I don’t have the boots that could get me back there
A true story from Appalachia
Southern Ohio never has been a trifling place. Two hundred forty-eight million years ago this plateau thrust upward from the continent surrounding it. The land’s been in a state of constant erosion ever since, wearing down the sandstone and shale all the way to the Ohio River. What’s left is a tangled web of hollows and steep ravines that spider down from around I-70. There is hardly a flat piece of land for thousands of square miles. It hearkens to the old saying about nearby West Virginia, that a cow would need two legs shorter than the others to graze on the steep land here.
The terrain of the Allegheny Plateau alone is forbidding. A flood or a landslide could wash out a road for months. Electricity, fuel, water, let alone broadband and cell service, are never taken for granted. Bobcats, coyotes, snakes, occasional black bears and spiders the size of beer coasters are the norm.
It’s also a place where people shoot first and ask questions later.
The conversation started via group text a few months earlier. There was a family commitment in Wheeling. Maybe that could be the triangulation point, where we could reunite near the old property. It had been nearly 20 years since the land was sold. We never thought we’d see it again, the cabin, or the dense woods, steep hillsides, sandstone overhangs, rocky cascades and deep pools that we’d loved. We’d find ourselves visiting other places and letting the others know that it was a lot like the area around the cabin, or “New Mat,” referring to the nearest Ohio town. All three of us found ourselves at a point in life where this seemed like the perfect idea. There was nothing forced or contrived about it…it just felt right. It wasn’t a very risky trip, but it offered some potential for adventure. And it had some nostalgia to it. We decided to go see the property and visit some of the favorite places in those several hundred acres of Appalachian back woods. To see what had become of the cabin, the creek, the woods and the little river towns nearby.
There are few places as glorious as Appalachia on a hot summer day. It’s dark and cool in the shade and the sun feels extra warm in the clearings left open by fallen trees. The goal for the three of us was to get onto and off the property without being detected — again, not a place to be trifling with. This seemed plausible on a Monday in July in this remote area. Were we going to trespass? Sort of. Someone said the creek beds were public land, so just walk up them.
There was still a touch of dew on the grass when we pulled off North Fork Road and onto the dirt two-track of the old property. We backed the truck into a thicket, out of sight of the road and walked around a locked gate. We shouldered our packs, applied bug spray and sun block, and made our way across the creek toward the cabin. The first stop was an old basketball hoop nailed to a lone electrical pole out in a flat, grassy area. We joked about being able to dribble a ball on that grass, firm as a court at Wimbledon. The area around the hoop was now surrounded by fairly tall trees. A game of HORSE or 33 would be impossible now.
Then we rounded a corner and looked back across the creek at the cabin, a rough-hewn A-frame perched on a steep hillside just as it was years ago. Something about it was more of a mirage than a reality. It had a weathered look that made it blend in with the surroundings, as if the color of the wood was more like the color of the tree trunks and the roof shingles more like the gray of the rocks on the hillside. The forest was closing in on all sides, a far cry from the level of maintenance of the past. The deck was sagging in front, but there was a steel fire pit and signs of use. The lettering of a wooden sign still read clearly from the tiny second-floor balcony, “R-O-C-K B-O-T-T-O-M,” the official though rarely used name of the cabin. A new bridge was the only sign that the cabin had been kept up. We never got up close to it, keeping a respectful distance. There were stomachs fluttering, chills and a few old memories stirred.
Now it was time to make our way to a few more sacred places. We’d need to walk up Mill Creek to get there, though. A rugged couple miles or so. The meadow path we had used in the past was well overgrown this year so we headed up the creek bed. Interestingly, one thing we’d never seen in the creek was any type of waterfowl. In some places, the creek is about the width of a tennis court. In most, it’s much narrower. That’s why it was so surprising when we spooked a merganser just upstream from the cabin. Then we saw that it was not only a merganser, but a mother with four extremely skittish young ones. As they hid out in the creekside brush, the thought occurred, maybe we were the first people who’d come past this way in 2019?
Then it was time to check on the “moose” cabin, a clapboard structure no bigger than a toolshed. Why this place was enchanting, I’m not sure, nor do I know why it was called the moose cabin. It just was. It had once been a place for guys to hole up during deer season decades ago, perhaps a progenitor to Rock Bottom. A drifter named Tractor Jim was said to have lived there for a time. We swung right where a tributary ran into the creek. We looked up the bank for the cabin, and there was no sign of it. A closer look revealed why: the remnants of the cabin were in a heap, only visible with a few more steps up the hill. The years of Appalachian wear, wind, rain, snow and ice, had reduced it to a mess of plywood, stones and roof shingles. There was a mattress with its springs exposed, an old 2 liter of some kind of citrus soda, a folding metal lawn chair and a two-chambered sink, the only detritus that was really recognizable.
A table of rock called the Permian formation makes up much of this part of Ohio and stretches into West Virginia and Pennsylvania for several hundred square miles. The epochs of erosion have worn away at the table, which itself is made up of ancient ocean deposits including strata of coal, sandstone and shale. The tops of these hills are remarkably uniform, the table making up the tops, all 200 to 400 feet higher than the streams that carved at them. There’s a seemingly endless number of hollows. The years of erosion had left something remarkable in one arm of Mill Creek, a gorge with a massive sandstone overhang, or recess cave, on one side. The cave was at least 300 feet wide, 30 feet deep and about 50 feet above the creek. The sand under the rock was bone dry and as powdery as anything found in the Caribbean. In winter, giant icicles would form, leaving the space under the hanging rock almost entirely enclosed. The gorge was lined with big ferns, hemlocks and giant oaks. It seemed as though a mist always hung in the air, with a few rays of sun beaming down biblically. Our teenaged minds had come up with a name for the place: Prehistoria.
A steady trickle of water provided the soundscape. Which tributary was it though? A moment of confusion as all the years had passed. Was this the right branch of the creek? Joints creakier and the risks seemingly higher, we’d crossed a number of fallen trees to get to this point. A wall of rock appeared on one side. I think there’s a false Prehistoria before you get to the real one, someone said. A few minutes later, I think I see it. A rock formation towered off to the right. This had to be it, but could we get to it?
A ruffed grouse flushed from the opposite bank as we contemplated what was next. Canadian wood nettle lined the slope up to the base of the cavern. Here is where I made a rookie-level mistake and began to march through the nettle and up, hoping to clear a path. A few paces in, the nettle sting began to set into my legs. I turned back. It turns out a walking stick or trekking pole makes a handy machete, though. And a tidy path soon was cleared right to the foot of the overhang.
When we got there, I recalled something. The sound under the overhang has a distorted, echoing effect. The rebounded sound of water dripping can be twisted into the sounds of murmurs, or the approach of another party in the woods. Again, the place can be kinda creepy.
This thought came back to me as we sat under the overhang, the time now going on two hours. We watched as a red squirrel walked down from the overhang, using a fallen tree as a bridge to the land below. A phoebe flitted along the stream and a Carolina wren sang in the mid-level of the gorge.
For some reason, this thought came to all of us at once. Maybe we should come back to this place, even tomorrow?
The area around the cabin always had been a little sketchy. In the age of opioids, rampant income inequality, maybe things have gotten worse than in the 90s.
My friend’s dad built the cabin by hand with wood from a nearby lumber yard. Let’s dispense with formalities and just call him Dave. A Vietnam vet, Dave wasn’t a guy to trifle with. The cabin and the several acres around it were meant as a hunting retreat; there were plenty of white-tailed deer and wild turkeys in the hollows.
Dave didn’t just drop in from Cleveland and avoid the locals, though. He bonded with them. Old Shapley up on the other side of the ridge became a friend. There were cookouts each Memorial Day with Clevelanders and local folks in the meadow. Some Southern Ohio moonshine made its way among the guests on those days.
The cabin didn’t have a security system, far from it in fact. It barely had power. So stuff got taken occasionally on the weeks when the family was away. Several years into owning the cabin, Dave was down there on a weekday with his big, beautiful black Labrador, Duke.
One night Duke started barking from the small living space of the cabin. Dave got up and walked out on the front porch to see what was going on. Duke sprinted down and across the bridge at once and into the dimly lit meadow, where there was another cabin, barking all the way. That’s when gun shots rang out, hitting Duke. Dave was right behind him, armed as always, and fired a shot into the darkness, telling the bastards that shot Duke to get the hell out of there — which he and/or she did. The shooters had a drug habit and were picked up quickly by local authorities. Duke was buried right next to the cabin.
There’s a place upstream we call the falls. In our faded memories, the falls were a short hike from the entrance to Prehistoria. So we started walking up a straight stretch of the main channel of the creek. It was a lot longer than we remembered. We had designs on a longer trek to an old farmstead, abandoned high on a ridge about a mile past the falls. That was getting less likely as the trek to the falls went on. We encountered a steep red clay bank, where the creek exposed an interesting strata of the plateau. Then a big treefall that left an entire hillside basking in the sun. Crossing trees over deep water is no fun. One slip and you’re in the water up to your chest, backpack, iPhone and all. Sometimes it was an all-out balancing beam act, dudes in their 40s tiptoeing across these horizontal trees.
Our reward, though, was that the treefall concealed the waterfalls on the other side. The falls are basically a rock amphitheater about 100 feet wide. The creek tumbles a total of 10 feet or so over two ledges. Niagara or Victoria this is not. Pretty it is.
It’s at this moment in the story that I noticed that each time I took a step in the loam and scree of Mill Creek, that my right boot felt heavier and heavier. I thought it must have been mud caked on the sole of my boot. I’d always been a little self-satisfied about these boots, a $300 pair from Italy fully loaded with Gore-Tex lining and Vibram soles. Then I took another heavy step and looked down — the sole came away from the boot from the heel to the ball of my foot, dangling flimsily by the toe. I stood at the base of the falls and ignored the boot. At that moment, it was far more important to enjoy the scene and the sounds of the cool water pouring over the ledges. Even being at the falls, having just been at Prehistoria, maybe for the last time ever, the rest of the trek didn’t matter. We were going to get back to the truck, in bare feet if I had to. The hard part was over.
A nice long break was had on the ledges, sitting in the shade long enough for the sweat to dry from our hot hike. One of us took an absolute pratfall on the slippery rocks of the ledges, right into the water face first. Whole front of a shirt and shorts soaked. For some reason this was hilarious.
Now we contemplated going back, less with anticipation and more with determination. Maybe we’d see the mergansers again. I left the sole on the boot, keeping it under my weight for every footfall. Somehow my foot was still dry, even when going through shallow water. A few steps later, though, my left foot had that same heavy feeling, like a huge clod of mud was hanging on. Then I looked down: same thing, sole of the boot dangling flimsily from the toe, stripped from the ball of the foot down to the heel.
Maybe we should come back to this place, even tomorrow? Now we had the answer. Maybe we shouldn’t. Even if we wanted to, I didn’t have the boots that could get me back there. I lifted each boot and pulled the soles off. It was easier to go without them than with them. The last hike into Prehistoria would end with me carrying the soles of my boots in my hands as we walked Mill Creek.
In our own personal hagiography, in the stories we wanted to have, we preferred to leave Prehistoria this way. This was the last time we’d be there, Appalachia claiming Bob’s boots like it claimed the moose cabin and someday maybe the A-frame, too.
Timelessness can be an elusive quality. While the environment and democracy itself are facing dislocating upheaval, Prehistoria is still there. The Prehistoria in our minds is still the Prehistoria that exists, maybe like it has for hundreds of millions of years. And it might be possible to truly relive one special place for even a few hours. ◊◊
