Another American Adventure: Erie

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Sunday, August 8, 2010

Erie

Coming over the hills of Western PA I kept getting views of the great blue expanse of Lake Erie. I had a yen to see the lake up close. When I stopped near Erie, I asked the girls at the counter how I could get over to the Lake. They directed me down State Street, and I found myself at a place called "Bayfront". I really wasn't directly on the lake, but in a harbor. There is an island (or peninsula) - Presque Isle - that separates the harbor water from the larger lake. There were water taxis that could take you out to places on the Isle, which is something that I think we should do sometime.

This is looking back toward the town of Erie ...

"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.