A Meditation From SGL 57

At about 2100 feet of elevation, I am at the top of a mountain in northeast Pennsylvania surrounded by red spruce, birch, hemlock, mountain laurel and high bush blueberry. It is quintessential habitat for Black bears, coyotes, ruffed grouse and rattlesnakes. This mountaintop swamp stretches for a few miles in either direction dotted everywhere with secret sandstone and gray shale balds, much like the one on which I stand. In front of me I feel like what I see are fossilized waves washing over rock spilling fourth from a blanket of green moss. 400 million years ago, I am on a shoreline somewhere.

An old stump supports a vivarium of mosses and lichens, ranging in color from gray to bright green, a small colorful community against the bigger one behind it. On top of the balds here all the flora is small and weathered and seemingly ancient. Some of these bonsai weathered hemlocks and spruces could be over a hundred years old, slurping from this sweet soil decade after endless decade.

This is one specific ecosystem that runs into and meshes with the others on all sides, the steep valleys of Chestnut Oak and Sugar Maple and White Pine and Ash that have be logged off and re-growing for 250 years or more. Which seems like a fleeting moment when pondering an ancient wave rolling through time on a mountaintop rock.

Many things ride upon another. One life blends into and comes fourth from the ones around it. For how long? In the forest this is clear. The vibrations inside the snag where the hairy woodpecker drums will somehow echo endlessly through time. The forest is unique in this way, because it is both a monitoring of real time, and also a portrait of the past.

Looking southeast the clouds sit low in the valley, creating a moment that seems at higher altitude than we really are. It is the peak and valley region here, the Endless Mountains, and I can just begin to understand why.