THE WATERS

By Jo

Part One:

"Captain! Don't make us miss the train!"

"I'm coming!" Captain called down the stairs, buttoning his finely-tailored grey suitcoat as he shut the door to his bedroom.

Captain Stuart was 23, had recently graduated from Harvard Law in Boston, and was once again in Pittsburgh. It was August of 1888 and he and his family were heading to the depot to catch the Pennsylvania Railroad train that would take them to South Fork.  Captain was the young man's first name, not his rank. He'd never been in the military.  His father, Michael Stuart, had been a major in the Union cavalry operating in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War. Captain had been given his name as a reference to his father's second cousin,

Andrew Carnegie, whom everyone knew was the premiere Captain of Industry in Pennsylvania, and probably the whole country.

As he'd entered adulthood, the name had given Captain more and more problems as it was, more often than not, assumed it was a matter of rank. Why they could not have named him Stephen or Matthew or even Andrew, if they wanted to honor Carnegie, escaped him. He had come to expect the confusion and even the jokes that followed the explanation he'd given more times than he cared to remember. A few friends called him Cappy, but he wasn't terribly
fond of that, either.

Captain ran a hand through his brown hair that tended to wave down over one side of his forehead, looking at his parents, who stood waiting by the front door. His family had been members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club since it first opened in 1881, but he'd never been to the lake high in the green mountains about two hours east of the city.  His parents had gone, staying at the huge clubhouse, for at least two weeks every summer since then. He, though, had been off to Europe for most of each summer, traveling extensively through Italy, especially, to indulge his passion for things Roman and Etruscan. 

Once on the train, he gazed out the window of the Pullman parlor car at the passing countryside.  He'd never really found either hunting or fishing to be engaging pastimes for himself  so had brought along a satchel filled with books. He figured the two weeks would be filled mostly with reading and, perhaps, some hiking and even a little sailing on Lake Conemaugh.  Not for the last time he wished he were in Italy.

At Blairsville, the train tracks took them close along the Conemaugh, following its cut through Chestnut Ridge, then stopping briefly at Bolivar and New Florence on its way then through the deepest gorge in the eastern United States, made by the river through Laurel Hill. 

(Picture I took in the gorge in October of 2009. The Conemaugh is way down deeper, off to the right.)

The gorge got his attention with its green-clad beauty, but when they came out the other end and headed into Johnstown, he sighed. It looked like a little Pittsburgh with its giant steel mill on the left.  The Cambria Iron Works belched its smoke and steam and the town even had its own point between two rivers, not big ones like Pittsburgh's Allegheny and Monongahela, but the smaller Little Conemaugh and Stony Creek, whose confluence in Johnstown created the Conemaugh River, whose meandering path eventually took it into the Allegheny.  His train crossed a large, arched, stone bridge and ran along the flats to the depot. The flats were certainly not much to look at, being where the Cambria folks had built so many of their workmen's cheap homes.  But, he had to admit, the setting in general was grand, with the surrounding mountains much higher than anything Pittsburgh boasted.  The town was limited in the space it had to grow and the flats had been increased by dumping dirt and sand into the rivers so there would be more room to build more workmen's houses.  The green mountains enclosed the town, towering around it on all sides, broken only by the steep, narrow river valleys.

From a third-floor window Letty watched the train rumble through town. Letitia Flynn had gone up to her bedroom to get the book she'd been reading to her grandmother, Maureen, who was too old and feeble now to leave her bed for more than a brief sit-up time in her rocking chair.  The first floor of the large, frame structure was the mercantile, owned and operated by her father, Patrick Flynn. Letty's mother had died five years ago, giving birth to a baby girl her father called Erin, after his homeland. Letty was 18, helped her father in the store, and was the main caregiver for both Erin and Maureen.

Sometimes, like now, when she watched the passenger trains rolling by, she had dreams of being on one of the cars, of going some place...any place. She'd been born in this house in Johnstown and had never been further than up the valley to South Fork, the little town near the big earthen dam the rich folks from the city had built up higher so they could have themselves a fine lake out in the mountains.  Some day she was going to see that fine lake herself.  Of course it was posted
all around to keep the likes of the local folk away, but she knew boys and young men who paid the signs no mind and went up there to fish and look around anyway. Letty was a good rider and she'd promised herself that one day soon she was going to ride right up that twisty valley and fill her eyes with the sight of sailboats in the mountains. She couldn't even really imagine what that must be like, white sails skimming along so high up there where sailboats oughtn't to be.

She watched as the last of the cars disappeared past Woodvale toward East Conemaugh where the railroad roundhouse was. For her, the 15 miles up to the village of South Fork seemed an immense distance. She'd been 11 when her father had taken her with him on his horse along the trails up the valley. Other than the railroad, there was no way there except by horseback.  South Fork was built on a little piece of land in the forks of the Little Conemaugh and South Fork
Creek.  There wasn't much to the place, but as it was the furthest she'd ever gone, it held a certain fondness in her heart.  You couldn't, alas, see the dam from the village as the creek made a sharp curve that blocked all sight of it. So, for her, the dam had been some giant, exotic thing always just out of her reach.  There was a road, an actual road, that went from the depot in South Fork, twisting its way back and forth, climbing steadily, until it actually crossed the top

of the dam itself.  That had to be simply amazing, a road with a huge drop-off on one side and a big lake on the other.  She knew the dam was 900 feet across and 72 feet high. That was big, really big.  It was 270 feet thick at its base. Big.

She knew, too, it had been started in 1836, the year the Alamo had been fought. Texas was unimaginably far away, of course, but the dam...she surely might make it some day to the dam. In 1842 Pennsylvania had run out of money for the dam and work had stopped when it was only half done. Its water had been intended as a reservoir so that a canal system could be built and the Allegheny Mountains would no longer block the route to Pittsburgh from the East. Even though the streams and creeks tended to flood in the spring, by late summer they were almost dry and the Portage Railroad, with its system of floating train cars on barges, needed a steady supply of water.  Charles Dickens himself had taken the Portage Railroad over the mountains, stopping in Johnstown where he got off and talked to the crowds. Her grandmother and father had told her all about it.

In 1850 the work on the dam had started again and two years later, the five sluice pipes through its base were closed and the valley behind the dam, where hundreds of acres of trees had been chopped down, began to fill with water. But, times change, and the Pennsylvania Railroad had just finished an all-rail route through the mountains. The Portage Railroad was old news and the water in the reservoir, well, it wasn't needed any more. To get the rights-of-way, the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the whole thing three years later. Other than that, they didn't want it, so it simply sat year after year, weathering, useless. Then the Civil War came and people just about forgot there even was a dam. In 1862, totally uncared for, entirely abandoned, the weed-covered dam gave way. There was, thank goodness, not a terribly high level of water in the reservoir and nothing horrible really happened. Her father had spoken of how water had come into the first floor of their house, but that had happened just from the spring flooding several times. The reservoir was reduced to not much more than a duck pond and a brush fire took down the single, wooden watchtower by the dam. The railroad saw no

need to rebuild it, so it never was, not ever.  Most of the lakebed dried, grass began to grow, and sheep were let there to graze.

In 1875, the railroad, eager to be rid of the useless heap of  torn-up earth, not something you could even really call a dam any more, sold it cheap to a man named Reilly, a Pennsylvania congressman.  Then in 1879 a contractor by the name of Benjamin Ruff bought the dam and the property. He'd heard that the rich Pittsburghers were looking for a mountain retreat not too far from Cresson, which had long been Andrew Carnegie's favorite place in the country. Reilly,
not happy with his bad investment, had the five discharge pipes pulled out and sold for scrap before the sale to Ruff was finalized.

When it was his, Ruff set about what he called 'repairing' the old, broken down dam, using some rocks, hemlock boughs, mud, even hay.  He didn't want to spend much money on the dam as he thought it would be better to use it for a fine clubhouse and stables. Not even enlightened by the fact that on Christmas Day of '79 his flimsy repairs were carried away by a downpour,  Ruff again decided against expert repairs or replacing the discharge pipes so the danger of overflow could be averted, and built up the dam in the same way he had before, mud, hay, and hemlocks.

Letty wasn't really interested in the construction of the dam so much as the existence of it.  It loomed out there in some nebulous, unseen place, and parents often used it to control wayward children. "Robert, if you don't stop that right now, the dam'll break tonight and we'll all be drowned in our beds."  No one really much believed that, though.  After all, it had broken in '62 and not all that much had happened, had it?  But it was useful, like the big bad wolf, if you needed to put the fear of horrid retribution in the mind of some misbehaving child.

After the train pulled out of Johnstown, heading up the narrower valley of the Little Conemaugh, Captain leaned his head back, lazily watching the sway of the crystal chandeliers inside the car. Sunlight coming in the windows played games with the crystals, casting delightful bits of rainbows on the pressed-tin ceiling. A porter came by and his father asked for a drink.  Before long they were crossing the high, stone viaduct that cut across the narrow landward end
of a two-mile oxbow loop the river made, doubling back on itself in such a tight curve that mere yards separated its eastern and western portions. Across the narrow gap, some fifty years ago, the Portage Railroad had built a 75 foot high bridge, with a single 80 foot-wide arch. The main line of the Pennsylvania still used the same bridge. It was rather spectacular going across it and Captain's attention returned to the sights outside his window.

A few minutes more and he was standing at the end of the railroad platform in South Fork, helping to load valises, trunks, his father's fishing gear, into the bed of the wagon that would take them up to the clubhouse.  Assisting his mother up onto the seat, he waited for his father to climb up, then sat in the back of the wagon, atop a trunk so that his view was, then, of where he'd been rather than where he was going. Now and then he caught sight of South Fork Creek through the dense trees, but he could hear it even when he couldn't see it. He liked the sound water made as it splashed and gurgled over the rocks in its path. He liked the dip of an oar in a lake, the susurrus the hull of a sailboat made as it sliced the waves; he even liked the sound of rain on a roof. 

"Lamb's Farm," his father said, pointing to an area to one side. "Hold on. We'll really be going up now."

Captain shifted his position atop the trunk, moving his legs to the other side so he could watch for his first sight of the dam, curious to see something so man-made in the midst of all this wild, natural beauty.  Then, there it was...steep, rising up like some ancient city wall, a wall so old it had become earth, become a place for plants and grasses to grow, bushes, honeysuckle vines, rubble, stumps of trees, rocks, flowers, crevices.  He found he did have to hold on as the wagon angled sharply in its upward climb, the horses straining to pull the load behind them. Finally they were at the top where the dirt road forked.  Their driver guided the horses right, which took them out across the dam itself.  The lake was a beautiful blue, a few white clouds reflecting in its surface as it stretched off out of sight. The earth here was rich with ages of silt and a dense forest grew around the lake, pine, spruce, hemlock, birch, maple, hickory. Sixteen cottages lay in a line near the shore, the huge clubhouse dividing them in two sections. The members called them cottages, but they were actually three-story houses built with great detail, large porches,
cupolas, balconies, and every amenity. He knew that even if you had a cottage, you were required to take your meals in the clubhouse's dining room. The Stuarts didn't have a cottage, though, and the wagon took them straight to the clubhouse.  A number of young adults, teenagers, even a few children were on the long porch, watching them as they arrived.  A few looked vaguely familiar, but he'd been away so long at school and on his trips to Europe, that most of the connections he'd had in Pittsburgh had faded. He wasn't looking for a social group anyway. He wanted to choose a book, take it out to some secluded spot in the forest with a view
of the lake. That's what he wanted for his two weeks here in this rather out-of-place resort.  It would do...but he wished he were in Tuscany.

ON TO PART 2

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