I built this site in 2002 as a way to learn HTML and to share pictures with my family and friends. I almost never update it anymore. Facebook gives me an easy and better option for keeping in touch with people. But this site is still up to keep the climbing guide online and I do occasionally add things to it.

On a warm day in summer you can lay in a field before the hay has been cut, and it surrounds you shielding all but the view of the blue sky above you. In the distance you can hear the beating of a tractor engine and occasional faint voices. The sun soaks into your skin and you feel heavy and tired so you close your eyes and lay your head back onto your arms. You feel the bent hay beneath you, clumpy in spots, but you are comfortable and content so you let yourself fall asleep.

Of the five rooms in our house, I liked the living room best. That is where the record player was. Dad had lots of records. Steve and I played basketball in the living room. We could also coast our toy cars on the floor, which sloped toward the center. We didn't have a TV, and although Dad had crowned the roof with a large FM antennae, we only got a few radio stations.

The kitchen and bathroom were cold, except for when Mom fired up the woodstove for baking or cooking. Mom didn't have a conventional oven or stovetop. She did everything with the woodstove. Nobody else knew how to make the right fire to work with food. Mom knew though. She knew exactly what kind of fire each type of wood would make. She said ash burned the hottest. Once a week Mom would bake bread. Mom could make the best bread. She was a great cook.

I shared a bedroom with my brother and sister. Jenny was the oldest; she was two years older than me. I was one year older than Steve. Our bedroom was upstairs with Mom and Dad's. The ceilings were low and angled in from both sides. Each winter Mom covered all of the windows with plastic. I slept closest to the window in our bedroom. I can remember feeling the chilly night air draft through that window, before the plastic was up. It smelled good. I once peeled the blue wallpaper back by the bedroom door. There was flowered wallpaper underneath. Under that there was a yellow striped layer. Each time I peeled a layer back, I found another. I think I counted eleven layers.

Sometimes I would get up early with Dad and sit with him while he drank his coffee and thought. We would put our feet up on the warm stove cover. Dad had a long bushy beard. I think Dad wanted to be a philosophy professor, but that was before the war. He didn't like to talk about Vietnam. He did tell me that a lot of good people died there. Sometimes Lady sat with us. She was Dad's dog and she went to work with him. Dad was a drywall contractor. He would come home after long hours at work coated in dust. He never seemed to get tired. He would always play with us at night. We liked to wrestle with Dad.

In the spring both the apple trees would open their flowers, and the daylilies by the porch would bloom. One of the apple trees had a hollow trunk. Steven could fit inside it, but I was too big. There were many trees in the yard; lots of them were great for climbing. We never climbed the big maple tree. It was massive, standing twenty feet in front of the house and rising nearly four times as high as our roof. Noel had told me that the maple tree was big when he was a boy.

We had a spacious yard. It was bordered on three sides by pastures. The front of the yard ended at a small stream. Dad had built a sturdy wooden bridge that spanned the stream, connecting our yard to the rest of the farm. All of the farm buildings were on the other side of the stream, situated around a large oval driveway. There was the big barn, the main farmhouse, a garage, a machine shed, and a grainery. Dad kept his tools in the grainery. The large farmhouse stood nearest the road, a quiet dirt road in North-Central Pennsylvania.

It was a hot July day. The sun sparkled from the stream. Steve was seven and I was eight. We stood up to our knees in the water. I could feel the tiny pebbles that the current rolled over my bare feet. We surveyed the progress of our dam. It was growing bigger and was well supported on one side, but we needed more big rocks on the other half. Of course the dam still had the drainage gap. The sound of my mother mowing resonated off the grainery wall behind us. Jenny sat slightly downstream from us on the bridge. She was reading a book and kicking her legs, which dangled above the water. She sat in the warm sunlight and looked up occasionally to assess the progress that Steve and I were making.

The wind shifted and I could smell the fresh cut grass. I took a five-gallon drywall bucket and a shovel and started to walk upstream.

"I'm going to get more gravel."

"OK. I found another big rock on the bottom."

Steve stood in front of the dam reaching into the cloudy water, groping at the rock's edges. I used the shovel to fill the bucket halfway with gravel. I then placed the bucket in the stream before filling it to the top. I straddled the bucket between my legs, grasping the handle with both hands, and used the water's help to move the bucket down to our dam. We had 'small-stream dam-building' down to a science.

"I'm ready," Steve announced, as I dragged my bucket of gravel up onto the dam. He had cleared the edges of the rock so we could insert Dad's big crowbar. We took a short break to let the murky water settle. When we were able to see the rock we approached slowly from downstream. It was much easier to do the leverage work when the bottom was visible.

I used Dad's crowbar, and Steve used the pick. We pried and wiggled the rock back and forth until it broke completely free. Then, keeping the rock in the water, we moved it downstream and flipped it over and onto the back of the dam. Our philosophy was that we would build the dam by digging rocks up from where the pool would be, thereby making it deeper more efficiently. The big rocks were put on the back to give the dam support. Smaller ones were put in front, and lots of fine gravel was added to fill the holes.

We stopped to take a break. It was quiet now; Mom had finished mowing the lawn. I looked at Steve. He was holding a wet shovel and grinning. We shared hopeful and excited smiles with each other, and then began to talk about how the stream would be. I envisioned a huge swimming hole, a place that would provide countless hours of fun. A pool big enough that we could float on inner-tubes and deep enough that we could jump in from the sides.

"Maybe Dad will help us again when he gets home."

"I hope so," Steve said.

We always got so much done when Dad helped us. Mom called out to us from the porch, "Do you guys want some cocoa and toaste" All three of us headed toward the house.

I lived on that farm for my first 17 years. Then we moved into the house that my dad had built two miles away. A rich man bought the farm. He burned the little tenant house, all eleven layers of wallpaper. The big maple was scorched, but it survived. And the stream? The stream flows to Phoenix Run, to Pine Creek, to the Susquehanna River, to the sea. And the sun carries it back, keeps it going.

Flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing to the sea

Flowing, flowing, flowing, always it will be