After the manicured quality of Eagles Mere, the rather more rustic, authentic living and working area around Dushore offered a refreshing contrast. With our friends Tom and Marcia, we went to stay in a ‘cabin’ belonging to a family relative. Actually, the term cabin is a misnomer – it really was a ‘modular’ or prefabricated house, erected on a stunning plot next to Black Creek – an ice cold stream running at the bottom of the garden.
Evidence of Hurricane Irene abounded in the State Parks. Worlds End State Park had huge trees stuck in the river where usually children played on a little sandy beach on a bend; , picnic tables trapped in trees; and a broken bridge which had kept people renting cabins trapped for twenty four hours longer than they intended. We were told that another State Park Rickert’s Glen May not be open for Labor Day week-end (spelled like that!) – and we have learned that this is a very important public holiday for Americans, symbolising the end of the holiday period, the return to school, and almost a marker for the end of summer (although, as Alistair Cooke used to report regularly, temperatures in many parts of the US are still in the 80’s at this time!)
We travelled around the area, gaining a real sense, I think, of the pleasures of this part of America – the simple coffee houses, general stores,
covered bridges
and the stunning landscape of “endless mountains” , as this part of Pennsylvania is called.
Tom’s sister and husband had bought their plot as an idyllic rural retreat – at least in summer; in winter the area can receive one hundred inches of snow - - that is eight feet of snow!. Their rural idyll, and this simple, unadorned rural life is being challenged by a tapping of a huge gas reserve – at the top of the road from the cabin was such a gas main. Farmers used to hard work and difficult conditions are going to be in receipt of thousands of dollars from the gas companies for leasing part of the land for many years to come. Incomers are coming into the area – not families, but men from Texas and Oklahoma, who are used to working very hard, for days at a time, before taking days off to spend their considerable earnings in bars and clubs. All this was a source of conversation with neighbours, and evidenced in the adverts of financial planners. A way of life, established over generations, is going to change.
When we attended Gwynedd Meeting on Sunday, an announcement was made about a meeting to protest at the gas development. This may prompt a post, on another occasion, of a more philosophical disposition, about Quakers and their dissenting role.
Finally, you may remember I wrote about a Meeting House we could have visited from Eagles Mere, but were prevented because of the storm. Well,, visit it we Here is the meeting house, and the poem I was moved to write:
Elkland Friends Meeting House, Sullivan County, PA.
Open June – September
Meetings on 4th Sunday of the month
We travel along the road -
Further than we thought we would need to-
Until suddenly,
Round a bend in the road,
There it is:
Heart-stoppingly simple building
Painted startling white
Set in a sward of tended green
Carefully maintained.
It has endured beating summer heat,
Piercing winter cold,
Snow.
A peek inside the clumsily painted frame
Reveals desert simplicity:
Floor, benches, stove -
Bare necessities, devoid of munificence or elegance,
Not lacking rustic charm.
A separate door
To earth closets,
Precisely labelled ‘Men’ and ‘Women’,
Is open for travellers in need of respite –
Practical Quaker hospitality.
Out at the back,
The simple low lying grey stones show family names
McCarty, Heeson, Pardoe,
Running down the years:
Faithful lives,
Across the generations.
I look over tree covered rolling hills,
Am moved to my very core.
“Who shall I send?”
“Send me.”
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