Let ‘Em All Go To Hell Except Cave 76
Do you remember comedy albums? I guess they have been replaced by Comedy Podcasts or Sirius Comedy Radio or maybe the regular Comedy Central not-so-special Specials. Like a good cartoon in my youth that got played over and over again to our glee (Beep! Beep!), where the themes were simple and easy to grasp and the key to most of the humor came in the repetition of playing the record over and over again, comedy albums were a part of my life. I hate to admit it, but the most memorable ones were Bill Cosby records like Why Is There Air, Fat Albert and Wonderfulness. Some of those lines like “Little tiny hairs, growin’ out my face!” or “Mom is great, gives us the chocolate cake!” seem only to hold meaning to me every time I mention them. In college there were the albums of Cheech and Chong. Cheech in particular held special meaning to me since I am his doppelgänger since his proper name is Richard Marin. We even met once at Deer Valley when I told him I occasionally got calls in the middle of the night from stoners looking for him and he said he preferred to stay anonymous. I used the occasion to suggest that skiing on skis that were painted to look like reefers might not be the best way to achieve that. The sequence I always remember on their comedy album had to do with the retired Canadian hockey player, Lemonpion, who when asked about his record said, “Hey man, how was I supposed to know she was only thirteen?”
But the comedy record that had the most impact on me was issued in 1975, the year I graduated from Cornell, and it was by that dynamic duo of Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Carl was well known to us a Alan Brady from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Mel was already seared into our comedic psyche through The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. So when they took a Hollywood cocktail party riff and turned into The 2000 Year Old Man album, it was an instant hit. Mel plays the old man and Carl is his interviewer. Carl asks him if they had countries 2000 years ago, to which Mel say, “Absolutely, we had countries, each cave was a country.” Carl asks, “What was your country?” To which Mel says, “We were Cave 76.” Carl then asks him if they had national anthems, to which Mel again says, “Absolutely, we had anthems.” Carl says, “Do you remember yours?” Mel looks up remembering and says in a thin and reedy old man’s voice, “It went like this, ‘Let ‘em all go to hell, except cave 76!’”
That was very omniscient. As our world fractures more and more each day with everyone gravitating to their own little corners, trying desperately to protect their personal freedoms while not concerning themselves over the collective, we are all forming our own little caves and we wear on our sleeves the sentiment that anyone not in our cave can just go to hell. Globalization is waning, nationalism is on the rise. Nationalism is waning and states-rights are on the rise. States are starting to feel too divisive among its citizenry, so we are being forced down to the local level. Texas (at least the Republican Party of Texas) wants the right to secede from the union, but not before kiboshing any thoughts of either DC or Puerto Rican statehood. North and South Dakota want to go further than two cardinal compass points and want to split into urban and rural parts of each. So we might end up with Northwest Dakota and Southeast Dakota. From there it is only a matter of time before we are all back in our caves, hunkering around the fire wondering who;s turn it is to go out and use our AR-15 to kill something we can eat.
Nature has a way of turning back the clock of civilization whenever it can. Wildfires are keeping people from building more McMansions in the High Sierras and ocean storm surge is making people wonder what they were thinking when they perched themselves on the third dune on Westhampton Beach only to find that dunes one and two are long gone and they are but one good September storm away from getting washed out to sea. Don’t worry, the insurance carriers have seen this coming and have been refusing to insure where wildfires or ocean storms are prevalent, so the ability to rebuild will be seriously impaired.
As I sit up here on my back deck in Ithaca, I remember back 26 years to when I first saw this house. It was an old derelict farmhouse that had been largely overgrown and nature was in the process of reclaiming it bit by bit. I arrested that process and stripped the land of its offending over-vegetation and laid new footers for the house, the deck, the pool, the new carriage house and the new shed. I laid driveway gravel in thick amounts, had Ithaca stone used to terrace small garden walls and used the contrast of painted white fencing and trim to offset the steel gray of the Ithaca stone here, there and wherever. Over twenty-five years, Cousin Pete battled the forces of nature back valiantly and new gravel and lots of white paint was used to stay ahead of all of it.
Now that the University has taken back the property and is in charge of maintenance, I can see after just one year that the institution is not up to the battle against nature and that nature is already showing signs of winning. The gravel driveway, which I replenished just last summer, is already rife with weeds growing through the gravel. The terraced stone walls where my well-paid friends at Cayuga Landscaping work (I continue to pay for gardening) are looking OK, but the ones beyond their more limited scope are already showing signs of being overtaken by plant growth.
Everything happens for a reason they say and I guess the reason that I am bearing witness to all this natural dominance is to remind me yet again that none of us own any of this despite what ground leases or deeds may say. We are all just tenants of the Earth and Mother Nature can take back whatever she wants whenever she wants it. I like to think that Mother Nature is on my side on this kerfuffle with the University and that she is saying to the Universe that if Rich can’t have it, then I guess I will just take the damn thing back. I’m sure the University has an environmental lawyer on staff that knows how to bring a writ of habeus corpus against Mother Nature or some sort of estoppel to get relief until they can sell the leasehold again to some unsuspecting sucker.
While I might get some satisfaction seeing the University allowing the property to slip back into oblivion, I stop myself from that thought and more sincerely hope that another nice young family with a wonderful Cornell-connected future to look forward to does lease it and does succeed in keeping the place in tact. I hope to someday drive by 313 Warren Road and see a new personalized sign on the rock in front (I will be removing the Homeward Bound brass plaque in the next week). If that is not to be, well, then let ‘em all go to hell except Cave 76.