Home Bound

Monday

• The High Falls of the Genesee river furnished the power to mill much of the western grain traveling along the early Erie Canal.  Rochester was known as “Flour City,”  but since then the area has hardly lived up to potential, rusting and industrial.  The city keeps trying to make this into a hip new area, but the recession broke the first efforts.

• Meanwhile, the Genesee Brewery (a real big affair over a hundred years old) realized what a prime location they occupied on a cliff opposite the falls, and has recently built a large beer museum, tasting room, and restaurant.

• It’s a pleasant place to spend afternoon August hours, plastic cups of Genesee beer in hand, on the roof deck, listening to a live band playing Rolling Stones classics.  A pedestrian footbridge over the gorge carries tour groups, couples wanting pictures, and on this particular Sunday, a person marching with a Puerto Rican flag from the nearby festival.

Tuesday

• Lake Ontario extends to the horizon North, has wide sandy beaches and surprisingly large waves, capable of wrecking sailing ships in the old days.  A huge metropolitan park with carousel occupies one corner of the intersection with the Genesee, where the seemingly inactive “Port of Rochester” welcomes shipping to the United States.  Small restaurants line the docks along the river, and a half-mile walkable breakwater extends to a lighthouse.
• New York never fear running out of drinking water _ half its border is on this lake, and almost all the water and snow that falls on lower Canada passes through here on the way to the St. Lawrence.  For those that prefer a less civilized experience, a few miles up the shore there is a large park with undeveloped beaches _ still sandy _ beneath high bluffs almost as wild as when they were first encountered by Europeans.

Wednesday

• The Strathallan has the best location in Rochester and knows it.  Taken over by Hilton a few years ago it has renovated upscale (sadly in my opinion) to become a prime destination for weddings and corporate events.  One of its new amenities is a rooftop café to overlook sunset on the skyline with a beverage of choice.
• I was a little shocked to discover that we had traveled far enough west that the sun goes down a half hour later in this time zone than it does in Huntington.  I tend to think of the world as discontinuously greater.  When places like this were founded, every local time was different.  Nobody cared. Only the coming of the fast railroads forced the issue by making our standard time zones so that train timetables would make sense to anyone.  We watched the later sun go down, looking exactly like the earlier sun does back home, if we only take the time to go out and experience it.

Thursday

• Newly opened rows of sunflowers greet my return to the usual haunts.  Surprising changes can occur to the environment in less than a week.  Even more surprising changes to my outlook.  A good vacation helps me reorient and establish new perspectives.
• The ride up was an adventure:  heavy dead stop traffic jams all through New York, then just when we thought we could relax, the nasty sound of something under the car detaching and dragging along pavement.  With that eventually cleared up, driving through a Niagara from the skies outside of Syracuse.  On the other hand, it made us appreciate a country where cars can be repaired in the middle of nowhere in half an hour, automobiles and roads don’t care about rain, and a comfortable lodging and adequate food await at day’s end.  The trip back, by contrast, was like a car commercial _ well above the speed limit, no delays under clear skies, only light traffic the whole way until within a few miles of home, where one of the local roads was being torn up by the water utility.

Friday

• Rochester’s Seneca Park Zoo is smaller than Huntington’s (18 acre) Hecksher, but manages to contain _ in addition to the usual suspects (monkeys, sea lions, snakes, fish, birds) _ a snow leopard, an Asian tiger, a white rhino, two polar bears, four elephants, and three lions.  Here the king of beasts surveys the fat luscious snacks parading below him.  In another area a bald eagle, probably injured with flight feathers clipped, preens alongside a pond.
• I bring this up because sometimes I feel caged and clipped in what I do here.  Any artisanship requires limits to allow mastery, and in this day and age most limits are self-imposed and completely arbitrary.  This current blog format has served me well, but I want to experiment a bit over the next month, and maybe settle into something different.  The pictures will remain similar, but the thoughts they trigger may veer in different directions.  Nature is inexhaustible, my commentary on it far less so. 

Saturday

• Nights are cool and dry, days delightfully warm with heat in full sun.  Adequate rainfall has kept most foliage lush.  Yet, for the observant, summer is winding down.  Nights come on more quickly,  the sun is moving south.  Some trees are showing hints of fall color.
• I claim to love all seasons, but like everyone around here I sometimes wonder in the depths of winter if it is worth the trouble.  Tuned to the culture of my youth, when September marked a time of returning to school or beginning the push to end-of-year at companies I worked for, I find this is the time for resolutions and plans and projects.  The challenge is always to find the best ways to use enforced indoor activities.  And so, more than New Year’s, I start into thinking about the next year and what I want to accomplish.

Sunday

• Spartina dispersing seeds into late summer wind and wave.  More miracles, that beds of grass can come from such tiny dry kernels.  Contemplating the spread and continuation of life _ positive impossibility rather than evolutionary competition _ can be far more rewarding than studying the entire remainder of the cosmos, stars and all.
• I can be religious in the sense that I believe there is an awful lot of the reality of our universe that nobody is capable of understanding.  I’m no neo-Platonist _ our reality is far more substantial than shadows in a cave _ but our reality is only part of much more.  I am not religious in that I think worrying about it, trying to figure it out, or submitting to my own or other’s ideas of what metaphysical reality (or purpose or meaning) may be is completely futile, silly, and almost a blasphemy on merely accepting and appreciating existence.

Openscapes

Monday

• Huntington is blessed with many landscapes, seascapes, townscapes, and harborscapes.  Language mavens were obsolete before anyone got around to naming mallscapes, ballparkscapes, and parkinglotscapes, among others, but those are here as well.  A photograph from a cheap camera in such a place never really captures the view nor invokes the actual experience, but it can give an idea.
• I try to come up with a theme each week that unifies my daily entries somewhat, and in this case I am trying to be more general than usual.  We’re driving up to see our son in Rochester on Thursday, where there are farmscapes quite different from the few remaining on Long Island, and vineyardscapes much more vast.  So, for a while, I will concentrate on the large rather than the small.

Tuesday

• Skyscapes, of course, are available to anyone anywhere who is not locked in a cell.  Some are more dramatic than others, but all bestow a sense of freedom. 
• It takes a professional photographer, with an artist sensibility, to truly record a sense of such things.  I see well enough, but do not have the technical skills to convey much.  On the other hand, the purpose of this blog, if it has any beyond keeping me occupied, is to encourage people to open their eyes and hearts to all the fantastic opportunities that surround us all the time.  Suggestions, then, are all I can offer.

Wednesday

• Few hillscapes exist in Huntington (or even Long Island.)  This area is just a big pile of sand left by the glaciers.  Still, there are bluffs along the North Shore and long ridges (called moraines) further inland.   Huntington exists where it does because three passes through such obstacles allowed easier access to the interior by horse-drawn wagons.  Even small hills can be steep, and for draft animals (or people of a certain age) any hill is too long.
• I probably picture this hill too much.  On the other hand, there is something to be said for knowing a locale intimately through years, seasons, and changes.  Utrillo painted Montmartre as if he had caressed each wall (and possibly had, returning from the bars.)  Corot treated Fontainebleau forest as his own private garden.  I find an awful lot of professionals these days concentrate too much on the same famous feature and put all their effort into effects.

Thursday

• Temporary farewell to tidal vistas.  Rochester is four hundred miles away, through cities, forests, mountains, plains, fields and at least one huge swamp, crossing once nearly impossible barriers like the Sound, Hudson river, deep ravines, high bluffs, following the only early (water) path connecting the East Coast to the center of the country.  Seven-odd hours, taking it all for granted.  Hundreds of years ago, most people in Western Europe hardly traveled more than five or ten miles from their village; until very recently almost everyone else in the world did the same.  Today such a person is considered a sheltered recluse.
• By such standards, I am almost a habitual hermit.  I try to appreciate the daily miracles _ even the man-made ones of abundant food and water, electricity, medicine, entertainment.  But once in a while, we break out a bit, and at such times I strive to view such things as wide clear highways and fast cars not as ordinary conveniences, but as magical passages to places that are different enough to refresh my sense of perspective.  

Friday

• Didn’t take pictures of farmland, although much of western New York was flush with crops, having received adequate rainfall this year.  Hard to remember that New York is a major agricultural state, fortunately situated in the event of global warming, since it is unaffected by sea level rise, is not within any models of severe systemic drought, and would only benefit from a few additional degrees of temperature especially in the winter.  Of course, tourism, as the main (only) street of Canandaigua demonstrates, remains a strong element everywhere.
• I’ve told my son to purchase land up there, only half jokingly.  Unfortunately, because of the time scales involved, only governments and corporations (and wealthy aristocratic land-holding families) gain much from long term trends.  The rest of us must get by in our mayfly lives with whatever short term events are going on.

Saturday

• Lake Canandaigua, one of the Finger Lakes, demonstrates why folks upstate do not feel deprived of water activities even without an ocean, sound, or salt-water bays.  Unaffected by tides, the docks are a little unsettling to someone used to high pilings. 
• I had hoped to take lots of pictures of farms and fields, which were quite plentifully in evidence while on the thruway.  But as it turned out this was a complete family vacation, and our son is an urban professional no more into spending time looking at cows and corn than any of his peers in Manhattan or any other city.  So I’m making do with whatever pictures I did take.  Trust me, however, we passed lots of farms just getting here and back to Rochester.

Sunday

• Gritty Monroe street, a block from Wayne’s apartment, resembles in some ways the old Greenwich village, the only difference being that there are back yards and tree lined side streets behind it.  But the ambience of all kinds of odd people _ bikers, transvestites, near-hippies, young professionals and college students provides an interesting mix, which he claims is mostly kept in check and is a lot less frightening than it was ten years ago.
• The south side of Rochester is the good side, not the one with crime and murders and urban poverty.  It is slowly gentrifying, but never sank particularly low, and has a wonderful housing stock.  Hopeful government redevelopment and infrastructure improvement is in evidence all over.  In the meantime, rents and houses are affordable.  It’s lovely on a hot August afternoon, in its own way.  We have been assured it is far less so in the middle of February, although even with snow piled high a vast assortment of restaurants and bars of all types stay open.

Late Bloomers

Monday

• Late blooming wildflowers like this thistle are now in full stride.  Their strategy is to avoid the mad dash of the early spring and summer when everything else competes for resources like mad; bide their time to bloom when insects and sunlight are guaranteed to be plentiful, the temperature is warm, and the ferocious pace of the earlier plants  has eased up or ended.  The downsides, of course, are that rain can be infrequent, solar energy each day diminishes, and the growing season becomes very limited.
• I also love cultivated species which add color where there would normally be little.  Their particular strategy is to completely throw in their lot with humans.  If the people disappear, so do they.  And, yes, I know that is anthropomorphic drivel, but isn’t it fun?  Doesn’t that give us a better perspective?  Fairy tales exist to help shape our world view.

Tuesday

• Admittedly, this time of August has few spectacular wildflowers or weeds.  Nothing equivalent to a Lady’s Slipper or Crabapple smothered in pink will be in view.  This sea lavender, with many lovely but extremely tiny flowers, is a good example.  As if more mature plants tend to have more somber displays.
• At any age I thought I had it all figured out.  Ongoing circumstances always forced changes in attitude.  Now, like other older folks, I often claim to be mature, experienced and wise.  When I break out of such reveries, the only appropriate response is uncontrollable laughter.

Wednesday

• Domestic and cultivated flowers now take up the slack in unusual outside colors.  Gardens are in full bloom with annuals and perennials and exotics, such as this hibiscus which somehow survived the harsh winter and is doing marvelously.
• I do tend to concentrate on the wilder side of harbor sights, but the fact is Huntington is cultivated and mostly tame suburbs.  It’s silly to pretend that these man-made and beautiful landscapes are not just as much a part of the world as any roadside weed or springtime woodland wildflower.

Thursday

• Queen Anne’s Lace has been opening its wide white heads for a while now.  Soon each will curl into a basket and brown up as it dies.  It’s one of the reliable signs that summer is well past midpoint and autumnal equinox is not far away.
• As I have grown older, particularly since I turned sixty, it seems I have more time in each day to enjoy the outdoors.  Yet unfortunately my memories are less capacious than they once were, and no matter how much I pack in on each walk it seems to dribble away far faster then, for example, certain recollections of long ago and far away.

Friday

• One of the few thistles along the harbor this year.  It’s amazing how the same apparently barren spot of cracked roadside can support an entirely different set of plants from one year to another, probably depending on rainfall, temperature, and the randomized dropping of birds and breeze.
• Almost everything I find now is non-native, even “invasive”.  We feel sorry for the crowded-out original and less-hardy original inhabitants.  Of course, it is necessary to remember that this works both ways _ in Europe American ragweed is a tremendous problem _ we probably made out better on this particular exchange.

Saturday

• Not sure what these are springing up in the narrow sands at a tiny beach at head of harbor.  Certainly showier than a lot of the other species which tend to be more tucked away than showy.
• I used to know all the names, or rush to references if I did not.  But as Gertrude Stein said, what’s in a name after all?  Someone who first classified it christened it in some Latin nouns and adjectives, which almost nobody uses anyway.  And the “common folk name” changes from locale to locale.  Better to just accept it as the miracle all such things are.

Sunday

• Another relatively tiny wonder, also now unknown to me.  Probably in the compositae or astor family.  Beautiful enough for its own needs of propagation, of course, or it would not be here.  This desolate area has nothing planted purposely except a few straggling pines and skimpy beach roses added by the town when they rebuilt the park next door.
• The bees are now extremely busy in our gardens, crawling around phlox and dahlias.  I’m always amazed at the sheer number of different insects _ giant bumblebees, tiny honeybees, earwigs, and of course the unseen cicadas constantly singing from the trees above.  I often have trouble realizing how much independent life our little area supports, and it is somehow a comfort given the dire stories we are fed each evening.

Hot Fun

Monday

• A long spell with temperatures near ninety every day, some with breezes some calm, scorching sun.  Kids and many adults on vacation.  Water has heated up nicely: even on Monday beaches are crowded, various craft cram the waterways, and children play at catching crabs and chasing minnows with nets.  Early in the day, on a low tide, there is still some solitude to be found.
• Not long ago, I loved lonely beaches.  I could not sit still and would walk miles along the sand as the rest of the family sat and absorbed sun.  Now I’ve slowed down a lot, and enjoy places with lots of activity, where I also sit and, I suppose, add something to the ambience.  Even on a brutal day, beaches this time of year are a far nicer place to hang out than the air conditioned prisons our TV doctors are always stridently telling elders to hide in.   

Tuesday

• Folks heading for their power boat permanently moored in deeper water.  Small boats barely afloat serve to ferry them out and back, the mooring is swapped for the duration.  Even in these civilized areas, theft of such small craft is not unknown.  An even more difficult problem is some being left to decay and rot along the shore when owners move or die or become disinterested.  On occasion the town clears out the whole roadside bank.
• I never quite understood the buoys themselves, but they are lifted in early fall and distributed anew each spring.  That must be done by professionals _ the spacing must be such that winds and tides will not cause collisions _ and each one requires payment to the town and is jealously guarded by its owner.  In any case, this is the “poor man’s solution,” the rich far prefer marinas with docks, security, gas, food, and everything else including help if it’s needed.

Wednesday

• Nowhere on Long Island is pristine _ perhaps not even primeval before the first Europeans arrived.  Yet walking along dirt roads through the woodlands and coming upon a meadow of grasses and milkweed like some reminder of centuries ago can allow some contemplation of man and nature.  More so, of course, when there are few other people around.
• We live on one of the most crowded and developed areas of the planet, so even the parklands are frequently filled.  Like many antisocial people, I have the gift or curse of being easily alone in a crowd, sensing others more as if they were flocks of geese (or passenger pigeons?)  One almost sure way to have maximum room is to go against the grain _ wet cool weather along the beach, or as today inland in humid heat that sends everyone else to the shore.

Thursday

• When Americans mostly lived along the Eastern Seaboard, and dreamed of being the next Rome (but exceptional!) Long Island Sound was dubbed “The American Mediterranean.”  On a hot August day with sun sparkling on wind whipped waves as sailboats dart about, it almost seems true.  Of course that effete European lake never experiences any winters like this body of water.
• We have plentiful public beaches and open areas, grace of bygone wealth and ancestral pride.  Some claim my boomer generation will bequeath nothing but ashes, but I think our record of environmental cleanup, social responsibility, heritage preservation, scientific research, economic growth, and knitting the world with commerce, culture, and electronic communication compares favorably with any others.  This bay, for instance, is cleaner and more alive than it was when we came into adulthood.

Friday

• The James Joseph goes out several times a day from the town dock, through the inlet and sets up just offshore on the Sound.  Although it can be chartered, it’s mostly just families going out occasionally to fish for something a decent size.  They must be successful, for the boat is usually followed by a huge flock of seagulls feasting on the thrown overboard remains of the cleaned fish.
• I find it hopeful that there are such activities remaining.  Fish populations must be relatively ok for this to pay well enough.  And I do agree that most true sportsmen tend to be conservationists.  More than that, this helps to protect the local environment more than donations to some remote wilderness, which is also necessary, but infrequently encountered by most of us.

Saturday

• This scene from Northport looks like an impressionist painting of the Paris Tuilleries.  People sitting, talking, eating, walking dogs, and mostly watching other people accented by brilliant harbor background.  In times of incessant  electronic immersion, it’s comforting that ancient human patterns and behaviors can sometimes prevail.  Probably people have gathered thus in beautiful places forever.
• I was amazed to see a couple playing serious chess on an inlaid concrete table.  Once I would have thought doing any more than taking in the spectacle and moving on was a severe waste of my time.  Now, slower and possibly wiser, I am just one of the crowd, letting a golden afternoon slowly drift from future to past without any of my help at all.

Sunday

• Small children need active play, no matter what time of year.  Even in high heat of summer, park playgrounds like this one at Hecksher are wonderful spots.  Sometimes in the overwhelming affluence of this culture, parents try to recreate everything in their backyard.  That can be a losing proposition, since various parks offer variety of scenery, and ranges of equipment to keep kids from being quickly bored.  Plus toddlers grow so fast that often back-yard construction is out of their age group within months.
• For a while, it seemed playgrounds were being dumbed down to such rigid safety standards that all that was allowed was sliding down a short plastic tunnel.  Happily, I see, swings and merry-go-rounds and jungle gyms are back in fashion.  Total safety is always an illusion, since any of us can severely hurt ourselves stepping off a curb or getting into a bathtub. 

Ripe

Sunday

• Catalpa seed pods look like giant string beans.  Most are higher in the tree.  The sheer overabundance of everything has always amazed people, leading some like Malthus to gloomy thoughts and predictions, and eventually providing Darwin with the underpinnings to his theory.
• I usually just walk by without noticing.  Green on green takes a little effort to make out until they darken later in the year.  Yet this tree is producing the next generation as vigorously as any hickory (whose nuts are becoming large enough to dent the hoods of cars carelessly parked under it.)

Saturday

• Hard to even get close enough to photograph the small berries of poison ivy.   That’s no real trouble, since it would be extremely nasty to eat them.  Perhaps this was the original tree of knowledge of good and evil, and it was rewarded by making its leaves and fruits toxic to people.   Animals do not, apparently, share the same allergic reaction.
• As far as I know, there has never been an attempt to domesticate or even use poison ivy for food or medicine.  It’s one plant that by luck or careful coevolution goes its merry way everywhere without folks doing much more than swearing as the itch later develops.

Friday

• Renaissance Christian concepts of the tree of knowledge of good and evil depicted an apple, but even a cursory scan of internet information shows how complex and universal those concepts were in many times, places, and religions.  The standard American understanding came from bible illustrations largely based on European painters.  The common apple is very much a creation of humans, aptly illustrating knowledge and, if one is into good and evil, even the dangers of meddling in genetic s.  Lately even more evils of pesticides and fungicides to create unmarked fruit, or the breeding of ever more prolific but tasteless abundance.
• My life has been long, relatively happy, and filled with incidents I enjoy remembering.  It is difficult to resist feeling there is some divine purpose, but easy to decide most other people’s conceptions of the same thing are ridiculous.  So I enjoy bible stories as science fiction morality tales, but I prefer modern fables of the same general type.  An apple, however, still recalls Durer and Michelangelo which provide beautiful images enriching my imagination.

Thursday

• Like a long introductory oboe solo, ailanthus seeds deepening into burnt orange herald summer’s future demise.  Since these invasive trees are easily controlled and their pollen apparently does not cause allergies,  they are well tolerated and even beloved by city dwellers.  Some marketing genius gave them the common name “tree of heaven,” which didn’t hurt their cause.
• Much summer remains.  Today is very hot, but who knows what may come.  We take comfort in averages, but averages are made of heat waves, cold spells, tremendous storms, long droughts, and calm times.  Those are what we actually experience, and even if the rest of the summer hews to average it may consist of strong contrasts.  So also the portents  of any change _ it will surely come, when and how are hardly certain.

Wednesday

• Apparently in olden days a summer chore for frontier children was to go out daily with a bucket to pick the ripening wild berries.  Lovely sunlit dewy mornings, clean air, birdcall all around, a pleasant fantasy.  But any chore is work, especially daily, and although perhaps less brutal than some of the other things children back then had to do, it involves stultifying heat and humidity, vicious insects, thick brambles, and disappointment.  Any ripe fruit, like these blackberries at Coindre Hall, are also rapidly harvested by wild creatures.
• I can imagine perhaps one pleasant morning a year doing such a thing for fun.  Then, being a child of my own age, I realize there are more interesting ways to spend my time, such as useless writing.

Tuesday

• Rose hips can be made into a nice tea, but it would be hard to subsist on them.  “Paleo diet” fans claim once people left the tropics, they had to eat nothing but meat, although game is also hard to procure every day in extreme cold or drought.  Only the development of staple crops such as cereal grains, potatoes, and corn allowed seasonal famine in temperate zones to be (largely) overcome.  That also led to domestication with useful byproducts of eggs and milk.  Without agriculture, life with winters or monsoons is chancy and difficult; with it, at least the elite (and the culture it transmits) can usually survive.
• The “natural” fruits and berries around here are products of long human development.  It is hard to find anything that could be used as a food source that has not been touched and “improved” for use by our species.  Unlike some, I have never yearned for a return to the healthy diets of the past.  For that matter, I am grateful for electricity, chemicals, fossil fuels, and all the other “horrors” of modern food supplies which allow me to eat my fill of anything anywhere at anytime of year.

Monday

• Everything rushes towards maturation.  Goslings, cygnets, fish, crabs, and infinite varieties of seeds and fruits grow rapidly.  Farmers are overwhelmed with produce, which will continue a few more months until decreasing sunlight and eventual frost bring an end to this year’s production.  Nature accelerates its annual increasing slope towards deepest winter. 
• People take a bit longer.  My wife and I sat on a dock last night watching the sun set.  It only takes three months to see almost a hundred sunsets, few of us will experience a hundred summers.  Of those hundred, many are when we are helpless children, or increasingly declining adults. According to 1960’s biology, I am genetically useless; according to Spencerian Darwinianism I am harming the species by holding back the most fit.  Human society _ especially civilization _ is supernatural in the sense that it upends almost all natural laws, including those that would have killed me off a long time ago.