Pennsylvania – Page 4

October 18, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Invasion of the swamp things

Red maples are one of the few tree species capable of becoming grotesque at an early age. In a way, their highly malleable forms reflect their superior adaptability: they are at home in wide variety of soil types and exposures, and though a first-succession species, can also take advantage of relatively small gaps in the canopy. They are, however, not long-lived trees, so unlike oaks, for example, they must start producing seeds at a young age. It makes sense, therefore, that they would evolve a mutable architecture geared toward short-term reproductive success at all costs.

The one thing red maples don’t tolerate very well is fire, being thin-barked and shallow-rooted. Oaks and hickories, by contrast, are good at isolating fire scars and preventing them from becoming an avenue for infection, and their roots go deep. A hundred years ago, small, low-intensity ground fires were a relatively common occurrence in the drier parts of the eastern forest, and as a result, red maples were rarely found outside of really wet areas. But with widespread fire suppression, the oaks and hickories lost their competitive advantage and the maples, being faster growers, were able to dominate natural and man-made forest openings such as blow-downs and clearcuts. It doesn’t hurt that the over-abundant white-tailed deer seem relatively unenthusiastic about red maple sprouts, and acid rain apparently doesn’t affect them much, either. So what was once a creature of the swamps has virtually taken over the state, and studies of forest composition show that it is now our single most common tree.

That’s scary news to anyone who cares about natural forest ecosystems. Maple seeds aren’t nearly as popular with wildlife as acorns and hickory nuts, possessing only a fraction of their nutritional value, and my insect-collecting brother Steve informs me that dead maple trees don’t support anything like the diverse invertebrate communities that populate dead oaks. It’s a good bet their decay doesn’t contribute much to the soil, either.

So if you’ve been around for more than a few decades, it’s not your imagination: the fall foliage really is getting more spectacular with every passing year. Whereas oaks are fairly temperamental, going straight from green to brown as often as not, and being fairly monochromatic by species when they do color up, you can count on red maples every year for an array of bright reds and oranges as variable as their architectural forms.

Knowing what I know, how can I still admire their colors and their grotesque shapes? But I do. Hell, it’s not their fault they’ve become so goddamn numerous. I love red maples the same way I love people, come to think of it.

Don’t forget to submit links to the Festival of the Trees by October 26 for the special Halloween-themed edition.

And yes, I have written about red maples and fire suppression at least once before, so Google informs me.

October 9, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Disaster area

It starts innocently enough: just a small rift, a discontinuity in the otherwise seamless joinery of our days. The pulse quickens. We feel a bit more… alive. Yes.

We were always told such frightening things about courting disaster. But what do the old people know? Surely they are just jealous of our youth and energy — they want to deny us the heady pleasures they themselves are too worn down to handle.

And the pleasures now are nothing if not heady. Bark turns to bite; bony dinosaur hide splits open and lifts into feathers. Welcome to evolution, baby!

But each new opening only retains its brightness for a little while before it, too, turns dull. The body is continually subverting the mind’s best efforts to fly free, and returning us to our cages of solid matter.

Nothing matters: that is our chant as we look for new chasms to outgrow, new eyeholes to peer out of, new mouths with which to whisper in disaster’s ear: save us.

And so we become like snakes, slipping our skins, going belly to belly with our parent rock. Our tongues taste the wind in stereo. We tap into the simple on-or-off reptile brain.

With our fellow heads we talk, we dance, we howl. Disaster possesses us in turn. We paint our headstones.

All photos taken at or near Wolf Rocks, a popular teen hang-out spot in the Gallitzin State Forest of Pennsylvania.

October 2, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Insect Fare

The mealworm tamales at Penn State’s Great Insect Fair this past Saturday were, indeed, a meal. The capsaicin hit about thirty seconds after the last bite, as a hot tamale should, and I found myself going back for seconds, and then thirds. There’s always something special about food that needs to be unwrapped, and if it contains the larvae of that most poetically named of all beetles — the tenebrionid or darkling beetle — well, that’s gravy. Of course, it helped that I’m not in the habit of examining my food too closely before popping it in my mouth.

Consuming mealworm larvae can amount to a kind of poetic justice, too, if they’ve managed to infest one’s grain supply. I’ll admit I’ve cooked up rice with flour moth larvae in it (though I’ve never served it to guests — don’t panic, y’all). It’s a way of making lemonade from lemons, and the results are usually much more nutritious than the unadulterated grain would’ve been. I’ve been told that the kinds of locusts that devastate crops are actually a culinary blessing in disguise.

They didn’t have any locusts on Saturday, but they did have two additional Mexican insect dishes at the food booth, and surprisingly, it was one of the few spots at the entire fair where I didn’t have to stand in line. My cousin Morgan graciously stepped to the side when I wanted to have a closer look at the wax moth bean dip.

This time, the insect ingredient was a little harder to ignore. But isn’t that the most succulent larva you’ve ever seen? Beekeepers, take note: when the wax moths start eating your hives, you can can simply turn the tables on them.

Then there was the guacamole. All three dishes were free, and very tasty.

It’s funny the prejudice we have against consuming terrestrial invertebrates, especially considering how much we prize certain aquatic invertebrates — shrimp, oysters, lobsters, clams, squid. But I guess that’s the point of the Great Insect Fair: to get people — especially kids — thinking about insects in a more objective light. It’s become a hugely popular annual event, packing the Ag Arena right across from Beaver Stadium, home of the Nittany Lions.

It felt a little odd to attend a free event at the Penn State University Park campus. The fair did have its share of vendors, though. My mother couldn’t attend due to a back attack, so as a consolation gift I bought her a t-shirt with a picture of a caterpillar taking a crap and the message, “FRASS HAPPENS.”

Morgan wanted to buy a pair of live Madagascar hissing cockroaches in the worst way, but her mean old parents nixed the idea. She found plenty of kid-friendly activities to console herself with, though: making a paper butterfly out of a coffee filter, for example, and fishing for crawdads with a flyswatter (see the video in yesterday’s post).

In general, any display with live invertebrates drew a crowd. The mosquito guys were great, wielding a scary handpuppet of the World’s Deadliest Insect, and pointing out the differences between male and female mosquitos in the jars in front of them, which tempted visitors to crouch down and wait for one of the swarming larvae to complete its course and graduate to the upper chamber. A stuffed crow served as a reminder of the real victims of West Nile Virus, which tends to be downplayed in the local media because, after all, it rarely kills people.

The turnout itself was the thing that impressed me the most. Who’d have thought going to the cockroach races would be a bigger draw than sitting at home and watching the Penn State-Illinois game? Next weekend, the fields across the road will once again be packed with tailgate parties, and the empty Ag Arena will echo with the roars of 100,000 football fans, but for one day, at least, insects reigned supreme.

In response to a prompt at Creek Running North.

August 14, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Singing in the bog

Picking highbush blueberries with the Amish, we discover that, unlike the other pickers scattered around the bog, they don’t like to shout back and forth to each other. My brother tells me they prefer to whistle. Steve loves to pick, and takes Amish with him every time he goes — it’s too far to drive in a horse and buggy.

This is a bog where occasional holes in the sphagnum can pull you in up to your waist. Some people wear hip-waders like trout fishermen; others, like me, wear old shoes and long pants and plan on getting wet. The Amish women pull on short rubber boots for better traction and wade out into the bog in the same dresses they wear for everything else. I guess they’re able to find areas free of sawgrass to do their picking in. On their return from the bog, they pour the water out of their boots, wash their legs in the creek, and change back into their shoes.

The Amish men and boys pick a little apart from their female relatives, I think. The day I went out with them, I twice heard the teenaged boy roaring like a bear, and each time his sister obligingly shrieked.

I was picking out toward the middle of the bog. It was on one of the last days of July, and I counted myself fortunate to hear the distant songs of both a veery and a hermit thrush from the fringe of old-growth spruce and hemlock that encircles the bog. Flocks of cedar waxwings coursed back and forth as always, catbirds and red squirrels scolded from nearby hummocks of blueberry bushes, and dozens of tree swallows swooped and circled over the sea of sawgrass at the center of the bog. Now and then I heard the croaking cry of a raven high overhead. Surrounded by ridges on three sides and protected as a network of State Forest Natural Areas and Wild Areas, this is as close to true wilderness as one can get in the valley-and-ridge province of central Pennsylvania.

Our Amish friends were too far away for me to pick up more than an occasional murmur — not that I understand a word of Pennsylvania German in any case. But I heard them clearly enough when the singing started: the 50-something maiden aunt’s voice raised in what I took to be a hymn, the only form of music their brand of fundamentalism permits. It was a haunting melody in a minor key, and I was disappointed when she stopped after a single verse. I suppose she might’ve been singing to illustrate some point she was making to her neice, because I heard two more, all-too-brief snatches of song in the next ten minutes.

By that time it had turned into a very hot day, and I was glad to see that my bucket was almost full. The slog back to the car was exhausting. My mother was already there, panting in the shade, and our car was the last vehicle left in the small parking area. We blew the horn in the agreed-upon signal — three series of three short blasts — and waited for the Amish to return. I wasn’t at all surprised to see that the older woman — the one who’d been singing — had picked about three gallons to my two and a half, while the boy had picked close to five and was disappointed to have to leave so soon.

On the way down out of the mountains, as we passed the ski lodge, we saw some people out on the go-cart course despite the heat. I tried to explain the attraction of driving in circles in tiny little cars as best I could. “Why would anyone come all the way here and not want to go for a hike in the woods?” said S. in her slightly clipped English, and I had to smile — it was exactly the sort of thing my mother would say. On the long drive back, she asked us to be sure and tell them as soon as the mountain that looms over their farms came into view.

August 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Ode to Scrapple

Sing scrapple: buckwheat-
& cornmeal mush-stuffed
relative of head cheese,
the hog’s gray matter.
Plus every part
that couldn’t be cured
into ham or crammed
into sausage casings —
some good foot meat, perhaps,
a corkscrew piece of tail —
up to & including
the oleaginous grunt.
Always the butt of jokes
for the ignorant mass
of weiner-eaters who prefer
their pig scraps pink
& prefitted for the throat.
This is a square meal
the color of earth.
It’s what’s for supper
when you haven’t eaten
since breakfast, & want
something you can
slap in the hot
fat of a griddle & fry
until it grows a thick
brown skin. Then
serve with Grade-A
maple syrup, go hog-
wild, wallow in the gray
& gritty mush.

July 21, 2007September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Fred Waring and other Pennsylvanians

Fred Waring display

The first four photos in this post were taken with the kind permission of the curator of the Fred Waring collection at Penn State, Fred Waring’s America, which I visited on a sudden whim yesterday morning. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians “taught America how to sing,” they say; I can’t begin to imagine what that means. All I know is that this golfing buddy of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, this once-renowned purveyor of bland, inoffensive, beautifully choreographed arrangements of big band music grew up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, the only genuine celebrity my home town has ever produced. I went to grade school in the former high school that had been built on the site of Waring’s childhood home.

funky Fred

But it seems Fred Waring had his wild and crazy side, too. He devoured the comics, and his archives include hundreds of original graphic artworks drawn for or about him by the cartoonists he befriended. He was apparently also fond of wearing “distinctive and original, sometimes ‘wild-looking’, jackets,” as one display put it.

delusions of banjur

I grew up listening to the five-string banjo. My older brother started learning the melodic clawhammer style when he was ten, after a few lessons from my banjo-playing uncle, who was part of the New York City folk revival in the 60s and 70s. I love the sound of this most African and most stigmatized of American instruments.

flag-waving

The music Waring got his start with wasn’t Appalachian string band music, however, but the kind of post-minstrel proto-jazz then popular among the hipper white folks. It makes perfect sense that Waring would go on to become the Pat Boone of the swing era. Someone had to do it, and who better than a genial, slightly funky, nice-looking white boy from smack in the middle of a state which was synonymous, then as now, with middle America?

barred owls

It must be said that Pennsylvanians come in all stripes, however. Later in the day I attended a function at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center — also part of Penn State — and took the opportunity to visit the birds at the raptor center.

one-eyed red-tailed hawk

The birds on display are permanent residents, too badly injured to survive in the wild — less shadows of their former selves than living ghosts, some of them. They may never again rise on thermals over farm fields or ride the wind currents along a Pennsylvania ridge, but they and their handlers regularly tour the state, visiting classrooms, county fairs, and the like. I’ve seen them in action, and I think it’s fair to say that these birds, however diminished, are celebrities everywhere they go.

I can’t help wondering whether some such diminishment might not be a prerequisite for achieving celebrity status, in fact. We crave an encounter with wildness, with what we dimly sense to be a more authentic reality than our own, but without the danger and disorientation full contact might entail.

accidental Buddhist

Shaver’s Creek also includes several miles of trails, a boardwalk over a wetland, and a beautiful little herb garden with a lily pond. Yesterday, the water lilies were in full bloom, and when I bent down to snap a photo of one of them, I realized that a green frog (Rana clamitans melonota) was sitting in meditation right next to it, like a Buddha that had just decamped from his lotus. I circled the pond, snapping photos. He never moved.

June 12, 2007February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area

A large black snake lay motionless on the moss beside the trail just past the signboard for the Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area. My hiking buddy and I had driven over this past Saturday afternoon to pay homage to one of Pennsylvania’s most spectacular old-growth remnants before it is altered forever. The air was crystal-clear, adding to the cathedral-like effect of shafts of sunlight reaching down through the canopy.

Just past the snake we began to find spectacular, red and orange polypores — the hemlock varnish shelf…

and the fungus beetles known as Megalodacne heros, colored to match. Those that weren’t busy eating were busy mating, true to their family name Erotylidae, and some managed both at the same time.

In fact, things are looking very good for hemlock varnish shelves and the beetles that love them at Snyder-Middleswarth for a decade or more to come. That’s because the hemlock trees are dying,

300-year-old giants falling victim to an insect barely bigger than the point of a pencil, the hemlock woolly adelgid. Their egg masses are often compared to the ends of cotton q-tips, an image more in keeping with the kinds of places where human beings go to die.

The eastern and Carolina species of hemlock are especially vulnerable, though occasional individuals do show resistance. It may take a century or more for their native predators and diseases to catch up with the adelgids and bring them more into balance with the eastern forest ecosystem, though they will probably always remain an outbreak insect. In a few centuries, we may have new old-growth hemlock forests in Pennsylvania.

But in the meantime, another climax species — yellow birch — seems poised to take over at Snyder-Middleswarth. Almost every fallen hemlock log we saw bore a thick fur of birch seedlings. Forest ecologists refer to these as nurse logs, which is a bit misleading: birches and other tree seedlings prefer to sprout on logs not because they are fertile nurseries — they aren’t — but because they offer relatively sterile refuges from soil microbes inimical to seedling growth.

The word seems to have gotten out that the giants are dying — that’s the only way we could account for the dearth of visitors on a perfect Saturday afternoon in early summer. We walked slowly along the trail above the inaptly named Swift Run, looking at everything and listening to the songs of hermit thrushes and winter wrens. In three hours, we only heard a couple planes go over. It’s a deep ravine far from any highways — one of the quietest spots in all of central Pennsylvania.

I renewed my acquaintance with several plants that I don’t get to see too often, including starflower (Trientalis borealis) and mountain holly (Ilex montana). And we encountered botanical oddities like the fern fist above, one of several we found, probably the result of some wasp or another hijacking the ferns while they were still unfurling in order to make gall-like brood chambers from the crippled fronds. (If anyone has a better guess, I’d like to hear it.)

But mostly what caught my eye were the dead and dying hemlocks. I know that new hemlock seedlings will sprout up after the adelgid population crashes, and some of them may even survive future outbreaks. But it will be a long time before the forest once again has trees with this much character and presence.

It was 7:00 o’clock by the time we made our way back to the parking area. Much of the ravine was already in shadow. I turned around for a last, long look at hemlocks bathed in cathedral light.

Slideshow.

June 7, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Extraordinarily ordinary

There are a couple of things that make Pennsylvanians unique among Americans. The first: we tend to stay put. If we do leave, we tend to come back, if only after retirement. Both sets of my grandparents, for example, relocated to New Jersey for their jobs, but moved back to Pennsylvania after they retired.

The paramount theme in analyzing the mobility of Pennsylvanians is their reluctance to move, however long or short the distance. Such relative immobility is most sharply illustrated by the fact that 84.5% of the state’s residents in 1980 were born in Pennsylvania, a figure well above the comparable values for other states. Such uniqueness persists as we examine movements within the state, local moves within a neighborhood, city, or county and moves from county to county within Pennsylvania. Such attachment to home and locality is not attributable to the usual economic factors, since it seems to prevail during economically slack periods as well as in more fortunate times. The only logical explanation would seem to lie in the nature of the regional culture, in some traditional inclinations, whether conscious or not, to remain amidst familiar surroundings.
–Wilbur Zelinsky, “Human Patterns,” in The Atlas of Pennsylvania (Temple University Press, 1989), p. 131

Coupled with a strong attachment to our local area is a very weak sense of regional identity. I sometimes like to put on a Pennsylvania jingoism for sheer comic effect: nobody ever gets all puffed up about being from the Keystone State the way they might if they were from, say, the Lone Star State. Zelinksy again:

In an analysis of terms of locational and cultural significance appearing in the names of various enterprises listed in telephone directories for 276 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, I discovered that nowhere within metropolitan North America is there a weaker sense of regional identity than in the cities of western Pennsylvania and adjoining portions of neighboring states. Furthermore, in the eastern half of the state the situation is not much better. …

How do we account for this apparent lack of self-knowledge or interest, so different from the insistent awareness of Southernness or New Englandness elsewhere? The failure to appreciate the regional personality of the PCA [Pennsylvania Cultural Area] (aside from its barns and Mennonites) stems largely, I suspect, from its sheer middleness. … [M]uch that was to become national and ‘mainstream’ later is found in the PCA, too prosaic and too normal to stir up comment.
–Wilbur Zelinsky, “Cultural Geography,” in A Geography of Pennsylvania, ed. by E. Willard Miller (Penn State Press, 1995), p. 151

In other words, we are unique in our lack of a sense of uniqueness. It’s kind of hard to pin us down — and we’re just fine with that.

It is seldom possible to make a statement about Pennsylvania that holds true of the whole state — and many observers have simply thrown up their hands in frustration. There is a good deal of evidence, however, that its inhabitants like it that way. Pennsylvania’s mosaic of varied, complex landscapes offers its residents an extraordinary range of environmental choices within a very short distance.
–Pierce Lewis, “The Pennsylvania Mosaic,” in The Atlas of Pennsylvania, p. 7

Yep.

June 5, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Rock city

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, A woods named Fred.

Hearing the thunder, we decide to pick up the pace a little — from one mile an hour to maybe two. It’s well past lunch time, though, and we finally stop to refuel at a cluster of Volkswagen Beetle-sized boulders. A few have managed to acquire a thin layer of humus over the millennia, and sport miniature gardens of Canada mayflower and Solomon’s seal, as in the above photo. Just like the small exclosure I wrote about last Friday, such boulder-top gardens suffer very little deer herbivory and are a good indication of what the forest floor might look like if deer numbers were kept at a saner level. Tree seedlings often take advantage of these miniature refuges, as well, but the thin soil offers little support for many species. For trees such as yellow birch and red spruce, rock-top purchases present little problem, but we don’t find either species along the Fred Woods Trail. Neither black birch nor eastern hemlock seems quite as successful; we find a number of them that have grown to a decent size on top of a rock, then toppled over in an icestorm or a strong wind, taking the humus with them.

I like that this is a mixed conifer-oak forest, though. I’ve encountered outcroppings of the Pottsville conglomerate in various parts of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and due to the variety of forest types and land-use histories, no two are alike. Even where the land has been horrifically treated, as at Dolly Sods in the Monongahela National Forest or the Wolf Rocks portion of Pennsylvania’s Gallitzin State Forest, the bare rock stands as a visible and charismatic reminder of an indomitable core of wildness.

The sun is still shining as we finish our lunches and resume our slow perambulation. The thunder seems to have moved off a little, maybe. We explore a small assemblage of bus-sized boulders and wonder if that’s what all the fuss was about. But then we come to a fork in the trail, with a Vista in one direction and a Rock Loop in the other. Not much of a contest there.

And then we are in the rock city, and it takes our breath away.

The surrounding vegetation might not be as lush, but the rocks themselves are every bit as magnificent as those at Bear Heaven in the Mon. The mossy parts are just as mossy, the iron oxide-y parts are as brightly colored, and the rock tripe is even bigger: we find two of the leathery lichens that are as big as serving platters. “The air can’t be too polluted here,” L. remarks.

Even the graffiti is tasteful: all of it incised, none painted. The oldest dated examples go back to the beginning of the 20th century, and one graffito from 1935 refers to a Civilian Conservation Corps unit, so it’s obvious that some sort of trail was here long before the completion of the entire Fred Woods Trail in 1980.

The graffiti is concentrated in a one-hundred-foot-long canyon, the narrowest portions of which would offer a bit of a challenge to anyone heavier than about ten stone. Even narrower fissures and caves allow sounds to travel through the rocks in strange ways. It’s easy to imagine the kinds of things that vision-questing teenagers must’ve seen here over the decades. The impression of enchantment is almost overwhelming…

…though some visitors seem to have taken a more irreverent view.

The rain holds off until just after we finish exploring the densest section of the rock city. We’ve gone a few hundred yards further when L. spots what appears to be the biggest boulder yet off through the woods, as big as a mansion. As we approach it, though, the top half resolves into a dense cluster of hemlocks, some probably of great age despite their relatively short statures, judging from their basal diameters.

My camera batteries have given up the ghost a short time before, so I’m a little out of sorts. It doesn’t help my mood when I notice a grove of mountain laurel bushes that are almost all dead, probably from a combination of deer browsing (yes, deer do eat laurel, even though it is mildly poisonous to them) and the various blights whose effects we have been noticing throughout central Pennsylvania. On the other side of the grove, another boulder curves upward like the prow of a ship. We are literally just standing and staring at that when a close crack of thunder signals the onset of a downpour. We duck under the shelter, and though we both have umbrellas with us, I convince L. that we’d be better advised to sit it out — it can’t last more than half an hour. We settle onto a couple of flat rocks that appear to have been placed there for that purpose by some previous visitors.

The rain comes down in sheets, and for a while that’s all we can hear. But after ten or fifteen minutes, it starts to slacken off, and I hear an odd sound — a cry off in the woods. A minute or two later, L. hears it too.

“That’s a person! Somebody’s over there.”

“I don’t think that’s a human being. Why would anybody be wailing?”

There’s not much of a wind, but the tree tops do seem to be swaying. “I think it’s a tree,” I say. “Dead trees can make all kinds of ungodly noises when they rub up against living trees.” I’m eyeing a particularly large example of this about a hundred feet away.

The rain stops twenty-five minutes after it began. We’ve polished off a bag full of dried pineapple pieces and are anxious to find out who’s been doing all the wailing.

We discover the culprit just ten feet away, resting against the limb of a chestnut oak: it’s a dead tree, all right, but much smaller than the one I’d had my eye on. Enough to scare the crap out of anyone who’s tried to camp here recently, though, I’ll bet.

And perhaps we should’ve been more frightened then we were about hanging out in that rock shelter. The next morning, L. will find a deer tick and have to go the emergency room to get shots for Lyme disease.

We pick our way slowly back along the wet trail. We smell the hay-scented fern hundreds of yards before we enter the younger woods. It smells nothing like hay now, if it ever did: an ambrosial odor that keeps us guessing even after the evidence of its humdrum origin is all around us.

For more photos of the Fred Woods Trail, see my photoset here, and another, by blogger Gina Marie, here. It was that photoset, in fact, that first tipped me off about the place. Thanks, Gina! And thanks also to Gary Thornbloom’s “On the Trail” column, which I found archived here [PDF].

June 4, 2007 by Dave Bonta

A woods named Fred

In the middle of a hot and humid afternoon, last night is still seeping out of the rocks. We are in a low place on a high place: caves and canyons on top of the mountain. We’ve driven an hour and a half north to find the same Pottsville conglomerate that we’ve explored five hours to the south in West Virginia.

We’re in a woods named Fred. The Fred Woods Trail is a five-mile loop in Pennsylvania’s Elk State Forest, named for a Bureau of Forestry foreman, Fred Woods, who died on the job in 1975. The trail was built by inmates in the Quehanna Motivational Boot Camp, mostly junior drug offenders, in 1980. To get there, you follow a steep gravel road out of Driftwood that ascends a chunk of the Allegheny Plateau called Mason Hill, which includes a number of hunting camps on private inholdings. The gated road into the trail is about a quarter-mile past the old yellow school bus.

The trail begins in a nice hemlock stand, but soon leaves that to wind through a typical Pennsylvania hay-scented fern savanna just like what surrounds the school bus: a thirty- or forty-year old clearcut that was never fenced, and has been ravaged by deer ever since. (All the surrounding private lands are posted for “No Doe Hunting.” Killing only bucks does virtually nothing to reduce the size of the deer herd.) I move as slowly as possible in the 85-degree heat. Fortunately, I still find a few things to capture my interest. Bare shelves of rock begin to appear beside the trail, each covered with a film of perspiration.

After about a mile, we enter an older, mixed deciduous forest and things get a lot more interesting. A fallen, curled-up petal from a tulip poplar looks for all the world like a pair of yellow lips. Mushrooms begin to appear.

And millipedes: we slowly become aware that the trail is a millipede highway. We pass dozens of them, all from the common woodland species Narceus annularis (or perhaps the closely related N. americanus – see comments), some digging energetically in the leaf litter, others thrashing around to try and discourage a host of small, presumably parasitic flies. Millipedes are sometimes called rain worms, because they tend to only come out of the ground when it’s very humid. The Tsonga people of Northern Transvaal and Mozambique invoke a species of millipede in a song used in rain magic:

Rain-making, rain-making, Hum!
Rain-making, rain-making, black millipede!
Black millipede, Hum!
Black millipede we want rain!
We want rain!

Whether or not millipedes have a role in making rain, however, it appears that they may help to mitigate the effects of acid rain here in the largely unbuffered forest soils of the Appalachians. One study near Ithaca, New York found that a sizable local population of N. annularis acted as a significant reservoir for calcium and phosphorous, essential minerals that otherwise tend to leach out rather quickly, especially when the rainfall is highly acidic.

Then something else catches our eye: dozens, and then hundreds of little yellow flowers on what we had initially taken to be grass. This turns out to be a type of stargrass known as common goldstar. And scattered among it are the blossoms of rattlesnake weed, also yellow.

A sign with a picture of a camera directs our attention to a view, complete with picturesque dead pine tree in the foreground. The haze is so thick, we can barely see ten miles. But my hiking companion points out a much more interesting sight at the edge of the clearing: a fallen pine tree that appears poised for flight on half a dozen Dr. Seussian legs.

That’s when we hear the first rumbles of thunder.

(To be continued.)

UPDATE: For more on Narceus millipedes, see Bev’s excellent photos and description here.