At home on the cosmic camper

By T.W. Burger

It had been a long walk in the muck, on legs that had spent too much time tucked under a computer table. And I will completely deny any suggestion that I might have been for a brief time lost. I knew where I was all along. All I had to do was look down, and there I was.

I will admit, however, that for a few minutes I was not entirely certain about the location of anything else.

Finally, the thicket in which I had been entangled opened up, and I recognized the corn field around which I had trudged confidently an hour or so earlier. Up the hill, I could make out the row of somewhat wobbly garages lining the old farm road on which my house sits.

Home. At last.

This place, this little corner of the world felt like home in a larger sense from the very first. I moved up here more than a decade ago from the place I had lived for 30 years, and never once felt a twinge of homesickness.

This must be where I'm s'posed to be.

Not long ago I took a break from some of the remarkable adventures that arise from home ownership and took a long ride.

I gassed up in Waynesboro, then took 997 to Mt. Alto and 233 through the mountains to Caledonia, thence up the ridge nearly to Ironmaster's Forge, then 234 to the very top of the Blue Ridge. Determined to stay off the beaten path, I jammed and slammed down a path that could be called a road if one were feeling exceptionally generous.

I spotted a fire tower, and parked the car to go have a look. I didn't see any No Trespassing signs but then, I didn't look very hard.

I tried hard not to remember that I am afraid of heights. Definitely rubbery of knee, I managed to make it all the way up to the trap door in the bottom of the shed at the top. I was tempted to go in, but I spied a gray box fastened to the underside that clearly contained electronic gear, which I thought could easily include an alarm system, and so thought better of it.

So: Plan B. Just stand on the little platform and have a look-see.

What a view! What a tiny platform! The structure was obviously not meant for public consumption. Picture a post-card with a railing and you'll have a pretty good idea what it was like. It would have taken very little bad luck for a person to stumble and make his or her way through the steel gridwork and thus to the ground, a queasy distance below.

Still, by gripping the angled steel frame, I could look out over the tops of the trees and see forever.

Looking west, the muscular ridges on the far side of the Cumberland Valley stood out in bold relief in the late afternoon sunshine. Closer, the valley itself lay, strewn liberally with farm silos.

To the northeast the mountains marched, and I believe I could almost make out Dillsburg, built right where the Blue Ridge ends. To the east, after searching for it just a bit, I made out the National Tower in Gettysburg, and nearby Big Round Top, which is very near this house. A little further on, I'm almost sure, I could make out the Pigeon Hills.

Suddenly, it all felt like home, cozy and near, yet with a sense of knowing that it all had a particular place, like a piece of a vast puzzle, very much itself, and yet an inevitable portion of the whole.

I was reminded of those T-shirts and posters depicting an image of the Milky Way galaxy with a little arrow leading to a tiny spot at one edge, at the other end of the arrow are the words: "You are here."

I are here, indeed. For a moment I could almost make out the arrow. In my mind's eye, I saw my little corner of creation radiating out from us there on that tower, the valleys just so, the hills here and also there, laced by the filigree of innumerable rivers and creeks, along a bend in one of the less significant of which stands this cottage.

All the whole of that fits just exactly into the pieces of the puzzle adjoining it, which forms a gas-shrouded ball - our local neighborhood planet - which whirls around a rather average sun, which itself is part of that greater dance around the galactic center, the whole shebang heading off in a great rush of 50,000 mph or so toward, I think, the Horsehead nebula.

I stood there long enough to see the eastern flanks of the far ridges fade to blue, dizzy from all that movement. I practically had to pry my fingers from the angle iron, before making my cautious way back to the ground.

Not long after my adventure on the fire tower, I called a fellow from one of the more western communities in Adams County as a source for a story I was working on.

He wanted to know why a reporter from "all the way over to Hanover" was calling him. I had a brief temptation to tell him we were all passengers on the same ride, a sort of cosmic camper, whirling out through the universe on the fringes of a flaming spiral galaxy, but thought better of it.

Fact is, it's a smaller world than most of us are comfortable thinking about, and getting smaller by the day.

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.