Descriptions of Places

On a rainy day in January, you are driving alone on an interstate. Up and down you go through mist covered hills, dark forests and tan, dormant fields. You are listening to a sermon about the fruits of the spiritual life on Christian radio, feeling ambivalent about religion. You come upon a broad valley, filled with cities and towns that look like urban New Jersey. Getting off the interstate, you pass narrow winding highways lined with strip malls, Industrial facilities, piles of scrap metal, and neighborhoods of densely packed, old wood frame houses. A downtown of grey concrete office buildings is visible a few miles away. You drive to a suburban park, and pull up to a cinderblock building like the least inviting public library you have ever seen. Only one other car is in the parking lot, on a Saturday afternoon. This is the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum. The valley you are in, home to Scranton / Wilkes-Barre, is the heart of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Region. The name co...

Schunnemunk Mountain is two parallel ridges of conglomerate bedrock. It is located maybe ten miles west of the Hudson River in Orange County, New York. The ridge tops have some large exposures of glacially scoured bedrock with only dwarf pitch pines growing between the cracks. The views from here of the surrounding country are expansive: the Hudson River and Hudson Highlands to the east, the Schawangunk and Catskill Mountains to the North, rolling terrain of Orange County to the west, and the rugged areas of Harriman and Sterling Forest State Parks to the south. The shape of the two parallel ridges is also cool. The inward facing sides have steep ledges and talus slopes above a long, narrow, moist, flat, deep-soiled inner valley. Tulip poplar, yellow birch, sugar maple, and various oaks attain good size down in there. Little streams drain either end of this valley, and there is a swamp at the northern end. The mountain has a distinctive wedge shape on a map. The northeastern slope is...

There is a photo of my great grandparents, Sam Topal and Rhea Gallay, sitting in a hole in the sand on Rockaway Beach. They look like they are maybe 25 years old. Sam's arm is around Rhea but his brow is furrowed with what seems like worry. Rhea looks at ease and happy. What was on the minds of these children of immigrants in working class Jewish Brooklyn? My grandma told me her father Sam had a difficult family life, and career difficulties too. Rhea had very close, loving parents, who my grandma remembers helped raise her, and she describes as the center of family life. Rhea was known for her warmth and caring. My only memory of her is her laughing as my cousin crab walked across her living room in her Brighton Beach apartment, as part of a game of charades. Nevertheless, her life cannot have been all easy. I would like these young New Yorkers, trying to make a life together, to know across the generations that whatever they're worried about, whatever they struggle with...

Sterling Forest is an area of intricate rugged terrain located between the Ramapo River and Greenwood Lake on the New York / New Jersey border. Roughly 20 miles west of the Hudson, it is mostly in the Passaic River’s watershed. Part of the larger NJ/NY Highlands region, it has typical features including rocky hilltops, precambrian metamorphic bedrock, boulder strewn valleys and swamps. For whatever reason, the hilltops are less glacially scoured than elsewhere in the Highlands. There are no great expanses of exposed bedrock here, like there are in Harriman and the Wyanoke Plateau, although there are ledges with nice views throughout the forest. There is high terrain along the divide between the Wanaque River (Greenwood Lake) and the Ramapo River but it’s not really a ridge, more of a jumbled series of hills. On either side are lower hills, rocky slopes and small valleys with streams and wetlands in them. On a small stream called Jennings Brook there are a couple of active beaver pond...

Radbun Bald is a high point on the Blue Ridge in Radbun County, Georgia, just below the North Carolina border. It has a 360 degree view from a stone observation tower at the summit. The Blue Ridge Mountains form the southeastern flank of the Southern Appalachians in North Carolina and Georgia. The ridge tends to have steep slopes to the southeast that face the rolling Piedmont many miles away. At Radbun Bald, the land drops away quickly in that direction, descending over the course of a few miles from the 4700 foot bald into a jumble of ridges 2000-2500 feet lower in height, criss-crossed by a network of winding streams. Beyond this birds-eye view of near wilderness, the flat Georgia piedmont stretches off into the haze. To the northeast, the Blue Ridge continues, with steep or rocky summits standing out at various distances. North and west loom some of the high ridges of the Southern Appalachians. Research has confirmed that the big dark shapes in the middle distance to the nort...

It’s easy to take the Midwest for ugly, because a casual look around can reveal so little. The horizon is flat and nearly featureless. Driving can seem like an exercise in futility, with the corn and soybean fields, rolling hills and plains, grain elevators and barns blurring together. The mixture of extreme fertility and blunt continental weather is somewhere between hospitable and forbidding. But get to the edge of a major river and things start to come together. In Minnesota, south of the Twin Cities, the Mississippi flows through a deep channel hundreds of feet below the surrounding plains. Steep slopes capped with limestone bluffs flank the river’s broad floodplain for hundreds of miles. Tributary streams cut through the limestone with networks of steep-sided gullies, or dramatic waterfalls. The Mississippi’s floodplain is about three miles wide, scooped out on such a grand scale by glacial meltwater. Today the valley is punctuated by deltas from various tributaries, that ...

The best north-facing views the author has seen in the Hudson Highlands are from Storm King Mountain, Beacon Mountain, and Bull Hill. These are along the northern escarpment of the Hudson Highlands, and they look directly down onto Newburgh and the Walkill Valley. A view of the Catskills is also possible from various places in Harriman State Park, and the Sterling Forest Fire Tower. The Shawangunk Ridge cut across the field of vision directly in front of the Catskills, a low but massive, dark, flat ridge. A rock outcrop forms a horizontal white stripe near the top. Behind them, a little lighter in color due to the haze, the peaks of a large mountain range loom, steep in some places and rounded in others. Slide Mountain is the first to catch the eye, a head taller than the rest, with its distinctive steep eastern slope and gradual western ridge. Its neighboring peaks surround it like waves on a choppy sea: Wittenburg, Cornell, the so-called Bushwhack Range, Peekamoose and Table Moun...