Another American Adventure: mid summer

Sunday, July 17, 2011

mid summer

It's mid summer here in Western PA. Everything is green and lush. More bugs than buds. This is what our favorite park (Knob Hill) looked like this morning.

The few swamp Cabbages that are left standing around the banks of the stream look to be in their last stage. (The stream itself is just a trickle, since there hasn't been much rain lately).

I didn't see any sign at all of the mayapples (umbrella plants) that were so predominant when we left. Not even apples. There was a new path cleared through what used to be a more rugged route.

Only a couple of wild flowers ...

It's still the same old place, though. Birds singing.

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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.