By David Blackmore

At eight years old, I don’t understand why my dad wants to move us from the comfortable Craftsman on a leafy Pittsburgh hillside all the way to the stinkin’ boonies. I love our rambling old house and its intimate suburban neighborhood, but Dad has decided it’s time to move “back” to the small Pennsylvania town where he and Mom went to the prom together back in 1960. A sensitive boy, effeminate and a bit snobby, I am not at all sure this move is a good idea.

Their sleepy hometown of Kane is three hours north, on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest. There, Dad tells us, we will be safe from the dangers of urban life and will thrive in the clear, brisk air of the Allegheny Mountains. He won’t have to work so hard, he promises, so he’ll have plenty of time to explore the pristine wilds with us boys.

As we traipse around Kane and its environs looking at potential new homes, I can’t help but be disappointed by the local housing stock. Just a few houses in town are built from brick or stone, and none of these is up for sale, so all the houses we view are 80-year-old, two-story clapboards with narrow windows and utilitarian trim. The only significant architectural variable seems to be whether or not a house’s original clapboards have been covered by aluminum siding, which tries but fails to mimic the wood underneath.

By August, we are starting to despair that we won’t find a house in time for the start of the new school year, when someone suggests we go check out the old Siegel place four miles out from Kane in the even-smaller village of Sergeant.

We drive out past East Kane, after which the forest on the hillsides is interrupted only every mile or so by small clusters of what Mom explains are old “factory houses”—modest one- or two-story cookie cutter houses that had been built for workers in factories that were shut down years ago. We miss the tiny sign that says “Village of Sergeant,” but we do see the “three houses on the left and then three houses on the right” that we had been instructed to look for, and so we turn off Route 321 down the unmarked dirt road.

The road is bumpy, and a storm of yellow dust flies up behind the Mercury. My younger brothers think this is cool, and they giggle as we cross a gurgling stream and bounce along through a forest thick with trees so tall you can only see a sliver of light high above. After a couple of minutes, the sky opens again, and the car crunches to a stop in a gravel parking area across from the house. Tommy and Pete push each other to get the first view from the small backseat window and then tumble out when my dad opens the heavy door and pushes forward his half of the split bench seat.

Like a couple of excited puppies, my brothers run down the side of the house, pulling my father behind them. My mother and I exit the car in a more dignified manner on the other side, pausing in the parking lot to look up at the house before following Dad and my brothers down toward the gurgling water of the brook we had crossed on the road. “Marilyn!” my dad screams, as excited as his five- and three-year-old sons. “Come see the beautiful trout stream!”

Mom walks through the overgrown grass to see what all the fuss is about, but I stay on the gravel of the parking lot, giving the house itself a careful once-over. I am not impressed.

Before me stands a large, squat rectangle with white clapboard walls and a green-shingled hip roof. The roof has one tiny brick chimney and a single narrow dormer that houses not a window but rather permanently closed shutters. Tacked to the front of the house is another rectangular box, a porch of dark green wooden shingles. The porch has been closed in by one of the house’s previous owners, white clapboard filling the area above the shingles, except for one squat window on each side and a simple wooden storm door in the middle. The main body of the house has uniformly narrow rectangular windows placed at rather large intervals from each other, their wooden frames painted black. Everything about the house seems designed not for any kind of aesthetic interest but rather with the dogged, single-minded determination to keep out cold winter air.

By the time I have decided the house is not interesting enough even to be ugly, Dad is walking back up the hill, saying, “This is it. This is the house.” My mother protests quietly that we haven’t even seen the inside yet, but she is weakening under the infection of my father’s enthusiasm, and she begins peeking in windows to see if the house might be a little more inspired on the inside than it is on the outside. (It is not.)

I head down to join my brothers by the stream. Already agile and athletic at age five, Tommy grabs Pete’s smaller hand and guides him down the rocky bank to the edge of the brook and points out a mud-colored crayfish scrambling across the slimy pebbles on the creek bed. Pete squeals with delight and waddles purposefully right into the water, his chubby hand reaching out to catch the marvelous creature. Tommy grabs Pete’s other hand just as Pete’s previously white Keds slip on the subaquatic slime, saving him from full immersion in the icy cold water.

I watch them a few yards downstream from the top of a six-foot mossy stone wall that marks the flat part of the yard off from the stream below. The water sparkles enticingly, particularly where it tumbles under a narrow footbridge about 30 yards upstream before flowing out of the forest and into the clearing where the house is located. But I have no desire to go any closer to it, certain that it will be full of all manner of slimy creatures and cold mud. And I can’t help but notice the rusting pipe just below me. About a foot in diameter, the pipe must once have crossed the stream, but now it has been cut, most of its length folded back toward the bottom of the stone wall. Fully submerged in the water, the pipe is covered with a metallic orange slime, particles of which also coat the stream bed below it.

Trying to open myself to Dad’s enthusiasm, I follow him as he leaves the stream and circles the house. The back of the house is of course rectangular, with another rectangle tacked onto it—another closed-in porch. The backyard is much larger than the front, walled on two sides by perpendicular columns of giant spruce trees that are about twice the height of the house itself. At the bottom of the stairs to the back porch, a narrow concrete sidewalk connects the house to an outbuilding that looks like a large one-car garage, except for the fact there’s no way you could park a car in it: the building stands on cement blocks in a swamp that is several feet lower than the yard, and there is a three-foot gap between the surface of the yard and the garage door.

A wide Hemlock stands in the low ground to the right of the “garage,” with even lower swamp ground behind it. “I think that’s wild watercress,” Dad says as he harvests some of the small-leaved, dark-green plants in the deepest part of the swamp, where the water is several inches deep and passing at a slow trickle.

I know then that this is where we will live.

***

Over the course of the following year, we explore the muddy woods that surround the solid clapboard house in every direction. Through all these adventures, I can’t help but notice the stone and metal ruins that seem to lurk everywhere beneath the fern-carpeted understory, evidence of some sort of mysterious earlier civilization. Amateur archaeologists, we learn to identify industrial and domestic ruins in our wanderings through the woods: Half-buried railroad tracks lead us to a large tin shed where a perfectly preserved steam engine is parked for posterity. Rusty metal can appear anywhere: 10-foot-diameter tanks, pipes to nowhere, antique oil wells that are still pumping away. The domestic remains feature stone steps to nowhere and signs of flora inappropriate to the overgrown forest: a wormy apple tree here, an iris there, a patch of foxglove or brilliant blue lupines.

One Tuesday in July, I have nothing to do, so I decide I will go exploring in the woods. Unlike my little brothers on their own ventures into the woods, I’m not especially excited about it, and I hope I won’t come across any creatures—newts, garter snakes, crayfish—in my travels. I am more interested in finding evidence of earlier human habitation in these Pennsylvania wilds.

As I leave the closed-in porch, the storm door whooshes closed behind me on its 1950s hydraulic closer. I step out into a fine, clear sunlight. Even in July, the sun in the village of Sergeant is not strong, and our house is so completely surrounded by 60-feet-tall trees that the house and its small front yard receive direct sunlight only at midday. Last night the temperature fell into the 40s, so right now it’s a crisp, dry 76 degrees.

I decide I will go left today down our dirt road. This road, which has no name that I know of, is less than a mile long, connecting at both ends with Pennsylvania Route 321. Just past our house, a tiny creek runs beneath it, the run-off from our spring farther up the mountain which then tumbles down a mossy waterfall before spreading out into the swamp. There are giant white pines on the slope leading up toward the railroad tracks to the right and towering spruce trees to the left, sloping down toward the swamp.

After about 100 yards, the sky opens where the ancient conifers give way to scrub on both sides of the road, and I come across the largest ruin of all: a two-story red clapboard structure with white trim leaning perilously onto the railroad tracks. Climbing the steep stairs to the concrete platform, I peer through the dirty windows of this crooked depot. Through the first windowed door, I can identify a huge, decommissioned meat cooler. The next door reveals a frontier-style general store with a bank of postal boxes labeled “U.S. Mail.” More mysterious is the final door, next to which hangs a crooked sign with the words “Otto Chemical Company” written on it. How, I wonder as I peer into the beadboard-paneled office, does one make chemicals in the middle of the woods, and why is there no factory visible anywhere?

Having seen all I can without breaking and entering, I continue about 40 yards farther down the road, where the scrub is interrupted by another stand of towering spruce trees. These trees form a perfect square around the house of our nearest neighbor—an old man in his 90s whom everyone just calls “Swede.” His sagging clapboard house, with its peeling yellow paint, is smaller than ours, with just one and a half stories. It is no doubt one of the old factory houses that are scattered throughout Sergeant, usually in straight lines of three or four.

No one has seen Swede outside the house in months, and there is no sign of life in any of the windows.

After Swede’s house, there is a crossroads of sorts, and I must decide which direction I will follow. The main road makes a sharp left and then leads down a small hill to the most open part of the valley, where Dad tells me the mysterious chemical factory once stood. This is the only place anywhere near us that is flat. This flat part is about the size of a football field, and it is choked with weeds, but significantly it has no real trees—another anomaly in this heavily-wooded hollow. I do not think to question why this is the case, why nothing tall has ever grown back here, even though the chemical plant was torn down decades ago.

Looking farther down the road and across the valley, I can see a row of four more factory houses, identical in their floor plans and exterior elevations, but diverse in their states of disrepair. The nicest one, which has been re-sided with 70s-style natural wood, houses some of the less prosperous but still respectable cousins of the timber baron who owns most of the land in this valley. The most dilapidated sags under the ragtag crew of six kids who seem to be raising themselves there.

Today, though, I’m not going to follow our dirt road all the way out to where it meets up again with Route 321. For today’s expedition, I am going to turn right and head up the mountain.

After a steep climb for the first 10 yards or so, I cross the railroad tracks and then reach another intersection of sorts, where three paths diverge. At one point, all these paths were no doubt roads, but now only one of them could reasonably be called that. That road, which heads straight up the mountain, is muddy and full of craters, but it is still used occasionally to bring felled timber down from higher up.

I bear right and follow the most overgrown of the paths—one that clearly hasn’t been a real road for at least a generation. Big patches of grass have grown up through the muddy gravel, and you have to push heavy green branches out of the way to get through.

This path is level and parallels the railroad tracks, which run about 40 yards farther down the mountainside. The hillside down toward the railroad tracks seems more or less wild, covered in trees up to 50 or 60 feet tall. The only sign of civilization on that side is the rusty metal reservoir, about five feet in diameter, that houses the mountain spring that supplies our house with its water. I walk quickly past the spring, not caring to be reminded of the salamanders and other slimy creatures that swim in our always icy-cold and delicious water before it travels down the hill to our house through the narrow pipe that froze last winter.

The uphill side of the path lets in more light than the downhill side, probably due to a power line that runs parallel to the path along a long plateau that is about 40 feet deep. This plateau is full of ruins, a perfect site for my amateur archeological dig. As I survey it, I think back to the three signs my parents have taught me to look for to confirm that a house once stood in what is now an empty hillside, or perhaps even a wooded one.

Apple trees are the most obvious signs of past inhabitation, since apples do not grow wild in this part of the country. You can eat the apples if you pass by in September or early October, though they are invariably small and bitter, and they often have a nasty little worm inside them, not always visible from the apple’s mottled outer skin. Now, in July, the apples are about the size of cherries.

The other botanical clue of a domestic past is common garden flowers that aren’t native to these woods. Often these will be German irises in a funky purple-and-gold pattern that must have been popular 50 years ago, or drifts of pink-and-white foxgloves. If you’re lucky, you might even come across a lilac bush in full bloom or a field of brilliant blue lupines never found in the wilder parts of the area.

The final signs of past domestic settlement are often less visible because they have been grown over by various mosses and vines. These are the giant cut stones that mark a disappeared house’s foundation, and sometimes a set of stairs leading from the former road up to the former house. These are the same stones that form the foundation and basement of our own house—rough on the inner and outer sides but cut into perfect rectangles on the sides on which they are stacked and carefully mortared against the winter cold.

Today I explore three sites of former homes, lined up in a perfect row as factory houses always seem to be. I am amazed that in these sites I can find nothing more than the telltale domestic plants and the foundation stones. How have all other traces of whole families’ lives just disappeared? Were their things carried away by thieves? By animals building their own nests against the Pennsylvania winter? Has everything just decomposed into the wet, mossy earth? How long have these people been gone, and how long did their houses stand empty before they were torn down or just crumbled to nothing?

I continue down the overgrown pathway until I see a much larger clearing to my right, on the gentle slope downhill from the former road toward the railroad tracks, which are still used once a day by a rattling freight train.

In this clearing, about the size of a soccer field, sit the ruins of an old glass factory. These ruins are much better preserved than those of the chemical factory closer to our house, or those of the old factory houses I have just explored. I’m not sure if these ruins remain more intact because the glassworks shut down more recently than the chemical factory, or because this plant was more complex structurally to begin with. Perhaps its owners were simply less concerned with covering it up when they closed up shop.

I’m glad my little brothers are not with me on this visit to the glassworks archaeological site, because the flatness of the site masks hidden dangers. Down by the railroad tracks there’s a six-foot drop-off, probably a former loading dock for getting the finished glass products onto the train. About twenty feet in from that, there’s a square hole about 15 feet on each side and five feet deep; the bottom of this depression is strewn with random debris, so it’s hard to tell whether or not there’s solid ground below. Then, toward the other end zone of the soccer field stand the hulking metal skeletons of giant ovens, their rusty doors hanging open on crooked hinges.

For me, there’s something satisfying in the glasswork ruins’ imposition of architectural angles on a natural site. Or maybe it’s the imposition of the riotous nature that has overrun the architectural angles. The biggest pleasure of the glassworks site, though, is the hunt for treasures. A rainbow glint in the mossy concrete under my feet might signal a half-buried glass brick or an electrical insulator, prizes I can take to add to my collection at home.

I tool around the ruins of the glassworks for about half an hour and then decide I will continue to my favorite ruin of all; I have saved the best for last, as I always do. About 50 yards past the glassworks, I climb the uneven concrete steps, pass through the unlocked chain link gate, and come upon a pool of clear, cold water in which darts the brown brilliance of a school of brook trout.

A rectangle of rusty chain-link fence encloses a rectangular pool with a narrow walkway around it. This pool is about 15 feet by 30 feet, and it is constructed of the same cut stones that make up the foundations of all the houses in the area, both those still standing and those disintegrating into the earth. Water trickles into the pool from another spring higher up the mountain, but it glides out of the pool in a flat stream on the downhill side, making a small waterfall that gleams in the clear July sunlight.

It's not clear whether this pool was at some point a swimming pool or if it served some industrial purpose for the glassworks below, but the stone pool is now home to a huge school of trout, who somehow do not bump into each other as they dart en masse from one corner of the pool to another, their lazy peace disturbed by the appearance of my shadow above them.

It was my father who introduced my brothers and me to this magical pool, and he still brings us here on occasion to feed the fish. Dad doesn’t let us fish in this pool, though, telling us it wouldn’t be a fair battle with the fish, who are trapped here and have not learned how to protect themselves from various types of predators, unlike the more wild trout in the streams. Fishing here, he explains, would be a kind of cheating on our part; we could not be proud of catching a fish in this pool because doing so would not demonstrate any particular skill or smart strategy or dogged persistence on our part.

***

I watch the brown fish dart around on the bottom of the clear pool for a while and then decide that I am hungry, so I will return home for a snack. I decide to circle back home via Upper Sergeant and the highway, making a loop instead of just turning around and going back the way I came. I get back on the path I had been following, which at this point curves down across the railroad tracks and connects onto a wider gravel road that was once part of the old Route 321.

This road is the population center of modern-day Sergeant, with two rows of about five factory houses each, the ten of them in a straight line that is interrupted in the middle by a paved section of the road curving up to meet the new, recently-paved Route 321. These houses are run-down, kind of like Swede’s but with the addition of broken-down refrigerators and moldy La-Z-Boy recliners on their sagging porches. One resident has spray-painted her name next to her front door: “Cheryl Kimes.” I climb up to the highway and walk along the berm, passing the three houses on the left and then turning down our dirt road just before the three houses on the right.

At the bottom of the hill, the road flattens out, and the gurgling brook passes below through a giant metal culvert before widening into a still pool on the downstream side of the bridge on its way toward our house. After the bridge, a slight upgrade takes the bumpy road into a cathedral of towering green. To the left is a deep, dark forest of soaring evergreens. On the steep grade to the right, a canopy of budding maples and beech allow dapples of afternoon sunlight to filter down to the riotous understory of ferns and moss and baby trees. I make my way home.

David Blackmore was born in Pittsburgh but moved mid-childhood to Kane, Pennsylvania. He is associate professor of English and writing program coordinator at Chatham University. David has published in Rockvale Review, Wordrunners eChapbooks, Watershed Journal, Allium, and Northern Appalachia Review, and he recently completed his memoir manuscript Chemical Works Road.