Seneca Creek comes up out of ancient, wrinkled folds of earth. Out of timelessness, an immense continuity.

That image, that whole idea of it, is what finally distills in my mind when I suck in the space and sweep from the top of Spruce Knob. Down along the length of the sunken wooded ravine below, where the creek has cut into the folds of the mountains and beyond that to the purpled distance, the curves of overlapping step hills assimilating into borderless haze. I have to strain, but I think I can still hear water. It is a muted echo, and now may only be a sound which is slowly dying away in my own head, like the diminishing ring of a chime long after it has been struck. But I want to believe that it is the real thing. The faint descant of flow and riffle mixed in with the feckless ridge winds.

This is a parting gesture. Trying to extend the last couple of days, those kind of hours, out to their own infinity. I have never really been much good at letting go.

The morning before, I began early in the gray chill.

I remember there were a few Blue Jays bobbing insouciantly in the dead lower branches of some Hemlocks and Red Spruce trees looming along side the path at the trailhead. At that hour I wanted to be indistinct, innocuous, a shadow slipping over ground. But as I tried to slink by unnoticed, they roused into a fit of animated cawking, screeching and harping, like they were raw, exposed nerves I had just sadistically prodded. I didn’t mean to do it, but I must have startled them out of an early morning torpor. But then later I thought that maybe I wasn’t the cause of the ruckus after all. Maybe I simply happened in on a noisesome, feral ceremony which had little, if anything, to do with my presence: a ritual of the dawn, of the night spirits lifting into wakening, the marking of darkness beginning to meld into slow daylight.

Late July is my time of year to come up to this country. It’s good for driving away the dregs of lowland dog days. But mostly I love to track this creek, to walk with its unfoldings, to chase around its spirits.

As many of the Voice readers probably know, Seneca Creek trickles from the wet core of the Monongahela National Forest at about 3000 feet in the rises of Pendleton County, West Virginia, draining the high narrow valley slung in between the western dip of Spruce Knob, the Mountain State’s highest elevation, and Little Allegheny Mountain.

The creek is probably a namesake of Seneca Indians. Although the Senecas were not a local tribe -- occupying homelands in what is now western New York -- they made trading forays out of their granitic northern tribal territories south into these settled down, earthy, humid Alleghenies. One of the traditional rendezvous points for the bartering apparently was at the flat river bottom area where Seneca Creek joins with the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River under the shadow of the exposed upended slab of tough Tuscarora Sandstone which constitutes Seneca Rocks. The every now and then presence of the Senecas memorialized permanently in wind and high craggy stone.

Recently, before the National Park Service started building the new Visitor’s Center at this site (the first one being flooded and the second one having burned down), in accordance with federal law protecting native antiquities, a troop of amateur archeologists emerged from nooks and crannies all over the place and began digging around. They barely had scratched the surface of the of the old farm field, when they began to turn up a treasure trove of scattered artifacts, and later on, down deeper, firepits, and lodgepole stainings, left from encampments there dating back as far as 8000 BC. The diggers went a little crazy, I think. I was there jabbering with them. I know.

And so, in the scale of that unearthed history, the Senecas were fairly recent on the scene. Supposedly they made their way down along a trace through the Alleghenies known as the Seneca Trail. Their path must have followed along the creek for a distance at its lower end, and since the Senecas would make their appearance from this direction, the stream presumably became synonymous with their coming. All of this, of course, is guesswork, with maybe a little hogwash thrown in, but this explanation does as much justice to the origin of the creek’s name as any other does. I like the story. And, anyway, my spirit has always traded much better in obscurity than fact. So there.

In about five minutes, I am out of the shady tunnel arched by the Hemlock and Spruce Trees, cross a stony brook, and break into a clearing, leaving the scolding Jays behind. Up ahead, ground scud is just starting to burn off in the intensifying heat of the shrouded sun, very slowly unveiling an open wrack of Sphagnum bogs, abandoned beaver dams, and a limberlost of decaying, lichen shackled Spruces, most half fallen over but some still spiring up defiantly into the mist.

A breeze slides down from the higher elevations. This is a zone of purity. The clean splendor of a Canadian wild, a primordial drapery, a ghost left behind in the high Alleghenies of a boreal , glacially imprinted landscape, still claiming its cold remembrance. But underneath it, I divine creek. A nascent wetness below the ooze. Percolating, biding its own murky time. Lingeringly fathering its waters, getting ready to pour out into day.

A little further on I hear pulsing. I know that the soggy puddles have coalesced into a flow. And I want to see it fresh, fresh out of the underground, fresh out of the decay and ferment. So I slip expectantly through the trees.

And, as I had guessed, Seneca Creek is there. Materialized. All light and shadows, delicate and clear, almost as if it were celebrating its own sparkling emergence from the depths of the muck. A slick ribbon of stream sluicing over the rocks, pulling drafts of refrigerated air along with it.

I stand in place for a few minutes, balancing on the gossamer, hypnotic boundary between earth and water until a word is formed from the sound, from the creek consciousness. Allegheny, it says, Allegheny. It is Algonquian whispering. Their expression for Eternity. It is everywhere in these mountains, Eternity. You are young with it, awash in it. Source and sapling and spendthrift seed in it.

Then, a filament of deeply felt intent pulls at me from the current. Homesteading. I am here on a homesteading project. Trying to find my way to the high hidden ground where I can take root and tap into the sweet eternal clarity of creeks. The still point of being where longing and landscape finally meet. Allegheny. I continue down the old narrow gauge rail bed from the logging days, which is now officially designated as the Seneca Creek Trail, passing out of the boreal reaches of Red Spruce dominance into upland hardwood stands of Red Maple, Beech, Cherry, and streamside Yellow Birch.

After about three miles, just beyond a grassy clearing - the remains of long abandoned farm now called the Judy Springs Walk-in Campground - the road constricts to a rocky footpath which hugs the stream banks more tightly as the valley steepens. It is after this point that the trail also becomes cloistered in tall forest and switches back and forth from one side of the creek to the other. Water seeps from ragged layers of mudstone and clumps of woodland ferns and open roots. Papery Crustose lichens in shades of washed out green and occasional floppy liverworts glisten on the rocks where they seem to have been haphazardly pasted on.

The stream begins a very long stretch where it stairsteps down a series of diminutive waterfalls. In between the little falls, the water knifes sharply into the sediments and spills out into dimly lit pools where I spot slivers of Brook Trout, the elusive treasure of these Allegheny creeks. Their orange underbellies flash, and they jet around seemingly in reaction to my movement like the commotion of the Jays when I started out. They are the spring stock. The eager fecundity of oxygen and snowmelt, once a million eggs incubating in pebbled wombs, exploded now into foam and current.

Not too far up ahead the stream drops off an edge and begins a whole other phase of its life.

After deftly negotiating a wobbly crossing on somebody’s flimsy makeshift bridge of Yellow Birch trunks right before this point, I cautiously ease my way down sideways along a path which cuts off steeply from the main trek. I kick out loose stones and gravel as I slide. When I reach the bottom, I am in the full view "and embrace" of the High Falls of the Seneca Creek. This is about as far downstream as I can go. The remainder of the trail was washed pretty much to oblivion by the 1985 West Virginia flood.

It is a wide waterfalls, and in its long time has scoured out a bowl which amplifies the deepest resonances of the plunge into and eternal hollow roar. I think that I must feel a little like Livingstone when the Zambezi brought him, finally, to the brink of Victoria falls: suddenly it’s just there in all of its huge naked thunder. Of course, I’ve been here before. But no matter. Each time is the first all over again. The virtue of this falls is renewal, reinvention of its own impact. The water pours over the moss slickened walls into a shallow pool where all the powers of the mountains seem to be gathering together before the final run into the North Fork - and then ultimately into a far settling in the humid, flattened expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. It is hard to imagine.

Maybe in another time I would have been like Ishmael. Drawn along by the articulations of the creek to the big waters and Moby Dick and the whales. But today what is being pressed into the weave of my genes is the irresistible instinct for cold upland creeks. This is where I want to stay. The urging will be given down and should affect the family for generations. People who will wake on steamy mornings and feel sudden cool rivulets veining their bodies, driving out the hangover of sweaty heat killed sleep, and wonder just where in the hell the freshness is coming from. Well, it’s because I was here. What is seeping into me may be my one worthwhile segue to the future, something I better hold fast. I may have no other such lasting connective tissue as this itinerant spirit of stream, this bloodline of heedless clear waters.

Later on, I set up for the night at Judy Springs near a solitary Apple tree. I kindle flames.

Darkness slides in like sleep, and the day turns inside out. The rush of the creek is headed down the hollow. And somewhere out there in that sonority are the Brookies, the Jays, Red Spruce, Sphagnum. All the brood of the Alleghenies, mingling with my drift toward sleep.

I slouch, legs lotus folded, against a Hemlock log - which now seems to have become a permanent piece of campfire architecture. The best posture for fire gazing. I fix on the settling and glowing coals, almost like I was staring into the red hot hissing oven where the earth was fused, waiting until the last dying ember of my consciousness is swirled around and swallowed up by the sound of the creek. Until my awareness is no more than intimation, uncertain, wordless. Until I am no longer myself alone, but myself in everything that is around me. In the Alleghenies. In the moist marrow of the earth. In the headwaters. In the beginnings.

In the long liquid time of creek.