Our family cabin was located in a tiny north-south valley, which was located in a larger east-west valley, and so I imagined the terrain as a giant Phillips-head screwdriver pattern, with our little spot in the very bottom of the center. It wasn’t exactly the Grand Canyon, because this was central Pennsylvania, but the trees grew thick in the hollow and embraced each other overhead, and the narrow ribbon of dirt that ran along the floor was known as Dark Woods Road. At night, driving down the road, local men like my uncle, who worked in the coal mines or farmed or both, would turn their lights off and glide through this tunnel, eliciting screams from the women and cheers from the kids, who knew that the ten-foot drop to the creek added an element of danger that wasn’t without merit.
We weren’t the kind of family that bought cabins. Vacations were road trips to stay with relatives. Summers were spent at home,
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