The Quarry

by John Sheirer

I grew up on a small farm at the base of Wills Mountain in the Laurel Highlands of the Allegheny Foothills of the Appalachian Mountain Range of southwest central Pennsylvania. High on Wills Mountain, just over 2,100 feet, is an abandoned stone quarry, a reddish-tan rock scar marking the top of the ridge. Until the early 1950s, this quarry was a source of Lancaster limestone used for building materials or pulverized to make cement. The official topographical map of the area simply refers to this feature as a "sand pit." Historical documents reveal the actual name was Ganister Rock Quarry. When I was a child, everyone simply called it "the quarry."

My grandparents owned most of Wills Mountain until they sold large chunks of it in 1946. The family who bought it was obsessive about keeping people off their property. At one time, there was probably a good reason they discouraged trespassers. They had valuable equipment over there that could be stolen or vandalized. But by the time I came along, the quarry had been shut down for decades, and the stuff over there had little more than museum value.

I always wanted to climb Wills Mountain as a kid, but I never did. I wasn’t actually afraid of getting caught or getting into trouble. I didn’t climb the mountain because I just didn’t--there was no real reason. The words "no trespassing" had been imprinted on my brain from such an early age that they just stuck there. But I’m not a kid anymore. It’s been more than twenty years since I left the farm, so I’m not as worried about trespassing as I was back then.

Last August, I came from my current home in Connecticut to Pennsylvania with my girlfriend Ginny, and we did some climbing on Wills Mountain. On our second day there, after a wonderful night relaxing in our rented cabin, we felt like taking a walk. The day was sunny and pleasant, and we had no specific idea where we were going. We just started walking about mid-morning, wearing only sneakers and carrying no packs with food or water. We just crossed the creek at the base of Wills Mountain on stones that rose an inch or two above the shallow water and started up with no exact purpose of destination.

After the creek bank, which is pretty steep in some places where the water has cut its way back into the mountain’s base, the land rose gently. The hike up the first half of the mountain was a leisurely uphill walk. It was invigorating, as it always is, to be in the woods on a beautiful day with a great walking partner. So I turned to Ginny and said, "Wanna try for the quarry?" She saw my enthusiasm and was just as game to keep climbing despite our lack of preparation, so our purposeless walk quickly became one with a very specific goal in mind--the top, the quarry.

About halfway up our delightful stroll, however, the felsenmeer began. These chunks of rocks that were formed by constant melting and freezing at the edge of the last ice age glacier seemed to jump out of the ground toward us with no other purpose than to turn our ankles. Then at the two-thirds point up, the mountain angled sharply upward. After a bit of steep climbing, we came to a band of mountain laurel (the state flower of Pennsylvania, but none were flowering at this part of the summer). These are either big shrubs or small trees, depending on your perspective. In one way, they helped with the climb by acting as handholds. Of course, they also scratched at our faces and grabbed at our feet. Between the rocks, the laurel, and the steepness, that nice uphill walk had definitely turned into a hike.

After an hour or so, Ginny and I began to wonder aloud if we were near the top. We were both thirsty and a little tired, wishing we had our hiking boots, water bottles, and maybe a chocolate bar or some beef jerky. But we both knew that half of the fun of any hike is how tired you get, how great it feels to reach the goal, how wonderful it feels to lean back in a soft chair when you get home. Ginny had her plant-identification book and was thrilled to discover a few species she hadn’t seen in New England. And I was delighted at all the childhood memories these woods were bringing back to me. This hike was already becoming one of the high-points of the trip.

We kept slogging ahead and soon found an old logging road angling its way across and up the steep mountain face. The road had been unused for decades, so it was a comfortable walking surface, covered with soft topsoil and thin sod, protecting our feet from the rock chunks. After a few steps on the road, we both looked up through the tree-tops and saw a pale tan wall of rock illuminated by the near-noon sunlight.

"There it is!" I cried. Without even thinking, I began to run up the road the last hundred yards or so to the quarry. The fatigue that had gradually built during the morning’s hike vanished in my excitement at being about to set foot in a place that I had seen throughout my youth, a place that had been a symbol of where I lived, not just a place, but a family and way of life on our small valley farm that somehow made me unique, the person I was at age ten, fourteen, eighteen--even the person I was at forty-one, years removed from my life on the farm and with that family.

When I made it to the top and emerged into the clearing at the base of the quarry, I was almost overcome by the scale of it. From my house at the base of the mountain, the quarry looked big, no doubt. But it had very little detail beyond a few wrinkles and ridges. But here, only a few hundred feet from its base, those ridges were cracks in the rock face were dozens of yards across, the wrinkles were cracks so deep a person could slip into them and disappear.

As a child, I imagined the quarry to be as tall as our house. But from this close perspective I saw that our house could be placed atop a stack of five or six big houses and barely reach the top. It was easily one hundred feet high in some places. The trees that grew precariously on the top edge looked like tiny shrubs, but I knew they were as tall as the ones whose shade I stood in at the bottom

While the vertical qualities of the quarry were impressive enough, I had an equally hard time taking in the horizontal scale. We must have emerged somewhere near the middle because I couldn’t see either end. When I stared at the cliff face and let my eyes slip out of focus, I got the feeling of being surrounded by rock as the quarry seemed to warp around me and fill the periphery of my vision.

At the quarry’s base were countless boulders piled nearly one-fourth of the way up the face, some as much as ten feet high and wide, that must have fallen from the quarry’s face during the decades since it was last an active source of limestone. For fun, I picked up a rock about the size of a baseball and prepared to see how far up the cliff face I could hit with it. My throwing arm is pretty decent for someone in early middle age, so I figured I could get it about a third of the way to the top. When I let it fly, I was amazed to see that I could get it barely halfway into the crumble of boulders. As big and close as the quarry looked to me, I realized that I was still a long way from it. The thing was so off-the-scale big as an element of the landscape that I had simply lost all ability to measure my surroundings in any meaningful way.

Ginny walked up beside me and took my hand in hers. She looked up and down and side to side for a minute or so at this landmark that represented so much of the first half of my life--the sentinel that had watched over my youth from the top of the mountain. She said only one soft word: "wow."

About the Author

John Sheirer is a writer and teacher living in Connecticut. His book of essays, Free Chairs, is available by searching amazon.com for "Sheirer+John."