"Their Smoking Hearth"

These old photos were taken in the late 1890s somewhere around Galeton, just east of the ANF. My guess is that the setting is in or near present day Lyman Run State Park, but I'm sure nobody knows. Like many of the public lands in the Commonwealth, Lyman Run was so devastated by the logging industry that Harrisburg had to purchase it and nurse it back to health over a 90 year period. By 1900, the logs were all gone, leaving behind eroded hillsides, polluted streams, and a sad collection of broken and barefooted people.

Alas, our state has always sold its resources, its people and their wellbeing, not to the "highest bidder," but to the very first bidder. We'll have to wait a few years to see how all the rampant drilling for Marcellus shale affects the cancer rate in the Keystone State. But tomorrow has never been our most pressing concern.
In his semi-fantastical book A Winter's Tale, author and rightwing pundit Mark Helprin describes the endless appetite of the ever-growing metropolis of New York at the turn of the century:

"Builders and machinists came from everywhere to layer the city in new steel...Pennsylvania, an entire wilderness, became their smoking hearth. They stripped the forests just for frames to help the ironwork. They mined, logged, and blasted, and brought everything to the city..."

It just gets to me, the way history repeats itself! Our home is still somebody else's smoking hearth, with people in faraway places despoiling its resources, then leaving the mess for us to clean up, or live with, or die from. The guy who got caught dumping toxic waste into old oil wells (above link) doesn't have to bathe and feed his own children using local tap water... He lives in sunny California, and his cynical lackey in Sheffield surely uses bottled water when he tries to wash the blood from his hands. I hope I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Judge McLaughlin is going to give these guys a slap on the wrist before inviting them back to his place in suburban Erie for a single malt Scotch.

Ah, I really need to get out into the woods this weekend. Last Sunday was a perfect day for hiking, but I had to finish a paper that was due Monday. Now, everything is turned in for the semester, and this Saturday and Sunday should be a go.