Country Life
John Denver said, “Well life on the farm is kinda laid back, Ain’t much an old country boy like me can’t hack. It’s early to rise, early in the sack. Thank God I’m a country boy.” No one would ever mistake me for a country boy. But I’m no metrosexual smooth dude either. I never grew up in the suburbs. I’m worldly and global, but not very Latino or Italian (those being the places I lived for nine years). I suppose I’m somewhat hard to define precisely, probably because I am like the land that spawned me. America is the great amalgamator. I have been blended and homogenized in all ways. There is a part of me that enjoys the city and another part of me that needs the country.
I’m spending the weekend in Ithaca. Ithaca is the perfect country setting for me. There is nature all around me, but all the conveniences of modern life exist here too. I think it’s one of the reasons Ithaca continues to show well on all the lists of great places to live, both in general and in retirement. There is a place here called Kendal. It is one of eight such communities around the country that targets retirees with a promise to manage their living and overall care needs as they age in a highly enlightened manner. It has a somewhat fatalistic air about it, it’s the Hotel California of aging. You can check in but you can never check out, actually, you check out only by checking out. This concept works particularly well in places where a large university can be tapped for continuous learning, something a growing number of aging baby boomers of a certain stripe place high value on. I like the concept of Kendal, but less for me than for the aging members of the academy that need a place to carry on their life of the mind. It makes me feel better that it exists. I whistle past it whenever I drive by.
If you want the country club golfing life, that’s available here in Ithaca too (at least for about seven months of the year), except without all the snooty exclusivity, pomp and ceremony. For very reasonable cost you can play a round, have a drink and sandwich and be on your way. With two major universities in town whose student population equals the town’s, the abundance of athletic facilities, ranging from tennis courts and squash courts to general sports fields is significant, especially in the summer months. That same phenomenon, combined with the visiting parental population, provides a great base for strong dining choices and event spaces. In fact, if you were designing the perfect community, you would likely design something like Ithaca. It exists as an enlightened oasis amidst a sea of hard core country and all the cow shit that comes with that.
You all know the Greek stories of Homer (yes there is a town 24 miles northeast of Ithaca by that name, not to be mistaken with the town of Ulysses, which is 12 miles northwest of Ithaca) and that Ithaca was the island home of Odysseus, the legendary adventurer king who was featured in both the Odyssey and the Iliad. The fateful voyage home from the Trojan War took Odysseus ten years with Ithaca highlighted as the golden goal he strove for. Given his reputed high intellect and shrewdness, the aspiration for Ithaca combined to give the town of Ithaca a perfect setting for an institution of higher learning where “any person can find instruction in any study.” That became the motto of Cornell University 154 years ago, as supposedly uttered by Ezra Cornell himself. It was this ambition which turned raw upstate New York countryside into a world-renowned venue for research and learning.
One of the many things that makes Cornell so unique is it’s agricultural and practical curriculum. It was the first college in America to combine the elitist arts and sciences curriculum like was offered at Harvard, Yale and Princeton with the land-grant education of a state-sponsored school. The result was an Agriculture, Life Sciences, Human Ecology and Industrial and Labor Relations schools that are second to none in the world. My home in Ithaca sits on the Robert Trent Jones Cornell University Golf Course, named in honor of the most famous golf course architect, who was a Cornell agronomist. Across two fairways lies the turf grass research center, next to the equine research center, just a few miles from the Sapsucker Woods Ornithology Laboratory. You get the picture.
While I was attending Cornell, I worked for two years at the Cornell Plantations Arboretum and botanical gardens. This was my one true foray into being a real country boy, spending eight to twelve hours of each day cutting, pruning, clearing and hauling all manner of plant matter. To this day when I drive through the ever-expanding arboretum, I remind myself that I have cut almost every blade of grass and read almost every phylum and genus tag on every plant in the acreage. I have a sense of ownership for the Plantations, now officially called The Cornell Botanic Gardens. In fact, that sense of ownership extends to the whole University, with a special emphasis on the business school campus and the Arts Quad, both of which I served for years advising and securing and seeding donations for.
I think I overdid my exposure to Cornell. With a mother who went there, two degrees from there, three children who matriculated there, ten years on the faculty as a Clinical Professor (coming up every week to teach), serving on every imaginable board (even Chairing some) except the Trustees, and owning a home there for twenty-three years, you can say I’ve done and done the place. Despite that, a summer night, driving down the lake from a dinner at Taughannock Farms Inn, stopping for ice cream at the always busy Purity Ice Cream and then getting out of the car at my Homeward Bound property under the starry sky to the hush of an Ithaca night, still sends chills down my spine.
Norman Maclean was haunted by waters in A River Runs Through It. I am haunted by Ithaca and it runs through me to my core. I spread my centennial mother’s ashes over the flat rocks of Fall Creek from the easternmost one-lane bridge in Forrest Home. I remind my wife regularly to the point of annoyance that I want my ashes spread there too. My name is etched in slate (Ithaca Stone to be exact) next to my mother’s on the terrace next to Uris Library with its iconic bell tower, forever looking down Libe Slope towards Cayuga Lake. My bronzed and bearded face will forever watch over business school students entering Sage Hall past the Hall of Honor. I have offered my stone and copper statue of a reclining Socrates (the one that used to sit in front of the Gutman Library at Harvard and now adorns my landscaped back yard) to the College of Arts and Sciences to place in their coffee shop in the Temple of Zeus. How much more connection can one soul have with one place? This country is my life.