Another American Adventure: Lake Erie

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Lake Erie

This is Lake Erie from a gas station just off of I86/I80. The man in the gas station said that on a clear day you can see Canada. This day was pretty clear, but I couldn't see Canada.

The trees are changing daily. On my trip back to Cranberry Township on Saturday, the colors looked different from the way they looked on Thursday.

2 comments:

BarbaraOctober 10, 2010 at 9:13 AM
You mean you did not see me waving at you from a foreign shore? Pity. ;)
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beth cioffolettiOctober 10, 2010 at 10:33 AM
sorry I missed you Barbara. I must get my glasses checked!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.