the cassandra pages

Reflections on a Visit

The weather was strange for central New York in mid-December, but that strangeness, that off-balance quality, is becoming normal. The geese circled overhead, honking incessantly, and even when they had settled down on the river, beyond the fields, you could still hear them calling to one another, like social media gone wild. I wandered along the shore of the lake one morning after the geese had left, looking into the stones beneath the clear water as if each of them represented a day of my childhood, idly tossed at the time but now accumulated and innumerable. There were dandelions still blooming in the grass, and next to them, thin sheets of ice, frozen overnight and broken in the morning. I knelt down and pushed aside dry oak leaves, looking for acorn caps, but the ones I found were already decomposing into the rich humus beneath the layers of leaves -- all exept for a few, carefully placed on the tops of the stone wall by chipmunks or squirrels for me to pick up and put in my pocket.

The Shades of Cherry Valley

Wind-pollarded trees

Line the Cherry Valley ridge

Silent sentinels

Or splayed-fingered settlers

Frozen at the first war-whoop.*

 

Micro-thin shards of ice, piled by the waves on the shore of the lake.

I'm just back from a quick trip to central New York to celebrate my Dad's 88th birthday (he's doing great.) While there, I went for a ride with him in our newly-restored 1952 Willys jeep, he and I played a few games of ping-pong (he's as impossible to beat as ever) and later went with my father and his girlfriend to a show at the Arts Council in Norwich, NY:  "A Blue Suede Christmas" by Scot Bruce, a well-known Elvis impersonator who plays a lot at Disneyland. He was so much like Elvis it was quite disconcerting!

Natural music was of a different kind. There were thousands of Canada geese in the area, and on Saturday morning when I got up, there were huge flocks wheeling overhead, calling to each other in a wave of sound that was almost deafening. On the way home, we passed a field that was white with snow geese, with thousands more circling up from the field in a continual pattern that reminded me of an insect swarm, or the living balls made by small fish as they try to evade predators. It was the sort of sight we had hoped to see when we visited the snow goose migratory staging grounds at Cap Tourmente in Quebec, but that day we only saw a handful of them.

Central New York has always been fairly wild country, home to large herds of deer and other smaller animals, and a stopping point on the flyway for many migratory birds; it's one of the things I always liked about living there. Now it seems to be even more this way. We saw large flocks of turkeys as well as deer, and my cousin told me that she regularly sees and hears coyote. Dad saw a black bear last year, but bear and moose are only occasional visitors south of the Thruway and Adirondack Park, so far as I know. I'm curious about sightings of bobcat, fishers, and lynx - do any of my readers have any information on those species in that area?

 

*I can never drive past Cherry Valley without remembering the Cherry Valley massacre, which took place on November 11, 1778 -- a group of British and Loyalist soldiers, Seneca and Mohawk Indians attacked a fort and the village of Cherry Valley, and massacred 30 people, mostly women and children. It was one of the most horrific massacres of the entire Revolutionary War, and to some respect still haunts that part of central New York State.

Au Sable

The Ausable River, looking upstream

We were in the Adirondacks on Friday, near Whiteface Mountain and Lake Placid, where we met up with three dear people, two of whom are longtime blogger friends.

Many glorious leaves were peeped at.

Many wooly fibers were petted at the local yarn shop.

Many bottles of excellent Montreal-made and home-brewed stout were drunk.

We had a very good time. Many photos were also taken, but by my husband -- somehow, I actually forgot my camera! So these camera-phone photos of the Ausable River will have to suffice for the moment. French-speaking friends, would you translate that as River of Sand? Is the river on the sand, or of the sand, or just sandy? There are, I think, old dunes in the area, but all the sections of river I've ever seen are full of boulders!

Looking downstream

When I was growing up in New York State, we pronounced the word Aw-SAY-bull, rather than au-SAHBl, and Ausable Chasm was more famous than the river itself. I've never seen it. The Wikipedia says that this gorge "has a continuous exposure of a section of the Potsdam Sandstone more than 160 metres (520 ft) thick, which includes, in an unpublished location, a rare, mid-cambrian jellyfish fossil."

Now that is something I'd dearly love to see, and to search for on a subsequent trip...maybe with these same intrepid friends!

In the Country - 3

 

Wheatfield.

We went up on a nearby ridge on a gorgeous day last weekend, and drove through the central New York farmland. This area, in general, is quite depressed economically, and every time I've gone recently I've been able to see the deterioration, which seems most apparent to me in the towns, where more and more shops are empty or boarded up, and increasing numbers of individual properties seem to be in disrepair. Unemployment is high, and several factories have closed or moved. Yet, in the grocery stores, where a lot of people looked pretty down-and-out, prices were higher than in Montreal.

Beans in the foreground; cabbages (blue-ish) in the middle distance beyond the trees and grass.

Corn. Everywhere.

Family farms have been hard hit here, as they have been all across the country. But recently things have seemed a bit better. One development in recent years has been an influx of Amish and Mennonite families from further south. They, and some other enterprising local farmers, are leading a revival of community supported agriculture, through CSA food-basket shares, and the sale of cash crops, eggs, crafts, and baked goods at the farmers' markets which are becoming a feature of small town life. Milk prices have been more stable, too, since the remarkable growth of a yogurt company, started in 2005 in a closed Kraft plant, which now makes a new brand of Greek yogurt, Ciobani; the factory buys most of the milk produced in this part of central New York, and it's all hormone-free.

The region seems divided, however, about a much more contentious issue: energy. I already mentioned the windfarms which have gone up in Madison County, but I haven't spoken here about the natural gas wells. During our drive we were astounded at the number of wells in the area. The gas companies enter into long-term leases with the farmers and landowners, many of whom have been so impoverished that they don't want to refuse; we heard of some who later wanted to get out of their contracts, only to find out that this was impossible. The area sits on the Marcellus shale, which is rich in natural gas and desireable for fracking. (As I understand it, the type of well shown above is a straight gas well, not the result of fracking, but perhaps a reader of this post who knows more can explain better.) New York State has put a moratorium on fracking while the longterm effects on groundwater are studied. I can hardly blame local people, who already feel forgotten and hopeless, for signing up for a chance for guaranteed income, but I'm very sad about what may happen in the future.

Meanwhile, the land continues to bowl me over me with its beauty.

In the Country - 2

Windmill blade, en route. There are two windfarms fairly close by, but not on a huge scale - each one has a dozen or so windmills. The local population is divided about whether this is a good thing or not, as they are about fracking. We saw plenty of signs in Madison County saying "No Industrial Turbines."

Homemade ice cream at Gilligan's Island. The lamps are made from minnow buckets.

Sheep, safely grazing.

Daisies, of course.

And back to the lake for some ripple-watching and fish-splash-listening...

and lying on our backs, watching the slow dance of the clouds.

In the Country

I'm back now, in my studio, in Quebec, and both feel like quite a contrast to the rural, agricultural landscape and small towns of New York State's Chenango and Madison counties, right in the center of the state. I love it there, where I grew up, for many reasons, not least of which is the peacefulness of being surrounded by nature and quiet. There are other aspects of life in the U.S., particularly rural areas like this one, which are not happy or peaceful at all, and which are painfully obvious to me whenever I go back. But my family was doing well; my father at 87 is still vigorous and enjoying life and golf and good health; the lake itself was clear and seemed in better ecological balance than it has been for some time. It was a good visit, with beautiful high summer weather all the time we were there. I'll post some more photos tomorrow; these are all from the small lake where I spent my childhood and where my dad still lives.

Part of our shoreline, looking northeast. Froggy habitat in those reeds beyond the ferns!

Crown vetch.

Honeysuckle berries.

And who was eating them. (A pair of cedar waxwings: they were very unafraid, and I watched them mating on the branch just before I took this photo.)

And a portrait of an important member of the family, exactly the same age as I am. Restorative and cosmetic surgery is an ongoing project!

Trip

It was a long hot drive getting here, with big holiday waits at the border. But I'm now in central New York, visiting my dad.

More photos tomorrow, all lush and nature-filled.

Wild Fire

My friend G. is a research scientist living on Long Island. He also loves to hike and kayak and explore natural places, and is keenly interested in (and writes about and photographs) the ecology of that part of the world. The recent wild fires on Long Island were nearby, and when he sent me these photographs as part of a letter, I asked if it would be OK to share them with my readers. G. expanded on the text a little, and this is the result. In his first paragraph he speculates, tongue-in-cheek, about the origin ofthe fire; in the past week, however, he wrote to tell me that ongoing investigations are increasingly suggesting arson.

 

On a clear windy day, a little over a week ago, a brush fire started in the tinder-dry pine-oak woods of Eastern Long Island, not far from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a nuclear physics machine designed to create and observe the hottest matter ever made on Earth, thousands of times hotter than the center of the sun.  The source of the fire remains under investigation.  More likely a careless cigarette butt than an escaped quark-gluon plasma, in my opinion.  

By late afternoon, smoke was visible for miles in all directions. Volunteer fire fighters from more than a hundred local departments across Long Island were working to keep the fire contained and away from the clusters of homes as the wind swept the front of the fire line eastward across sparsely populated woodlands.  First thoughts, of course, turn to friends who live downwind, with their organic garden in the woods and small flock of pastured, named chickens who supply us with eggs.  Then to their unknown neighbors, and to the countless volunteer fire fighters, who train and equip for just such occasions,  who enjoy a special camaraderie, the intermittent gratitude of their neighbors, a rare opportunity for heroism amid danger, plus a chance to dig in the sand with their expensive toys.

When it is over in the morning, I read that over 1100 woodland acres have been scorched, several homes and businesses destroyed, but mostly astonished relief at how much worse it could have been,  with only a few minor injuries among the fire fighters.  After catching up on  the "where were you when..." stories with friends and acquaintances, it is time to think about mourning for the woods that feel like my own, through which I often walk to work, solitary miles of sandy paths, through pitch pine and scarlet oak, blueberry and cat brier, more likely to encounter white-tailed deer and wild turkey than a fellow walker.

Here, a foggy morning walk through these woods only a few weeks before the fire.  The leaf-litter is decorated with the foiled camouflage of ground webs,  deadly-invisible to unsuspecting insects in dry weather, but now revealed to all in a cloudy dew.   Even the architect is too embarrassed to be seen next to her luminous creation, far too visible to be functional.

--

The disaster tourist's urge to gawk is restrained by closed roads, continuing fire danger and police investigations for a day or two, but eventually I am drawn to the smoky devastation, to see for myself.

Failed Firebreak

Unnamed sand roads cross in the woods.
Hidden by overgrown pitch pine saplings, stands a street sign
incongruous, once red, now charred and blistered,

East Firebreak and North Firebreak
dividing four quadrants of scorched earth.

What was once pine needles, leaf litter, early spring-dormant underbrush, and a generous tangle of new windfall from last autumn's tropical storm Irene, is now monochrome black and grey, stretching to a more distant horizon, a rolling carpet of lustrous charcoal in the shapes of needles, twigs, and logs.  The standing trees are in shock. Many will survive, but for now, the needles change from unhealthy yellow-green to brown, almost as I watch.  I tell myself, these woods are made for fire.  The pines and the oaks take one more step in their battle for sunlight. And a cleansing burn of the understory is something that in retrospect, we can wish had been done more proactively throughout the pine barrens, to reduce the danger of the truly rampaging wild fire that might one day follow the fuel and wind through an area 10 times or 100 times larger, making us wonder, whose land is this, anyway?    

Our western neighbors, toward "the city", have already cleared and paved their habitat,  leaving a few parks and many lawns, but little wild land or wild fire danger, just as thoroughly as we have exterminated wolves and bears. We need not pave and exterminate, indeed we depend on these wild acres not only for their wildness, but also to recharge our wells with rainwater better than what we drain through our cesspools.  But those of us who choose to intrude on the woods must expect to be part of nature's cycles, like tenants on the fault line, or in the flood plain.

A week later, and we've finally had a soaking rain. Roots beneath the char push out new growth and the race is on again.  The air is still heavy with damp smoke odors, but alive with territorial bird calls, pronouncing their intent to start over.

Parmanu's New York Diary

"Man with Hat" (c) 2012 by Parmanu

"I do not know what it is like to live there, but as a visitor, no matter how many times I’ve been to the city before, New York does not fail to impress. Like Venice, Paris, or Mumbai, its character assails you the moment you step into the city. Arriving by train into the New York Penn station, the same passengers who were relaxed and laid back when they boarded the train in the suburbs spring into motion, like toys with wound up keys, and march with an infectious purpose through the station into the maze-like streets of Manhattan..."

Highly recommended reading and seeing, from one of my favorite writers and blogger friends.

 

A Farm in the Catskills

 

This was our final stop, after Cooperstown, before heading back to Montreal. We stayed overnight in the farmhouse, visiting someone dear to us, who served us white wine and cheeses and huge pickled capers and olives in the garden, and a delicious dinner afterward, and then talked until we were all falling asleep. The next morning we got up and ate the breakfast I've already shown you. Then we went on a walk to see the ancestors' resting places, the basil and tomatoes, the barn filled with new hay, the old tractor and the young workhorses -- and finally, reluctantly, headed back up the Northway in the Hudson Valley and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, the long and beautiful waterway that lies between the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.