Why Pine Creek?

As I have talked about here before (and will again) I am planning on a 60-mile bike trip this summer along the Pine Creek Rail Trail in northern Pennsylvania. It will be 60 miles for my 60th birthday. I have given one of my reasons for the trip. I have always been entranced by the Pine Creek Gorge and when I was younger the New York Central/Penn Central/Conrail line ran up the Creek. I always wanted to make that trip in the head end of a freight. What an adventure. What a feeling of power in a diesel pounding out the miles.

Well, the rails are gone. It is now part of the Rails to Trails program. It is an "easy" trail having no more than a 3% grade anywhere along the route. So it makes sense for a first time bike trip like this.


But why Pine Creek? There are probably 60-mile rides like that elsewhere. Well, not for me. Pine Creek is a deeply embedded part of who I am. It is one of four waters that I think of as my spiritual well. In many ways it may even be the most influential, though not the biggest. There was an old saying that my aunt used to repeat when I would talk about leaving the area and not hanging around. Once you get your feet wet in Pine Creek you will always come back.

So there is that pull. But it is richer than that. It is the spiritual pull of water- and for me this water- that draws me. It is a place of spiritual power. It is what the Celts would call a "thin place," a place where the wall between God and you is so thin that He can break right through, a place where the separation of the spiritual and material is thin enough that you can see to the other side. Some places have this naturally; others have it because of what we bring to them.

My spiritual intuition tells me that Pine Creek is one of those natural places. It has a sense of the Holy about it. It has a sense of the spiritual flowing around and through it. Water in and of itself can do that. Pine Creek has a wilderness and a majesty that is hard to grasp that adds more of that Holy. Over most of its 60-mile length it is hard to get a sense of the whole since it is so large. At the northern end at the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania you can get some sense of it. There you can be on top and look down and see, like in the picture above. But elsewhere you are caught by its height and even "softness." (Like in the picture on the masthead.) It isn't a mountain like you see at the Arizona Grand Canyon or the Rockies.

This is the Allegheny plateau with the gorge cut by ice and water. The valley is a water course through the plateau. It is not a water gap between mountains. It is cut out of the mountains themselves. Generations ago it may have been one of the few routes north in that part of the country when the native Indians needed a way to connect with their brethren in New York. Yet it was dangerous with rattlesnakes and wild animals, not to mention possibly hostile other humans.

But there was something about it. Something unique and special. When I was young that something terrified me. All wilderness did. I dropped out of the Boy Scouts because I was afraid of camping. There were things and powers and problems that I couldn't easily solve out there. Give me my warm bed and solid roof. But I remember going to the Canyon as a child. I remember, no, I don't remember in a memory that can be pulled back, I remember in a feeling that has never left me. Every time I have gone back over the past 40 years (and it has been many) my soul remembers that this is part of "home." It is part of me. I cannot let it go. It won't let me go. It is part of my ongoing pilgrimage. It is part of how God has filled me with His Spirit.

Okay, so I'm getting all mystical and weird about this. That's because these are things that are beyond words. They reside in that deep place of the soul that you know are real. They also remind us that in spite of all we may say about "home" being heaven, I am not so sure that this is the case. We were not created to live in an ethereal or other worldly "heaven." Eden was here, material, earthly and I am sure earthy.

So this trip is a time of connecting. I don't expect some overwhelming spiritual experience. I don't know what to expect in that sense. Other than a beauty and a power and a spiritualness that will, I hope, be a celebration of life and its ongoing hope and possibility as I end my 6th decade and head into a whole new territory.