I needed to clear my head yesterday. Over the month of June I'd become mired in unproductive (albeit familiar) patterns of procrastination and avoidance. I wasn't writing. I wasn't exercising. I wasn't praying. I was feeling bored, lost, adrift. I needed to get back to where I once belonged. I needed to head for home by leaving it.

I drove to Kutztown, Pennsylvania, a town 70 miles north of here which is home to the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center. The campus of Kutztown University (one of the state colleges in Pennsylvania's State System of Higher Education) includes a complex of restored 19th century buildings (among them a barn, a farmhouse, and a school) and hosts an annual Pennsylvania German Festival.

Actually, there are TWO Pennsylvania German Festivals (or "Pennsylvania Dutch" -- a designation more common among tourists than scholars; the "Dutch" derives from a mispronunciation of "Deutsch," the heritage of the original settlers who came to Pennsylvania in the 1700's from the Palatine area of Germany seeking religious freedom). About five years ago some plan to raise money by selling the name to another promoter went awry, resulting in a bitter struggle for attendees that is actually more interesting than either festival.

When I arrived in Kutztown yesterday I chose not to attend the festival --$8 admission and $2 for parking. Instead I spent about an hour and a half in the research library of the Cultural Center. "Research Library" sounds like something you might find at Yale or Stanford. Actually, it's a block building about the size of a two-car garage with a copier, a computer, and one table set beside a half dozen bookcases laden with atlases, will abstracts, and various other resources used by genealogists.

That table, however, is beside an open window which looks out on a wheat field. Despite its proximity to the festival, a busy university in the midst of summer session, and even a small airport, the field yesterday was quiet, serene. I sat beside the window and read some reminiscences of 19th century farm life (the subject of my eventual historical novel). And looked out the window. A lot.

After that I drove 30 miles south to Wernersville, the village just west of the city of Reading that so intrigues me. (I wrote a little of why I love this place on March 15.) I spent about an hour sitting quietly in Hain's Cemetery beside the graves of the people I write about. There was a breeze, and silence, and peace.

Later I decided to go up the hill known as South Mountain (the cemetery is on the north side of the main road). In the 19th century there were several resort hotels nestled in the lush woodland. Wealthy people from New York and Philadelphia came each summer to escape the city heat. They would travel by train to the station at Wernersville, making the final ascent of the hill by horse-drawn carriage. That was a single horse. Yesterday it took ten minutes in my many-horsed (so to speak) car to reach the area where several of the lovely old buildings still stand.

Some of the hotels were sanitariums. These "health resorts" were founded on the belief that the air and the water on the mountain had curative powers, especially for such ailments as heart disease and tuberculosis. They drew clientele from the 1850's well into the 1920's. Two of the old properties -- with many modern additions -- are today part of a complex operated by a foundation that provides drug and alcohol abuse and mental health rehabilitation services.

I sat for a while at a public park about half way up the mountain. Then I traveled the route that two young women from Harrisburg traveled one hundred years ago this August. (Their story is the subject of an essay I'm preparing for an October deadline.) And then I returned to Hain's and, as dusk deepened, I began to collect what had been scattered in my soul.

I feel better today than I have in a month. It seems the mountain air of Wernersville can still renew and restore.