Allegheny Pilgrimage: Day 6, Tionesta Creek from Hastings to Kellettville

 

Monday was Memorial Day, and so I no longer had the creek to myself.  Various bands of kayakers shouted and cavorted on the water, but I typically passed them all by with a smile and a nod.  It was a perfect day for paddling--breezy and cool with lots of sun.  At my streamside camp in the early morning, I saw two female deer swimming across the creek in the mists.

Somehow, I'd left my hat in my friend's van, and so I had to wrap a T-shirt around my head like a turban.  But it was a wondrous day riding the currents, staring in awe at the bald eagles that soar up and down the valley, and thinking about life--my life, my career, my family, but also the life of the world.

By the time my water adventure was finished, on Day 8, I would put in 25 or 30 miles on Tionesta Creek--including the portions of the creek that constitute Tionesta Lake, a human-made lake with a campground that's run by the Army Corps of Engineers.  But for this day, my humble goal was the tiny forest hamlet of Kellettville, passing through the even smaller hamlet of Mayburg.  Neither town has many year-round residents.  They're mostly just summer homes and hunting camps.  But there is the notorious Cougar Bob's Kellettville Tavern, where I was hoping to have dinner.

This shot was taken from under the bridge in Mayburg.  On the Tionesta, you measure your distance according to the few bridges that span the creek.  What joy to travel the water on a day like this, with the sweet smell of a fresh creek in the woods, and the birdcalls, and the eagles still darting about overhead!

Somewhere on the water between the two towns, you come across Frog Rock, a large boulder in the creek that someone has painted to look like a frog.  I'm glad they didn't paint it to look like a shark.  That honestly would have creeped me out a little.  But a giant frog?  No problem!

The paint seems to be wearing away a little, and it's more visibly a frog when you see it from the downstream side, which I was not able to do because I was too busy attending to the fast-approaching shallows.  In fact, I took far fewer photos on the water than I would have liked because I had to keep my phone safely stowed where it wouldn't get wet.  There were a few occasions where the currents carried me over big boulders that were hidden just beneath the surface of the stream.  Sometimes you would see them through the clear water and go floating overtop with no problem.  Other times they would scrape the hull of the boat.  But still other times, if you hit them sideways, they could easily overturn your boat.  This came close to happening to me just once on this trip, but I'm a pretty experienced kayaker and was able to avoid meeting a Titanic fate on the floor of the...creek.

Before long, Kellettville appeared through the trees. On past adventures, I had looked into staying at the Army Corps of Engineers' little campground at Kellettville, but it never panned out.  This time, the thought of staying at a now-deserted campground with a picnic table, a restroom, and a fire ring was nearly irresistible.  The hostess told me that almost everyone had packed up and left earlier that day, and that there were three "walk-in" campsites that were free to backpackers.  I happily accepted and learned later that the kind hostess knows my father-in-law.  (A lot of people do.)  At dinnertime, I made a little trek into Kellettville to see if Cougar Bob's was open.  It was not.

But en route, I discovered this pleasant snowmobile trail along the creek.  It was here that I finally felt a sense of melancholy.  I hadn't felt any kind of sadness since Day 1, when the trail-runner went flying past me on the NCT.  But on that Monday, walking along the creek that I'd been traveling, a sense of loneliness finally descended on me.  What am I doing here when everyone I love is far away?  And am I mediocre?  And has my living really mattered to anybody yet?  And why do we spend our short lives in places that are not beautiful, places where there are jobs but no bald eagles?  

The gloomy funk was short-lived.  A redemptive thought came to the rescue: It doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter if I'm mediocre.  It doesn't matter if my living hasn't made much difference in this world.  It doesn't matter that we spend our lives in the bland and faceless suburbs.  What matters is that we've been invited to the dance of life, that our living takes part in something bigger than itself, that we belong to the Mystery of Life itself, that in it we "live, and move, and have our being."  It was actually the memory of a Bible verse that pulled me out of my gloomy state--Colossians 3:3--a verse that comforts me with the notion that my own life is somehow lived out within the larger life that we call "God."  And the meaning and the fullness of any one human life are impossible to judge because our lives are all intertwined in something so much big and longer lasting than their own short span of years. I am free to participate in all the goodness, truth, and beauty that our world offers, and the value of a life is not in its achievements but in its participation in those marvels that are not "things" as such.  It gave me joy to think that some of the water molecules that had wetted me on Friday morning at Red Bridge were perhaps joining me again on the creek.

And so, I returned to my campsite at the conventional campground in a happier state.  Maybe I'm not working as an attorney for BLM, and maybe I'm not down at the border putting out jugs of water for migrants in the Sonoran Desert...but I do desire those things, and desires are something.

Oh, how the water calls!