by Peter Stark
At first I thought it was a golf course planted out here in the forested mountains. Then through the mist I noticed that in the middle of the broad greensward squatted a modern industrial complex. Large pipes curved out of the ground and into the complex, like the legs of some great metallic insect sitting on a lawn. Later I learned it was a natural gas storage plant. This corner of Pennsylvania had been drilled for oil and gas over a century ago. Now the empty wells were used in reverse—natural gas was piped from Texas and Mexico, and with 25,000 horsepower pumps, injected back into the old wells here in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and stored underground until needed; for instance, to heat the homes of East Coast residents. It was the largest gas storage facility east of the Mississippi River. While the surface was forest or grass, underground, at least right here, was hardly blank—rather, it was the subsurface natural gas tank for New York City.
Winding on back roads into the forest, I reached my destination—an old frame house on a broad lawn surrounded by the dripping forest. This was the home of Eric and Peggy Lucas, whose late mother, Dorothy M. Bailey, was a prominent local historian.
“You came two years too late,” Peggy told me. “My mother knew everything about the area.”
As we sat in the Lucas’s living room, chatting amiably, they periodically dug into one of Dorothy’s files or another, photocopied its contents, and handed it to me, such as the brief biography of Simeon Pfoutz,44 the first settler on the fertile flats along Kettle Creek, now a well-known trout stream just off the plateau. He’d arrived by canoe in 1813 with his wife, Susannah, fathered nine children, raised several baby mountain lions, and, after anointing himself the valley’s feudal lord, appropriated a share of the crops of later British settlers. This lasted until the British settlers, out of frustration with his bullying, brought in a tough Irish settler by the name of Ikey Corn who put a quick end to Pfoutz’s feudal pretensions. Pfoutz died abruptly in 1856 while showing off his parlor trick in which he slipped his “pet” rattlesnake down his shirt collar to show how it could crawl out his sleeve. On this particular occasion, the pet rattler chose to nail the radial artery in Pfoutz’s arm. He was dead within nine minutes.
Eric Lucas had worked at the gas plant that I thought was a golf course. He told me that decades ago, before the gas wells, Cross Fork had a booming lumber industry.
“All these mountains were covered with virgin timber. Some of that lumber built this house.”
They pulled out more photos from Dorothy’s files. One from 1905 showed dozens and dozens of houses in Cross Fork. Big stumps dotted the bare, surrounding hills where the loggers had cut. The next photo, from 1937, showed only about six houses sitting on big pastures where the rest of the town had once stood. Young forest sprouted from what had been the stump-dotted hills.
Originally erected as a four-room bunkhouse and cookhouse for a lumber camp, the Lucas’s house had later been expanded to ten rooms and was Dorothy Bailey’s childhood home. Born in 1915, the local historian, her daughter told me, had traced her ancestry back to Robert Campbell, who served as a piper and drummer for George Washington’s army during the Revolutionary War. It was through fellow soldiers in Washington’s army—though not Robert Campbell—that much of the Indian land in these parts of Pennsylvania ended up in white hands.
I drove from the Lucas’s house back to Sproul State Forest headquarters, where I learned more about these Revolutionary War land transfers. Two decades later, due in part to his military experience gained in the French and Indian War, George Washington would, of course, head the American army against the British during the Revolutionary War. The American Continental Congress didn’t have much money to feed or pay its soldiers to fight the British, but the new nation did have access to land—and, at least in Pennsylvania, a lot of it.
The Sproul Forest headquarters now manages 300,000 acres of land around Renovo, and the foresters unfolded old land maps for me. They were crosshatched with an out-of-kilter checkerboard pattern—almost a jigsaw puzzle—of “warrants” of from 100 acres to 1,000 acres or so each. The first warrants dated to the years just after the Revolutionary War, and each still bore the name of the original soldier who had received it as pay from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
“In most cases, the soldiers didn’t even know where it was,” District Forester Doug D’Amore told me. “‘We owe you “x” dollars from the war—here’s your land.’”
The great majority of the land, as it turned out, was steep, mountainous, and rocky. Only very small fertile strips in the river bottomlands made decent farmland. That’s where the few settlers stayed. The rest was virtually worthless to these war veterans and simply abandoned. This reconfirmed what I’d found in Maine—that fertile land is settled quickly. Wherever the land is not suitable for farming, you’re most likely to find a blank spot.
“Some of these warrants sold numerous times at tax sales,” said D’Amore, who works closely with the Sproul State Forest’s landholdings and warrant issues. “Ultimately the warrants got in the hands of the early lumber companies. This valley was logged three or four different ways. They started probably in the 1830s cutting Kettle Creek for the big, fat white pine.”
The timber cutting lasted, off and on, for nearly a century—from the 1830s to the early 1900s. The early loggers rafted the logs down the streams and rivers. Later, company railroads were pushed into the forest to haul out timber left over from the first cut—hemlock trees to extract tannin for leather tanning, hardwood saw timber, and finally the small pulpwood to be ground up and made into paper. This forest cut, the railroads and logging companies then pulled up the tracks and moved on to a new forest.
By World War I, the region’s forests were all logged out. The timber companies no longer had any use for those Revolutionary War land warrants they’d assembled. They sold off the warrants cheaply to the state.
“Basically, you just take the resources off and let them go,” said D’Amore.
“You can’t farm rocks,” added the assistant forester Rich Kugel. “With the logging, everything was sucked out of it. In the 1930s the Commonwealth got most of the state forest land for a buck an acre.”
Not much had changed since the 1930s. With the logging lands up for grabs at so low a price, Pennsylvania purchased massive acreages and assembled its vast state forests in these western mountains. These are what showed up on my Earth-at-night photo as “blank spots.” Instead of a sea of stumps, trees now had regrown as a second-growth forest. This is the forest that exists today, and that I visited during my hikes down into various “runs” and along ridges. The manufacturing—what little had existed in some of the small towns—had largely died out. As a way to market its attractions to tourists, the state had recently re-branded this big, empty region the “Pennsylvania Wilds.”
Tourism, however, has remained slim.
“Right now,” said D’Amore, “the mind-set is we don’t want foreigners coming in hunting our deer, catching our fish, drinking our beer, chasing our women…and anybody who isn’t from this county is a foreigner. An ‘Influx Flatlander.’”
D’Amore, though raised in a still more mountainous region of Pennsylvania farther north—and at a higher elevation—said he is still considered a “Flatlander” here, while Kugel lives on Kettle Creek but is not considered a true “Cricker.”
“We’ll always be outsiders,” D’Amore said.
I LEFT THE SPROUL FOREST HEADQUARTERS and drove back up into the mountains to Jews Run Road, where the previous day I’d explored the deep ravine called Burns Run. Today, I planned to descend into Fish Dam Run—the place that Rich Kugel had recommended as the wildest of the wild in these parts. Leaving the car parked on the same open, grassy ridgetop, I followed the path to the right instead of the left as I had the day before, dropping over the ravine’s steep brink into Fish Dam Run. The afternoon already had grown late. Dark rain clouds blew over, lending a heavy gloom to the forest. I kept onward, more dutifully than enthusiastically. As
I hiked down deeper into the forested ravine, I thought longingly of the cheery warmth of the Sportsman’s Motel back in Renovo. I’d come this far to seek out blank spots. Now I was in one.
The path wound down, down, down, crossed the ravine’s bottom, and began to ascend the other side. Instead of following the path up again, I left the trail and struck off on my own still deeper into the ravine, which ran several more miles down to the Susquehanna River.
While on the path my mind wandered, but once I stepped off the trodden path, I concentrated exactly on what I was doing. I stepped carefully across the forest floor, over fallen logs and across carpets of leafy ground cover. I looked behind me periodically to identify landmarks and side gullies to mentally mark my return route. Crossing the little creek on boulders and logs, I left footprints in the mud in the event I got lost and searchers needed clues—or I needed clues. I crossed the fresh trail of a bear—I was quite sure it was bear—that had crushed large, broken-stemmed steps through the leafy patches.
As I had in Burns Run, I thought again of the acute awareness a young Indian hunter would bring to this spot, right here, three hundred years ago. But now I asked myself a different question. What was I hunting for down in this deep, obscure ravine? I wasn’t looking to kill a bear or deer, or to gather plants, as an Indian hunter might have been. Nor, unlike an early American Puritan, was I alarmed at the devilish quality of these gloomy deep woods. Nor did I seek to clear a farm and build a homestead, nor chop down the forest and sell the timber. I didn’t seek any practical use for this wilderness. I searched solely for the experience of wilderness. I hunted for the transporting aspect of wilderness. I hoped to experience some grand emotion here, to experience it and take it back with me. I sought the romance of wilderness.
For this notion I had Billy Bartram to thank. And channeled through Bartram, I had Rousseau to thank and Edmund Burke, and Denis Diderot and Lord Shaftesbury, and the Deists, and before them, way before, the Greeks and the Romans whose paeans to Arcadia—to the idealized rural life away from cities (which also may have been the source of the name Acadia45 given to that bountiful region those early French settled)—were read avidly by these eighteenth-century writers.
After traveling with the surveying party divvying up Indian lands, Bartram and young M’Intosh returned to the coastal lowlands of Georgia, borrowed a canoe carved from cypress, and paddled up the Altamaha River—one of the largest rivers on the East Coast, flowing from the Appalachian highlands to lowland coastal swamps and then out to sea. Here’s how Bartram would come to describe the Altamaha.
I ASCENDED this beautiful river,46 on whose fruitful banks the generous and true sons of liberty securely dwell, fifty miles above the white settlements. HOW gently flow thy peaceful floods, O Alatamaha! How sublimely rise to view, on thy elevated shores, yon Magnolian groves, from whose tops the surrounding expanse is perfumed, by clouds of incense, blended with the exhaling balm of the Liquid-amber, and odours continually arising from circumambient aromatic groves of Illicium, Myrica, Laurus, and Bignonia. WHEN wearied…I resigned my bark to the friendly current…THUS secure and tranquil, and meditating on the marvellous scenes of primitive nature, as yet unmodified by the hand of man, I gently descended the peaceful stream, on whose polished surface were depicted the mutable shadows from its pensile banks; whilst myriads of finny inhabitants sported in its pellucid floods.
This is just one typical passage in his book, based on what would become a four-year wilderness expedition, titled Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, etc. by William Bartram.
In this Altamaha passage the word sublime appears twice—a word that puckers the lips before sliding so liquidly off the tongue like Billy’s cypress canoe down the river’s waters. It appears with remarkable frequency throughout the Travels. It was a word—a broad concept, really—that finally defined an inchoate feeling about the glories of nature that had swirled in the minds of early and mid-eighteenth-century European thinkers—thinkers who had ventured into the Swiss Alps, the English hill country, as well as into the woody British clubs and trendy, glittering salons of Paris amid the rustling silks and tinkling china and witty conversation of the philosophes. Bartram was one of the first—if not the first—to apply this concept47 to the American wilderness, and did so with long-lasting impact.
To understand where the concept originated, it’s helpful to return to Europe—the other half of this intellectual rally across the Atlantic—and especially to the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
A great con man, passionate writer, and adventurer rolled into one, Rousseau imparted the spirit of “wild nature” and the “natural man” to a whole generation in Europe. After his mother’s early death, Rousseau ran away from his home in Geneva, drifted south over the Alps to Savoy, and, at age sixteen, was taken in by a twenty-eight-year-old baroness, Madame de Warens, who had a penchant for collecting young men. It was from Madame de Warens that Rousseau got his first education in the natural world, and, as result, we have been handed down part of ours.
Despite ties to the Catholic Church, Madame de Warens was a committed Deist. She believed in the spiritual goodness of all humans and put great faith in the power of the natural world, as well as dabbled in herbalism and alchemy. Over the course of several years in residence at her estate at Annecy—the most delightful period of his life, he described it—Madame de Warens introduced Rousseau to great works of literature and philosophy, refined his manners, his conversation, his ways in the arts of love, and imbued in him a sense of the power of the natural world.
Eventually Rousseau showed up in Paris in the city’s exploding literary scene of the mid-1700s, at the height of the Enlightenment, as French thinkers leveled the weapon of reason against king and church. It was while walking to Vincennes prison one hot summer day to visit his friend the philosophe Denis Diderot, who had offended the church with his proto-evolutionary theories, that Rousseau had his central inspiration about man and nature.
Lying under a shade tree to rest and read a newspaper,48 his eye fell on a notice that the Academy of Dijon was offering a prize to the best essay addressing whether advances in the sciences and arts had helped to refine or corrupt morals. Like all great con men, Rousseau possessed a remarkable talent for sniffing out the spirit of the moment and making it his own. Hot, agitated, en route to visit his imprisoned friend who’d spoken out, he embraced a spirit of the age that was much alive in Paris intellectual circles—a rising, radical voice against the oppression of church and state—and melded it with a new, and equally heretical, belief in the inherent goodness of “natural” man. Rousseau’s short answer to the essay question was that advances in “civilization” hadn’t helped purify morals.
When Rousseau arrived at the Vincennes dungeon, the incarcerated Diderot helped him shape his ideas about man and nature. Diderot knew well the work of the English philosopher Lord Shaftesbury, whom he’d translated into French, and who strongly believed in the inherent goodness of “primitive” man—a goodness that could be perverted by exposure to poor morals, religious fanaticism, and other supposed “civilized” influences. For these observations, Shaftesbury drew on reports coming into London from sailing expeditions all over the world in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
“Turn [your] Eye toward remote Countrys,” Shaftesbury wrote in his Advice to an Author. “[S]earch for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has often been known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce, and, by sad Example, instructed in all kinds of Treachery and Inhumanity.”
The notion of the goodness of the primitive man and the simplicity of nature resonated with Rousseau. He’d witnessed firsthand the artificiality and intrigues of the “civilized” life in Italian noble houses and Parisian salons. He fondly remembered his simple days of wandering through Savoy and the Alps, subsisting only on a sturdy chunk of bread and a bit of wine. The natural and uncorrupt
ed man in the natural and unurbanized landscape now became for Rousseau an icon of goodness—and of freedom.
Sending off his impassioned essay, Rousseau, to his great surprise, won the Dijon Prize, and instant and widespread acclaim.
Always quick to seize the moment, Rousseau then personally resolved to strive for the simplicity and goodness he believed lay within all men. Growing a beard, and selling off his lace shirts and white stockings, he cut a wild and celebrated figure in the Parisian salons—a kind of French intellectual proto-hippie. Finally Rousseau retreated to the French countryside and to his native republic of Geneva to write, including his book The Social Contract, which helped trigger the American and French revolutions. But it was his novel Julie, or The New Heloise, published in 1761 and a resounding bestseller throughout Europe, that helped trigger the Romantic movement and captured a new passion between Man and Nature.49 Consisting of a series of letters between a young tutor and the daughter of a nobleman in the Alps who are in love but forbidden to marry, it brimmed with soulful emotion instead of cool reason. Instead of the bright city life—Paris was portrayed as an endless desert—The New Heloise celebrated the pastoral villages and wild mountain landscapes of the Alps. It spoke of nature—and of wildness—as exerting a transformative effect on the human soul. An emotionally confused St. Preux, in love with Julie, now a wife and mother, describes how he found hope by climbing a peak in Switzerland’s Upper Valais:
Meditations there take on an indescribably grand and sublime character.50…It seems by rising above the habitations of men one leaves all base and earthly sentiments behind, and in proportion as one approaches ethereal spaces the soul contracts something of their inalterable purity.
Here in Rousseau’s description of the Alps appears that word sublime—which would become a touchstone in Billy Bartram’s writings about the wilderness. The word itself was philosophically explicated a few years before Rousseau’s novel by a young Edmund Burke, who later gained renown for his political essays: Explained Burke in his early treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible…is a source of the sublime…”