Place Entry #2

As soon as I climbed the rubble hill up towards the cave, I immediately felt the refreshing cool air that emits from the dark slope of the cave. Today is a warm day but still very nice. It is around 1 pm and the half-mile walk on the trail to get here was relaxing. It is a sunny day and as I sit here, I like to look at the forest below me and notice the contrast between the lime green, sunlit leaves and the darker leaves that brood in the cooler shadows. Mosquitoes fly around my face and feet. I am a warm, soft thing compared to the chalky grey cave, cool and careless behind me. The mosquitoes are biting through my thin shirt. I can hear, but not see, the barges on the Allegheny River. Just to let you know exactly where I am, I am north of Pittsburgh about thirty miles in a town called Arnold. This is the town in which I grew up and since five days ago, moved back to.

The trail that I walked on to get here used to be an old railroad track, but it is now gone and maintained as a private walking trail that has various trails meandering away from it and up the hills or down to the river bank. Because there used to be train tracks, there are also "ruins" of brick train stations, covered in grafitti and ivy. In the summer, any view of these structures are obscured due to thick bamboo-like weeds that grow taller than I am. From where I am sitting now, I can see what seems like a brick column, like a chimney, on the ground. If I walk past that a bit, there are brick walls to the left. I will have to bring my camera sooner or later.

On the tree next to me, a fuzzy vine of poison ivy snakes upwards. I always tell people that I can roll around naked in poison ivy and not get a rash. I'm not quite sure if that's true or not. I do know for certain that I have been exposed to it plenty of times but have never received a rash. This experience, though, is contrary to what Gift mentions in her book _A Weed By Any Other Name_. She says that the more you become exposed to poison ivy, the more likely that you will receive a rash.

Upon looking at the cave, I see various slabs of rock jutting outwards above me. And there are many colors. Rust orange. Any and every shade of grey. Light salmon. And there's the chalky, calcium-green splotches of lichen that give parts of the cave a crumbly looking texture. To the touch, the lichen is like a very dry and crumbly clay. And it smells just as moist and dirty as moss. It was not until I read Gift's book that I learned that moss and lichen are related. When I look up, I see ledges of rock with moss that hovers above the edges. It is not the dark green, compact, carpet moss, but the lighter, dryer, hair-like moss. The sunlight captures it brilliantly. There are also spider webs that adorn some crannies of the cave and since they are in the shadows, the silk of the webs take on a lavendar hue. One web in particular contains the outer skins of what looks like maggots. It reminds me of my dad's old fishing bait. I'd open up the blue plastic containers and find dried up adult maggots that have shed multiple skins.

I am looking at a particular splotch of lichen that takes on the silhouette of a plump angel. An angel with big hips and small wings. I wonder how that angel blotch will change over the next few weeks or months.

Sometime soon, I would like to bring someone along so that I can get a second pair of eyes. It is amazing what one can miss when looking in one spot and not another. This is a very beautiful spot, not very disturbed by human contact. I cannot help but wonder, though, what it must have looked like when the train station was still in working order. It makes me think of a television show I once watched that documented what would happen to the Earth if humans all of a sudden vanished. This documentary gave a timeline for various things like how long a pet would survive.

The wind blows in small gusts and is bringing golden leaves down from their boughs. They all seem to lay on the ground in the fetal position, their little spines and ribs too obvious. I pick up a small yellow leaf, speckled with brown dots. It has eleven veins on each side of the stem and the top bends downwards as if ashamed. A small brown ant walks along it much like how I would walk in an open field.

And these leaves, man, they don't gracefully fall like they're in some scene from Fantasia. Behind me, I hear them land crunch on the ground like something on purpose. They're heavy with some knowledge of the fall. Sometimes I feel like something has been thrown at my back. A pebble? A stick? Is someone there?

No, it's a leaf.