Ithaca is not Ohio, or the death of farmland
After a lovely trip to NYC for a long weekend which ended in a less than lovely trip through traffic-filled NJ, exacerbated by extreme grumpiness over buying dishes (stupid dishes!), we landed back in our beautiful, spacious town for a whole two days before we got back into the car and went away again. This time to Ohio to visit my sister, her 3 amazing daughters, and her grandson (I'm a great-aunt, gah!).
I've visited them in Ohio plenty, but this time, the trip was fascinating. Whenever I visited there from NYC it was just another visit to a random suburb with all its sad cookie-cutter development and sea of big box stores. This time, coming form my new home, it was a visit to every city planner's nightmare. Her town and my town have very similar demographics (relatively similar population, sq miles, county population, etc) but that's where all similarities end. Here I live in a compact, walkable town, with a strong downtown core that actually gets used regularly. Within a few miles of the town center you have lots and lots of farmland and natural areas. The big box chain stores are relegated to just north of town and just west of town, both in strips that are relatively short. Ithaca certainly doesn't rate more than one of any chain store and many of the national chains don't bother with Ithaca at all. In her town there are housing developments after housing developments all built on old farmland, it takes 20 minutes of driving to get anywhere, the shopping strips are huge, trafficy, and never-ending and if you drive for a while down the same road, you'll start to see repeats, if not of the store itself, the type of store. All with a similar population. Either they must shop all the time for anything and everything or the people in Ithaca are particularly non-consumerist. Or both. Either way, the contrast was dramatic.
What shocked me most of all was the dirt. This weekend as a birthday present for my niece, I installed a perennial garden around her deck. My sister was so impressed, she asked if I could make an herb garden for her. I did so, happily. But in both cases I was dismayed when I started digging. It was hot, the sun was beating down, and the soil was hard clay. There are trees around, but they are all rather young and small. Or at least I thought they were young and small. The ones in my sister's development were at least 10-15 years old. Not too old for a tree, but considering their canopy I was underwhelmed. And in the middle of trying to get a shovel into the hard clay soil it dawned on me: the entire landscape is flattened, stunted, and sterile. I always thought of the midwest as pretty flat (in every sense of the word) but I started looking around and seeing pockets of undeveloped land among the rest. There are hills there, small ones, but they exist. Those hills are often home to mature trees with broad, generous canopies. Everywhere else the land had been bulldozed, flattened, the topsoil stripped away, and what was left compacted by heavy machinery building everyone's American Dream. This is not new information. I have my master's degree in Landscape Architecture and spent plenty of time studying about how bad development rapes the land, but that was all theoretical knowledge. When I tried to thrust that shovel into the hard packed clay all the understanding of what had been done to the land vibrated up through my elbows and landed in my muscles and became a deep, vibrating understanding. How could anything possibly grow in such constraining clay? The trees, the people, the government are all girdled and they don't even know it. They mow their lawns and throw away the clippings. Thoughts, ideas, leaves don't go back into the great cycle of living. No wonder Middle America is what it is. I wish my sister and her kids could live somewhere richer. I love them dearly and want life for them to be bigger. My one niece just got back from a year in New Zealand with all its beauty and adventure. She's suffering from the shock. I don't blame her one bit. After seeing so much of the world life can't be filled with strip malls.
In installing those gardens this weekend, I tried to take some if the land back from the developers. I laid in lasagna gardens with layers of grass, straw, clippings, manure, compost, sand, and topsoil in hopes that it will all compost together beautifully and give a worm somewhere to live.
Now, I am glad to be back in Ithaca with all its glorious bugs and trees and pure fecundity. It is an older town, with old houses, old trees, and things rotting everywhere. The rot is good - it means there are leaves falling and microbes doing their marvelous transformations so that we can grow and nourish new things. I saw a luna moth last night. It was eerie and amazing. I saw more kinds of beetles today than I can name. There are at least 3 different kids of moths flitting around the house (I let the dog out and she nosed her way back in - the door stood open long enough). There are more species of trees in this town than anywhere else east of the Mississippi thanks to a long line of experimental-minded town foresters. I spent my day making, not consuming for the sake of consumption. That is good.
I've visited them in Ohio plenty, but this time, the trip was fascinating. Whenever I visited there from NYC it was just another visit to a random suburb with all its sad cookie-cutter development and sea of big box stores. This time, coming form my new home, it was a visit to every city planner's nightmare. Her town and my town have very similar demographics (relatively similar population, sq miles, county population, etc) but that's where all similarities end. Here I live in a compact, walkable town, with a strong downtown core that actually gets used regularly. Within a few miles of the town center you have lots and lots of farmland and natural areas. The big box chain stores are relegated to just north of town and just west of town, both in strips that are relatively short. Ithaca certainly doesn't rate more than one of any chain store and many of the national chains don't bother with Ithaca at all. In her town there are housing developments after housing developments all built on old farmland, it takes 20 minutes of driving to get anywhere, the shopping strips are huge, trafficy, and never-ending and if you drive for a while down the same road, you'll start to see repeats, if not of the store itself, the type of store. All with a similar population. Either they must shop all the time for anything and everything or the people in Ithaca are particularly non-consumerist. Or both. Either way, the contrast was dramatic.
What shocked me most of all was the dirt. This weekend as a birthday present for my niece, I installed a perennial garden around her deck. My sister was so impressed, she asked if I could make an herb garden for her. I did so, happily. But in both cases I was dismayed when I started digging. It was hot, the sun was beating down, and the soil was hard clay. There are trees around, but they are all rather young and small. Or at least I thought they were young and small. The ones in my sister's development were at least 10-15 years old. Not too old for a tree, but considering their canopy I was underwhelmed. And in the middle of trying to get a shovel into the hard clay soil it dawned on me: the entire landscape is flattened, stunted, and sterile. I always thought of the midwest as pretty flat (in every sense of the word) but I started looking around and seeing pockets of undeveloped land among the rest. There are hills there, small ones, but they exist. Those hills are often home to mature trees with broad, generous canopies. Everywhere else the land had been bulldozed, flattened, the topsoil stripped away, and what was left compacted by heavy machinery building everyone's American Dream. This is not new information. I have my master's degree in Landscape Architecture and spent plenty of time studying about how bad development rapes the land, but that was all theoretical knowledge. When I tried to thrust that shovel into the hard packed clay all the understanding of what had been done to the land vibrated up through my elbows and landed in my muscles and became a deep, vibrating understanding. How could anything possibly grow in such constraining clay? The trees, the people, the government are all girdled and they don't even know it. They mow their lawns and throw away the clippings. Thoughts, ideas, leaves don't go back into the great cycle of living. No wonder Middle America is what it is. I wish my sister and her kids could live somewhere richer. I love them dearly and want life for them to be bigger. My one niece just got back from a year in New Zealand with all its beauty and adventure. She's suffering from the shock. I don't blame her one bit. After seeing so much of the world life can't be filled with strip malls.
In installing those gardens this weekend, I tried to take some if the land back from the developers. I laid in lasagna gardens with layers of grass, straw, clippings, manure, compost, sand, and topsoil in hopes that it will all compost together beautifully and give a worm somewhere to live.
Now, I am glad to be back in Ithaca with all its glorious bugs and trees and pure fecundity. It is an older town, with old houses, old trees, and things rotting everywhere. The rot is good - it means there are leaves falling and microbes doing their marvelous transformations so that we can grow and nourish new things. I saw a luna moth last night. It was eerie and amazing. I saw more kinds of beetles today than I can name. There are at least 3 different kids of moths flitting around the house (I let the dog out and she nosed her way back in - the door stood open long enough). There are more species of trees in this town than anywhere else east of the Mississippi thanks to a long line of experimental-minded town foresters. I spent my day making, not consuming for the sake of consumption. That is good.