Juniata, a river story

The Juniata River valley near Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

Seasons mingling in Central Pennsylvania.

The sun was squatting low to the west as I scooted up Washington Street in front of my parents’ hundred-year-old house. The hill climbed moderately at first as I passed the Johnsons’, the Parsons’, the Thompsons’, all houses where kids close to my age lived. A block farther up I passed the Mission House, a three story brick building owned by the college, although it was several blocks away from the manicured campus. I tried my best not to look too long at the intersection with the alley on the other side of the Mission House. That intersection made my skin crawl. On the porch some college kids were drinking beer, and their talk drifted among the quiet homes and swishing trees.

I passed a house where an old man with wrinkly blue skin always sat on a swinging chair on the front porch at the end of a school day. He was always there. Every day at three. I wondered what his life was like, how he ended up on a lonely porch swing every day at the same time. He must have had a story, I thought. We all have stories.

I continued and passed the old Smith place, and then the houses stopped altogether on that side of Washington Street. The hill got steeper, and then the sidewalks disappeared as abruptly as the houses did.

Farther up the hill an expanse of green came into view, and I could see across to a line of handsome houses that had big views of the little town below. When I drew close to the line of big homes I turned to look back. The grid of city blocks was spread out in neat rows and columns. I could see the Owens Corning Fiberglass factory, the towering courthouse where my father worked and on another hill on the other side of town I could see the J.C. Blair Memorial Hospital, which was named for some industrious guy who founded a factory more than a hundred years before. It was a nice view. It was strange, though, that most towns I’d been to seemed to line up pretty much the same way. Big houses were always on the hills, and normal houses on normal city blocks were always down below. Big houses were like thrones, I figured, and thrones were no good if there weren’t other chairs around that made the thrones seem more important. Or maybe it was simply a matter of being seen. No use having a fancy chair if there’s no one around to see how fancy it is.

I walked into the upscale neighborhood on top of the hill and threaded a few blocks that led to a driveway where I knew a trail meandered into the woods. Feeling the dirt under my soles improved my contemplative mood. There were sweet-smelling birch trees casting long shadows through thickets of tangled blueberry bushes. The blossoms were falling off, and I figured it would only be a few weeks until the berries were ready for eating.

The neighborhoods now out of sight the trail descended and gathered into a rocky ravine. The woods gave way where the trail spilled onto a large rock shelf, which jutted out in a V and presided over a steep wooded valley. My kind of throne. The sun was crawling down the western edge of the sky and was suspended over Warrior’s Ridge. It cast shades of pink on thin wisps of clouds over my head. The meanders of the Juniata River down below reflected little splashes of the gathering ethereal cinema.

The Juniata River slithers through The Land of a Thousand Hills.

Time to reflect?

There were a bunch of names that were used a lot in the town of my childhood, J.C. Blair only one of them. Juniata, a name the Indians gave to a trading post in the area, was another. The name of the college in the town of my childhood was Juniata. And so was the name of that slow river with splashes of pink reflecting in it.

The Juniata River was first fed by springs seeping from the eastern edge of Western Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Plateau. It’s headwaters collected in two main channels, the Little and Frankstown branches. These streams slowly gathered strength from other streams, tumbling waters like Bald Eagle Creek and Spruce Creek where Jimmy Carter went fly fishing at least once every year. About ten miles up river from my cliff was where the two branches joined to become the Juniata, and it flowed for about a hundred miles threading the heavily wooded country, which early settlers called The Land of a Thousand Hills. And it really was. The folded ridges piled up on each other, one faded horizon after another in the thick eastern air.

Juniata wasn’t the only Indian name used in contemporary nomenclature. Alfarata was said to be the name of an Indian princess. It was also the name of my elementary school. Susquehannock, Oneida, Kayuga, Aliquippa, Kitanning, Kishaquikillis—they were the only remnants of cultures that were long vanished from that country. The stories were inconclusive, but a historian who talked to my eighth grade class said the region was home to an ancient group of Native Americans white people called Woodland Indians. More recently it was settled by Susquehannocks.

The lady said it was unclear exactly what happened because when the whites started settling the East Coast all the Indians started moving inland to places like the Juniata country, and then they started fighting, which apparently confused the matter for historians. It looked, though, like the Susquehannocks were there first. A tribe called Lenape conquered the Susquehannocks, and then the Susquehanocks conquered the Lenape.

I smiled at this memory thinking about Samuel Clemmens’ Hatfields and McCoys. It’s human nature, I guess.

Anyway, when the Irriquois were driven out of New York state, they came here and wiped out all of the Susquehanock and Lenape people. And that wasn’t long before the French and Indian War. I don’t know what happened after that. The lady said the Lenape were driven the whole way to Oklahoma, where I guess they lived in peace for a little while until white people decided they wanted a little piece of Oklahoma too.

I sat in the palm of the rock for some time watching the river float by, watching the sun set on another day of my life. I stood to retrace my steps, as we all must eventually.

As I made my way back into the hillside neighborhood with the town spread out in orderly rows and columns below a curious thought crept into my head.

I wondered if the Indians had made their homes like thrones, too.

© Greg Stahl

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Juniata.

The word slips happily from a person’s tongue like the smell of rain, like a warm smile from a stranger, like … the waters of a playful stream meandering over rocks on a long journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Juniata.

The word, however, is considered a corruption of the Iroquois word “onayutta,” meaning “standing stone.” There was once a 15-foot-tall stone in Central Pennsylvania that contained carvings that recorded one of the area tribes’ history, but it vanished in 1754 when the Indians left and, legend says, took it with them.

The Juniata River runs for a little more than 90 meandering miles through Central Pennsylvania’s rugged interior before melding with the Susquehanna River and, finally, Chesapeake Bay. The Juniata formed an early eighteenth-century frontier and was the location of Native American attacks against European settlements during the French and Indian War. The watershed encompasses an area of about 3,400 miles, about an eighth of the entire Susquehanna River’s drainage area.

The above story is years old and comes from a contemplative time and space. It is more fiction than reality since I don’t remember any such specifics from any given day during my youth, but it does center on this place. Family names, not historic names, have been changed. The photos are from today’s hike with Sasha, my parents’ very enthusiastic and affectionate pup.