Walking Seasonal Roads: Reflections on a Dwelling Place

8. There Was a Crooked Lake: Urbana Road

73 8 There Was a Crooked Lake Urbana Road On sloping hillsides Row upon row the vineyards Flowing with the land They drove up in their shiny new Lexus, knocked on my door, and introduced themselves as the Joneses (not their real names). They had come to my home to ask for easement rights. My partner and I had declined an earlier written request from their lawyer— we wanted to keep impacts to the land as minimal as possible— but Mr. and Mrs. Jones were now on my doorstep asking to discuss the matter. They were nice, pleasant people, and he explained that he wanted to run a phone line from a nearby Empire station (the rural phone company) across our land to his property so that he could have a connection to his new house. They had cell phones, he said, but he wanted a land line for his security system, a very expensive one, he added. They had a waterfront home near Rochester , and they were now building this “vacation house in the woods” overlooking Keuka Lake. To pay for the house, he was dividing the property, selling off a strip of six acres that bordered our land, and asking $10,000 per acre. Urbana Hill was once covered with vineyards, much of them belonging to Gold Seal Wineries, a vineyard dating back to the 1860s. We had purchased ten acres of the old vineyards in the There Was a Crooked Lake | 75 1990s, and since that time had been trying to restore it to native grasses and trees. We planted a native cultivar of switchgrass and a hundred red oaks, white oaks, and black walnuts. In 1998, a nearby landowner bought the land south of us and logged it. The loggers went onto our land, cut some of our trees and left the site a mess. While timber theft is common all over the country (Saulny 2008), it is especially troublesome in rural New York (NYSDEC 2011j). Since there was no proof of who actually cut the trees on our land or who was responsible, there was little we could do. Legal action can take years and requires considerable expense. After logging, that same landowner divided up the land and sold it off in smaller lots. It changed hands several more times, and one of the parcels now belonged to the Joneses, who had built their “vacation house” on it. The Joneses also wanted to break up the land again, selling part of it to pay for their new house. Around Keuka Lake, land fragmentation is happening at an increasingly alarming rate. With lake views in demand, dozens of McMansions have gone up along Middle Road as well as development around the entire seventy-mile shoreline of Keuka Lake. The old vineyards, the farm fields, and the woods are being carved up and turned into housing developments, and country homes for the wealthy are expanding beyond the lakeshore into the hills. In January 2008, we discovered loggers on our land again. This time they had been hired by another neighbor. Loggers cut 108 trees from her eight acres, hauled off about half of them, and left the others lying on the roadside—they were not worth the money to haul them to the mill. She claimed she didn’t really want to cut the trees but owed back taxes and had to get the money to save her home. We hired a survey team to reflag the lines, but the loggers still managed to cut some of our trees, and they ran over all the young oak trees we had planted along the border. One spring morning out in the field checking trees, I heard the cry of the pileated woodpecker that once nested in the old 76 | Walking Seasonal Roads shagbark hickory along the road. The loggers had cut her nesting tree. The old tree, full of holes, was deemed worthless and left on the roadside to rot. Her call seemed the most sorrowful cry, and I was struck by an overwhelming sense of grief and futility. Our attempts to care for the land, to keep it in a natural state seemed “a candle in the wind.” Not only have we been unable to protect our land from logging, but all around us the land was being fragmented and turned into housing developments. Even though we have been trying to treat the land in...