Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside Written By: Les Jordan Jr.
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Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside A Spiritual Voyage Wrapped in Destiny
Written By: Les Jordan Jr. Smethport, PA
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The spring at the base of Big Rock Hill and Digel’s camp in Dog Town.
large rock juts out of the steep hillside southwest of Smethport. The huge rock is about 50 feet high on the side and its top is flat. A person can stand there and see for miles in either direction, almost as an eagle can from its lofty flight in the blue sky. If you know right where to look, the Big Rock, as we call it in our youthful days, was clearly visible from the valley below where U. S. Route 6 travels east and west across the entire length of the United States. Whenever I would go on on a ride in the family car I would always look up at the hilltop to see the top of Big Rock jutting out of the hillside and wish that I was sitting on its flat top gazing like an eagle across the endless horizons of the Allegheny Plateau. The site was a favorite destination for the adventurous youth around Smethport and many of us young teenagers often hiked there for a day’s worth of adventure. Many of we boys were Boy Scouts and hiking was in our blood. The all-day trip required only but a can of pork and beans placed in a knap-sack to carry us through the nutritional needs of the day. Dogtown is a small residential section of the borough where the Hilton Glass Company had its large window glass factory that was fed by two railroads. The Pittsburg, Shawmut and Northern, a standard gauge railroad, traveled along Marvin Creek into Smethport from the southwest and entered Dog Town via a short spur in order to serve the glass plant. The second railroad which was the first to build into Smethport was the Bradford, Bordell and Kinzua Railroad. It descended the steep hillside below Big Rock and entered Dog Town behind several residences built for the workman of the glass plant. The remnants of both railroad grades are still visible today. One of the workman’s houses was the site of my mother’s birth while my grandfather, John and Florence Dragoone, lived there in the years after the factory closed in 1925. As young teens we played along the abandoned railroad grades around Dog Town and used the roadbeds to enter the secluded residential
3 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside section of Smethport which got its name from all the dogs kept there by Belgium glass blowers working in the factory who used the dogs for hunting. Dog Town served as the gateway for us young adventurers to the well-worn path up the hillside that led to Big Rock and a scattering of smaller rocks deposited by glaciers on the hilltop not far from the Big Rock that dwarfed all the others. One of these rocks jutted out of the side of the hill and rose some 50 feet high. At its top was a table like flat section where a person could sit and see miles in any direction. It was a breathtaking sight, but one that required care not to get too close to the edge and risk slipping over the side and falling to the hillside far below. At the base of Big Rock hill just north of where the B. B. & K. R.R. followed the contour of the hill was a spring that crept out of the hillside. Beside the spring rested a comfortable camp owned by Smethport’s Digel family. It was here that the trail to Big Rock began and descended straight up the hillside to the plateau some three hundred feet above the Marvin Creek Valley. One third of the way up the slope was an open pasture centered inside hardwood trees growing on the hillside. The pasture was part of the Isadore Farm in the valley below and the site offers the most beautiful panoramic view of Smethport. It is breathtaking. It is inspirational. It is grand. As young boys we climbed the trail quickly without pausing to rest. But, we always paused at the pasture to look with awe at our hometown spread out under our feet. Years later I took my fiancée to the Big Rock on a spiritual journey to help her overcome her depression. After visiting the rock on the hilltop we descended the point of the hill to the clearing. She didn’t want to stay and urged me to continue the descent. But, a strong interior voice took control and made me stay for reasons that I did not understand. As I sat in the clearing remembering all these things from my youth and all the happy feelings I had as we hiked up the hill to the Big Rock, I also had a heavy heart and a mysterious understanding that this site meant more than just a nostalgic place above a small town in Pennsylvania. It took years before this voice was understood. The “Big Rock,” in a way, is a symbol of a solid form of living that
My mom was born in the Dogtown house shown behind the two Gifford sisters. The Model-T Ford was my granfather’s, John Dragoone Sr.
The B.B. & K. R.R. entered Dog Town at the base of Big Rock Hill.
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Hilton Ave. in Smethport’s Dog Town section looking away from Big Rock toward town.
Dog Town as seen from the clearing on the hillside below BiG Rock.
comes from having a foundation based on spiritual strength, a much higher form of strength that raises high above will power or determination or magic. The Big Rock on the hill above Smethport was the Big Rock of spirituality. Physically climbing the hill to the Big Rock is the same idea as the work that it takes to climb spiritually to the Big Rock. Once there, just as with the view from the physical rock above the valley, the spiritual view is astounding and filled with insight and every bit as dramatic as the real panoramic view across the Marvin Creek Valley. Minutes before, we had made the climb physically to the rock and looked out across the endless vista. I explained the metaphor and gently encouraged her to follow the process to find a spiritual way to overcome her depression. My efforts went misunderstood. The pilgrimage stemmed from a dream that I had several days before we made the hike. It was a horrible dream. I stood on a hill on a rock that cropped out of the mountain, just like Big Rock did. It was warm and sunny and the view was wonderful. I had a rebirth a few years earlier and knew that the Big Rock was God and spirituality and faith. Suddenly, a horrible wind began to swirl and darkness came. I looked up and could see a tornado spinning with great power and it was heading directly at me. It pulled me down off the rock and began to suck me down the hillside as trees snapped like stalks of grass. I clutched anything that I could, small bushes, broken limbs and even muddy grass. I screamed to God to keep me from going down the mountain side and finally, after a moment, the force pulling me down stopped. I looked down in the valley and there was the tornado mired in the mud below, spinning, ever spinning, digging itself deeper into the mud. The tornado symbolized the depression spinning out of control in my fiancÊe. I sat alone pondering the significance of this site, the meaning of the dream and what strong power was at work holding me there. It was painful. It was inspirational. It was a moment in destiny. I recalled the vision I had in 1988 of the cross on the mountain where Big Rock is located that I saw out of the bay window of my second story apartment where I lived in one of the huge mansions that align Smethport’s West Main St. The day that the vision occurred, a miracle of insight, changed my life totally and forever.
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I was taking a nap around 4:30 that afternoon, and pondering spiritual thoughts, when an interior voice summoned me to the window to look outside. The sky was dark with swift moving clouds that suddenly produced a small opening high above the hill top in the West above Big Rock. Golden beams of light began to spin outward and flood the valley, the sky, and into my heart. The beams formed a cross on the hilltop; one horizontal shaft in orange, another vertical shaft in gold. An odd triangular shaped cloud floated into view, and touched the side of the cross as did the spear in Christ’s side during his crucifixion. At that moment a burst of bright magenta light emanated outward from the cloud for a brief second, and then the golden light once again returned. I stood at the window and watched this magnificent scene for nearly 20 minutes. The sun spun in the tiny opening in the clouds, and the golden rays continued to fill the air. I stood beside a Christmas tree that I placed in the bay windows, where the kids used to play until the split-up with their mom came three years earlier. It was a special room for me. It was a room filled with memories of their laughter as they played. It was a room that was safe for them separated from their mother’s abuse. I felt the pain of their absence and the anger of the system that sold them out with deceit and back into their mother’s abuse. There were prayers, oh----so many prayers, painful prayers for their return. There was a card on the Christmas tree that I placed there when I decorated with an image of the Star of Bethlehem. This Bethlehem theme was my first born daughter’s favorite because her name was “Beth”. As I stood watching the spinning sun, the Christmas card that I had placed on the tree several weeks earlier fell to the floor of the bay windows. I reached to the floor, picked the card up, and placed it carefully back into the tree. But again, it fell. This happened three times, the number of the Holy Trinity. Something unique, significant, mystical was at work. Then the sky became dark with clouds once again. I could see the shape of a mask in the cloud form and an interior voice said, “Listen!” Then I heard the voice of God say to me, “you are my own dear son, Les!” Wow! I had turned the corner in life and now understood a deep secret
Sunbeams cast their mystical glow upon Big Rock.
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The vision of the cross on Big Rock that iI had in 1988 when I realized that God was within me and because of that I was His own Son. The evnt signed my “rebirth.”
The cross on the hill at Jumonville can be seen from a long distance away.
that, “The Kingdom of God is within.” A couple years later I would realize that a similar vision was seen at Fatima of the spinning sun in 1917, at other times through history, and currently at Medugorje, Yugoslavia. In studying scripture, I learned that the apostles received the words, “listen to him, He is My own Dear Son,” from God when Christ was baptized in the Jordan River. Wow! God seems to use these universal words whenever anyone “sees the light!” I would contemplate these events for days to come. Slowly, I began to understand that I had experienced a “rebirth”. It was then that I remembered Jumonville. My fiancée, Judy, and I drove along the valley leading into Uniontown. It was only few weeks after Easter in 1969. Judy had spoken several times of her fondness for Jumonville where she camped during her high school years. Those times were some of the only fond memories that she had from her teen years that were filled with family problems. I liked her reverence for the place. As we neared Uniontown, a white cross was visible in the distance ahead. The cross stood high on the mountain, proud, beckoning, and mystical. Moments later, we climbed the hillside road and arrived at the foot of the cross, and then wandered through the courtyard surrounding the camp buildings. I could feel the presence of something very special. But I could also feel love for the girl that I would soon marry. They were wonderful days filled with a sense of belonging to the whole universe. We returned there several times in the early years of our marriage. But, the marriage ended in bitter pain after 17 years of her drinking, promiscuousness and terrible, violent abuse. It was a pain that brought me to my knees; and then the pain nurtured me into me a new birth. I saw the cross on the mountain from my bay windows, and I saw Jumonville’s memory in my heart, too. Even then I was searching for that cross on the mountain. Yet, I was not aware of that mystery at that time in my life. Back in the grass filled pasture I thought about my experiences in that younger age and was reminded of hope for the sun to again return, its light spinning a mystical glow that lights my loving spirit with faith once again. I knew that I must stay in the pasture for a little while. I didn’t understand why. It was a voice that was strong and I knew that I had to follow
7 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside it even though it hurt to stay there alone. I gazed out at the town below. Glimmers of light twinkled from sunlight reflected off of chrome decorated from cars moving along Smethport’s spacious streets and from glass windows behind shifting leaves in the houses built on the bountiful tree-lined streets of the town. I knew, somehow, that I had to be there in that clearing even though I could see my fiancÊe already in the valley crossing the ramshackle bridge across Marvin Creek behind the County Home. I knew that what I was looking at was, in reality, the tornado stuck in the valley that I saw in my dream and realized that I needed to take her on a spiritual journey to try and stop the emotional destruction that prophesied in the dream. Three weeks later she was gone; her depression was the victor over her. And I was left with a spiritual mystery to unravel. I had taken several photos from the clearing. One was a beautiful specter of sun filtered through a tall maple tree at the top of the open field. I took other photos, too. But, she would not allow any pictures to be taken of her. I took several more photos and then sat in the verdant grass looking across the panorama and listening to my spirit talk to me inside. I later gave the photos to her after she moved to her mom’s. The photos, like her, were gone, unappreciated and I never saw them again. What followed was an emotional tornado that she and her new boyfriend aimed at me through various forms of abuse. Threats and fearful events soon arrived from the new couple while I was nurturing my son back to health following surgery for a broken neck. All I could do, just as in the dream, is hold on for dear life until the storm had passed and buried itself in the mire of its own making. It seemed to take forever. Nearly ten years passed and I agreed to co-author a book for the 2003 Sesquicentennial Celebration of Smethport. I contributed several chapters to the book and most all of the contemporary photos of the town. The cover was to be a panoramic view of Smethport. I again traveled to the clearing on the hillside and took several photos. It was late April and the trees on the hillsides had not yet adorned themselves with green foliage. I snapped away, taking several photos and then sat down once
I looked down from the clearing as I sat in the grass and watched her cross the ramshackle bridge at the County Home.
Another view of town from the hillside.
A view of Smethport from the hillside pasture taken in autumn 2005.
Isadore’s pasture forms a prominent meadow of brilliant green halfway up the hillside to Big Rock.
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I sat alone in the soft, spring grass studying the town below.
Hamlin Lake as seen from the clearing on the hill in autumn of 2005.
again in the soft, spring grass so clearly visible from the valley below. Again I pondered as I viewed every fold in the mountainsides and studied the buildings giving a picturesque quality to the town. It was a town that I loved. I knew that as a young teen climbing the hill to that Big Rock. With pain in my heart, I recalled sitting there nearly ten years ago watching my loved one down in the valley and how I heard an inner voice tell me to stay there in the clearing and take the photos. There was more to the insight, but I couldn’t quite understand it. Destiny was calling me, but my heart was too heavy to let the entire message in. It was not yet time. Suddenly, I knew what part of that message was; I was to take those photos for an important book about a town that I loved. I was filled with joy and proud that I had listened to my heart tell me to stay in that clearing on that fateful day in 1994. I returned home with several panoramic views of the town. One became the cover of the book. Additional text was being added to the book and one section became paramount to further insight into why I was called to stay in that clearing. It was a chapter written by one of Smethport’s earliest pioneer settlers, J.O. Hamlin, who wrote about his impressions of Smethport shortly after the Civil War. In his book he wrote about seeing the beautiful town surrounded by pristine forests and winding water courses filled with crystal water running along the Marvin Creek Valley, the same valley that amazed me and served as a part of our youthful adventures. Hamlin described the shapes of the hillside and how Smethport nestled into one section of the hillside that was like a huge amphitheater, perhaps a comparison to the ancient Greeks use of the same as an important part of their culture. Mr. Hamlin, a lawyer, sure could write. It was obvious that he wrote with the spirit from above and surely loved the town that he promoted. I realized that I am much like O.J. Hamlin. I was deeply moved. Our town’s very first pioneer sat where I sat and looked with amazement at the same valley I looked at and felt many of the same things that I felt. It was at that moment that I understood my destiny is what had called me to stay on that hillside. I was a pioneer, too, a pioneer in a new evolution promoting a beautiful town. The tornado was gone! The spiritual trip to Big Rock that seemed to have been for nothing actually produced a miracle of goodness that ended up transcending gen-
13 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside erations and was then given to the next generations from the little town nestled in a “natural amphitheater” in a hillside in northwestern Pennsylvania. I created the title of the book from my inspirations gathered from the miracles of insight. The title is Timeless Home. Smethport is that, Timeless. Mysteries were solved with Timeless Home. I learned that God had a destiny all planned for me from the time that I was just a lad. I am so grateful. I love what I do. I was, all along, destined to promote the little town nestled in the hillside amphitheater. In realizing that destiny, a miracle of insight, I thought that no more chapters about Big Rock were needed. I was wrong. There was more to come; more heartache-but more beauty to realize as well.
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fter my visit to the clearing in 2003, I climbed to the same site twice more in the brilliant autumn sun to take photos of the town while the bright foliage hung proudly from the trees in town and on the steep hillsides protecting the borough. They were warm, perfect days in early October when the bright orange and yellow colors of the foliage reach its peak in the northwestern plateau region of the state. Again, I reflected on all that had evolved. It was a moment in my life of loneliness mixed with faith and hope. It had been over ten years since I sat in the meadow on the hillside and watched my fiancée disappear. There were moments of deep loneliness. I turned my heart to the vista in front of me, instead, absorbing it as though I were one of the leaves shimmering in the gentle autumn breeze and feeling grateful for the warm October sun that lit up the scene. I took several photos and edited them later and then placed them into my archives. I used many as post card scenes of the town. Then, in August of 2007, I made a fateful decision to attend my class reunion for the first time since I graduated from Smethport Area High School on the hillside south of town. That was 1967. It had been 40 years. A classmate approached me and cast out her had to say hello. I drew a blank and asked for her name. I was struck! We had walked home from
The cover of the Timeless Home book featured a photo of Smethport taken in April, 2003. The title, Timeless Home, was Les Jordan’s creation.
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My high school love sits in the green grass in the pasture just after we re-connected a few weeks earlier. It was a bright autumn day in 2007.
Brilliant autumn foliage brightened the lanscape with vivid colors that afternoon in 2007.
school together many late afternoons and I listened with compassion to her tortured heart caused from family problems she endured at home. I loved her secretly in those high school days. I was too shy for anything more. At the reunion, seconds after we reconnected, we were together as a team and I thought that I finally had someone special to share my insights and love with. It was August and the summer sun still brought hot, humid air to our section of Pennsylvania. Soon the season began to change and the foliage increased in colorful hues of red, yellow and orange. My special clearing stood green and inviting and I took my new fiancĂŠe there in order to share my story of the Big Rock with her. She had noted that she had suffered from depression in the past and had overcome it with counseling. I thought that a trip to the spot would provide spiritual strength for her in order to prevent future occurrences of the monster disease. I also thought it would bring spiritual healing to me. We sat in the grass and held each other as we gazed at the town where we both grew up. I stayed in the town after graduation, but she went off and around the world to many places and diverse experiences. I felt much love and secretly gave God gratitude for this person also feeling love that cuddled in my arms. We sat there, in love, for an eternity it seemed and then took several photos of ourselves and the vista around us. I explained how meaningful it was for me to have her lovingly agree to have her photo taken in that spot and how it took the pain away from another that rejected that opportunity to combine our love back in 1994. One of the photos that we took of her and I together in the pasture became my wallpaper on my computer monitor. Every time that I looked at it I felt the love again from the original moment when we stood on the hill in 2007. Our relationship grew and thrived for a while and then began to diminish for diverse reasons. We moved from my beloved town to Florida where the relationship completely unraveled because of her need for basic gratifications. I wanted to return to my hills soon after I arrived in the hot, humid, sunny state. I struggled to endure, my thoughts often returning to the hillside above my hometown. I began to attend a small church in Dunedin in the Tampa Bay metro
15 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside area. I met a special woman there one day after the service while my fiancée was visiting her daughter in Spain. It was a moment in destiny. We became instant friends and I, along with my fiancée, met often at a cozy café in Dunedin to chat. I shared my insights with her and my struggles to find my direction in life. She listened with love and compassion and would joyfully find humor in my whimsical moments that would arrive spontaneously as we talked. In mid-winter she gave me a small, shiny, black rock specifically to help me find my way. It is one of my most treasured gifts that I possess. My heart beamed with gratitude! About the same time I received another Rock. This was different. It was a small rectangular shaped white limestone rock from Jerusalem where my fiancée had lived for seven years while she served as an archeologist in the Holy Land and was therefore, another prized gift. The stone was part of a service at that special little church that was created to help church members to recognize their “new name.” I instantly knew what it was and wrote, “Free,” on the little rock with a pencil distributed to the congregation. One insight about being free was freedom from all the years of father’s abuse. I shared the story with my beloved friend and then a few weeks later I added additional insights that once I returned home I would finally have the joyful, satisfying life that I had been praying for. I could tell from her response that she felt that my insights were real. The Rocks, along with my prayers, were working their miracles. Late in April we packed the moving van and started the long journey home to Pennsylvania. My heart leaped with joy and anticipation for that new life. I wanted my fiancée to be a part of the experience. That was not to be. Before we arrived home she informed me that she was abandoning me because my “health problems were holding her back and she wanted” to satisfy her basic desires. I arrived home alone and with the giant task of rebalancing my life. Grief nearly overcame me. I hung on and reached out. My friend’s life in Florida took a turn for the worst at the same time and we sent each other hope and love. Miracles of insight flowed freely from me in e-mails that swiftly found their way to her computer. Her compassion and love became strength in my life.
16 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside I would look up at the clearing on the hill as I walked the peaceful trails around the large lake in the center of town and pray. One evening, after a special rainbow that appeared in the yellow-tinted late evening sky, I photographed an unusual golden sunset above the pasture on the hillside. More miracles were unfolding as earlier I understood with deep love how she was a bright spot in my life, one filled with sun and warmth. The little clearing below Big Rock was still evolving into a continuing and expanding mystical story. My friend’s little gift, a rock, worked miracles as I found my way home in my heart and a new chapter was being added to the story of Big Rock. My friend is loved and cherished, just as is the little rock that she gave me. Not long after arriving back in my hometown, folks there offered me compliments on my photographic skills, being a nice person and a creative benefit to Smethport. One classmate who works in the County Court House recently remarked that she didn’t want to hear any trash-talk coming from my former fiancÊe about me or she would straighten her out in a hurry. I was flattered and grateful. I began realizing myself in a different way than ever before. I had become respected and cared about as a valuable person in my community. The feeling generated from those insights spiritually generated a peaceful, accomplished feeling in my heart. Soon after I published a Facebook site titled, Discover Smethport. The concept was developed several years earlier while I was head of the Tourism Promotion Committee for Smethport. It was a branding idea to encourage tourism and business development. I set up the Facebook site soon after, but never published it because of a variety of distractions. Once published, another key to understanding my destiny clicked open, almost as if the combination was set and the tumblers clicked the door of the safe open. Oddly, a short time before that I realized that the more I opened as I had been since arriving back in Smethport, the more doors of recognition and love opened, too. I began to recognize the miraculous change in me, a metamorphosis once again of arriving home within my heart. I wrote my dear friend in Florida that the new life I vaguely grasped as becoming a reality once I arrived back home was being more clearly understood, reality now etched in rock.
17 Big Rock and the Pasture on the Hillside The move to Florida created a deep loss in my life. I lost my hometown bearings and my hometown. I felt grief, almost like I had lost my dearest mate. But, the move also produced many insights that helped more clearly understand my identity and destiny. I also was able to play a key role in helping my daughter ease into a more happy life. And while I was there, I learned to love my most beautiful friend, a friend so full of joy and peace and love that she is my Angel of Love that helped me stay on the rock. And only now, as I write this, do I gather another gleam of insight and now understand why my eyes were compelled to search for the Big Rock jutting above the hillside high above Marvin Creek while riding along in the family car, a young boy who was even, in his youth long ago, searching for the BIG ROCK that is God within. The story is of the Big Rock and the pasture on the side of the hill is not over, yet. No. Another chapter in the spiritual journey has begun.
I stand on the rooted path to a group of rocks formations known as Thunder Rocks where American Indians sought spiritual insights.
Sunlight bursts through the foliage of an old maple tree on the edge of the clearing on the hillside. The journey to the Big Rock continues.
I stand on the top of a huge rock at Rimrock which has giant rocks similar to that at Big Rock.
My daughter, Virginia, and I stand together beside a rock formation at Thunder Rocks.