A View from the Ferns

The ferns were here first. Sometimes I wonder if they won't be here last.

Long before there were ash trees, with their emerald ash borers; well before the elm trees evolved, much less Dutch elm disease; before anyone had ever yet laid eyes on a white oak or a gypsy moth, the world was green with ferns. Of all the living things that greet the woodland wanderer, the fern is oldest. Millions of years ago, before Lucie the protohuman shuffled through the Great Rift Valley, the dinosaurs dined on ferns. That's an impressive pedigree.

Funny thing about ferns: they thrive on all the things that destroy trees. Global warming? The ferns are glad someone turned up the heat! Air pollution? It's mother's milk to a fern! Excessive logging and drilling on public lands? The ferns will be the first to reclaim the wasted acreage.


If you let the ferns have their way, they'll shade the forest floor so darkly that no new trees will ever sprout. If not for human intervention, the Wilds of Northern Pennsylvania would be mostly treeless. Ferny hills, ferny valleys, ferny meadows, ferny river banks. You've got to hand it to those ferns. They survive.

When my life is in flux, sometimes I like to take it to the ferns, as I did today in a remote stretch of the Elk State Forest. So beautiful, so far flung, so alive with birdsong and brooks. Today is the first time I've thought to ride a mountain bike into the forest in order to get as far into the wilderness as possible before choosing a remote spot for a hike. The mountain bike is a great way to save on precious weekly hiking time...especially since the old Allegheny National Forest and I are soon to part ways.

Yes, friends, that's right. The parson is leaving the snowbelt. "The Allegheny Journal" is not an ancient, adaptable, long-surviving fern. No, the Journal is more like one of the short-lived boomtowns that I've documented on this site. They say that you become the things you think about. Maybe, by spending so much of our woodland energy digging through the wreckage of Guffey, and Granere, and McKinley, we've brought the fate of those extinct towns down on this site itself. Soon, the Journal will be little more than a bit of abandoned real estate on the Internet, the Windy City of the worldwide web. I'll continue to publish my treks through the Month of July, then it's off to balmy Southern Pennsylvania for the parson.

I don't know. Maybe I'll start blogging about some other patch of trees down there. Or maybe I'll take up exploring abandoned buildings, like Mayview State Hospital, less than two miles from my new home. In the meantime, I've still got a few things left to say on this blog. And I'll continue to maintain the site as a resource for hikers well into the future.

Here you've got a photo of those resilient, old ferns. The wisest plants in the forest. The bottom pic is an unguarded border crossing 2 miles from the Land Before Time.