Wending My Way

     Neighboring Lightfall Hollow are additional lands I have walked since I learned to walk. Countless times for what is now getting close to seventy years, I have rambled my home’s adjacent forests, their hollows and hills. Often, I have followed their timeworn creeks, abandoned logging roads, and active deer trails. While far more frequently I have sauntered their silvas on my own unbeaten, solitary paths.

     But increasingly these days, the woodlands I have walked, known, and loved since I was a little girl are off limits. More and more, “No Trespassing” signs, surveillance cameras, electric fences, and locked gates forbid me to traverse my lifelong stomping grounds.

     One of the places I can no longer wander is the middle of a wild nowhere, where there sits what little remains of a home from pioneer days. It is a forlorn relic of a house that I have always thought of as a haunted house. Although never once did a ghost appear to me there.

     It was more like I was the ghost. Because I felt soul-bound to frequent the ruins of that house, stand within its crumbling stone foundation, and look out at the idyllic landscape that would have been seen by its long-dead dwellers every day. In this way, I came to imagine the house when it was whole and full of life.

     I guess you could say that my phantasm haunted that house back into being. I doubt it or its dead minded. At least, I hope not. Because I am still with them in spirit.

     Another site I can no longer roam is an old, forsaken cemetery of Black Americans that rests on a small hilltop deep in the forest. Quite a few of the graves are those of people who lived in the 1800s. While the last person buried there was John Berry, who died in 1945. He must have been a U.S. veteran, perhaps dying in combat during World War II. I surmise this because, when I visited the cemetery, there was always an American flag planted upon Mr. Berry’s grave, and it was replaced every year with a new flag, by whom I do not know.

     The last time I laid eyes on that Black American cemetery, John Berry’s headstone was still standing, its inscription legible, but otherwise the graveyard was filled with memorial markers that were broken, leaning, sinking, and fallen, the words upon them made mostly unreadable by the ravages of weather, lichen, and fungi. While weeds covered the earth, and briars formed dense thickets, heavy with thorns.

     A couple of times I came with my gardening tools and tried to clear the overgrown, tangled, shameful mess, but the task proved too difficult.

     Despite my failure to give the dead their due respect, I always got the friendliest feeling in that old, neglected graveyard. There was, and I fathom yet is, a solace there I can only describe as holy.

     Another pilgrimage I can no longer make is to a towering and perfect climbing tree that, when I was a timid tween, my scallywag uncle dared me to climb, said I couldn’t climb because I was “just a girl.” So, of course, I climbed to that tree’s highest branch. While as I climbed, my uncle cheered me on, knowing full well I could meet his challenge and so many more that life would surely bring me. When he died and his body cremated, I climbed that tree again and sprinkled a few of his ashes upon its loftiest limbs.

     Yet another walk I can no longer take is the last one my dear dog, Anna, and I shared the day before she died. I can’t walk either where my father and I picked wild blackberries together and took turns tossing those berries, like miniature basketballs, into the hoops of each other’s mouths. I can also no longer walk where my mother taught me, and later my son, the self- confidence and freedom that comes with soaring on a grapevine swing over a steep, seemingly unconquerable downhill decline. Nor can I walk where I remember a sort of lean-to constructed entirely of grapevines, Mother Nature its architect and builder. When I was a child, I spent a lot of happy hours in that grapevine shelter, playing and pretending it was a wolf den and I was its cub.

     I have no idea why I imagined myself as a wolf. (Other than it gave me an excuse to howl.) Even when I was a young girl, there were no wolves in Pennsylvania. Although gray wolves in particular used to live in these woods. But they got pushed out of their habitats and into extinction. As did the bisons, elks, mountain lions, and many other wild animals that were once native to this region.

     Sharing a similar doom were the indigenous people who, centuries ago, lived nearby to Lightfall Hollow and, judging by the arrowheads that used to be found in the hollow, had a hunting ground here. They too were ultimately parted from their and this territory.

     I grieve for those extinct animals and exiled humans. Their communities were brutalized and killed into departure and separation from the land to which they belonged. Whereas I only experience some disquiet and sadness as I am sundered from the same sacred spaces.

     But I understand. Land is becoming more and more developed at an ever-accelerating rate. Woods wanderers like me, along with modern-day hunters who grew up with the age-old, venerated, and environmentally valuable tradition of hunting that lives on in these hills and hollows have fewer and fewer backcountries open for quests. Unsurprisingly then, some of those amongst us, including myself on occasion, become overpowered by homesickness, and we trespass on private ground.

     Trespassing is disrespectful, intrusive, and aggressive behavior. Which understandably often results in property owners becoming additionally protective. It is a vicious, ever-tightening circle and, as both a woods wanderer and woods property owner, a dilemma of which I am on each side. Yikes!

     It is difficult to stop journeying through woodlands that have gifted me with wonder, imagination, and tranquility. It is challenging to say good-bye to haunts where I have found refuge and courage. It is heartbreaking to leave behind where my dearly departed loved ones have loved me.

     Nevertheless, I have my wonderful memories. And I have some other wonderful woods wandering spaces too.

     I am so grateful and gratified that relatively close by to Lightfall Hollow are a good number of Pennsylvania’s state parks, wilderness areas, and hiking trails. All of which I can freely wander to my heart’s content. And I do.

     Maybe such public spaces are not the answer for every forest lover, but they are for me, and I sincerely admire, respect, and appreciate the people whose hard work preserves the natural world for its own most worthy sake, as well as even for the likes of me. Because of their diligent care of the great outdoors, there are still wild spaces open and free for all.

     As much as my old stomping grounds have defined me and will always be a part of me, my new stomping grounds are providing further interpretation. What’s more, as it turns out, I haven’t really lost or left behind a single beloved hallowed place or being. All my marvelous teachers are still with me. Spirit guides, as I meander the woods of my life and wend my way home.