Another American Adventure: Bemus Point at Chautauqua Lake

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Bemus Point at Chautauqua Lake

On the way back to Pittsburgh we stopped off at Chautauqua Lake for lunch. It was a sunny, Sunday afternoon and the streets were full of tourists while the lake was busy with boaters. A good Italian Fish place right on the lake at Bemus Point, with a floating stage right next to it ...

Good music. We had fish sandwiches on the deck. Great breeze coming off the water.

Looks like a good line up of musicians all summer ...

Lots of knick knack and ice cream stores ...

... and stately old hotels ...

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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.