Where the Woods Meet

Where Fall Creek’s woods meet Sapsucker Woods, Hanshaw Road curves between them. A small stream is culverted there under the road, carrying Sapsucker Woods runoff toward Fall Creek. Residents know to take it slow on Hanshaw Road through this wooded corridor to avoid hitting the deer and other wildlife who use the continuous woodland cover to traverse a gap between one county-designated Unique Natural Area (Sapsucker Woods) and another (Fall Creek). Those are probably not the place-names used by animals.

Big birds are often perched in the trees here, maybe for the view to be had at this wooded crest of the long slope up Hanshaw Road from Cayuga Heights, Ithaca and Cayuga Lake in its deep valley below. The wooded corridor at the Hanshaw Road crossing is narrow, just a couple hundred feet wide, but it spreads outward to the north and west into the wetland woods on both sides of Sapsucker Woods Road, surrounding the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Across Hanshaw Road southward, a five-minute walk through the arc of woods that widens between Hanshaw and Freese Roads brings a hiker to the steep crumbling bluffs high above Fall Creek, and onto the Cayuga Trail. Just beyond the woodland edge in old pastures is Cornell’s Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies.

To the east of this wooded corridor, Hanshaw Road curves around the edge of flat Cornell farm fields, bordered on their southern edge by Fall Creek and its woodland cover and on the north by Sapsucker Woods, old pasture lands, and wooded wetlands that extend along Hanshaw as it takes a sharp turn northward (and Lower Creek Road continues straight). Here again there is a narrow wooded meeting place, between the Hanshaw Road wetlands and Monkey Run woods. Again, Hanshaw Road parts them and a stream, culverted under the road, joins them. The stream travels on next to the hiking trail (beloved by dogs and their owners) that was once Monkey Run Road, downhill to Fall Creek.

West and south of the Sapsucker-Hanshaw woodland corridor, blue-hill vistas can be seen beyond patches of woodland as the open Cornell farmland drops away from both Hanshaw and Freese Roads toward the wooded Fall Creek valley below. Westward and downslope lies Ithaca, its suburban homes infringing upon the edges of Sapsucker Woods.

The northern extent of Sapsucker Woods and the Hanshaw wetlands are abruptly cut off by a strip of intense human development. The heavily-traveled, limited-access Route 13 highway is an ever-humming backdrop to this quiet area. The road severs Sapsucker, Hanshaw and the area’s birds and beasts from wetlands and woodlands to the north. On the north side of Route 13 from Sapsucker Woods is the Tompkins County Airport. Its need for landings, takeoffs, wide beds of flashing lights and extended runways makes it a noisy, light-polluting neighbor for the Hanshaw-Sapsucker area.

Invisible, destructive boundaries cut through the heart of this unified natural area. Sapsucker Woods Road is the border between the Town of Ithaca and Town of Dryden. The southeast border of the Village of Lansing runs east-west across the northern quarter of Sapsucker Woods Road, and contains the airport on the north side of Route 13. This division among three municipal interests has resulted in neglect and misuse on all sides of these arbitrary, highly unnatural straight lines and right angles. An understanding of the whole has been discarded.

From the micro-scale of backyard fences to the international interfaces between countries, borders and margins are places for sloppy land-use at best, and criminal behavior at worst. Farthest from the nearest seat of power and governance, borders are where unwanted land-uses are dumped. At the edges of things, planning and zoning wear thin and can become slipshod, and are more easily set aside for convenience.

Less powerful than residents nearer the center, the human residents of border areas often have the least say in how their land is used. They lose out when land managers and agents of governance are swayed by those with attorneys and a thumb on the scale as the laws are written and the regulations are enforced.

Within the Sapsucker Woods and Hanshaw Road wetlands and woodlands, the non-human residents have the least power and have lost out most of all. Over the past fifty years their land, water and air habitats and travel routes have shrunk and shriveled, severed by new residential roads, Route 13, and airport expansion, and gouged by the bulldozers and bullying of builders who have carved suburbia out of the woodlands and wetlands on the edges of, and driving toward the heart of, Sapsucker Woods.

On the Ithaca side of the line, builders are poised to eat further into Sapsucker Woods very soon, if the planning wizards can be convinced that no real harm will be done. On the Dryden side of the line, businesses were allowed into the wetlands along Hanshaw Road before residential zoning was put in place to slow their spread and impact on this wetland area that feeds Fall Creek. There should not be, but there are, big parking lots and warehouse-sized businesses set on elevated fill pads in the wetlands at Hanshaw Road’s intersection with Route 13.

At the moment (February-March 2009), Verizon is playing games with the governments and planning entities on both sides of the Ithaca-Dryden border, trying to get a (possibly non-complying) cell tower placed on the Dryden side of Sapsucker Woods Road in order to serve Ithaca residents. Verizon proposes to place this tower in that woodland along Hanshaw Road which serves as a corridor from the Fall Creek Unique Natural Area to the Sapsucker Woods Unique Natural Area. The landowner has informed neighbors that if the tower does not go in, he will sell the woodland to a developer.

This immediate situation has prompted me to write this essay, to illustrate how these woodlands, fields, and wetlands make up a unified (though under siege) natural area of semi-wild nodes and corridors between Sapsucker Woods and Fall Creek. I argue that these natural functions outweigh the value to the three adjoining municipalities of continuing to use this area for a dumping-ground of unwanted land uses and zoning waivers.

Our informal group, Friends of Hanshaw-Sapsucker, is made up of neighbors (in Ithaca and Dryden) who see a center here, not edges. We want to protect this wonderful natural area from further fragmentation and neglect. We support the work of the Save Sapsucker Woods group. We invite you to join us.

A locavore salad to kick out the midwinter jams

Call it “late winter” or “pre-spring,” these are difficult weeks with their apparently endlessly repeating pattern of snow, freeze, thaw, rain.

But the deeply cold nights bracketed by dark mornings and afternoons are already giving way to a softer light that lingers longer each day. The snowdrops have poked out of the brown oak leaves beneath the old lilac bush. No season lasts very long: our beautiful planet spins us relentlessly from one to the next, and around again.

While brooding on these verities, a person needs a salad. The soups, stews and other warming dishes of winter can cloy the body and mind, and a sharply sparkling crunchy bowl of fresh-tasting exclamation points helps us begin the climb up and out of midwinter torpor.

How to begin? After only a few months on a strongly-locavore diet, the pallid globes of plastic-wrapped iceberg lettuce trucked in from the distant California desert look a little comical; but their green freshness is a siren’s call.

Feigning deafness to that call (.ie., walking out of the hissing grocery store doors without the damn lettuce), I return home to do a fearless inventory of the refrigerator bins, heavy with locally organically grown root vegetables. With a little bit of work, a near-rainbow of sparkling crunchiness is quickly unleashed.

Cut off a big hunk of knobbly, root-encircled celeriac to release a whiff of fresh energy. Pare off its dull exterior, along with the grimy outer skin of two golden beets, and chop them into small chunks, either by hand or with a bit of mechanical help. Suddenly the kitchen is scented with bright outdoor memories, and the vivid gold of the beets tangle in a heap with the pale white morsels of celeriac.

Chop a chunk of green or red cabbage and a handful of carrots to a slaw texture, and pile them on. A turnip cut small adds bite, as does a white winter radish with its ruby core. Chop fine a garlic clove and chunk of ginger, and stir the whole thing up really well. You now have a wildly colorful, aromatic winter salad that will blast your brain free of its midwinter slump. I’d dress it with olive oil, a dab of sesame oil if you have it, a flavorful vinegar (not much), salt and freshly-ground pepper.

Serve the salad from a big bowl, and set out a few toppings for those who like to complicate matters: raisins or currants, sunflower seeds, walnut chunks, leftover peas or chickpeas, sprouts. My own favorite topping for this crunch-fest is almonds, roasted quickly in a pan and mashed into small chunks.

It’s time to wake up!

Midwinter Locavore Update

or,

Dirty Hairy Salsify

The midwinter locavore is prey to soul-searing temptation at the grocery store: "DON'T touch those hothouse imported tomatoes -- we have parsnips back at the house!"

"It's been ages since we had a bag of potato chips...(long, sorrowful pause)...maybe I can make ... parsnip fries with salsa."

"No mushrooms for us, until we finish the damn salsify."

The parsnips have been the roughest part. Ben says, edge of menace in his voice: "I am ready to be DONE with parsnips." Peggy is dogged with the haunting conviction that they taste like pee (we do not want to know how she knows).

In comparison to parsnips, most of the other vegetables in our weekly box of locally-produced, organically-grown, seasonally-available midwinter vegetables are light and cheerful, and we greet them with comparatively glad cries:"Onions!... a teeny garlic!" "More turnips -- yummm."

Potatoes and the beauteous beet (both purple and golden!) are the gods of this weekly boxed assortment. Celeriac, peeled and used as a root-veg form of celery, is also lovely. Not to mention tart and crunchy big white radishes.

BUT below parsnips lie worse vegetable snakepits.

These are the salsifies. There's salsify, and then there's...black salsify, or oyster plant. The local farmers who are in this experiment with us to make a better world (and who have to suffer the email and verbal commentary on what they send out each week), have dealt us the black salsify hand in only one weekly delivery -- so far.

That week, I cooked both the salsify -- white tubers that arrived bearing their original soil -- and the black salsify -- black tubers with black skins -- and set bowls of both on the table for us to taste-test. Both salsifies take a lot of rugged preparation: you basically have to shave them (see photo). Cleaning off the dirt and excess skin and rootlets is detail work -- not quick. When you prepare salsify, you are worshipping Mother Nature at her most basic. Digging up and cleaning native sunflower tubers is just a little bit more onerous.

Ben has a frequent diagnosis of "It tastes like dirt!" (and he's a caver, so he knows), and when we sampled the two salsifies we heard that comment quickly, although we were fascinated by the oyster scent and flavor of the black salsify. The white has that 'slightly nutty' flavor found in so many marginalized yet nutritious foods: bland, starchy, filling.

This is Thursday afternoon: a new vegetable box looms, and there's excitement coming our way -- leeks!!

It will be St Michael's Day in mid-March (still a month distant). He's the patron saint of Wales, and the Welsh celebrate their rainy, blustery holiday with leek soup feasts. The Scots wash down their haggis with whisky at Burns night feasts: is there a liquor to brighten leek soup?

Actually this is great fun, and we are learning a lot and liking almost all of it. But we do look forward to the lighthearted joys of spring and summer crops (some of which we grumbled about last year) -- Swiss chard, spinach, and eventually the pinnacle: summer-grown tomatoes, green beans, and corn on the cob.

BUT for now: "Don't touch those tomatoes, we have a whole bin of carrots to work our way through before Thursday."

Becoming Locavores

Peggy and I went a-walking, out in the August morning recently. The sky was a cloudless blue and the air warm with meadow scents as Aurelia pulled us forward with her leash toward the trees across Hanshaw Road. We carried a plastic basket and scissors, in search of rumored wild fruits along the woodland edge.

Peg’s husband Ben had returned with reports of laden blackberry bushes by the path “just beyond the manure pile” in the Cornell field and along the tree line; I had found wild black cherry trees and a fruit-filled apple tree clustered together on the edge of a homely old field tucked into the woods. I had begun roaming through there in the late 1960s dreaming of a quiet retreat, and found an old stove and blue-spotted coffee pot tossed down the slope, suggesting that long ago others had shared my liking for the wooded slopes between creek and fields. Today, though neatened by the Cornell ag school and bordered by the Cayuga Trail, this secluded cove still feels like an old home place. (Is there a New York word for that Kentucky state of mind?)

Although not radical locavores, Peggy and Ben are well on their way. The choices they now make tend to be either local – or not at all. They bike and walk great distances, or use the bus. They sort and recycle every darn scrap, and have a compost heap for the rest. Their house is undergoing a major energy-conserving overhaul. Casual long-distance travel has faded away. Their food choices focus on what is in season and what is produced locally and or with a minimum of industrial inputs.

As part of these life-altering strategies, they have purchased a “harvest share” in Full Plate Farm Collective, the local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Each week they pick up a box of produce at Ludgate Farms, gathered from three local organic farms, and each week they come to terms with chard, spinach, beets, and other crops that ripen as the season rolls forward. This relentlessly fresh array of beautiful foods demands to be eaten, every single day – there is no rest from its neediness: “Eat me while fresh – and before the next box arrives!” Since June, the packaged and processed foods in Peg and Ben’s diet have in large part been replaced by vegetable-focused dishes supplemented with pastas, home made breads, local cheeses and the occasional dab of meat from the Farmers Market. (Not forgetting locally-made Finger Lakes wines and beers!)

Additionally a modest garden was started in the least-leafy, least-wet area of their big backyard. While stealthy gophers have taken the best stuff from under the fence, there has been lettuce, a few beans, cucumbers and one healthy pumpkin; and the promise of many pounds of tomatoes – if they would only ripen.

By mid-August, Peg and Ben were comfortable enough in their new vegetable-based habits to try the wild foods that grace roadsides and woods-edges during central New York’s glorious midsummer.

On this particular morning, Peg and I scrambled into a creekbed to grab green and red apples from the sunnier side of a big old tree on its bank, and snipped a half bucket of ripe wild black cherries. These became, respectively, deeply-flavored applesauce and a small bottle of cherry juice concentrate that shouted good health. Wandering along the woodland edge, we also gathered two cups of sublimely ripe blackberries.

What a haul! And our day of small, gem-like harvests had just begun. Peg and I and Aurelia took my car on the back route across the Cascadilla and Six Mile Creek valleys, up past Ithaca College to the heights where one of the cooperating organic farms, Three Swallows Farm, is situated. Probably the proprietors work far too hard most of the year to appreciate the wild romanticism of their view across the deep hidden valley with horizons of cool blue hills further on, and a glimmer of the deep blue coolness of Cayuga Lake far below.

We were there to pick stuff on our own sweet free time, and could glance up from plucking basil leaves to look at the cows in the field below, or pause between the long undulating rows of jalapeno pepper plants to gaze at other folks like us, ambling and plucking. A mother and daughter gathered a massive bouquet of zinnias, snapdragons and cleome, an outrageous blast of bright colors. The flowers were free after all so we overcame our Puritanical tendencies and collected our own bundle of bright sweet blossoms, laid carefully in our paper bags on top of piles of peppers (four different kinds), basil leaf heaps, and sharply-scented lemon verbena. The rows of beans were done, the okra was not in yet (and difficult for Peg to love), and the masses of hanging cherry and plum tomatoes were, like the ones in the backyard, not yet ripe. But we gathered in plenty for our needs.

Back at the house, scratched and sun-warmed by our day outside, we sorted our goodies, and topped off the collection with a visit to the backyard garden, adding several crunchy green beans and a cucumber to the day’s haul.

None of these beautiful foods were gathered in great quantities. We had enough basil leaves for one big pesto meal on pasta, with leftovers. The cherry juice concentrate was enough for five drinks added to wine or sparkling water (five amazing drinks). The blackberries went into a couple of servings of morning yogurt; the lemon balm made a nice small bouquet as did the fancy flowers. The apples made plenty of applesauce, lasting several days. We did have a heck of a lot of jalapenos. A few went into two fresh salsas that very night; most of the rest were frozen for individual thawing and use.

For all the time spent working at it on that breathlessly beautiful day, we did not collect massive quantities: we gained a few handfuls of most things. But you know, a little bit of intense flavor goes a long way. And, when you become immersed in the collection, harvest and preparation of locally, sustainably grown produce, the preparation becomes part of the meal: actually part of the food value. The entire process nourishes and sustains, so that you do not need as much to eat as when your food comes from packets and boxes and frozen microwave pouches.

Within a few days after our varied harvest, Peg and Ben had gone back across the road with Aurelia to gather another batch of even riper cherries. When I last checked, they had their eyes on apple trees, heavy with fruit, going unharvested across the Cornell campus and the city of Ithaca. There’s one next to the old schoolhouse, one on Triphammer Road next to a fraternity house, one on Campus Road next to frats and dorms, and one on Buffalo Street below Stewart Avenue. The harvest becomes the meal.

Remembering Bobby: "Shared Memory Alert!"

Art Bicknell
Oh, oh, oh! Shared Memory Alert! (and WE hadn’t even met, yet!). 1964—you’re in seventh grade, I’m in eighth. On the morning of RFK’s stopover, my friend Larry Heath (a staunch Nazarene and Goldwater supporter, following his parents’ lead, of course) gave me a bottle of candy pills proscribed to “chronic loud mouths” (I’d been following him around for days quoting passages from LBJ’s “My Hope for America”—God, I was obnoxious). I remember we all (well, not Larry) gathered in DeWitt Park, across the street from the school. I don’t recall having to get parental approval. I don’t recall his car or any kind of motor brigade—just dozens of us swarming all around as Bobby shook one hand after another—including mine. I remember he was smaller and skinnier than I’d imagined, and that his teeth were very yellow. (He must have been a heavy smoker). My friend Eddie Hart lost his footing, got trampled, and never managed to get a handshake. I remember feeling bad about that. I wrote all about this event in my 1964 diary (still have it), which also includes a tracing of the big toe of my left foot, age 13.

Remembering Bobby

A presidential election loomed in the fall of 1964, between Barry Goldwater, Arizona Republican and Lyndon Baines Johnson, Texas Democrat. In New York State, Robert F. Kennedy was running for Senator, reviled by some as a ‘carpetbagger’ and by many more as the natural heir to his fallen brother’s legacy.

I wanted to help elect these Democrats, so I and fellow 7th grader Anne devised a campaign of our own.

Charles Schultz’s “Peanuts” cartoon strip ruled the comic pages, and his character Linus believed that, every Hallowe’en, the Great Pumpkin arose from a local pumpkin patch to deliver toys to children around the world. One day while doodling in school, I discovered that if you put black glasses and a cleft chin on a pumpkin, it looked remarkably like Barry Goldwater. The campaign to elect Barry Goldwater for Great Pumpkin was born.

One benefit of having a college-teacher dad was access to the mimeograph machines at his Cornell office. We used them to run off family Christmas cards and neighborhood “Nature Notes.” I devised a flyer urging people to support Goldwater’s Great Pumpkin candidacy, arguing that “If he is elected to G.P. perhaps he will lose interest in the Presidency (Yeh Yeh Yeh).” Those last three words are a “Beatles reference,” to that band whose presence saturated our lives.

Thank you to the long-suffering departmental secretaries who agreeably ran off copies of strange writings and drawings for Professor Lambert’s little girl.

With the hot pile of flyers clutched in my hand, I hung them up and displayed them everywhere I could. During a downtown political rally that my family attended, I wormed my way through the crowds in the small Democratic Headquarters office, ducking under the elbows and past the legs of full-grown people, stacking a heap of my flyers onto the table holding political literature, buttons, and bumper stickers for New York and national candidates, and then squirmed outside to the sidewalk.

In my zeal, I sent a copy of the flyer, with cover letter, to the New York Times, and gave one to Robert F. Kennedy when he came through Ithaca on his campaign tour. In my time capsule I have a good-natured thank you from the Times—and an indelible memory of Kennedy.

But first, let’s go forward in time, for a bit of back story.

In 2003, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Kentucky to bear witness to mountain-top mining and valley fill (reprehensible practices by the coal industry). I attended a fund-raising dinner in his honor that evening. When he made the rounds of the room shaking hands, I told him that I had once shaken his father’s hand. In his speech that evening, he began by saying that several people in the room said that they had met his dad when he was in Kentucky in 196().

No, no—it was not like that at all.

In the fall of 1964, DeWitt Junior High School students were abuzz with the news that Senatorial candidate Robert F. Kennedy would stop at our school to shake hands with students, on his way to the rally nearby at Democratic headquarters.

Our social studies teachers teased us: “Why would he want to meet YOU? You can’t vote!” and we would reply, spiritedly, “We will be able to vote, someday!”

On the appointed date, those of us with signed permission slips and supportive parents stayed after school and arrayed ourselves along the sidewalk outside, talking excitedly about when Kennedy’s plane would arrive and how long it would take him to get from the airport to our school.

I stood with my mom in the crowd, holding tight to the “Barry Goldwater for Great Pumpkin” flyer that I wanted to give to RFK. Sure, I knew this campaign of mine was a joke—but I also knew that it was a good joke, and I felt that he would appreciate it.

He was late, but not very. Suddenly around the corner and down the block, here he came, sitting up in the back of a convertible and waving to us as he approached. We small kids swarmed to the curb as the car pulled up, with our parents and teachers watching to make sure that we did not get hurt. No security or bodyguards. He sat high, and we got in close.

We shouted his name: “Bobby!” and he grasped our hands strongly, one after another. I shook his hand with one of my hands—and with the other, gave him the flyer. He took it and held onto it. Soon the car backed off from the curb and took off for the grownup rally, with us shouting after him.

As they drove away, his head was down—reading my flyer.
Yep, I can remember that anytime I want to. What a bright little window.

Election Day Aggravation (on being a one-l Hilary)

After voting for Hillary in the KY primary, I made my way to the post office and got in a long slow line.

Behind me was a big man with a deep, resonant voice that hummed into my brain as he talked endlessly on his cell to a woman whom I learned is suffering from depression, and for whom he had ordered online, "love that eBay!" and dropped off at her back door, six boxes of a "completely holistic, can't do you any harm" anti-depressant.

He further suggested that she stop taking her doctor-prescribed medication and shift to his cure; and then went on to tell her about his son's (don't know that for sure, as I was merely an unwilling listener) struggle with his parole officer and his license-loss for a DUI, and then on to many, many other topics in great and loving detail.

As the line we were in moved forward, I would jump ahead to get some space between me and his deep resonant voice directly into my ears, but each time he closed the gap to stay closely behind me.

This low-grade misery ended when I gained the head of the line and stepped up to the tall and handsome, grey-haired, U of KY basketball-obsessed woman postal clerk. The big guy moved to the other clerk.

"Well, how are you today!" The clerk boomed at me as she began to process my letters.

"I voted, so I feel good!" I replied, touching the "I voted" sticker on my shirt.

"Well, I didn't!" she almost-shouted, so that her voice could be heard by everyone in the place. "No one to vote for!"

OK, I thought, "no one to vote for" among Hillary, Barack, and McCain. That probably means deep religious right. I looked down at the counter and did not speak.

"Did you hear about Ted Kennedy!" she shouted, as she placed the label on my envelope. At that I looked up. She wanted a fight.

Looking her in the eye I said, "Yes, and that is terrible news to me, though I bet a lot of people around here think it's great." I had cut out her chance to smirk and do the right-wing anti-Kennedy nudge-nudge, or so I thought.

To undercut me, she took up the "thoughtful Christian" response, wide-eyed and loving. "My gosh, I know what you mean, but people really should be able to separate out a man's personal life from his political beliefs, you know?"

She was not taking this in a very logical direction, so she tried again, while we interpolated comments about adding one-cent stamps to my letters. "I remember when my husband was in college, and Jack Kennedy was assassinated, and the negative comments - "

At this bizarre attempt to show her sympathy for the Kennedys I interrupted her, trying to prevent myself from hearing more shit of this terrible type. I lowered my voice and said, "Anyway, seeing as how my first name is Hilary, I just keep my mouth shut around here to get along, you know?"

She did not hear me and shouted "What?" So I repeated myself, a bit louder. And then the big guy who had stood bellowing on his phone behind me, heard my remark and burst into new voice. "Wow, with that name I bet you aren't voting for Bama - Obama, Obama," he crowed from beside me.

I hunched down and looked at "my" clerk, who finally realized that maybe she should shut the hell up and get me out of there. I said, "You see what I mean," and she nodded in sympathy and gave me my stamps, as the guy, on his way out the door, shouted to the room, "She has to vote for Hillary, she doesn't have a choice, not a choice!"

I turned around wide-eyed to the line behind me to make my escape, and found one indignant woman shouting at the hastily retreating back of the big guy, "She does too have a choice!" The others in line stared back at me, mildly shocked at all this outcry. As I walked toward the door I saw a beautiful young black woman standing in line, with her "I voted today" sticker on her shirt.

I said, to her, "I voted too - and isn't it great?"
"Yes, it's WONDERFUL!" she replied with a friendly smile, and I went out into the fresh air.