We cross the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, turn northwest in Mercersburg where Civil War-era homes front the highway, and then our headlights begin to pick up traces of yellow and orange in deciduous boughs dangling over this quiet strip of State Highway 16. We cross an invisible border into Huntingdon County and crest Tuscarora and Shade mountains, two ridges that trend north by northeast, and then settle into a pastoral valley in the timeless shadow of Blacklog Mountain to the west.
These are the outermost ridges protecting the land of my childhood from the Atlantic Coastal Plain and its sprawling megalopolis to the south and east. These ridges were walls that slowed early settlement of Pennsylvania’s interior, a place coined by its early inhabitants The Land of a Thousand Hills. And it truly is. The northern fringe of the Appalachian Mountains doesn’t have the scale or size of mountains in Virginia or Tennessee, but the undulating landscape piles up on itself here, mountain after mountain moving with soft curves into the next with parallel rows of corn and small historic towns filling spaces in between.
The car careens around a black bight in a shadowy and sheltered canyon, and my dad asks if I know the ridges’ names. I don’t.
Tuscarora, Shade, Blacklog, he begins, describing the order in which a traveler encounters them going east to west. Then Jacks Mountain near Mount Union, followed by Terrace, Tussey and Bald Eagle. After that, farther west still, is the Allegheny Front, a 2,000-foot forested wall that leads to Pennsylvania’s high country, the Allegheny Plateau, where my dad was born.
The fact is, I haven’t been in this part of the world for four years, and that’s the longest stretch I’ve been away from The Land of a Thousand Hills since I was seven years old, my age when my family moved here from Ohio. I was bitter about that move. I had left friends behind.
But this place has a way of getting beneath a kid’s skin. I remember Sunday afternoon hikes in woods so thick a sound could get lost. I remember climbing on sandstone cliffs above the tumbling waters of the Juniata River, a tributary of the Susquehanna whose headwaters are on the Allegheny Front to the west. I remember swimming in rivers and diving in lakes, swinging on huge vines that dangled from the trees.
We turn west in Mount Union and pass through a water-gap where the Juniata has sliced a notch through Jacks Mountain, then pass the northern edge of Terrace Mountain before settling among the rolling hills and spotty towns of the upper Juniata River Valley, a place as clear and defined in my imagination as any on Earth.
I wasn’t born in this place, but I became a person in this folded country. Having spent my entire adult life west of the Hundredth Meridian, I don’t know it the way I know Colorado and Idaho, but I know it the way a man knows his home. Because as many times as I go away and return, it always is.
Welcome back, I say to myself, to one of the most beautiful and understated parts of the United States. Welcome home.
© Greg Stahl
