Freshly graduated from Penn State, my job-hunting room up for lease to the incoming class, I would touch bases with roommates back in State College and then drive the ’77 Impala back over the wooded ridge to the quiet darkness of Greenwood Furnace State Park, about 20 miles south of State College. One night, I pulled in at the gravel entrance, my big back seat beckoning.

The place had a certain secure seclusion. An Amish buggy’s fluorescent triangle climbed past a lover’s lane, and a classic pickup truck drifted along, the road so dark that the tailpipe sported a red safety reflector.

Beside me as I slept, a suite of Revolutionary War veteran graves stood in a grassy strip—telling, yet as unassuming as the sounds of the creek and September katydids. I remembered the American flag crowning the grassy hilltop overlooking Revolutionary-era McAlevy’s Fort 6 miles down the blacktop road, where spectral antique dolls glared out from the crossroads. Oddly, I felt only a sense of freedom and safety that night.

I slept between two giant, friendly thoughts. One was an FDR thought: Steps away, a wall of Tuscarora sandstone fronted a white sand beach. Many such facilities were built by the Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, whose members happily accepted the freedom to labor and create; Pennsylvania honored their work with a no-fee use policy in its acclaimed state park system.

A few more steps away, a green meadow held a counterweight freedom: to embrace and maintain a free foothold, a Lincoln thought. When the redbud and dogwood blossomed in May, a party of Pennsylvania Amish drove their horse-drawn carts over the adjacent hill on a road nearly as empty as it was centuries ago, and picnicked in the grass. Then they returned to their vault of stars above their nearly private valley. My choice of freedoms was imminent, but the two giant thoughts held me without today’s coercive tension.

Messages from the big, friendly thoughts came silently at Greenwood Furnace. I said nothing during my coming of age in the silent fragments of silver moonlight there one warm night. Then one day, a slip of paper landed on my campsite’s picnic table—a telephone number, a name.

It originated from the director of the venerable Federal Register in Washington, then passed through the hands of the park ranger on duty and on to the wooden table. They were inquiring of my whereabouts and requesting an interview. The journey commenced as ridgetop clouds ran through the moon and ended in the office of the director, on the wall a photo of past associate JFK.

There’s a restored iron furnace across the road from the Revolutionary War graves. They say that ghosts of the laboring families appear there in the audience during iron-making demonstrations, caught between the freedom to stay and the freedom to strive. It is a sanctuary American place, the home of the big freedoms in the darkness.  

Bill Rozday lives in Frederick, Md.