Our Family Cabin in the PA Wilds: Part II
- by Alex Getty
- August 22, 2018
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My brother and I were difficult to entertain when we were young, and with my dad having purchased our cabin on the Allegheny River for hunting and fishing he thought he very well may be doomed with us little boys constantly requiring snacks, drinks, and all matter of cellophane wrinkling treats that invariably scared away game for miles.
But he persisted, and took my brother and I on several hunts in the State Game Lands backwoods of the Pennsylvania Wilds, with him carrying a turkey gun, and us carrying our Red Ryder BB guns taking pot shots at stumps 50 or so yards behind my father just hoping to stumble onto a bird that apparently would have to be stone deaf to not hear us coming.
More than once we toted Game Boys, playing Super Mario Brothers while my dad just sat on a log in full camouflage with his bow, praying that some deer would be curious enough to check on all the ruckus.
On one occasion my father was approached by a six point buck while squirrel hunting, and struggling to teach us a game eye, he showed us silently where the deer was among the brown leaves. Brown on brown with no training to look for pieces of animals was difficult for us, who at 6 and 8 fashioned ourselves woodsmen with our portable video games, BB guns, and very official small game jackets.
Little did I know that when we tromped around the State Game Lands well before we even eclipsed double digits we were learning more about the great outdoors than most kids our age.
In between our busy schedules of school and baseball, our camp was two hours away from our home just outside Pittsburgh, just close enough to run home for something if you absolutely had to, just far enough that cell phones didn’t work unless you were on Cellular One at the time.
We learned about responsible forest management, and that while the term that was used by most of the older generation was “clear cut”, what the Game Commission was doing was selective timbering, leaving some middle age and older trees while taking many others. We came to learn that the bulldozer trails that were created during logging operations were temporal, and while many of them were maintained and mowed for a while, there were still others that only seasoned veterans would disappear off into when we were hunting together. They could somehow read the gentle slope of the ground that had been excavated into a false ridge line worth following for some unforeseen shortcut to the top of the mountain.
All of these adventures in woodsmanship came naturally when you were exposed to it every weekend at the cabin.
During the late fall, our visits as children dropped off after Thanksgiving, when we knew it was getting close to the time of the year that we would have to close the doors, drain the pipes, and leave the place until the following spring when trout season would bring us back to the mountains, with still a chill in the air from an Allegheny winter.
Even though my brother and I were not at the cabin, it was at this time that the men in the family began to assemble. The weekend after Thanksgiving meant Black Friday sales for some, but for many it was the preparation of the deer opener in Pennsylvania. This was a ritual for my father, grandfather, uncle, and friends.
Preparation happened months in advance, with blaze orange “pumpkin suits” coming from closets, rifles being cleaned, Halloween candy being horded, and boots being carefully conditioned with Sno-Seal.
For it was the weekend after Thanksgiving that the “orange army” descended upon the northern camp counties of Pennsylvania. Both a boon to the local economies but also sometimes a scourge of out-of-towners that bought every case of beer, steak, pound of slab bacon, and pint of ice cream for miles.
In my young mind the trip my father took seemed like forever, but in reality it was only ever a week, or maybe a week and a half depending on what my father could get off of work.
During that time my father, uncle, and grandfather would almost certainly come back with a deer or two. While we weren’t exactly poor growing up most of our meat was venison from the time we were babies until middle school. It was at that time that I began to recognize what a big deal hunting was in our little section of Pennsylvania, with the opening day of whitetail largely being an excused absence from school, and if it wasn’t most children older than 12 got mysteriously ill during that first day or two while they went to the mountains.
When I came of age, I too was one of the excused absences taking two days off of school in order to try my luck as a junior hunter.
Too young to have much more than a vastly over-sized Cabela’s coat that I’d eventually “grow into” — at something like 16, I was out for my first season sitting on a stone chair my father had built at his own stand wearing jeans, two or three pairs of socks, long johns, and a blaze orange radar cap, and I loved every frozen second of it. It was being so cold on that opening day nearly two decades ago that actually kindled a fire in me, one that burns brightly today — a love of the outdoors, hunting, fishing, and camping. The snowflakes that sometimes blew on that first day of deer season only stoked the embers that this was going to be a large part of my life forever.
While there’s huge benefits to traveling the world and seeing all places once to get a Rolodex of diverse experiences, what we built in our childhood was a deep knowledge of our wild backyard. Establishing roots in one area allowed us to explore, with twisting mountain streams and the rolling rugged topography indelibly etched in our psyche, calling us back as we got older.
Did you miss Our Family Cabin in the PA Wilds Part I? Check it out here.
