More Bogus Mysteries

So, I've got the day off, and I'm home alone with the kids, trying to plug away at my doctoral coursework, but to no avail. It's impossible to concentrate with the kids around.

Besides, there's a brutal shortage of hiking and blogging in my near future, as I'm leaving for classes in Rochester this Sunday, then writing papers (as well as juggling a very tolerant parish and a relatively-tolerant-but-don't-push-it-buster wife...and two children) until February 22, when this term's papers are all due.

And so, in this "calm before the storm," I decided to do another post about Bogus Rocks...since I'll probably be living off the memory of that last hike until late February. (Most things are bearable if you know for how long you'll have to endure them.)

I thought it would be really clever to name the first photo "Dos Equis," but it doesn't quite evoke the Siberian feel that I associate with that ghostly quadrant of the forest. The derelict tracks off to the right lead to the Rocks. And the icy road leads off into the forest to a place called Watson Farm. The signs are for real when they say "no winter maintenance," too.

And did I say that those rocks were thirty feet high? Well, they're surely thirty feet at the overlook. But in most spots, the height is probably something between fifteen and twenty feet, as you see in this second shot. Still a nasty fall.

And check out the poor, denuded tree, exposed to the winter weather. What strange woodland varmint climbs so high to eat the bark of trees, and why does it eat so selectively, bypassing perfectly identical bark closer to the base of the same tree? Other trees had the bark chewed off a full twenty feet off the ground (no exaggerating this time). Are we dealing with young black bears here?

And finally, who made these tracks in the melting, two-day old snow? A young bear? A bobcat? Do you think he knows that he lost his glove?

Anyhow, rock on, most excellent rocks. (Dude, that was bogus.)

Bogus Rocks

A pretty entertaining movie that got totally overlooked by the world was Transsiberian, a 2008 "neo-noir" Sundance thriller starring Woody Harrelson. As I set out in quest of "Bogus Rocks," I was reminded of the film: long expanses of abandoned railroad tracks stretch through miles of the level pinewoods. This is a dark, eerie quarter of the forest, silent and blanketed in snow. The terrain could definitely pass for Siberia, or Yakhutsk...or Irkhutsk.

Bogus Rocks don't get their name from being made of styrofoam. They're real rocks, and big ones at that. Once, long ago, this part of the forest was blessed with an industrial site called "Bogus-Something-0r-Other," and the name stuck long after the factory disappeared. Bogus was surely the name of the guy who owned the factory, although when I was young, and could still get away with using pop slang (back in the days of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) "bogus" meant something roughly equivalent to today's "lame"...which Bogus Rocks are not.

The stream that runs through this part of the forest is called Bogus Run, too.

Bogus Rocks are a long stand of boulders overlooking a broad basin-shaped valley, or depression, in the forest floor. Several streams flow through the valley, and local legend has it that there was once an "Indian fort" here. Others say that the Indians used the valley to corral livestock...which seems pretty unlikely to me. Not because it wouldn't make a great natural corral, but because...what kind of livestock would they have corralled? Elk?

In any case, earlier inhabitants of Kane asserted that there were wooden pens, earthworks, and defensive ramparts in the slopes above the valley. Some say that you can still see ancient carving in the rocks themselves, but I find nothing.


In the 1920s, an archaeologist from the U. of Rochester documented a site somewhere around this area, and he called it a "hilltop stronghold" claiming that it was bulit by "proto-Erian" people 600 to 800 years ago. He collected pottery and other artifacts. That's pretty cool because so little is known about the Erie Tribe that originally inhabited this region. The Senecas in nearby New York State exterminated them in the early 1600s, but left their land largely unoccupied.

Nevertheless, I have my doubts about whether Bogus Rocks are indeed the site of the archaelogist's "Indian fort." The site of Bogus Rocks is in Howe Township, Forest County. The history books situate the old Indian fort in Highland Township, Elk County. True: Bogus Rocks are very close to the line between these two backwoods political entities, but---unless I'm very much mistaken---it's still on the wrong side. That gives me reasonable doubt that the locals are right in saying that Bogus Rocks is the same site as the old Indian fort.

Bogus Rocks make a great hiking destination. There's an overlook, seen in the second photo. In the third photo, you see an icy cliff edge dropping off to the forest floor thirty feet below. The fourth pic shows some sort of lair among the rocks. I couldn't identify the tracks, but whatever creature lives behind those icicles has itself a nice little pad up there. Is it a porcupine? It climbs high into the trees to eat off the bark.

Strangely, hiking guides of the ANF don't tell you how to get to Bogus Rocks, so take note! Go to Chaffee, the intersection where PA948 leaves PA66 and heads toward Warren. Continue on PA66 toward Marienville, but only go about one mile. Reach a Y in the road where the pavement (PA66) veers to the left, and a dirt road (Chaffee Road) continues due west. Take Chaffee Road into Forest County, and cross the railroad tracks two times. Park at the second railroad crossing, and follow the tracks to the right. After less than half a mile, there's a sign and a well-worn path off to the right.

The Weary Road

"And you, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
And rest beside the weary road
To hear the angels sing."

This sentimental old Christmas carol always seemed so sappy to me until I learned that it was written by a Massachusetts minister in protest of slavery. After learning that, it became my favorite Christmas song; you can see traces of outrage in all the lyrics, poetic cries against the injustice of human bondage.

(It's said that there are more slaves in the world today than there were when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, many of them foreign women hidden in dingy trailers at ordinary truckstops...where caring people buy their gas then zoom off to their destinations, all unawares. Alas, although The Allegheny Journal is mostly about "escape," human trafficking is beyond the scope of our homespun journalism. )

This Christmas Eve, I find myself thinking about the power of metaphors. One cool thing about Christmas is that it's a time when people expect metaphors and parables. I've hated Santa from the time I was five, and I noticed that his liar's beard was made of cottonballs. But other Christmas metaphors / parables have their power: You don't have to believe in "The Whos" for the Grinch's story to get its point across. You don't have to believe in ghosts for Scrooge's story to speak to you. And you don't have to believe in angels and miracles for the Nativity story to touch your soul. In fact, stories are really the most powerful medium for speaking to the soul, whether they're literal fact or simple parable. Even the best literal stories work themselves into parables at some point, becoming a strange mixture of fact and fantasy, taking on a more than literal meaning.

Christmas is a time to tell ourselves stories. Pick good ones. We'll get back to some serious backwoods discoveries next week. For a few days, at least, The Journal is going to "rest beside the weary road." Hope you'll do the same.

Winter's Silence

There's a silence in the winter woods unlike any other season. No insects. No people. No birds.
Winter hiking can be less exciting because the plant life is all hidden away, as are the old industrial artifacts. Parking near trailheads can be difficult, too, since the pull-offs usually aren't cleared. You can only cover about half your normal distances in the snow. And yet, winter hikes are worth the pain.

It's the profound silence that I love, "the silence of eternity." Once you get out there beyond the noise of the road, there's a deep hush over all the frozen landscape. That intense quiet takes me by surprise every time, even if it's the very thing that called me to the woods in the first place. It's an unexpected visit from an all-too-rare friend. The only sounds are the gurgling brooks, not yet frozen, the creaking branches, the snow underfoot.

Today's trek covered the southern terminus of the much neglected Mill Creek Trail. You gotta love making the only set of tracks in the snow, even if it does bode ill for the trail's future. (In the Darwinian cycle of funds apportionment, the upkeep goes to the most utilized facilities...like the ATV trails.)

When I was a kid, I used to think it was weird that, in the woods, Christmas Day looks just like any other. The squirrels are still holed up; the wind still rattles bare, snowy branches; the same supreme silence reigns. There's nothing special about the day, no music, no lights, no feasts or gifts. The childhood magic of Christmas ends where the woods begins, stark and cold. I used to think it was a little sad, how December 25 was just another day in the wintry forest.

Now it makes me want to spend Christmas in...the woods. The silence is a gift.

The Holy Experiment

This famous painting, by Bucks County folk artist Edward Hicks, is known as "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts an encounter in the 1680s where William Penn is talking cordially with the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people from whom he purchased much of the colony of Pennsylvania. Penn is a Quaker. He believes that there's a fragment of the Divine in every human being, and so he is duty-bound to treat everyone with respect, and to honor his agreements with the original inhabitants of the land. The river in the background is the Delaware.

In the foreground, you see the fulfilliment of the words of the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox... They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain." Isaiah 11:6-9

Penn and his followers called Pennsylvania a "Holy Experiment." His was the only colony that guaranteed absolute religious freedom for anyone who claimed to believe in some version of the Christian God. That's narrow by modern standards, but it was pretty liberal back in the day. In fact, the Quakers were so tolerant that they were soon outnumbered by people far less tolerant than themselves. And in time, those "less tolerant" folks rose to power, where they sit entrenched these 300 years later. But as long as Penn lived, the land was never "taken" from the indigenous peoples, only "purchased." That's pretty fair, since Penn could have behaved like other European settlers, laying claim to the land and purchasing it only with musket and sword.

This second picture, of course, lampoons "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts a ruinous place where respect has been supplanted by the shameless and shortsighted drive for material gain.

I know--as you do--that there's no returning to innocence once it's been lost. And all the Utopian experiments in the history of the world have failed. Wisdom cannot be legislated, but only acquired through pain and openness. Respect will never be as glitzy and glamorous as raw material gain. But how did we get so far from where we started? I don't mean "How did we get so far from our religious roots?" God knows religion has been a huge part of the problem! I mean, how did we go from a society based on respect to a society based on individual gain? And what can be the future for people who make such a shift?

Images

My philosophy of life in the Pennsylvania Outlands is this: Don't let the weather stop you. If you're a ninny about the weather, then you will never enjoy life here. Heck, if you're a ninny about the weather, then you've probably got deeper issues that this blog can't address.

And yet, I'm more than a little saddened that I got freezing rain during my week's most sacred hours, Sunday afternoon. Freezing rain is the one thing that can usually make you wish you'd stayed in. And so, instead of reporting on the weekly adventure, I am left to pour over images from finer seasons, the Ghost of Hiking Past.

They say there are two phases to life. There's an earlier phase when you're primarily oriented toward the future: marriage, children, career goals, adventures, etc. And then, after all your goals have been met (or left glaringly unmet), and the flower of youth begins to fade, there comes a second phase, where you are primarily oriented toward the past. This second phase comes earlier for some than for others, and it isn't necessarily a bad time in life. How bad it is depends on how you invested the energies of your earlier days.

I wonder why no one ever gets caught up in the present, the here-and-now? Why don't we ever fix on the phase we've got in our hands at the time? I don't know. But I've got to admit: I'm definitely oriented toward the future this week. I've got a lot of hopes riding on the afternoon of Sunday, 12/20, the next chance I'll get to hit the trails.

I was hoping to explore the ghost of Pig's Ear, but the ATV trail reopens down there next Sunday, so it might have to wait for another day. I'd love to find out how that place got its name. Was someone really trying to make a silk purse or something?

Byways

A lane rose steeply off to the right.
It flanked the mountainside a little crookedly,
tunneling beneath hemlocks
before disappearing from sight
and rolling on forever
into other byways
across mountains
and through valleys
that I would never see.
It called to me, that road.
In promising tones,
it chanted the old, old song of my soul:
Come away. Turn away.
This is the path of
adventure,
freedom,
solitude,
peace.
After all these years,
the anthem is unchanged:
Discover. Escape.
And when I’m old,
that road will still beckon.
Come away. Turn away.
This is the song of every way
I’ve ever had to shun;
once it rang with promise,
tantalizing and sweet,
but today the sacred song accuses me,
for we’ve both learned
that I do not come away.
I never turn aside.