Kleiner's Blog

It doesn’t matter how many times you go up there, the reaction is always the same.  I thought of that last week when I took Sabrina and Michelle there for the first time.  I knew what they were going to see, I had seen it before.  I knew it never got old and I knew what made it special.  The climb to the Knob itself was a little more difficult than usual given the fact that despite the recent spell of warm weather, the Appalachian trail remained a Winter wonderland.

Whatever. We were pushing on. Higher. No matter the ice, we’re getting there and we did.

I know what it is that makes Bake Oven Knob unique.  On the smallest scale, it’s a test or a bill or a break-up or a funeral or another wedding watched alone.  It’s the cars, noise, and obsessive compulsive disorder of modern life. It’s the chain restaurants that destroyed the family dinner and sustainable farmer.  It’s the big box store that sucked the life from entrepreneurship. It’s the world we live in everyday and up there, on Bake Oven Knob, you can’t see it.  The world up there is a different place and it is that world that guarantees the reaction and the sensation that I knew Sabrina and Michelle were going to feel.

I love the world up there, where for just a little while, amongst the trees there seems to really be a balance.  It is the same balance that we could have and should have in the parks here in Allentown but we prefer our Nature left completely to the controlled whir of sharpened motorized blades and giant asphalt tongues laid out to sap the life from the soil we should hold as sacred. But it isn’t the soil that is sacred these days, or the sky, or the trees, or the balance of an ecosystem that could even continue the functionality of the modern conveniences of humankind, is it?  No, we hold our material possessions as sacred and they will end  lost and  replaced with more things meant to be lost.

Michelle and Sabrina stood on a mountain that will never be lost.  They stood among trees in an ecosystem that should never be lost.  We stood together in a world on the brink of being lost even at this advanced stage of our civilization, years removed from Carson and centuries from John Muir.  We know better.  We should be better.  In the meantime, I will continue my pilgrimages to the mountains and like Michelle and Sabrina, I will keep taking people there.  I will work for my parks here in Allentown. (And trust me, I am working harder than ever!)  I will forget this nonsense of planned obsolescence for the seconds I can spend in the breath of a wind that I know will blow, somewhere, forever.
(3 pics below)