"He-l-l-l, if it wasn’t fer the piss in it, there wouldn’t be any water in Wills Creek a’tall."

Once in a while you hear things like this in Kline’s. Little perorations. Scraps of Alcohol fortified Appalachian hyperbole drifting over the din of conservation while you’re shoveling in supper. Kline’s is the only dining establishment along the old Route #40 National Highway as it snakes through the looming Cumberland Narrows in western Maryland’s Alleghenies.

This kind of parlance usually has a more serious current in it somewhere – an uneasy consciousness, a festering apprehension maybe. I’m Appalachian to the bone. I sense these things.

The Narrows is an at least 400 million year old 1000 foot deep water gap separating Will’s Mountain to the north from Haystack Mountain on the south. These two mountains define the western limit of Cumberland’s tight sprawl. And Kline’s is an iteration of the slightly seamy genre’ community eatery found in western Maryland and neighboring parts of West Virginia and Pennsylvania – just clean enough to pass for a family place, yet despoiled enough to tolerate a good dose of boisterous commentary after pouring down a few brewskis. There’s nothing phony about it. It’s the real McCoy. Kind of murky and crowded and noisy with Country and Western juking in the Lover’s Leap Lounge. A cultural lyceum of my neck of the woods.

Kline’s is representative. Especially located where it is, in the literal shadow of these towering hunks of Paleozoic sandstones. It is in its obliviousness to this geography, in its wearied fried chicken and beer cured human architecture in the midst of the overwhelming, that it is emblematic. It bespeaks a kind of fatalistic mindset that is imbedded in much of the Central and Southern Appalachians – where heart stopping landscape has become passe’, and the awareness of the failing integrity of local and global ecosystems has been recast into well honed cynicism or outright denial. Something like that.

But Will’s Creek, the aforementioned public urinal which flows almost at the back door of Kline’s, is, in reality, a liquid blade.

Over the years, the unassuming stream bisected what was at one time a single continuous ridge. While I’m sure the stream does have its share of piss in it, it was once a clear torrent spurting out of the Alleghenies destined to rendezvous with the North Branch of the Potomac River. And as the Appalachian crests were heaved into position, it bored out the almost two mile long fissure which now serves as the back and front drops for Kline’s.

I doubt that much in the way or this larger picture works into conversation in the Lover’s Leap Lounge. Maybe your marriage giving out, the brake shoes getting thin, your blood pressure climbing up, the fuckingovermint, the fuckinhippie environmentalists destroying the economy, always being on the ass end of the opportunity mill. Not the long deathless eonian history. The vast geological canon. Not the mighty wheels of the Gods grinding away right outside the doors.

Nothing of the ilk of Kline’s was there 250 or so years ago when the Ohio Land Company built an outpost named Fort Cumberland (after a rather bloody British General who never once set foot in the New World) at the confluence of Will’s Creek and the North Branch of the Potomac – about a mile and a half east of the Narrows. The bottom land of the Narrows was swampy then. Too swampy to build any kind of road through it. In fact, it was for this reason that when the ill fated British General, Edward Braddock, arrived at the fort with the intention of marching westward on the French who held Fort Duquesne, he would not consider going through the narrows. Instead, his cobbled together army of smartly uniformed soldiers and whisky soaked locals built a roadway up on the hard ground slightly to the South though a mini gap depression in Haystack Mountain. This saddle would undoubtedly have become a colossal incision like the Narrows, had not Wills Creek "captured" its lost stream millions of years ago and diverted it through the Narrows.

George Washington and Daniel Boone were among the company. Boone high tailed it just about the time the French and their Iroquoisan allies, who had been hiding in the trees along the road, were finishing off routing Braddock’s army about a day’s march from Fort Duquesne. Enough of these fur trade campaigns, thankyou.

Many years later, after the massacre was consigned to history, 19th century engineering technology was eventually brought to bear, and rock talus from the slopes was piled on either side of Will’s Creek to build parallel roadway and railroad beds through the Narrows. The road originally blazed by Braddock, like the stream, was captured and channeled through the narrows. Later the road was improved by Congress to become part of the National Highway system.

And the gap, due to the increasingly heavy flow of westwardly bound people, wagons, and animals along the National Road, got to be known as the Gateway to West. I think, also, that it was sometime during this period that people began calling it the Narrows. As the Narrows became more of a well known landmark, it frequently got confused with the Cumberland Gap, which is on the Kentucky/Tennessee border. And if memory serves, Boone did walk through that opening.

But to fully experience the raw physiography of the Narrows, away from the Kline’s-always-congested National Highway rail line conglomeration, I have to hoof it to the top. The best view is from the Will’s Mountain side. After meandering up past an injection molding plant and the weed wracked remains of a turn-of-the-century spa, I can work my way to the edge. From there, I follow it along to an outcropping called, what else, Lover’s Leap.

It seems like every small town with high escarpments nearby has a some kind of Lover’s Leap. In the case of the Narrows, the story goes that the lovers were a hunter named Jack Chadwick and a Shawnee Indian princess of surpassing beauty. In an enraged encounter with her chieftain father, who objected to the liaison because he felt Indian blood was getting too thin, he managed to jab him with his hunting knife, inflicting a mortal wound. As a result of this, his princess was dishonored among the Shawnee – whose numbers had been whittled down considerably by then. And, of course, she had always been despised by the settlers since the affair began. There was but one choice left for her. So she met her suitor at the summit of the overhanging rocks, explained her dilemma, and then before he could stop her, over she went.

Jack, being faithful to the bitter end, and also, probably more importantly, being the person directly responsible for her situation in the first place, unhesitatingly followed after, flinging himself to his own death. So goes one of the versions. Nowadays the only people who fall off the ledges are adventure starved teenagers and drunks – an increasing number of which may be both.

But I hike up to the Lover’s Leap vantage point now and then not to enact the final resolution for a recent love affair’s denoument, but to get perspective. To have the Eagle’s eyes. To sense the plunging abyssal verticality of time beneath the rough surface tension of the brick and asphalt. For here is where the immensity of the Narrows and its proper significance in the cosmos comes into play. I especially like to hit these heights when the atmosphere is clean and lucent

in the early spring and late fall days. Then the Narrows almost rings. Something akin to the crisp pellucidity of Mozart piano sonatas. I also have grown to like days that are more blustery and dark when it seems like the grounding centripetal pull of Bach’s Pasacaglia & Fugue is rising from the bowels of the chasm. From this ledge, Kline’s and the roadway recede into the far down reaches of the huge womb of the canyon. Only the faint vwroooo-m-m-m now and then of a truck engaging gears carried up by the drafts reminds me at all of the Lilliputian life I temporarily discarded below.

Sometimes I have a sense of hovering. Suspended over the edge of this massive quiet, this great void, bounded on either side by jagged exposed Devonian quartz and Tuscarora sandstone strata on the upper 300 feet of the canyon and by sparsely timbered slopes and crumbled rock scree on the lower 700 feet. And it all converges down on the muddy strand of the creek which has finally worked its way into the Ordovician times, dating from about 460 million years ago. (The Ordovician layers were revealed when the B&O Railroad built its line through the Narrows and blasted into the Juniata Formation at the base with its distinct rusty hue of Iron Oxides – evidence of the change to an oxidizing atmosphere from a reducing one).

Not a whole lot of people come up here. Although not a very far distance to walk, there as yet is no established public access or overlook. It’s mostly those like myself, who feel like picking their way along who get the view. Maybe it’s better this way, because the experience is more solitary in nature. On the other hand, in not having this opportunity easily available, I have a hunch that folks in Cumberland are robbed of a rich and sacred dialogue that exists in media res, smack in the middle of ordinary life. Lately, however, there has been some talk of building a public park surrounding Lover’s Leap.

I hope it’s not just rumor. For I have a soulful comfort in knowing that in Cumberland there is a place you can get to – Lover’s Leap, or anywhere along the Narrow’s ledges, for that matter – and reverse figure and ground. In imagining that, in the future, even though a community’s range of view may be frighteningly entrapped in all the redundant fabrications of structure and thought it has to operate within every day, just as quickly as people can skulk into Kline’s, they can also secret their way to this one particular place of such unyielding sweep and power.