Day 10 - Andover, MA to Ithaca, NY
I started alongside the Atlantic ocean this morning, and I ended at the Hot Truck….
WARNING: This is likely to be a very long post with a lot of references to Cornell. It won’t hurt my feelings if you choose to skip this.
After saying my goodbyes to Rob, Trevor, and Kiva, Val took me to the airport. After she dropped me off, and I made my way to the airplane, there was a family with a very young boy watching me go out and get ready. Since I had some time on my hands, I went back and invited them to come out and check out the airplane.
The boy’s name was Ethan, and he was just loving the fact that he got to go out and see airplanes, especially mine. I always love the joy that comes over kids when they get to actually touch something that they’ve admired from a far and they think it’s so cool, it’s even better when I pick them up and put them in the cockpit and they get to pretend like they’re flying a spaceship.
As I cruised westbound on my first leg, headed in the general direction of home, I had to play around with my altitude to try and balance the speed I was making over the ground versus the amount of gas that I was burning. Tailwinds, which are generally the case when flying eastbound, typically get better mileage and speed the higher you go. Since I’m going to be battling headwinds most of the way back, I need to balance how strong they are against the fuel efficiency of different altitudes. In this case, down at 4,500 feet, I was able to go about seven or 8 miles an hour faster while getting the exact same number of miles per gallon.
As I crossed the Hudson river south of Albany, near the town of Saratoga, I flew almost directly overhead the famous horse race track, and was able to see one of the races just getting started as I went by. I’ve never been to a horse race and although it’s not something that’s very high on my list of things to do, I probably ought to go see one at least once.
A few miles farther on, I was able to look down and see a submarine sitting on top of the ground. Yes, that’s correct, the Navy nuclear engineering training prototype is located just outside of Saratoga, New York. Past that, I continued along the edge of the Mohawk River heading towards Rome, New York, which promised lower priced gas.
If you’ve never been to upstate New York, it’s worth noting that there are many towns named after towns of classic Greek and Roman background. These include Ithaca, Rome, Syracuse, Utica, Troy,… Well, you get the idea. When Simeon DeWitt surveyed upstate New York wrote out on horseback in the 1700s, he probably only carried one or two books with him, the Illiad and the Odyssey. Towns named after famous people of antiquity also included, Brutus, Cato, Cicero, Cincinnatus, Homer, Romulus, and Virgil.
As I headed down towards Ithaca, I called the tower and asked for permission to orbit overhead the Cornell campus. It was obvious from above that there were a lot more buildings than I had known when I was a student there. Although I’ve been back briefly twice 10 and 13 years ago, it is actually been 25 years since I’ve spent any amount of time on campus.
Over the course of the afternoon and evening I logged 11 1/2 miles walking around the town and the campus.
I saw a lot of new construction, both completed and underway, and I revisited many places that I had spent significant time as a student. In some cases, the new construction has completely changed the look and feel look of an area. This is most noticeable in the College Town area, which is just off-campus. Gone are fantastic pizza places like The Nines (a converted fire station), and fun bars, like The Connection (where my physics TA used to hold class on Friday afternoons) and Dunbars. As my friend Holly pointed out, the place that used to be an ice cream store just as we crossed the bridge into college town Is now a waxing and eyebrow store. I’m not sure that when we were college students anybody even knew what those were.
As I walked around campus, I ducked into various buildings where I had spent many hours in lectures or labs. One of the first that I visited was Upson Hall, home to the school of Mechanical and Aerospace engineering. I realized it was a longshot, but I tried sticking my head into the Department Head’s office. Although they weren’t there, his assistant was, and she made a point of getting up and taking me down into the basement where all the competitive engineering teams were based and introducing me to some of the people there. Noah Is the newly appointed safety leader on the administration side, and he gave me a great tour. I had an interesting time talking to Raj, the newly appointed leader of the Cornell Mini Baja engineering team. This is the same team that I had been on when I was a student, where we built a dune buggy that could float and maneuver on the water. Over time, the water requirements have been dropped due to safety concerns, but the basic concept of the car remains the same. When I visited Brian Johnston in Fort Collins earlier on this trip, he had been on the same team with me.
Places that I tried to see in the engineering quad that are no longer there include the main lecture hall in the basement of Upson, as well as the old Computer Aided Design Instructional Facility (CADIF) in Hollister Hall. I had worked in this facility my junior and senior years as a systems operator, as well as spending countless hours writing code for classes and a special project that I did for the professor. It taught me more about coding than any other class I took.
As I walked across the campus, I heard in the back of my mind various conversations that I had had with friends and classmates while doing the same walk all those decades ago. I thought of fun and not so fun events, the discomfort of doing the walk in blowing snow and ice, and especially remembering the three months that I was on crutches. Before going onto North campus, I ducked into the Physics and Chemistry buildings, Clark and Baker, where I went looking for the big conference rooms where I used to take classes. Although the Physics auditorium was no longer there, the auditorium that we used for the quintessential chemistry class, Chem 207, is still there, although it has been done over and much nicer quality furniture.
From there, I took myself on a walk up around Beebe Lake and the gorges upstream.
Time for another geography lesson: the Cornell campus is located on the side of a steep hill above Cayuga Lake, which stretches 40 miles to the north. This lake is part of an area called the Finger Lakes because if you look at them on a map, they look like the five fingers of a hand. The whole area was covered by a massive ice sheet tens of thousands of years ago, and as it retreated, it left behind it deeply cut gorges that straddle the campus.
When I came to Cornell in 1982, one of the first things that my orientation counselor did for our group was to take us down into one of the gorges to lay out in the sun and go swimming. Officially, this was banned, but nobody seemed to enforce it. Today, there are nets and fences and walls to prevent you from accessing any of these places, as well as numerous signs reminding you that swimming and diving are forbidden
One of the most noteworthy examples of this is at the far end of Beebe Lake where Sackett bridge is located. It is a 30-foot high stone arch that spans the end of the lake as it enters one of the smaller gorges. When I was a student here, many people jumped off this bridge into the lake below. Those of us on the swimming and diving team made a point of doing all sorts of diving off the bridge. Now at the peak of the arc there is a plaque embedded in the top of the bridge pointing out that doing so is both forbidden and dangerous.
From here, I wondered all around North campus, where the most noteworthy amount of construction has occurred since I was a student. Numerous dorms have been crammed together in areas where there were open fields that I remember playing soccer and ultimate frisbee. The buildings are very nice and modern looking, and I’m sure quite comfortable, but they are not what my memories lead me to expect.
As I started to head back to the main part of campus, I took a trail dropping me into the Fall Creek Gorge. It allowed me to get down near the level of the water, but I had to hop over a fence to get all the way down to it. It is said that smells have the ability to evoke some of the strongest memories that we have, and I would agree. The smell of the creek on a warm afternoon is a unique one that brought back many fond memories of the times that I was down there as a student.
It was back up to the rim of the gorge and then out onto the Cornell suspension bridge. This was the most egregious example of efforts to enhance safety. The entire bridge has been wrapped like a cocoon with a fine steel web. Sure, you could still look through it, but you definitely had the feeling that you had been trapped. These safety measures were implemented due to a series of students and others having leapt from the bridges, including a grouping of them in 2010 which led to emergency measures to improve safety. It’s a shame that these additions impact the views, but given the benefit they provide I guess it’s something I can learn to live with.
Bridge under wraps
From the suspension bridge, I headed to the top of Libe Slope, the steep hill that looks over West campus, where I lived for three of my four years at Cornell. From here, there is also a great view of the town of Ithaca and Cayuga Lake stretching off to the north.
I quickly ducked into Willard Straight Hall, the main student union. During my student days, many of us would trek over there when the library would close at 9 PM to join in with the tradition, called a Straight Break where you would get a cookie and something to drink.
Inside the Straight
After that, it was off to the campus store to get the obligatory Cornell merchandise.
About this time, the first of several heavy rain squalls hit campus, right as I set out to the Engineering Quad to meet up with Kaleb Smith. I know Kaleb from back in Redmond, WA. He and his family attend the same church as we do. Kaleb was a babysitter for Sean and Alex. These days, he is working on his PhD in civil engineering, focusing on optimization of energy markets for wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear energy.
Once the rain died down, we walked down Buffalo Street, swinging by my old house where I stayed my senior year, which was halfway down. It is just as rundown looking as ever. Once we got down into the town proper, we headed for the Short Stop Deli. The reason that we walked all the way down there is because when Johnny’s Hot Truck, an iconic food truck that graced West campus for decades, finally shut down, they sold the recipes and the rights to their unique pizza like-sandwiches to the deli. We ordered ourselves some Sui’s, and although we didn’t have to wait out in the snow for two hours to get one, they sure tasted good.
We also passed by my fraternity house, Delta Tau Delta. It is closed for a massive renovation inside, but the outside still looks the same as when I was there.
It was back up Buffalo Street before Kaleb and I split up. He went back to his office, and I headed along Stewart Avenue towards Cayuga Heights. Along the way, I dropped down to the apartment complex, where my girlfriend lived my senior year, and I began to notice some things that I had not noticed before.
Since it’s summer, the campus is very quiet, almost unnaturally so. I had hoped to be able to listen to a chimes concert up in the McGraw Bell Tower, which was one of my favorite things to do during my student days, but unfortunately none were offered today. I did at least get to hear the bells ring the hour, the deep sonorous sound that I remember so well. Another sound that I miss is the occasional sound of the horns that would go off to alert the members of the volunteer fire department that they were needed and where to go. It was a unique sound to Ithaca, and I’m sure it has been made redundant by the development of cell phones and text messages.
At this point, my walking objective was a place called Sunset Park in Cayuga Heights. It is a park that I used to go to in the middle of winter on very cold nights. From it, I could see the entire city below and listen to the various sounds that were carried by the crystal clear cold air. Like everything else, this park has changed too: the view of the city is no longer there as the trees on the hill below the park have now grown so tall that you can no longer see the town.
I headed back to my hotel (the former Hillside Inn on Stewart Avenue just before the bridge), where I am writing this blog and thinking of all the changes that have occurred since I left here as a student. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that so much has changed, but it really drives home to me how many years I have been out here on my own since I left.
Just as Ulysses returned to Ithaca to find everything changed and not necessarily for the better, I to find that my return to Ithaca is different than I had hoped for. I’m very glad that I came, but I realize that this is not the place that I had left.
