Lonesome Pines

The abandoned village of Corduroy is little more than an empty post-residential lot surrounded by large, sweeping pine trees. Like the camp site at Guffey, it's a spacious grassy lawn with a stone fire ring on the spot where a big house used to stand. Or it might have been a church or an inn. Both ghost towns sit in pretty stream valleys. Corduroy is unlike Guffey in that there is no evidence of any old industrial complex here, and the town site is entirely level and low-lying. Corduroy is also smaller and a whole lot further afield.

Of course, our hardy ancestors planted pines around their rural homes in order to insulate them from the bitter cold winds. Today, the pines at Corduroy are so tall that they provide more beauty than warmth. But that's okay because nobody ever camps here except fishers, in the spring and summer when the weather is good.

I mainly like these fine pines because they show me traces of what used to be. I'm fairly certain that this is the spot where the largest house in the hamlet stood, presiding over a broad green lawn on the banks of Hunter Creek. I know nothing about this old settlement. I don't know if it was a lumber town, a tanning town, or just a regular old farming town. But the thing I love about ghost towning is exactly this: to stand in a place where there are traces of long-forgotten lives and to imagine them. Who were they, with their real hopes and fears, their genuine sorrows and joys? What living, what childbirth, what labor, what abuse, what passion, and lovemaking, what dying and grieving took place on this very spot, which is now just a patch of grass in the forest? What heartache and horror took place right here; what lives were lived out in this place, and how different were they--really--from my own? Their stories will never be told. Aside from a few pine trees in a row, their tale is lost forever. As the Hebrew psalm says, "Their place remembers them no more."

They say you can find anything on Google. I sure can't find anything about Corduroy except the vain promise that it is "a populated place" in Elk County, PA.