Hemlock Headstones

 

    Our first snowstorm of the year hit on Wednesday night, blanketing my area with a soft cold sheet that cling tightly to the ends of the Earth, not wanting to let go. I had walked out of a yellow-warm and red brick classroom to a sudden chill and a dark night scattered with falling flakes like cold, cold ashes from a campfire. For the next two days it became bitterly cold, and bitter, bitter was the wind and wilder, wilder grew it's song as it howled with anger down the mountainsides. Maybe they started as a small breeze in a neighboring valley, a breezed that produced sighs of relief as they cooled throbbing temples when someone cracked open a window with a sweltering hot hearth 'neath. However, that breeze by this point had been kicked and thrown up and down the mountains and now raged, lashing out and rattling the dried leaves on the oaks and beeches, and all the people in between with a whistling shriek.

    However, when I woke up on Sunday, I was greeted by sunshine and birdsong. The snow and wind felt like a dream, folded up into a paper kite and thrown up into the air to spiral and drift every which way it could, up, up and away. It almost made me jealous, the whole inhumanity of it. The ability to bypass dead ends. 

    I did some half-hearted trout fishing in the lowland limestone valleys. The river was green and almost painfully cold from travelling snowmelt, the kind that leaves a little twinge of frost on all it passes through it's seaward, Eastward journey. The sky was bright, a baby blue with not a cloud in sight. The kind of sky that stays blue until it puts on a billowing gold fringe to mark the beginning of sunset. 

    I soon left the trout grounds and began to walk up, up through the ancient lowland hemlock growths studded with ferns and rocks that have seen hundreds of years pass through this mountain. Up the gradient, the composition of the mountain began to change from hemlock and yellow birch and ferns to the crooked spiraling ridge-top oaks trying to carve a living in an environment that gave them obstacles at every turn. I wish them the best of luck. 

    Nestled between the oaks and laurels were the bright yellow flowers of witch hazel. By November, when the forests have shed their greenery and donned their winter grey, witch hazel flows against the ebbing ephemeral fall tides. A lone bright spot, a late fall-early winter Pennsylvania forest is marred with the long finger-like yellow flowers of a witch hazel, and the silent insect-less woods are harmonized with the pitter-pattering of black seeds falling onto the dead leaves. 

    About a mile later brought me to the edge of the ridgetop, where you could gaze down the peaks of ridges past and see the winding snow-melt green river through the Pennsylvania lowland farm country. Generations ago, this ridge was a lookout point for the Lenape and Shawnee, who stood upon the peak and stared through that line where blue mountain met blue sky. 

    The Appalachian mountains have ancient, ancient origins. The mountains are the same as those of the Scottish highlands and the ridges and peaks of the Norwegian coastline, that were separated millions of years ago in the Continental divide. The Scots and Scandinavians have similar hollow folklore of witches and an air of the mythological that dwells deep within. Thousands of miles and millions of years away. All connected by mountains.