Living with the Water
Pennsylvania is almost entirely rural but it's not rural like the South or the Midwest are rural. It's rural as in, like, you can walk into the woods and no one will find your body for years rural.
It’s just forests and forests for miles in every direction.
When I was a kid I literally lived in these woods. My backyard opened into acres of old-growth forest and running through it all was an old abandoned wagon trail not used since the colonial era. My childhood home, The Swiftwater Inn, originally served as a carriage house along the trail, built to service the first enterprising wagoneers who carted materials, letters, and goods between the colonial cities of Albany and Philadelphia. A carriage house like ours provided refuge to the white colonizers from what was then still seen as the untamed frontier.
But before it was a wagon trail, it had previously existed for many thousands of years as a Lenape footpath alongside the western bank of what is today called the Swiftwater Creek.
Before the Europeans had arrived with their new-fangled wagons and guns, the trail connected fishing camps that had been set up alongside the creek. Each year, after the spring floods, the Lenape would use rocks to build waist-high dams, effectively making the whole length of the trail a kind of low-effort hatchery for rainbow trout. Once they had devised a system that worked with the spirit of nature instead of against it, fishing became as easy dipping their hands into the water. So simple, a child could do it. And for thousands of years, without the aid of anything we’d today call agriculture, the Lenape lived in peaceful abundance with what is one of the healthiest, most nutritive sources of protein ever known to man.
When I was kid, my family also built makeshift dams like these along the creek. When I was growing up, catching a bucketful of trout was as easy as dipping a net into the water. So simple, in fact, I, as a child, could do it. And each of those trout we caught we sold broiled in our family restaurant as the freshest, healthiest dinner any diner could expect to have in the deep woods of rural Pennsylvania.
Now we only call it fresh when the fish is flown in overnight on a plane.
But, hey, that’s progress for you.