… and in some places, it was.

When I started this Finding Ulysses blog years ago, I thought that I might write on it a bit more than I actually have. Things have happened – two additional children especially – that have gotten in the way of that vision. I’d like to write more, and at more length, here than I do, and every now and then I feel bad when I see the site not so frequently updated.

I’m not feeling that way so much this evening, though, as I look on over at the official web site from the Trumansburg village government. The latest item in the news there is from May of last year, talking about the annual water quality report – the report that will be coming again just three months from now.

Yikes.

Could we arrange for the Village Board of Trustees to start a Twitter feed, perhaps? A quick Twitter search tonight does reveal that Trumansburg resident Don Ellis is a recent winner of an iPad from WSKG. What else of that sort could be shared by our local government?

In other local news, The Piggery announces on Facebook this week that it’s looking for a driver to take its products to New York City every thursday, for “CSA shares”:

“…looking for a farm driver to deliver our CSA shares from Trumansburg to NYC every Thursday starting March 10th. No special driver license needed, but a clean driving record is needed….. Please have anyone who may be interested get in touch:)”

It’s great to see anyone can offer any sort of job these days, even if it’s just one day a week. Also, I strongly respect the Piggery’s local food efforts here and at the Ithaca Farmers Market. Still – if the food travels 4 to 5 hours by road to get to its destination, how does this part of the business qualify as community supported agriculture?

Let’s get together, Trumansburg, and commit to eating more of our share of local pork – so they have less to send to Manhattan.

It’s a simple test shot of my perspective as I’m riding a bicycle down a slushy Cayuga Street in the middle of the winter, with the snow piled high on either side.

What the video can’t show are my very cold hands. I can still remember how much they hurt, just from an ungloved exposure to the air.

Our parade here in Trumansburg goes right by this plaque commemorating Sullivan’s March. 

Here are George Washington’s orders to General Sullivan,

The Expedition you are appointed to command is to be directed against the hostile tribes of the Six Nations of Indians, with their associates and adherents. The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.

I would recommend, that some post in the center of the Indian Country, should be occupied with all expedition, with a sufficient quantity of provisions whence parties should be detached to lay waste all the settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner, that the country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.

Sullivan was very successful.  They encountered very little resistance because the warriors were not there, they were off fighting the invaders – us.   One officer noted “The nests are destroyed, but the birds are still on the wing.”   They were “insurgents”, so were we, in the eyes of the British.

”Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.”

Washington was ordering terrorism.  

 Little has changed.  230 years later, we still haven’t learned much.  We honor our warriors more than our peace makers.  The soldier in camouflage is shipping off to Iraq soon, where we have killed one million Iraqis in a war based on lies.  At least the Indians were in our way.  At least we got something in exchange for the massacre, that’s where we live.  

Last year we had a peace march to protest the invasion of Iraq, but this year I couldn’t muster enough support for it, because those of us on the left seem inclined to give Obama a little more time.

But wouldn’t a peace march make a lot more sense than this militaristic parade?

Allen Carstensen

It is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eliot-spitzer/the-need-for-both-passion_b_59546.html

Here’s an easy way to tell the difference: Look at the number of petals on the flower. A woodland phlox has five petals, and dame’s rocket has four. Also, dame’s rocket is taller, and the leaves are alternating as they go up the stem, not opposite from each other. On this last point, the difference is a bit trickier. I’ve identified the flowers on my property as dame’s rocket, based on the height and number of petals, but the leaves look like they’re alternating in some places and opposite in others.

I’ve got a funny kind of mixed up feeling about the realization that what I’ve got in the woods is dame’s rocket and not phlox. Dame’s rocket is listed as a noxious weed, an invasive non-native species, whereas woodland phlox is described as a non-noxious, non-weed, non-invasive native.

Learning the truth about those purple flowers, how am I supposed to feel about them now? The horticultural orthodoxy seems to be that I should now realize that these plants are an enemy to be eradicated, just like the garlic mustard that I have been pulling out by the roots for two years now. (The two plants don’t look much alike at first glance, but they are both members of the brassica family.)

Of course, the flowers of dame’s rocket are just as pretty as those of woodland phlox. According to the sources I’m reading, that’s part of the problem. Dame’s rocket is so pretty that its seeds have been put into packets and sold to gardeners across the United States. It’s our human attraction to the dame’s rocket flowers that makes them so invasive.

That brings me to a deeper level of discomfort at the discovery of the true nature of the sweet scented purple flowers growing throughout Ulysses: I’m a non-native myself. Or, at least I can be described as one, depending on how you define a human non-native.

Some people in Trumansburg and Ulysses define a non-native as someone who wasn’t born here. For others, a non-native is anyone who hasn’t been here a long time. These people will describe Rordan Hart as a native, even though he was born elsewhere.

A lot of people here take regard person’s native quality as an important qualification for public office. Thus, we see in profiles of candidates that the first question asked of them is, “How long have you lived here?”

Well, I’ve lived here in Trumamsburg for two years now. In a lot of people’s eyes, that makes me a newcomer. Though I’ve voted in several local elections in my short time here, in many people’s eyes, a person who has lived here for a long while, but never voted in a village election during all that time until he decided to run for office himself, has more qualifications as a citizen.

Nativism usually starts to get fuzzy when you look at it closely. For example, I may have lived in Trumansburg for only two years, but I’ve lived in central and western New York State for most of my life. Before moving here, I was living in Cayuga County, just an hour to the north, which was in turn just 20 minutes down the road from where I went to high school. I was born in Oswego, and attended elementary and middle school in western Monroe County. So, you could say that I’m a non-native to Trumansburg and Tompkins County, but I am a regional native.

Besides that, my grandmother’s maiden name is Covert, like the town just to the north of us in Seneca County. It turns out that one of my great great great grandfathers was James Covert, born in New York State a long while ago. There’s a census record of a James Covert who was born right around the same time as my ancestor was born, living near here in the town of Covert as part of the larger Covert family, back in the 1800s. Does that make me a native, returned to my home soil?

Hardly. After all, I seem to be purely of European descent, unless one of my great great grandmothers was fooling around on the side, which I’ll never know for sure. I’ve been doing some geneological research recently, and it turns out that some of my ancestors were in Plymouth, Massachusetts in the early 1600s (they were in Salem too, but left there shortly before the witch trials). I’ve got some old roots in this country, but even the Massachusetts Bay Colony people came from elsewhere – mostly Dorchester, in England.

Where did they come from before Dorchester? The English people are a mix of people from many different places, as our language attests. Another branch of my family came over in the 1800s to the United States from the village of Allenau, in what used to be Prussia. It turns out, however, that the entire region around Prussia was ethnically cleansed by the Dutch long before that. So, I have no clue about the true ethnic heritage of that branch of my family.

Come to think of it, even if that branch of the family were genuine Prussian, they mixed with people of English descent when they got to the United States. That means that, even if I were to go to England or Prussia, I would be genuinely native in neither place.

How about garlic mustard and dame’s rocket? How long will they have to live here before they are regarded as natives? One hundred years more? A thousand years more? Will they never be natives, ever?

I can tell you one thing for sure: They’re not leaving. I spent last autumn, and all the way into January, carefully pulling up the garlic mustard that would be flowering this year. I didn’t get it all – not by a longshot – but I did clear some large areas. Or so I thought. This year, the flowering garlic mustard is just as thick in those areas as in the areas I didn’t weed. Garlic mustard is a biennial plant, so I know those flowering plants are not new from seed this year. It seems that they just evaded my detection, or had died back below the ground early so as to evade my probing fingers.

I could employ a team of ten teenagers for three straight weekends over the next four years to go over my four acres and pull out every single garlic mustard and dame’s rocket. What would happen then? The plants would re-invade in almost no time, from my neighbors’ properties.

I haven’t come to any final conclusion about who’s native where, or what to do about all that garlic mustard and dame’s rocket, but I know this: Nothing is as simple any more as distinguishing between a noxious weed and a native plant.

Remember, after all, that poison ivy is a native.

Ultimately, this kind of fiction project exposes the presumptions about the world that already exist in our heads, whether there are extreme events or not. About 1,400 other people are contributing to the project in one way or another, but looking through their contributions, and mine, I see them splitting up roughly into just two camps. One camp imagines that the increase of the price of oil by just a few dollars per gallon will cause riots in the street, economic collapse, and wars around the world. The other camp imagines that people will find ways to adjust their lives, alone and working together, and move on with some difficulty and anxiety, but without the end of civilization.

I put myself in the second camp, though I do peek over in my mind to pay attention to what’s going on in the other camp. I can see how communities where there are already significant problems would have those problems amplified in a crisis, but, although we do have strong divisions in the Town of Ulysses, our problems are really small potatoes compared to what other communities have to deal with.

I think Ulysses would come through all right in the end, given an energy crisis. Written as reports of a fictional reality, that conclusion lacks a certain sense of drama. Maybe that’s why other participants imagined elaborate disasters taking place in their neighborhoods. They didn’t want to get bored. Wouldn’t most of an energy crisis be rather tedious, though, like standing in a bread line?

I salute the creators of World Without Oil for creating a great psychological experiment. I have nothing against the project, but I’d like to go back now to looking at my community as it is, not how it would be in the future if things go terribly wrong.

Still, I find value in the project in the way that it encourages people to use their imaginations to consider the impact of post-peak oil on their local communities instead of the United States of America in the large, abstract scale. Imagining how the Town of Ulysses might react to the disintegration of the fossil fuel economy is much more provocative a challenge than making pundit-worthy predictions about nationwide trends. Here, on the level of the town and village, we have more of the genuine human element at play, and less of the posturing creations of mass media interpreting that human element for our filtered pleasure.

So, I’m giving this fiction experiment a few more days to work itself out, and see what emerges. I’m inclined to think that Ulysses will fare better than many other communities.

I noticed that the leeks I’d left in the ground over winter had been gnawed on by the herd of deer that regularly pass through my back yard.  Is there nothing that they won’t eat?  I’m starting to think that given enough time, they’ll develop a taste for anything!

I visited a friend in San Francisco last year, my first trip to the northwest US.  The weather was delightful in January, a bit drizzly, but moderate in temperature.  It was sweater weather, but everything was very green, and flowers were in bloom in profusion.  My friend told me the weather never varied much during the year.  It got drier in the summer, but it never got very hot or very cold.  Some people love the weather there.

Me, I like the change of seasons.  Summer means long bike rides and swimming in the lake’s fresh water, a reprise from the chlorine I usually swim in.  Fall, the brilliant leaves, the slow shut-down of the sun with the shortening days, and that smell again, like the flip side of the spring smell.  I love winter — snow is beautiful, even if driving in it isn’t so much fun.  I think of a woman from Georgia I met when I was a child, a woman who’d never seen snow before:  she was fascinated.  “It’s all sparkly!” she giggled.  And spring, spring is the reawakening of the earth, the anticipation of new life, the season that it seems takes forever to get here. 

I wouldn’t want to live where seasons are indistinct.  And every season is my favorite.  Especially the one I’m experiencing at the moment.

Given the local business climate at this time of year, it’s a good living.

Puerto Rican writer and Gimme man Garik Charneco is among us, watching the personality of Trumansburg Creek. He says that enclosed water hypnotizes him. He’s writing about much more than what he’s writing about, of course.

Desire that is free is not nearly as appealing to us as desire that struggles for freedom. On the shores of greater bodies of water, we enjoy the waves, the places where the tranquil unity of the ocean recaptures something of its ancient memories of falling, when it ran through our village, so eager to be gone.

The creek is not the water in it. The water thaws, but the falling of the creek itself is always frozen, an eternal path that never takes the journey itself.

Garik writes, “Trapped water always has some land telling it where to go.”

In this line, I suspect Garik has expressed his reason for writing.

Keep at it, creek, Garik.

There has been, in response to an article that I wrote here yesterday, a hard, provocative, useful conversation. In that conversation, I see people pushing, defending, and finding the boundaries of themselves in the community.

To spark this kind of raucous discovery is the reason that I created Finding Ulysses. It’s not journalism. It’s not reporting what is. It is discovering what could be. It’s finding, pushing, falling, stumbling, fighting to get to the home where we want to be. It is a return to something that never was, and a recreation of it. It is the spirit of Ulysses.

Whenever I hear people use phrases like “retaining the character of Ulysses” in a conversation about local politics, I smile to myself. Most of the time we forget that Ulysses is not just a place, but also a character. It is a legend.

We should, living in Ulysses, never forget Ulysses. We should never forget that we are living, in a name, in a myth.

If you still aren’t following me, call it an Odyssey.

Something that I noticed in the article is the way that both Democratic candidates emphasize the rural identity of Trumansburg. David Filiberto says that he thinks it’s important to “preserve the rural, residential character of the village.” Christopher Thomas discusses the need to protect the “rural nature of the village” from ill-conceived development along the village edge.

I was thinking about the rural nature of Trumansburg in another respect last night, while excavating my mailbox from the compacted snowbank created by the snowplows yesterday. I’ve lived in several rural communities in Upstate New York before I moved to Trumansburg, but where I lived before, there was not rural mail delivery within village limits. In the village where I went to high school, up in Wayne County, we had mail carriers who walked door to door to put mail in boxes attached to houses right next to our front doors. That village has just a few hundred residents more than Trumansburg, and so it’s struck me as odd that a village street in Trumansburg is still regarded by the United States Postal Service as part of a rural route.

There are aspects of rural life in Trumansburg, but it seems to me that the word rural doesn’t do justice to the character of our village. Most of us here don’t depend upon the land, or depend upon the people who do. Trumansburg isn’t just a bedroom community either, or a genuine suburb. Many of us live and work right here, albeit not in professions that are rural in character.

Trumansburg needs a self-concept that transcends the traditional separations of rural, urban and suburban communities. I’m not sure, however, that language describing a village like Trumansburg yet exists.

What is Trumansburg? Where does Trumansburg fit?

It’s a time of re-entry into Trumansburg for me, finding Ulysses again. In order to protect the time around the birth, and the integrity of my changing family around that event, I’ve had to push myself through some especially intense periods of work over the last two or three months. Over the last three weeks, I’ve been travelling for my work, able to return only for a day or two on weekends. Now that I’m back, and not set to leave home again for at least another two months, it feels as if I’m moving in all over again.

The reality of small town life these days is that many people get their money from outside of the community in which they live. I lean somewhat in this direction. Half of my work is purely home-based, and the other half is mixed, taking me away for research, although I am able to work on analysis at home. I know many others in Ulysses suffer from this kind of divided life.

I’m sensing that, with a third child, I’ll need to shift the balance of my work more toward home, or I won’t be the only one in my family to suffer the consequences. I’m working on ways to make it happen, but it’s not simple to find ways to rip a living out of the national economy without becoming a part of it.

Ulysses as a whole suffers from something similar to this kind of conflict. Collective income comes at a cost of the collective local identity. We get chains, and we get chains. We commute and become the commute. Unless we can reintegrate where we live and where we work into who we are, the entire world becomes a suburb without a center.