Chimney Bluffs

If you absolutely HAD to live in a city, if you had some sort of health issue that required you to be close to a major medical center, or if you were a devout practitioner of some uniquely urban faith, or some such thing, then Rochester wouldn't be a completely unlivable option. It's got great old buildings, shady, quiet neighborhoods, and lots of human diversity. It's also got Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, one of only about a dozen overtly progressive seminaries in the nation (which is why I find my way here each June and January). And yet...it's still a city.

I used to say that a person can make a meaningful and fulfilling life anywhere in the world. Once you commit yourself to a place, you find ways to make it livable. I mean, I even managed to enjoy living in Oklahoma...long ago. There was something almost Zen about those big, empty spaces and that long, flat line where the grasslands meet the sky. But that was long ago.

Today, with a few free hours in the morning, I made an early trek out to a New York State park that the locals don't seem to know about: Chimney Bluffs. Interesting earthen formations along the coast of Lake Ontario, "an ice age legacy." Here are some pictures. I like the otherworldly feel of the place. It's as bleak a spot as January offers, like some sort of cross between a Beaver County strip mine and the Ice Planet of Hoth. And that frozen lake, stretching off to the horizon, gives the place the feel of a looming presence. Not a bad place to visit, but a pale substitute for my explorations in the ANF.

What I always forget about cities is how long it takes to travel in them. How frustrating that travel is. How inhuman people become in their cars, how anonymously they behave. And how much wiper fluid you need to drive across a northern city in January.

On one hand, cities are great. I have a personal relationship with New York and Paris. They're places where I've spent lots of time, places that I've been returning to again and again for the past twenty years. Whenever I visit either, I have my favorite haunts, my hideouts and well-worn paths, my private city within the city. Far better than New York and Paris, I know the African cities of Douala and Yaounde, labyrinthine and dangerous. I know their open air markets, and their seedy expat bars, their sordid hotels, their squallid back streets. I know their Greek bakeries and "European" grocery stores. I know their public places and squares...because they were once the backdrop to my life. When a man is still young, his life intersects easily with the world's many places. (At least that was the case in the 90s.)

And yet, I don't think my soul is an urban thing. And I feel a deep conviction that the cities of my life are quickly becoming memories to me, ever more distant, the old familiarity fading like the names of the students I taught a decade ago. I just don't find those cities "life-giving" anymore. Alas! Three years in the Allegheny National Forest have ruined me for all other settings.

Sorry about the navel-gazing. We'll return to backwoods reporting as soon as I get home from Rochester and finish writing a few 20-pagers. (Can't believe I'm still doing homework at my age.)