Trumansburg Pastoral Village Life: Haiku
Appreciate the
vanishing pastoral and
peaceful village lift.
- From the written comments to the Trumansburg Comprehensive Plan survey.
is that supposed to be “peaceful village life? I think I prefer the magical idea of a vanishing pastoral and peaceful village lift.
I picture an elevator in the middle of a peaceful pasture, with some sheep, perhaps on school grounds. Where does the elevator go? Up or down? It vanishes.
What is vanishing is the pastoral people. Fewer and fewer people around here are interested in actual working the land. It is the working of the land around here that gave it many of the aspects that non-pastoral people appreciate. The patchwork of open fields and woodlots. The post and beam barns and rambling farmhouses. The grain elevators (there are your ‘lifts’) and silos.
What we are looking at now is a neglected vernacular landscape. It isn’t particularly natural and it certainly isn’t wild.
If it is simply left to succeed back to its original state, then it will be hardwood forest, interrupted occasionally by hemlock stands on steeper north-facing slopes and pine groves on the sandy well drained ridges. The only clearings will be where wind throws down the trees and where beavers drown them.
That is more or less what is happening in the parts of the national forest that they have put aside as “natural areas”. I’m all for putting aside land in the public trust as parks, but I’d rather see private land managed, especially when it is inhabited. You can’t really have wilderness or anything close to it while you have people living on the land. And I certainly would hate to see Ulysses revert to a forest littered with a bunch of expensive houses on 2 acre lots.
The land is much more than “open space” or a “buffer”. It is our partner and ultimately our parent. It is where society comes from. If we lose our appreciation for a working relationship with the land, then we have cut ourselves off at our roots.