PROLOGUE

       The Pennsylvania Wilds

      IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 1794, MY ANCESTOR, the German missionary Johann Jacob Eyerly Jr., walked across Pennsylvania via the Allegheny, Raystown, and Venango Trails.¹ His journey took him from the Delaware and Mohican mission town of Bethlehem, founded by the Moravian Church along the eastern border of European settlements between the Susquehanna and Delaware Rivers, to Fort Pitt in the west. From there, he journeyed northward to survey Native lands granted to the Moravian Church by the United States government in the early 1790s along the shores of Lake Erie at Presqueisle. As he walked through the forest to Presqueisle and back, he kept a diary.² He wrote about the massive trunks of chestnut trees, six or seven feet in diameter and of “an amazing height,” towering over the forest floor. Lower in the canopy he observed shellbark, hickory, black and white oak, beech, maple, poplar, sugar maple, and ash, spreading their tangled boughs in a dense cathedral-like ceiling that blocked the undergrowth. In the deep thickets near French Creek—in the Shawnee territory surrounding Fort Le Boeuf—he was struck by the richness of the soil, and the variety of trees and plants: “[this] is very good rich land, with many clearings where, from all appearances, the Indians used to dwell. Where these bottoms are not cleared, they are densely overgrown with White walnut, wild cherries, and the like. I have seen hawthorns here that were from 12 to 15 inches in diameter. There are all sorts of trees on the uplands.”³ He traveled through “woods and glades, wading through streams and through grass half as high as a man.”⁴ The path, he wrote, was difficult to locate, especially after a rainstorm. Often, he oriented himself by the sun or by sound: listening for the distant roar of the Susquehanna or the Juniata River, the lapping of waves on the shores of Lake Erie, or the silent spaces that signaled the densest parts of the forest. Along the way, he paused to study some of the unknown plants that grew along the trailside, noting the “sassaparill, ginseng, and nettles [that] grow here in abundance, large and juicy.”⁵ Most of all, he chronicled the sheer human endurance required for the journey—it was so wet that his clothing began to rot off of his back—and his joy at hearing again the sounds of his home community. As he made his return journey, he listened intently for the soundscapes of Bethlehem, heard but not seen through the forest.

      It was this chronicle of how my ancestor experienced the landscapes and soundscapes of early Pennsylvania that first inspired me to write this book. I was fascinated by his detailed descriptions of plants and trees, and by the fact that he listened so carefully to the acoustic ecology of the forest that surrounded him. He wrote of Pennsylvania’s natural environment with such joy that I could not help but envision a man who walked through the forest with his eyes open and ears unstopped. Like my ancestor, I grew up in Pennsylvania, or Penn’s Woods. The farm where I spent my childhood was located in a sparsely inhabited part of the state known as “the Pennsylvania Wilds”—a two-million acre tract of forest that is home to numerous stands of Longfellow pines, the tallest trees in the eastern United States, and some of the only remaining areas of virgin forest in the mid-Atlantic. As a marketing website for the region proudly states, this is a place with night skies so dark that “the Milky Way casts a shadow,” and where travelers and residents alike can be rejuvenated by “crisp, mountain air,” “nature,” and “thousands of miles of forest trails.”⁶

      The bookshelves of our house sported an array of Audubon field guides to Pennsylvania’s plants, trees, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. I spent many summer afternoons in the fields and forests near my house, trying to puzzle out the names of particular ferns or hardwoods, or looking vainly under logs for elusive salamanders with red, white, and brown spots. I clearly remember the day when I first heard the song of a male wood thrush in the marshes near the Moshannon Creek and Moravian Run.⁷ As it had Henry David Thoreau, the thrush’s song struck me as one of the most musical sounds I had ever heard: “Whenever a man hears it [the wood thrush] he is young, and Nature is in her spring; wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of Heaven are not shut against him. . . . The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest.”⁸ Listening to the vibrant songs of the wood thrush and the other birds that populated the nearby meadows and woods, I learned to orient myself by sound to the environment around my home. But, in the sparsely populated spaces of the Pennsylvania Wilds, it was also possible to hear and to respond to quieter sounds: wind, water, insects, and the rustling of trees and grasses mixed with the faraway sounds of vehicles and homes. These sounds oriented me to the structures of forest and farmland, imparting a sense of meaning, home, and place within what might otherwise have been a formidable tract of wild land. It was possible to get lost in these wild spaces, so my mother installed an iron bell on the corner of our house. Its ringing signaled dinnertime to me and to the horses and sheep who roamed on the pastures to the east of our house, out of sight of barns and buildings. Within the sound of the bell was home. Like my ancestor, I listened intently for those sounds of human place and geography heard but not seen through the forest.

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      Almost twenty years after I moved away from my family’s farm near the Moshannon Creek and Moravian Run in Cooper Township, Pennsylvania, I embarked on the writing of this book. I can only describe the process itself as an unexpected journey that has caused me to consider deeply the imaginative and storytelling work of history, and the ways in which we are influenced by networks of material objects, manuscripts, sounds, people, and places that connect us with our research subjects in the past and the present. In June 2017, as I was preparing the first draft of the manuscript and simultaneously preparing for my mother’s funeral, I found a picture of her as a teenager. It was taken at our family’s farm, her childhood home, which I happened to be writing about in this book. In the picture, she was smiling radiantly while leading her pet sheep on a leash. In the background, I could see the corner of the house and the farm fields behind it. In the distance rose the edge of the Allegheny Front, falling away toward the deep cleft of the Moshannon Creek where it joined Moravian Run. My mother looked perfectly at home. I sensed that the picture had somehow captured a deeply revealing image of her as not just the woman who had loved and cared for me for over forty years, but also the gentle person for whom the beauty and solace of life were centered in that place. I thought about the times we sat quietly together on the porch of our home, just looking at the leaves as they turned in the wind, or observing the flight of bluebirds along the fence rows, or listening to the choruses of small frogs in nearby puddles and ponds as they rejoiced in the spring and the thawing of the once-hardened earth.

      My mother loved that place—the farm and plot of land where she had many happy childhood memories. Caring for it was one of her greatest joys. But like many things, that joy came with great sadness when she had to leave it, and when she could no longer care for the place she loved in the silent, steadfast way that she valued most of all. Toward the end of her life, her body was almost completely immobilized, and she struggled to find new meaning for a life that had been spent in doing, rather than in imagining. For the past three