Colyer Lake

Three years ago, my husband and I moved from an urban area in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, where we’d both been born and raised, to a rural town in the Northeast.

I anticipated a drastic change. A cross-country transplant of almost 2,667 miles (but who’s counting) was bound to supply a certain amount of culture shock. In a country as large as the US, moving states is almost as disorienting as emigrating to a new country entirely. The food, the landscape, the laws, the accents, the culture— at first, very little is recognizable, outside of the stars and stripes flapping outside of most businesses.

We tried hard to acclimate, not to pine for the ‘leeks and watermelons’ we’d left behind, to do and to love what the locals did and loved. But the one persistent prejudice we couldn’t seem to shake was that the East Coast was so civilized.

I was used to wilderness— real wilderness, volcanic forests and barren high desert. Mountains— the kind with glaciers and alpine meadows. Our first ‘hike’ in the Northeast involved paying a fee and walking through a turnstile before being admitted to a heavily-peopled boardwalk that traced a modest creek and series of underwhelming waterfalls. We completed the loop in 45 minutes, bought some magnets in the gift shop and tried not to voice the painful comparisons rattling around in our brains.

These people don’t know what they’re missing.

Then Covid hit.

Everyone experienced it at the same time: the drastic and dramatic shrinking of your personal universe. Travel evaporated, and with it, the snobbery about which places outshone the others. The world became your house, your street. If you were very, very fortunate, it became your neighborhood.

Our neighborhood included a place called Colyer Lake.

The lake, like many in Pennsylvania, is manmade. Our neighbors told us it used to be a quarry. Google says it was formed when the dam was built. No-one remembers the details. Basically, like so many “wild” places in the Northeast, it had to wait for industry to finish with it before Nature could reclaim it.

During the first empty, upside down weeks of pandemic, at loose ends, desperate to stop reading the news, we put on masks and left our house. We live on Church Hill road— our landlords’ home is a converted church, an abandoned church sits in picturesque decay across the street and as we walked down through the bright and blooming spring, we turned right past the last remaining church and into a gently rolling farmland. Sheep and cows lolled in green meadows as we passed. The foothills surrounded us, verdant offshoots of the ancient and weary Appalachian mountain range, green ridges dotted with white farms and red barns. Frogs and crickets sang in the marshy fields. A motley herd of mixed horses, ponies and mules wickered and pranced optimistically at our approach, hoping for apples or carrots.

Despite the wild, horrifying, unstoppable steamroller of pandemic every electronic device relentlessly trumpeted back at the house, outside was calm and serene and unchanging, thoroughly out of time.

I fell in love with Pennsylvania on those quiet walks.

The lake itself is 77 acres, looped by a muddy path, frequented by kayakers and mountain bikers and college kids and moody locals of all stripes. There are two step-stone creek crossings required if you’re going to go all the way around, impassable after a snow melt or a heavy rain, a minor adventure almost any other time of year.

Looks can be deceiving… Dignity and cell phones have been lost in these waters.

In the autumn we walked around the lake in a blaze of fall foliage. I thought of my friends and family living in cities, walled up in their apartments, tethered to the drumbeat of crazy-making news reports. Wildfires had ravaged Oregon over the summer. Both my parents, many of my friends had been forced out of their homes till the danger passed. We grieved beloved natural spaces, devastated by a manmade disaster. We took solace in a manmade space, dressed in nature’s clothes.

When the long winter came, casualty lists mounting in the distant cities, we came again, exiled from work and desperate for daylight. The lake was frozen over, like something out of Little Women. Ice skaters traced dizzy circles on its surface. Leaves skittered across the ice in the frigid breeze and the sunset made gold out of the early afternoon.

I would never, never again belittle this patch of undeserved serenity.

Pandemic seems to be easing these days, although we’ve grown wary of hope. Vaccines and loosened restrictions hint that travel may return. For the first two years I lived in Pennsylvania, I tried not to fantasize about returning to the Oregon Coast, the Cascades. the Columbia River Gorge, Lava Canyon, the Rogue River, all the wild places that put this civilized land to shame. Now, I’d gladly bring my friends and loved ones here instead, to this land of overgrown reservoirs and reforested mining camps, canal tow-paths turned to nature preserves and quarries turned into boat ramps. All the earth will need to recover before we’re out of this mess, and Pennsylvania proves that it’s possible.