Hay bales lay in the up-sloping meadow to our right, and a moving stream glinted in the vale below, to our left, as we slowed along Bethel Hollow Road. The spray-painted letters "GH" lay on the pavement ahead of us. We opened the car windows, alert to the stillness.
The stream made dabbling noises and the wind rushed through the trees. It was country-road quiet in the middle of the afternoon, somewhere in Bedford County.
Jon inched us forward, just beyond the letters for Gravity Hill. The downward slope ahead was about 15 degrees. He put the car in neutral and took his foot off the brake. We began very slowly to roll backward, uphill. Then we stopped. We tried it again.
We studied the lay of the land for a clue that might explain this, at the meadow, at the stream, the trees around it and the ridge line beyond. We muttered under our breath, "I can't believe this," and, "What the hell?" Did the wind seem to be rushing a little more insistently? Wind could move a car. I rejected the notion as soon as I uttered it.
We drove slowly down the hill, almost even with a concrete building on our left. The road behind us was sloped just enough to pull on the thighs if you were to walk it. Jon stopped, put the car in neutral and took his foot off the brake.
As the car began to glide backward uphill somewhat more swiftly than before, we reacted as if we were on a gravity-defying amusement park ride. Our faces went wide, and we began to giggle.
So, Gravity Hill wasn't some stupid thing on the Internet that we would later regret wasting a day finding and shrugging off disappointedly.
As the car rolled backward, I thought of curtains being pulled by the wind through an open window. Soon, we were near the crest of the slope. The car rolled to a stop. We were pointing downhill.
As Jon studied the bank of the hillside and the ridge lines and measured the ascending line of telephone poles with his raised hand, I stared at the hay bales and the clouds and thought, the twilight zone. No cars had come, no sounds but the wind and the stream. Anxiety began to crimp the edges of my imagination.
We pulled the car onto a swath of grass and began walking. We walked with our eyes closed to see whether it felt as if we were walking downhill. We walked backward, to see whether there was the same kind of pull on our bodies.
It had to be an optical illusion. You can't roll uphill. Reason kept dogging me, but each time we returned to the concrete building to try the ride again, my mind began tearing pieces of possibility from all the supernatural suggestions I have absorbed in my life. A fissure lurks in the ancient crust below the earthly cosmetic of hill and dale. We are sitting directly above a mind-blowing magnetic imbalance or a trapdoor to Middle Earth. "How long are we going to keep doing this?" I asked. Jon had turned around several times to try it in both directions.
"I'm trying to figure it out," he said. "There has to be an explanation."
I knew there had to be, or I think I really believe there had to be.
Some time later, we were sitting at the bar at the Shawnee Inn in Schellsburg. It was the kind of bar that seems to have the same cast of characters as every other roadside bar you come across, anywhere in the country. Country characters who are amused that you have come from the city.
The men at the bar chuckled at our queries about Gravity Hill, as if it were one helluva good practical joke.
"Look at the slope," said one man, making shapes in the air with his arms. He was explaining that the bank tapered in contradiction to what seemed to be the slope of the road.
"Optical illusion," said another. "Plain and simple."
As we drove home, I thought about the expression, Your eyes are playing tricks on you. When you think you saw something that others swear wasn't there, did you really see it? You did. You had to have seen it, otherwise it wouldn't have been an optical illusion.
The one cannot exist without the other.
Diana Nelson Jones can be reached at djones@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1626.
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