Bushkill Falls

Bushkill Falls postcard showing catwalks

Bushkill Falls (the Niagara of Pennsylvania) (not to be confused with the Niagara of New Jersey)was crawling with people on an August Sunday. Crowded like no roadside attraction has a right to be.

The eight waterfalls of that make up the Bushkill Falls attraction are scaffolded with catwalks. Encased in trails. Stairs disappear into impossible gorges. Streams are spanned by bridges that dead end into walls of rock. No vantage point or vista is unreachable from this elaborate set of rustic, log hewn walkways. A family, lost on the labyrinthine trails for "over an hour" asks me for directions but I can see in their eyes that they have lost all hope of finding the exit ramp.

Contained, edited, sublime. This is nature perfected by man.

Penn's Cave

Penn's Cave: Rocks, Underground

The quality of a "tourist cave" (a term I swear I am not making up) depends up its quality of the morphization of its rocks by the tour guides. The proper guide can conjure up all manner of fairies, demons and food from the minerals. Penn's Cave is home to piles of rock looking vaguely like the Statue of Liberty, a Nittany Lion, bacon (a pereniel favorite), the Pope, and other tasty morsels. Or so said the tour guide. To me, they looked like rocks. Can't they just be rocks? All representation is morphic. You have to see the duck in flat line shape and color to "get" a picture of a duck. It's magical.

Did Clyfford Still's abstract paintings, often characterized as "cave-like" suffer through double morphization? Is that brushstroke a dog represented by rock formation?

Penn's cave is navigated in a long narrow boat, six of which are floating through the cave at any given time. The boat goes through the narrow, winding series of rooms and passages, then out a hole blasted through the hillside, into a man made lake. You edge by some ducks and the dam, which backs up the natural stream that fills the cave half full of water. Penn's cave, when discovered, had a stream flowing through it. Now it has a lake in it, thus making it : "Penn's Cave - America's Only All Water Cavern and Wildlife Park".