When we left Pottstown, i had to navigate us on streets until the Schuylkill River trail began again near Valley Forge. I don't necessarily remember it being so bad, only that, as verdant and pretty as it still was, I was getting tired of worrying about oncoming traffic and the noise of all the cars. Schuylkill Road was also a state highway, occasionally spattered with no pedestrian signs. I wasn't really worried about a cop giving us a ticket since i assumed those signs were for walkers walking with traffic and possibly hitchhiking. Still, i thought it would be nice to get on to a quieter road where we could actually hear each other if we wanted to talk. The 3 of us had started to get in the habit of quietly trudging along.
We passed Limerick Nuclear Power Plant, more grasshoppers and countless meadows and reached a point where the road divided to the "old" Schuylkill Road. Immediately we passed a tavern built in the late 1700s and other stone houses quietly sitting vacant on the edge of a narrow road. A few elderly ladies sat in rocking chairs on a big wooden porch and sceptically stared at us.
I had trusted Google Maps to navigate me through these smaller roads and i thought i had found a good shortcut to get through to Spring City when i started to see more no trespassing signs. I even bypassed a "no through street" sign, assuming that maybe they just didn't want cars going through here. What could be the harm in a few people? There were no people and no traces. It felt like walking in to a Stephen King book. But i trusted in the map in my hands until we passed what seemed to be a fake department of transportation building and into a giant field of an abandoned town. The deeper we walked in, the narrower the streets became as the trees and plants consumed the shoulder. I knew if i kept walking through, i'd eventually get to Spring City but imagined the beginning of a nightmare where we'd walk and walk and soon the vines, branches and weeds would be wrapped around us and we'd be lost in the woods forever. There was an eerie absence. Not just that people weren't there but that they were removed purposefully. I felt like i was in a lion's den and too deep to get out safely.
I won't go into more details since i already covered them in my post from Sept 1. Stumbling on to Pennhurst State School grounds was one of the only experiences in this walk that consumed the entire day to be of its meaning. Even though i ended up walking only 1 or 2 miles shy of the miles i walked on the hellish day 2 days before, it seemed insignificant since my mind was occupied with a creepy, special feeling. I'm still having trouble thinking of anything else of significance to mention. When something grips your mind that much at the moment, it must dim other input to put it in the forefront.
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