Returning to Elements of the Endless Mountains (October 2026)

I have been visiting the Endless Mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania for 30 years, always returning to the same place, Eagles Mere, described in travel articles as “the town time forgot.” This phrase, coined by Rudy Maxa [1], celebrates how little the town has changed since becoming a vacation resort about a century and a half ago. The houses and cottages, built between 1885 and 1940, are lovely in a way with their solid craftsmanship, wrap-around porches, old trees, and long views. More than half of the town’s structures are listed in the National Register of Historic Places, and many owners pride themselves on preserving the buildings’ original features. So there are some ways in which time does not change the town, and there are also ways in which contemporary visitors forget time when they are “away from it all.” But there are layers beneath this preservation of a way of life.

I rarely venture into the peopled part of the town in part out of disinclination toward the resort aspect and in part because I go to the hills for the silence and solitude. My return is to the elements of the natural world beyond the populated center, small as it is, with its restaurant and ice cream parlor, bookstore, coffee shop, real estate and rental office, and museum, as well as a couple of boutiques. Although there is no supermarket, gas station, or even traffic light, both the little commerce there is and the too much seeming sameness among the visitors feel like more than I want. For me, this place is one of and for remembering, reminding, and revisiting through returning to earth, water, and air and to the solitude, resounding silence, and spiritual companionship I find in coming back and again to the natural elements here.

Part of the Appalachian Mountain chain that runs from central Alabama to Newfoundland, the Endless Mountains are technically not a mountain range at all but rather a swath of dissected plateau composed largely of sandstone and shales. The long ridges and ravines were first the seasonal home of the Munsee Lenape, the Susquehannock, and the Haudenosaunee Iroquois and subsequently traversed by the settlers who displaced these native peoples. The two groups had very different concepts of endlessness. The Indigenous visitors to the land valued cyclical, generational, and natural continuity—concepts and realities destroyed by the settlers who gave the mountains their name because the journey to cross through them felt like it would never end. [2]

For me, several hundred years later, endlessness registers mostly as a visual perception—seemingly uninterrupted tree-covered hills for as far as I can see, as in the photo above of Loyalsock Canyon. This visual perception in turn evokes a full-body feeling of entering, unhurried, into the openness of a landscape to which I return to follow the movement of light, wind, and water. In both the open space and the open time, as in my experiences of them, there are also many layers.

The history of Eagles Mere is as disturbingly American as the hills are stunningly beautiful. After several attacks on the native peoples in the mid 1700s, the colonizers took control of the areas in and around what is now designated Sullivan County. In 1794, the wealthy English importer George Lewis purchased more than 10,000 acres surrounding the lake at the center of the town, built cabins for workers to live in while they melted the lake’s white sand into glass, and developed Lewis Glass Works. When this venture collapsed, the area became a farming community, and with the construction of a railroad from Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal to Eagles Mere in the late 1800s, the town turned into a vacation destination for wealthy, white people with a certain social status from Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and New York. The preservation of both the built and the natural environment is for the privileged, not, of course, for the original visitors. So the layers are more than of sandstone and shale.

I recognize both my privilege and my responsibility to honor the land and what lives on it here. Each season turns the elements of this semi-wild place into different forms of themselves. Like the history and the land itself, each of my returns to these elements is a stratum among the millions of years of strata.

Stone Walls and Wooded Hills

Our house was built as part of a selling off of parcels by Rip and Carolyn Hanley in the 1990s and early 2000s on a steep hillside about a mile from the center of Eagles Mere. The Hanleys had previously used this hillside to run an alpine ski slope, and old skis and other resort detritus still litter some of the wooded areas. We are the second owners of our house, one of only about a dozen on the quiet cul-de-sac. It nestles near a stone wall, pictured above, ostensibly built by members of the Hanley family. This stone wall, with no mortar or grout, is not as carefully crafted as the stone walls of west Ireland, but returning to the stones’ lichened gray-greens and their sometimes altered angles reminds me of what is steady, what stands still to contain, and what slightly shifts over time. The wall seems to stabilize not only the house below but also the field above, keeping it from sliding, visually and literally, into our house. The palpable intersection of care and carelessness I discern in the construction of the wall is a reminder to me of how precariously we perch here on the side of the ravine between the hilltop town of Eagles Mere and Chestnut Ridge. The ridge is a perpetual play of color and light. In autumn, it is ablaze in yellows, reds, and oranges, as in the photo below, taken through the south windows.

At all times of year, I wake before dawn to sit across from these windows to work or to write, and I watch where the ridge meets the sky for the first light. Depending on the weather, that meeting can be a heavy, muted, white line linking gray cloud above and dense dark green below. Other times it is a strip of bright red or fiery yellow throwing splashes and streaks of color into the sky and illuminating the forest below, as on the morning I took the picture that opens this post.

Watching the leaves and light rising up as the morning dawns in this middle of October, I think of the many ways that autumn is a time of falling: temperatures dropping, light arriving later and fading earlier, leaves of one tree caught in the branches of another as they float toward the forest floor.  And yet fall is the time I feel most alive and most awed by the transformations Mary Oliver invites us to notice in the leaf-filled woods: “Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light.” [3]

Each morning, the dawning of the day parallels my coming back to noticing. The other meaning of dawn—to come to awareness of—is carried for me in the coming of the light. I think again of In Nature’s Heart, the collection of excerpts from John Muir’s writings I found in a bookstore when I was visiting southern New Mexico. The excerpts are arranged to move through the phases of the day, starting with dawn, which always evoked for Muir the awe and wonder of coming back to life, of re-creation. Every time the hills of Chestnut Ridge reappear, I feel that same sense of amazement and gratitude. I hope the elements can feel those forms of reverence in my gaze.

As I felt so keenly while I was in New Mexico, color and texture here are more than visual perceptions; they are full-body experiences and entire environments, and they link my being with the life of the land. I think of the phrase ”mood of the landscape,” one reading of which implies that it is the landscape experiencing the mood. For Indigenous peoples, who view the land as living and sentient, this meaning makes sense. But many who use this phrase mean the mood the landscape evokes in people—defined as both a state of mind and a state of emotion. The relationship is uni-directional rather than reciprocal. What both meanings evoke is felt consideration.

Vittoria Di Palma writes in in her chapter “In the Mood for Landscape” that considering landscape as a mood “privileges interpretations that focus on mental states, types of response, varieties of emotion, and patterns of interaction, rather than on objective descriptions, disinterested evaluations, or big data.” [4] Arguing for “a more environmentally and socially equitable future,” Di Palma writes about abandoned “wastelands” rather than stewarded wildernesses like Eagles Mere, and she focuses on disgust, in contrast to the deep connection I find in returning to these still-beautiful natural spaces. But there are interesting resonances. The “basic emotions,” Di Palma writes, which also include sadness, fear, anger, and surprise, occur as “both a seemingly instinctual, reactive response, and a highly developed, culturally and socially inflected tool of discrimination and moral judgment.” [5] What we see, how we feel, and what we do about both are what shape our relationships to the land, having an impact on the elements and on our selves.

All the land that we can see from our house, including Chestnut Ridge, pictured in a muted mood above, has been owned by the Lewis Lumber Company since the 1940s. According to the Lewis Lumber website, they strive “to use only sustainable forest resources that cause negligible disturbance to the environment.” Whether the Lewis family is guided by a sense of sustainability closer to an Indigenous valuing of cyclical, generational, and natural continuity or by a drive to counter, in Di Palma’s terms again, the “moral disgust directed at human actions that inspires the deployment of a form of gardening understood in redemptive terms” [5], they not only harvest sustainably but they also maintain a web of trails on their “timberland”—a term that stands in sharp contrast to Traditional Ecological Knowledge that holds forests as living relatives with which humans are interconnected.

The Lewis land trails are accessible to members of the Eagles Mere Conservancy, which, as explained on their website, “preserves natural resources through land acquisition for water and soil conservation, wildlife sanctuary and refuge, and preservation of scenic beauty in Eagles Mere, PA and the surrounding area.” The “No Trespassing” signs posted on trees along the trails remind me that these woods are held for profit as well as stewardship. I benefit from both—another uneasy layer. Neither resolving nor forgetting these layers, I strive to bring a reverence to my passages through the elements I revisit.

On my every return to Eagles Mere, I hike the trail on the Lewis land that follows the creek in the picture below. Walking alongside the running water is for me a revisiting of the “same” waterway with the understanding that the water itself is always different. This both/and of element feels like the both/and of time: I and the world in which I am moving both are and are not the same with each visit.

Walking on the softened earth trails after the rain, I feel as though they are soaking up sound as well as water. The woods are muted in the concentration of absorption.

Or so I perceive they might be, since I experience a kinship to how I feel when I am balanced between absorbing and creating, as when writing. I press my hands to the wet soil, the saturated mosses, the rocks that seem softer for the rain, and I thank these living things for their being and the ways they let me be.

There is a sound the water over stone makes in small creeks that is unlike any I have heard elsewhere. It’s really many sounds at once, each the specific pitch produced by the popping of air bubbles depending on the volume of water, the speed at which it moves, the distance it falls, and the surface it lands on. This symphony is, for me, uniquely joyful—the sound of life passing both beside and within me, as though the circulation of my blood were syncing with the running of the water. When the trail veers away from the creek, I miss its song; for as much as I love the silence, it doesn’t feel as much like a dance between what’s within me and what’s beyond me as this particular water sound.

Away from the creek, this trail threads through a scattering of boulders that make the path feel like a passage. Like the wash of the water over rock in the creek, this earth passage is one of the places along the trail that always makes me especially aware of the flow and the shapes of time and space. I know water has washed over, and is still held by, these formations, but I can’t hear or see it in the same way, so it seems silent and still.

As I climb, I wonder what other people and creatures have passed before me through this cluster of rocks. I wonder about the layers of sediment that form them and the mosses and lichens that grow in and around the rainwater-filled crevices, and how long they can wait for water to nourish them. While the greens’ identifiable features give away the size of the stones, a photo like the one to the left still captures for me what could also be of a soaring cliff face or an aerial view of wooded lands far below.

I experience scale, like duration, as at once relative to me and beyond my comprehension. Here is where awe mixes most thoroughly with gratitude.

Canyon Vista Rock Garden

I visit Canyon Vista Rock Garden less frequently than some other places in the Endless Mountains. The garden is part of the Pottsville Formation, which is roughly 300 million years old. These block and fissures have been shaped by erosion as well as the freezing of water and the melting of ice (called “frost wedging”).

The last time I returned was during the early COVID-19 pandemic years. When schools shut down, I came here with my daughter Morgan to walk the road that winds through the quiet woods and to talk through how she might navigate the isolation and boredom of lockdown. On that road, which passes beside this rock garden, we conceived of a plan for her to develop a new method to learn piano pieces after losing her central vision to juvenile macular degeneration, which rendered her no longer able to read sheet music. This method became the subject of her high school senior project, “Losing Sight, Finding a New Way,” which showcased in three languages—her native English and the French and Spanish she had learned in school—the method she created and the piano pieces she taught herself using it.

Today I walk alone among the water-carved rock formations, listening to the particular silence born of the settling of sediment and tracing the veins that lie within and the roots that spread across the rocks. The density of the layers of soil and the sudden gaps between those both support in their solidity and sustain in their channeling of rain water the spreading tree roots and scattered ferns and mosses. I find such tenacity an inspiration—a reminder of what life and choice are possible in seemingly inhospitable circumstances. The silence here feels as ancient as the stone. The endurance, erosion, and evolution of these formations will always remind me of how Morgan found her way through the fissures.

This time I hike a segment of the Loyalsock trail—a hike I haven’t done since Morgan lost her vision.

I remember her as a young child  clambering over these rocks, determined and delighted. Now she navigates the streets of Bordeaux and the tram system all on her own with her cane and her growing confidence.

Both beautiful.

Jeannette Winterson writes: “Inner time, where our minds live…is not subject to chronological imperatives…not a measurement but a music" [6]. I wonder, though, if there isn’t a more reciprocal relationship between inner and outer time—the flow that both builds sedimentary rock and carries me back to the elements of the Endless Mountains. Winterson’s work has always both enacted and argued for the power of narrative to write and rewrite lives, and while there is a solitary authoring aspect of this storying, there is also a relational aspect. As I am writing this meditation, my friend Alice shares with me some of Leslie Marmon Silko’s wisdom: “...the storytelling always includes the audience and the listeners, and, in fact, a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener, and the storyteller’s role is to draw the story out of the listeners. This kind of shared experience grows out of a strong community base” [7]. Another manifestation of cyclical, generational, and natural continuity, this reciprocity is more in keeping with my sense of shared meaning making both within and across time and place—part of what I understand spiritual companionship to be.

Two Lakes

The life of Eagles Mere has always revolved around its lake, which is located just 1000 feet northeast of the "commercial" center of the town. With successive takeovers, the lake was renamed several times. “Walpaleechen” was the name that records show the Iroquois used for the lake area. The descriptive “Lake of the Eagles” was used before European development, then “Lewis Lake” for George Lewis and his glass factory. The name “Eagles Mere” was conferred by Judge Richtor Jones, who combined “eagles” with the old English word for an enclosed body of water. [8]

Only when my daughter was small did I spend any time at the small sandy white beach at the north end of the lake. Otherwise, I have avoided this popular place, and I return to its shores only to walk the Laurel Path.

The Laurel Path was cut through the woods that encircle the lake in the 1800s, and it remains a narrow, root-woven passage around the perimeter, never straying more than a few yards from the water’s edge. Like the lake itself, the Laurel Path is open only to members of the Eagles Mere Association.

Because of the roots and rock, some of which spread as much above as below ground, navigating the path requires a certain degree of outward attention. I cannot wander carelessly, and more than once I have twisted my ankle on a root and tripped over an edge of rock.

Walking the path requires slowing down and watching, placing my feet carefully, looking at the earth as much as at the water and trees. The slow, intentional, and mildly strenuous circumnavigation of the lake, like walking the trails on the Lewis timberland, requires and inspires deliberation. As I pass familiar boulders or enter well-traveled tunnels of rhododendron bushes, I note both the recognition and the newness of returning as a continuous but also ever-changing version of myself pondering some of the same and some different questions—in work, in life, in composition for both.

The water is both aural and visual companion in this circling. Unlike the trails through the woods, the path around Eagles Mere lake is always right next to the water. Around the entire perimeter, the lake water laps the rocky shore, a syncopated rhythm that shifts with the wind, sometimes gently rippling and sometimes loudly splashing. It can be hypnotic and so steady that sometimes I forget to notice it, until an unexpected shift in rhythm or volume brings it back into my awareness. The close growth of trees and bushes along the path, and the always-lapping lake water make walking the Laurel Path feel like threading my way through the elements.

So when I come upon an opening and a vista of the lake and sky open up, I stop to adjust to the also-familiar combination of altitude that holds the clouds close in the sky and in reflection, the dense trees that line the shores of the lake, and the boats of the people who have their houses nestled behind the trees. These are reminders of other elements, other scales, other ways of being.

When clouds pass over, it feels as though I am almost among them; because of Eagles Mere’s altitude, around 2100 feet above sea level, their shifting shapes pass right overhead, as in time-lapsed photography or accelerated filming. Only the click of the phone camera stills the near-constant movement of these elements. Also because of the altitude, there is almost always a breeze—swirling air full of the freshness of trees and soil and stone. When the wind blows through the hemlocks and pines that grow amongst the deciduous trees, they make the sound like water rushing, a kind of synesthesia, mixed with rustling of broader leaves.

At the south end of the lake, about as far as one can get from the white-sand beach, the Laurel Path turns to a small wooden foot bridge, pictured below, that links the main body of the lake with the outlet pond that regulates the flow of the rain and spring water. The bridge is always mirrored in the water, unless there are high winds. It evokes memories for me of all kinds of crossings—out of the shaded path and into the heat of the summer sun or the icy wind that blows off the water in the winter, on my own or in the early years of my daughter’s life when she too would walk (or ride her small like-a-bike) around the lake. It is usually the last leg of the 2-mile walk around the lake’s perimeter before I turn away from the town and head back down the hill to our house.

For many people, the bridge is emblematic of the town: quaint, quiet, the right balance of nature left wild and turned tame. It is those qualities that distance me from it, but also remind me of the privilege of wandering the woods on easy paths, as at the national parks in New Mexico. The early-morning obscurity, as in the photo above, captures both its picturesque quality and reminds me of the privilege of having access to a place like this where I can walk alone, unmolested, and unconcerned. I don’t query Google here about whether it is safe to walk by myself, as I do in some other locations. I feel both grateful for and uneasy with this privilege.

In contrast to the private and populated Eagles Mere lake, Hunters Lake is open to the public and is surrounded by 117 acres of forest land. Down Route 42 out of Eagles Mere and then along the gravel Brunnerdale Road, the lake is restricted to unpowered boats and electric-motor boats operating at a slow, no-wake speed. There is no development around this lake. It is home to more Eagles than I have seen at their lake’s namesake, reminding me of a friend’s comment that places are often named for the natural inhabitant they displace.

I prefer to visit Hunters Lake when it is most peaceful and quiet, still shrouded in mist, and empty of people, as in the photo below. In the dark of the early morning, I wrestle my kayak into the back of my station wagon, cross tie it to the inside door handles, and drive to the lake with my hatchback wide open. It’s odd to be able to look straight over the boat and onto the open road behind me, and it’s probably illegal, but it’s only a 5-mile drive, mostly on back or unpaved roads. Sometimes no one is at the lake that early; sometimes two or three fisherman have arrived before me and found their preferred spots near the shore, across from the boat ramp and dock. I slip my kayak into the water and begin paddling the perimeter, the water entirely still and smooth, the mist moving across it as it evaporates.

In the predawn silence, there is almost no color, only emerging greens and the first hints of sunrise, the changes often visible in reflection before I see them in the actual sky. Paddling on these calm waters requires much less attention than walking the Laurel Path or the trails on the Lewis land, and so I can focus on feel of the cool air on my face, the sound of the boat gliding through the water, the slow coming back into presence of the light. I often hear Eagles calling to one another and then see them rising from one tree top and alighting on another high branch on the opposite side of the lake. Sometimes I startle a pair of loons as they are passing through on their annual migration or wood ducks, who live here year round. I am not accustomed to gliding swiftly and nearly silently through water—the only time I do this is the few times a year when I visit the Endless Mountains—so what I notice is not only the sound of the water and the wash of the air but also the speed at which perspective shifts.

Returning

As the root of the word suggests, and as I reiterate in the first paragraph of this post, the “re” of “returning” refers to turning both “back” and “again.” It signals a revisiting of both place and time. This spatial and temporal intersection reminds me of lines from T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” [9] Eliot argued that modern poets needed to "dislocate language into meaning" [10], and while I have some sense of what he was striving to break away from, there is a less violent power in locating and relocating language to make meaning. Witness the stunning simplicity of Mary Oliver’s language that evokes equally profound experiences and insights. A follower of Emerson rather than Eliot, Oliver understood the natural world in ways closer to Indigenous sensibilities: as a living, communicative collective of creatures, each moving in its own cycle and each with its own form of expression that warrants deep human attention. Eliot’s own words about cycles of spiritual growth, the fundamentally non-linear relationship of past, present, and future even as we live them in a line, the result of ongoing exploration being re-newed and also new understanding—these are the ways Eliot’s as well as Oliver’s sensibilities reflect how I experience the Endless Mountains.

The final stretch of road approaching our house in Eagles Mere is a steep hill. Part way down is the view below captured in the bright green of early summer. When I arrive in Eagles Mere, descending toward our stone-wall cabin, I always stop here, look out over the Endless Mountains, and feel myself begin to take slower, deeper breaths. When I leave, I always take one last look back at this vista, the layers of green, gold, or gray, depending on the season, and the blue air, sometimes clear and sometimes strewn with clouds so close they seem to be more a part of the landscape than the sky. My returning is an honoring of the cycles and seasons, of the land, and of myself, slowing to feel and know even while recognizing that the exploring never ends and the layers never resolve. Remembering the human history in the cycles and seasons is part of my return to old and new injustices in fresh and in continuing ways.

1. Rudy Maxa, 1980. "The Town Time Forgot." The Washington Post Magazine.

2. Ed Van Dyne, 1967, “Deep in the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania.” The New York Times.

3. Mary Oliver, 1983, “In Blackwater Woods,” American Primitive.

4. Vittoria Di Palma, 2017, "In the mood for landscape." Thinking the Contemporary Landscape, edited by Christophe Girot and Dora Imhof. Princeton Architectural Press, p. 15.

5. Vittoria Di Palma,"In the mood for landscape,” p. 18.

6. Vittoria Di Palma, "In the mood for landscape,” p. 27.

7. Jeanette Winterson, 2026, One Aladdin Two Lamps.

8. Leslie Marmon Silko, 1981/1996, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.”

9.Julia Lawlor, 2006, “Near a Lake, and Away From It All.” The New York Times.

10. T.S. Eliot, 1942, “Little Gidding.” Four Quartets.

11. T.S. Eliot, 1921, "The Metaphysical Poets."