It’s curious that 14.3 miles is close to the distance from Cornell University to the Trumansburg Fairgrounds, where the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance is taking place this weekend. I’m not saying that I know that Ranger was actually en route to hear Donna the Buffalo, but it would provide some motivation for going the distance.

Part of this project is a map showing where Top Secret government locations are. It turns out that there are 5 nearby: Two in Bath, one in Elmira, one in Binghampton and one in Ithaca.

I wonder what’s going on in that Top Secret Ithaca location.

There’s the benefit of the exercise, of course, and the savings of a couple dollars worth of gasoline. If we’re ethically minded, we might note that riding the bicycle avoids putting a good amount of pollution into the air, keeps carbon emissions down, and withholds a bit of profit from oil companies engaged in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

At a more animalistic level, however, there’s the benefit of yummy, yummy ice cream.

This morning’s Ithaca Journal briefly notes that Bicycle Benefits has come to Ithaca. It’s a system in which a person joins by purchasing a five dollar sticker at a participating business. That sticker, which you put on your bike helmet, acts as a coupon entitling you to discounts, as high as 50 percent in some locations. Purity Ice Cream is participating. So is the Ithaca Bakery, Mate Factor, GreenStar, Taste of Thai, Buffalo Street Books, Autumn Leaves… You get the idea.

In Ithaca at 4:00 this afternoon, on the corner outside the Tompkins County Public Library, there will be a Speak Out for Peace event to give county residents the opportunity to express opposition to Obama’s decision. The event is taking place in coordination with other anti-war protests across the nation.

Contact leahlovely@gmail.com for more information.

Sadly, no, we cannot even say that this portion of Trumansburg Creek is in Tompkins County. It’s in in that little corner of Seneca County that we go through as we head out toward route 89 from the end of Cayuga Street – even if we’re headed south to Ithaca.

Still, it’s smacking right up against the Town of Ulysses, and so in order to be neighborly, I’ll post it up here in the Just Down The Road section.

What’s not shown in this video is the interesting pattern of accumulated animal tracks alongside this stretch of what comes to be called Frontenac Creek. It’s under the bridge of Route 89, and so the rain never washes the tracks out of the dust.

Some deer, and some small critters, seem to come that way, but most of all, the bank above the gorge seems to be visited by dogs with large paws. Go under the bridge and you’ll find my footprints for awhile too – until the rolling rovers run them over.

What criteria can we use to determine that it is legitimate for some trucks to drive down state routes through Ulysses, while others are not legitimate?

Is it the noise? If that’s the problem, will people seek to ban the purposefully noisy Harley Davidson motorcycles that rumble through Trumansburg every summer as their owners ride around for the mere pleasure of it?

Is it their content? We ought to remember that everything that’s in the garbage was once regarded as fresh and desirable. Do we object to garbage coming through our town in trucks, but welcome trucks filled with new things that, eventually, we will throw away as garbage?

For that matter, if we don’t like trucks with garbage in them going down routes 89 and 96, why do we welcome garbage trucks every single week to come down every little side street in Trumansburg, to pick up our garbage? If the issue is really that people aren’t being locally responsible for their own garbage, why don’t we apply this same standard for ourselves? Why aren’t we just burying all our garbage in our own back yards, and keeping those garbage trucks off our streets? The Ithaca Journal article points out that our own garbage goes into those big trucks that we love to complain about.

Besides that, we’re the source of pre-garbage that goes out into the rest of the world, only later to become garbage. People love the way that State Route 96 brings travelers into Trumansburg’s shops to buy things, taking them away to their homes. It’s good for the local economy, for someone to come and buy a dinner plate from Salmon Pottery, right? Can we, however, legitimately hate the same dinner plate after it’s fallen on the floor of someone’s kitchen, broken in two, and been trucked back through our village on the way to its final destination?

John Gant’s criteria for what’s legitimate seems to be that the trucks are making deliveries locally, to places here in Trumansburg. However, to get to Trumansburg, those trucks have to drive through other towns where their deliveries are not local. Are the trucks legitimate in those towns, or not?

It seems lopsided to me, that we’ve got some truly twisted psychological issues with both garbage and transportation. We say we don’t want garbage coming through our town, but then praise the very activities that create that garbage. We say we don’t want trucks coming through Trumansburg, but then we go to stores and buy stuff that’s come on trucks… and then throw the wrappers in the garbage.

I live on Cayuga Street, where big trucks going to the Millspaugh hardware store rush by, just a few feet from where my young children are playing. I don’t like the feeling of those trucks being so close to my home. On the other hand, I do appreciate having Millspaugh within walking distance when I need to go get a little screw of a particular size for a project I’m working on.

Other villages in Upstate New York don’t have to deal with garbage trucks that Trumansburg does, but then again, in Trumansburg, many streets don’t have to deal with the frequent truck traffic that we have to deal with on Cayuga Street. Ought we Cayuga Street residents angrily protest when people from other parts of the village come to get hardware?

I’m not a garbage lover. I’m not a truck lover either, for that matter. However, when I hear people demand that trucks filled with garbage coming through Ulysses on the way to Seneca Meadows be re-routed along some other road, I can’t help but cringe at their narrow vision of the issue.

As long as we in the Town of Ulysses are making garbage, we’re part of the problem we’re complaining about.

If you don’t know about this convention, well, you ought to. It was the spark that ignited the engine of activism that resulted, eventually, in women’s suffrage here in the United States. Present were Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. The convention made a big enough historical impact that it’s earned Seneca Falls a National Park commemorating the occasion.

Seneca Falls is just a half hour’s drive up the road. It’s in our own congressional district… and that brings me back to Mike Arcuri.

Many political leaders from around the world spoke today about the Seneca Falls Convention, showing respect not just for the historical efforts that make Seneca Falls special, but also honoring the place of equality that women deserve in our society. Congressman Arcuri was not among them.

Michael Arcuri had nothing to say about the Seneca Falls Convention. He didn’t even have an aide write a short statement for him. Congressman Arcuri’s office seems to have forgotten about the whole thing.

What else has Michael Arcuri forgotten about, sitting in his office down there in Washington D.C.?