touching grass

Before he had a chance to spend much time asking for it, I got my inattentive self together and took Murray toward the door for the day's first walk outside. As he so often does, he paused on the threshold to take in the air of the morning. He looked right, left, and forward, then strode across the porch to the grass, where he got on his butt and scooted a straight line long enough for a first down. And then we were off.

The grass needs cutting, as it has since the day after I cut it, three days ago. Every patch that's ever been dug up by utility guys (about the footprint of three or four vans) was subsequently reseeded--they may think they're doing good--with some alien fescue that grows like bamboo as soon as an hour after being leveled through brute force. You can see by the dandelions where we park off-driveway (in plowing season, because the plow guy only feels obligated to plow as far as he can go without plowing a section that's touched anywhere by a part of a car, so we go all the way off the paving). Kathryn says they grow where the ground is too compact, and car parking spots seem to fill that bill. I will obtain a pitchfork and stab the ground there to show it who's boss. The wind blew, as it always does, so there were more pieces of the tree to pick up and pile in the gutter. A solid chunk of trunk was on the ground, solid insofar as being heavy, but it's spongy mush, like every other part of the thing that ever comes down. It's mostly sawdust held together by bark, but a great tree for a little girl and her friends.

Murray and I made our happy way along trails of scent, passing the home of Lucy, who surprised us by not barking at every window as we went by. Also silent were the Shih Tzus two houses down, whose names I haven't yet learned. Once I know them, I'll say hi to them quietly, just like I do Lucy. Murray and the poop bag and I proceeded down the block. He wanted to sniff a yard with a "sprayed" sign in it, but I urged him across the street, where the black dog and the white dog barked at us from somewhere inside. "They won't poison their pets," I reasoned to Murray.

I kept watching the rise of the hills visible past the end of the block. As we're on a named hill, the ground went down first, then level (Knickerbocker's field), and then rose up again on the other side of the canal. In Colorado growing up, I always knew the mountains were in the west. I noticed this morning that now they're on the east, and they're old Appalachians instead of Rockies, but a hill's a hill, and we have hills. A couple of the lately ubiquitous utility trucks were coming our way, so I walked over to the other side to let them pass, and of course they had to drive right around us. Triumphant at having mildly annoyed men doing their jobs, I turned us for home at the butterfly garden on the tiny island at the corner of our street and itself.

Home again, home again, with Murray in his "anywhere but home" mode. I could close my eyes and know that as long as Murray pulled a hundred eighty degrees against it, I was heading straight home. (Thanks to the Junior Woodchucks of America for this knowledge!) Sighing a final one at the lawn, which I intend to cut today, I dragged my companion to the garage and let him stand and probe the shaggy back yard (where deer hang out and bunnies and groundhogs play and a fox passes through regularly) for a minute and run in to grab a bite and take vitamins. Can't mow a forest of headless dandelion stems on an empty stomach.

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Stalking the Wild Abutment

I didn't hurry to get to my walk today, as it was going to be cool and (knock wood) not wet in about the same proportions for a couple of hours. When I did walk, it was a lovely day, and I made good time. GREAT time if you believed my walking odometer, which reset its time after twenty minutes... while keeping my mileage! So I showed a superb average speed today, you betcha.

On the canal, I spotted a disused dock, just about the only one with no trespassing signs on it. It was a little overgrown with weeds, and has creeper on the bench. I photographed it for future reference. There's a Little Free Library not far from State Street, on the canal, and I poked through it and straightened the books and CDs out. I even tightened the latch, having a Phillips Head on my knife.

In the area back of the Del Monte motel (where we all stayed our first night in town, as our other accomodations wouldn't be ready for another day, twelve years ago), I went to the portion of the Auburn Trail that Sarah and I had walked once, from the apartment we were in for three weeks or so as we waited for this house to be ready for us. At the time, I'd seen signs that something was odd about one part, near the end. I looked down and saw some concrete. Later, I decided that was a spot where another line (I recently learned that it's the old electric car line from Rochester to Victor or Bloomfield or one of those places) crossed below, which I'd seen in a photo. This photo:

I'd almost started to think that I had imagined it, having spent some of my walks bumming around that stretch of the railroad trail, looking in the dense growth below for signs of that underpass. I'd spent time looking at what I could find online--like this photo! 

I thought I had it in a book, but couldn't find it, so I found it at a site set up by Mr. David Gardner, who had some early photos, and a map showing the path of the streetcar, which brought me to within a few paces of the spot earlier this week. Just above is a view of the elevated part of the Auburn, taken from a spot on or near the tracks in the old shot. When you're on the trail up there, nothing really tells you you're on a cement structure. It just looks like a raised right of way, except when you notice how far down the trees on either side go.

Today I walked to the spot, about to look for the thing for a couple of minutes at the apex of my walk (from home back to home was about six miles today), and there it was, plain as anything--because some men with tractors and other equipment were removing the vegetation that covered it and clearing off the front of the old underpass (which is now undoubtedly bricked or cemented in) so it can be seen from the trail. And they're putting in a bench, and for all I know a historical info sign. I thought this was great, and thanked them. The above view is looking own from the upper track bed at part of an exposed side of the underpass--it would be on your right in the old pic.

The above map shows where this took place. The arrow by "Abutments" points to where my abutment has been several times in the past couple of weeks. I used that map and a screen snap of the satellite view from Google and worked out where that spot should be, and checked the scale and estimated about a hundred paces. I wasn't far off. I also went and looked at Jojo's, which occupies the old streetcar depot (handily across Main Street from the Auburn's depot). I also located the old German Howitzer that used to sit in a park just above that arrow indicating the station. There's no sign of its base in the park now, but the Pioneer Burying Ground a mile from my house has three cement pads that used to hold the captured armament until 1936 when the other park was created. By about 1980, they decided to landscape it out of existence, and they loaned the piece to East Rochester. By a coincidence, the day after I had been reading about it, I walked around a corner of one of the paths between the Auburn Line and the canal and there was the howitzer.

A guy there told me they were looking to put the thing in the park they're creating back there, but it needs some work. He said some Mennonites were maybe going to fix the wheels and tires, but it still needed sandblasting. To add another layer of unlikely coincidence, I was telling my next-door neighbor about the howitzer, and he said that his Legion post (or was it his VFW chapter? Never mind!) had refurbished the thing in 1980. A sign on it says it was done again in another year, too. I'm deciding against buying a howitzer for my yard. Too much maintenance.

In other railroad trail news, I saw some 'new-to-me' miles yesterday when I drove (first time I drove somewhere to walk by myself) down to Railroad Mills, the street that marks the farthest south I'd gone before, and parked by Powder Mill Park, and walked to the trail and went two and a half miles (not an ambitious day, distance-wise) and saw some nice glens and woods, on a very well manicured trail with stone mile markers and reasonable signage. I reached Fishers, NY, which has a two-story blocky, knobby stone pump house that is the second oldest railroad building in the US. Though it's a very small town, they did have a Little Free Library there, and I traded the book in my pack for one they had. 

Between Railroad Mills and Fishers, however, was another little mystery.

Why, what a nice tunnel under I-90 (Dewey Thruway)! You fellows surely didn't build that there because the old railroad trail ran that way. How recently did the trains run this way? And how long ago did they build the Thruway? (On different days, I found the answers: This part of the Auburn Road was abandoned in 1960. The Thruway was built in 1954. It was just that close.)

My research this week also shows that the Trails group that was starting up in the late 1990s had considered connecting the Auburn as it crossed the Erie Canal (presently a dead end on each side) by putting a new footbridge where the railroad bridge used to be, something I'd often wished someone would do. In 2002, the job was estimated to cost $1.4M to do. No idea how much it would cost now, but that big concrete piece still stands ready in the middle of the canal. (I also learned that some abutments I'd seen when crossing the canal at Marsh Road were not from an old Marsh Road bridge, but were there for the street car line.)

Anyway, on the way back, I sat on a bench and played with my tiny keyboard for a quarter of an hour, getting back my version of Fats Wallers's "Viper's Drag" that I can play on a 31-key instrument with just two notes of polyphony. 

Getting back to today, I found the Harladay Hots stand in operation in a vacant-lot park on Main Street, and had an Andouille Sausage for lunch. Then I went home and played the piano. Life was full of fun today, and I relished it, haw haw.

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Trail of the Lonesome Pal

Today I went out for my usual walk, planning to hit the Auburn Trail (formerly railroad tracks for the Auburn line), which became viable once I started thinking of walks as being around three miles long. I take different walks, most often through the streets of my neighborhood, but lately I've rediscovered the Auburn. It's easier now than the first time I got on it, at which time it dead-ended up against a property owner in the Cartersville neighborhood who believed that he owned this public land because it was next to his place. The Town of Pittsford spent some time changing his mind, and a few years ago, it all opened up.

I went in the usual way. A beaten path skirting a farmer's field (the Knickerbocker area, and Knickerbocker Hill, are all named for this farm, which is still apparently in the Knickerbocker family) leads to the former railroad tracks, sometimes a dirt trail, sometimes a cinder trail. A few feet of it are paved where it joins Knickerbocker Road.

Here I am, looking back toward the invisible spot where the trail begins. On the horizon is the Knickerbocker Farm. I'm given to understand they aren't wild about people walking on their pasture, which I did once before I knew that. Now I am good. YOU HEAR ME? GOOD!

 I turned the corner of the field and walked east toward the tracks, and saw white blossoms, which my camera didn't want to photograph. Well! Who's to be the master, here? I paid money for you, my fine photographic instrument! I boldly turned the wheel from Automatic to Manual for a walk on the wild side. I experimented with ISO and shutter speed today. So far I've been able to capture detail in darkness at the expense of losing all detail in the sky and some other bright areas.

By the way, these photos will enlarge if you click on them. Well, they do for me. Perhaps your set-up differes from mine in this way. How can you find out? Go on, give it a try. I clicked and adjusted my way along through a couple more turnings, and could see the cinders of the Auburn below me. One thing I like about this route, there's more up and down and the terrain is less regular. One thing I don't like: I think it's where I'm getting the majority of my bug bites these days. 

I wasn't quite satisfied that my photo looking down captured the elevation change satisfactorily. Hitting the trail (not literally: I stepped on it), I turned around and tried the converse shot, looking back at where I'd come from. As advertised, this shot captures some detail while losing the blue of the sky. I might be able to get it back in Photoshop, or turn a darker shot to account, but for immediate gratification today, I'm dumping them all in just as I clicked them. The greens of the foliage seem to lose some of their yellow and tend toward blue. You should see the ones I threw away.

There we go. Captured the trail looking back, and the one that forks off if it.

THE ONE THAT FORKS OFF OF IT??

Holy George Gordon, Lord Byron, there's another path there, leading into the enticing thick of the woods that I could see from the crest of the previous path. Here was my chance to see something new, and I took it right away. It led through grasses and elbow-high shrubs with flowers and a dragonfly and a lovely dark butterfly way cooler than the little white cabbage butterflies I've been seeing back in (ptoo!) civilization. A creek I had never suspected in my twelve years here ran along quietly, easily accessed from occasional forkings of the path, and full of rocks to stand on. 

I took photos that looked surreal when I got them home, some with rocks as green as the foliage, and many with what could have been the atomic flash of The Big One in the area outside the shade of the trees. 

After all that, the path eventually led to a big flat area where it stopped being a path and became something else. A big patio, maybe. I returned to the railroad trail, where I saw a half dozen people in all as I made my way toward Knickerbocker and pavement again.

On the downhill side of the Auburn trail, the creek opened up into a gorge. There was also one upstream, come to think of it. I tried for a couple more shots, going portrait mode for this one. I'll preview this and see if I made it too big. I hope I can leave it this size.

I turned aside to capture the sorels. Is that the word? Tree mushrooms. A couple passed behind me while I did, and when I returned my attention to the trail, they had proceeded far past the point of pantomiming a hello through my mask. All through this, I'd been listening to Act III of Sullivan's grand opera Ivanhoe, and would have had to pull an ear bud out to communicate anyway. 

Another view of the sprawling Knickerbocker farm, with its huge barn. The high ground here conceals a horse or two that might have been visible otherwise. I boldly took another side path as a shortcut to the road, but missed little of the steepest uphill part of the whole walk. I once saw a turkey coming out of the corn on the south side of the road and stopped and jogged back with my camera, but it was gone. Since then, I've looked for it two thousand times or more, and can report that it's still gone, "like a turkey in the corn."

Here, not far from the entrance to our neighborhood (through the subdivision built next to ours, and I believe more recently--Knickerbocker Hill, named for the hill named for the farm named for the Knickerbockers--dates to about 1965, and in the aerial photos we received along with this house, seems to have been the first thing put here) is the farm stand that sells corn grown in the fields on the north side of the road. They also sell other vegetables and eggs that they buy from other farms or, more likely, from a jobber who brings them stuff. Useful, sometimes, if you need a tomato.

The road leading into the newer (and ritzier) subdivision is a short avenue, with a median and everything. On the left is a rather nice house that I got to be in one time when an outgoing owner had a moving sale before returning to England. The downstairs had a room full of built-in cabinets that I, of course, envied.

Behind that fence, off the large back yard, this gazebo sits and looks out over the Knickerbocker fields to the rolling hills (are they Appalachian mountains? hmmm) and far horizon. I often wish I'd had the foresight to ask the outgoing owner if they'd mind me sitting out there for about a half hour while slowly sipping a glass of cold water. Missed opportunities (like not asking the owners of an enticing tree swing at the end of a private drive I used to see on bike rides around the Mariner's Park, back in Newport News)!

1902 map, I think. I see these plats here and there, usually for wall decoration, and usually when I only have my phone to take pictures with. It's instructive to see the progress over the years. Our subdivision seems to be the Blodgett holdings, but was expanded to include the Knickerbocker lands just south of them. Then the newer stuff came in on the James Stewart spread (didn't know he owned land here, did you? DID YOU?). Silco's place became another subdivision. Other patches were filled in (I guess) as patriarchs died and their families cashed in. East Road was moved somewhat around the turn of the century, which may be reflected in the map. You can see the railroad tracks. They crossed the canal on big cement piers that still stand, and I wish somebody'd built a foot bridge over them so I could walk the trail across the Erie Canal there. Oh, the places I'd go.

Since I'd done so much extra walking, I cut through Joe and Deb's yard, once I'd located their house. They're our back neighbors, living on a street of lovely individual homes which had some of the best trick-or-treating back in the days when I had a trick-or-treater in the family. As I got to our yard, I met them coming back through our yard (or our neighbor Bob's yard, which also backs onto theirs) and criticized them jovially for walking on other people's property, and they asked if I was the guy photographing the tree on the railroad trail. We chatted about trails and other possible complete circuits one might make by going right onto the Auburn instead of left, and caught up on where our kids were going to school and such.

A good day walking. Next time--Monday, most likely, as I take Sundays off--I think I'll take that right turn, and either walk on Mill Road, or follow the RR trail to Thornell and re-enter the neighborhood through one of several little paths that give shortcuts to Thornell Road Elementary and the houses near it (those houses take miles to drive to, but I can walk or ride right to them) or the high school (located in Clare Barker's old spread), or Thornell Farm Park (due south of Barker's).
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Status Update, June 2020

No time like now to write this! For one thing, I have clients. Jobs! I'm earning money at home in my spare time.

I'm getting exercise. When I felt I had to stop going to the gym, I increased my walking to six times a week, three miles each time. First, I went toward town on the paved sidewalk, but I spent too much of my time stepping aside, calculating whether I actually could step aside (between a fence and a puddle), and resenting people who don't step aside when I do. I sat down and figured out a three-mile path in this neighborhood, where everyone walks in the street and it's fairly easy to be six feet away from someone coming toward you. After some weeks of that, I've started exploring a little more, and have rediscovered the overland route to the railroad trail. It makes the walk a little more than three miles, and includes uneven terrain and a bigger hill. Presumably, that's all good. I carry a camera and an umbrella much of the time. The latter not only repels rain, but gives me moving shade. I also use the occasion to research the best way to keep my glasses from fogging up with exhaled breath that comes up from my mask. So far, the second best is the folded-tissue-at-the-top trick, and the most effective method is carefully folding the glasses and placing them in a pocket.

Today.

And I'm making music. Once a week I record a piece for the Irish group that can't meet at the college at present, and send them to Jane (mandolin player) to forward to the group, and then for a couple of days, people thank me, and some of them record tracks of their own, or record themselves playing along, or send a link to something else musical.

mrkip w · Ashokan Farwell [Ungar]

I'm also getting together with a violinist who wants to play the same music I'm interested in. We had been sending mp3s back and forth. I'd send her an accompaniment, and she'd send back the track with her playing on it. We finally got together here, outside, and practiced under the tree out front for a while, properly distanced, and since then we've been playing at her place in Victor while her husband applauds (gently, as he is recovering from shoulder surgery). Next week, we're going to try this wild idea I have of practicing in the garage here. Better acoustics, and there's an outlet right there, and we can still be far enough apart to feel fairly safe.


Now and then, I send a link to the Shakespeare group, which has had its last two meetings via Zoom, which I still haven't installed on my laptop. It doesn't feel like a meeting. Only one person can talk at a time. How am I supposed to whisper to the person next to me?

I'm also slowly collaborating with an old friend in Colorado on new comic projects. It would go faster in person--for me, drawing is often a social pursuit, passing a clipboard back and forth across a kitchen table, that sort of thing.

I also have a project to transcribe some of my sister's songs to sheet music format. Robert Benchley once explained that you can get all kinds of things done, provided you have a big job you are doing all the others to escape from. I'm hoping something bigger will come along so I can devote more time to this worthy project.

And sometimes I blog.
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