I just returned from an interesting vacation in the mysterious East. This is the annual bike trip with a very eclectic group of friends who have been doing these trips in one form or another for about 40 years now. This year we were in the Finger Lakes area of New York. It was strikingly different from here.
They approach lawn mowing with religious zeal. At first it seemed funny, watching somebody with a relatively small riding lawn mower attacking a 5- or 6-acre lot. It was an endless job. By the time they got finished, it would be time to start over. Some people had a perfect argyle pattern mowed into the lawn, others just hacked away.
As we rode on, it became clear that if you didn’t mow for a couple of months, the forest would reclaim your lot to the point that you couldn’t find the house. In the town parks where we had lunch, the crews were running those zero-radius turn mowers at breakneck speed, ramming picnic tables out of the way and careening around trees within inches of the trunks without damaging the bark.
The parks were beautiful, clean, and equipped with all the cool, dangerous playground equipment we knew as kids. Somehow, the safety people haven’t hit small town New York, and there are still lots of ways to get injured on the playground equipment. The local kids were loving it. There are no pickleball courts. We didn’t see one, anywhere, even at the resort hotels.
There is so much history there. It’s a strange backwater that, in a very short time, produced several religious movements including the Mormons, and was a hotbed of the abolition movement. The Rochester airport is named for Frederick Douglass, who lived there. The Harriet Tubman house was there.
The women’s rights movement was launched in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Seneca Falls. For 20 or 30 years, great thoughts and movements were launched there. Monumental social changes, and then it all went to sleep for 200 years. It seems like stuff that should have originated in Boston or Philadelphia, and instead came out of a place that now has all the gravitas of Vernal. Nobody could explain why.
The history goes back farther, of course. In one park where we had lunch, I was walking to the port-a-potty set up in preparation for the weekend’s Grape Festival. I tripped over a non-descript chunk of granite, and found a plaque on it. Everything has a plaque on it.
Apparently at that spot in 1775, George Washington accepted command of the American Army in the Revolutionary War. The monument had been smacked by the snow plows and the go-kart lawn mowers for years and was in the way of the line of outhouses. It seemed like a significant bit of the national story, and I literally tripped over it on the way to the outhouse. There should have been a plaque stating that “George Washington peed here.”
We went to a cheese tasting. From the “cheese educators” serving the cheese samples (we can’t have any uneducated cheese out there), I learned that the milk for the cheese came from the spectacularly beautiful Mennonite dairy farms we had ridden through the day before. They were prosperous looking and absolutely immaculate. Not a piece of junk anywhere. My cheese educator posited that because they tend to lease their farm machinery rather than own it (for reasons both religious and economic), there weren’t any old machines to dispose of. At the end of the lease, it goes back to John Deere. They don’t need a boneyard for parts.
I also learned that the cows are usually leased rather than owned. A well-bred dairy cow is worth several thousand dollars, and a herd of 600 could run $2 million. So there is a whole Wall Street operation where some MBA, who wouldn’t know a heifer from a flugelhorn, leases the herd to the farmers. You can buy tranches of cow leases, like cold cuts. The cows are independent contractors. I had to spend some time researching that one. Lightning insurance is included in the cost of the lease, just in case your cows get lit up. It happens.
While there seemed to be endless ways to subdivide a cow, nobody was subdividing real estate. It became a contest to see if anybody could find a “for sale” sign on our rides. It was hard to do. Property only changes hands when somebody dies. Locals I talked with reported having the same neighbors for a very long time. I asked if that meant six or eight months, like here, and they said that no, they had the same neighbors for generations.
In five days of riding, I saw one cement truck. I counted three dump trucks — all county road maintenance vehicles. The dirt in that part of the country is exactly where they want it. No need to move it around. There was some construction activity, but all in the maintenance category with almost no new construction.
It’s hard to imagine living someplace that was stable and finished, where leased Holsteins produced educated cheese on Mennonite farms among the ghosts of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Tom Clyde practiced law in Park City for many years. He lives on a working ranch in Woodland and has been writing this column since 1986.