Tiering Up
Today we drove the last leg of our Eastbound journey from California to New York. That rounds off to 2,800 miles in seven days of driving for an average daily ride of 400 miles. Today’s ride was only 335 miles, so about five and a half hours plus whatever stops we decided to make. We made it a forced march at 5mph over the speed limit (which I figure put us marginally over the speed limit by 2mph after consideration of the speedometer inflation factor built in by all car manufacturers). One gas stop and two rest stops later we made if from downtown Cleveland to high above Cayuga’s waters, a.k.a. Ithaca.
One of the great overused references for those of us having schooled or lived in Ithaca, besides the commentary that it is gorgeous (surrounded by gorges) was that the Homeric legend of Odysseus had him dreaming all through his voyages about his return to his home on Ithaca. Ithaca has been the subject of epic poems and has always stood for the ideal of homecoming. It is not an accident that I call my home in Ithaca, Homeward Bound.
But I have never driven across the length of the continent to cross the country in my quest for Ithaca. And I have certainly never done it after an absence of eighteen months without seeing my spiritual home and the place where my children roam. My new home on the range (technically the chaparral) where my sculpted boulder buffalo roams, is nice and we love it, but that’s where we live. Wabash is where Kim’s heart lives and Ithaca is where my heart lives.
The drive from Wabash to Cleveland was all about fields of soybeans and corn that is not yet quite knee-high as we approach the Fourth of July. Note that new GMO crops drive this standard up to as high as an elephant’s eye per the lyrics of Oklahoma! That all reminds Kim of her visits as a child to Uncle Hubert’s pig farm in Lagro, and Aunt Ruth’s chicken farm (along with its chickenshit) near Lincolnville. But the drive from Cleveland to Ithaca runs up along Lake Erie on Rt.90 and then takes an abrupt right-hand turn in Erie, PA. That’s where Interstate Rt. 86 (the old Rt. 17) starts and goes for 222.2 miles from Erie across the Southern Tier of New York to the Catskills and dead ends at the New York State Thruway at Harriman, New York. Old Rt. 17 was the preferred route between Ithaca and New York City back in the day. I’ve driven that route countless times, but I have never driven Rt. 17 (the new Interstate 86) across the western half of the state, and never heading towards Ithaca after a week on the western roads.
As we headed east towards Jamestown, the first thing we pass is Lake Chautauqua, the home of the Institute that became what Teddy Roosevelt called “the most American thing about America”, the summertime entertainment and cultural phenomenon that grabbed the country by the throat between 1874 and WWII. For those never experiencing a Chautauqua gathering or speech, imagine a TED talk with a broader culturally diverse audience, a hundred years prior. From Jamestown to Elmira, The Southern Tier Expressway weaves its way through the northern part of the Allegheny Plateau and is comprised of numerous and continuous rolling wooded hills, occasionally interrupted by a river like the Susquehanna or Delaware.
When I was growing up and driving here and there in the country from the Midwest to the Northeast, my mother, who spent her first twenty years in Ithaca and then another ten years between Ithaca and Plattsburgh, had as her geographic reference to the world, the rolling hills of Upstate New York. Everywhere we went, she would say that this area “looks a bit like Upstate New York”. To her, Upstate New York was the center of the Universe, but the center that she needed to escape in order to appreciate. She spent her life living on three different continents and traveling to the rest, and not the best of the rest, but the most difficult of the rest. But, like me, her heart always lived in the rolling hills around Ithaca. When she died, I was given some of her ashes and I spread them in Fall Creek so that they could flow down the gorge, over the hills and into Cayuga Lake. Her heart will forever be a part of these rolling hills of Upstate New York.
So, the biggest draw of the Chautauqua Circuit, Russell Conwell, wrote and delivered a much-touted speech called “Acres of Diamonds” about the fact that opportunity was everywhere and you didn’t need to leave your backyard to find the path to riches in life. I am far less a fan of the theme that Conwell advocated about the need for everyone to seek wealth and riches and that rich men were inherently honest and that poor men were not to be trusted. But I am a fan of his belief that opportunity is all around us and that we can find grace in the place were we find ourselves rather than elsewhere. We just watched the new production of In the Heights, the Lin Manuel-Miranda play that he has made into a modern classic of a musical. That show centers around people with dreams that didn’t think they could find them in Washington Heights only to find how much more there was sitting right there at their feet in the Heights.
For the full distance of some one hundred fifty miles along that Southern Tier Expressway, I found myself thinking about how comfortable I feel, even driving through a misty rain, in the rolling hills of Upstate New York. There is something about the expansive vistas along that particular route that seems more a part of who I am than anywhere else I can imagine. I have spoken of the cathedrals of Zion and the views of the Pacific from my hilltop, all wonderful views, but not the places of my heart. I have left a small piece of myself on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, on Middle Range Pond in Maine, the beach at Ostia and on New York Harbor. But all of those pieces don’t add up to the portion that will one day flow down Fall Creek, through the gorge to Cayuga Lake where it will merge forever with the portion of my mother that has chosen to stay in the rolling hills of Upstate New York, specifically here in the Finger Lakes.
The ride today, culminating at Homeward Bound and an afternoon walking around marveling at the advancing growth of nature around its landscape, found me welling up with emotion. I choose to call this my form of tiering up over my heart and its home.