A Pictorial Tour of the Finger Lakes

Carol and I had a fabulous time!

We laughed and laughed and laughed, and pried into the intimate details of each others’ lives, and endlessly debated the question of why there are still cornfields throughout New York’s Southern Tier that have not yet been harvested even though it is nigh October.

Also, we explored Watkins Glen State Park, visited the Farm Sanctuary, made two trips to the Corning Glass Museum, and generally immersed ourselves in the deeply weird ambiance of small towns that ought not to exist except that at one time, 200 years or so ago, somebody thought there was some compelling reason to build them.

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If ever Wes Anderson decides to make a movie about a weird little hotel in the Finger Lakes, he’ll pick the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort.

The property includes Hector Falls’ two lowest cascades:



As you can see, the falls are right under a concrete roadway. Not optimal placement for a majestic landscape attraction! Upstate New York is just filled with strange civic engineering decisions like this one.

The Ritz Carleton, it was not. Days Inn, it was not. Jonathan, the guy who owns it, spent 15 years driving a taxi until he could save up enough money to buy a dilapidated 1960s resort, which he is slowly renovating. The rooms have all the amenities, but scattered across the property are cabins he hasn’t gotten around to renovating yet. Funky!



I love funk.

“You don’t mind if I give you some advice, do you?” I asked Jonathan. (Of course, if he had minded, I would have given him advice anyway! It's one of the things the exchange of cash allows you to do.) “If I were you, I’d play up the funk! Pretend it’s a style decision! Maybe paint the place pink! Or yellow! Throw some plastic flamingos around. Wait! What would be the Finger Lakes equivalent of flamingoes?”

“Uh—we’re putting in aluminum siding,” said Jonathan very politely.

Anyway, I loved the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort. TripAdvisor members, by and large, did not. So I urge anyone reading this to log on to the TripAdvisor site immediately and write the Finger Lakes Waterfall Resort a glowing review.

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Watkins Glen State Park is justly famous for its gorge. It wasn’t formed by the usual erosion process but by the unequal rates at which the underlying sedimentary shale, sandstone, and limestone layers freeze and fracture. The result is a natural staircase—considerably helped out by WPA efforts in the 1930s—that runs along Glen Creek's waterfalls, cascades, and plunging pools:







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In the early days of my marriage to Ben, while I was working for People Magazine, we would visit Nancy, his mother, in Millport every summer. Robin was her only grandchild.

Millport is a mere 10 miles away from Watkins Glen.

So, Watkins Glen brings back memories.

It may have been here, in fact, that I developed my obsession with economic geography since B and I spent endless hours tromping around the town and the hills above it, wondering whether it would make any sense to buy one of those 19th century mansions with incredible stained glass windows but only one indoor bathroom for seven bedrooms and, of course, despite the fireplaces, a bitch to heat in the winter. You could buy one back then for $50,000. The mansions had been built by industrial moguls, businesses long since bankrupted, corpses rotting away in one of the innumerable graveyards that also dot this part of New York.

The area has changed. The New York Finger Lakes district is now the second-largest wine area in the U.S., and they specialize in the types of Teutonic whites, Rieslings and Pinot Blancs, that don’t do well in Napa/Sonoma.

Money flows into those tiny towns that dot the lakeshores! But it’s seasonal money. Wintertime is bleak. So little Watkins Glen uses every trick it can to bilk the tourists in the high season. Oddly, the town elders haven’t figured out that the best way to bilk tourists is to offer tourists McLuxury at bargain rates. Watkins Glen’s bilking is cheesy and therefore, touchingly innocent:



Why, there’s even a Zoltar!



Bruce Shoe’s family originally came from the Finger Lakes. (That’s why they have that cottage on Keuka Lake.) Perry made all his real money buying and selling railroads when he subsequently moved to Minnesota. But the original Shoe building still stands:



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The Corning Museum of Glass is astonishing in every way.

Unlike just about every other museum I’ve ever been in—including several New York City museums I actually belong to—the Corning Museum of Glass did not give me a migraine after an hour and a half. Maybe I won’t be a veterinarian in my next life. Maybe I’ll be an artist who works in glass:



A tiny, tiny fraction of all the wondrous things we saw:











We did a glassmaking class. Here is Carol looking grim and determined as she begins her apprenticeship:



Due to a failure in communication, our beads will be mailed.

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We also visited the Watkins Glen Farm Sanctuary, founded by Deadheads in the late 1980s. The Sanctuary houses just under 1,000 animals rescued from farm factories and the like but mostly functions as an advocacy group. It’s a wonderful place, and I’m sending them a check:









“I’m starting to feel guilty about eating meat,” Carol murmured to me halfway through the tour.

Not me! Meat doesn’t comprise a huge part of my diet anyway, but the little I eat, I like.

The Sanctuary is big on promoting the vegan lifestyle.

To me, though, it’s not about giving up meat. It’s about raising animals that provide that meat in a more humane way. Or possibly growing meat proteins in vats.

At Deep Springs, Max did a rotation as the ranch butcher for six months. He has a trade he can fall back on when this U.S. Constitution thing crashes and burns!

But, after he started at Stanford, he became a vegetarian for a while. When I asked him about it, he told me “Oh, I’m not really a vegetarian. I’ll eat meat. But only if I know it was raised and slaughtered in a humane way. Like I’ll eat venison if I know the hunter.”

He’s no longer hardcore about his diet, but I suspect he’s still very careful about sourcing meat proteins.

One thing I think I will give up is eating turkey on Thanksgiving because those factory farms really do torture those turkeys. Not gonna post pix—they're actually pretty scary— but those poor turkeys looked like prisoners who’d survived some kind of Abu Ghraib run by Napoleon the Pig.

Anyway, fabulous weekend:



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Of course, Watkins Glen is only 30 miles from Tburg, so on the way home, I popped in to see RTT:



In general, he is doing well. Returned to work. Completely rearranged the furniture in the apartment—it looks a thousand times better; he has a really good eye for design.

But, of course, rearranging the furniture means he’s gonna stay in the apartment. For the foreseeable future.

I get why this is practical. John, the landlord, is gonna give him a break on the rent. It’s close to his work. He doesn’t have a car, doesn’t yet have a driver’s license, and when I offered—once again—to give him my car, he said, “Thanks, Mom. But I am never, ever gonna learn to drive a stick shift. I tried. It’s not happening.”

On a deeper level, it’s the place he’s called home for the past 10 years.

And right now, he needs the security that only home can give him.

But he has got to get out of Tburg. Out of upstate New York. I worry that it gets harder and harder to generate escape velocity, and I don’t know how I can communicate that to him without nagging.

Plus there is my sense that come winter, Ben’s ghost, like Catherine Earnshaw’s before it, will begin tapping at the window: Let me in! Let me in!

Robin is sad. The old posse has dissipated. Fortunately, he has gotten back together with the fabulous Rachel who love/love/love/loves him and will take as good care of him as he will let her.

Still. I was melancholy the next morning when I finally began driving back towards the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley. Route 17! In the rain! The very highway that Ben and I drove so often when we were very much in love and if not exactly young, then at least not yet old.

I swear—when I’d made the trip three days ago, the trees in the Catskills were still mostly green!

And now, they were mostly orange.