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The
people's choice in Livingston County... and beyond!
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I've walked around seven of New York's 11 Finger Lakes. As a child, I was
entranced by a relief map on the wall at my uncle's Keuka Lake cottage.
I imagined a giant Ice Age hand reaching down from the sky and clawing a
swath across the state with its glacial fingernails. I pictured those finger
marks filling with clear blue water and the hills between them bursting
into lush green forests. d, I learned these glacier-formed lakes and hills,
and the wildlife inhabiting them, were a New World Eden that drew native
peoples from afar to hunt and fish their peaceful shores.
Eventually, the Iroquois Nation evolved. Their main east-west trail (now
state Route 20) stretched out on the map like a long piece of rawhide, just
north of the lakes, with the lakes, themselves, "hanging" down
in a row like so many eagle feathers. These freshwater havens carry the
names given them by the Iroquois: names like Conesus, Honeoye, Canandaigua,
Keuka, Seneca and Cayuga.
I'm neither geologist nor historian. My obsession with the Finger Lakes
draws its energy from indelible impressions of childhood summers on Keuka:
arriving in June to the smell of musty furniture; feeling the hot, sun-baked
wooden float against my wet cheek as I lay my soaked and shivering body
down to dry; working tirelessly at pulling every stone out of the lake,
then throwing it back in; the peacefulness of falling asleep-often in a
bathing suit-to the soft lapping of waves against the breakwall.
My mother's passion for hiking provided the childhood building blocks of
my adult infatuation with these lakes. She took us on hikes up the steep
glens and gorges that rose from the lake into the woods and farmlands.
Some women might collect wild flowers as a souvenir of a day in the woods;
my mother collected fossils.
My grandmother sold "our" cottage when I was 10. One summer, as
an adult, I decided to connect all those summer childhood sorties. With
tent and sleeping bag, I backpacked 59 miles around the lake. In that three-day
trek, I ferreted out glens and gorges conquered as a child, and located
three of the four cottages my family once owned.
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