Thinking Like a Mountain Stream - A Nature Photo Essay
This tiny tributary of Red Run up on the Allegheny Plateau in northwest Pennsylvania is a favorite place of mine. It's always a thrill to climb around the boulders at stream's edge of the narrow canyon that holds this little headwater stream. It's a shady, steep headwaters with a northern hardwood forest of birch and red maple, high up on the Allegheny Plateau. The winters are cold and edgy here, the summers cool and calming. The boulder-strewn slopes are home to black bear, whitetail deer, bobcat, and whatever mountain spirits are willing to accept you. Timber rattlesnakes live here as well, although I've never seen any in this spot. Still, I try to be wary.
Wary? Worry? Why? Here? It's too peaceful. The deep shadows of these old, old mountains reach deep.
Native eastern brook trout still live in these clear, cold waters. Fortunately it's such a small stream that fishermen seldom find it attractive, preferring the excitement of the larger, hatchery reared, non-native trout stocked each spring in the bigger streams below. The put-and-take trout crowd. I used to be one of them, a long time ago. These days I'd rather have a few wild trout than a lot of lazy hatchery drones, doomed to die in streams too warm, too silted, too unshaded, too polluted to call home.
The moss and fern-covered rock that form the streambanks are wet under my hand. It's an interesting sensation: rock so cool and slippery. I try to watch my footing, for a bad fall on hard rock would be trouble, especially when you're alone.
The clear mountain waters gurgle and bounce off rocks, drag by small sand bars, slide through deep pools, tumble over little waterfalls. Tiny waterfalls that you can get your face right up to.
I try to walk softly and slowly, try not to rip the moss and ferns. A reverence returns, deeper and more natural than in any man-made cathedral. Although I've been here many times, I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of this place. I wish I could live here, in a hidden cabin high up on the side of the slope, where not even the bear hunters would find me in November. I would not speak a word, would not tell a soul. I would be an Indian ghost.
I would drift down the slope in the early morning, touch the cold stream to drink and wash, then steal away to wherever my muse lead me that day. Maybe up on top of this tableland, up onto the table-mountain pine plateau that crowns this area, where whitetail deer rear their fawns and grouse drum on logs back in the trees. Where the drooping chandeliers of grass spiders glow like relaxed strings of pearls in the morning sun.
There are many secret places here, where mountain springs flow over white sands under the pines. Where forests give way to bracken fern moors, with a few rusting ruins of metal left behind by loggers and homesteaders long ago. Look hard, because they are almost gone. The ruins, that is; the land is coming back, changed but powerful still. These mountains have gone through many rebirths through the eons; what's one more?
When I was a teenager, my brother and I were picking wild blueberries near this area, up on top in the bracken meadows. The best berries were near the edge, in the afternoon shade of the trees. Sweet and big.
Later on, we stumbled on the foundation of an old homestead house. Some exploration revealed the springhouse ruins, with cold, clear water forcing itself up through the sand. Knowing that homesteaders threw away trash such as bottles around their homesites, we dug with our hands down through the sand bed of the spring. Eventually we struck hard objects. Sometimes they were stones, but sometimes they were small bottles, clear or blue and with narrow necks that had once been stoppered with corks. I tried to imagine the people who had lived there. What were they like? Where did they come from? Where did they go, and why?
The land there has largely healed from their attempts at beating back the forest. Forests stripped by logging (complete, ruthless denuding of entire watersheds, unlike the more scientific timber management of today), burned over by rampant wildfires, have transformed themselves into something resembling the forest primeval, at least to the casual eye. The 200-foot tall white pines that were once branded for royal British ship's masts are long gone, although the species remains in a less-regal form. The giant hemlocks that were once felled for only their bark--leaving the wood to rot--remain, with a very few remote stands even still claiming the status of "old growth".
All in all, the mountains and streams remain. Forests and other plants come and go relatively quickly, while the rocks and soil set the true pace. The Appalachian Mountains are very, very, old; the oldest on the continent. They wait, they live, they breathe.
When I'm here, there's nowhere else I need to be, nothing else I should be doing. Even so, I wonder: what's around the next bend in the stream, what's even higher up? Curiosity and wanderlust reign as I keep moving. Am I moving too fast to appreciate this place? I hope not.
Think like a mountain, listen to a clear mountain stream. See if you aren't changed for the better.
Photo location: Red Run, Quehanna Wild Area, Elk and Cameron Counties, Pennsylvania.
