Day 9 - Rest day in Rockwood, PA

I heard rain splash against my tent roof early in the morning and I fell back asleep. The weather was bound to turn for the worse and we needed a rest day at some point. I woke again to feel the moisture of rain coming in at the foot of my tent. I begrudgingly exited my warm sleeping bag, put my shoes on and jumped outside to refasten my rainfly. I ran to the bag of food i had hung from a near by tree the night before. I was preparing to hunker down for the day.

I wish I could accurately portray what a freight train sounds like passing through an old rail town, which is normal as quiet as the crickets keep it. You first hear a dull ruckus from the tons of steel carrying more tons of coal rambling along the tracks. Just as the noise sharpens into a discernable rhythym of locomotion the roar of the horn blares across all that was quiet and serene, firing in slow succession as it approches the crossing. It's an alarm only the dead would fail to hear. It is louder than any ambulance stuck in traffic, the squeel of the uptown 4/5 train bending into 42nd or the 5 am garbage trucks sweeping up the lower east side.

In town is an old grain house turned into an opry upstairs and eatery downstairs. The building is full of artifacts from the boom times, a cabled switchboard and telegraph, a saloon cash register. A burger at the local restaurant cost $1.75. A glass of wild turkey at the tavern, $2.50.