It’s hard for me to believe that I ever drove the width of New York State in vehicles of obviously uncertain (but certainly brief) futures without thinking twice about it. Thanksgiving holiday? No problem, even on an ancient Indian motorcycle with no windshield. Date in Buffalo? Here we go! No interstates then, either.
After this past week, I can attest that them days are gone forever. My dear friend Bea has for many years been traveling annually to her in-laws’ summer place in Mayville, N.Y., on a gentle hill above Lake Chautauqua. She and her late husband made the trip all the way from their home near Boston, a nine-hour drive even with the help of Interstate 90, which comprises the Massachusetts Pike and the Dewey Thruway. They usually broke the trip in mid-New York state to avoid fatigue.
Last year, Bea did the trip herself in one day, which seemed to me a bit much for a person of her mature years. So this year I invited Kiki and me and Batty, my hybrid, along for the run. We’d break the trip up as usual, a bit past halfway across New York, and focus more on the passing scene, rather than the slowly passing miles.
Fat chance. The Mass Pike was crammed with cars reenacting the first lap of a Grand Prix race. It was survivable, I determined, but hour after hour on high alert takes a steep toll on the nerves. I looked forward to the relaxing ambience of the New York Thruway I remembered from my youth.
Unfortunately, that ambience, like my youth, is long gone. The only difference I noted was that, while the Massachusetts drivers were madmen, they at least seemed to know what they were doing. The New Yorkers appeared both mad and motiveless. At one point my car’s GPS announced a 55-minute traffic jam with no discernible cause — accident, construction, or breakdown. Just too many vehicles. By the time we halted for the night in Weedsport, just past Syracuse, I was ready to retreat; except that, like Macbeth halfway through his murders, returning were as tedious as go o’er. The exit for the state road to Mayville next morning was a very welcome sight.
People who think of New York as a piddling little state of honking traffic jams, apartment houses, and stifling regulations have no idea of its reality. Western New York, as we cruised slowly south toward Mayville, at the northern end of Lake Chautauqua, is a green-carpeted, thickly forested paradise of oaks, locusts, peach orchards, and vineyards with a beautiful lake at its center.
We passed a peaceful week in the summer house above a meadow where the deer emerged at dusk to feed on fruit beneath an old apple tree. I lounged by the fire pond each afternoon as Bea paddled around, occasionally tossing a floating acorn up onto the bank. Kiki, ecstatic to be loose after two days in the car or on a leash, zoomed around sniffing for chipmunks. She also was allowed, as a service dog without credentials, into the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater to listen to a lecture about the Middle East (this year’s Chautauqua theme) by Thomas Friedman. Our hosts, year-long subscribers, also went most nights to concerts or dance performances.
Since the near-fatal stabbing of Salman Rushdie on the amphitheater stage three years ago, security has tightened somewhat. Any purse or pack larger than a few inches must be transparent, and I’m pretty sure that when we bought our tickets, the computer, which asked many more questions than the usual, was vetting us loosely. Still, the overall atmosphere among the audience members was friendly: rather like coffee hour after a Presbyterian church service. I good-morninged most of the people I passed, and even met a couple from Waterbury, Vt.
At the end of the week we drove home by the southern route, which swings ‘way down toward Binghamton and even into Pennsylvania for a few miles. What a difference! Rounded green hills south of the glacial advance, clear little rivers with native American names winding through the valleys, and much less of the feeling of being in a crowd of running elephants nose-to-tail.
We dove into the Mass Pike just east of Albany knowing that when the next four hours were over, we’d be at Bea’s home. We’d unload the car and carry in the boxes we’d brought from the land of peaches and wine grapes. If we had time, we’d sit on the open porch, sip something cool, listen to the waves on the beach below the house, and reflect that, just two days away, there’s a world that’s in its own way just as beautiful as this.