Quarry Exploring

Charlotte, Abby, and I spent three hours this Sunday afternoon sneaking around the limestone quarry near our house and hiking the mountains behind it.  It. Was. Glorious.  I hadn't been on a good hike since coming home, and I think my soul was just aching to go exploring.  (Note to self: we all need play time.)

The quarry itself is dilapidated and beautiful; full of crooked, sagging rooftops covered in thick layers of white dust; twisted pipes and electrical wires trailing like rust-colored jungle vines; windows with missing panes.  Due to running machinery we couldn't actually explore up close, so we settled for climbing around on the old train and inventing stories about groups of runaways living in the quarry (because it looks like the perfect place for such things).

Before the climb

After that, we trail-blazed up the side of the mountain and found a bunch of secluded cow pastures.  (Why there are cow pastures up there, I have no idea, but they are lovely.  It’s like another world.  I wish I had pictures, but thanks to sky-high weeds and unsteady ground Char couldn't whip out her camera.)  Finding an actual path up the mountain proved trickier than expected, involving a detour directly through a patch of scruffy bushes, into a creek, and across the train tracks before we finally found a gravel road leading onward and upward.  From here, the hike got very messy.  We scrabbled up the incline, knocking stones loose, grabbing for sturdy looking branches, and yelling “Rock!” whenever we dislodged a sizable object with potential to knock out the person below (there were quite a few of those, and usually the person yelling only did so after the rock had already bounced off someone’s knee or shoulder – there was a lot of yelling all around).  By the time the three of us reached the top, the incline was too steep to let go of anything.  Abby and I hung onto flimsy-looking tree branches while Charlotte looked for a place in the brush to climb through.

    

“There’s barbed wire up here!” she called, to which the reply came, “Well, figure out how to climb through it!  We’re NOT going back down!”  The barbed wire turned out to be nothing more some rusty metal fencing, so we shoved over it and plunged into what looked like a mess of dense, wiry bushes.  Unfortunately we found ourselves in the middle of a thorn patch.  A minute or so of yelping, ripping, and squealing and everyone was free, though not without a few cries of “I’m bleeding!” and “There are thorns in my underwear!” 

Then we were through.  The pastures stretched ahead of us, tantalizingly separated from our strip of wildflowers and weeds by a singing electric fence, long sunlit grasses melting into the shadows of the mountain beyond it.  A few black cows dotted the hills.  We marched through the thick weeds along the fence, suddenly transformed into dirty, sweaty, thoroughly bedraggled British explorers (with terrible accents):

“Hullo!  I daresay we’ve stumbled upon Welsh countryside!”

“No, I think it’s the Amazon.”

“Nonsense, it’s most assuredly Wales.”

“The Amazon!”

“WALES!”

There’s something intoxicating about the thrill that comes from being almost (but not quite) lost.  We plowed on for maybe half a mile, stepping into rabbit holes, jumping over miniature creeks, and tangling in spiders webs until we decided it might be a good idea to figure out how we were going to get down again.  Abby found a promising spot where the bushes thinned a little, and we decided to go for it.  Alas, MORE thorns.  Lots of them.  Story of our lives, I guess.  We got about five feet into the bushes and found ourselves completely surrounded by prickly things.  Charlotte got stuck and Abby slipped on a thorn patch right in front of me (after she got free, I of course fell into the same patch).  Much wild giggling ensued.  I concentrated on freeing my shorts from all the thorns, ignoring Char’s shouts of “Blood!  Blood!  BLOOD!” which kept increasing in volume.  FINALLY, somehow, we both tugged ourselves free and half-ran, half-fell the rest of the way down the bank to where Abby was waiting below on solid ground.  Charlotte was, in fact, bleeding and not just being overly dramatic (I took pictures as evidence). 

 The rest of the days adventures included splashing around in giant quarry puddles, throwing mud at each other, and getting stuck in various thorn patches.  (Come on, it hasn't been a REALLY good adventure until you've gotten a few scratches and some thorns in your underwear.  Seriously people...)  We arrived home three hours later, scraped, a little bloody, covered in mud and prickles, and quite happy.  

Dear reader, if you ever find yourself in Bellefonte and are looking for an excellent hike, go check out this quarry.  So much fun.

Return of the Wandering Blogger

Hi again!  It seems that my blog has died.  But (hooray!) I am here to revive it.  Maybe.  At least I have good intentions of doing so...  It’s been almost a year since I posted anything, so here's some of what’s been going on in the past eleven-ish months, all the way up to where I am now…

As of October last year, I became an actual published author!  Eeep!  I wrote a short story titled "Time Travel, Coffee, and A Shoebox" which was published online by Daily Science Fiction.  Not ashamed to admit that the day it appeared as a finished piece in my inbox was one of the happiest days of my life.  Much screaming and leaping around the house ensued.  Check it out, yo.  Here’s the link if you feel so inclined.  http://dailysciencefiction.com/science-fiction/virtual-reality/nina-pendergast/time-travel-coffee-and-a-shoebox

In November, I decided try National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  I had thirty days in which to hammer out a 50,000-word novel.  As usual, it was something I plunged into without thinking too hard about the fact that I worked 20 hours a week and still had a fifteen-credit semester to tackle.  Somehow, in the midst of all the chaos, sleepless nights, and mass consumption of vanilla tea, the novel got written.  As you might imagine, it was a train wreck.  Some of it reads like the ravings of a madwoman (which, by November 30, I practically was).  It was both the most exhilarating and the most nightmarish month of fall semester.  As for the manuscript… I’d let you read it, but then I’d have to kill you.

May marked the end of my first year of online college classes.  Doing college online is… a very different experience, and one that sometimes makes me want to tear out my hair.  This is probably the subject for another blog post entirely.  Anyway, in the beginning of June, I left my dear old Bellefonte for a third summer of counseling at Camp Hebron, a Christian camp in Halifax (PA, not Canada).  There’s absolutely no adequate way to do justice to the nine-and-a-half weeks I spent there, at least not in one paragraph.  There never is.  It was one of the most beautiful, adventurous, wonder-filled summers I have ever experienced.  Stargazing.  Mud fights.  Canoeing on the Susquehanna.  Midnight hot chocolate raids with my campers.  Laughing until my sides hurt.  Eating worms.  Climbing rooftops.  Sharing stories into the wee hours of the morning.

I’ve been back for two weeks now, and the semester officially starts tomorrow.  It’s hard to describe all the feelings I have about the end of summer, about all the goodbyes I’ve had to say and how strange it feels to settle back into the routine of home.  Ah, end of August, how can you be so lovely and so sad at the same time?  I am reading The Wind in the Willows and Kenneth Grahame does a better job articulating this than I can, so I'll borrow his words:

“Nature’s Grand Hotel has its Season, like the others.  As the guests one by one pack, pay, and depart, and the seats at the table d’hôte shrink pitifully at each succeeding meal; as suites of rooms are closed, carpets taken up, and waiters sent away; those boarders who are staying on, en pension, until the next year’s full reopening, cannot help being somewhat affected by all these flittings and farewells, this eager discussion of plans, routes, and fresh quarters, this daily shrinkage in the stream of comradeship.  One gets unsettled, depressed, and inclined to be querulous.  Why this craving for change?  Why not stay on quietly here, like us, and be jolly?  You don’t know this hotel out of season, and what fun we have among ourselves, we fellows who remain and see the whole interesting year out.  All very true, no doubt, the others always reply; we quite envy you – and some other year perhaps – but just now we have engagements – and there’s the bus at the door – our time is up!  So they depart, with a smile and a nod, and we miss them, and feel resentful.”

While the end of summer often finds me unsettled, querulous, and craving change, I'm determined to find contentment and adventure here.  It's been a topsy-turvy past couple of weeks, but not without plenty of wonderful and interesting happenings.  So there will be more stories to come regarding said adventures, soon.  For now, farewell, goodnight, and (if you’ve made it this far down the page) thanks for reading my ramblings.  I'll be back later.