PA Union Canal Towpath

 

Towpath

It was windy and brisk, an exhilarating day for a scenic out-and-back ten miles on the Union Canal Towpath.. Berks County Parks maintains this 4.5 mile section of trail but I started at the Blue Marsh Lake dam stilling basin upriver at the Army Corps Blue Marsh Lake to add a few extra miles of that trail system to my ride. The Union Canal and connected heritage area define Pennsylvania's "Americana Region" with its old stone-built homes, mills, covered bridge, and barns. This is both the historic and mid-century working landscape that, along with the work-a-day world of Reading just a few miles south, inspired writer John Updike who was born and grew up in a small town near here. 

Coal shuttle/ house boat conversion

I didn't have John Updike in mind when I was riding south from the dam, through woods and fields, along the sunken remains of the canal on one side and the glittering Tulpehocken (The Tully) Creek on the other. I enjoyed stopping at the Berks County Heritage Center to admire the restored wagon factory and covered bridge. When I got to the end the trail at Stonecliffe Recreation Area, however, I dismounted to have a snack (it was chilly!) and got caught up watching a couple half-argue/half-laugh about some situation they clearly disagreed about, he in his work clothes, her in nursing outfit, both trying to eat their MacDonalds lunch in the twenty minutes they had together. 

Wertz's covered bridge, 1867

Watching the couple eat, argue, and joke with each other, for some reason John Updike popped into my head and I tried to imagine the novel he might build around the scene before and around me. I kept people-watching on the ride back to Blue Marsh and past the old homes and barns I was reminded of his short novel Of The Farm which describes the visit of a middle aged son to the Berks County farm he grew up on and meeting his aged mother who remained there to defend it from what was to come to so much of the Berks County landscape. The story is full of those half-argue/half-laugh conversations where an entire life's story evolves.

Burr truss engineered

What to do with the old farm, the son asks, because surely she won't live much longer and we need to make plans to sell it for a golf course? a housing development? a county recreation park? As I rode past the Heritage Center, formerly a dairy farm with it's high arched barn cloaked in the makings of a visitor and education center. I wondered about the conversations that family must have had when the dairy was failing and its lands were being eyed by greedy developers aiming to make a killing on quarter-acre plots.

Gruber Wagon Works

The quiet drama of losing an old farm to re-development while serving up a Pennsylvania lunch of steaming pork sausage and cabbage and shoo-fly pie to people not-from-here made the novel resonate with me. We'd had such conversation ourselves once and we certainly couldn't get enough shoo-fly pie when we were young. I watched nearly all my elder neighbors on their own farms wring their hands with worry when no one in their families wanted to take on the work to keep them up. I could imagine this scenario playing out time and time again as I rode past newer developments built on old farm lands, past the stories of dozens of families who may have inspired Updike's little novel of ordinary but sorrowful Berks County memories of the land in the 1950s and 1960s. 

The "Tully" - Tulpehocken Creek

From Of The Farm: 

"What's the point," Richard asked, as I told him to, "of a farm nobody farms?"

I feared we had gone beyond hushing, but my mother seemed unexpectedly pleased with the question, and moved her head still farther forward above her folded arms, to give herself breath for a full answer. "Why," she said rapidly, "I guess that's the point, that nobody farms it. Land is like people, it needs a rest. Land is just like a person, except that it never dies, it just gets very tired.

Gring's Mill

Bridge over the Tully

Rolling past the Heritage Area, heading north, I could feel ever so slightly an uphill. I shifted gears and thought there must be a lock around here somewhere that helped canal boats level the gradients of the stream as it flowed to Reading and the Schuykill and eventually, the Delaware River. Further on I  stopped to admire the work of a construction crew to repair Lock 48, to clean it of flood muck and overgrowth. A big scoop bucket swung back and forth, clearing the floor of the lock clear of log jams and mud. What a job it was, dredging out history and making it relevant again.

Remains of a dam

I stopped to admire the remains of a paper mill dam recently demolished to allow Plum Creek, a tributary of the Tulpehocken, to run free again. Huge chunks of concrete were piled almost to the edge of the towpath where trucks will load it up and take if off to a crushing yard. Swim free, fish! I called, pedaling on. 

Restoring Lock 48

I could hear cars crossing the metal deck of Reber's Bridge up ahead where I would soon cross the road to finish my ride a few miles further on at the modern dam at Blue Marsh. Another Updike moment occurred, however, when I stopped to take a photo of an old historic marker along the road that paralleled the towpath. A young woman appeared walking around the curve of the trail. She was dressed in classic 1950s thrift store attire and it made me smile. Dark blue vintage dress, dark hose, and sensible black leather shoes with a slight heel. (Was she off to work in the parachute factory?) A three-quarter length beige Peter Pan overcoat trimmed with dark fur around the neck and down the lapels, a most perfect pillbox hat on her head, the nostalgia that I felt for the characters in Of The Farm come to life. 

"For many men, work is the effective religion, a ritual occupation and inflexible orientation which permits them to imagine that the problem of their personal death has been solved. Unamuno: ‘Work is the only practical consolation for having been born.’ My own chosen career — its dispersal and multiplication of the self through publication, its daily excretion of yet more words, the eventual reifying of those words into books — certainly is a practical consolation, a kind of bicycle which, if I were ever to stop pedaling, would dump me flat on my side. Religion enables us to ignore nothingness and get on with the jobs of life."

   

 - John Updike, Self-Consciousness: A Memoir (1996)

Notes:

Walking History Tour pamphlet for the Berks County 4.5 mile section of the Union Canal Trail: 

https://www.countyofberks.com/getmedia/8431c59f-f3db-4548-af55-1971201ab7c6/Union-Canal-Bicycle-and-Walking-Trail-Brochure-Map.pdf

Gruber Wagon Works is a beautiful addition to the Berks County Heritage Area. 

https://www.countyofberks.com/departments/parks-and-recreation/berks-county-parks/heritage-center-7b1a799b206ee9f26045057c130470d4/gruber-wagon-works