Walking Seasonal Roads: Reflections on a Dwelling Place

6. Seeing the Forests for the Trees: Robie Road

54 6 Seeing the Forests for the Trees Robie Road A loon on the pond The moonlight painted it there Soon a memory The loop we most often walk begins with Robie Road, joins Sonora, then Kettle, and swings back to Robie. It crosses two state forests, Moss Hill State Forest and Birdseye Hollow State Forest in Lamoka Valley, a valley speckled with kettle lakes and ponds. Lamoka and Waneta are the largest lakes, but there are many smaller ones. In the bends and curves of Mud Creek as it zigzags through the valley from Mill Pond to the Conhocton River, lies Sanford, Van Keuren, Round, Peterson, Leonard, and Birdseye lakes, to name a few. From lakes and ponds have come some of America’s greatest nature writings. It might have started with Thoreau’s Walden, but ponds continue to be a significant inspiration for naturalists and nature writers. John Burroughs (1871) wrote of wildflowers on ponds near his home in Riverby, New York; Ann Morgan’s Field Book of Ponds and Streams: An Introduction to the Life of Freshwater (1930) described the ponds of New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut; John Kieran (1950) walked ponds in Riverdale, the Seeing the Forests for the Trees | 55 Bronx, New York; Joseph Wood Krutch (1969) wrote about living near a small pond in Concord, Massachusetts; and Robert Finch (1983) described the pond of his Cape Cod neighborhood. The list of writers on northeastern ponds and lakes is indeed long. Contemporary writers like Mary Swander write of ponds as places of refuge. She weaves together a visit to Walden, recollections of a childhood pond on her grandmother’s farm, and images of her own pond at Fairview School to create a portrait that reflects sanctuary. For her, the pond is a place where she felt whole (Swander 1995, 92–98). Linda Underhill describes a kettle lake—Moss Lake—in nearby Allegany County that is geologically similar to those along these roads. She writes about the pond, part of the Nature Conservancy Preserve purchased in 1957, as off limits to campers and sportsmen, and cites the preserve sign: “This is an inviolate natural area where all living things both plant and animal are to be left undisturbed” (Underhill 1999, 39). Surrounded by a peat bog with floating mats, sphagnum, pitcher plants, sundews , and all the wondrous vegetation of the bog first described by Elizabeth Cook (1973), it is a glorious wetland sanctuary. Moss Lake has not been managed for human use like the lakes of the Lamoka Valley. Waneta and Lamoka lakes, with their ring of waterfront homes, have been treated with herbicides for years. In an effort to eradicate the invasive, European milfoil (Myriophyllum spicatum), New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) allowed the lakes to be treated with a chlorinated pyridine herbicide called fluordone. The treatment was not effective, so in 2008, a $200,000 grant from NYSDEC was used to treat the lakes again. This time the herbicide, triclopyr, another chlorinated pyridine, was used at one hundred times the original concentration (Perham 2008b, Trondsen 2008). Again in 2009 herbicide treatment continued. Several Steuben County Sierra Club members voiced their concerns, stating that such herbicides are mildly carcinogenic, but they were dismissed 56 | Walking Seasonal Roads as “a few tree-hugger types” by officials of the lake association. When I think of my own choice to use the carcinogen, an artificial sugar, and how I justify it as a means of saving calories, I have to be careful not to be too judgmental regarding those who want an attractive lake free of milfoil. But the fact is that chemicals that kill vegetation, reflected in the suffix -cide, as in biocide, herbicide, pesticide, insecticide, can also kill or damage human cells. We may all be supporters of breast cancer drives and wish to eradicate cancer, but to acknowledge the connection between cancer and the use of certain chemicals, and that there is a price to pay for such chemicals, is a more difficult process. It is easy to imagine these public forests with their lovely kettle lakes and ponds as refuges or safe places, but that is a myth. One summer I noticed a girl’s sneaker beside the road near the pond. Lying on its side, it looked injured with its pink shoelace draped to one side. I was reminded of Lisa Couturier’s essay “For All the Girls Who...