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One of the greatest childhood gifts my parents ever gave me was the freedom to walk alone in the mountains. Taking a scruffy yard dog and a lunch, I would set off for a whole day up in the hickory and maple forest on the mountainside my uncle owned in the Alleghenies. For water, I drank from any of a plenitude of mountain streams. I climbed in wild grape vines as thick as my arm, swinging like Tarzan until they let go. I tracked deer trails to see if I could find their owners. Grey squirrels scolded, and chipmunks watched me, but I never saw a black bear, despite parental warnings to play dead or climb a tree, depending on whether the dog ran or stayed.

My mother explained that these mountains had once been mightier than the Alps. But they are worn now, a series of green folds stacked in long rows like smile lines. Walking here was my favorite activity until my eleventh year, when we moved too far away to come for weekend visits. Knowing that apples still fruit around a crumbled house foundation, that mint rebounds annually next to a certain toady spring — that and a hundred other observations of nature's eternal cycle — makes the area a sacred oasis, a balm for my soul. So I was especially shocked to hear on September 11, 2001, that flight 93 had gone down just over the ridge from my stretch of mountain.

The echoes on that land reverberate in many directions. They go back to the native peoples who, in 1763, parleyed for this mountain swath to be the boundary of westward English expansion. They flow with escaping slaves, eager to cross the Mason Dixon line, who trod these valleys on the way to freedom. They eddy around the grand old resort at nearby Bedford Springs, where the United States Supreme Court made their Dredd Scott decision while on a working vacation in 1857. They resound through the Johnstown Flood of 1889, the biggest natural disaster the United States had experienced up to that time. The communities dotted across leafy southwest Pennsylvanian mountaintops are steeped in the echoes of a history that is not usually visible.

Now, when I visit my grandmother in her one-light town, where most of the buildings have been peacefully aging since the 1800s, I cannot glimpse the sky without imagining how it would feel to hurtle from the air into that landscape, knowing that you were committing yourself to history. I think of Osama Bin Laden having a vicarious connection to the area. International events reach in with a tide of visitors who roll west on Route 30. Turning off onto a mundane-looking side road, then onto a smaller bumpy lane, leads to a grassy clearing with a large chain-link fence covered in teddy bears, flags, plaques, plastic flowers, hats, necklaces and innumerable other items. People seem compelled to give something here, even if they were not planning on it. Some cry. Everyone speaks softly.

The wreckage of a small silver plane already sat at the top of the ridge where I used to walk. It marked the boundary of my uncle's property, and I was to go no further for fear that the neighbors might accidentally shoot me. I remember being very curious about that earlier crash — who was in the plane? Had anyone survived? What were they doing there? What had gone wrong? Had the weather been bad? The abandoned metal shape intrigued me and acted as the conduit to another time. Perhaps the greatest gift that these ancient mountains can share is their ability to absorb what people leave behind. After all, the echoes of the past go on and on for others to catch a whisper of while walking alone in the forest.

Pamela Sonn. as a Masters Degree in Cultural Resource Management and is well known for making her husband walk up as many mountains as possible.

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