|
I was staying
in Geneseo, a town seven miles from Letchworth, but almost an
hour's drive from the launch site. The narrow park is 17 miles
long and the speed limit is 35 mph. I headed out in the dark for
the park's northern Mount Morris entrance, radio blaring to keep
me awake.
My eyes caught
movement to my right, then to my left. The moon was full and so
were the woods — full of deer. They were everywhere.
I turned off
the radio, opened the windows and slowed to a crawl to take in
the sounds, smells and feel of the place. Enchantment was in the
air.
Free as a
bird
Shortly before
6 a.m., I arrived at Balloons over Letchworth.
This was my
second attempt to float above the area. On an earlier trip, I
was thwarted by bad weather. But today was perfect and trucks
with equipment rolled in promptly at 6 a.m.
Eight of us
watched as big fans inflated two 450-pound balloons. Then, we
climbed into baskets — partitioned to distribute our weight
— and with a roar of propane torches, rose into the now blue
sky, watching trucks and people below shrink before our eyes.
Safe in our nest, with no sense of swaying, we hovered above Middle
Falls as the Genesee River plunged over the 110-foot precipice.
Once in the
air, the wind has its way with you. There's no steering a hot-air
balloon. If it tracks the river gorge, owner Sean Quigley dipped
down next to the falls. This day, we moved noiselessly above trees
to a ridge that fell away to a breathtaking expanse of fields
striped with bean plants.
As we wandered
with the river, company vans followed on the road below. After
about an hour, Quigley found a freshly mowed field and set down.
We helped
the crew squish air out of the balloons, punched them back into
their bags and rode a van back to the launch site. Quigley popped
the cork on a bottle of champagne and we toasted a beautiful morning.
Quigley said
that tradition dates back to the 1780s in France when some men
filled their balloon with hot air, went aloft and soon landed
in a farmer's field.
"Afraid
of evil spirits, the farmers pitchforked the balloon and ruined
it. The next time the men went up, they took champagne and the
farmers cheered," Quigley said.
Geocaching
for novices
Cheering is
what my husband, Herb, and I did when we found our first cache,
a box of trinkets hidden in the woods. The sport of geocaching
was new to us and so were the handheld GPS (Global Positioning
System) receivers we carried into the woods for a treasure hunt
in hiking boots.
Here's how
it works. Geocachers pack stuff (everything from pens to rubber
bugs) in a container, hide it and post the location's GPs coordinates
on the Internet. Then, other geocachers search for the quarry.
Simple idea, but it's not easy.
With help
from park manager Roland Beck, we found two caches. One was buried
in a hollow tree. The other was in a film canister behind a reflector
on a park fence.
According
to the geocaching Web site, there are 187,082 caches hidden in
216 countries and the number grows daily. Beck said 30 are in
Letchworth.
Of course,
you can take great hikes here without gizmos. There are 65 miles
of trails. But geocaching may be the magic that reconnects a generation
of game players with the great outdoors.
"Two
boys were looking for a cache the other day and came upon fawns
that had just been born," Beck said.
Happy trails
We found colts,
not fawns, when we pulled up to Wolcott Farms' corral near the
park's Trailside Lodge for a horseback ride through the woods.
My horse,
Bonnie, had given birth to TJ a week before. He followed her on
our 40-minute trail ride, nursing whenever he got the chance.
Tina Wolcott
led the ride from atop a huge gray horse, encouraging us to talk
to ours.
"It helps
you relax and keeps them from getting bored," she said.
She also had
good advice every time we headed down a hill.
"Lean
back, heels down, toes to the horse's nose," she yelled,
which kept us from inadvertently kicking the horses' sides and
making them run.
Running came
later, when we donned life jackets and boarded Adventure Calls
Outfitters' rubber rafts to run some of the Genesee's more gentle
rapids.
"Picnics
to go"
The park is
named for William Pryor Letchworth, who experienced enchantment
the first time he saw rainbows in the mist of the falls in 1858.
He built a home here and called it Glen Iris after the Greek goddess
of rainbows.
His home is
now the elegant Glen Iris Inn, with lustrous parquet floors and
unique lithopane windows he brought back from Europe. In the heart
of the park next to Middle Falls, the inn has 16 guest rooms and
a fine dining room open for lunch, dinner and "picnics to
go." The menu capitalizes on a bounty of regional fruit and
vegetables, including cranberry almond bread pudding with vanilla
custard sauce.
Letchworth
donated his 1,000 acres to the state of New York in 1907, launching
what is now a 15,000-acre park. His legacy also pays homage to
Mary Jemison. Known as the "white woman of the Genesee,"
Jemison was kidnapped by Shawnee warriors when she was a teenager,
then adopted by the Seneca people of western New York. She chose
to remain with the Senecas for the rest of her life, raising seven
children from two Seneca husbands along the river here.
Two years
before she died in 1833, Jemison moved to a reservation near Buffalo.
Forty-one years later, moved by James Seaver's 1824 account of
her life, Letchworth brought her back to her land.
Jemison is
buried on the bluffs above Middle Falls beneath a statue depicting
her journey to the Genesee Valley with her second child, Thomas,
on her back.
Peter Jemison,
an eighth-generation descendent of Thomas, now manages the Ganondagan
Historic Site 40 miles away in Victor, NY It preserves and interprets
Seneca traditions.
As I headed
home, a whimsical Paul McCartney song called "Uncle Albert/Admiral
Halsey" played on the radio. Its familiar chorus celebrates
"hands across the water" and "heads across the
sky." It was the perfect soundtrack for this locale.
|
