The entire Atlantic seaboard and areas for hundreds of miles inland sleep quietly this evening, huddled beneath a giant howling snowstorm that continues to blanket the region with record-breaking snow.  Here in south central Pennsylvania, on the Saturday before Christmas, even the malls are empty and have announced that they’re closing at 5:00 p.m.  You KNOW the weather is bad when the malls close early on the last shopping weekend before Christmas!

The Dog and the Daughter 

Walking the old railroad grade 

 My little family loves winter and this snow has come as a wonderful surprise, especially to my 13 year-old daughter who is absolutely ecstatic about every flake that flutters to the ground.  This morning the dog could wait no longer and took us all, willingly, out for a walk along the abandoned railroad bed above the Conestoga River.

 Old stone dam along Mill Creek

Mill Creek, 200 yards from confluence with the Conestoga River 

 We live at the confluence of Mill Creek and the Conestoga River in Lancaster County.  Both rivers originate in the rich limestone agricultural valleys in the center of the county and then meander back and forth wildly, westwardly, like writhing snakes.  They essentially run parallel to each other for most of their length before the Conestoga reaches out and captures Mill Creek, stealing its contents.  From there, the water meanders another dozen miles to the mighty Susquehanna River at Safe Harbor, and from there to the Chesapeake Bay.

For over ten centuries, this was Indian land.  When the Europeans arrived to settle the East Coast, they unknowingly brought death in the form of contagious diseases that traveled with such speed and deadly precision that almost 90% of the local native population was already gone when John Smith first explored up the Susquehanna in the early 1600’s.

The land passed to the ownership of William Penn (“Pennsylvania” = “Penn’s wood”), who sold and sublet it to settlers.  The first European landowners were hardy Swiss Mennonites who crossed the ocean and followed an old Indian trail west to settle in this very area in the early 1700’s.  One of their original stone houses still stands just a mile or two from where I write this.

All that remains of the bridge and lock system that serviced early transportation in this region. 

As the snow fell today in big, fluffy flakes, we walked through the woods along a path that was once the railroad bed of an 19^th century line from Lancaster to Quarryville.  It was destroyed by a catastrophic hurricane/flood named Agnes in 1973.  Today it is only known to local hikers and dog walkers.

This snowstorm is not unique to us.  It continues to rage through the night from North Carolina to New England.  But the thing about a snow storm is that it isolates and quiets everything, turning the world into a million private little wonderlands.  We discovered just a few of them today.  There are millions that remain. 

Let it snow.  Let it snow.  Let it snow.