The Big East

It's not that I'm getting tired of the Allegheny National Forest. The ANF is a place of wonders that would take decades to discover. It's just that I've been dreaming about those big, townless spaces to the east: vast stretches of state forestland with names like Susquehannock, and Moshannon, and Sproul. A decade ago, when I was just home from five years in Africa, I got a job in the suburbs of New York. I decided to cross Pennsylvania on old US Route 6 instead of Interstate 80. (All unknowing, I drove past the very house where my children would later learn to walk, and speak, and have their first memories of the world. I drove past the mock gothic church where I would later be ordained.) I took Route 6 because I hadn't seen autumn in my homeland for five long years. Africa was a wonderful place for an adventurous young man. I left a part of my soul there, and I still miss it every day that I borrow breath. I'll never wash its red soil off my heart. But Africa wasn't my home, and it was half a decade of endless summer.

I guess, by traveling Route 6, I was also attempting to succeed where Jack Kerouac had famously failed. When he decided to strike off and see the country, he hitch-hiked from New York up to Route 6 and waited in vain to catch a ride west at the Bear Mountain Bridge. Unlike the dharma bum, I was headed east. And I couldn't believe the glorious wildlands of northcentral Pennsylvania. And here lately, I've been looking at maps and dreaming.

There is a series of outstanding state parks, most of them surrounded by state forestland, beginning in Potter County and extending east about 100 miles. This region has the darkest night skies on the east coast. (I didn't even know the wonder of truly dark skies until one clear, moonless night in Mills Canyon, New Mexico, last September. It blows my mind to see all those stars and to think of the millions of galaxies out there and the mathematical chances that there's so much life beyond our knowing, or seeing, or imagining.) One National Geographic article calls this stretch "The Wild, Wild East." And so, I've been dreaming about Cherry Springs State Park, and Sinnemahoning, and Kettle Creek. They look like a whole new dimension of beauty and isolation.

And the closest of these mythological places is a state park called Sizerville, one hour east of Kane. So I bit the bullet and spent precious hiking time in the car. And it was worth it. The Elk State Forest and the Susquehannock State Forest run together out here. There are amazing trails and forest roads, abandoned farmhouses, and land for sale! Wonderful, far-flung woodland property for sale! Hunting camps and cottages for sale, too. Some of them with porches that I would settle for.

I hiked a trail in Sizerville State Park called Nady Hollow. It was very, very steep with fantastic, unphotographable views. At some places, as in the top photo, it looks as if you could step off a bluff to the end of the world. Unfortunately, the trail crests at a clear cut in the Elk State Forest, but that's just old Mother Pennsylvania reminding you not to be beauty-greedy. The bottom photo is Colonel Noah Parker's tomb in Gardeau, the southeasternmost settlement in McKean County. Parker figures in the outlandish local legend about Blackbeard's treasure. Believe what you want about that. (I think it's perposterous.) But his grave is desolate.

If I didn't have a wife, and family, and career to anchor me, I think I would wander off into that big eastern woods and disappear like that kid in "My Side of the Mountain."