Finding Ulysses

I was in the creamery the other day, waiting for the other hot and sweaties to get their cones so that I could make my request at the counter, looking for some way to pass the time, and I picked up one of those fliers they keep near the door for vacationers looking for something quaint to do. I must have had a secret, unrealized yearning for quaint deep in my soul, right next to my hunger for something cold.

Anyway, I picked up a flier for Cold Springs Studio Pottery, and it looked vibrant - not at all the kind of country-kitschy stuff I’m used to seeing. The flier said that the pottery adds “zing” to a dinner table. I never realized it before, but now that I think of it, my dinner table does seem to be suffering from a zing deficiency.

Having now visited the web site for the studio, I find that it’s run by the Solla family, who seem like a really charming group of people. Here’s their artistic statement:

“Cold Springs Studio began in 2002 as a family-run pottery. Inspiration comes from our garden, our travels, the seasons, our grandmother’s kitchens, our students, and our school-aged daughter. We love the simplicity of Japanese forms and boldness of early 20th-century American colors. It makes sense to try to combine the best aspects of both and see what happens.”

If you’re looking for some zing, and aren’t we all, look for their sign on route 96 between Trumansburg and Jacksonville, and drop in.

It’s been a hot, stormy summer - weather to match the political season this year. Wrapped up in the family activity of summer, you may not have noticed that you’re living in one of the hotspots of American politics this year.

In our congressional district, New York’s 24th, there’s a race for an open seat - a rare event in congressional politics. Republican Sherwood Boehlert, sensing that Republican power may soon come crashing down as the bubble of fear and nationalist hysteria threatens to pop, is retiring. This year, in our district, for the first time in a generation, the Republicans do not have the advantage of incumbency.

Democrat Michael Arcuri is running against Republican Ray Meier. I’ve been following this race since the beginning of the year, and let me tell you: Ray Meier is no Sherwood Boehlert. Boehlert was known as a centrist Republican, voting with the right wing on some issues, but also promoting science and the environment. Ray Meier is siding with the Religious Right to oppose open scientific research, and taking money from big oil companies who are happy with his plans to promote a fossil fuel economy in the Congress.

As of this week, there will be only 100 days left until Election Day. This year’s congressional elections are crucial - only if the Republicans have their majority control of Congress stripped away from them can we hold George W. Bush accountable to the law and stop the right wing agenda that is destroying America.

The Just Desserts Potluck we’ll be having this Monday, sponsored by MoveOn, will be pretty low key. The idea is that everyone will bring a dessert to share. We’ll talk, drink iced tea to cool down, and talk about the elections to come - local and state elections are happening this year too.

Just Desserts After Dinner Activist Potluck
8:00 PM, Monday, July 31
21 Cayuga Street, Trumansburg
Call 607-387-3938 for information

There will be a nationwide conference call with Barack Obama and Al Franken that we’ll be able to join, but most important of all, there will be information about how to get involved in this year’s effort to take back the Congress - focusing right here in our own district.

All are welcome. If you’re a member of MoveOn, you can register for this event by visiting http://political.moveon.org/event/eparty/10557

If you’re not a MoveOn member, no problem. All are welcome. Just show up, and bring anyone you like - including the kids (ours will be here, after all). Honestly, this is a last-minute event, so we’re not expecting many to come. If anything else, it’s always nice to say hi to a neighbor.

Hope to see you on Monday.

Like most people around Ulysses, my woods are full of garlic mustard, an invasive plant from Europe that rushes up to create tall, thick stands in and out of the shade, crowding out native wildflowers.

This year’s flowering plants have bloomed and gone to seed, turning brown. I got a lot of them, but not nearly all. I think I’ll need to hire some teenagers next year to help me with the effort to make the undergrowth safe for mayapples and jacks-in-the-pulpit again.

But, I’ve been working ahead a little bit, here and there, against next year’s seed makers. You see, garlic mustard is a biannual plant, which means that it grows from seed to establish a reserve of energy in its roots one year, and then comes back the next year to reproduce. This biannual strategy is what enables the garlic mustard to grow so fast in the springtime, crowding out slower growing perennial natives.

The trick is that the biannual strategy also makes the garlic mustard plant vulnerable - if you know when to strike. A lot of people believe that it’s too late to work on eradicating the garlic mustard in their yards, fields, and forests, but it’s not - if you know what to look for.

First year plants, sprouted from last year’s seeds are still around, perky and green. Here’s what its leaves look like, though many of the plants will be considerably larger than this. Right now, they’ll range from an inch to six inches high.

Go out and pull, and put them in your compost pile. They won’t panic and try to blossom with their last bit of energy or anything like that. They’re easy to pull, or to hoe, for that matter. Just take a look around where you work to make sure that you’re pulling up any native wildflower seedlings along with them.

An article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has some interesting implications for our local economy. Yesterday, the Baltimore Sun reported on a study by a team of researchers at Purdue University about the effects that global warming would likely have on the wine industry here in the United States. What they found was that the Southwest, including much of California, could gain enough extremely hot days so as to make the production of grapes for premium wines extremely difficult. Napa, Sonoma and other well known wine regions would be hit, according to their model.

The Baltimore Sun article also forwards the prediction that, with further global warming, “Premium wine-grape areas would shift into New England and the Pacific Northwest.” Will the Finger Lakes be enough like New England, climatologically, to benefit from this shift? Could Finger Lakes wineries reap an economic windfall from this global disaster?

Time will tell, but that time could be shorter than we might think. Last week, the National Climactic Data Center reported that, so far, 2006 is the hottest year ever on record in the United States.

It wasn’t too long ago that the gas station on Route 96 in Jacksonville changed its brand to Valero. That may not mean a lot to you. After all, gasoline is gasoline, right?

The difference with Valero is in the company that provides the gasoline. The Valero Energy Corporation is major political player, it plays the game of politics with money. The Valero Energy Corporation Political Action Committee is in the top ten list of corporate PACS in the energy & natural resources category, in terms of amount of money spent on political candidates in the 2006 election cycle so far. The Valero PAC has given out more money than Exxon/Mobil.

And where do these political donations go? Valero’s political action committee is not at all even-handed with the two major political parties. So far, of the money Valero has sent to candidates running for Congress in this year’s elections, 89 percent has been to Republicans. Only 11 percent has been to Democrats.

Of course, it’s true that big oil companies in general tend to favor Republicans over Democrats. Exxon/Mobil’s political donations to congressional candidates this election cycle have been only slightly less partisan, with 87 percent of donations going to Republicans. Shell Oil’s political action committee has given 86 percent of its money to Republicans so far.

There’s a big difference between oil companies, however, in how much money they spend on political contests. The Shell Oil Company PAC, for example, has only spent a little bit more than ten percent of what Valero has. Between the two companies, Valero seems to be much more interested in influencing our elections.

When I say our elections, I mean our elections. This year, incumbent Sherwood Boehlert has decided not to run for re-election to the U.S. House of Representatives. The contest has boiled down to Democrat Michael Arcuri and Republican Ray Meier. Ray Meier is not at all the moderate that Sherwood Boehlert was, and doesn’t have the record Boehlert had on issues related to the environment. Valero knows that very well, and rewarded Ray Meier with a big fat check to help pay for his campaign. Valero is interfering with the 24th district’s congressional race this year, siding with the Republican candidate.

Buying and burning gasoline in our automobiles is not a great thing to do in any case, but we all are participating in a fossil fuel economy, whether we like it or not. We can, at least, make a choice about what kind of oil company we’re buying gasoline from. For Ulysses Democrats, Valero looks like an unattractive choice.

Yesterday, I went down to Gimme Coffee and took advantage of a special offer that they’ve had running for awhile. You give them one hundred dollars, and you get one hundred dollar’s worth of Ithaca Hours, and three free drinks of any sort down at Gimme Coffee.

You get a 5 to 10 percent instant return on your investment with those free drink coupons.

What about the Ithaca Hours? Are you losing anything by getting those? Not if you plan on buying locally.

I sent my wife off with a Half Hour this morning as she went shopping down at Greenstar. Here in Trumansburg, Simply Red takes Ithaca Hours. So does the PourHouse. If you’ve got guests coming into town but don’t have room for them, the McLallen House B&B takes Ithaca Hours too. McLallen Street artist Dan Burgevin takes Ithaca Hours in payment for his murals and illustrations.

Check out the Ithaca Hours directory for a lot more local places to spend those Ithaca Hours. If you don’t already spend one hundred dollars at those places in a year’s time, well, maybe you should. The point of Ithaca Hours isn’t just to spread around groovy money with a colorful salamander where otherwise a dead President might be. It’s to keep our money cycling through the local economy, instead of being siphoned away to some corporate headquarters in a place like Bentonville, Arkansas.

I just stopped back in to Gimme, and was told that they’ve run out of Ithaca Hours to exchange for now, but they’re going to get some more back in within a week or so, and the deal will be running again.

While I was away in northern Michigan, the new video store opened in Trumansburg, next to the new dollar store, amid the bright new lighting system of the Big M strip mall. (Has anyone told the developer about light pollution?) Today, I stopped in for the first time.

The first thing that struck me was the newness of the place, especially the smell. The store has a new paint, new carpet smell, and it made me a little bit uneasy. I hate to think about what those fumes are doing to the employees, though I suppose that they may get used to it aesthetically.

As a business, there isn’t too much else to sell about the place. The employees are nice, and there were a couple customers in while I was browsing. The place rents and sells videos, as well as video games for the Xbox and Playstation 2. It’s a very standard operation, part of a natiowide chain that boasts of 4,700 stores - 94 per state in the union. The Trumansburg store is not yet listed on the web site, so make that 4,701.

This makes for three video stores in Trumansburg, if I’m counting correctly, but it’s been a hot day and I just got done with a spot of gardening, so I may well not be counting correctly. Anyway, with this new video store, we officially enter into the category of too many video stores for a village our size. Considering the shift in the video business away from in-store rentals and toward DVD purchases and Netflix, it’s not the best time to open up a new video shop. Monday afternoon, there’s a near parade of red Netflix envelopes going into our post office. Then again, the national franchise may have the resources to invest in waiting out the competition, to lose money for a good long while before the local guys call it quits.

Of course, in a highly centralized business like the movie industry, it wouldn’t be quite right to characterize locally-owned video stores as purely local businesses. The product is definitely not made anywhere around here. So, will I try renting a movie from the new store? Maybe, but not yet. I’ll wait for those new store fumes to settle down for awhile first.

I just met Diana Travis and Dave Capista, a couple of neat people who live right near, just down by the hospital. They were across the street with a pickup truck and some crates in the back - not seeming like anything out of the ordinary. What was inside those crates was definitely out of the ordinary, however: Racing homing doves.

Specifically, these were white doves that are used in ceremonies celebrating peace. At the height of festivities, the doves are released into the sky, as happened recently at the wedding of my neighbor’s daughter. These are recyclable birds, however. They don’t just fly around looking for the nearest bird feeder. Using their innate navigational instincts, they fly right on back home - in this case, to the nearby roost that they share with Diana and Dave.

My five year-old son went with them to the fairgrounds today to help give the doves a practice run for next week’s grassroots festival, where they will be released as a symbolic affirmation of peace. He held two of them himself, which was a pretty big thrill for him.

Diana, Dave and their doves of peace are available for any occasion. Give them a call at 607-275-9114, or email them at SoaringSpiritsLoft@yahoo.com.

I’ve been spending the last week or so in the area outside Alpena, Michigan, visiting my in-laws in their small house on the side of a lake.  In many ways, it reminds me of Cayuga Lake.  Though it’s not quite of the same length, Hubbard Lake is about 5 miles wide, they say - too wide for me to make it across in the little rowboat I use (people in speed boats keep stopping to ask if I’m in trouble when they see me using my muscles instead of a gasoline engine to move on the water, then leave me rocking in their wake).

The community where I am does not at all remind me of Trumansburg.  When I send a letter to my in-laws, it goes to Hubbard Lake, but there is no actual village of Hubbard Lake, just a fringe of houses around the lake in an unincorporated area.  My in-laws are going to a street association meeting later this morning, but that’s just because they live on a private road and need to discuss with their neighbors whether the road should be repaved this summer.  There is no mayor of Hubbard Lake, nor even a four corners.

Spruce is the nearest four corners, and it’s got a post office, a used car dealership, a church and a general store, but that’s it.  Ossineke is the nearest real village, about 15 minutes away.  There’s a school there, and a grocery store, and hardware.  Like Trumansburg, Ossineke is on a state route.  But unlike Trumansburg, Ossineke seems to be there because of the state route, not the other way around.  Route 23 defines Ossineke, which has no real geography to place it except that it is on the way to other places, and a convenient stop.  In comparison, route 96 in Trumansburg feels like a visitor.  There’s history and future in that road, but the road is not the whole of our making.

I go into Alpena to work, at a McDonald’s.  Actually, I don’t even make it into Alpena to work.  The McDonald’s is on a stretch of strip malls on route 23 that goes on for miles and miles before Alpena actually begins.  The length of this development is about the distance between Jacksonville and Trumansburg, and is filled up with gas stations and fast food restaurants, a Kmart, a struggling shopping mall, Alpena’s grocery, and a whole lot of other little businesses that go by like a long, brownish blur of dusty pavement.  I go to the McDonald’s because it’s the only place my laptop can get online for at least a hundred miles around.  Three dollars for two hours of wireless access keeps me working, though I feel duty bound to eat french fries or, in the morning, what they call hash browns.

I get coffee too at that McDonald’s, but it’s not like our Gimme Coffee.  In the McDonald’s, everyone sits in a booth, and no one talks to each other.  I don’t see anybody walking up with their dog, or sitting outside to enjoy the sunshine.  Most people stay in their cars, their engines still running as they wait in the drive-thru, instead of coming inside to get their food.

 Alpena has seen a lot of growth over the last couple decades, but has it seen much benefit?  It’s hard to even see Alpena anymore.  From the north or from the south, one has to struggle to get through sprawl to get to the heart of the little city, maybe half the size of Ithaca.  I look at Alpena’s library, which our beloved Philomathic Library easily surpasses.  There are merits to Alpena, with its place on the lake and some good old buildings remaining downtown, but its streets feel rather too busy with traffic to make a stop easy, or to make a walk comfortable.  Alpena feels driven through at the heart, impaled by its own widened streets.

How different Trumansburg’s Main Street promises to be, a project to get us out more comfortably walking on our Main Street, and to reclaim our Main Street itself from the rushing character of the state road that runs to the north and south of us.  The difference between us and the people of Alpena seems to be that we are still trying to harness our streets instead of giving them free rein.  

Without reflection, we could go the way of Alpena, with its outer skin clogged with trashy baubles and the same signs seen outside of too many towns, fake color only halfway obscuring a washed-out anemia.  Yet, I don’t believe that we will go down that road.  We know too much about who we are to loose ourselves in that way.  We are not, in spite of the dominance of Cornell employees, wholly a bedroom community, a place to sleep.  We live where we live.