Tale of Two Cities because it's written about a time and a place that wasn't his own." Well, you're right, his least memorable characters are in that book, and I think I see your point. Your point is that the dithering old parson, too, should stick to topics he knows and resist the urge to report on lakeside parks in the lowlands of New York State. Point well taken.

It's good to be back in the woods again... After a whole day of working on a really dry and esoteric final paper for one of my classes, I discovered that I still had some daylight hours left. So, I went to a part of the forest I know too little about, an area known as Cornplanter's Bridge. About a half mile from the entrance to Red Bridge, and on the opposite side of the road, there's a beautiful little brook that flows down off a very steep mountainside. Following streams up mountainsides is bushwacker paradise. Photos can't capture the allure of this stream valley under the snow, and it was the perfect destination after too many weeks away.


The steep hillsides are spectacular. Summitting, on the other hand, can be a little anticlimactic in the ANF. In this case, the summit, which promised glorious vistas from afar, was a clear cut with two major forest roads and three active oil derricks. Even when the summits are wild, they're usually little more than broad, level areas with trees and rocks. Views are relatively rare.

This January Thaw surely ruined some of the fun up at the annual Winterfest at Chapman State Park, but it provided a great day for hiking...if you don't think too much about just how extraordinarily warm and long the "Thaw" has been... (Global warming, while horrible, is at least better than the New Ice Age theory that's propounded by some pseudo-scientists in the pocket of Big Oil.)

Chimney Bluffs

If you absolutely HAD to live in a city, if you had some sort of health issue that required you to be close to a major medical center, or if you were a devout practitioner of some uniquely urban faith, or some such thing, then Rochester wouldn't be a completely unlivable option. It's got great old buildings, shady, quiet neighborhoods, and lots of human diversity. It's also got Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, one of only about a dozen overtly progressive seminaries in the nation (which is why I find my way here each June and January). And yet...it's still a city.

I used to say that a person can make a meaningful and fulfilling life anywhere in the world. Once you commit yourself to a place, you find ways to make it livable. I mean, I even managed to enjoy living in Oklahoma...long ago. There was something almost Zen about those big, empty spaces and that long, flat line where the grasslands meet the sky. But that was long ago.

Today, with a few free hours in the morning, I made an early trek out to a New York State park that the locals don't seem to know about: Chimney Bluffs. Interesting earthen formations along the coast of Lake Ontario, "an ice age legacy." Here are some pictures. I like the otherworldly feel of the place. It's as bleak a spot as January offers, like some sort of cross between a Beaver County strip mine and the Ice Planet of Hoth. And that frozen lake, stretching off to the horizon, gives the place the feel of a looming presence. Not a bad place to visit, but a pale substitute for my explorations in the ANF.

What I always forget about cities is how long it takes to travel in them. How frustrating that travel is. How inhuman people become in their cars, how anonymously they behave. And how much wiper fluid you need to drive across a northern city in January.

On one hand, cities are great. I have a personal relationship with New York and Paris. They're places where I've spent lots of time, places that I've been returning to again and again for the past twenty years. Whenever I visit either, I have my favorite haunts, my hideouts and well-worn paths, my private city within the city. Far better than New York and Paris, I know the African cities of Douala and Yaounde, labyrinthine and dangerous. I know their open air markets, and their seedy expat bars, their sordid hotels, their squallid back streets. I know their Greek bakeries and "European" grocery stores. I know their public places and squares...because they were once the backdrop to my life. When a man is still young, his life intersects easily with the world's many places. (At least that was the case in the 90s.)

And yet, I don't think my soul is an urban thing. And I feel a deep conviction that the cities of my life are quickly becoming memories to me, ever more distant, the old familiarity fading like the names of the students I taught a decade ago. I just don't find those cities "life-giving" anymore. Alas! Three years in the Allegheny National Forest have ruined me for all other settings.

Sorry about the navel-gazing. We'll return to backwoods reporting as soon as I get home from Rochester and finish writing a few 20-pagers. (Can't believe I'm still doing homework at my age.)

A New Decade

Every time my father moans about how wonderful the 1950s were, and how things fell apart in the 60s, I try to tell him that the 60s were a product of the 50s. Everything that came to a head in the 60s was already in the works by the late 50s. But he won't hear it. For him, the world just changed (for the worse) out of nowhere.

Now, I for one, don't believe that the 50s were probably all that great. Jim Crow laws in the South. Racial injustices and tensions in northern cities. Fewer options for women. The looming and constant threat of nuclear holocaust. People are always looking back in time for a golden era to re-create.

I don't believe in golden eras. I don't believe in supermen, or in heroes, or national deliverance. What I believe is best said in the words of Paul Tillich:

"Here and there in our world, now and then in ourselves, there is a new creation."

A moment or two of 'new creation' is good enough most of the time. Oh, and I hope this is a good year for growing tomatoes, too. Ours were awful last year.