7.2.02

     Since I last wrote I have dutifully trotted across many of upstate New York’s finest acres. I hiked along Chimney Bluffs, a small state park on the banks of Lake Ontario where wind and rain has carved mammoth sand castles out of a half-mile stretch of cliff. I went wine-tasting on the Seneca Lake wine trail and (twice in one weekend) on Keuka Lake’s trail. I went to a small and inconspicuous lesbian-owned pride store in Seneca Falls, home to America’s first Women’s Rights caucus, an event many of the town’s residents probably still rue. I did not go to Rochester’s famous Lilac Festival, an event which opens the festival season, as it invariably rains and drops into the 50s whenever it is held. I even spent a weekend in Atlanta during a freak cold snap and a week in the Texas Hill country in time for San Antonio’s annual Fiesta.

     And yet I have been negligent in my responsibilities to Dean and to you, dear readers, who no doubt have been anxious to set their travel plans to Upstate new York and have been left adrift during my extended absence. I have been a very poor travel advisor indeed. The irony of this is that I lied in my first column. I have, in fact, paid a few bills through travel writing. I did some work while in graduate school for a travel company that will remain nameless. During that time, I was very poorly compensated to write descriptions and suggested itineraries for places I had never been. I even did restaurant reviews. It took a bit of research, but most of the time I just faked it by making broad cultural generalizations: “The goulash at the Two Brothers restaurant in Budapest is a delight! Try the roasted chicken with paprika!” To those of you who may have visited the Two Brothers restaurant and found the goulash to be sub-par, please accept my humble apologies.

     Now, as I have been gallivanting across New York State in its most beautiful of seasons, I find that I am too busy gallivanting to find time to have anything to say. Perhaps those folks at Unnamed Travel Agency knew what they were doing when they hired folks who had never been to the fabulous cities described on their website. If I were in Budapest, it probably wouldn’t be able to tear myself away from the blue Danube to write a blurb about anyone’s goulash, no matter how divine it was.

     And a word in my defense for my long spring absence: as much as we love to see Lady Spring finally arrive here in Rochester, she is not a kind muse. In fact, she toys with our emotions with coquettish glee. April is the cruelest month here in Rochester New York, mostly because we are painfully aware that large regions of our great country to the south and west of us are enjoying springtime buds budding, bees buzzing, and birds singing. It always snows in April, though not too hard or too frequently to disrupt anything other than our winter-worn, fragile sense of well-being. This year we did have snow in May, which felt profoundly unfair. And March can be a real bitch, too.

     Even if it snows on May 20th, by Memorial Day the docks are reassembled, barbecues are pulled from garages, and the boats are back in the lake. I have been doing all the above, except for the dock reassembling, having no dock to reassemble and, if we did, we’d pay someone else to hitch it together. We also finally decided that it was about time we paid our due to “waaaay upstate” Upstate New York and visit the Thousand Islands.

     There is something mind-boggling about seeing these homes perched on what amounts to a pile of rocks peaking above the St. Lawrence River. You can’t help thinking about logistics: what if you run out of bread and want to make a sandwich? What if you need an ambulance? Where do those homeowners do between November and May? Can you get insurance for something like that? And you can’t help but being impressed by the sheer novelty. And the fact that the novelty is so alluring that people go ahead and do it anyway, last minute runs to the store be damned. I have been trying to deconstruct the aesthetic or ideology that leads one to build a home on a rock in a river, and it’s been difficult. You could argue that its part of an almost universal aesthetic of rivers. It may be a romantic aesthetic involving watching life, or a source of life, run by you. Perhaps living on—literally on—a river helps people meditate about permanence and frailty and the beauty and dread of the passage of time. Perhaps Americans and their Canadian neighbors (roughly half the Thousand Islands is Canadian) are a little too impressed by novelty or whimsy, which jives with charges that U.S. culture rests in a permanent state of adolescence. Perhaps people just think its cool.

     I thought it was cool. I thought it was damn cool. As they say in “upstate” Upstate, I even thought it was wicked cool. And so did the scores of Long Islanders and their upstate cousins who were there for the weekend, too.

     Those often stately little homes courageously perched on rocks also give an aura of wealth to the Thousand Islands. Even the tiniest ones on the tiniest of rocks suggest that somewhere the owner is rolling in oodles and oodles of dirty, dirty money. Who but the rich would look at a rock in a river in the northernmost part of a northern state and think, “what this place needs is a cherry bungalow with a boat launch and faux lighthouse viewing tower.” Alexandria Bay, a lovely town with a great view of some of the Islands, including the famous Boldt Castle, has some lovely old turn-of-the-century homes on its own shores. You can imagine nouveau riche in the gilded age arriving by train, lunching along the river, and generally looking wealthy and fantastic in front of their seven-bedroom summer cabins.

     You can imagine it, but you won’t see it. Imagine my surprise when, arriving in Alexandria Bay hungry for some bisque and 1910 grandeur, I saw more mullets than I have in my entire life. And I spent most of the ‘90s living in the South. We had been staying the weekend in a cabin on Lake Ontario with no running water and were looking pretty grungy ourselves, but it was nothing compared to the other clientele. The most striking dichotomy, however, was not between us and the other unfortunately groomed, but the unfortunately groomed and the unfortunately styled. For every mullet I saw, there was someone dressed in lamae shorts or shiny jumpsuits not two steps behind.

     Now let me stop briefly to say that I love the movie Working Girl. I love its defense of the worth of those not born to wealth and I love its take on corporate culture and I love its Cinderella message where the girl does get the prince but, more importantly, she gets a corner office. And I dig mid-80s Harrison Ford. In the film, Melanie Griffith plays a bridge-and-tunnel Manhattan secretary who, after getting shafted by her successful yet devious boss, essentially assumes her professional identity after she suffers a freak ski accident. Working Girl is a great movie with a great message about culture, class, respectability and economic mobility. I love what it says and how it says it.

     We didn’t see any Melanie Griffiths in Alexandria Bay, definitely no Harrison Fords, and the conversations we overheard were depressing: “Cher looks so aw-ful with all that cosmetic surgery! She just looks AW-ful!.” Clearly, none of our fellow travelers were vying for a corner office. But I found the Thousand Islands visitors to be the best part of the show. It was like being in a time warp, seeing a style that never was “style.” The turn-of-the-century glitz was all their playground. Their may have been some grandsons or granddaughters of robber barons hiding in their homes on the rocks, but they kept to themselves and abandoned the less precariously perched summer cabins to the spandexed, mulleted, and permed rabble.

     On our way out of town we drove across one of the handful of bridges linking some of the larger islands with the mainland. On one we did find vestiges of the old Thousand Islands. Golf courses filled one half of the island, the other was filled with beautiful, old, mostly pedestrian streets which could have all been entitled ‘Main Street USA”. Kids played baseball in manicured squares, families flanked the sidewalks pushing strollers or walking dogs. There was even an ice cream parlor that looked like it sprang from a Normal Rockwell portrait. The beautiful old Victorians were clearly authentic relics of an earlier era, but everything else seemed inauthentic—not so much preserved as carefully planned. It was a prettier drive, but not as entertaining as Alexandria Bay. After all, the Thousand Islands’ one enduring claim to fame is a salad dressing made of ketchup and mayonnaise. So why be uppity?

-K. Mitzel