The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
A week ago, we were enjoying sunny skies by the side of the sea. Now, we’re back home and enjoying this:
It was a light snowfall and it all melted before I even got up this morning. And it was pretty.
I loved the place with the mountains and the waters and I have no intention of not returning someday…but this is home.
Feels like it took longer than usual this year, but it’s finally here!
I reserve the right to get sick of the stuff once my traditional cut-off date, St. Patrick’s Day, rolls around (though for some reasons to be revealed later, my tolerance for snow this year might actually be increased). But for right now, I am happy as a clam, because SNOW!!!
A lovely post about autumn, over at Nerdishly:
Punctuated by long nights and scented by benign smoke and wet leaves, the period between first frost and December is my favorite part of the year. The furnace is pressed into service by 5 a.m., and I, now be-sweatered and -socked from rising until bedtime, begin yawning before 6:45 p.m., but the rest is a sort of everyday magic, from the perfect circles bored into the pumpkins by what I imagine to be a stout but agreeable-enough nocturnal animal to the prehistoric trumpeting of the sandhill cranes as they gather in ever-widening circles over our home before beginning their journey away from the prairie; from the slant of the afternoon sun on the living room floor to the color of the sky when I collect the mail; from best-of booklists to seasonal menus… I adore autumn.
I make no secret of my love for autumn. While I enjoy a lot of summer activities, I always feel a certain disconnect during summer. We’re culturally wired to worship summer, but I tend to keep summer at arm’s length. Warmth is nice, to a point; hot gets unpleasant. And there’s too damned much sunlight in summer! I know that sounds weird in our sun-drenched culture, but I like nighttime, I like moonlight and stars and the flicker of firelight when it’s the only light to be had. I don’t like sunrise before 7am, and I really really really don’t like that it’s light enough to read outside at 10pm.
No, I don’t hate summer. But I’m always glad to see it in the rear-view mirror.
Fall? The time of crisp mornings, earlier sunsets? When the winter stars start to peek over the horizon? The time of lovely flannel and sweaters and overalls after multiple months of boring shorts and t-shirts? The time of color and of apples? Of spooky tales? Of huddling around the fire, and not just sitting near it? Yeah, autumn is the stuff.
This year the transition has been significantly warmer than usual, and the traditional fall color hasn’t been its usual self to this point. By this point we’re usually “past peak”, but this year…heck, maybe we won’t even peak at all. But there’s still a lot of beauty out there.
Here are a few images from just the other day, taken at Knox Farm State Park and from the Mill Road Overlook in East Aurora.
From Knox Farm:
From the Mill Road overlook:
I live in a beautiful place, and this is its most beautiful time of year.
Here are two photos of the Buffalo Niagara region, taken from atop Chestnut Ridge! The first is clearer, but the second is obviously a wider shot, in which can be seen in the distance the skyline of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. (Note that Niagara Falls, NY has no visible skyline from this distance, which is a statement in itself.)
Here’s the wider shot! I took both of these with my still-new-enough-to-me-to-call-it-new new phone. I have to say, I really love that waiting three or four years to get a new phone allows enough improvements to make me say, “Holy crap, my phone can do that?!”
If you’re wondering where Niagara Falls, NY is, see the Seneca One tower there? It’s the reddish building that’s the tallest in Buffalo. Go along the horizon to the left until you see a faint boxy-looking building. That’s the Seneca Niagara Resort and Casino, the only building in that city tall enough to have a horizon-topping presence from this distance. This angle also makes it look like it’s a much farther distance separating the two Niagara Falls cities; the Seneca Casino on the American side actually lies at the far end of the city, well away from the Falls and the gorge themselves. The American side, at least right up to the river, falls, and gorge, emphasizes nature parks and the like; the Canadians have built their side’s touristy stuff and giant resort skyscrapers almost right up to the brink of the gorge itself.
Anyway, on a fall morning, that’s what a big chunk of the 716 looks like!
This weekend The Wife and I spent a bit of time driving on US 20A, from Orchard Park to Perry Center, where we hung a right for a day trip to Letchworth State Park. After Letchworth we went to Avon, NY where there’s a good pizza place we like (they also do gluten-free!), and then we drove home, traveling south from Avon to Geneseo and then back home on 20A again. US 20A is one of my favorite drives for a number of reasons, all of which boil down to that it’s just a beautiful road to drive, with its roughly 85 miles going from the flatness of the Buffalo area into the hills of eastern Erie County and then into the more rugged terrain of the western Finger Lakes region.
In addition to US 20A being a beautiful drive (and it’s one of many gorgeous drives in autumn), it’s also a bit less-traveled than its coast-to-coast parent road, US 20, which runs about twenty miles or so north of 20A (the A is for ‘alternate’). Many farms dot its length, so you often have to be on the lookout for a tractor or a combine or hay wagon on its way from one part of one farm to another. US 20A runs east-west, which means lots of railroad crossings, and as you exit East Aurora and start encountering hills, you dip into small towns and up out of them on the other side. (Danger for leadfooted drivers: speed limits go from 55 to 35 immediately at the foot of the hills!)
US 20A is also an old road. It hasn’t always been designed as 20A, but its route has existed since before World War II. It goes through old towns and old places. There are many long-closed businesses along its length, including restaurants that I’ve never known to be open that still carry signage. Restaurants out in the middle of nowhere…but at one point there was enough business for someone to make some money slinging hash or frying steaks. Each little town along the way has its own local hangout, located in very old big houses with fading paint jobs, and woodwork that’s long been out of true, but with the current popular brands of beer advertised in neon (or whatever passes for neon these days).
There are two particular spots along US 20A that harken back to the road’s, and the region’s, younger days. Both are within sight of each other.
US 20A goes through a town called Warsaw, NY, which lies at the bottom of a steep-walled valley. The valley is actually so steep that trucks and other large vehicles (cars with trailers, campers, and buses) aren’t even allowed to descend 20A into Warsaw, from either direction. Going either way, before you get to the steep descent into Warsaw, there are big signs and even a turn-off for large vehicles to figure out their alternate routes. Here’s the signage at the turnaround west of Warsaw, for eastbound traffic:
Apparently this was all necessary because of a big fire that happened over fifty years ago:
It’s a trucker’s worst nightmare — losing your brakes while traveling down a steep grade.
That’s exactly what happened to the driver of a large gasoline tanker on Warsaw’s East Hill about 5:55 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 1969. The huge tanker careened out of control, smashed through a retaining wall and then crashed into a station wagon, rolling on top of it and bursting into flames.
The station wagon driver, Thomas Drake of Elmira, was killed instantly. Tanker driver John M. Malatta of Macedon miraculously escaped serious injury, leaping from the cab before it became a giant fireball.
Mr. and Mrs. Chester Kwiecen of Perry, driving up the hill behind the station wagon, narrowly escaped death by running to safety moments before their vehicle was overtaken by flames.
Much of the East Hill area was transformed into a sea of fire, according to Daily News accounts. The explosion created a river of flames that engulfed four two-story homes within minutes, leaving 17 people homeless. All escaped safely, including an 83-year-old woman who was carried from her home by a neighbor.
Still, the danger was far from over.
Thousands of gallons of gasoline from the destroyed tanker leaked into village sewers, causing numerous explosions that blew manhole covers high into the air and caused a life-threatening situation for hours.
As evening approached, the glow from the massive fire could be seen for miles around the Oatka Valley.
(quote from here)
In other areas around the country I’ve seen runaway truck piles, which are like exit lanes off the thruway except they go into a giant pile of sand, but 20A into Warsaw is too narrow for that sort of thing, so trucks have to just figure out a way around.
The truck entrance to Warsaw isn’t the only interesting thing there! Just before that eastbound truck turnaround, on the opposite side of the road maybe a tenth of a mile away, is this building and structure:
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| Courtesy Google Maps street view. |
As you come around a bend at the top of one of 20A’s numerous hills and rises, the trees on the left end and then there’s that structure, with the bunker beside it. I remember seeing a lot more of these towers at the tops of hills on our various drives (we road-tripped a lot when I was a kid); I remember one standing atop the big mountain that rises just south of Olean, NY, just before you crossed the line into Pennsylvania. I wouldn’t learn for quite a few years just what these towers are, but they were once a crucial part of America’s communications infrastructure. They are microwave transmission towers.
Between early wired networks and today’s fiber optics sat a system of microwave relay towers transmitting information from coast to coast across the United States. Built in the early 1950s, this line-of-sight network spanned the continent using zig-zag patterns to avoid signal overlap. It conveyed phone conversations and television signals from the era of the Kennedy assassination through the resignation of Nixon.
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| Courtesy 99percentinvisible.org |
On one side of this road, a bit of old communications infrastructure; on the other, a construct built in response to an awful accident in the region’s lore.
April is a strange month around these parts. I’ve maintained for years that of Buffalo-Niagara’s four seasons, spring is the worst. Summers can be too hot and humid, but are mild compared to the South or the Eastern Seaboard; our autumns are spectacular and frankly, our winters are fine. Really. I’ll take the snow. But spring? It’s always an unpleasant March and April, usually stubbornly cold and stubbornly cloudy and just persistently unpleasant until May.
This April, though, has been…not bad. Not bad at all. It’s been mixed, certainly! But all in all? Not bad.
In baseball terms, May is on deck and warming up, but April has hit a solid single that it’s stretched into a double with some deft baserunning.
Here are some images of April 2021.
I’ve long been of the belief that as delightful as three of the four seasons in Buffalo Niagara are, the last one is usually just annoying. It might surprise you to learn that the one I don’t like is not winter, but rather, spring. I stand by this! Spring in these parts is not a welcome return to warmth, but rather it is generally a two-month affair of temperatures remaining stubbornly in the mid-to-upper 40s. Spring in Buffalo Niagara is usually a pretty gray affair, as the clouds maintain their stranglehold over the sun until mid-May at the earliest. It takes forever for trees and bushes and everything else to come back to life, to the point that green isn’t the dominant color here until Memorial Day at the earliest. The snowpiles in parking lots and at the ends of streets endure, in their dirty grayness, and it seems like mud is everywhere.
And yes, it usually snows in April around here. Last year it even snowed not near Mothers Day, but actually on Mothers Day.
But we do once in a while get to enjoy a day like today in springtime around here, a day when it is warm and sunny out, when we get to open windows and switch out the stuffy indoor air for fresh outdoor air, when we can walk the dogs multiple times, and when the sun shines from sunrise to sunset.
Geology and astronomy may be in agreement that it is spring here, but it’s just not. Not yet. Not in a way that feels real.
That’s not stopping nature from looking like it’s embracing the early wake-up call….
That’s Chestnut Ridge park, just this morning. It’s one of my favorite places, where The Dee-oh-gee and I visit often on our weekly Sunday morning nature walks. That particular stream is a combination of two streams that tumble from the upper reaches of the park; this is at the park’s northern, and lower, end. Here it tumbles down through what’s left of a deep ravine, and under a steel-deck bridge before it flows on, winding its way toward Lake Erie before it finally empties into Eighteen Mile Creek, which then flows on to Lake Erie. A lot of that water will eventually flow out of Lake Erie, down the Niagara River, over the Falls, and out to Lake Ontario…and on and on, eventually to the sea.
There’s still snow up there (Chestnut Ridge is in what the weather people call “the upper elevations” when they are threatening snowfall for some of us), and as of now there hasn’t been enough warmth to cause the grass to really start greening or for dormant trees and bushes to start budding. But it’s tempting to look for those things.
Spring in Buffalo Niagara. It’s here…kind of.
Except for a few days, winter here in Western New York has been a dingy affair thus far. I like snow, but we’ve had barely any at all. Mostly it’s just been one gray, damp, muddy day after another. Days like what we’ve had thus far tend to be what March and April are like in these parts. But last night we got snow, and more is on tap for tonight, so maybe we’ll finally have some actual winter, the way winter is supposed to look.
Here’s the view of my street when I left for work this morning. It really was quite lovely.
