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| Pond basin for several springs |
A gentle hike today in the few hours I had before teaching my night class. The class is on complex systems analysis and is somewhat complicated for both teacher and students. It was good to clear my mind before diving into the upcoming lecture meeting and I thought what better place to exhale and wander than at the former home of a poet, now a York County park at Spring Valley.
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| Chestnut Oak forest on the rim of the bowl |
Poet Robert Frost advised his Pennsylvania friend Lee Anderson that living in NYC was not the best place for a creative writer and that he thought poets did their best work while living in the country. So Lee Anderson and his wife Helen heeded Frost's advice and moved back to PA to this remote valley in York County PA, in the 1950s. They lived in a 1800s-era stone farmhouse without electricity or running water but found that oil lamps, wood heat, and abundant springwater met their needs. Anderson opened a publishing business, The Shrewsbury Press, in the nearby town of Shrewsbury. He composed his long poems here and worked on a recording project that featured poets of the day reading their own work. His friend Robert Frost was glad to contribute. It was the first such project to combine poetry with the author's voice as an audo performance, marking a new genre of spoken-word media.
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| Ridge trail (marked with purple blazes) |
Before his death on the farm at age 76 in 1972, Anderson had composed over 500 poems, the kind that are best read aloud. Several were epic long-form poems. His inspiration for these often came from his walking the old gravel roads and cattle trails that criss cross the valley, preserved as he would have walked them throuhout the park today. I hiked about three miles of trails and walked as many road miles, feeling the calm and quiet settle around me like fallen leaves that Anderson surely appreciated.
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| Spring-fed East Branch of the Codorus |
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| Swamp Thistle, a native wetland thistle |
The valley is broad, leafy, and low and the ridges that encircle it are like the rim of a bowl, topped with limestone outcrops and ridges in forests of old Chestnut Oak. Many springs erupt from the sides of the valley and flow downhill to the creek or gathered into a small spring-fed basin pond which has a mucky, squishy trail around it that leads through seeps and stands of wetland plants. Amos, ever mindful of his work as a turtle-hound, was chuffed to see a small Eastern Painted Turtle basking on waterlogged limb. It quickly plopped into the dark water and he had no way of getting to it - thus deprived of his prize of turkey jerky.
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| Fall Phlox |
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| Tall Goldenrod |
I walked along Potosi Road and up Blymire Hollow Road and imagined Anderson walking here to ponder how he would compose verses and make revisions. He often referred to his process of composing poetry like that of composing a symphony made up of movements and flowing themes, punctuated by breath stops and long pauses that created tension, to be read aloud like a spoken opera or a old Norse ballad. "The Bearstone," (1969); "Prevailing Winds," (1944); "The Floating World," (1954); "Nags Head," (1960) in their pages and pages and pages of verse may explain why his work was less celebrated than his friend's Robert Frost, who got to the point, kept his poems short and pithy, and turn-of-phrase memorable. Yet Anderson was celebrated for his decades-long recording project, housed now at Yale University and the Library of Congress. It became his legacy to American poetry and the spoken-word genre of poetry performance.
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| Walnut yellowing along an unamed valley road |
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| LOTR elf or portrait of a full-bearded Anderson? |
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| Potosi Road |
On the Line Road, limestone gravel crunched beneath my boots and Amos decided he didn''t like walking on it. He tugged at the leash to be let on to the shoulder where it was grassy and soft. Around the bend we startled up a Turkey Vulture and the sound of its enormous wings battering the air for lift made us both jump. It was a fresh death, a young deer, its eyes just plucked by the scavenger and a feather left behind to ponder. The experience of the beauty of valley road was puncuated by this young deer's death and I breathed it out like an Anderson poem with inhales and exhales and pauses that marked our stroll the sudden stop our gasp battering wings jump in surprise observe in silence for a while then walk on.
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| Line Road |
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| Blymire Hollow Road |
We wandered on and off the trails at their many intersections with the gravel roads and when I caught sight of a gravel rider cruise by on his muddied Cannondale I got excited to come back to explore by bike. The rider caught a glimpse of us and swung back 'round to compliment Amos, "That's a mighty fine hound!" he said, smiling and asking if he could "get his dog fix" with a pat and ear scritch for Amos. A lovely conversation followed about the old roads and how lucky we are to live in a county where gravel roads and grassed-over backroads are still found in abundance to walk or ride and think about our poetry.
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| Lee Anderson. Photo courtesy of York County History Center |
Notes:
York Daily Record "Lee Anderson Lived in York County..."(2017) https://www.ydr.com/story/opinion/2017/07/11/poet-lee-anderson-lived-york-county-many-years-column/465886001/
The Poetry Foundation. Lee Anderson, "Saturday as Usual." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=101&issue=6&page=34
York County Parks. Spring Valley Park (named for Anderson's poems referencing the "valley of springs") https://yorkcountypa.gov/701/Spring-Valley-Park
Library of Congress. Lee Anderson reading aloud "Bearstone" and "Nags Head" https://www.loc.gov/item/94838586/
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