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Appalachian Summer
This is the third book in acclaimed naturalist Marcia Bonta's series on the seasons of a Pennsylvania mountain. As she did in Appalachian Spring and Appalachian Autumn, Bonta offers a day-by-day account of the natural life of one place--her 648-acre property on the westernmost ridge of the ridge-and-valley province of south central Pennsylvania.
- GenresNonfiction
232 pages, Hardcover
First published May 6, 1999
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About the author
Marcia Bonta
11 books12 followersMarcia Bonta is a freelance nature writer who lives in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 20, 2025
Appalachia in the summertime shows nature in all its glorious profusion. Plants that germinated in the springtime are in full bloom by midsummer. Animals that gave birth to offspring in the springtime are making sure that, before the harshness of an Appalachian winter sets in, their young will know what they need to know for a lifetime of finding food and shelter and avoiding danger. Summer is, in short, a glorious time at which to be observing the wildlife of the Appalachian biosphere, as Marcia Bonta documents in detail in her 1999 book Appalachian Summer.
Bonta, a naturalist and free-lance writer, lives with her family on a 650-acre property atop a mountain in central Pennsylvania, where they pursue a simple and nature-oriented way of life that eschews the materialistic and consumption-oriented norms of modern U.S. society. As she did in her prior books Appalachian Spring (1991) and Appalachian Autumn (1994), and as she would in her later book Appalachian Winter (2005), Bonta in Appalachian Summer provides a day-by-day recounting of her wildlife observations from a single summer, starting on June 1 and ending on September 22. The year of Bonta’s observations, I am guessing, was 1996, as at one point she mentions the damage that Hurricane Fran inflicted upon the Bontas’ mountaintop property.
Two helpful maps at the beginning of the book show how the Bontas’ property, nestled between two ridges atop their mountain, abounds with nature trails that lead from field to forest to thicket to grove to stream. While Interstate 99 and the town of Tyrone, Pennsylvania, may be relatively close by, it seems clear that the Bontas have established a sort of naturalist refuge on their mountaintop – one where the frenetic, mechanized getting-and-spending ethos of contemporary American life can seem far away indeed.
Bonta’s observations of natural life on her mountaintop often take on a Thoreauvian quality. Admirers of the work of Henry David Thoreau already know that, in works like Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), October: Autumnal Tints (1862), and The Maine Woods (1864), Thoreau uses observations of seemingly ordinary and prosaic elements of natural life to evoke transcendent, universal truths about the universe and humankind’s place in it – hence his frequent categorization as a “transcendentalist” (an oversimplification, perhaps, but let that go for now). Bonta similarly sees aspects of the transcendent in her observations of the natural world, as in this passage that describes her encounter with a moth on June 26th:
In the warmth of early evening, as we ate dinner on the front porch, a Virginia crenucha moth climbed over my fingers and arm, allowing everyone ample opportunity to admire its glossy black wings fringed with white, its electric blue body, orange head, and feathery, black antennae….Although its chumminess was probably due to my salty sweat, I am awed when a moth or butterfly lands on me, as if I’ve been briefly touched by the wings of an angel. (p. 52)
Bonta’s gift for careful observation and talent for descriptive language are both apparent in her description of her encounter with a porcupine on July 24th: “It walked like a miniature bear, its front feet turned out, its rear end waddling purposefully from side to side, its quills surrounding it like a barbed halo of protection….[Porcupines] walk up on their legs, keeping their body and tail well above the ground, and, like bears, move faster than their lumbering gait might suggest.” As she does elsewhere in the book, Bonta draws an insight from this moment of observation: “The lesson to me is to continue to identify every noise in the underbrush” (p. 108).
It may all sound very Arcadian, but there are a number of occasions on which the outside world infringes upon the Bontas’ seemingly bucolic mountaintop existence. When a group of university students come up to the Bontas’ for a wilderness visit, they are quiet, and a couple of them even seem nervous; the reason, it turns out, is that TV nature specials have conditioned them to believe that the wild is always a violent and dangerous place.
Bonta reflects that the natural-world violence these students see on television is not something they’re likely to run into in central Pennsylvania, where even black bears are shy creatures that run away at the first sight or sound or smell of a human being. Indeed, the overpopulation of the area with white-tailed deer is a vestige of the time when the predators that once roamed these mountains were wiped out by humans:
Shapes loom up in the mist and people the forest with all kinds of possibilities – both those creatures that I can still see here and those that have long been extirpated. Those ghosts often haunt me, the mountain lions, elk, wood buffaloes, and wolves that once roamed this mountain when it was a balanced ecosystem untouched by the meddling hands of humanity. Even Native Americans used our mountain lightly, as a place to hunt but not inhabit. Today I must be content with a depauperate ecosystem of small predators and too many prey animals, an island surrounded by a sea of humanity pressing in on all sides. (p. 145)
It turns out, at one point, that there is danger in the woodlands of Central Pennsylvania - not from any wild animals, but rather in the form of human beings' capacity for violence. A most serious intrusion upon the peace of the Bontas’ home begins with the arrival of large numbers of police officers. It turns out that an 11-year-old girl named Melody Curtis, a Florida resident who had been spending the summer with her grandmother in Tyrone, has gone missing; foul play is suspected, and the bloodhounds have led the police to the Bontas’ mountain.
Bonta had previously meditated on how her isolated mountain home gives her a safe place to walk alone – a relative rarity for a woman: “Such a place has allowed me, as a woman, the kind of freedom from fear that remains an impossible dream for most women” (p. xiv). But the resolution of the search for Melody Curtis – an outcome that is as unsurprising as it is heartbreaking – leads Bonta to grim reflections on how “so many girls and women remain victims in a society that is concerned but helpless in the face of evil” (p. 74).
Indeed, the story of Melody Curtis is so tragic that it sometimes threatens to overwhelm the book; in the face of such cruelty and violence, I found it difficult to enjoy, as much as I ordinarily would have, Bonta’s observations regarding a chance encounter with an Eastern coyote, or the mating habits of box turtles, or the elusiveness of worm-eating warblers, or the best stream-side rocks to lift in order to find a northern dusky salamander.
Yet I persisted in finishing Appalachian Summer, and I am glad that I did. Because I was once a resident, for seven years, of the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania, I wanted to read all four volumes of Marcia Bonta’s Appalachian tetralogy; these four books provide an evocative year-long journey through all the seasons of life in a beautiful and threatened American region. Appalachian Summer, like the other three volumes in the series, combines close observation of natural life with thoughtful meditations on the importance of living in harmony with, and striving to preserve, the beauty of the natural world.
Bonta, a naturalist and free-lance writer, lives with her family on a 650-acre property atop a mountain in central Pennsylvania, where they pursue a simple and nature-oriented way of life that eschews the materialistic and consumption-oriented norms of modern U.S. society. As she did in her prior books Appalachian Spring (1991) and Appalachian Autumn (1994), and as she would in her later book Appalachian Winter (2005), Bonta in Appalachian Summer provides a day-by-day recounting of her wildlife observations from a single summer, starting on June 1 and ending on September 22. The year of Bonta’s observations, I am guessing, was 1996, as at one point she mentions the damage that Hurricane Fran inflicted upon the Bontas’ mountaintop property.
Two helpful maps at the beginning of the book show how the Bontas’ property, nestled between two ridges atop their mountain, abounds with nature trails that lead from field to forest to thicket to grove to stream. While Interstate 99 and the town of Tyrone, Pennsylvania, may be relatively close by, it seems clear that the Bontas have established a sort of naturalist refuge on their mountaintop – one where the frenetic, mechanized getting-and-spending ethos of contemporary American life can seem far away indeed.
Bonta’s observations of natural life on her mountaintop often take on a Thoreauvian quality. Admirers of the work of Henry David Thoreau already know that, in works like Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), October: Autumnal Tints (1862), and The Maine Woods (1864), Thoreau uses observations of seemingly ordinary and prosaic elements of natural life to evoke transcendent, universal truths about the universe and humankind’s place in it – hence his frequent categorization as a “transcendentalist” (an oversimplification, perhaps, but let that go for now). Bonta similarly sees aspects of the transcendent in her observations of the natural world, as in this passage that describes her encounter with a moth on June 26th:
In the warmth of early evening, as we ate dinner on the front porch, a Virginia crenucha moth climbed over my fingers and arm, allowing everyone ample opportunity to admire its glossy black wings fringed with white, its electric blue body, orange head, and feathery, black antennae….Although its chumminess was probably due to my salty sweat, I am awed when a moth or butterfly lands on me, as if I’ve been briefly touched by the wings of an angel. (p. 52)
Bonta’s gift for careful observation and talent for descriptive language are both apparent in her description of her encounter with a porcupine on July 24th: “It walked like a miniature bear, its front feet turned out, its rear end waddling purposefully from side to side, its quills surrounding it like a barbed halo of protection….[Porcupines] walk up on their legs, keeping their body and tail well above the ground, and, like bears, move faster than their lumbering gait might suggest.” As she does elsewhere in the book, Bonta draws an insight from this moment of observation: “The lesson to me is to continue to identify every noise in the underbrush” (p. 108).
It may all sound very Arcadian, but there are a number of occasions on which the outside world infringes upon the Bontas’ seemingly bucolic mountaintop existence. When a group of university students come up to the Bontas’ for a wilderness visit, they are quiet, and a couple of them even seem nervous; the reason, it turns out, is that TV nature specials have conditioned them to believe that the wild is always a violent and dangerous place.
Bonta reflects that the natural-world violence these students see on television is not something they’re likely to run into in central Pennsylvania, where even black bears are shy creatures that run away at the first sight or sound or smell of a human being. Indeed, the overpopulation of the area with white-tailed deer is a vestige of the time when the predators that once roamed these mountains were wiped out by humans:
Shapes loom up in the mist and people the forest with all kinds of possibilities – both those creatures that I can still see here and those that have long been extirpated. Those ghosts often haunt me, the mountain lions, elk, wood buffaloes, and wolves that once roamed this mountain when it was a balanced ecosystem untouched by the meddling hands of humanity. Even Native Americans used our mountain lightly, as a place to hunt but not inhabit. Today I must be content with a depauperate ecosystem of small predators and too many prey animals, an island surrounded by a sea of humanity pressing in on all sides. (p. 145)
It turns out, at one point, that there is danger in the woodlands of Central Pennsylvania - not from any wild animals, but rather in the form of human beings' capacity for violence. A most serious intrusion upon the peace of the Bontas’ home begins with the arrival of large numbers of police officers. It turns out that an 11-year-old girl named Melody Curtis, a Florida resident who had been spending the summer with her grandmother in Tyrone, has gone missing; foul play is suspected, and the bloodhounds have led the police to the Bontas’ mountain.
Bonta had previously meditated on how her isolated mountain home gives her a safe place to walk alone – a relative rarity for a woman: “Such a place has allowed me, as a woman, the kind of freedom from fear that remains an impossible dream for most women” (p. xiv). But the resolution of the search for Melody Curtis – an outcome that is as unsurprising as it is heartbreaking – leads Bonta to grim reflections on how “so many girls and women remain victims in a society that is concerned but helpless in the face of evil” (p. 74).
Indeed, the story of Melody Curtis is so tragic that it sometimes threatens to overwhelm the book; in the face of such cruelty and violence, I found it difficult to enjoy, as much as I ordinarily would have, Bonta’s observations regarding a chance encounter with an Eastern coyote, or the mating habits of box turtles, or the elusiveness of worm-eating warblers, or the best stream-side rocks to lift in order to find a northern dusky salamander.
Yet I persisted in finishing Appalachian Summer, and I am glad that I did. Because I was once a resident, for seven years, of the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania, I wanted to read all four volumes of Marcia Bonta’s Appalachian tetralogy; these four books provide an evocative year-long journey through all the seasons of life in a beautiful and threatened American region. Appalachian Summer, like the other three volumes in the series, combines close observation of natural life with thoughtful meditations on the importance of living in harmony with, and striving to preserve, the beauty of the natural world.
June 14, 2023
At first, I found Marcia Bonta’s musings on her daily hikes around her property a bit repetitive, and I worried that I would give up on the book. It all turned a corner shortly thereafter as Marcia started to share personal stories that quickly developed into a daily urge to catch up on the latest goings-on in Marcia’s life, including her flora and fauna sightings. Marcia claims to feel safe in the midst of her many acres of wilderness, and I believe her. I, personally, find her confidence in the gentleness of all wild creatures, great and small, a trait of bravery. I would be constantly alert to the possibility of a startled mama bear or deer attack. But, maybe if I spent each day in the perspective that these woods were my home, I, too, would lose that learned fear. Since starting this book, I have developed a new found interest in identifying birds that collect at my feeder, and plants in my neighborhood. Thank you, Marcia, for opening my mind to what only my eyes could previously see.
May 28, 2021
It was fun to read this wonderful diary-like book in late May as summer approaches. It brought back lots of memories of the summers of my childhood in the Appalachians and all of the delights of the natural world there.
August 16, 2025
I love books like this. Living in Pennsylvania I was fascinated in her daily walks and what she saw in the forest. I was a bit put off my the murder case in the middle and it was disturbing to me. Not sure about adding that part of the story.
February 29, 2008
There are still people who care about the earth and
the creatures who also live here.
the creatures who also live here.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews