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.