Beth went home a few days ago, from Montreal to the place where she grew up, not far from the place where I did. On her blog she posted photos.
That landscape is so familiar. Essentially identical to the first one I knew, and then nothing like it whatsoever, different in the way each cubic foot of topsoil is different, opaque and unknowable.
This morning I thought of Hamilton Street in Geneva, how it rolls over the ridge toward Main Street and around the north end of Seneca Lake, a beautiful view in one direction and decaying town in the other, and the internal landmark denoting twenty more miles to Grandma’s. I wondered if I would ever see it again. I have dozens of relatives in the area, and none I’d mind seeing again, but it was my grandmothers who prompted the drive out to the Finger Lakes when I visited Buffalo.
I’m not even sure I’ll see Buffalo again.
The thought does not bring sadness, exactly. My last few visits have not brought a feeling of returning home, exactly. I have made my home out here in the chaparral and redwoods and cacti, and when I’m in New York, if even for a weekend, I long for the West. I cannot relax until I am past Omaha. I have a nephew and a niece I’ve never met, and aunts and uncles with whom I’d love to visit, and yet I know how I get.
I miss the farmscape of my youth, the staghorn sumac and rusted manure spreaders and old planks over mudholes between the drive and the back porch. Those spreaders are as likely to be drawn by Percherons these days as tractors, and hand-lettered signs advertise Amish quilts and pies to passersby. Some there are caring for the land, even if I have abandoned it.
Shale and wild grape. Thick algae around the ankles, a sensation half feel, half smell. Trodden wild strawberries on the path. In the woods, mosquitoes and tiger lilies. Each driveway has a row of day lilies, a row of peonies.
Beth’s photos are familiar. Maple and oak and hemlock forests grow back where they can, in thick stands like hair on a poodle’s back. The chestnuts are gone, probably for good. Confined to my threescore and ten I mourn the plowed forests when I see them, as I mourn the missing top third of the San Francisco Peaks.
Parochial of me. The old forests themselves were fleeting, a brief inhalation as the smothering ice ebbed.
Speaking of old growth trees in NY, I’m still getting emails from the WNY Sierra Club listserv for some reason, and just last week they were talking about how some of the last remaining old growth forest in WNY has just been logged this month. In the Erie County Forest, they found stumps and logs of hemlocks, etc. and counted hundreds of rings in some.
The logging has something to do with FEMA, apparently (I don’t know the details.)
Is it any wonder that there are thousands of aphorisms, analogies, and metaphoric rhymes about our relationships with the construct of home?? And much like home, fleeting forests are in the eye of beholders; what took 10,000 years to be, can be completely destroyed in 250, never the same again. All new people all the time, we are in this life.
I do have to laugh with you about east of here. SoCal lifeguard days we used to have a saying when referring to girls we would meet on the beach. “Does she live east of Lincoln?” This inferred that 8 blocks in from the coastline was the limit of life and sustenance for us. Now i distinctly draw my line at the Missouri River and the front ranges. There is no life east of them.
Just over the ridge from those photographs, one of the loveliest agricultural high plateaus in central New York has been cut in two by the NYS Highway Department, who cut a black asphalt scar across the wide bean fields so that truck traffic could rush into Utica without having to slow down; they even installed giant, incongruous, and totally unnecssary signs telling the traffic where to go. The landscape has been ruined. The first time I saw it I was so shocked I nearly cried. I had done a painting of that quiet field and the back side of the hill shown in my photographs a few years before; it hangs in my house now as part of my testimony to what used to be.
Chris, when you say you may never see Buffalo again, I feel a deep ache. I only go back for funerals now, and each time the city itself has died a little more. The East Side may not have been much of childhood landscape, but it was mine. To see the empty lots - why isn’t anyone gardening on them? - and the empty windows of the old church - did someone save the stained glass? - is to realize that it is not home anymore, and never will be again. Parochial of me - but we are ourselves fleeting.
(yeah, I’m off my meds.)
Chris, You really must come and visit us in decaying old Geneva New York,they have been revitalizing the old town, and we now have Ramada and Hampton Inns on the lakefront as well as many other new buildings of interest. As well as a new look to Hobart and William Smith Colleges. And while your in the area stop by and visit us.Aunt Dottie