Huckleberry Friend: Pen Mar Revisited

Once in a great while I get to visit the past. Last Tuesday's hike was on the AppalachianTrail in Maryland. And it started at the Mason-Dixon Line (the ancient border between Maryland and Pennsylvania) at a tiny community called "Pen Mar". Now long ago, when I was a small child, I and my two brothers (Jonnie and Charlie) would spend a week or two there. Aunt Corona and her husband, Benny, owned a small vacation house with a great screened porch (another family connection: my parents' wedding reception was at that little house).

Now the porch has been walled in and apparently is an integral part of the house. The porch is on the West side of the house, and had a half-wall that was fully enclosed with screening from there to the ceiling. It had wood-slat blinds that rolled up in the day and down at night. We children slept out there with all the strange nighttime noises that we didn't hear in our suburban Bethesda bedrooms: cricketsand buzzing insects, owls hooting, dogs barking.

Next to my aunt's home was the house of Benny's brother Charlie and his wife, Cecile. This one is just as I remembered it. Even the blue paint. And there were also Elsa and Sam, our cousins; and their cousins, Linda, Louise and Richard - tho I'm not sure of the boy's name.

Next door to Charlie and Cecile's house was a tennis court. It was old and ragged even then; the net had holes in it. The grownups didn't play tennis. But we children really liked having an enclosed place to run around in and to whack balls to each other - having absolutely no knowledge of the rules of tennis.

I have little memory of the rest of the community, except for three very different places.

One place was the large old building across the road - the Pen Rock Hotel. The great thing about the hotel is that it had a pool room - not a room with a pool but with a pool table. Now, the hotel manager didn't like having children in that room. After all, I was barely able to see over the edge of the table. But it was deliciously daring to sneak into that room and knock the balls around.

After the 2nd or 3rd summer, the hotel was gone - I recall that it burned down; or perhaps it simply closed its doors. Most of its visitors, I recall, drove out from Baltimore and many stayed for the summer. But no longer - - I guess air conditioning kept them at home.

The second place was a little store where we children could spend our pennies deciding which of the great many penny candies to purchase and savor. . . something that I could hold in my mouth and enjoy for a long long time, or something that was to be chewed with a great burst of wonderful sweetness. According to a recently posted sign, the store was called "Jim's" - selling popcorn, ice cream, sandwiches. And not just to the local residents. Pen Mar had been the site of a late-19th century amusement park; trolley lines brought visitors from nearby towns like Waynesboro, PA (where my mother and Aunt Corona had been born and raised).

The last thing I recall about Pen Mar was the spring on the mountainside. Aunt Corona really liked the taste of the spring water (I didn't - it tasted too much of iron), and so we'd walk there with buckets to carry back to the house. What I really liked was the walk: short distance down the curving road to the railroad track, then along the track to a footpath that went down the mountain to the spring. I was always fascinated that water came from other than a spigot - why was there water inside the mountain? what forced it out? and how come it was so heavy in those buckets when you could see clear through it?

I don't know whether the spring is still there. However, in talking with Charles Trite, a long-time Pen Mar resident who stopped to chat with us, he confirmed my memory of it and other things. The spring is called Glen Afton. Driving to Pen Mar we passed the lake at Fort Ritchie - I've great memories of the lake and the pier but had forgotten all about the large, elegant bathhouse next to it. We passed Camp Louise which is still in operation. We passed signs leading to the town of Blue Ridge Summit, where we'd go to church on Sunday. The very short visit revived good memories with people I loved so much but who are long gone.