Mountain Home, May 2009

E E R F he wind

as t

May 2009

sterious n y m e Th nce i a r a e p p disa vania ain l y s n n e the P ins of Capt mountace Ritter Lawren onnor C t t a

By M

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page

Page

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

May 2009

VOLUME 4 ISSUE 5

Mountain News & Chatter The Last Great Place

Our wonderful writers take five more awards in this year’s Keystone contest.

6 Swing into Spring By Beka Brown

©James Fitzpatrick

15

5 Winners! By Michael Capuzzo

Birds, blooms, brushes, and LPGA golf: let the games begin.

Cover Story 8 The Final Flight By Matt Connor

A WWII plane went down near Slate Run, Pennsylvania, in April 1946, and so began a mystery.

Features

Heart of the Mountain

12 Out There By Patricia Brown Davis

With the abyss below and the creepy crawlies above, the old outhouse still had an advantage: no need to flush.

Looking Back

14 Country Roads By Joyce M. Tice

Often lost in history, the names of our highways and byways tell the stories of our past.

15

Outdoors & Sport 15 On the Footpath By Angela Cannon Crothers

Three different sections of the Finger Lakes Trail plus four dedicated trailmasters equals some awesome hiking.

The Mountain Man Bewildered by a shrinking wood pile, a Depression-era mountain man hatches a plan.

Reading Nature

18 Harmonies of Scale By Tom Murphy

Life is local, Wendell Berry points out in Home Economics, and economics that stay that way stay more sound.

Courtesy Jacqui Wensich

16 To Catch a Thief By Roy Kain

The Lunker

22 When the Going Gets Tough By Fred Metarko Fish-less fishermen head to private waters to get their groove back.

Life ~ Body & Soul Yogamama

23 Samsara 2.0 By Kathleen Thompson

Tired of that pesky operating system installed by your parents? Try out Witness 1.0, just out of Beta testing.

The Better World

24 On the Other Hand By John and Lynne Diamond-Nigh Leisure ~ Arts & Travel 26 I Hear That Train A-Comin’ By Kay Barrett

Winth new owners and new services, the Tioga Central Railroad comes rollin’ ‘round the bend.

26

Cover art by Tucker Worthington.

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

COURTESY WELLSBORO & CORNING RR

Stay open to voices from the other side of the aisle—every once in a while you may hear a truth you value.

Page

Magazine of the Pennsylvania Mountains & New York Finger Lakes

Continued Onstage Off the Wall “Everyone needs a Mountain Home”

28 The Play’s the Thing By Larry Biddison

Or at least the most important thing this month, as we welcome back the Tioga Short Play Festival.

Food & Drink 35 Back Home on the Farm By Barbara Coyle

Dentist Sue Bullock and her family traded their old life for a new and sustainable one: BackAchers farm in Bradford County.

Wine & Dine

36 My Kingdom for a Grape By Rob Lane

Seneca Lake’s newest winery, Kings Garden, opens for its first full season.

Finger Lakes Wine Review

36 The Merry Month of May By Holly Howell

May is packed with occasions, not the least of whihc is the spicy Cinco de Mayo. And Holly has the perfect wine to go with it.

Cooking Bachelor Style

Publisher Michael Capuzzo Editor-in-Chief Teresa Banik Capuzzo Associate Publisher George Bochetto, Esq. Operations Director Marian Conicella General Manager James Fitzpatrick Cover Artist Tucker Worthington Production Manager/Graphic Designer Amanda Doan-Butler Graphic Design Assistant Kay Barrett Circulation Manager Christopher Banik Contributing Writers Kay Barrett, Larry Biddison, Dawn Bilder, Sarah Bull, Angela Cannon-Crothers, Matt Connor, John & Lynne Diamond-Nigh, Patricia Brown Davis, Holly Howell, David Kagan, Roy Kain, Rob Lane, Fred Metarko, Karen Meyers, Dave Milano, Terry Miller, Tom Murphy, Mary W. Myers, Jim Obleski, Gary Ranck, Myles C. Rhodes, Joyce M. Tice, Linda Williams Photography James Fitzpatrick, Ann Kamzelski Intern Beka Brown Sales Representatives Richard Burton, Michele Duffy, Laura Rose, Gary Runtas Accounting Ruth Braham Beagle Cosmo Mountain Home is published monthly by Beagle Media LLC, 39 Water St., Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, 16901.

Copyright © 2009 Beagle Media LLC. All rights reserved.

38 The Fountain of Youth By Terry Miller

Looking to lengthen his lifespan, our loony bachelor learns the guitar.

40 Make Mine a Sidecar By Myles C. Rhodes

To advertise, subscribe or provide story ideas phone 570-724-3838 or e-mail info@mountainhomemag.com.

Each month copies of Mountain Home are available for free at hundreds locations in Tioga, Potter, Bradford, Lycoming, and Sullivan counties in Pennsylvania; Steuben, Chemung, and Schuyler counties in New York; and outlets in downstate Pennsylvania including Lancaster, Reading, York, Harrisburg, and suburban Philadelphia.

Visit us at www.mountainhomemag.com.

Shop Around the Corner

Get Mountain Home at home. For a one-year subscription to Mountain Home (12 issues), send $24.95, payable to Beagle Media LLC, to 39 Water St., Wellsboro, PA 16901.

42 Ettinger’s Landscaping By Lynette Ambrose

LOOK FOR Mountain Home Real Estate Guide wherever Mountain Home magazine is found.

Market & Classifieds Roads Scholar With the 2003 H-D Electra-Glide, Harley-Davidson makes it two for the road with a bucket

Over decades and acres, a garden center grows in Montoursville.

44 Zoo Zee Zoo Zee Zoo Zee By Angela Cannon-Crothers That’s the Mountain Home speaking black-throated green warbler. You can, too.

Home & Real Estate 45 The Time of His Life By Jennifer Cline

Watchmaker Richard Awiza, one of the last of a dying breed, mends time in Montoursville.

Ask Gary

46 Fit To Be Tiled By Gary Ranck

Our handyman isn’t too keen about tiling over Formica, but he’ll tell you how nonetheless.

Some Place Like Home

48 One Man’s Junk By Dave Milano

Dave pens an ode to hardware trail mix, that thrifty staple of the prudent homeowner, and the tinkerer’s joy.

Page

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

The Last Great Place Michael Capuzzo

And the Winner Is …

J

oyce Tice, please stand. Kindly hold applause for Joyce for a moment. The Mountain Home “Looking Back” columnist wrote the best feature story in the state, about Blossburg’s epic Woodrow Wilson monument. (Second place went to The Philadelphia Weekly.) “Mountain Man” Roy Kain, “The Lunker” Fred Metarko, Bradford County writer Barbara Coyle and Wellsboro photographer Ann Kamzelski also took home the prestigious Keystone Award from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. That’s sixteen Keystones for Mountain Home in three years. Of course you, dear Reader and Advertiser, are Mountain Home’s keystone– the central piece that supports everything. Thank you! And special thanks to Joyce, Roy, Fred, Barbara, and Ann.

Joyce M. Tice 1st Place, Feature Story “A Priest, a President, and Proud Poles”

Ann Kamzelski 2nd Place, Photo Story “Dragonfly”

Barbara Coyle 2nd Place, Business Story “Station Reborn in Towanda’s Heart”

Roy Kain 2nd Place, Sports/Outdoor Column “The Mountain Man”

May 2009

Fred Metarko 2nd Place, Sports Story “Love for the Long Haul”

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page

© James C. Hayes

LPGA Swings into Corning Classic

By Beka Brown

James C. Hayes “Orchid” photograph is just one of the many pieces of art that will be on display at the “Bloom” exhibit.

Art in Bloom A

W

here the world’s best meet to compete.”

This is the motto of the Corning Classic, the annual Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tournament that takes place at the Corning Country Club in Corning, New York. The tournament took off running in 1977 when Bill Griffiths pitched the idea to executives at Corning Glass Works and thirty-one years later, the tournament has the same name, location, and sponsors—a feat no other LPGA tour has accomplished.

Griffiths idea was to help support the Club and the community by donating proceeds from the tournament to local hospitals. That notion has also remained preserved through the years. One thing that has changed though is the amount of money involved in the tournament. The first Corning Classic winner was awarded $15,000. This year, the winner will receive $225,000. More importantly, according to corningclassic.com, over the years more than $5.4 million dollars from the event has been distributed to local women’s health care programs and community organizations.

More than 1,200 volunteers work all week, and many throughout the year, to put on seven days that includes: a pro am, junior golfer clinics, a community day, professional competition, and entertainment for the whole family.

In order to attend the event, tickets may be purchased for no more than $20 at the gate. Kids under the age of fifteen with an accompanying adult will be admitted at no charge.

WHAT: Corning Classic LPGA Tournament.

WHEN: May 18–24.

WHERE: Corning Country Club, Corning, New York.

INFORMATION: Tickets available at the gate. Season tickets available online. For additional information call the tournament office at 607-962-4441.

Page

MOUNTAIN HOME

pril showers have yielded to May (and June) flowers this spring at the Palace Theatre Gallery.

Almost forty artists from New York and Pennsylvania are currently on display at the gallery, showcasing their finest work to suit their interpretations of the theme: “bloom.” This marks the most entries any exhibit has ever received at the Palace Theatre.

Sharla Lefkowitz Brown, the exhibit curator, could not be more pleased with the impact of the display.

“The quality of the selected artwork is impressive. The exhibit is colorful, exciting, and full of energy. It is a perfect way to celebrate the Spring season,” Brown says.

The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes manages the gallery, which is located in the Gaffer District of Corning, New York. The Bloom reception will be held on May 8 and is free and open to the public.

WHAT: Bloom exhibit at Palace Theatre Gallery WHEN: April 1–June 28, Friday, May 8, 5:00– 7 p.m.

WHERE: 17 West Market Street, Corning, New York.

INFORMATION: Contact The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger, Sharla Lefkowitz Brown, 607-962-5871 x223, infoarts@earts.org

Oops & Etc. On page ten in last month’s cover story “First Fishmen,” Yellow Breeches Creek was incorrectly referred to as Beeches Creek.

Also, in last month’s Wine & Dine column, Chef Richard Lerman was incorrectly referred to as Chef Robert Lerman in the photo caption.

May 2009

Mountain News & Chatter

©GARY TYSON (2)

A Day for the Birds and the Bird Lovers

With tour guides present, the birdwatchers lift their binoculars to view the wildlife at Hills Creek.

I

t’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Super—no, it’s really a bird.

Every Saturday in the month of May, members of the Tiadaghton Audubon Society will serve as bird watching tour guides at Hills Creek State Park.

The annual Saturday Morning Bird Walks will showcase both water and woodland birds in the area that make their habitat in Hills Creek. So far this year, ducks, loons, grebes, and bald eagles have been spotted.

Although there are binoculars available at the park, bringing a pair is suggested. The society also requests that watchers wear muted colors and comfortable walking shoes.

Participants must meet at the park office at 7:30 a.m. to join the walk.

The American goldfinch is one of the colorful birds often seen by the Tiadaghton Audubon Society.

May 2009

WHAT: Tiadaghton Audubon Society Saturday Morning Bird Walks WHEN: May 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30 WHERE: Hills Creek State Park, near Wellsboro INFORMATION: www.tiaaudubon.org

Calling All Artists A

ttention all artists! The Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania will be accepting entries to the Regional Annual Juried Art Show from May 16 to May 23.

The 36th annual show will take place in June, but entries must be submitted in advance. Professional and amateur artists who reside within 150 miles of Wellsboro will be considered for the show.

Entries will be accepted in the following mediums: water color, gouache, oils, charcoals, pastels, pen and ink, alkyd, and pencil. No work may exceed a span of 48 inches. Each artist may submit up to two entries for $10 each. Members of the Wellsboro Art Club will be charged $8.

Awards to the exhibit will be dispersed on June 7, from 2–4 p.m.

WHAT: Submissions to the 35th Regional Annual Juried Art Show.

WHEN: May 16–May 23, from 2–5 p.m.

WHERE: Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center, 134 Main Street, Wellsboro, Pennsylvania.

INFORMATION: Each artist may submit two entries at $10 per entry. Wellsboro Art Club members will pay $8 per entry. Each submission may be no larger than 48 inches. Call the director at 570-724-1917 for an entry or more information.

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page

O

n Friday, April 26, 1946, Captain Lawrence Ritter of the U.S. Army Air Corps, slipped the surly bonds of earth for the last time as he was flying over central Pennsylvania’s Black Forest near Slate Run. A twenty-seven-year-old decorated World War II pilot, Ritter was ferrying a P-47N Thunderbolt fighter plane from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Michigan to LaGuardia Airport in New York when he hit a catastrophic surprise April snowstorm. His plane went down in one of the most remote regions of the Keystone State. It would be months before his plane was recovered.

The story of the eventual discovery of the Ritter plane, and its re-discovery over a half-century later, is one of the most fascinating chapters in the history of Pennsylvania military aviation, and one that still resonates with history lovers, tourists, and outdoor enthusiasts who continue to make the pilgrimage to the crash site today.

That site, on Pennsylvania State forest land, is accessible during the spring and summer months via deeply rutted gravel roads leading through thick forests and winding streams, with an occasional hunting cabin to break up the primeval atmosphere that permeates these woods. A twenty-five mile drive from the village of Slate Run ends at a gated footpath, where a hike of a mile or two farther will lead one to a circular clearing in the forest and, just beyond that, the pile of twisted metal, wiring, and rusted gears—all that remains of the once-majestic P-47 aircraft that came to its end here.

It’s not an easy spot to find, but as the story of the Ritter plane crash continues to seep into the wider culture, hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts increasingly are making it a destination of choice.

“The first time I came here I was with a friend, who is a pilot, and my daughter,” said Roger Tracey, who acted as Mountain Home’s tour guide on a visit to the site in late March. “She was walking way ahead of us, and I had told her some things to look for. She came running back and said, ‘There’s a big turnaround, and it comes to a dead end.’ I asked her if there was a huge mound of dirt and some hemlocks. She said ‘yes,’ and I said, ‘Good, I think we’re there.’”

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds—and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew.

And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand, and touched the face of God. —John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Page

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

©JAMES FITZPATRICK

In addition to the few pieces of P-47 wreckage that remain there, a memorial stone dedicated to Ritter now also graces the spot, placed there by two Boy Scout troops who re-discovered the Ritter site fifty-five years after the plane went down.

“The forest ranger who originally talked to us about it told us that Captain Ritter’s father had wanted to place some kind of headstone at the crash site. However, he was denied access because he was from New York and the crash occurred on Pennsylvania State game land.

That was part of the lore of the crash story,” said Bryan Makos, the former Boy Scout who was instrumental in creating the memorial to the fallen flyer. “My goal was to fulfill a father’s wish fifty-some years later.”

ROUTINE MISSION, TRAGIC END The flight from Selfridge Field to La Guardia was supposed to have been strictly routine. Ritter, a Yonkers, New York, native who had 1,500 flight hours under his belt (more than half of those with P-47s) was more than capable of handling his mission, having shot down two Nazi fighter planes and helping to sink a German U-Boat while a member of the 319th Squadron of the 325th Fighter Group—the famous “Checkertail”—during World War II. Broad-shouldered and dark-haired with a high, intelligent forehead, Ritter was a married man with at least one child, and was no doubt looking forward to returning home to his family at the close of his military career.

At about 3:40 p.m. on Friday, April 26, 1946, Ritter’s plane left Selfridge Field. An hour and twenty minutes later he hit a snowstorm over the mountains of northcentral Pennsylvania. The roar of an enormous explosion ripped through the region about 5 p.m. that evening. That explosion marked the last moments in the life of Captain Lawrence Ritter, whose plane went down violently in that thick forest just months after the close of World War II. “He had survived the war,” Makos said. “Now the war is over and he’s looking forward to the best years of his life, and instead he tragically dies in a freak April snowstorm.”

In the ensuing days, the Army Air Corps, the Civil Air Patrol, and state police combed the area searching for the missing plane without luck. Frustrated at their inability to find a trace of the plane, the search was abandoned and Ritter was declared “missing” on May 2.

It would be seven long months before the family of Captain Ritter finally learned of his fate, when the crash site, and some human remains, were finally discovered by local bear hunters.

“I was living around Nauvoo, Pennsylvania, and bear hunting was not the best around that area,” begins Paul Seaman, a Williamsport resident and former post office employee, who may be the last surviving member of the hunting party that discovered the Ritter crash site.

“I had a chance to go with a friends of mine, Bobby Hiler and Claire Gardner and the fish warden from Tioga County.

We were around Leetonia, and there were several other fellas the fish warden brought in. I don’t recall their names anymore.”

Seaman, 86, has an active mind and a sharp memory, despite some recent health challenges. He is also a former Army Air Corps flight photographer, giving his observations of the site a decided credibility.

“I was a staff sergeant, an aerial photographer in the Fifth Air Force,” he said. “I flew in all the aircraft. If it had room for me, I flew in it.”

Seaman and his hunting companions had just finished their lunch, around noontime, he says, “when somebody over on my left said, ‘Hey, there’s a big piece of metal laying over here.’ I went over and looked at it, and I thought right away that that could be the plane that crashed in April 1946.

“I got to looking at it a little closer and a little closer, and I recognized that it was a P-47. Since I had been in the Air Force I recognized different parts of aircraft and could identify them. I recognized the engine, which was humungous, and buried at least four feet in the ground. It was an eighteen cylinder radial engine embedded in the ground. As I stood on it, in the crater caused by the crash, my shoulders were just about level with the ground around it.”

Almost incredibly, in an era long before the development of the cell phone camera or even the pocket-sized instamatic cameras of the 1970s, Seaman actually was able to take some photos of the wreckage at the moment they were discovered, the first ever taken at the site.

“It wasn’t my aerial camera, that’s for sure,” Seaman says of the old folding camera he used that day. “It was a cheap camera.”

From his observations of the scene, Seaman said he thinks the sudden winter tempest disoriented Ritter and caused him to crash straight down into the mountain.

“From what I remember, there was a blinding snowstorm that came up quick, and I imagine he was 7,000 or 8,000 feet above the mountain there and became disoriented,” Seaman said. “He lost his sense of direction and didn’t know if his upside was down or his downside was up. It’s one of those things that happens when you’re flying, at times.”

The trajectory of Ritter’s plane as it went down disturbed far less of the surrounding forest than if it had come in horizontally across the mountain, crashing into trees and other obstacles as it went.

“You’ve gotta remember, this

aircraft is on top of the mountain, and after it crashed in April and was missing, the army came in with search parties,” Seaman said. “They also had aircraft flying overhead. What the aircraft overhead was looking for was a swath cut through the trees. That didn’t happen. This airplane came straight down. When it did, it hit into the mountain; there was no swath.

There was nothing visible from the air that you could see, unless you were really very good at aerial observation. You would have never recognized it as a crash site.

“There wasn’t any piece of the aircraft that was larger than … well, there may have been one piece that was about ten feet long. There was probably one piece of that wing that was probably eight to ten feet long, but as the P-47 came straight down, you’ve gotta remember, the leading edge of the aircraft compressed that wing, and I would say it was compressed from seven or eight feet down to about fourteen, fifteen inches. But that portion of the wing stayed together.”

Seaman and the rest of the hunting party went down into the (now nonexistent) village of Leetonia to notify the authorities, then accompanied them back up the mountain to the crash site.

“I said, ‘I think we ought to notify them as soon as possible.’ We got word down to Leetonia and they got the state police down there, and they questioned us. We went back up on the mountain where the crash was, and they took over the investigation from that time on.”

Seaman said there was indication of fire at the location, and of human

May 2009

COURTESY JOHN RAUTH

Right: Capt. Lawrence Ritter (standing, fifth from left) with his WWII Army Air Corps sqadron. Facing page: Memorial marker erected at the crash site through the efforts of Lycoming County Boy Scout troops.

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page

Page 10

THE REDISCOVERY Bryan Makos is the publisher of a bi-annual military history magazine called Valor, based in Montoursville.

He is also a former Boy Scout who was instrumental in the rediscovery of the Ritter plane wreckage over fifty years after Seaman and his hunting buddies first stumbled on the site.

“There’s a local gentleman here who helps out with veterans’ affairs and has a huge military collection.

His name is Jess Hackenburg. He’s pretty plugged in on anything to do with World War II and veterans in the whole Lycoming County area. He had told us about this crash site, about a P-47 Thunderbolt that had crashed up on the mountain near Slate Run,” says Makos, 25. “We thought, ‘Hey, this might be a neat Scouting project, to get the Scouts together to try to locate this crash site.’ So that’s where the spark came from.”

After searching newspaper archives for information on the crash, Makos and members of Boy Scout Troops 172 and 93 planned their journey into the Black Forest in the late spring of 2000, armed with GPS coordinates of the crash provided by the Bureau of Forestry.

“We didn’t know what we’d find, but we knew it wouldn’t be like some crash sites in the South Pacific, where you can actually stumble upon an intact airplane,” Makos says. “We were expecting to find very little, and that’s essentially what we did find. There are just little bits and pieces left now.”

But it wasn’t easy. Turns out the GPS coordinates were far from accurate, and after hours of searching the young men still had not found a trace of the crash site.

MOUNTAIN HOME

©PAUL SEAMAN

remains. In both cases, however, the signs were minimal.

“Remember there was a snowstorm going on when it happened,” he says. “The fire was from the fuel on the aircraft. That’s all that was really burned in the area there. I would say there was maybe a fire in an area of maybe fifty, sixty feet… The only other thing I ever found was vertebrae, small bones. I did find his little shaving kit. That’s how I found out who it was. His name was in there. He was a captain. He was flying from Michigan to New York. You’ve gotta remember it lay there from April all through the summer into November of 1946. If there was any part of that body left there, the animals would have carried it away.”

After arriving on the scene, state police informed the military, and soon dozens of army personnel and vehicles were converging on this tiny, isolated speck of Pennsylvania mountains. The Slate Run Tackle Shop, containing the only delicatessen in the area, found itself taking orders for fifty sandwiches at a time to feed the officers and enlisted men combing the Black Forest.

A new road was carved into the forest to access the wreckage, which remains today as a footpath to the site.

Most of the material from the crash site was retrieved, with some of the pieces of the plane allegedly going to a local scrap metal dealer. Ritter’s remains—some small bone fragments and his dog tags—were returned to his family, who reportedly had them cremated and spread at the crash site.

And that’s where the story would have ended, had it not been for an ambitious young man with a yen for military history and a drive to earn his Eagle Scout badge.

“It was in May or June, so there were gnats everywhere,” Makos said. “You had the summer heat that was starting up, and you had bugs in your eyes and mouth. At first it was like Indiana Jones. We were very excited about what we were going to see. Would there still be oil in the actual crater, as we were told?

How much of the plane would still be there? Are there

May 2009

©VALOR MAGAZINE

still human remains somewhere? Will there be machine gun shells?

“So you have these wild images running through your mind, but then it starts to take longer.

We started to get frustrated. It’s hot and sweaty and you have the gnats. We still had the uniforms on, and it was getting frustrating marching through the woods, with the trees all looking the same.

Everything looked the same. During the initial search it became very clear to all of us involved as to why it took them so long to find the crash site back in 1946. That area is remote wilderness, really. So we were a little down. At the same time, we had a feeling for the way the people who were searching for the wreck back in 1946 felt.”

Finally, a break. One of the boys stumbled across a cylinder from a P-47 radial engine.

“It was just sitting out there in the woods. I think it attests to the violence of the crash because it must have been a good 200 yards away from the actual crash site. So it really threw it for a loop.”

Finding the cylinder made Makos feel “like Indiana Jones finding a piece of gold treasure,” he says. “It was enough for us to say, ‘Okay, we’ve gotta be close.’ That cylinder head is heavy, it’s huge. It’s the size of a small boulder. So we knew it had to have crashed nearby in order to fling that thing where it was. That was like a shot of adrenaline to the whole search effort. After a bit more searching we came upon the actual crash site.”

The mood among the Boy Scouts was euphoria mixed with reverence, Makos said.

“It was a surreal experience, because while it wasn’t what you might picture when you think of a wrecked airplane—this is sixty years later, after all—we were still extremely excited to see it and accomplish what we set out to do. At the same time, I think there was a certain reverence that was felt upon being there because we knew a man had died there, that blood was spilled there.”

The spot was marked with a post and a piece of plastic, and the boys returned to their homes to begin planning a memorial. The Scouts, joined by veterans’ groups and members of the general public, raised several hundred dollars for a memorial stone, and contacted various interested parties about the possibility of holding a service of remembrance at the site, which took place in June 2001.

“The most disappointing part of the whole experience was that we were unable to track down any relatives and have them come here,” Makos says. “We wanted to have someone from the family there when we dedicated the memorial stone. I sent out hundreds of letters to Ritters. I knew Captain Ritter was from Yonkers, so that was the starting point. So any Ritters in the Yonkers area, Please see LOST on page 13 Facing Page: In November 1946, twenty-three-year-old Paul Seaman stands on part of the airplane engine embedded in the impact crater. Right: Lycoming County Boy Scouts with temporary memorial marker at the crash site in 2000.

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 11

Heart of the Mountain Patricia Brown Davis

Tales from the Black Abyss ut I don’t want to go out there!”

“It’s all they have.”

“But the grass is wet and it’s dark!”

“I’ll give you a flashlight.”

I put my slippers on and scurried out into the night.

As scary as this was for a nine-year-old, it was better than the alternative. If I didn’t go, the next morning I’d be carrying a chamber pot from the upstairs bedroom out there to dump, rinse, and return to its place back upstairs under the bed. With that thought in mind, I made a beeline to my grandparents’ outhouse.

I ran down the path as quickly as possible, feeling the tall grass whip against my pajama legs, which were wicking the dew from the blades of grass. All kinds of creatures seemed to lurk just beyond the flashlight’s beam. The path was long, the building foreboding.

I directed the light beam onto the handle of the old latrine and pushed open the creaking door. Gingerly, I stepped up into the small dark space and looked around to make sure nothing else inhabited the room.

Quickly, I shut the door and set the flashlight on the floor with the beam shining towards the ceiling. I didn’t take time to study the flowered wallpaper, the calendar, or the padded burgundy velvet-covered toilet seat that hung on the wall as a joke. It was a three-holer—I chose the medium sized one.

Pulling down my pajama bottoms, I hiked myself up over the hole. Balancing on two hands, I tried not to let my bottom touch the rough wood. All the while I was wondering and hoping I wouldn’t fall into the black, odorous abyss. How far down was it to the bottom?

Were there living things that lurked down there just waiting to grab onto the first butt that exposed itself? If I fell in, would my family hear my cries for help?

Short work was made of the affair. Jumping down from the platform, I hiked up my pajamas, grabbed the flashlight, opened the door, and raced out into the night. Sprinting back up the path, I had a strange feeling I’d left something undone. Oh yeah, I didn’t have to flush!

As a child, this was my lot (and everyone else’s) when we visited my mother’s parents, Leroy and Lula Love Graham, on their rural farm on the border of Tioga and Lycoming counties. It made me feel lucky that in all of

Page 12

the houses I grew up in, we always had a “flushable.” a time when a couple of boys were made to ride home However, there were still many places in the area— in the bed of an open truck after extracting themselves farms, cabins, and camps—that still had “functioning” from an odoriferous black abyss where they ended up outhouses. while trying to tip one over. Then there was the time Dad’s side of the family had a cabin on Waneta Lake, someone inside hollered out as a couple of classmates in the Finger Lakes. Like the rest of the cottages there tried tipping one over. at the time, it also had an outhouse. Usually, when I attended Middlebury Elementary School, now the we were there, the place was filled with relatives and site of the Middlebury Fire Department. There were friends—and food and drink. two inside bathroom facilities, It was summer, and it was hot. one each for the boys and the There was always plenty of iced girls. Each had several stalls, tea, lemonade, and assorted and all toilets were unflushables! adult beverages. This meant the Educational facilities in the outhouse was a particularly busy 1950s had not caught up with place. And adults were pretty the residences of the area. The clever at getting their “dibs in” on rooms were not heated. No who would be next. This was not one lingered there, which I’m always a good thing for a small sure teachers would consider an child, who usually did not plan advantage over today’s modern very far in advance for bathroom school bathrooms. breaks.

When I think of the thousands Mom’s answer to this for me of gallons of water used in our was to use an empty three-pound flushables today, I begin to Spry can. (Spry was Proctor think of how “green” these old & Gamble’s answer to their “I was just old enough to unflushables were. There was competitor, Crisco.) The upside no worry about plumbing or feel really embarrassed if freezing pipes in the winter. of this was that I did not have to subject myself to the “black abyss” I had to do this, and was People did not linger long in and the ensuing odor it exuded. one, either. On the other hand, ever so happy to instead one often had to plan ahead.

However, a lack of privacy was the bitter trade-off for this. Since Every time I travel to Third be swimming and just let one-piece bathing suits were World countries, I think of “it” go in the lake …” fashionable for girls, and I was those childhood days. Those always wearing one, it meant unique and funky travel stories stripping down the entire suit to go to the bathroom. I could fill another page or two. When I saw the movie was just old enough to feel really embarrassed if I had to Slumdog Millionaire recently, I was reminded of my do this, and was ever so happy to instead be swimming outhouse exploits. Though life was much simpler then, and just let “it” go in the lake, until I was reminded that a flushable is one practical convenience I’d rather not “it” was something that I might gulp while swimming. do without.

I’m embarrassed to reveal outhouses were also part of Halloween chicanery among my friends and I as high school students. Tipping one over seemed an easy Patricia Brown Davis is a professional musician and feat, since they usually had no foundations and were memoirist seeking stories about the Wellsboro glass factory. designed to be set on their sides for cleaning. I recall Contact her at patd@mountainhomemag.com.

COURTESY PATRICIA BROWN DAVIS

“B

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

LOST continued from page 11

I sent letters to. Then I expanded that and sent letters to any Ritters throughout the New York area and then into Pennsylvania. I didn’t find any relatives.

“Then I enlisted the help of the Veterans’ Administration,” Makos continues. “They put in a search for next-of-kin and were unable to turn up anything. So between the two of us, we came up with nothing. Despite everything, we weren’t able to turn up any relatives. That’s the only bittersweet part of the whole thing.”

But Seaman was there, along with a veteran P-47 pilot who spoke briefly about the aircraft Ritter was flying at the time of his crash, as well as about 100 members of the general public who trekked to that isolated mountain to pay their respects to the fallen pilot.

There was a twenty-one gun salute, a moment of silence.

“We found out that what little remains were recovered were cremated, and Captain Ritter’s wife had them scattered over the crash site. So he really was there,” Makos says.

“There’s some gratification, if you believe in the afterlife, that perhaps Captain Ritter was looking down at us and smiling the day of the memorial.”

Bradford County resident and amateur historian Roger Tracey honors Captain Ritter’s memory by making an annual pilgrimage to the crash site on Veterans’ Day to place a new flag at the memorial and fire off a one-gun salute.

Editor, author, and frequent Mountian Home contributor Matt Connor lives in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

Nationwide Coverage for a Better Price Thousands have switched and you can too!

WELLSBORO-MAIN OFFICE: 64 Main Street MANSFIELD STORE: 1 North Main Street CALL 570-787-6000 OR VISIT indigowireless.com

$29.95 per month indigowireless.com 570-787-6000 May 2009

• Unlimited Local and National calls anywhere, anytime when your phone says Indigo • 450 Nationwide Anytime Travel Minutes • Unlimited Incoming Text Messages • No Roaming/Long Distance Charges • Add a line for only $9.95 each • Excellent data plans available Nationwide Coverage WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 13

Looking Back Joyce M. Tice

treet or road names often tell a story, or they can be full of humor and whimsy. Many western cities efficiently labeled with names such as Third Street and Fourth Avenue give us neither. Such street names keep us from getting lost, but they’re as interesting as cells on a spreadsheet: row four, column three. A recent contest for unusual street names awarded Psycho Path in Traverse City, Michigan, first prize. Now that’s interesting.

Names like Stony Lonesome Road, where my cousin lives in Williamson, New York, or Hardscrabble Road in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, remind us of the hardships of early settlers. Newtown Hill Road in Mansfield was once the road to Elmira, named so long ago that Elmira was still called Newtown.

In Syracuse, New York, Erie Boulevard runs atop the filledin Erie Canal, lined now with strip malls instead of towpaths for mules. Many towns have Canal Streets, Railroad Streets, or School Streets commemorating resources that are no longer there. Mansfield’s two-block long College Avenue was originally Normal Avenue until the State Normal School became a college in 1927. Although the college became a university in 1983, no further change reflects it.

Hannah’s Stump in Cortland County is neither a street nor a road, and no sign marks it as such. Its story is so endearing that the junction of Parker Street and Route 38 in Lapeer Township, New York, is known widely by that name. Long ago a woman named Hannah had been

Page 14

“keeping company” with her beau for such a long time without a marriage proposal that at one family picnic she climbed up on a stump at the edge of the high cliff there and threatened to jump if he did not propose. He did. Hannah’s identity is lost in time but her story lives on.

The name Sanitarium Hill in very rural Sullivan Township, Pennsylvania, seems out of place, but a century ago, it was an accurate description. Dr. Mary Smith and three of her siblings were homeopathic physicians. Doc Mary’s brother, Dr. Joseph Smith, practiced in Pittsburgh where he founded a tuberculosis sanitarium. In 1903 they relocated the sanitarium to the Smith family homestead in Tioga County. Doc Mary ran it as physician until her death in 1926, with patients coming from all over the Northeast.

Many street and road names remind us of people who lived on them long ago, and the names usually changed at every intersection. It is a tragedy when names such as Gardner Hollow in Sullivan Township are lost. The road, named for original settlers, became an extension of Reitz Road per PennDOT. Strange Hill, named for the Strange family that had a mill at the foot of the hill in the 1840s, lost its name in the 1980s after almost a century and a half. The road was absorbed into a much longer span with a different name.

Sometimes a road named for a person is shortened in the common local usage. In Endicott, New York, George F. Johnson Highway and Harry L. Johnson Drive are referred to as George F. Highway and Harry L. Drive. I once managed

MOUNTAIN HOME

a garden center on George F. Highway. A lost and confused truck driver called asking to speak to George. When I asked George who? the driver said, “George F. Hwy,” doing his best to pronounce it as abbreviated. I told him it was rush hour and George was being run over by several thousand cars.

This is a subject without end, and I will continue it in a future column. I invite you to share with me historic or unusual street and road names in your neighborhood that I can include.

Joyce M. Tice is the creator of the Tri-Counties Genealogy and History Web site (www.joycetice.com/jmtindex.htm). She can be reached at lookingback@mountainhomemag.com.

Courtesy Joyce M. Tice

S

History in the Highways

May 2009

FINGER LAKES TRAIL CONFERENCE, INC. 6111 Visitor Center Rd., Mt. Morris NY 14510 Tel: (585) 658-9320 Fax: (585) 658-2390 www.fingerlakestrail.org

Adirondack Park

Voices from the Footpath

Niagara Falls

Ma

Tr a

il

Bristol Hills Branch

h

Onondaga Branch

Interloken Trail Cortland

g Lon

Norwich

Ithaca

Ma n

Pat h

Oneonta

Proposed Great Eastern Trail

Corning Elmira

Binghamton

Lon

gP

il

App

a

Courtesy of Lynda Rummel

Middletown

ath

to steep climbs and rocky under-footing from the terminal moraine that was left by glaciers that receded over 10,000 years ago. Most notable along this route is “Little Finger Rock Lakes City,”Trail an - Blaze and Disc Colors - White Blazes area that boasts sedimentary rocks the size of cars Main andTrail trucks.

Main Trail in Catskills - Blue, Red, or Yellow Discs Eventually the trail drops into Ellicottville, near skiHills slopes Bristol Branch - Orange Blazes Conservation Trail - Orange Blazes and some awesome views. From here you enter New York Trail state- Orange Blazes Interloken Letchworth Trail - Yellow Blazes forest lands and, says Szabo, “the hills become much Onondagamore Branch - Blue Blazes sane.” Some of the overlooks approaching the Letchworth State Park area include wide expanses of the Genesee River Valley, trails of mixed woods, and fields of endless variety.

Szabo talks fondly of a favorite place on the trail—The Huckleberry Bog Nature Trail—with access from Bean Station Road south of Prattsburgh, New York. “Probably some big blob of glacier sat there for a long, long, time and that’s why there’s a bog there now.” She describes the towering black tupelo and black spruces, the vernal pools, and highbush blueberry there. “It’s an amazing rich patch of state forest,” she says. The nature trail is a four-mile loop. An interpretive trail booklet produced by a Wayland-Cohocton High School honors senior science class is available at the kiosk.

Catskill Park

chi an Tr a

Hornell Olean

la

Allegany State Park

ra

il

May 2009

Conservation Trail

Geneva

T

Patrick Fava and Kenny Alton – The Central Region and an Unaccustomed Season “When we decided to hike the entire trail in the middle of winter, we had no idea nobody else had ever done it,” says Patrick Fava, now a recent graduate of SUNY Brockport with a degree in business management. In 2006 Fava and his college roommate, Kenny Alton, decided to spend their winter break hiking the entire FLT in memory of their scout master, Weldon Hilchey, who had recently died.

“Our scoutmaster taught us to do things with nothing but the bare essentials, to help us become more in touch with the trail and more satisfied with ourselves,” says Alton, who, along with Fava, learned winter camping skills from Eagle Scouting.

Both spent many weekends hiking in the Adirondack High Peaks with Hilchey and other Scouts. Both young men had recently learned of the FLT and were eager to give it a try.

Fava and Alton carried a tarp for shelter and simple foods like oatmeal and Ramen noodles. They planned to find Please see Trail on page 17

©Scott DeSmit

“Discovering the Finger Lakes Trail in the mid 1980s was the beginning of the end of the rest of my life,” jokes Irene Szabo. “I was in rotten shape when I first started,” she admits.

But thanks to a dog that needed walking, she eventually stepped onto a section of the FLT trail near Swain, New York, was soon swooped up with enthusiasm for it, and has been hiking ever since. Since then, Szabo has served twice as Finger Lakes Trail conference president, is an end to end hiker (she has completed all 562 miles of the main trail) and is currently a trail maintainer for more than twenty miles of the FLT. The FLT access begins about a mile from PA Route 346 in Allegany State Park, and although Szabo says you can muddle through with a park map for a little way, she suggests that everyone get a FLT map, which can be purchased by calling the Finger Lakes Trail Conference office, by ordering online at the Web site, or by stopping by the office at the Mt. Morris Dam. “Maps are only a couple of bucks, and maps of the entire trail system can be purchased for about $20,” says Szabo.

The start of the western pathway is actually part of the North Country Trail (which joins the Lewis and Clark Trail) that begins in North Dakota and continues over 4,000 miles into the Adirondacks. Entering from Ohio, the trail runs through Pennsylvania for approximately 180 miles. The first twenty miles or so are pleasant to hike, but the trail soon gives way

Letchworth Branch

East Aurora

Co

il

Utica

Syracuse Auburn

os e d N o r t

ra

i

Starting from the West with Irene Szabo

Canandaigua

in

P

eople hike for different reasons. For some it’s exercise; for others, it’s a way to commune with nature, to unwind from the everyday, or to seek adventure. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least, and it is commonly more than that, sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.”

Surprisingly, finding a trail in which you could hike for hours, days, or even weeks, might be just a few footsteps away.

The longest footpath in New York State, the Finger Lakes Trail (FLT), was established in 1962. The FLT meanders and climbs from Allegany State Park on the Pennsylvania border, some 562 miles eastward across the state, to the Long Path in the Catskill Mountain Preserve. Five branch trails and fourteen loop trails provide another 236 miles of hiking. The FLT was created, and endures, because of the efforts of volunteers.

There are twenty organizational and thirty-eight family and individual trail sponsors, as well as one paid agency—The U.S. Forest Service—which maintains the twelve-mile Interloken Branch Trail. The Trail is made possible through the hard work of volunteers and the generosity of over 450 private landowners who help promote the “Forever! Trail.”

Pr o p

Rochester

Buffalo

By Angela Cannon-Crothers

T

The Finger Lakes Trail

try un

Top: Irene Szabo is both a hiker and maintainer of the Finger Lakes Trail, which she has hiked end to end.

Above: Patrick Fava and Kenny Alton were the first to hike the entire Finger Lakes Trail in the middle of winter.

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 15

Outdoors & Sport

Mountain Man Roy Kain

T

Loaded Firewood

he post-World War II decade of the legendary 1950s saw the growth of self-reliance for a great majority of the senior population—none more so than those living the rural lifestyle. The fathers and mothers of the 50s progeny had witnessed the Great Depression.

They knew hard times, tasted the grief of having to do without. Self-dependency was exercised as an undeniable requisite to staying fed and keeping the wolf from the door.

The Depression-era city dwellers were “many among a larger many” and mingled among the masses to find relief, often through the scraps of those better off. There was some strength in numbers. All necessities required an exchange of money, and money was hard to come by.

Country folk subsisted primarily through hard “bread” labor and frugality. They learned to make their wants their needs.

“Huck” Phillips was a seasoned veteran of hard times. He came through the Depression on his parents’ homestead, then married and raised six children on the same realty. He kept a garden and raised chickens for eggs and meat. He hunted and trapped furbearers.

The cellar of his two-story farmhouse was his drying room for the skins, which hung on stretching boards from the open floor joists overhead. Red and gray foxes, muskrats, beavers, raccoons, and opossums hung like stalactites of fur throughout the basement, awaiting shipment to Sears, Roebuck. Most carcasses were cooked and fed to his pack of foxhounds.

Some went to the chickens, some went back to the earth of his vegetable garden, and some consummated in a stew bubbling on the kitchen woodstove.

The Neshaminy Creek flowed lazily alongside his property; its bank provided a springboard for swimmers on hot summer days. A huge willow made shade for fishermen pulling in plump catfish on bamboo poles. Across the sixty-yard-wide stream lay the woods where Huck hunted and trapped and collected firewood to heat his home through long, frigid winters. In his rowboat he would cross the creek and load what he could into the boat, towing large logs across the water to his yard for cutting and splitting. Since he couldn’t afford the price of a chainsaw, the wood was cut with an old coarse-toothed bow saw. He labored for hours on end, sawing wood and hauling it to the house, where it was split and stacked under the roof of his open back porch.

A carpenter by trade, Huck found work with the local builder and remained a dependable and faithful employee for nearly fifty years. He worked every day, and at night after supper, he rowed his boat across the creek to the woods. An oil lantern guided him along as he hauled firewood home for the woodstove and cook stove. He didn’t work fast or furious. Rather, he worked steadily, trip after trip, back and forth across the water.

Huck was always a steady, quiet, and determined individual, incapable of telling a lie.

His greatest natural possession was his particular practice of minding his own business. His nearest neighbor, whose property adjoined his, was regretfully not of the same nature.

The hard-earned firewood neatly stacked on Huck’s back porch began to mysteriously shrink by a dozen or more pieces at irregular intervals. On frosty winter nights, after he loaded his heater and banked it for the night, he would briefly survey the wood in order to keep track of the amount being burned and how the supply was holding up. And after handling each piece personally, two or three times before going into the stove, he was somewhat familiar with various pieces of wood. It wasn’t hard for Huck to notice that ten or twelve pieces of choice wood he had said goodnight to had escaped by morning.

He deliberately placed specific chunks of wood at the top of the stack and informed his family of the investigation. The mystery of the disappearing wood continued. The family hadn’t touched the wood, and yet, piece by

piece, it vanished. Huck was beside himself—a thief was lifting his firewood rather than crossing the creek and getting his own. He recalled rarely seeing his neighbor cross the water.

But that was the neighbor’s business. Huck had his own matters to tend to, like feeding and clothing his family and keeping them warm through the icy winter.

He chained his favorite foxhound, Whiskey, near the stacked wood, and still the thievery persisted. A tarp tied tightly over the wood made more work for the bandit, but didn’t arrest his raids.

Winter occasioned weather too harsh for Huck to work steady at his carpentry occupation, and his wages fell off, failing to meet the needs of his family. He trapped thick, sleek furs to sell to Sears in order to generate income for the household. He hunted rabbits and pheasants during days without work and maintained a line of traps up and down the Neshaminy.

Skinning and dressing his furs kept him in the cellar well into the night. One such night, he fell upon a notion.

He was busy cleaning his old single-shot .22 rifle. He scrubbed the chamber with a bore brush and was working a short .22 bullet in and out to assure smoothness, when, all of a sudden, he ejected the bullet and walked directly to the wood stacked out back. He returned with a piece of firewood and placed it on the workbench.

With a razor-thin smile across his lips, he took hold of his auger and bored a small hole into a knot in the wood. The hole was round as a pencil and no deeper than the first joint of his finger. Into this orifice he placed a .22 short bullet, poured in melted candle wax to nearly fill the hole, and camouflaged the operation with a sprinkling of wood dust from the knot. He performed the same application on several more pieces of wood. All the pieces were cherry wood, and he knew them. He had brought them across the creek, sawed them into lengths, and split them for his stoves. He recognized them.

Huck returned the pieces of split cherry to the top of the stack out back and climbed the stairs to bed.

A dozen pieces of wood disappeared while he slept, including the cherry wood on top. Huck went about his day with an undeniable air of contentment with the world. When asked by his youngest daughter if he suspected their neighbor, Mr. Wheelsin, of the wood stealing, he lifted her up to his chin and exclaimed, “Don’t worry. If our neighbor is the wood-bandit, we’ll hear about it sooner or later!”

You can contact Roy at mountainman@ mountainhomemag.com. Someone will walk up into the hills and make sure he gets the message.

Page 16

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

lean–tos along the way and stop in towns for real meals.

“The FLT maps were extremely valuable,” Fava says. “They are up to date and spot on for where to find shelter or a way into a town.” The maps were even more valuable when the two discovered there wasn’t anybody else out on the trail in the winter.

They set out on the FLT just before Christmas and experienced blizzard-like conditions on their first night in.

After that, however, the weather took an amazing turn. It didn’t snow or drop far below freezing for the rest of their seventeen days on the trail. They took a video camera to record their journey and reflect on their travels through the wine country and along the shores of Keuka and Seneca lakes. “We nibbled

on frozen grapes when we passed through the vineyards,” says Fava. Alton adds that the middle portion of the FLT was the most enjoyable for them. “There weren’t such steep elevations.

It was definitely hilly, but not like the rest. Watkins Glen was very, very beautiful, with ridge hikes along gorges and streams. It was pretty cool,” says Alton. Following the Seneca Lake area, the trail veers upward to Ithaca and Trumansburg State Park. From there, the trail cuts south and then heads north towards the Onondaga and North Country link trails.

The central portions of the FLT have varying terrain, with a wide mix of state and private land, as well as amazing gorges, waterfalls, and lake shores. Traveling at a rate of twenty to fortyfive miles a day is no easy feat, and both men agree there were difficulties. There were also many emotional ups and downs, like the days that Alton was far too ill to hike out of the woods. But there were great highs as well—like having “Mr. FLT,” Ed Sidote, pick them up for dinner out and a night at his home.

Since completing their amazing cross-state winter hike, Fava has become a member of the Finger Lakes Trail Conference, which he believes has opened doors to more experiences for himself. He says the biggest thing he’s gotten out of the FLT is “an enhanced love for the outdoors.”

“Doing something of that magnitude and sticking with it helps build confidence in yourself and builds a strong sense of just being,” adds Alton, who will complete his degree in criminal justice this month.

He now plans to hike the Appalachian Trail with Fava in March 2010.

Trail blazer Ed Sidote presents patches to fellow hiker and Finger Lakes Trail photographer Jacqui Wensich.

May 2009

Courtesy Heidi Bellinger

Trail continued from page 15

Ed Sidote – The Final Legs of the Trail What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.

—Henry David Thoreau Like many who eventually find their boots upon the FLT, Ed Sidote surely was lured there, and has spent the latter part of his life on a mission ‘aright’ for the Trail. “New York is a beautiful state, but if you want to appreciate the scenic beauty of the state, you have to park your car and walk it.

You can’t see a waterfall or gorge from the highway,” says Sidote, who became interested in hiking the FLT back in 1977. He and his hiking buddy, Rufus Perkins, discovered they didn’t have to drive all the way to the Adirondacks to hike, because there was great hiking close to home.

Sidote became an end-to-ender, finishing all segments of the trail in 1990 at the impressive age of seventy-three.

He and Perkins were only the third and fourth people to officially do so. Since then, Sidote has been on a campaign to encourage other end-to-end hikers, and continues to promote the sublime majesty of the Finger Lakes Trail.

The last sections of the FLT are in Chenango County, where the trail enters at the northwest corner of the county and goes diagonally southeast to Bainbridge, where it joins the Delaware County line. “Chenango County has seventy-two miles of FLT; the northwestern sections are quite hilly and the southeastern section is a much easier hike,” says Sidote. “We have Bowman Lake State Park in Chenango County, which

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Please see Trail on page 20

Page 17

Outdoors & Sport

Reading Nature Tom Murphy

Our Economic Fates

Review of Home Economics by Wendell Berry. Berkeley: North Point Press, 1987.

T

he big economic picture in the United States today is unsettling, since the problems are measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. The forces at work are titanic, like some global financial ocean liner that takes forever to change course, and all of us passengers must live with the results of past decisions long after it’s clear that the decisions were bad ones. It is all about the vast scale of things, and the vague (or not so vague) sense that we could be casually crushed by those cold, impersonal forces. Brrr.

In the midst of this economic crisis, I remembered a book that was written more than twenty years ago, before the boom that just went bust began: Wendell Berry’s Home Economics, a collection of fourteen essays, written between 1982 and 1986, when the U.S. was in the midst of and beginning to recover from a serious recession. Many of the essays talk about rural communities, some talk about education, and some about wildness.

Berry used the title Home Economics not because he is talking about cooking and cleaning; the title reminds us that economics ought to have its foundation close to home. One story he tells stood out strongly for me when I took the book down from the shelf; it was one of the first I looked for. In the 1970s, in his midthirties, after studying and teaching in California, New York, and France, Berry returned to a part of Kentucky where his grandfather and father had farmed, and he bought a farm.

In the story I like so much, he was mowing a small hillside field, one with trees on two sides, using a team of horses. At one point he looked up and saw, in a tree fairly close by, a red-tailed hawk watching the field intently. When Berry paused, the hawk landed about twenty feet from him. As Berry continued to mow, the hawk stayed around, obviously watching him. Though he does not pretend to know what a hawk thinks, Berry makes two speculations: one is that the hawk came so close because the scale of the place was small and rich in edges, a safe place for a

Page 18

hawk and a person to meet. The other is that he was with horses, which the hawk knew and understood.

The small scale of what he was doing made it possible for the domestic and the wild to coexist.

As Berry observes, “If the human economy is to be fitted into the natural economy in such a way that both may thrive, the human economy must be built to proper scale.”

Since I teach at a rural university, one essay in particular gave me pause. “Higher Education and Home Defense” begins with a story about the effort to site a nuclear power plant near Berry’s community.

He notes that the people sent to defend the idea at public meetings are part of “a powerful class of itinerant professional vandals.” He identifies two requirements to become a member of that class. First, their primary loyalty must be to their careers, so that for them “no place is as valuable as what might be taken out of it.” For them, anyone’s home is just “raw material.” Second, they must have a college education.

Berry notes that originally many colleges, especially public and land-grant colleges, were intended to supply communities with the educated people they needed to “serve and strengthen communities,” but instead many have “worked to uproot the best brains and talents, to direct them away from home into exploitative careers.” Berry suggests that an education “must be used some where; it must be used where one lives, where one intends to continue to live; it must be brought home.” The challenge for rural colleges is to figure out how to provide the local leaders that communities are going to need in a world that will become both more global and more localized.

Perhaps the real threat to home is not the bad national economy, but a coming good economy that will, for example, increase the demand for natural gas, make it profitable to start drilling the Marcellus shale again. A good economy will require us to determine how much risk we can tolerate as we invest our homes in the market. In good times, we must remember the

MOUNTAIN HOME

lessons taught in the bad. Berry’s book reminds us that we can decide how much we want to depend on and attach our fate to the big economy. He is realistic about the forces lined up against living on a proper scale in harmony with our surroundings, but reminds us that we are not helpless, and our decisions do matter.

Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University.

You can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com.

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 19

is a great place to go camping during the summer months.”

“The highlights of Delaware County and the Catskills Preserve are the wildlife,” Sidote says. “You are very apt to see a bear along with the usual whitetail deer, turkeys, and small game. There are wildflowers during the spring and summer, places where there are a sea of ferns, and others where there are huge rock formations.” Rolling hills turn steep as you hike towards the Catskill Mountains. Along the way you pass Cannonsville Reservoir. Several miles of road walking are involved here, where “posted” land is owned by the New York City Water Department. “We are not allowed, as yet, to hike on their property, but this is gradually changing, and it will enable us to get the trail off roads,” Sidote says.

As the FLT end-to-end coordinator, Sidote asks candidates to fill out a questionnaire about their hiking style preferences (such as camping out, day hiking, taking their dog, etc.) and asks for a trip itinerary when they set out on the trail. “If they are backpacking, I try to get a hike schedule from them so I can keep track of their progress across the state,” Sidote explains. “I kinda worry about them. The FLT is not heavily traveled like the Appalachian Trail, so I try to figure out their location based on their hike schedule.

They have my phone and e-mail address with them in case they need to contact me in an emergency, and I have their cell number, if they have a cell phone. If not, I have to try to figure out where to leave them a message in a trail register if I need to contact them for an emergency.” Many times, end-to-end hikers coming into Chenango County get Sidote’s royal treatment of a car ride to a nearby all-you-can-eat Chinese Restaurant and, if they like, accommodations in his guest room at home.

Farther east on the trail, outside of Walton, are the Bear Spring Wildlife Management Area and Campbell Brook Mountain.

Page 20

Courtesy Jacqui Wensich

Trail continued from page 17

Hikers at the Templar Falls along the Finger Lakes Trail.

From here you enter the steep and sylvan trails of the Catskill Mountains in Ulster County. Strenuous climbs offers scenic lookouts and beautiful stopping spots at places like Alder Lake, Turnwood Village, and Little Pond Campground. The FLT officially ends about eight miles east of the town of Claryville.

Sidote’s most significant role is his official presentation of the FLT end-to-end patches. Sidote, who is now ninetyone years old, used to meet hikers on the end of the trail as they completed their journey. He’s been noted for his past efforts to assist hikers in completing their last ten or more miles of trail by shuttling them by car and hiking with them.

Once, he even helped one hiker complete the last seventy miles of his journey. He currently helps keep up a list of car spotters—people who can help hikers get their car to their destination point—that is also available at the FLT office.

Sidote recommends that hikers carry a cell phone, even if it doesn’t work everywhere they go. He also suggests hikers find a buddy or join a hiking club. The Finger Lakes Trail

MOUNTAIN HOME

Conference sponsors a county hiking series every summer where people can join others, take a bus, and have a meal at the end of their day, all for a reasonable price. The 2009 hike series is in Delaware County. For those hiking on their own, the FLT network includes some sixty individual car spotters who can sometimes arrange to hike with them.

As the wise elder, Sidote stresses safety on the trail. Some important things to remember: make certain you know where you’re going, wear proper attire, treat any water you didn’t bring with you, and do not lose sight of the trail blazes. He also suggests hikers bring cell phones, tape recorders, and video cameras to journal their experience, as well as a digital camera to snap shots of all those wildflowers, geological formations, and spectacular views. While Sidote admits the days of Lewis and Clark are over, there is still a trail you can hike just on the far end of town.

Angela Cannon-Crothers is a freelance writer and outdoor educator living in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 21

Outdoors & Sport

The Lunker Fred Metarko

he large popular lakes are fished daily, and the fish receive a lot of pressure. Personal watercraft and pleasure boats affect the fish population, driving them deeper and making them wary. Sometimes after an unsuccessful tournament, we question our ability as anglers. We feel the need to find waters where we can prove we can still catch fish and feel that tug on our line.

There are many farm ponds, small lakes, and private lakes in the area. These usually require permission from the owner or association to gain access. One such private lake lies nestled in the hills in Bradford County, Pennsylvania.

When the bite gets tough, Skip Bastian, a bass club member, makes a trip to the lake to renew his confidence. Another member, Ron Hoyt, joins him on occasion. They usually have great success and catch a few nice largemouth bass in the fivepound range. Of course, they take pictures and email them to me. After not having much luck in tournaments, Skip finally asked me, “Do you want to go to the lake for a fish fix?” I said, “Yes, I need one.” And we were on our way.

We headed east beyond Troy, over the Berwick Turnpike to the lake. I surveyed the area as we pulled into his relative’s driveway. The lake was small, but nice, surrounded by beautiful houses and grounds. We carried our equipment across the lawn to the lake and loaded it into an aluminum jon boat.

Skip mounted the electric trolling motor, and we were ready to fish.

Page 22

We started in the deep water at the dam. Immediately Skip hooked up with a nice fish, which, after fighting all the way to the boat, was unhooked and returned to the water.

Continuing across the breast of the dam, we were getting nice fish but nothing huge. Along the bank heading toward the shallow end of the lake we picked up a few more in the laydowns and rocks. But the fun began as we reached the shallow water and lily pads.

We were using Senkos, a slow-sinking plastic bait, letting them slowly sink or sliding them across the lily pads. The bass would explode on them as they hit the water. Or, as they sank, the line would start moving through the pads. We set the hook and the battle was on. Sitting in one spot and casting in all directions, we were catching bass after bass, at times both battling a big one. They were huge three-, four-, and fivepounders, which we immediately released. Some pictures were taken to show at the next bass club meeting to prove we could still catch fish.

Skip said, “The dock in the lily pads and the house at that end of the lake belongs to your doctor.” I said, “The next time I see him I’ll have to tell about the fun we had catching his bass.” Skip’s daughter, Katie, also had a productive time on the lake. She had a picture of her catch, a nice nine-pound-plus largemouth. She sent me a copy to show my doctor.

At my next doctor’s appointment, I told him about my visit to his lake and the fun we had in the lily pads by his dock. I

MOUNTAIN HOME

Courtesy Fred Metarko

T

The Fix Is In

Katie Bastian with nearly ten pounds of largemouth bass.

gave him the picture of Katie with her big largemouth bass. I told him where we caught them and what lures we used.

The last time we met he said, “I heard a twenty-six inch bass was caught through the ice on my lake. I asked if they put it back, they said, ‘Well … um, no.’” I replied, “That’s a shame; the smaller twelve- to fourteen-inch ones are better eating than the larger ones. See, I told you there are huge bass in your lake.”

If the fishing gets tough again this year, maybe I can convince, persuade, or bribe Skip to take me to that magic lake to rebuild confidence in my fishing skills.

The Lunker is a member of the Tioga County Bass Anglers (www.tiogacountybassanglers.com). Contact him at lunker@mountainhomemag.com.

May 2009

Yogamama Says Kathleen Thompson

Life’s Operating System(s) S

ometimes I find it helpful to think of my brain as a computer. My body is the hardware, and I have an operating system like Windows XP that runs all the software.

This morning during my meditation, I kept asking myself: Who is watching these thoughts? Who is interrupting them, noticing what is going on, and then switching direction?

Who is that? What brain function does that?

And in the reflection that followed, I came up with this: There are two predominate ways I seem to operate.

Ninety-five percent of the time I run on “auto.” I just run the default program.

I’ll call it Samsara 2.0.

I don’t know much about Samsara 2.0. It just came with the computer.

It’s the default, the “no brainer.” (Literally.) It’s just in there humming along, and I don’t even pay attention to it. Normally. It’s what I generally refer to as “me” or “just the way I am.”

Samsara 2.0 is basically my social conditioning, the way my parents raised me, the socio-economic situation I find myself in, the safe patterns of operating I’ve devised over the past 20,503 days of my life.

But here’s the thing: every once in a while during a meditation, I actually notice this programming. And when I do, it’s kind of a shock.

“Whoah,” I say to myself, “look at me getting all caught up in that story. That’s amazing. There’s been a whole brain takeover. I am running an epic of complete and utter fantasy, and I am really into it! I’m totally believing it.

And not only that, I’m trying to run all my relationships, and my life, as if that’s actually me!

“Man, I am really screwed up!”

But what is really the incredible part of this whole scene I just described is that I was able to pull out of the drama

May 2009

in the first place. I was able, for a brief moment, to actually notice that it was a drama, and that I was running Samsara 2.0.

And who exactly did the noticing here? Which program in there allowed me to pull out and notice the running of Samsara 2.0?

Clearly, I must have two operating systems available to me, right? Samsara 2.0 (the default) and another one I’ll call Witness 1.0 (which is still in beta testing)—a kind of “over-lord” program that notices the running of the other one.

And I have a choice of which one to run. All I have to do is remember (no small feat), then hit the drop-down menu and switch from Samsara 2.0 to Witness 1.0.

I am thinking that if I start to run Witness 1.0 more often, there is a good chance that, over time, Witness 1.0 could move out of beta and become my new default consciousness.

And that would be great, because I am totally bored and disgusted with Samsara 2.0. It has become viral. It has infected my whole life, causing me to run outdated, not to mention demented, programs like, “Fear of Failure,” “Everybody Has to Like Me,” and “Procrastination Will Keep Me Safe.”

So that’s what I’m going to do for the next 100 days. I’m going to start installing a new operating system. Check back with me in 100 days, and I’ll tell you how it’s going.

Wish me luck.

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Kathleen Thompson is the owner of Main Street Yoga in Mansfield, PA. Contact her at 570-6605873 , online at www.yogamansfield.com, or e-mail yogamama@mountainhomemag.com.

Page 23

Life ~ Body & Soul

The Better World John & Lynne Diamond-Nigh

R-E-S-P-E-C-T T

ake out a pencil and paper. We’re going to write—our swine list. Each of us gets to make a list of our five worst people—people of pure, vindictive malice. Little piggy people beyond all hope of social redemption, folks who, as a friend puts it, “are watery yogurt—90% humanity-free.” Dante put his swine list in hell, enchantingly suiting punishment to offense. Our five little piggies shall spend eternity up to their noses in mud—not warm, therapeutic spa mud, but farmyard gunk. How’s that? Having put them there, forget about them. They are not worth the strain of another thought.

The next category is a bit more ambiguous. Let me illustrate. I was raised in a strict church. By middle youth I could no longer stomach the narrow and exclusionary beliefs of my upbringing. I departed. Years later, in graduate school, I found myself at the other extreme. There was still the divide between good and evil, except now the good were the oppressed and the evil were the oppressors. What astonished me was how much really good stuff (same as in my church) got lumped under the bad.

“Never presume that you have the ultimate truth. Yes, believe certain things, do so passionately, but every once in a while remind yourself that you could be wrong.”

Even the kindest medical doctor, if white and male, could not avoid his status as a white, male oppressor. And really horrible stuff got an easy pass if it belonged to “the oppressed.” A suicide bomber was just an avenging angel.

Neither point of view is one we can possibly respect. And in each case the conviction was so engrained in the people that it was really hard to separate person from belief.

The Marxist student sitting beside me really would fight in the trenches to efface the freedom and the character of a country that I love so much. As the Russian painter Malevich put it, “abandon love … abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant.” Hmmm, we kinda like love and wisdom. How about you?

It may seem odd, then, to assert this simple truth, that respect—R-E-S-P-E-CT—is to civility and democratic common sense what the heart is to the body. It’s that important! So just how do we sort this out? First of all, it’s a basic instinct to associate with people toward whom we feel a natural rapport. So nature does some of the work for us by hedging us away from those we cannot respect. How many times are you going to have a drink with a guy who tells you that you’re ugly and stupid and that your wife would lose to a turtle in a beauty contest? On the other hand, we have talked in previous columns about the danger of associating only with people that you like and agree with. The rub, of course, is that your crowd may all be wrong. It’s like color—look at a stained glass window that’s just one tone of yellow. Gets pretty stale.

Sprinkle in some panes of bright blue glass and the window jumps to life.

Here’s a principle that has helped us a lot. Never presume that you have the ultimate truth. Yes, believe certain things, do so passionately, but every once in a while remind yourself that you could be wrong. And that the obnoxious oaf over there, giggling into his beer, just might have a particle of truth, the missing piece to your jigsaw puzzle—the possession of which might do you a whole lot of good. Take Malevich.

The guy was a nasty strong-armer whose political opinions we positively revile. And yet he produced some of the most marvelous and genuinely innovative art of the twentieth century. Go figure. If we were offered, in some fantasy sphere, the chance to sit down for a glass of vodka with the man, we’d both jump at the chance.

The principle goes by another name—humility. Not a sniveling, namby-pamby, walk-all-over-me kind of humility. Rather, a humility of courage, dignity, and openmindedness that can meet the world at almost any level, listen with deference—we ain’t talkin’ talk radio here, my friends—to almost any point of view, can say its say and then walk away, wiser for the interchange.

Then again, perhaps we’re wrong.

Lynne is an etiquette and protocol consultant and a humanities professor at Elmira College. John is an artist and designer. Please send questions and comments to thebetterworld@mountainhomemag.com.

Page 24

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 25

All Aboard!

By Kay Barrett

om Myles is a Con Man, and proud of it.

The new owner of both the Wellsboro & Corning Railroad and Tioga Central Railroad is a throwback to the romance of the American railroad. He worked for the late, great Pennsylvania Railroad, following in his father’s tracks— Myles’ dad was a track supervisor for the legendary line now only remembered on the Parker Brothers Monopoly game.

After the Pennsy, which was once so big and powerful its chairman of the board was called the “51st Senator,” failed, Myles had a long and distinguished career at Conrail, the freight line, and started his own rail freight business under the name of the Myles Group, based in Exton, Pennsylvania.

“I’ve been in the railroad business for forty-five years,” he says. “Railroads are in my blood.” His sons, Tom Jr. and Bill, are also following in the family railroading tradition.

Tom’s long-held dream was to run his own railroad. It seemed unlikely it would ever happen until that day with Wellsboro’s Mary Worthington when he stood looking at the thirty-four miles of track known as the Wellsboro & Corning. Mary, the head of Growth Resources of Wellsboro (GROW), insisted he keep the passenger service growing even as he began to haul freight. Tioga Central Railroad would be part of the deal.

Mary talked him into it, and Tom talked Mary into a lot, too, giving new life to the historic Wellsboro line, which has been in service since 1872. Myles is that rare idea-aminute man who spouts crazy new concepts and schemes at a dizzying pace, inspires, beguiles, charms—and actually gets things done.

Since purchasing the two rail lines, he’s improved passenger service and worked hard to make the freight business more viable, hauling water and sand for East Resources, the natural gas company drilling in the region, and other customers.

He’s made grand plans to start passenger service between Wellsboro and Corning, which his son, Tom Jr., virtually

Page 26

COURTESY WELLSBORO & CORNING RR

T

The 506 engine is the Tioga Central’s lead locomotive.

promised the Wellsboro Rotary recently would become a reality. “It won’t happen next year, but it’ll happen,” he said.

The Myles Group even purchased an historic railroad car that once transported a famous American. But he won’t discuss it. Not yet. Tom Myles likes to fire the imagination of his audience first.

“Yeah, that’s what we Conrail guys call ourselves, the Con Men,” says Tom proudly.

Tioga Central owner, Tom Myles, was born in 1941 with a destiny to ride the rails. As a fourth generation railroader,

MOUNTAIN HOME

Myles knows the ins and outs of the business. So it was not surprising that after returning from the Vietnam War, Myles began his own railroad career in the 1960s. Starting at the Pennsylvania Railroad, like his father, Myles would work his way up the chain in the railroad business, until ten years ago when he started the Myles Group.

In 2007 Myles learned that the Wellsboro Corning Railroad, a freight service that hauled commodities such as Please see Train on page 30

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 27

Leisure ~ Arts & Travel

On Stage Off the Wall Larry Biddison

A May Montage

M

y own focus this month is on Hamilton-Gibson’s Tales of Tioga Short Play Festival, which features six original plays written, directed, and performed by local talent. As coordinator of the event for the past three years, I’ve found it both challenging and fun to use the old Davis Furniture Store as a little theater. But, with construction soon to begin on the Deane Center, this may be the last time the plays will be staged there.

This year’s plays span time and space. One is a bit of romance taking place on the night of the 1969 moon landing; another provides a glimpse of the challenges of selling hot dogs on Wellsboro’s Main Street; still another depicts a heavenly encounter between Wellsboro’s legendary Nessmuk and his wife. Two plays tap into history and myth, one offering a dramatic moment in Blossburg during a coal strike in 1899, the other exploring variations in the Sara legend at Mansfield University. And one play is an off-the-wall Monty-Pythonesque fractured fairy tale taking place somewhere in Tioga County’s fabled forests.

What helps make this event exciting is that on opening night a prize will be awarded to the play receiving the highest marks by readers from the American Association of Community Theatre.

And here are other exciting May events for you to enjoy—both on and off the wall.

ANNUAL STUDENT ART EXHIBIT What: Two- and three-dimensional artwork by students from Williamson and Wellsboro Area high schools and by Tioga County home-schooled students.

Where: Gmeiner Art & Cultural Center, 134 Main Street, Wellsboro.

When: May 3–28, with opening reception Sunday, May 3, from 2–4 p.m.

Introduction of teachers and students at 3 p.m.

Information: Gallery open 2–5 p.m. daily. (Looking ahead to June: The Annual Juried Art Show open to artists living within 150 miles of Wellsboro. Call 570724-1917 for details and entry form.)

LEADING DUOS What: An informal “NYC evening” of Broadway tunes sung in a cabaret setting.

The entire event, including assorted hors d’oeuvres and beverages catered by MU’s own food service, will be held with party-goers seated at tables on the Steadman stage. Come to the Cabaret! Sponsored by Wellsboro Electric Company.

Where: Steadman Theater, Butler Music Center, Mansfield University.

When: Friday, May 8 and 9, at 7:30 p.m.

Information/Reservations: Tickets $20 if reserved by May 6. Call 570-7242079 or hamgib@epix.net or www.hamiltongibson.org.

TALES OF TIOGA SHORT PLAY FESTIVAL What: Annual showcase of six original plays by local playwrights who entered Hamilton-Gibson’s playwriting contest in February. Sponsored by Nickerson Construction.

Where: The Deane Center, 100 Main Street, Wellsboro.

When: May 15 and 16 at 7:30 p.m.; May 17 at 2:30 p.m. Opening night party

by Timeless Destination.

Information/Reservations: Admission by FlexPass or $6-$15 at door. Reserve at 570-724-2079 or hamgib@epix.net or www.hamiltongibson.org.

RABBLE TO REVOLUTION: TALES OF REVOLUTION AND DISSENT What: Westfield Public Library presents Commonwealth Speaker Alan Irvine, specializing in tales of Pennsylvania history. Learn more at www.alanirvine.com.

Where: Westfield Methodist Center, Maple Street, Westfield.

When: May 18 at 7:30 p.m.

Information: Free public event. Questions: 814-367-5411.

Larry Biddison is professor emeritus of literature at Mansfield University. You can contact him at onstageoffthewall@mountainhomemag.com.

Page 28

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 29

Leisure ~ Arts & Travel soybeans and sand from Wellsboro to Corning, was up for sale. “Because I have been interested in the railroad my entire life, it was of course a dream for me to own my own railroad, but at the time I was only interested in buying the Wellsboro Corning freight service. It wasn’t until Mary Worthington of Growth Resources of Wellsboro (GROW) expressed her wishes that the Wellsboro & Corning and the Tioga Central be sold together that I became interested in the passenger train. I wouldn’t have purchased both lines if I didn’t have faith that my sons and I could make it work,” Myles says.

When purchased in January 2008, the Tioga Central was already popular with tourists for passenger excursions, but Myles wanted to revamp the train into a service that would be in demand for tourist trips or a night out for the locals.

“I visited Wellsboro long before I purchased the railroads.

It’s one of those perfect American towns. It’s beautiful and historic, and people really care about their community, so I wanted the Tioga Central to be able to provide something to the community. I wanted it to be a place where local couples could go for dinner or where families could go on weekends,” Myles says. Throughout the winter, Myles and his team developed a new program for the Tioga Central.

With pre-season beginning May 12 and the official season beginning May 23, Myles and team will be able to unveil their new program complete with new partnerships with area businesses, new train trips, and a new look.

Michael Keefe is the general manager of passenger services at the Tioga Central and has played a major part in the reconstruction of Tioga Central activities. “We want to establish activities that will keep people coming back. One

Page 30

COURTESY WELLSBORO & CORNING RR (2)

Train continued from page 26

The Tioga Central gift shop, where the excursion trains depart.

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Leisure ~ Arts & Travel

way we are doing that is by expanding our food options,” Keefe says.

The railroad has partnered with the Coach Stop Inn of Ansonia, Pennsylvania, a partnership that creates new possibilities for dinners and train rides. “We now have a liquor license and with catering provided by the Coach Stop Inn, we really want to start some new theme nights where we have food to match the theme. We want our events to be new and fresh, so people don’t think that we are always doing the same old thing,” Keefe says.

The Spirit of Wellsboro is a Thursday night train that will serve hors d’oeurves and alcoholic beverages for adults over twenty-one. “It’s like a happy hour on rails that rolls all the way to Hammond Lake,” Keefe says. Keefe and others at the railroad have developed a number of theme nights for the Spirit of Wellsboro, including Tex-Mex Night with nachos and chili (and possibility margaritas), and All-American Night with hot dogs, hamburgers, and potato salad.

Another addition to the train’s schedule is the Lake Shore Express Brunch. “We want to make the brunch everyone’s new Sunday favorite and we are doing that by providing more than juice and muffins. People will be given three or four meal choices to keep them coming back for more, such as three buttermilk pancakes or French toast with sausage,” Keefe says.

Myles and team have also remade an old family favorite.

The Ice Cream Express has been a summer time must for children and parents but now, thanks to local artist Jack Hart, passengers will be able to take home a custom designed souvenir. “Jack Hart does the most amazing artwork, and he Please see Train on page 32 The dining car is used for popular passenger excursions like the lakeshore brunch.

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 31

©JAMES FITZPATRICK

Fourth-generation railroader Tom Myles of the Myles Group, owner of the Tioga Central and Wellsboro & Corning.

Train continued from page 31

agreed to let us feature his drawing of our lead locomotive, the 506 engine, on souvenir ice cream cups that passengers will be allowed to keep. The 506 was painted red, white, and blue in 1976 for the bicentennial and it is a recognized staple of the railroad,” Keefe says.

The train’s activities will change with the seasons. With spring now here, the Tioga Central has paired with Nature

Page 32

Quest for a bird watching expedition on May 16, which will be called Quest Fest. In the fall, the train will go German for an Oktoberfest-themed train ride complete with bratwursts and Sam Adams, and, in December, the train will make a special trip for Dickens.

The image of the railroad is also being changed with the creation of a new web site and brochures. Tioga Central Railroad public relations director, Noelle Owens, says that

MOUNTAIN HOME

the Web site and brochure are just one-way of making the railroad more recognized. “With the new Web site and our published information, we are really trying to create consistency and recognition. We used color and images that give the feel of the old time railroad, while still being inviting and visually appealing,” Owens says. The railroad is also planning a new sign designed for the junction to welcome visitors.

Even with all the recent readjustments, the railroad still has plans for more changes. They are in talks to pair with Hamilton-Gibson for a theater train, they are experimenting with the idea of a wine tasting train, and they have recently built a repair facility that fixes passenger trains. Myles has endless ideas for fulfilling his dream. “We are always looking for new ways to expand,” Myles says. “We are currently looking to possibly purchase additional short lines.”

Myles’ mind is filled with plans for the future and his determination and risk taking is reminiscent of a quote by Victor Hugo: “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

WHAT: Tioga Central Railroad Excursion Trains WHEN: Thursday–Sunday from Memorial Day weekend through the end of October.

WHERE: Wellsboro Junction (three miles north of Wellsboro on State Route 287) to the north end of Hammond Lake.

INFORMATION: Adult tickets (ages 13 and up) are $20–$25 and junior tickets (ages 4–12) are $10.

Children under the age of four have no charge. 570724-0990; www.tiogacentral.com Kay Barrett is graphic design assistant at Mountain Home. She graduates from Mansfield University this month.

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 33

Page 34

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Bountiful Bioharmonic BackAchers Y

ou will know when you reach BackAchers Farm.

You can tell by the signs.They are big, bold, and beautiful, much like the farm itself. BackAchers sits on eighty-two acres of land in northcentral Bradford County, Pennsylvania, and is owned and operated by Susan Bullock and her family. Describing the farm as a “bioharmonic” farm, the Bullocks coined the term themselves to describe their intent to live in harmony with nature. BackAchers Farm is a testament to that effort.

Sue Bullock and her late husband, Alan, moved to this land twelve years ago from New Jersey. It was a new beginning for them and their two children, Aaron and Sam. It was also an opportunity to put into action their philosophy of living on the land in a responsible and sustainable relationship. Alan left a successful career in architectural design as manager and vice president of Turntable Junction and Liberty Village in Flemington, New Jersey, bringing considerable skills as an artist and businessman to their new life. Bullock had always been interested in biology and nutrition and has no regrets about leaving behind her dental practice for the life of a farmer in northeast Pennsylvania.

When the Bullock family made the decision to change careers—and lifestyle—they searched throughout New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania for the right property to farm and to raise their children. Bullock fell in love with the area the first time she came to Bradford County.

She had grown up on a chicken farm in New Jersey and has always been drawn to farming. As a young girl she raised sheep on her parents’ farm, and can remember her excitement at the age of six when she found a packet of seeds in a drawer, planted them, and watched them grow.

She describes their family farm as a continuation of a tradition that started in the mid-1800s, when Richard and Almira McCabe cleared the virgin land and built the house and large barn that Bullock lives and works in today.

She always wanted to farm organically using sustainable practices. What does all this mean to her family? “That we are able to continue farming this land and pass it on to the next generation to farm. That we produce some of the best foods in the world, and that we can make our living doing it,” Bullock says. “That we leave the land in better condition than when we found it.” She considers herself a caretaker of “this small piece of the planet,” obligated to continue the tradition that the McCabe family started in the 1800s.

The Bullocks started to farm with sheep and a couple of cows. They planted a big garden but did not sell much to the public at first, working towards self-sufficiency from May 2009

the beginning. Alan worked on construction on the farm and started a sign painting business.

Today many business signs throughout Bradford County show examples of his work. They started a handmade candle shop and maple sugarhouse.

Alan created the BackAchers Babbler, a newsletter that they direct mailed to market and advertise. Although they sell directly from their home, they knew that to make a living they would have to get off the farm and find other places to sell since their farm was too remote for easy access by the public. They started at Sue Bullock at her shop on BackAchers Farm. farmers’ markets in Johnson well? Do we want to be healthy or don’t we?” These are City, New York, and Scranton.

Bullock still sells at the Scranton market in Nay Aug the choices that Bullock and her customers make.

Today, BackAchers Farm sells pasture-raised poultry, Park and at the Wyalusing market in Bradford County.

Her son Aaron, who had worked with his dad and knew pork, beef, and certified organic brown eggs. Maple the ropes, jumped right in to help with the markets syrup, cream, and candy come from the 800 sugar maple right after Alan became ill. Both Samuel and Aaron have trees and an old-fashioned wood-fired evaporator. A helped Sue and show interest in continuing in the family wide variety of produce is grown organically, and they use innovative farming practices and wind energy on the business when they finish their schooling.

The Bullocks deliver their goods to many of the farm.

What about the part of passing it on to the next families and restaurants that buy their meats and vegetables. Customers now ask for her chickens at some generation? Bullock will tell you that she believes that will happen. Her husband and partner passed away the area restaurants.

Bullock is a proud member of the Pennsylvania spring before last, but his spirit lives on in her day-to-day Association of Sustainable Agriculture and has become work and vision for the future. Her sons are involved and a big advocate of Community Supported Agriculture, supportive and have “bioharmonic” dreams of their own. which is built on a relationship of mutual support and BackAchers 2 is in the design stage. An organic dairy, raw commitment between local farmers and the communities juices, an organic bakery perhaps? Their dreams are big, they serve. Bullock says that the families involved with her bold, and beautiful here at BackAchers Farm. Just like the farm are more aware of how their food is grown and more signs. connected to the process. They don’t expect tomatoes in the spring because they know that tomatoes ripen in WHAT: BackAchers Farm this area in August. They know that apples are harvested WHEN: Maple Store 24 hours/day and 7 days/week; in the fall. There are about a dozen families who are Candle Shop Tuesday–Friday 10 a.m.–6 p.m. supporting BackAchers Farm and who in return are being WHERE: North Rome, Pennsylvania fed nutritious and delicious organic foods in season.

INFORMATION: To learn more about local A pragmatist, Bullock knows that people will not stay distribution and products, contact owner Sue Bullock in the locally grown food business if they cannot sustain at bullock@epix.net or by phone at 570 247-2940 their families. “People need a higher consciousness. Local food grown organically with sustainable agricultural Barbara Coyle is a freelance writer and organic practices will cost more,” she says. “Do we want to be fed gardener living in Bradford County.

COURTESY BARBARA COYLE

By Barbara Coyle

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 35

Food & Drink

Wine & Dine Rob Lane

ike and Corinne Oleksyn met on Seneca Lake, a fitting location in light of their common love of boats and wine. They proceeded to sail full speed ahead, open the newest winery on the east side of Seneca Lake, and tie the knot at their new Kings Garden Vineyards, located just south of Lodi, New York.

What sounds like an overnight success story actually started in 1998 when Mike bought a plot of land in the “banana belt” area on the east side of Seneca Lake, so named for its warmer air currents that moderate temperatures favorably for grape growing. Mike’s work as a fiber-optic engineer had taken him throughout Europe, where he enjoyed the finest wines and where the idea to make his own fine wines started to gel.

Despite having no farming background, Mike counted on his mechanical experience and determination to learn the skills of grape growing and winemaking. He spent every spare minute working on his vineyard. He even handgrafted every vine in his original 1988 planting. But disaster struck in the infamous winter of 2004. Mike, like many other vintners in the Finger Lakes, lost many of his vines when temperatures plunged to fifteen degrees below zero.

Still determined, Mike replanted and kept honing his skills while he continued to log copious amounts of frequent flyer miles with his day job. Then, in 2006, a chance meeting with another boater on Seneca Lake changed his life. That other boater was Corinne, who had great energy as well as experience working in Finger Lakes wineries. Mike had found his true love and a partner to help him realize the dream of opening a winery.

They were married last June at Kings Garden Winery (so named for the gardens that French and British troops kept while stationed in the area in the 1700s) and opened the winery on Labor Day weekend. The challenges have been many, including keeping deer and turkey away from the grapes. “The turkeys seem to coordinate their grape eating as they walk with military precision,” Mike says, “one turkey to a row, and devour the ripe grapes.”

But Mike and Corinne expect to produce 2000 cases for 2009. As for what visitors can expect, Corinne says, “We want to give visitors personal attention, and we want them to have a fun experience and enjoy themselves here.” Mike and Corinne plan to have music and special events at the winery, including a first anniversary party.

Their current wine lineup includes three Chardonnays and three red wines. Favorites include the stainless steelaged 2007 Chardonnay ($16 per bottle) with butterscotch highlights, classic Chard citrus tones, and a long, spicy mineral finish that is unique to the Kings Garden terroir.

The 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon ($18) features nice plum and deep cherry tones tinged with that special Kings Garden spicy finish. Coming soon is a unique and excellent late harvest Chardonnay with beautiful honeyed pear and spice.

Kings Garden Vineyards is located at 9085 Route 414, Lodi, NY 14860. For more information, visit www. kingsgardenvineyards.com, or call 607-582-7444.

Rob Lane writes a Finger Lakes wine blog, www. fingerlakesweekendwino.blogspot.com. Contact him at robl@mountainhomemag.com.

Page 36

© ROB LANE

M

Kingdom on the Lake

Mike & Corinne Oleksyn with their Kings Garden Vineyards’ wine.

Finger Lakes Wine Review Holly Howell

Sip a Salamander M

ay is a month of many celebrations in my family—lots of birthdays and anniversaries, along with Mother’s Day and Memorial Day weekend. All of them mean good food on the table, but the one I look forward to most is the mouth-watering “Cinco de Mayo” (May 5 in Spanish), which is the ultimate excuse to indulge in some great Mexican food.

And that means spice! I have been saving a stash of Finger Lakes Gewürztraminer wines just for the occasion. Gewürztraminer (pronounced Guh-VURTS-trah-MEE-ner), is a white wine that originated in Germany but is now loving the climate of New York State. It comes in an elongated bottle that reminds me of Riesling, but its flavor is more floral and spicy in the savory sense—clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger. When it comes to Mexican food, Gewürztraminer is the next best thing to a chilled Corona. One of my new faves is Red Newt Cellars Gewürztraminer ($19). Red Newt is located on the east side of Seneca Lake, and Gewürztraminer is definitely one of their specialties. The 2006 vintage is totally fruit driven (think lychee and citrus), and can easily take on a plate of nachos, a trio of enchiladas, or a salsa-covered chimichanga. If you want to kick it up a notch, try one of Red Newt’s “single vineyard” Gewürztraminers.

The Sawmill Creek Vineyard 2007 ($36) received a ninety-point score from Wine Spectator, and the Curry Creek Vineyard ($42) received an eighty-nine. Both receive a perfect score for yum-factor on the Holly scale. Happy Cinco de Mayo, and Happy Gewürztraminers!

Certified sommelier Holly Howell teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology and the Seasonal Kitchen Cooking School.

Contact her at wineanddine@mountainhomemag.com.

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Sunday Brunch! om

w

ill

l

e ov

it

10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

!

Breakfast

M

Lunch Dinner

y Drive, 200 Gatewa A 16933 MansďŹ eld, P ervations Call for Res 22 570-662-32

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Tuesday - Thursday 7 AM - 9 PM Friday & Saturday 7 AM - 10 PM

Page 37

Food & Drink

Cooking Bachelor Style Terry Miller

Skin Tight I

read recently that having a woman in the house helps you live ten years longer. With bachelor written all over me, I felt like I was missing out.

Being a proactive kind of guy, I decided to learn to play an instrument in an effort to attract a woman and add those ten years to my life. And it would be easy, as I come from a family of players: my father played electric guitar; my mother played bass; brother Rick, drums; brother Dennis, keyboards; brother Don, the field (though he eventually got married).

I decided on strings, since guitarists seem to be the screaming meemies of music. I had the gift and learning came quickly. When my fiery fast fingers could finally fly from fret to fret, I phoned a friend who founded “The Flaming Foo Foos.” I asked if I could join the band on the nights they played the local bars.

The Foo Foos were famous for playing nursing homes and vets’ clubs. Nothing against either, but my motives were elsewhere.

When the band was booked to play a local nightclub in Indigo, Indiana, I got the call. The club was notorious for wild and crazy women. Easy pickins, I thought. Ten extra years for a note.

I drove to the club that night dressed in tight leather pants, a T-shirt two sizes too small, and with enough mousse in my hair to start my own hair care company. Nearing middle age, I must have looked like … well, just that. But I didn’t care. It was life in the fast lane, baby.

On stage I scanned the scene and smiled. Beautiful women as far as the eye could see. Silence overtook the crowd as the lights dimmed and the first few drumbeats boomed in the opening song. Just as it was my cue to strike the first chord, I leaped into the air like I had seen in the videos on TV. When I landed, however, my left knee popped and my tight leather pants split wide. As I lay groaning, grabbing my knee and flashing the crowd my polka-dotted boxers, laughter erupted from the crowd. Someone threw a beer, and a woman shouted, “Are you pregnant, or a fan of the local buffet?”

My band buddies dragged me backstage. As the smell of cigarette smoke and stale beer swirled, I could only shake my head. What the hell was I thinking?

Life in the fast lane came to a screeching halt. As for those ten years, I guess I’ll play my swan song in the nursing home.

Terry Miller’s Web site is cookingbachelorstyle.wordpress.com. You can contact Terry at cookingbachelorstyle@mountainhomemag.com.

Scalloped Potatoes and Ham 2 large potatoes, sliced thin 2 cups cooked ham, sliced in small chunks 1 large onion, sliced thin ½ cup shredded cheddar cheese 1 stick butter, sliced in ¼-inch sections 1 pint heavy cream 1 ½ cups milk Flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Coat a roasting pan or 9x11-inch casserole dish with cooking spray. Spread a single layer of potatoes on bottom of dish. Add one cup of ham; spread evenly. Separate half the onion “rings” and top the ham. Sprinkle the cheddar cheese on top of onions. Add ½ stick of sliced butter alternately over top of onions. Sprinkle flour over top of entire dish. Repeat the process. (You will only have enough cheese for the first layer.) When the second layer is complete, pour cream and milk over top. Bake covered for 45 minutes. Remove from oven, stir the entire dish thoroughly, until sauce begins to thicken, and return to oven for another 20-25 minutes. Bake until potatoes are done and sauce is thick. Salt and pepper to taste.

Page 38

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

May 2009 2008 october

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM Mountain HoMe

Page 395

W

A Salute to the Sidecar

illiam S. Harley and Arthur Davidson had an idea about how to motorize the American public, and later the world, and started building motorcycles in 1903.

With help from one Ole Evinrude of outboard motor fame, their second engine design resulted in increased power and reliability. 1906 models were referred to as the “Silent Gray Fellows” due to the dove gray paint finish and the reputation of the quiet and reliable Harley-Davidson motor. Modernday Harley riders take note: loud pipes will not make friends in the quiet small towns of rural America.

The traditional bar and shield logo of 1910 is still used today by what experienced riders refer to as “The Motor Company.” Nothing is more valuable in advertising than a recognizable logo or trade mark: Ford’s blue oval, Big Mac, Coke, and Kleenex. But the definitive motorcycle icon worldwide is simply called a “Harley.” (To be socially correct, since l986 HOG stands for Harley Owners Group.)

Sisters Cheryl Black and Laura Bennett of Larry’s Sport Center Inc. have been selling Harleys since l986 from a family-owned business started by their father, Larry. These women know their Harleys and will find one to suit your personal style and skill level.

I selected a used 2003 100th Anniversary Electra Glide with the ever-eccentric third wheel, also called bucket, sidecar, sidehack, chair, monkey seat, mother-in-law seat, suicide chair, widow maker, and some other unmentionable names. It has 8,000 miles on it and lists for $22,995.

It was difficult to hide behind my nom de plume in this sterling silver and vivid black nostalgic beauty. Its abundant chrome and flash accentuate its powerful stance and spirited good looks. In a sea of parking lot Harleys at a Saturday morning breakfast ride or a on a social evening out riding, you’ll likely stand out as the only sidehack.

The motor is the popular Twin Cam 88, 1450cc, with vibration isolation mounting. It gets fifty mpg on the highway and forty-two in city touring even with a passenger.

Page 40

©JAMES FITZPATRICK (3)

Roads Scholar Myles C. Rhodes

It features a five-speed foot-shifted transmission with a quiet factory muffler system.

A recent survey of “hacked riders” revealed the number one reason most riders use a chair. Most respondents listed “to haul my best friend—Fido.” I once followed a suicide chair with two matched white English bulldogs for sixty miles. One watched ahead while the other viewed the rear scenery, which included me. They changed places every fifteen to twenty minutes and seemed to be very skillful and cheerful passengers in the corners.

What is the ride experience with Top: Console your Harley soul with this. Above: Rhodes with his a sidecar mounted? Much like any sidecar diva, Raven, in front of the 1936 CCC cabin at the Pennsylvania motorcycle, you’re in the open, feeling Lumber Museum. free and exposed with the mystique of the open American road. But with the attached sidecar, you popular when companies like Excelsior, Henderson, Indian, can’t fall off and it’s always feet up when you stop. Steering Iver Johnson, Harley-Davidson, and hosts of others like is more “point it,” and it’s only as precise as the road surface Curtiss (inventor of the seaplane)—all from Hammondsport, is level. There is no neutral center-line feel. As the crown of New York) built sidecars to extend the popularity of their the road changes, so does the steering. Tense arm muscles are motorcycles. The great era ended in the l930s with the the norm as you push and pull the front wheel around turns. Depression, while the later economic turnaround converted Tight and hard figure eights practiced in the flat parking lot riders into automobile drivers. of the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum made for tired arms Thank you to Harley-Davidson and Larry’s Sports Center the next day but also left me with a happy memory. Riding (www.larryssportcenter.com) for the opportunity to in the sidecar is almost as comfortable as being in a small car experience a little sidecar magic and a time warp. Sidecars— but more unique and more fun. With storage behind the bring ’em back! sidecar seat and ample saddle bags and top trunk, you can Ride safe, ride quiet. haul most anything but a rocking chair or an antique oak sideboard. A mother-in-law is a comfortable though tight Myles C. Rhodes, our automobile reviewer, is the pen name of fit. a Twin Tiers racetrack professional who runs East Coast races In the early l920s there were as many sidehack builders and can be seen, when he slows down, at Watkins Glen, NY. as there were motorcycle companies. Sidecars were most Contact Myles at roadsscholar@mountainhomemag.com.

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Auto Services

To Place a classifed in Mountain Home please call 570-724-3838 or email

classified@mountainhomemag.com

Accommodations

Attractions

See Your Classified Here!

570-724-3838

General Contractors

Wellness

May 2009 2008 october

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM Mountain HoMe

Page 411

Outdoors & Sports

Market - Auto & Classified

Shop Around the Corner Lynette Ambrose

Ettinger’s Landscaping Owner: Wayne Ettinger Address: 2345 Warrensville Road, Montoursville, PA 17754 Phone: 570-433-4550 Hours: Mon–Fri 9 a.m.–7 p.m., Sat 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Sun 12–5 p.m.

Web site: www.ettingersgardencenter.com

B

570-724-3838

Professional Services

COURTESY ETTINGERS LANDSCAPING

See Your Classified Here!

efore most people begin sipping their morning coffee, the predawn stillness in a quiet valley near Montoursville, Pennsylvania, is broken by the hum of highly orchestrated activity: trucks are being loaded with heavy equipment, mulch, trees, and plants for transport to landscape jobs. Landscape, maintenance, and construction crews assemble only to disperse to numerous destinations. The gates open to plant-craving customers, while the overhead watering systems Wayne Ettinger with grandson, Tanner. shower a fine mist over acres of growing plants.

This is Ettinger’s Landscaping, the biosphere of Wayne Ettinger.

A fascination with the world of plants led Ettinger to a degree in horticulture at Penn State University (where he became the first Penn State horticulture graduate certified to teach at the secondary school level), and eventually to Penn College of Technology in Williamsport, where he developed the curriculum for and launched a two-year associate degree program in horticulture.

He retired from teaching after eighteen years to devote his time and energy to creating his own landscaping and garden center business. What Wayne Ettinger began over thirty years ago with a homemade snowmobile trailer and a single truck has matured into a full-scale landscape service company that continues to prosper.

Ettinger runs the business in a distinctly casual, yet meticulously professional, manner, and his attitude throughout the years has garnered the respect of his unique family of employees, some of whom have been with him from the early days.

“Thinking back over the last twenty-seven years, it has been a positive learning experience,” remarks Brooke Barton, landscape maintenance manager. “I remember my first year while potting roses, when Wayne came outside and said, ‘I think you can do that faster.’ I handed him the shovel and said ‘here, show me’—not a good or smart thing to have said! He said a few choice words and went back into the office. I have to say I can’t think of a better role model as a young man. He has been a very positive influence in my life.”

Encompassing over twenty acres of nursery area, Ettinger’s Landscaping is a fullservice facility: the construction division creates stone walkways, retaining walls, and water gardens; the maintenance division does pruning, spring and fall cleanup, shrub fertilization, pest control, irrigation, and mulching; the interior plantscaping division offers tropical plants, custom-planted decorative containers, and porch boxes, as well as maintenance service; and the design and landscape division provides individual consultation, design, and installation for both residential and commercial properties. Many of the vast selection of plants used are grown in the property’s numerous greenhouses. The garden center offers free do-it-yourself design consultations and hosts several informative seminars each season for the public.

Ettinger faces this new growing season with confidence in the center’s ability to adapt to the ever-changing economy. “We are our own competition,” he says. “I have good people who help run the company. That is part of our success, and we are going to keep going. I will still be here.”

Lynette Ambrose is a first-time contributer to Mountain Home.

Page 42 2

MOUNTAINHoMe HOME Mountain

May 2009 october 2008

Professional Services

Mics.

Photography Real Estate

Shopping

Gaffer District l Corning, NY Market St., Corning, NY

Personals

72 E. Market St Corning, NY 14830

exams · glasses · contacts

607.962.0386

www.glaswerkoptical.com

May 2009 2008 october

Real Estate

See Your Classified Here!

570-724-3838

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM Mountain HoMe

Page 433

Shopping

Market - Auto & Classified

May Songs

By Angela Cannon-Crothers

Z

oo zee zoo zoo zee! I hear the familiar trill as I scatter bits of colored yarns throughout the yard to adorn bird nests I’ll search out next fall. I crane my neck upward, squinting into the stick-fingered canopy overhead looking for the maker of the call. It should be an easy time for spotting birds, when only thumbnail sized leaves have yet emerged, but I still can’t find the source of the call. Zoo zee zoo zoo zee! It calls again, teasingly, and quickly flits away. “Black-throated green warbler,” I say to myself.

When I look up into the treetops to scan for a bird, I hear singing. I often see only a silhouette framed against a background glare of sky. With that I can discern if the flighty creature is crow-sized, robin-like, the size of a sparrow, or smaller.

Sometimes that’s as far as I get, which is why I depend on my ears to guide me in identifying birds.

Years ago, while working for the Forest Service out West, I had a naturalist colleague tell me she couldn’t identify birds by their song. “That skill is for people with a musical ear, and I’m tone deaf,” she said, excusing herself from auditory aviary translations. I might be somewhat musical, but what I really rely upon are the mnemonic devices of bird phrases, for instance, while I vie to catch a glimpse of the lovely patterns of a chestnut-sided warbler. I know when I hear pleased, pleased, pleased to meet-cha! that the small-winged beauty is nearby. The yellow warbler, arriving in mid-May, intones sweet, sweet, sweet, I’m so-stinkin’ sweet, while the common yellowthroat’s cadence is witchity, witchity, witch!

According to a study put out by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Allegheny Plateau and all of Pennsylvania outside the plateau are critical hot spots for migrating neo-tropical bird species. Birds like the scarlet tanager, the cerulean warbler, the solitary vireo, thrushes, and many wood warblers, depend on this area for summer breeding.

By the end of the month, a pair of nesting rufous-sided towhees are waking me up (along with our Turkin rooster) with a drink your teeeeeea! Of course, the rooster says something else entirely. Afternoons are filled with the rich caroling of cheeryo, cheery-me sung by robins, and the ovenbird calling to service a teacher! teacher! teacher! My favorites of all the woodland songs happens mostly at dawn and dusk with the fairy flute-like calls of hermit and wood thrushes.

May marks the month my bluebird houses will hold their first hatch, with the possibility of a first flight of fledglings near. The great horned owl, gently hooting who’s awake, are you? lured in its mate during the late winter and will already have young “branchers” to tend now and throughout the summer. May also includes my own milestones, like a son who is about to turn thirteen, a number deserving of a rite of passage something akin to a first hunt or a vision quest. Usually we do some sort of mother/son waterfall hike, but this year we might try rock climbing.

Spring ephemerals make their prettiest show right now. I’m sure to find purplish-red wake-robin and large white trilliums; trout lilies with their speckled leaves, peppery tasting toothwort; wild ginger, with fragrant roots, perfectly heartshaped leaves, and a prehistoric-looking fluorescence; the tiny purple stars of blue cohosh; and the peppermint-pink striped flowers of spring beauties to name a few.

Meanwhile, my yard will be scented with a riotous blooming from all the towering wild cherry trees that surround my home, the pits of which filled my car heater last fall when a mouse made the Jeep its home.

May rushes in with the business of all things emerging, at last. The Full Flower Moon on the ninth of the month means that if I want to plant my garden according to moon phases, I should be planting only bulbs and vegetables that produce root crops after the ninth until the moon turns new. Considering the hard frost we had here on Memorial Day weekend last year, waiting until after the new moon on the twenty-fourth to put in seedlings is probably as wise an idea as any.

But the busy-ness of May doesn’t end there. We have chickens to move to their summer house, horse fence in need of constant repair, newly inoculated mushroom logs to monitor, a roof in need of repair over the human habitation, a dock that still needs to be put in … But wait, what’s that I hear? Weesee, weesee, weesee, weesee! It’s black and white and flew off that-a-way.

Angela Cannon-Crothers is a freelance writer and outdoor educator living in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

4Page 44

MOUNTAIN HOME Mountain HoMe

May 2009 october 2008

As Time Goes By

By Jennifer Cline

n a throw-away era, when people don’t give much thought to tossing items away instead of having them repaired, Richard Awiza is preserving his customers’ memories.

One of a few of his kind, Awiza opened R.A. Time Capsule: Quality Watch and Clock Repair in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, in 1990. The shop, located in a historic building that once was home to a pharmacy, is an enchanting spot where— amid the ticking of clocks from every era—art and modern technology mix, and Richard Awiza touches history.

After earning a two-year degree in horology (watchmaking) from Bowman Technical School in Lancaster in 1984, he began work for the Swiss Watch Technical Center, formerly the Hamilton Watch Company, also in Lancaster. There he worked on the 18K gold Omega retirement watch belonging to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who piloted the lunar module for Apollo 11, the first manned aircraft to land on the moon. Awiza explains that the Omega Speedmaster Professional Chronograph was the only watch to meet NASA’s criteria for all manned space missions.

While he sometimes knows the stories behind the timepieces he encounters, at other times he and his wife, Kim, the “mom” in their mom-and-pop shop, can only wonder at the stories the objects have witnessed.

A few years ago, three one-of-a-kind eighteenth-century grandfather clocks were in the shop for repairs at the same time. Awiza surmises that, in each case, family members collaborated to make the clocks, one person crafting a beautiful case of the finest wood while another cut the intricate gears and movement. And in each case, that unique clock may have been the only one that family ever

May 2009

produced.

“You never know what’s going to come through the door,” Kim Awiza says.

On another occasion, Rick opened the weights on a large antique wall clock to find Civil War bullets inside.

“If only that clock could have told its history,” Richard remarks.

Richard has also overhauled hundreds of railroad pocket watches. An intrinsic part of the railroad system, Richard explains that a genuine railroad pocket watch had to meet specific criteria, such as jewel content Richard and Kim Awiza of R.A. Time Capsule in their workshop with and size. “The reason is simple,” grandfather clock movements over 200 years old. he says. “Timekeeping could “I must’ve driven my bike past it hundreds of times,” not vary but just a couple of seconds a day.” Inaccurate he says. When the clock came back to him for repairs, in timekeeping could have resulted in train collisions.

Along with the railroad pocket watch, the Seth Thomas poor shape with the bottom rusted out, he knew he had No. 2 railroad wall regulator was a staple in railroad stations to have it. So, after acquiring the clock through a trade, he across the nation, and Richard says both are engineering restored it. He added new neon, and it now hangs in his marvels. The timepieces are sentimental for most of his storefront.

The shop is not only about history. It is variety that helps customers, who send him photos and other mementos to show their gratitude. “They remember the clock ticking or to keep Richard and Kim excited about their work. In a even the chimes going off in the middle of the night and single day they might receive a 200-year-old clock and a Seiko watch with the most modern technology. “We’re full waking them,” Richard says.

He can relate. Among his personal treasures is a neon clock spectrum here,” he says.

His tools are also very modern: a video microscope that that once hung on Dave Bower’s garage in Montoursville.

As a child, Awiza rode his bike past it every day to visit Guinter’s Gas Station, where he could buy sweet treats.

Please see Clock on page 49 COURTESY RICHARD AWIZA

I

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 45

Home & Real Estate

Ask Gary Gary Ranck

Countertops, Act II Dear Gary, We have thirty- or forty-year-old Formica countertops in our kitchen, and we’d like to update withtile.Thecounteredgesandaneight-inchbacksplasharealsoFormica,anditisallstillverysound and solid. Can I tile directly over the Formica, or is there some elaborate method of prepping the countersforthis?Iamespeciallyworriedaboutadherencetotheverticalsurfaces.Thanksforyourhelp.

Fit to be Tiled Dear Fit, Even if the Formica on your countertop is very secure, I would not suggest putting tile on top of it. It is not good practice to put tile over Formica or any laminate.

If you disagree, you should scratch or sand the Formica to make it rough so the adhesive will stick to it, but the tile job would only be as good as the substrate. If the Formica ever lifts or breaks bond, it could fall off, taking the tile with it. The grout could crack and fall out as well. If you want to start from scratch, remove the existing Formica-covered countertop and discard it. To assure a sound substrate, build a new ¾-inch plywood top with ¾ x 2inch strips fastened with glue and screws, under the edge around the entire perimeter, placing divider strips where the cabinets meet and fasten together. Then attach the tile to the plywood with thin-set mortar or premixed latex adhesive designed for ceramic tile. Grout the joints with a latex-based grout or add a latex additive when mixing the grout. Mix the grout to a pudding-like consistency, let set for ten minutes, then stir again before using. Happy grouting.

Tip: After a few days, when the grout has totally dried, apply silicone sealer to the grout joints. This will make the grout stain and water resistant. You’ll need to apply sealer about every six months.

Carpenter Gary Ranck is a sales representative for Brookside Homes. Contact him at or submit a question to askgary@mountainhomemag.com.

l Corporate l Business Law l Job Injuries l Workers’ Compensation l Wills & Trusts l Estate Administration l Social Security/ Disability l Home Owner’s Claims

Page 46

MOUNTAIN HOME

l Personal Injury Claims l Auto Accidents l Criminal Defense (including DUI) l Dental, Medical Negligence l Family Law l Divorce & Custody l Residential/Commercial Real Estate Law

May 2009

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 47

Home & Real Estate

Some Place Like Home Dave Milano

Oh, Nuts! (and Bolts) H

© Dave Milano

ardware “trail mix” is the mechanic’s lifeguard—invaluable provision for the farm, home, and anywhere that unpredictable and assorted repairs are made.

For me trail mix began in earnest as an auction box lot, purchased not long after Mary and I had moved into our first home. The box—ten pounds of mostly unmatched bolts, nuts, screws, nails, washers, odd fasteners, fuses, latches, chain links, and I can’t remember what all else—clinched a dignified station in the basement, front and center under my workbench. It was an instant hit, becoming a regular companion at household repair jobs, and even the occasional guest of neighbors and friends.

Repair joys were not the box’s only rewards. I was surprised to discover that fingertip foraging through the bits of stuff was actually enjoyable in itself—examining, comparing and contrasting, sometimes lingering for a moment over a mysterious something or other— and when the search culminated in the discovery of that elusive oval-head screw or special brass washer, it produced a euphoria as addictive as sunshine.

That was over a quarter century ago, and while the old cardboard box has long since disintegrated, most of its original contents hang on, intermingling now with a new crop of old parts, more complex than its progenitor. Today’s mix sits divided between several newer boxes, a couple of coffee cans, and my latest trail mix innovation, the cookie sheet, which represents one of the few worthwhile changes I’ve made to the typical and venerable old box o’ stuff. While boxes and cans must be dumped for effective use, the tray’s horizontal anatomy is easy to rummage through without unloading—to me a real improvement. (I realize that some find dumping their mix a frankly enjoyable operation, so you should think carefully before converting, but I will suggest that containers are best discharged onto an old towel rather than a bare bench top, so afterward the corners can be lifted to easily funnel the contents back home.)

The best trail mix follows no organizational rules. All the “extra” hardware that inevitably accumulates around the shop is simply tossed in. Time spent in qualitative analysis of what should stay or go makes only needless complication, and in the end diminishes a mix’s value. Likewise, one should waste no time worrying about how long an item has been in the box without good use. It’s just a small thing, and you know darn well that if you toss it today, tomorrow you’ll need it.

Friend Dave, no mere tinkerer, considers trail mix not only convenient, but vital.

He practices its collection and maintenance as a survival art, likening trail mix to oldfashioned sourdough in the kitchen, partially utilized here and there as necessary, and kept healthy with regular feedings. At Dave’s level some minor categorizing is necessary, so he keeps separate coffee cans full of nuts, washers, machine bolts, and tapping screws, plus one or two special cans for misfits that don’t justify their own container. He also keeps a barrel of extra-large trail mix that if examined today would reveal several pieces of leftover reinforcing rod, scraps of angle iron, numerous pipe joints, a jackhammer chisel, and a short section of steel studding.

Most everybody has some experience with trail mix, from the housewife with her button box to the salvage yard owner who collects hardware by the acre. Trail mix is, for all who employ it, a routine and genuine blessing, saving trips to the store for that twenty-five cent item, preventing repair delays, and dissolving the frustration of being almost done with an essential job. But more importantly than that, trail mix promotes thrift and prudence— elusive characteristics in these days of wealth and excess.

Perhaps if our economy continues to tank, trail mix will become a more universal staple, reinforced for the believer, newly discovered by those whom necessity has not yet instructed.

I say, let the improvising begin!

Page 48

Dave Milano is a former suburbanite turned part-time Tioga County farmer. You can contact him at someplacelikehome@mountainhomemag.com. See his blog at www.mundanedaily.com.

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Home & Real Estate not only allows Richard to see tiny details he could not see with an eye loupe but that also allows customers to see their watchworks on a large monitor in the front of the store; a crystal cutter; lathes for manufacturing parts; an electronic timer; and a variety of high-tech tools for thoroughly cleaning the inside and outside of a watch or clock.

Richard’s wood shop, where he restores clock cases, is in the basement, . In many instances, clocks have been stored in attics or barns, where they’ve accumulated not only dust, but sometimes bee and rodent nests, as well. Richard returns them in as close to new condition as he can make them.

“He’s so particular, he won’t even put a Phillips screw in a watch,” Kim says.

“It’s not period,” Richard explains. And, in fact, seeing a repair that includes such oversights drives him a little nutty.

It’s led him to collect millions of parts for nearly any repair job that comes up. Included in that collection is a room filled with cabinets that hold more than 100,000 antique watch crystals.

And while a hard-to-solve problem may have him sometimes ready to toss a clock into the middle of Broad Street, he says, “I’ve just got a passion for it. I’m like a dog—I always come back.” So much so that, for fun, he’s got another shop in his garage, where he’s restored several motorcycles. “I’m constantly building, constantly restoring things and making them new,” he says.

Richard was attracted to watchmaking after serving in the Navy, where, on long cruise trips, he had to find something to keep himself busy. He took up the hobby of

May 2009

fashioning palm-sized metal motorcycles with moveable parts and creating anchor pendants for his friends.

“When I got out of the Navy, I knew I had some kind of talent,” he says. While working for an air-conditioning repair contractor at Granby High School in Virginia in 1982, he walked into the guidance counselor’s office and asked the counselor whether he could find him a list of all the watchmaking and jewelry schools in the United States. Half an hour later, the guidance counselor’s dot-matrix printer spit out a yards-long list. On it, he found the Bowman Technical School just a couple of hours from his hometown.

When he and Kim visited Bowman, he saw a group of dozens of students who, he was told, were studying to become jewelers, as well as a group of three men The inside workings of a Ball watch. studying to become watchmakers. “I said, ‘There are seventy-five jewelers; they must be a dime a there are fewer than 5,000, and most of them are aging. dozen. There are only three watchmakers. I want to be one His alma mater, which was founded in 1887 and was of those.’ And, lo and behold, I’m getting to be one of the world-renowned in the field of horology, closed its doors in last watchmakers around.” the late 1990s. It was the last school of its kind.

For Richard, with his painstaking attention to detail, it “We’re a rare species,” he says. His son is interested in a means a booming business as clocks and watches stream more high-tech career in information technology and will into his shop from around the country. At any one time most likely not follow in Richard’s footsteps. “When we’re the shop typically has seventy-five clocks and fifty watches gone, that might be the end of the Time Capsule.” in for repair.

Richard cites a study that found that in the 1960s there Jennifer Cline is a first-time contributor to Mountain were in excess of 40,000 watchmakers nationwide. Today, Home magazine.

COURTESY RICHARD AWIZA

Clock continued from page 45

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 49

Page 50

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009

Beautiful wooded setting with 11.5 secluded acres. This 3 BR house with a third floor loft needs some finish work, floor coverings. Great deck to watch the wildlife - wonderful camp or full-time home. Cozy and charming. OGM will transfer; gas is currently leased. MLS 118421 $156,500

Beautiful 3 BR colonial farmhouse sitting on 3.15 acres with spectacular views. Home is only 3 miles from Wellsboro, situated on an a very good road for easy access to town. There is a nice, open floor plan with two living areas and an updated kitchen. The detached, oversized 2 car garage is a great benefit, as well. MLS 118343 $199,900

Classic 4 BR farmhouse w/large barn on 14.5 acres priced to sell. House needs work, but with the unique patterned cherry hardwood floors and wall detail, along with the tile kitchen, 1st floor bath and 2nd floor full bath w/laundry there is a great opportunity to fix this up to your liking. Silos could be dismantled and sold if not necessary for farming, barn could be utilized as work area or a shop/studio. Small stream and a pond site and this home sits at a great location excellent hunting area in NY State near the PA border. MLS 118399 $89,900

Post & beam mountain home with the privacy that you’ve been looking for - 5.54 wooded acres with a spectacular house. A fieldstone fireplace & vaulted ceiling in the great room, lots of light, hickory kitchen cabinets and Zodiaq quartz countertops, fieldstone hearth with a wood stove in the downstairs family room, along with a large additional gameroom with a 3/4 bath, 2 natural stone custom patios - one with a stone fire pit that can seat 8 Adirondack chairs - 36,000 BTU central A/C-heat pump system. MLS 117306 $466,000

You must take the tour to appreciate this immaculate, truly move-in condition 2 story, 4 BR home in a great Coudersport neighborhood.

Starting at the bright foyer/sunroom w/tile floors you can enter the living room through oak French doors to rooms that have beautiful oak trim and floors, nicely upgraded kitchen and bathrooms, a formal dining room, library/study with a gas fireplace and built-in book shelves and a very well defined laundry/utility/powder room off the kitchen. Large closets in the bedrooms, several tile floored rooms, large nicely landscaped backyard, macadam drive. MLS 118417 $139,900

In town 4 BR home in a very nice Wellsboro neighborhood. Master BR and bath on the first floor, 3 BRs and a full bath on the second floor - ideally suited for either retirees with visiting family or a young and growing family. Situated on a nice lot that borders a creek at the back of the large yard, this home is conveniently located near schools, downtown shopping and medical facilities. Nice features include a slate floor foyer, built-ins, pantry, first floor laundry and 1/2 bath off the kitchen. Lots of room and lots of charm. MLS 118409 $174,900

May 2009

WWW.MOUNTAINHOMEMAG.COM

Page 51

Page 52

MOUNTAIN HOME

May 2009