Up on a small, grassy hill sits an old dilapidated home overrun by the elements. Ivy winds through ancient windows of thin, warped glass. The porch is falling in on itself. The home is a product of the early 60s, its facade yellow paint on thin wood board with burnt brown trim work. The paint is peeling. No one lives in the home anymore. Its name is the Nittany House, on the dead end of Nittany Road by the Nittany Trailhead.
Inside, there is a man on the second floor of this long-abandoned yellow home moving a giant taxidermied deer head from side to side out one of the ancient windows. Next to the man, a chess board and an ashtray full of cigarettes sits on a tiny card table.
The man explains that sometimes he’ll sit up in this second-floor room and freak out onlookers by moving the obviously dead deer to create the comical, eerie illusion that it’s alive.
———
I am in State College, Pennsylvania, surrounded by cows and dairy and a large educational institution known as Penn State. I am about twelve minutes away from the university at the base of a trailhead which winds up a humble hill—a mountain by East Coast standards—named Mount Nittany. Along the path are tall green maples with iridescent leaves that let in the July light but keep the heat down in the comfortable 70s. The trailhead begins at the dead end of Nittany Road, melting into the modest property and old yellow house.
While standing at this intersection of house and trailhead, I am greeted by a man tanned and modestly wrinkled by the Arizona sun. He is wearing a cowboy hat slightly reminiscent of one that might be found in the aisles of a costume shop. His skinny but healthy frame is covered with a t-shirt and jeans fastened with a worn leather belt. Average, thin, black-framed glasses rest on his nose. I notice a small silver earring. He has a peppered mustache and beard.
His vibe is simultaneously wild western cowboy and cool uncle.
His name is Dan Loerch.
———
Anyone who parks their car at the Mount Nittany Trailhead is immediately presented with the charming absurdity that is Dan Loerch. He has constructed a makeshift visitors center, the quirkiness of which some hikers gravitate towards while others adamantly avoid by veering steeply to the right and beginning their hike—but they still have to pass his bulletin board full of animal photos at the end of the gravel road. People have left notes of appreciation and excitement: “First birthday hike with my son (: ” “I held two snakes today! One peed on me :/ but still so cool!” There is also a picture of two black bears: Bears Last Seen 7/8/19.
Dan has set up a porta-potty for hikers that find themselves in an emergency, and there is a table adorned with trinkets of the trail: an Easy Button to press after a hike, a guest book to sign, a globe to mark where you’re from. I put a dot on Colorado. There’s a wooden bowl of green acorns, fossils, arrowheads, and small violet minerals. Beside the table is a big plastic tub filled with mulch. A snake that Dan captured rests inside. If you appear curious or scared, Dan will encourage you to hold it. Sometimes, snakes will hang around his neck all day while he greets hikers and does yard work.
At this time of the summer, Dan has also set up a large blue tent behind the bulletin board and table. Key lime green chrysalises with thin golden stripes hang from the tent: inside, little caterpillars grow into monarchs. The black and orange insects will emerge and then migrate in the fall. Dan seems to love the butterflies.
———
It was 1963 when Dan came to the edge of the Mount Nittany trailhead located in the small, unincorporated town of Lemont, an offshoot of State College and an overpass away from the University. Dan’s father served six years in the Air Force and was stationed in Okinawa, Japan, for a year before the family arrived. Dan would’ve been around four years old at the time.
His father, “Liked having his own space. He liked the seclusion.”
But today the seclusion has morphed into a frenzied hubbub of locals and visitors and there are almost always cars lining the gravel drive to the trailhead. During busy hiking days, parallel parking is a pain and turning around becomes almost comical. The days where the trail was merely a deer path that went straight up the mountainside are long gone.
“It was wild,” Dan remarks. “Nobody even knew it existed. Rarely would anybody wind up here.”
Down in the town of Lemont, a mile and a half away, there’s an elementary school that was built in 1938. It is stone and squatty and angular. In some ways it’s beautiful—you can imagine all the wonderful childhood memories made in the schoolyard—yet the building itself is arguably ugly. Locals have nicknamed the school Rock View (presumably because of its resemblance to the Rock View prison nearby), cementing its status as a landmark in Lemont. This past summer, the school was shut down and now it sits empty.
In the ‘60s, Dan would walk home from the elementary school, about a mile and a half up Mount Nittany Road to his family’s property, a world that was entirely separate from the town. Dan was a small, scrawny kid, and a jokester. Never popular. But he knew trees. He knew that you could bake acorns into a bread-type meal if survival depended on it. He knew when the butterflies came into town for the annual monarch migration. He knew that the milkweed had a sticky sap that would get all over his math homework. He knew that every time he crossed the intersection at Thompson Street, there would seldom be another soul on his walk up the dirt road to the yellow house at the Nittany Trailhead.
His seclusion, his feeling of not belonging, was a product of a cultural and educational divide which Dan found himself precariously placed within. His father was a 30-year-old bio-chemical engineering professor at Penn State, yet they lived a good distance from the University up on a hill: a rural mode of living that didn’t traditionally jive with the high class of academia.
Growing up, Dan felt like half of the population of the area was the University and the other half were the mountain folk, the type of people who would chop their own firewood and survive off the land. Dan didn’t fit in. He lived as a “hick” but also considered himself a scientist.
“I didn’t socialize much,” Dan says. “It wasn’t a pleasant experience.”
———
The trees surrounding the yellow house are overgrown with vines. They create a canopy with their tangled branches—tree forts for children, fairies, and dogs to play in. In the yard, Dan is trying to grow seemingly everything under the sun. Pots are grouped together around the entrance to his property. He is in the process of labeling pretty much every living thing—even simple plants are given labels: hydrangea. It’s very helpful for me, given my dearth of plant knowledge.
Dan is continuously curious and eager to share with the world: he’s playing and talking and chatting at the corner of his residence where his land begins, and the Nittany Trailhead wanders up the mountain. He invites visitors to walk on a nature trail that he has constructed on his own property. There’s a sign that reads:
Real Bear Den
5-minute loop
Follow the bamboo!
Self-guided trail open to the public.
Today: Sunrise to Sunset.
Will YOU dare the bear?
The sign is an exaggeration. The 5-minute loop is probably correct, but the bear den is questionable. It’s a big overturned log, and yes, a bear could likely fit into it, but it’s clear one never has, or at least hasn’t recently. The bear apparently walks around the property on occasion and up the trailhead, so it seems to me that it just hangs out at the log. Dan insists he once found fresh bear poop on the massive piece of fallen timber. Enough justification for a den classification apparently.
Along the trail are blackberries ripe for eating. Dan delicately picks several with his rough, tan hands. They roll around in his palm and stain his skin a purplish pink. The berries are sweet and small with soft flesh and disproportionately hard middles. I suck off the sweetness and then crunch the bitter middle. Dan points to more plants on the walk.
“This was my solace. This was my home. This is where I fit. This is where I understood how things worked and why. This is where the patterns made sense. The people didn't make sense to me. The oaks, the trees, the relationships of the life: that makes sense.”
It seems that Dan is principally concerned with the segmentation of our world. He theorizes often about butterflies, about the butterfly effect: that cheesy adage where a flap of a butterfly wing can cause a storm on the other side of the world. He speaks knowing the phrase is tired, but he genuinely believes in its principle. Love and acceptance are essential to connection. The natural world is an unquestioning incubator: it has accepted Dan, and it embraces everyone in some form or another.
Dan locks eyes with me for a second and then tilts his head and moves his arms to gesture towards the sky and plants that surround us. “Love the world. Love nature. You’re part of it. Love yourself. You know love yourself because you’re part of nature.”
His philosophies are endlessly cliched, but they hit harder the more I talk to Dan. His intention is far from surface level. You can feel that he truly cares.
———
Dan and I return from the garden and sit at a picnic table. Hikers mill about behind us during our conversation and Dan’s dog, Shane, occasionally runs off to greet other dogs on the trail. Dan gets up and ties him off on a very long leash and returns, apologizing.
He begins to tell me about his past.
“When I had the opportunity to go to college, because that's what you have to do, I was only seventeen and a half. I chose the University of Arizona, because it was about as far away from here in every way possible. The desert, the climate. Everything about it was different. And so, I sought to find out what the real world was like because this microcosm couldn't be it, I figured.”
Dan was a Chemistry major at the University of Arizona for two years before dropping out and getting married to Tina, who he met at 20. By 21, he had his first son. It was 1981. Dan and Tina moved back to his family quarters in Pennsylvania and lived on food stamps.
A year and a half or so later, Dan found himself in Oklahoma for three months. After a workers’ strike, the Reagan Administration was recruiting air traffic controllers. Dan passed the aptitude test and went to Oklahoma to train. Then he was sent to Los Angeles to direct air traffic. Dan and Tina, with their one son and another son on the way, packed up and moved across the country. The family stayed in Los Angeles for ten years, and then moved back to Arizona. At this point, the Loerch family had three sons and a daughter on the way.
At this point in the story, Dan’s voice begins to get shaky. He looks down at the picnic table and his eyes focus hard for a second, like he’s searching the wood grain for something that’s not there. He doesn’t make eye contact with me when he speaks, his eyes darting around at the plants on his right, and past me towards the butterflies.
“Tina was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, which is the skin cancer that kills you and the mortality rate’s 95% in three years, and when you get that kind of a diagnosis, so to speak … So, it took about two years and … I don't remember a lot of those two years.”
Dan’s voice is now raw, but he moves past the painful memory quickly. No need to dwell. If we linger longer it feels like something might pop.
———
Dan remembers thousands of Monarchs flying above Mount Nittany on their migration route towards Mexico when he was a kid, but now he says there are only hundreds. He talks about how milkweed used to grow up all along Nittany Road to Lemont. It was a nuisance. It would get all over his hands, all over his math homework, so they cut it. People around the country did the same. Monarch populations were decimated.
Dan’s demeanor becomes positive, “You just gotta try … and I can create one extra monarch. I'm pretty sure. I've got this. And who knows what that's going to do? What difference one can make, because one can make a difference. One flap of a wing can make a difference.”
The key lime green chrysalides with thin gold stripes that rest under Dan’s blue tent are testaments to this belief. They are delicate. Small. Unaware of their human caretaker.
———
Eventually, after Tina’s death, Dan remarried, but Dan and his second wife had conflicting priorities.
“We never shared the same goals in life,” Dan explained. “I didn't want to work until the day I died, you know, living in a city, and she thinks you should do that. And she worked 60 hours a week, and I wanted to do other things … ”
A certain type of detachment and rawness comes across when Dan speaks of his past. It feels like he pushes his words away from his mouth. A peculiar pain rings through, heavy and accumulated: glossy healed scars. Wounds re-exposed through words, wounds that you’d prefer not to agitate. Rub some more Neosporin on and call it a day.
But Dan Loerch would be the last man to just hand you Neosporin.
Dan seems like the type of man who would wrestle through your struggles with you. Who would sit down and listen. He seems steadfast in easing any pain that others feel, yet there’s so much percolating up through his words. His own pain is quiet, shiny—it glistens and stings.
Dan continues, “We stuck it out for about 20 years and relationships take compromise, but eventually when you've compromised everything that matters to you, both people just have what's left.”
“So, I moved up to the mountains of Arizona for three years, finished all of the legalities of getting divorced. All my kids are grown up and moved on. I don't have a job. I sought what to do. And once everything got resolved last April, a little over a year ago, I planned a trip. I was going to travel across the country. I was going to visit every one of my nieces and nephews.”
———
Ajo Arizona is near the U.S.-Mexico border, in the middle of nowhere. It has tall reaching Organ Pipe cacti and charming brown desert scrub. Dan’s aging parents had a parked trailer out there in the desert, ten miles from any building. On a long trip once, Dan visited their camp before moving onto Flagstaff to fish for trout. He caught one and moved on. Dan was on a quest to catch a fish in almost every state as he visited his nephews and made his way to the East Coast. One down. And he was off. A quick pit stop for family, a remnant of home.
He went to San Diego next and caught a mackerel off the Ocean Beach pier with his son Andy. Then he caught fish in New Mexico and Texas. He skipped Louisiana. Couldn’t catch a fish and didn’t want to pitch a tent.
“I was free, and my goal was defined.”
Dan looks around his property and out at the visitors buzzing around his table of trinkets and venturing up the trail. “I made it all the way back here,” he says, “and when I got here, I knew I found home. This place was where I felt like I belonged. I traveled across the country, met a lot of people. And I never felt like I belonged. I didn't belong in Texas and I didn’t belong in Arkansas. I didn't belong in Tennessee. I didn't belong in Ohio. I belong here.”
A month after Dan arrived home at Mount Nittany, his father and mother returned from Ajo. Dan’s father wanted to die at home. He had stage four cancer.
“He lived life in control up until the very end.”
Dan’s view on death and life is holistic and all-encompassing. He spews bits and pieces of philosophical ramblings, “Disease is disease and life is a state of disease and every organism is a disease to other organisms in the environment.” Some meager and unassuming things survive, unique in their own way. Other bigger, supposedly smarter things will die. You never know when something will die, when a spouse, or parent will pass; all you can know, all you can believe, is that the earth will produce something useful and great afterwards.
Where some turn to insular communities to cushion their egos and ill-founded beliefs, Dan turns to the refuge of the familiar, but ever-morphing natural world: a place where everything is in some way accepted, the comforts of a backyard where hikers from every corner visit, where “invasive” and “native” species compete—a microcosm of the larger reality. “Everything’s invasive, but some things will work and succeed and thrive and others will hang on until conditions change.”
Dan’s garden is all encompassing. The dirt has just as much value as his butterflies.
———
Since his father’s death, Dan has begun to revive the family’s land. I’ve caught him in the middle of this process. He now rents a home down the road, complete with hippie tapestries and beads hanging from the doors. Every day he comes up to where the trailhead meets the family property and hatches a plan to transform the small, old, yellow home into “the Nittany House,” a cultural hub for hikers and nature lovers in the area. He plants flowers and welcomes nearly every hiker. Here, he’s a servant and protector of the land and those who enjoy it.
As we talk, Dan picks a small orange flower. Its silk-like petals and stem are no bigger than a fingernail. He reaches down and picks a seed pod off the same plant, a light green, scraggly thing. He explains how the pod will shoot out little seeds with an unbelievable force when touched. He holds up the flower again. It is dwarfed by his hands.
“Could you think of anything that you could engineer to make that more beautiful?”
Nature creates angles, and colors, and a world that humans are both a part of and could never quite engineer and control themselves. In the end, all we can do is try. Dan tries with his signs and his bear den and his snakes and his bugs and plants.
“I’ve got butterflies and I think they’re beautiful and I love it.”