MICHAEL GARRIGAN
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ALONG THE RAFTMAN'S PATH

Potter County Hollows

6/12/2019

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A day after school let out, I found myself rambling up hollows of Potter County. 

It is here, where rock tightens its grip to water, that everything grows more full. 

Color, life, sound, smell, the way deadwood lays across rock - patterns stitched by the quick wind that slices down these drafts. 
Patterns of the elders
It is a good way to start the summer - sitting on the tailgate with mountains in the windows, looking at maps, tracing hyphenated courses and blue lines, waiting for the sulfurs to hatch. One night, after we caught brook trout on little bright yellow flies, I made burritos. We sat around the fire and ate them. The thin moon showed us the movement of night. The next morning we sat on the porch and drank coffee for a few hours, watching the valley and the clouds slowly shake by. During the day we bushwhacked through thick brush and found plunge pools. The long thin red marks across my shins, those are good scars, tattoos of exploring. 
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    About

    I stumbled upon the name "Raftman's Path" walking the river trail that traverses through the little town I live in. It was named during the days when lumber was a huge commodity in this area. The Susquehanna River was an industrial thoroughfare - bearing down loads of lumber from the northern reaches of Pennsylvania towards the Chesapeake. Marietta was a stopping point, a place for the lumber either to go to the mills lining its banks or shoot further downstream through pig iron smoke. Raftmen would guide the lumber down to the mouth of the Susquehanna into the Chesapeake - an estuary of salt, water, lumber, ore, eel and shad. When their job was done, they would walk the raftman's path back through the Susquehanna Riverlands of Lancaster County towards their homes. The path is now wooded and meanders through some of the only "wild" places left in the county. 

    Sketches & scatterings. Rooted in Pennsylvania along the Susquehanna River. All words  & photos by Michael Garrigan unless otherwise noted. 

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www.mgarrigan.com by Michael Garrigan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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