Tag Archives: Ithaca

A Walk in Sapsucker Woods

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Last Sunday after church… following the equinox, but still a beautiful summery day (albeit with bright autumn leaves)… we took a drive over to Ithaca, and visited Sapsucker Woods.

Sapsucker Woods is the wildlife sanctuary attached to the world-renowned Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Many bird watchers and bird students find it a very special place because of the association, although it’s not particularly a place for rare birds. It’s just a place to enjoy (and study) birds.

We first visited Ithaca 26 years ago, as my wife was awaiting open-heart surgery. Now she’s waiting for a pacemaker, and she wanted to make another trip.

All of the trails are good trails, level (mainly) and well-kept (with some roots here and there). They’re good to wander around on spotting birds, frogs, squirrels, and other small wildlife. They’re good to exercise on, if you want to stride out in pleasant settings. They’re very good of you have heart or balance problems. We set off on the three-quarter-mile Wilson Trail, and we started at the pond, right by the visitors center.

The center itself is closed “for the duration,” but there were a fair number of people at the pond and on the trails – all of them observing good mask discipline and distance discipline. We saw a group of two or three college-agers, a couple of separate families with young children, one three-generational family group, and several couples or individuals. It sounds like a lot, but for most of our walk we were alone in the woods.

The pond is shrunken and anemic just now, choked by lily pads and surrounded by mudflats, thanks to the drought or semi-drought we’ve been suffering. A couple of Canada geese were honking away anyhow, while nearby a small duck (maybe a black duck) ignored them on its never-ending quest for water bugs. On the island nearby, a pileated woodpecker puttered around in the leafy tops, while an immature red-headed woodpecker zipped in and out along the shore.

The pond was open to the blue sky, but a few steps away we were in a yellow wood under the forest canopy, enjoying quiet, in companionable shade. A few deer had dug their hooves in along our way, while squirrels vibrated themselves across the trail, up the trees, under dead logs, along the forest floor… sometimes all within the space of ten seconds.

The trees were still leafed out, and the colors were vibrant that weekend, but it was also the first week that leaves seemed to be falling with purpose. They were dappling the trail and the boardwalks – in a few days, they’d be covering them. Most of those that had fallen (or WERE falling) were yellow, but Joyce found some eye-catching specimens that were mostly yellow, but with green streaks along the veins.

Although the trail goes around the pond, for most of its way it loses the sight, until you come back almost to the shadow of the visitors center. The one duck and the two geese were still on the job, but now we also saw a great blue heron, perching its four-foot height on a high dead branch. Blue dragonflies zipped by, back, and away in the immemorial manner of their kind.

Milkweed had gone by, cattails were breaking open… down from both was caught in the corner cobwebs. Among the reeds and tall grasses, asters and thistles beamed out brightly in summer’s dying green. A pleasant walk. We opened the car, took a seat, and shared a peanut butter sandwich. The trail was just right, while we’re waiting for the pacemaker.

A Visit to Cornell Botanic Gardens

I’m writing this on a soon-to-be rainy day, remembering a sunny day, about a month back, when we last visited Cornell Botanic Gardens.

*I say “last” (or most recently) because we’ve been visiting for over twenty years. And will do so again.

*A visit stretches you from the 19th century into the 21st… from the cozy Cornell of upstate New York to one of the great universities of the world. The welcome center is a modern masterpiece of glass with swooping lines and landscape-friendly placement. But next door is the old center, quiet and dignified like a gentle dowager at a baby shower.

*Vine-covered bowers shade the flagstoned walk. In the adjoining space are raised brick-walled beds with herbs and flowers, edged with a sloped rock garden. Some creative gardeners have organized plants by topic – herbs mentioned in literature, herbs used in religious ceremonies, herbs used by Native American peoples. Juncos and robins hop around at our feet in the grass, while blue jays yack and yell from the bowers and the trees. In the distance, a pair of Canada geese serenely survey the lawn.

*Next to Beebee Lake we take the circular walk that wends around the rhododendron-covered Comstock Knoll. When we stop to look at the young shoots on the branch of an overhanging evergreen, we’re rewarded with a puff that unleashes a cloud of pollen… a sight that we’ve never seen before.

*Though we enjoyed our visit immensely, we only touched on a fraction of the 4300 acres that come under the Botanic Gardens umbrella. And, of course, we didn’t touch at all on the vast academic and scientific dimension of the gardens.

*If you’re visiting Ithaca, you might also like the Sapsucker Woods nature preserve operated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. If you like public gardens, don’t miss Sonnenberg Mansion and Gardens in Canandaigua. Then there’s the Buffalo and Erie County Botanical Gardens, and the delightful gardens at Highland Park and Ellwanger Garden in Rochester. Genesee Country Village has 13 heirloom gardens scattered across the grounds.

*How many more summers are you going to get to look at flowers? Close the computer, and go take a walk.

Wanna Buy Some Books?

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More than half a millenium ago Chaucer wrote about the Clerk (or learned man) of Oxenford. He wears threadbare clothes, his horse is as thin as a rake, and he himself is so thin he looks hollow.

*Ah, but he has books… TWENTY books, in a day when every one was painstakingly copied by hand, and hardly anyone could read. Few institutions had twenty books back then. His “library” (kept right next to his bed) represented a fortune, and whenever he scraped up some money, or even when he could borrow some from friends, he bought even more… not as investments, but because “Gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.”

*Books are far far cheaper today, but no less wonderful. If like the clerk (and like me) you like to prowl around ferreting out more books to buy, where can you go?

*Well, if you want the big-box big selection, complete with cafe, there are Barnes & Noble stores in Elmira/Big Flats, in Ithaca, and in Rochester. The Rochester selection is a little smaller, since it doubles as the U of R bookstore, but also includes a nice sampling of books by U of R faculty and alumni. Besides, you can just walk up the block from Strong Hospital, if you have someone spending time there. (This store also makes a good break if you have to drive up to Rochester to meet the train or do some business.)

*The only independent new-book store in the four-county region is Long’s, on Main Street in Penn Yan. If you like bookshops, take a ride out there. You’ll be impressed by their selection. There’s also a very good local-history section, and a large selection of cards, gifts, and office supplies. If you’re there on a summer Saturday, you’ll find a sidewalk farmers’ market out front.

*Across the street is a used bookstore, Belknap Hill Books, though in my experience the hours there can be whimsical. A block or two down Main is Books Landing, a friendly used-book place in a welcoming space, with a great selection of used jigsaw puzzles.

*Also on the used-book side, try The Paperback Place on Main Street in Canandaigua, or Autumn Leaves on The Commons in Ithaca. Autumn Leaves has a magnetic effect on me whenever I’m in town. It’s a large store for used books in a university community. There’s ALWAYS something interesting.

*That’s also true at Book Barn of the Finger Lakes, out between Dryden and Ithaca. Just prowling through the place is half the fun.

*Over on Geneseo’s Main Street, Sundance Books has held its own for decades.

*Henrietta Library has a year-round book sale room. Dormann Library in Bath has its Wednesday “book barn” on the grounds whenever weather suits. Libraries in Corning, Ithaca, and Hammondsport have significant sales from time to time.

*If you want graphic novels, go to heroes Your Mom Threw Out (Elmira Heights), Comics for Collectors (Ithaca’s Collegetown) or Pulp Nouveau (Canandaigua).

*Each of these towns is interesting in and of itself, and there’s always someplace not too far away to get ice cream. Take a ride. See the sights. Buy some books.

Fascinating Stuff at Johnson Museum of Art

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Recently in this space we reported on a July visit to the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. We had gone for a special exhibition (now closed, sad to say) on Aboriginal contemporary paintings. But there’s a lot more to the museum than that.

*For instance, we also enjoyed “American Sojourns and the Collecting of Japanese Art.” The thrust of this exhibit (through December 18) is the American experience of visiting or living in Japan over the past century and a half… an experience that has led to great enthusiasm for Japanese art in this country but has also led to transformations within Japanese art… either for the purpose of sales, or by way of learning, adopting, and transforming something new.  Just the adoption of photography, for instance, marked the incorporation of an entire new technology and an entirely new art form.

*We were very pleased to see three color prints donated by our friends Jerry and Virginia Wright.  Jerry, who experienced Japan while in the military and repeatedly while working for Corning Glass Works, demonstrates varieties of ways American experience that country.

*It’s interesting that earlier military visitors, still fiercely bitter about Japan’s aggression and war crimes, quickly fell under the spell of Japanese art in all its beauty. There’s a long history of “nature art” including landscapes, but Japanese artists have also found beauty even in industrial scenes.

*While not mentioned in the exhibit, American comic books in Japan influenced manga, a distinctly Japanese form of comics, and manga has bounced back across the Pacific to influence American comics. It’s a never-ending story.

*While “American Sojourns” is a temporary exhibit, a permanent feature of the museum grounds is a Japanese garden… art in landscape. This particular garden presents in landscaping the story of the three laughing sages (Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist) – a story that raises questions about the boundaries that we build around ourselves.

*There’s more Japanese art, and other Asian art, on permanent exhibit on the fifth floor. This is also the exhibit space for ancient art, including cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia (Iraq) and its neighbors. One of these included the earliest datable picture of a man riding a horse.

*The most spectacular feature of the fifth floor is seen through the wraparound windows. Strolling around the perimeter you get a fantastic view of the campus, the city, Cayuga Lake, and the far shore of Cayuga Lake. Right below, on the north side, you overlook a footbridge across the gorge of Fall Creek.

*Of the seven levels, five are public spaces dedicated to exhibits. We covered three of those levels (one incompletely), so another visit is called for (and looked forward to!).

*The building itself goes back to 1973, and has that Soviet feel that was then nearing the end of its popularity. I suppose you can argue that the minimalist structure allows the art to stand out, but it still has a cold feel – not rejecting the visitors, but perhaps indifferent to them. Were I responsible, I would make the entrance area more inviting. But perhaps the sense is that while visitors are welcome, and admission is free, its mission is about academics instead of visitation.

*Parking is at a premium on the Cornell campus, so make sure you read signs and meters and follow instructions. My experience is that no map of Ithaca or Cornell ever shows what’s actually on the ground at the time you’re there… I think they’re both playing Brigadoon. But keep your patience, and your sense of humor, because the place is definitely worth repeated visits.

“No Boundaries” Aboriginal Paintings Are Worth the Trip to Ithaca

Our rural area is pretty well served in terms of art museums.  There’s the Rockwell in Corning, the Arnot in Elmira, the Yates County Arts Center in Penn Yan.  Down in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Gmeiner Art Center has a new exhibition each month, open hours seven days a week, and free admission every time.  Make the trip to Rochester, and you can visit Memorial Art Gallery, enjoying the outdoor sculpture garden while you’re at it.

*Of course our area is also home to a great world university, and for our fortieth anniversary we visited Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art… as we’ve been saying we’re going to get around to doing, for exactly half of that time.

*In particular we wanted to take in a special exhibition that closes August 14, which is what got us out onto the country lanes of Tompkins and the hills of Ithaca in torrential downpours.

*This is “No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting.”  Nine painters were represented, including one whose family had no contact at all with the western world until he was about 25 years old.  None of them have “academic” training in art, although several have been involved in community-based art programs.

*We’re not very familiar with Aboriginal art, but if we understand it correctly much of it is abstract or geometric.  These artists (only one’s still living) continued in that tradition.  The resulting paintings partake of traditional Aboriginal art, and also partake of modern western art — “no boundaries.”

*Several of the pieces would fit right in with the most hip gallery going.  Others definitely maintain a sense of “other,” the voice of a different culture.  Aboriginals maintaining their own culture… or at least drawing strongly from it… often need to function in the western culture as well.  Native peoples in the Americas often face a similar challenge.

*We looked very closely at most of them, and we were interested to see that the painters used few or no brush strokes.  Instead, the paintings were mostly formed by close-set dots, echoing the dot motif in Aboriginal body art.  It shares something with pointillism, but it’s another “movement” altogether.

*It’s overwhelming to look at a five-foot painting, completely covered with “op art” irregular swirls, and see that every single “line” is actually a line of dots.

*From what we understand, some of the painters indulged in a color palette far more varied and exuberant than those colors available traditionally.  Some of them are excitingly eye-catching.

*As a museum professional myself, I know the challenge of creating labels that are at once informative and short.  The labels really helped us in understanding something of these artists, and of individual pieces.

*But some labels communicated little more than the artist’s identity and a title in  one of the Aboriginal tongues.  Since the paintings are abstract, I would have found it worthwhile to know whether the title referred to a person… a place… an object… a concept… or what.  For all know they all said “Up against the wall, whitey,” which would certainly have been appropriate.

*This piece is a little late, given that the show closes on the 14th. But we found it was really worth the trip, and worth the look. And we haven’t even mentioned the rest of the museum, which will be a topic for a future blog.

A Trip to Ithaca

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Well, last month I drove two lakes over… past Hammondsport on Keuka Lake, through Watkins Glen on Seneca Lake… and made a trip to Ithaca, on Cayuga Lake.

*It’s always a good drive from Bath, through some of the finest countryside in the central Finger Lakes, and through hamlets such as Tyrone, Bennettsburg, Mecklenburg, and Burdett, past farms and vineyards and churches and cemeteries, between the “Little Lakes” and through plenty of forest.

*Everybody in my family likes to visit Ithaca, but it also makes a good place for me to go when I have to think things through alone. And overall, it’s just a good place to visit. We first did so back in 1995, when my parents sent us money and told us to go away for a few days before my wife’s (highly successful!) open-heart surgery. (This was also the first time we saw Watkins or Penn Yan, but that’s another story.

*In this space a few weeks ago we talked about my time in Sapsucker Woods, northeast of the city, and there are other very special places out on the fringe. It’s a nice level walk in to Taughannock Falls, with its straight drop even higher than Niagara’s. At Robert Treman State Park we once walked a beaver galumph down the terraces alongside another waterfall, then slip into the pool. And Museum of the Earth is definitely worth a visit.

*For me the beating heart of Ithaca is The Commons, the downtown pedestrian mall with its events, its eateries, its art galleries, and its wildly-varied shops. One World Market (formerly Ten Thousand Villages) has fair-trade crafts from around the globe. Alphabet Soup emphasizes imaginative toys and games. Outdoor Store has been purveying bikes, outdoor clothing, and other gear for over half a century. Titus Gallery carries watercolors, African art, and antiques from around the world.

*I myself never miss Autumn Leaves, that marvelous three-level used book store… OR Comics for Collectors, around the corner in Collegetown. Going to either of them always lifts my spirits.

*Moosewood Restaurant, just off the Commons proper, has been driving America’s interest in vegetarian cooking since 1973. Collegetown Bagels is always crowded, for very good reasons. Shortstop Deli opened up with a very simple mission statement: the best sub in Ithaca. It’s been open since 1978, so it seems to be meeting its mission. The State Diner started out as a manufactured designer eighty years ago, in 1936; having eaten there repeatedly myself, I can say that they are, in fact, doing something right.

*The Commons recently completed a multi-year renovation and is sort of sparkly right now, but will soon look lived-in again. A small section of the old trolley tracks is preserved, and an obelisk in the center of the Commons marks the start of the Sagan Planet Walk. This is a fun walk that ends up three-quarters of a mile away, at the Ithaca Sciencenter. The planets, the asteroids, and Pluto are spaced off proportionally to their actual distances, and represented in obelisks at their proportional sizes. If you really want to “go the distance,” the Planet Walk also includes our nearest star group, including Alpha Centauri, proportionally set in Hawaii.

*Get out from the Commons and the downtown area and you can find Ithaca Falls, plus other falls and gorges for which the city is famed. Cornell Plantation is a 175-acre arboretum and botanical garden, including lovely Beebe Lake.

*Of course we can’t talk about Ithaca without Ithaca College and Cornell University. Cornell is our state’s land-grant institution; its 1865 creation was a huge step in making college accessible to New Yorkers. A recent count showed 22,000 students at Cornell, plus three Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, and five MacArthur “Genius” grant recipients. In all 41 Nobel Prizes have gone to people who were either faculty or students at Cornell. All of this guarantees that a trip to Ithaca will find a zest, and even a goofiness, that offers a lot of fun. I like it.

Sapsucker Woods

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Well, I got up to Ithaca a week or two back. It’s a place I sometimes go when I need some quiet by myself, which is sort of a surprise, as it’s actually a very busy place.

*But I started my visit at one of the quietest places in or around Ithaca, namely Sapsucker Woods. Birders world-wide know the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which blends extremely scholarly research with resources for the backyard birder. I’ve taken part in some of their “citizen science” programs, where ordinary people use their observations to contribute to scientific study.

*I came for the woods and the trails, for the Cornell Lab maintains a (mostly wooded) 230-acre sanctuary called Sapsucker Woods. With binoculars around my neck I wandered the trails, stopping to spot the birds but mostly working on the brooding for which I’d come. Just being in the woods works wonders for me, and there are trails here that I’ve never even seen.

*Something else I’ve never seen here, to be honest, is a sapsucker. But I do run across other woodpeckers, and one of them was drumming quite close as I wandered by. I saw a yellow warbler, and even came across a couple of wood thrushes. I felt good about this because I see them so seldom nowadays, acid rain and habitat destruction having wiped out fifty per cent in fifty years.

*In the pond I spot a number of great blue herons, and a bewildering being seeming to glide along the surface without any activity for propulsion… until a head breaks the surface, and I realize with a laugh that it’s a submerged muskrat carrying a clump of reeds.

*Around the feeding station (and elsewhere) are cardinals, starlings, robins, goldfinches, mourning doves, and red-wing blackbirds. Squirrels and chipmunks zip in and out from under cover, while butterflies, moths, and damselflies flit along on the missions peculiar to their kinds.

*You can enjoy the trails on your own… they’ll even lend you binoculars… or there are activities and guided walks from time to time. Inside the center you can sit by thirty feet of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pond (lately covered with lilypads) and the feeders.

*Whenever the space is open I like to look at the wildlife murals and painting of Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Named for a great naturalist, Fuertes became a great nature artist, and his works are always wonders. Although born much later (1874, in Ithaca), he was in many ways a successor to Audubon.

*There are also two new murals, each covering a two-story interior wall. I instantly spotted what James Prosek was doing – echoing the endsheets of the groundbreaking 1934 Field Guide to the Birds, by Roger Tory Peterson. Both artists rendered the birds in their typical settings, all in black silhouette. For those of us of a certain age, such silhouettes seem as real as the birds themselves. They conjure up wintry days spent poring over those endsheets, hankering for the birds to come back again.

*Facing this is a marvelous world map by Jane Kim, depicting one representative of all 423 living families of bird in a location at which that bird is normally found – life size! The seven-foot ostrich, the five-foot cassowary, and the wandering albatross with its 10-foot wingspan all adorn more than 3000 square feet of mural, along with much smaller birds far more prosaic to us. But ghostly images show other families that have gone extinct, some in historic times.

*Anyhow, the Cornell Lab is a jewel of our Finger Lakes region – it’s even got its own Wild Birds Unlimited store. On my way out, a deer sauntered across the road in front of me. Great place.