POTTER COUNTY

POTTER COUNTY
When I was very young, my father and several of his friends bought a small piece of land and built a small rustic cabin on it in northern Pennsylvania. We always said it was in Potter County, but it was actually in Clinton County. I have no idea why we said it was in Potter County. The cabin was built of old lumber, old shingles, old concrete blocks, old windows, and old doors. I did say it was rustic, but it was inexpensive. It had no indoor toilet, but it did have an outhouse close by. After a few years it even had electricity. One thing it had that I will always remember is the big green chair. The supports for the seat had broken, so when you sat in it you sank almost to floor level. For a young boy, it was interesting to have the arms of the chair not much lower than head height. Honest, the seat was comfortable.

The most desirable thing the cabin had was Kettle Creek, which flowed about twenty-five feet behind the cabin. Just above the cabin the creek came around a bend, flowed downward over a set of riffles into a pool about five-feet deep, fifty-feet long, and twenty-feet wide. In this pool were a number of trout, both small and large. Swimming in this pool was fun as the trout shared the pool with swimmers and didn’t seem to mind them. BUT, once you got out of the pool and picked up a fishing pole, the trout were not quite as friendly. Oh, a number of fish from this pool provided dinner for those visiting the cabin, but the men were always selective of the fish they kept from this hole; they didn’t want to fish it out. Besides there were many, many more fishing holes as good or better than this one within a few miles of the cabin.

I speak of this cabin as if I went there soon after it was built, but that is not true. I experienced a number of frustrations before I ever got to “Potter County.” I couldn’t go while it was being built, and it seemed to take a long time to build it. The men who built it could not afford to just go buy the lumber and other equipment they needed; they had to accumulate it. And accumulating it took a long time. I thought I would get to visit it soon after it was completed. (Completed? – it was never really completed. The men continued to work on it, and add to it for years.) But that visit was delayed because the first day of fishing season, about April 15, was a school day, and my parents didn’t think I should take several days off from school just to go fishing, although my father and his friends did take several days off from work. We didn’t get to visit it that summer, and the next time anybody went up was the first day of deer season. I was too young to go deer hunting, so I didn’t get to go then either. Finally, during the spring Daddy, his friend Don, and I left for a weekend in Potter. Well, we didn’t get twenty miles from home before Don’s car had a flat tire. Don and Daddy thought we should go back, and Don couldn’t afford both a new tire and a trip to Potter, so we didn’t go. I thought we should go even without a spare, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Sometime within the next year I did get to take the much-anticipated trip to Potter.

We got there after dark, and the car we were riding in had a spotting scope on the front fender. When we got to the turnoff into the field where the cabin was, the spotting scope was turned on and the many eyes of the deer in the field reflected the light back to the car. I had never seen so many deer in one spot in my life. We went on in the road and parked by the cabin. At the back end of the cabin were two double-decker, double bunks, but that wasn’t where I was to sleep. Between the bunks was a ladder built onto the wall. I climbed the ladder to the upstairs. The upstairs consisted of a walkway down the center of two rows of mattresses laid on boards between the ceiling of the room below and the roof of the cabin. I got to choose the mattress I wanted. If a person had awakened suddenly and stood up, he would probably have bumped his head on the roof beams. If he had rolled off the back side of the mattress, he would probably have fallen through the ceiling. Believe it or not, I slept well, didn’t bump my head, and didn’t fall through the ceiling.

In the morning when I got out of the cabin, I got to see the lay of the land. I had heard Kettle Creek during the night, so I was not surprised to see it so close behind the cabin. What I didn’t know was that the mountain began just on the other side of the creek. It was covered with trees and went uphill right away. It was steep enough that I couldn’t see anything beyond the ridge just across the creek. In front of the cabin was a field several hundred yards wide and many hundreds of yards long. Across the field and the 1 ½ lane road was a hill with many trees. There was one large field on the side of the hill, and as we watched during the day we saw deer in the field.

After breakfast we went fishing, or rather my dad and his friends went fishing. I just drowned worms. Actually, I tried bubblegum as bait. I never thought the gum from the baseball cards was good to eat, and the fish evidently agreed with me. The water was clear enough that I could see them swim up to the gum, push it around, and swim away. It’s good lunch didn’t depend upon my catch of fish. My dad and his friends were good fishermen, so lunch (or dinner) was never a real problem. One plus of my lack of success at fishing was that I didn’t have to clean any fish; I just got to eat them. Fresh-caught trout from a mountain stream is GOOD EATING!

We did actually get to Potter County. A few miles from the cabin was the town of Cross Fork, and it was in Potter County. We stopped at a combination service station/convenience store. (I really think it passed for the grocery store for the town.) There we bought lunch – soda, candy bar, and a cake of some kind, a precursor of a Twinky. It was a great lunch. I don’t imagine my mother would have approved, but she wasn’t along.

Tune in again next time for further adventures in Potter County .