Living in Dryden

Local snake drops in

I'm trying to get back to what I call "Dawn Patrol Gardening", where I take advantage of the early sunrise and cool temperatures to get garden work done. (The dew is less pleasant.)

I was carrying a bag of compost when I thought I felt something fall. It turned out I'd moved someone's bed, and he wasn't very happy with me.

Snake on the driveway.

Snake looks up, none too happy.

The pictures aren't great because they're cell phone pictures - the best camera is the one you have with you. Still, this little snake (probably two feet long, and a common garter snake) found an army of friends on Facebook this morning, so I thought he was worth sharing here. I suspect he moved on to a more stable bed.

As for me, I kept working on the hillside by the road. It's steep enough that everything there is twice as tiring as usual, and it was infested with bedstraw. At least I got (most of) the bedstraw out before it flowered and set seed, unlike last year, when it was a giant ugly mat over the (also invasive) goutweed that fills most of that space.

Organic pest control discussion tonight

Tonight, at 6:30pm the Dryden Community Center Cafe, you can learn about Organic Pest Management for the Home Garden. The poster tells it much better than I can, and you can click on it if you want to see a larger version.

Organic pest control meeting, sign at Dryden Community Center Cafe.

Looking for more to do? Check out Cathy Wakeman's Dryden Town Talk.

School budgets pass

The Ithaca Journal reports that Dryden's school budget, purchase of three school buses, and a new roof for the Freeville school passed. Bill Harding, Paul Lutwak, and Lawrence Lyon, the listed candidates, won three-year terms, while write-in Brian June won the remainder of a term.

Ithaca's school budget and capital reserve proposition passed, and candidates Sean Bradwell, Jay True, and Eldred Harris won seats on the board.

School elections today

Live in the Dryden Central School District? Polls are open from 7:00am to 9:00pm at the Dryden High School-Middle School on Route 38 between the Villages of Dryden and Freeville. You can find budget information here (PDF). Three candidates are running for four slots, so write-ins matter.

In the Ithaca School District, four people are running for three seats. Polls open at noon, and the budget information is here. Here's a quick summary of where to vote, though you may want to check the map to be certain which district you're in:

• If you normally vote in District 8 at Bethel Grove Church Activities Center (1749 Slaterville Road), you vote at Belle Sherman Annex (Mitchell and Cornell Streets., Ithaca).

• If you normally vote in District 9, Ellis Hollow, at the Varna Community Center, you vote at Caroline Elementary School, 2439 Slaterville Road (Route 79).

• If you normally vote in District 4, Varna, at the Varna Community Center (943 Dryden Rd), you still vote at the Varna Community Center.

• If you normally vote in Districts 1 and 5 at the Etna Fire Station, you vote at Northeast Elementary School, Winthrop Drive, Ithaca.

As always, it's complicated.

Primitive Pursuits Day coming up

4-H Acres is one of my favorite things about Dryden, and Primitive Pursuits Day is guaranteed to be interesting:

11th Annual Primitive Pursuits Day
Saturday May 26, 10:00am-4:00pm
at 4-H Acres, 418 Lower Creek Road, Ithaca

Enjoy old time music by local bands while wilderness skills instructors from across Central New York offer hands-on wilderness survival and outdoor living skills workshops and activities for kids and adults. Activities scheduled throughout the day include flint-knapping, friction fire, guided tree ID walks, tracking walks, basket-making, games, and much more! Events go on RAIN or SHINE! - we have covered space in case of wet weather. Music by Sunny Weather, Steve Selin and Friends, Curt Osgood & Friends, Luke Gustafson, Uncle Joe & the Rose Bud Ramblers! Cost: $10/person or $20-$30 per family suggested donation - all are welcome and none will be turned away! For more information, contact Primitive Pursuits at Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, (607) 272-2292.

Republicans revolt against their own

Via One of Nine, I see that Congressman Richard Hanna, who currently represents Dryden but whose district drops us in January, has a challenger, Mike Kicinski, who claims to be "The Real Republican and Conservative."

Similarly, and more practically for Dryden, since the district will still include us, Senator Jim Seward has a challenger from his right, James Blake.

School board candidates, Happenin' in the Hamlet, AES maneuvers

The Ithaca Journal has a Meet the Dryden School Board Candidates set of articles from Paul Lutwak, Bill Harding, and Lawrence Lyon. There are three candidates running for four slots, so I'm guessing someone out there will be elected through a write-in.

Groton Town Talk notes McLean's Happenin' in the Hamlet festival, which is coming this weekend.

Happenin' in the Hamlet, coming this weekend. (Poster at Dryden Community Center Cafe)

Finally, there's an article on legislation to keep AES Cayuga open, preserving the Lansing coal power plant that produced most of Dryden's electricity until this March. The proposal, which has the NYS Power Authority buy relatively high-priced coal electricity for distribution at low cost, doesn't really add up to me, though I'm also not convinced that the current crash in natural gas prices will last forever. My guess is that this is more Senator Nozzolio's gesture toward Lansing than an effort likely to succeed.

Update: Stuart Staniford's take on the power plant seems about right.

Learn from Roscoe

I posted this yesterday at The Albany Project, thinking that it was mainly about state and maybe national issues. There isn't, even in the wildest extremist fever dreams, a political machine in these parts that can compare with the O'Connell/Corning machine in Albany. (Erastus Corning 2nd was Mayor of Albany from 1942 to his death in 1983.)

On reflection, though, Roscoe's lament here is less about the machine specifically and more the perspective of someone justifying his power. I keep hearing echoes of the gas companies' PR in this griping about those utopians, clearly imperfect themselves, who dare challenge a system built on power and avarice.

It's worth contemplating, whatever level or kind of politics you deal with. Learn from Roscoe, but don't become Roscoe.

No, not the how-to of cheating at cockfighting or fixing elections. Roscoe, William Kennedy's 2002 classic of Albany politics, certainly explores all that, but mostly it's a study of a man deeply embedded in a political machine. Roscoe Conway helped build it, profited by it, and now mostly wants to retire - but can't. The machine needs him, for now, even if its participants don't all realize it.

Roscoe is a scoundrel, and even he seems aware of it, though he continues nonetheless. His journey through post-WWII Albany illustrates how the machine works, how it justifies its work, and how the social ties of political relationships sustain it especially when it's under attack.

Roscoe is always thinking about this, but rarely brings it all to the surface. One paragraph, describing a photo of Jimmy Walker, Roscoe, and his comrade-in-the-machine Patsy, though, gives a taste:

This is a war photo: three warriors marching into combat against what Roscoe calls the Morality Plague...

The Plague comes out of oblivion every seven or so years and, like the locust, builds its white houses in public cemeteries, and propagates, with evil simplicity, "truth" and "honesty" as political virtues. This has the popular appeal of chocolate, the distorting capacity of gin.

But Roscoe wonders: Since when has truth been a political virtue? Can you name one truth that is everywhere welcome? Certainly there are none in play in any quest for, or defense of, political power - Jimmy's for instance - for power is based in the deep comprehension and perverse love of deception, especially self-deception, and any man who seeks power through truth is either a fool or a loser.

Roscoe knows of no candidate's ever making a campaign pledge to reveal all his own self-inflation, all those covetous, envious, lascivious, venal, and violent motives that drive every move he ever makes in politics and will continue making if elected. Roscoe certainly did not invent the perverse forces that drive human beings and he can't explain any of them. He believes they are a mystery of nature.

He concedes that a morally pure society, with candidates unblemished by sin and vice, might possibly exist somewhere, though he has never seen or heard of one, and can't really imagine what one would look like. "But I'll keep looking," he concludes. (page 235, paragraph breaks added)

This is a painfully familiar cynicism, echoed in the hallways of power regularly. "We are flawed," it says, and denies that any improvement on those flaws is possible, unless perhaps an impossible utopia springs up. It questions the right of reformers to ask for more of their elected officials. It assumes that the greater knowledge - indeed the cynicism - of those already in power outweighs any possible claims to political virtue of those outside the machine.

Of course, it stands ready to welcome those willing to play its games, and machine politics have a long history of absorbing reformers, turning the last decades's reforming challengers into next year's old guard. Sometimes it can apply its power to defeating reform challengers, and other times it's had to stand aside and wait for the Morality Plague, as Roscoe puts it, to run its course.

Kennedy's Author's Note at the end reminds us that "This is a novel, not history", but like all of his Albany novels, he does an excellent job of capturing a time and a place and a city in ways that usually elude historians. I didn't read Roscoe expecting biographies of Mayor Corning or Dan O'Connell, and I wonder if they experienced quite as much drama as Kennedy presents here. Perhaps.

Roscoe's lessons aren't limited to Albany the city, either. They still apply today - minus many of the exciting period details - to Albany the state capital. Somehow I wasn't surprised to find Assemblyman Jack McEneny listed in the acknowledgments. After all, beyond his interest in history, a decade after Roscoe was written, he was the Assembly's face on LATFOR, continuing a long tradition of selling out the voters in favor of privileging those already on the inside through creative redistricting.

Roscoe has a lot to teach us reformers. Read it, weep, and know your opponent. It took me years to make myself finally read it. It was worth it.

Hollenbeck's Spring Classic Road Race

I spent yesterday morning in Virgil as a corner marshal on the Hollenbeck's Spring Classic Road Race, helping point bicyclists toward their last hill climb and the finish line. (I was volunteering for the Ellis Hollow Preschool - it's not something I normally do.) It's run by the Finger Lakes Cycling Club.

It was great to connect with neighbors Glen and Marcia Swan during the swirl of registration, but I spent most of the time at the intersection of Route 392 and Van Donsel Road.

Registration and setting up.

I'd never seen a large bicycle race before, and it was somewhat different than I'd expected. Riders were crowded at the start, but spread out - some - over the course of the race.

Watching the start.

One rider in the first group got off to a major head start and seemed to keep it, pushing the pace car for the group well ahead of the main body of cyclists. Some cyclists stayed in groups, while others moved alone.

The last big group of cyclists approaches the final hill-climb to the finish.

Racers faced a 22-mile course over Route 392, Parker Street, Clarks Corners Road, Route 221, Babcock Hollow Road, and Owego Hill Road. Some races did one lap, while others did two and the most grueling race did three.

I've posted a gallery of photos if you'd like to see more. (And apologies again - these are all cell phone photos.)

Is Groden in the future?

I'm not guessing that the Towns of Groton and Dryden will merge any time soon, but school districts? Maybe. This article on school budget squeezes notes that the state is pushing consolidation pretty much everywhere.

At TC3, "Associate Professor of Nursing Paula Moore won the award for a new internship that goes along with the college's study abroad program in Nicaragua.... Moore was the only community college faculty member honored, according to the college."

Power plant? What power plant?

The AES Cayuga plant hasn't been running since March, so our electricity is no longer coming from Tompkins County. For more on why, see Stuart Staniford's look at the paths of oil and natural gas prices.

This storm mostly missed our house, though we got lots of rain from the next one through. Here are some pictures from the Dacha Project.

Update: Somehow I missed Henry Kramer's latest bluster about, er, I'm not sure. How valuable it is for the gas industry to spend lots of money pushing its positions, and how we should be grateful to the Ithaca Journal for taking their PR seriously? Something like that.

Bird walk Sunday

You can find the birds in Dryden's southern hills this Sunday...

Join the Finger Lakes Land Trust on Sunday, May 6 at 8:00 AM for Birds Everywhere!, a bird walk especially for families and children. Join Mark Chao at the Roy H Park Preserve in Dryden for an easy walk through varying habitats. Mark has lots of experience teaching children to bird, and this walk is recommended for young people ages 6 and up. Children must be accompanied by a responsible adult. Please bring binoculars and field guides if you have them and don't forget water and snacks! From Ithaca, take Rt. 13 north to Irish Settlement Rd., turn right and continue 1.5 miles past Hammond Hill Rd. The preserve parking area is on the left just past the southern end of Goodband Rd.

For more information visit our web site at www.fllt.org or call 607-275-9487. This event is free and open to the public and will go rain or shine. M&T Bank is a generous sponsor of this series.