MD/PA Mason Dixon Trail -Map 6 to Map 5: Crossing Over The Line

We are steadily crossing from summer to full-on autumn here in the Mid-Atlantic. So, I decided to dedicate this post to the crossing of  Maps 6 to 5. Remember that we are hiking the maps in reverse order from #10 to #1 in the set. Today we crossed paths with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon west of the Susquehanna and we crossed  the official halfway point of the trail, so it's a pretty important moment in our hike, so here's to a map crossing!

The Blue Man, near Broad Creek, MD

We made it to the west shore of the Susquehanna River two hikes ago and today we were heading steadily north towards the Pennsylvania line. The trail itself does not follow the actual Mason Dixon Line, the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania,  but on this section it will intersect their historic route. This was a highly contested and bloodied region during the mid-1700s. As I've explained in past posts, the history of the Mason Dixon Line is full of science, politics, natural history, and colonial era troubles. But when they made the river crossing to the western shore, they were worried for their safety. Mason and Dixon, two Brits, one an astronomer, one a surveyor, were hired by Maryland and Pennsylvania to establish a true boundary, that not only ended the violence between the colonies but in effect, divided the slave-owning South from the Freeman's North.  Violence, however, was not just waged amongst homesteaders eager to stake and defend their claims to newly opened lands...

This woods road approximates the width of the West Line, near PA/MD border.

Gangs of whites who called themselves the Paxton Boys (thugs really - no other way to describe them) slaughtered the last of the peaceful native farmers who resided in Lancaster County, PA, the year before Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon made it to the east bank of the Susquehanna.  During the winter's rest of 1864 Mason rode through Lancaster County to visit the places where Susquehannocks had been hunted down and butchered by these marauding thugs, hell-bent on eliminating Indians wherever they found them. Mason was very disturbed by these events and wrote about them in his journal. He tied the violence against Indians to the violence amongst the colonials themselves. During the winter break of  1865 he rode into Tidewater Maryland and Virginia to explore the lands to the south. During one day's ride he witnessed a farm slave being brutally whipped and beaten in the streets of a southern Maryland town. He dismounted, took the whip from the overseer and offered aid to the beaten man. He carried the whip with him from then on, as a reminder of the violence he witnessed and the violence that gave cause for the multi-year project of establishing boundaries.

It is difficult to imagine so bucolic a landscape scarred with violence and bloodshed. Peach Bottom Township, PA

With the importance of their work becoming more clear to them, Mason and Dixon cut the West Line from the three-way boundary corner at Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Maryland and worked their way west. From that marker, the West Line was measured in miles and chains. By the early winter of 1864, they had come to the Susquehanna's eastern shore and stopped for the season. In early summer the West Line work resumed. I mentioned in the last MDT post that I wondered how Mason and Dixon and their enormous surveying crew made the river crossing. The river was a full mile wide here, and the ferry had to negotiate between rocky ledges and swift current. Back in 1765  cable-drawn or poled flatboats were the only way to cross. There were no bridges and often the river was in flood or too low so timing was everything. Today the Conowingo Dam pond has flooded the ledge-filled crossing route.

Looking across at Lancaster County, PA - near where the large survey crew would have been ferried across in 1866.

Map 6 crossing into Map 5 finds us in the middle of a most beautiful countryside full of farms, woodlands, orchards, and the high river hills and rocky bluffs that make this area so scenic. On the summer solstice of 1765 the survey team with their heavy wagons, draft horses and oxen, and dozens of assistants and hired hands, stood on the opposite bank of the Susquehanna in the Village of Peach Bottom, awaiting dawn. The group included candle men who marked the next day's path at night according to celestial direction-finding , camp cooks, tree cutters, chainmen, camp hands, drovers, tent and equipment keepers, all the precision surveying and astronomcal equipment of the day, wagons of food, a library, and trunks of personal supplies and tools.  That morning the river was placid and smooth and they crossed into what is now Peach Bottom Township, York County. The party began immediately to cut the West Line that had been begun the previous year just south of Philadelphia at 'The Post Mark'd West' into some of the most rugged country thus far.

Much like it was in 1865, Peach Bottom is still productive, settled farmland of German and Scot descent.

As the great teams of horses, oxen, and wagons lumbered up the ferry road to the high plateau above, Mason observed how settled the land was, mostly with German and Scot farmers and English tradesmen. This was the center of the embattled territory, war-weary from decades of violent attacks, murders, arsons, and bloody scuffles between Pennsylvania and Maryland woodsmen, gangs, and settlers who all declared lands for the expanding colonies of Maryland or Pennsylvania west of the great river.

The sight of the survey team created such excitement and celebration among the farmers, however, that work was put aside for two days so that families could follow the tree cutters and chainmen who laid the eight yard wide path. The West Line would put an end hostilities. There were no signs of the murderous Agnew gang, the feuding  Black family, or the thuggish Eddy boys. Instead, the Scot farmer McKinney learned he was now an official resident of Pennsylvania, the German orchardman Greer learned he now paid his taxes to Maryland. The schoolhouse was two chains north, the church three chains south. There was great relief across the land as the large team made it's way west, crossing the Gunpowder River in July and reaching Piney Run by August.  Mason's journals made note of all the settlers within a mile north and south of the 8 foot wide path. "At 30 Miles 42 Chains Mr. James McKenleys  House 3 Chains to the North..."

Railroad cuts of the late 1800s and early 1900s long abandoned on  PBAPP property.

As we hiked the trail we encountered many kinds of paths -  powerline right-of-ways, camp access roads, abandoned railroad cuts, beautiful gravel lanes that are happily still unpaved, landings for loggers, foot paths leading to remote cabins, hunter's trails flagged in orange tape. Our actual paved road walking (complete with speeding traffic) was minimal on this stretch, offset by winding trails through the woods, steep scrambles up and down, and skirting a police gun range and police dog training center, and the ever-scenic Peach Bottom Atomic Power Plant (it really is!). My favorite stretches were the old woods roads that followed pretty creeks and streams,some of which we had to wet-foot to cross. We crossed the West Line, now called the Mason Dixon Line, when Tabernacle Road (MD) became Cooper Road (PA) marked by a small metal sign "End of Harford County Maintenance" on the shoulder. To think that these old hill farms were witness to the passing of the survey team gave me a shiver.

A woods road followed this pretty stream for some distance.

It was during this section from the river crossing to deep into Piedmont hill country that the surveyors began to use an innovative new and time-saving method called triangulation that would become standard-use ever after in American surveying. On July 12 they crossed the dusty York Road that connected the colonial crossroads of York to the port city of Baltimore. The days were sweltering, nearing 100 degrees, and the nights thick with humidity. The eight-foot wide path kept to its course, marked by candle and marker men at night, following the shouted measurements of Jeremiah Dixon, and cut by day by axe men, loggers, and chainmen guided by the terse calls of Charles Mason.  Luckily we were having a different weather day, breezy and cool with winds coming from the northwest announcing autumn in full swing!

A series of step-falls on Michael's Run furnished our lunch break view.

Pretty Cooper Road in Peach Bottom Township, PA

The highest point of our hike was across Bald Hill, a serpentine woods where trees are stunted (see previous post on serpentine barrens) and great gobs of maiden hair fern grew.  Like Goat Hill Preserve in Lancaster County, the forest on Bald Hill has a very spare understory, carpeted in the signature grasses of the barrens.  As a forested grasslands it supports large herds of deer and a few bears. This is rugged country up here. The people who keep cabins down on the river must walk a steep path down the cliffs to get to their places if coming in by foot.  Most, I would assume, come in by boat.

Bald Hill serpentine forest, part of the serpentine belt that arcs through the Mid-Atlantic.

Crossing Broad Creek in Harford County, MD - walking north to the PA Line.

Kim looks up and sees the halfway marker high in a tree!

The leaves on tulip poplars and maples are beginning to turn and fall, but so too are the 'evergreens.' Though not as obvious as their deciduous cousins, the pines and hemlocks will shed about a third of their needles each fall. Needles live on the tree for about two years and when it's time to get ready for fall the oldest needles will turn a light gold and drop. I've always wanted to put a time-lapse camera on a pine stand for a whole year so I could see the very subtle color changes through the seasons. Though we call them 'evergreen' the pines and hemlocks do shed and turn colors.

Tulip poplars really pour on the color, but hidden in the leaves are golden pine needles, too.

I was encouraged to see the Wildlife Habitat Council sign at the entrance to the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station. This is a great organization that works with corporate landowners, like Exelon to improve and manage their lands for the benefit of wild things. They've been around a long time and are one of the more quiet conservation groups that works behind the scenes for sustainable and ecologically functional natural and human landscapes. One of the best things they do is to offer an annual conference and monthly in-service academies for corporate landholder management staff that focus on habitat improvement, conservation strategies, and stewardship practices. Its'a  avery science-based, hands-on organization. It's certainly clear that the land management staff at PBAPP has taken the WHC's work to heart. The top of the hill is managed as a beautiful grasslands and in our trek across we saw wild turkeys, kestrel, deer, and flocks of sparrows that are now migrating through. I suggest a good look at their website to learn more - it's worth a visit:  http://www.wildlifehc.org/

The plant does it's part to be a good wildlife neighbor!

The MDT crosses the top of the substation and tower hill.

I gawked up at the many towers that spring high over the grasslands and thought about how technology in communications, energy production, and land management has changed just in my lifetime.  Can you imagine what Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon would think if they could somehow revisit this landscape 250 years later? And then, how I would have loved to have seen for myself the spectacle that colonial farmers here witnessed as the surveyors from England climbed the steep ferry road to the broad rolling plain that is Peach Bottom Township with their enormous wagon train.  To know that peace was finally achieved in their passing made me smile and love this landscape even more. 

We started this hike on Memorial Day Weekend and are now well into fall!

Notes:

Kevin Kenny. Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment. (Oxford University Press, 2009)   - A good history of the Paxton Boys and the attacks on the Indian settlements in South-Central PA. I have it on my Kindle and read through it now and then to remind myself of what happened just miles from my backdoor.

Edwin Danson. Drawing the Line: How Mason and Dixon Surveyed the Most Famous Border in America. (John Wiley and Sons, 2001) - I'm a science and engineering geek as well as a naturalist and historian, so this book hits all the buttons for my desire to know all the how's and why's behind the history of the survey.

Hughlett Mason. Journal of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 76. (American Philosophical Society, 1969) - One of my most favorite trips to Philadelphia was to hold this book in my hands and to see some of Charles Mason's actual journals!

Living in a Toxic World: Willisbrook and Goat Hill Preserves

The Barrens, an increasingly rare habitat-type found in our region, reminds us that life started and evolved in a heavy metal environment. To appreciate these unique  geoecological communities you have to start with the chemical composition of the serpentine belt that cuts an arc across the Mid-Atlantic. The presence of serpentine, a hydrothermally formed rock that once oozed as magma from canyons deep in the ocean floor, signals a hostile growing environment when it is found at the surface. Known for its seafoam green color when polished (i.e. foot traffic, vehicle tires, buffing), the ore chromite was important in steel and iron-making and was  heavily mined from the 1830s through the early 1900s. Road and place names still carry the heritage of quarrying as Rocks Chrome Hill Road (Harford County, Maryland), Bald Hill Road (Baltimore County, Maryland), Barrens Road (York County, Pennsylvania), Chrome Mine Road (Lancaster County, Pennsylvania) and many others.

Polished serpentine on footpath - Willisbrooke Preserve, Chester County PA

The story of this landscape starts as much of the region's geological history does, during the Paleozoic Era.  Some 500 to 250 million years ago, ocean sediments, volcanic islands, and ultramafic crusts (that ooozy stuff gone solid) was squeezed together as accreted terranes (parts of other land masses) and thrust onto the North American continental plate by the great migration of the North Africa. Imagine layers of sodden leaves packed tight against a midstream boulder - layer upon layer of tilted ocean beds, compressed islands, flattened vertical pillows of lava, welded seams of sediment end on end, and the mantel crust itself pushed up and over an unyielding plate. Where the layers of raw ocean bottom stand vertically exposed at the surface they look a lot like this:

Weathered serpentine ridge -  Willisbrook Preserve.

The chemical composition of serpentine is a combination of magnesium, chromium, iron, and nickle - heavy metals and toxic! These are the components of Earth's deep interior that have come to the surface very different than other types of igneous or continental crusts! The resulting soils are very low in calcium and other minerals important to plant life. The most tolerant lichens and mosses introduce basic biomechanical processes that slowly weather the rock and here a thin layer of nutrient and moisture-holding humus accumulates.

Thin soils over gravel - Goat Hill Serpentine Barrens, Lancaster County, PA

Exposed cliff outcrop near the old chromite mine - Goat Hill.

Serpentine soils do not hold moisture well. Outcrops and barrens occur on steep land, atop high, sun-scorched ridges. Thin soils are more like those found in desert environments. Endemic plant communities that form in these places are strictly contained by the boundaries of the serpentine exposure. The most plant diversity occurs in pockets of soil accumulation and in shady areas that hold precious moisture. The rarest of plants occur where conditions exclude all others. Those that thrive do so on inhospitable ground. There is a lesson here in the evolution of life in a toxic environment, like the environment we've created out of heavy manufacturing and industry over the course of the Industrial Revolution. Heavy metal soils are found downwind of industrial centers, dump sites, and brown fields of manufacturing plants along the Eastern seaboard. I wonder what a serpentine barrens can teach about reclaiming soils for a less toxic life?

A tuft of Bryum moss holds morning dew - Goat Hill.

Pixie cup lichen holds rain droplets and dew in its upturned bowls - Goat Hill.

I examined collections of moss and lichen and noted that oak and sassafras leaves from distant woods had blown across the savannah and were caught in tangle of pine needles and fallen twigs. The simple process of blowing wind imports vegetative matter, dirt, and dust needed to start the process of forming a duff layer. When enough of a stable surface has built up grasses will germinate and take root. It may take centuries for enough organic matter to build under a living layer of grass and moss before pines and bear oak can establish. The forests in most protected barrens are over a hundred years old but may only be twenty feet high!

Gravels and distinct soil zones that favor grasses then trees - Goat Hill.

The savannahs of the barrens served indigenous people well. Susquehannock and Lenne Lenape hunted large grazing animals on these grasslands: bison, elk, deer. Early hunters learned to manage the savannahs for ultimate productivity by burning the barrens every few years to kill off intruding forest and scrub and to encourage fresh new grasses favored by big game. Whether fires caused by lightening or managed by man, this process is essential to  barrens ecology even now. Today the Nature Conservancy, Natural Lands Trust, and Pennsylvania State Forests management in the WIlliam Penn Forest section include control burns in cyclical applications. The only thing we are missing are the large herbivores!

Willisbrook Preserve.

Can you imagine when large parts of Maryland and Pennsylvania existed as lush grasslands? I can picture how beautiful it must have been! Though the barrens landscape is but one type of Eastern prairie, the whole classification of native grassland in our area is considered endangered under threat  from suburban sprawl and highway expansion. What developer doesn't love a treeless plain on which to build the next mega-mansion neighborhood?  Sally and I gawked as a new 'carriage home' community was being built right up to the edge of the Willisbrook Barrens Preserve. Surrounded by sprawl, conservation and land trust groups scramble to save these places from development. 

Indian Grass, Willisbrook Preserve.

Dropseed Grass, Willisbrook Preserve.

At Goat Hill Preserve, William Penn State Forest, Lancaster County, survey flags are found along the trails - please don't remove them. Rutgers researchers are looking how shifts in ecological communities occur over time as soils build and improve, and as plant communities colonize and migrate. All living things require metals for metabolism and evolution has provided ways to balance this with the possibility of toxic overload, especially in those plants that tolerate these soils. 

The Rose Trail start at the Goat Hill parking lot.

What is interesting about plant studies on inhospitable land is that heavy metals in our atmosphere, emitted by coal burning power plants, a century of historic heavy industrial steel industry, vehicle and manufacturing plant emissions, all eventually end up in our soils. This forces ecological communities to quickly adapt or perish. What we are learning from the barrens may help us with bioremediation strategies that address  toxic industrial sites including the use of moss and lichen soil builders and tolerant plant communities. It looks like lichens, mosses, and grasses save the day!

Research site, Goat Hill Barrens.

The evolutionary responses of plants to a toxic environment include complex interactions within  biogeochemical community networks. What we know about the serpentine barrens is that, realistically, conditions should be so severe here that it might just as well be desert. But it isn't. So our curiosity is piqued and we begin to ask questions. At the level of genes, mutation, and adaptation, complex responses change the trajectory of an organism's ability to thrive or die.  As I walked around this achingly beautiful grassland with Sally at Willisbrook Preserve on Saturday, and by myself at Goat Hill on Sunday, I couldn't help but ask questions that have everything to do with our own survival in a world we've made hostile by our own doings:

Maiden Hair Fern on the edge of a grassland community.

• Is there a contemporary proxy for environmental adaption to human-induced heavy metal pollution?

• What can life's ancient and exquisite ability to form protective systems teach us about enhancing our own prospects for survival?

• How do mammals and birds intersect and interact with disconnected grasslands communities in our region? 

• Will it ever be possible to reintroduce large grazing animals like elk (that are doing fine in North Central PA, thank you!) into some of our larger barrens landscapes? What would the trophic cascade look like if elk were re-introduced?

Bushy aster is a rare blue flowered serpentine plant, Goat Hill.

Serpentine aster, another rarity, is abundant at both sites.

A tiny mustard flower in a brown and parched section.

I don't think it's a matter of biomicry, to simply copy what another species is doing to survive, but a question of restoring relationship to other species from bacteria to bald eagles and beyond. The world of the serpentine barrens teaches us about the processes of biological community evolution, some important lessons in a world where we are just waking up to the idea that, as Leopold said, we are part of landscape community.

The start of a grassland - marked for migration survey.

Notes:

Goat Hill Preserve is closed from October to January for hunting season. 

There are several conservation lands that feature or include serpentine barrens in our area. You might be surprised, however, at how development and the pressures of other types of land use have surrounded them. 

The Natural Lands Trust - Willisbrook Preserve, Malvern, PA
 http://www.natlands.org/preserves-to-visit/list-of-preserves/willisbrook-preserve/

Friends of the Stateline Serpentine Barrens oversees a broad expanse of serpentine barrens, working towards a connective sanctuary concept of interrelated sites. They maintain an index of published papers regarding flora, fauna, paleoclimate, and geology on this site.
 http://www.statelineserpentinebarrens.org/home/about_the_state_line_serpentine_barrens

Emily Monosson, PhD has written an incredible book for us science and natural history geeks interested in evolutionary response to hostile environments.  Evolution in a Toxic World: How Life Responds to Chemical Threats (2013).

Fact sheet on the Serpentine Aster, Symphyotrichum depauperatum 
 http://www.naturalheritage.state.pa.us/factsheets/12998.pdf

The Query

This is a different post for me this week. I usually write about some of the cool places I've visited during the week or write about natural and human history entwined. But not today. I am grounded from hiking due to a little health issue, no big deal, just disappointed I can't leave the house. It is International Peace Day and a big Climate March is happening all around the world. Aside from watching Twitter and Facebook to see what everyone else is doing to participate in one or both, I settled in for weeding the garden. Some thinking time, some praying time. It's been a different week.

I was called to do jury duty this week and appeared at the courthouse to join a line of 155 people waiting with summons in hand at the candidate intake room. A staff person came out and said "This will not be the usual process. We ask for your patience. You will be be here until you are invited to leave." By noon I had filled out two interview sheets (name, date, vital info) and a 37 page questionnaire. The first question asked if I had any religious beliefs that would prevent me from deciding in a death penalty case. I was aware of the rest of the room, everyone opening their packets at their tables and getting to the first page at about the same time as me. Some people gasped. The court officer asked for silence. I felt like a fish in a big school of bigger fish in a small dying pond, trying to come to the surface to breathe air. I responded to every question truthfully and thoughtfully, though some people simply dashed off quick answers so they could get in line for the initial interview, in hopes of getting dismissed. I finished near the end of the time allowed - two hours. And turned in my packet. I was directed to a room. I was asked not to share anymore information about the case, and I won't do so here. But the interview was serious, and the team read every response I had given in my packet, even reading aloud so the others could listen. I sat and waited while they read. 

Finally the judge put down my packet and looked at the team. Then back at me. "How many grandchildren do you have?" he asked. I answered. He asked "Why, if you are really a Quaker, did you serve in law enforcement? You carried a gun? You could have killed someone with it. And yet you claim nonviolence." I answered that I believed my role was to protect and defend - that to our natural resources and the laws that protect all living things, including people - was my service." He looked down, back at the team, then back at me. "Could you serve on this case and make the decision to sentence a man to death?" I answered, truthfully, and thoughtfully - as I had in the questionnaire - that I could not.  He nodded. Then sent me out to join a group that had been asked back in a few days.  There were about twenty five people in the room. I don't know if there were other groups, or where the other 125 people went.

I was told that I will have an opportunity to petition during final selections.  But why was I placed here?  Was it because I don't watch TV and have had no media influence or familiarity with the story? Or was it my long-ish response to the question about  bearing witness to gun violence? Or just that I took the time to think about every answer I gave? In any case, I prayed while weeding the garden this morning. 

I prayed for the family of the victim. I prayed for the victim. I prayed for the killer. I prayed for the family of the killer. I prayed for the attorneys and the judge. I prayed for the jury, whomever they might be.  I prayed I would find clarity to engage the team honestly this week. I was so focused on my thoughts that I didn't even feel the thorn that ripped my finger open. I was back in the house before I realized I'd left a blood trail. There was blood on my pants, drops on my boot, across on the porch, in the kitchen. In a way, I thought as I cleaned up the trail of blood and washed the wound, we all sit on a jury, we are all the accused, we are all the victims.

Today people are marching in NYC and in cities all over the world to bring attention to the state of our our planet. We are all complicit in its dying. As a human society we've made the decision to condemn it to death through our greed, our ignorance, and our apathy. What if everyone on the planet had to think about this decision as seriously as a Quaker being asked to serve in a capital murder case? Would there even be a death sentence for the planet if we could all just think and pray deeply about our next steps? Surely the planet has done nothing but give us its incredible bounty whenever and wherever we seek it: food, air to breath, fish from the seas, water to drink, raw resources to make our things, forests to build our shelters, stone to build our roads and churches. But we've been slowly (well not so slowly now, with accelerated effects of climate change on our doorstep) marking time as we march down a road that has no return. We can only go forward. 

Earth has been sending us plenty of signals that something is not right, for quite some time. Like a small child raised in a family of violence who knows no other way forward in life than to lash out, argue, beat his own children, and commit the most severe of all acts upon them - to maim and kill, we have been oblivious to the the planet's cries, and now its shouts, that something needs to stop. We all need to stop and look at the insane world we've inherited from our parents, from society, and consider the world we leave our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. We do violence to our home, to the mother that feeds us and cares for us, and she cries for the abuse to end. What message will we send home to her from our own prisons of selfishness? Will we ask forgiveness? Will we ask her to stop crying? Will we assure her that we'll work on making it better. It won't be easy. And we can't go back.

Photo by Coreen Evans Weilminster

When I had finished with my interview, I was shown to a smaller room where I was the last of twenty five people who had been asked to wait for further instructions. My attention was drawn to a woman sitting in the corner by a window where the shades were permanently drawn. No one could see in and no one could see out, just a sunny glow of light filtering into the room.  Her head was bowed and her lips were moving as if in prayer. Everyone was still and quiet. 

The judge came in and asked if we had any questions. The woman looked up and said "I will serve if asked, and do the best I can, but  we will have the opportunity to petition our inclusion in this case, is that correct?" He sat on the corner of a table and bowed his head. "Yes, as I said in the interview. You will have the opportunity next week to petition before final jury selection is made. We do not take this lightly. This is as serious as it gets and we want you to know we will honor your petition." He looked straight at me then back at her. "I know there are a few of you who would like that opportunity and we will honor it." 

Over the summer my granddaughter and I went storm chasing. It was her first chase and we ended up in the parking lot of a nearby grocery store along with others who had been following an enormous storm front blasting through our area. The storm was wild. It spawned a tornado five miles to the east, but here in the lashing rain and tearing winds, in the safety of the car, we laughed and cheered for bolts of lightening and the great enormous wall cloud that rose before our eyes. "Oh Grandmom! This is great! This is so great!" she exclaimed. Afterward an arc of brilliant color and light blazed across the sky. Onlookers in their cars, like us, were out snapping pictures and enjoying the gentle wash of showers that followed the storm. The storm in its fury and beauty made us pay attention, open our eyes, and consider it's potential. People rushing in and out of the grocery store stopped and gawked. Fellow storm chasers applauded the sky as if a great performance had just ended - and well it had. My granddaughter, caught up in the excitement jumped and hopped, clapped her hands with the crowd. 

I want my children, all grown up now, and my growing flock of grandchildren, to have many more experiences like this and that they remember our hikes, canoe trips, birdwatching and whale watching expeditions, star watching, mountain climbing, and storm chasing with a growing sense of commitment to protecting and sharing the natural world with their own children and grandchildren. But what will it take to make sure this can happen for them?  How often are we asked to think deeply, even pray, about our next steps as stewards, protectors, grandmothers and grandfathers, and citizens? How often are we asked to love what sometimes cannot be loved by everyone? That is the hard part. We aren't asked very often, and sometimes we miss the invitation to do so.

How can we love a storm, even after it has caused damage, sometimes so severe as to have caused us harm? Surely we love it for the message of power and fury it carries, but too, for the opportunity it give us to clean up, make things right again, and to grieve, if grieving is necessary, for things lost or destroyed. Learning the way of peace is so much harder than the way of war. Anger is easy. Seeing through the anger on our way to love is the hardest journey we will take. We have been messaged throughout our time here on Earth to choose love. The turn of seasons, the beauty of the sea, a child's laughter, the glint of sunlight in the eye of a bird, the longing for acceptance in the eyes of an outcast, even - and I am not reading into this too deeply - in the bow of a judge's head. 

In the tradition of the query, I ask myself in what ways do I petition for love, above all else? Can I petition for the life of a condemned man as I would for a condemned planet? Will those who march today for peace or  planet be able to, when presented with the most serious of decisions to make, choose love, forgiveness, and compassion over everything else? 

In Peace,

A Friend.

MD Mason Dixon Trail -Map 6: Havre de Grace MD to Mason Dixon Line

Sunday August 17, 2014: Havre de Grace to Susquehanna State Park, MD, 6 miles

The MDT has taken us through a few funky waterfront towns at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, and today we started and returned to the funky-French-named town of Havre de Grace, Maryland. Nobody actually speaks French here, but General Lafayette did, and since he helped us win the Revolutionary War, and since he came through here a few times, he got to name the town. The MDT starts in the backyard of the Susquehanna Lockhouse Museum and connects to a set of beautiful community trails that took us north along the west shore of the mighty Susquehanna River.

Lockhouse Museum in Havre de Grace, MD

This was our shortest hike of the series so far. We gave ourselves a recovery hike after slogging 11 miles through Cecil County last time. The weather was cloudy but cool, with little sprinkles of rain and little peeks of sun. We followed the blue blazes up a wall of boulders at the Arundel Quarry boundary only to find ourselves stopped dead in our tracks by a wall - a three story high wall - of briars, tear-thumb, and cane-banks of thorns. With thick sticks we beat down a path, slipping and sliding backwards on the steep embankment. There were no blue blazes to be found anywhere and we hoped that the description on the back of the map was right "shooting range at top' but without the shooters. After a frustrating half hour, we topped out at the gate to the county police range. Closed on Sundays. Good, because I put away that kevlar vest years ago.

Straight up the quarry dump wall into a thicket of thorns.

Lapidum Road leading into the park.

The road walk beyond our climb was  rather pleasant. We crossed over I-95 and rambled down the hill along Lapidum Road into a haze of cool drops hitting the humid air of the river valley. Our stroll ended at the Lapidum landing, now a boat launch, once a thriving riverside town and ferry crossing. We explored the river front, the remains of the canal and the foundations of an old hotel. The clouds broke apart and sunshine squeaked out. I could imagine Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon and their huge surveyors team coming across on the bateaus that served to ferry big wagons, men, draft horses, and oxen teams.

Colonial era ferry across the Susquehanna.

We hiked up the hill to find the MDT, blended with another trail for awhile, and soon skirted down the same hill to Rock Run Mill in the center of Susquehanna State Park. Full disclosure: I worked in this region as a law enforcement ranger so I am really familiar with this park, but it is still one of my favorite state parks as a hiker and kayaker. We visited the old mill still and it still  gives me a little shiver to think it's standing here after hundreds of years, dozens of calamitous floods, and that people still care for it and keep her huge overshot wheel rolling on days they open the millpond gate to run the equipment inside.

Rock Run Mill in Susquehanna State Park.

Trail marker for the MDT in the park.

Sunday September 14, 2014: Rock Run Mill, Susquehanna State Park to Glen Cove Marina

Back to a ten miler, we started at Rock Run Mill where we left off ...ummm... like a long time ago. This past month has been busy and we haven't had a chance to resume our hikes until now. Fall is in the air and temps to start - in the upper 40s, low 50s! It was nice! For this section we did the least amount of road walking so far, keeping mainly to well established and much cared for trail sections. 

Flint furnace along Deer Creek showing 2011 earthquake damage.

Our first stop was on the Deer Creek bridge on Stafford Road. As we left our little road section to pick up the Lower Susquehanna Greenway Trail, we paid the old flint furnace a visit. Here flint , quarried nearby back in the early 1800s, was reduced to a fine material here that was used in porcelain production, some of the finest in the region. The old stack is showing a bad set of cracks, that according to someone who looks at it almost everyday, opened up as a result of the 2011 earthquake. Creepy. But if I were a bat I would think it was the best thing ever.

Sycamore trees starting to show colors!

All the way to Conowingo Dam the trail was wide and getting a little busy with joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, and Sunday morning strollers (the push kind). Hands down the busiest we've seen any section of the MDT thus far. Another short road section up the hill and across Shuresville Road and we were back into the woods. We did not get lost this time because some one really enjoyed making blue blazes.

Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River, at Fisherman's Park.

Clearly they are not releasing water from the dam! Great catfishing!

This trail marker would surely leave an impression if you ran into it with your head.

There's no way you'll loose the trail on this section!

We crossed a very busy Rt. 1 (be careful here!) and entered the thick river hills woods, well-marked with lots of ups and downs through a pleasant oak-hickory forest. We pretty much apologized to every spider we met for whose web we walked through, ate, wore, or inhaled. Back to the spider web sticks! The breezes and river views were lovely and even included the world's largest warning sign and a bomb-shaped scary looking thing. My friend Ken (who served in the Royal Navy) says it is a oropesa, a bomb-shaped scary looking thing that was designed as a mine sweeping float towed behind a minesweeper ship. And it was the third one found since a flood washed them down river (two through the gates of the dam!) this past spring. 

A very nice trail marker at Conowingo.

I think they mean to tell us the gates are open.

Big bomb-shaped scary looking thing washed up in Hopkins Cove.

So there we were pondering the scary thing when Kim asks "I wonder if I can get it home?" She read on her smart phone an article posted by the Cecil Whig concerning the other two floaty things found down river. "What would you do with a mine sweeping float anyway? How would you get it in your van?" I asked, "It's fifteen feet long and several hundred pounds." She was lost in thought, however, no doubt plotting her salvage mission as we climbed over a stile that crossed a live electric fence, then walked next to the live electric fence on roly-poly rocks for about 200 yards trying not to tumble into it. We came out on to a beautiful pasture.

The hills are alive!

I wanted to twirl like Julie Andrews and sing 'The Hills Are Alive!" as we broke into the warm sunshine, our most open section of the trail this day, when - still pondering her great recovery operation - Kim stopped and looked down. "Poop. Big poop."  Now, when you see a big poop and you are inside the electric fence, a few things go through your mind. Practically steaming poop in a bushel-basket-sized-heap could mean a sweet-natured horse just meandered by, or a protective cow strolling with her calf came here to nurse, or a nasty bull is waiting for us just over that crest ready to drive our bodies to mud with two stomps of his enormous hooves. We hoped for the horse. And moved along a little more quickly. I stifled the urge to twirl and sing. Make sure you close the gate behind you and drop the latch, advised the map.

Lava rocks. No really. Lava rocks.

The trail is getting progressively rockier underfoot. Long gone now is the Coastal Plain deposits, pebbly and sandy and soft and flat. Now we were well above the Fall Line at Conowingo where Captain John Smith had to turn back his expedition of the Chesapeake, above the lift of tides where his little boat could go no farther upstream. Now we were hoofing across lava rocks, well into the wickedly folded and metamorphosed river hills. Some of the weathered boulders still showed their ooziness. I picked up a really nice hefty clod of undersea lava and placed it in my pack for the collection at home. This sliver of ridge that runs about two miles from the dam to the north of Peach Bottom (my home) is the remains of a fore-wall of a volcanic island arc caught between the North African plate and the North America plate, a tectonic event that closed the proto-Atlantic Ocean and created Pangea. That rock added about seven pounds to my carry. It is very dense stuff. 

Glen Cove Marina open directly out on to the great lake behind the dam.

We tumbled off the ridge literally into the boat launch at Glen Cove Marina, ten miles north of our start at the mill. The launch is the flooded valley of a river hill ravine, carved over 650 million years by a swift little creek to the drop at the river. Now it is flooded by the dam pond. We snagged some ice cream from the little supply and bait shop there and talked to the owner about our trip. He's a really nice guy and cares very much about the MDT and the hikers on it. He's allowed thru-hikers and long distance paddlers to camp above the launch and has even treated weary travelers pizza and beer. "I love their stories," he said. I was reminded of my own 440-mile paddle trip down the Susquehanna in 1993 and how much I appreciated the river folks allowing me to pitch a tent, even inviting me into their homes for a meal or a beer, and always to tell and listen to river stories.

Kim told the marina owner about the big bomb-shaped scary looking thing and he assured her that it would be better off where it was. "Some guy towed that thing all the way around here one day," he said, "and tried to winch it up on his boat trailer. I asked him what he planned to do with this thing and he said he wanted it for a lawn ornament." I could see Kim was crestfallen. "That sucker must weigh twelve hundred pounds! He couldn't get even part the way up on his trailer. So he towed it back to where you found it."I asked her later what she would have done with it. "Lawn ornament sounds nice."

We aren't quite finished with Map 6 yet as there's still about six miles to go, but we'll save it for the start of Map 5 so that we can make a good 11 mile hike out of crossing the Mason Dixon Line.  Now I wonder how on earth did Charlie and Jeremiah do it? These hills are formidable. But then, so were they.

A bonus for this section - visiting with an old friend who lives near Glen Cove Marina. Hey Bob!

Notes: 

Link to the Susquehanna Lockhouse Museum:  http://www.thelockhousemuseum.org/

The Cecil Whig reported on two mine sweeper floats down river from where we found this one in Hopkins Cove: http://www.cecildaily.com/news/local_news/article_3d86e98b-4385-516a-a9f0-f1ed4578b479.html