Category: Cultures

The Yarb Woman of Cornell: Elfriede Abbe’s Tribute to Herbal Wisdom in the Botanic Gardens

A quiet encounter with Elfriede Abbe’s Yarb Woman reveals the enduring wisdom of herbal traditions, inviting reflection in the intimate stillness of Cornell’s Herb Garden.

MichaelStephenWills6 Comments

We did not come upon her the way you come upon a monument. On a late winter morning my sister and I chose to walk through the pergola alongside the Richard M. Lewis Education Center and there she was.

There is no plaza, no axial approach, no insistence. Instead, the Yarb Woman statue waits in a corner of the Robison New York State Herb Garden, where paths narrow and attention shifts from spectacle to detail. The pergola frames the space, the beds lie dormant or fragrant depending on the season, and there—almost at eye level with the plants—is the woman herself, bent into her work.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

Her posture is one of reguard. That is the first instruction. Her posture is a study in intention: forward-leaning, balanced, attentive. One hand gathers, the other steadies. She is caught mid-action, not posed. This is a figure practicing herbal knowledge.

Right hand on spade handle

And because of that, she alters the space around her. Standing there to regard the statue the garden becomes a workplace—a field of quiet labor. Each plant is no longer merely labeled but noticed. The dried hydrangea beside her, the winter stems, the low green groundcover—everything begins to feel like it belongs to her attention.

Left hand grasping plants, pockets full

We began to notice the small offerings at her feet—stones, a tiny object left by a passerby—that suggest that others have felt this shift. Not worship, exactly, but recognition. A kind of informal acknowledgment that this figure gathers more than herbs; she gathers meaning from the overlooked.

There is something deliberate in her scale. She is not monumental. She does not dominate the garden. Instead, she invites you downward—to stoop, to look, to consider what is beneath your habitual line of sight.

This is consistent the sculptor, Elfriede Abbe’s, larger artistic life. She was not drawn to grand gestures but to process: carving wood, printing pages, observing the minute structures of plants. In “Yarb Woman”, that ethic becomes embodied. The sculpture is less about a person than about a way of being in the world.

To gather. To attend.To work with care.

Standing there, you may feel the subtle inversion: the garden becomes something you enter into, as she has. The distance between observer and participant narrows.

And time shifts slightly. The date on the plaque—1980—anchors the piece historically, but the figure herself resists that anchoring. Herbal practice stretches backward through centuries of unnamed practitioners, most of them women, most of them unrecorded. She could belong to any of them. Or to all.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

Even the word “yarb” participates in this temporal layering—an old word surviving in a modern garden, just as old knowledge survives in new forms.

Yarb Woman, Elfriede Abbe, sculptor, The Auraca AHerbarists, May 6, 1980. Robison New York State Herb Garden, Cornell Botanical Gardens, Cornell University, Ithaca, Tompkins County, New York State.

What we encountered, then, was not simply a sculpture. It was a quiet proposition:

That knowledge can be gathered slowly.
That attention is a form of reverence.
And that in the midst of a university—of speed, abstraction, and analysis—there remains a place where understanding begins with kneeling close to the ground.

And noticing what grows there.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

A Strange Orchard at Cornell: Discovering Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree Sculpture

On a March afternoon at Cornell University, I encounter Rona Pondick’s surreal sculpture Untitled Tree, where scattered aluminum “fruit” reveal unsettling human teeth beneath bare branches.

MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

An encounter with Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree (1997)

One March afternoon on the lawn near the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, you might notice a small, leafless tree rising from a circle of red gravel. At first it seems merely dormant, another tree waiting for the long Ithaca winter to loosen its grip. But as you approach, the scene grows quietly unsettling. Around the trunk lie dozens of smooth gray forms—small, rounded objects like stones or fruit that have fallen from the branches.

Then you see the teeth.

The objects scattered beneath the tree are cast aluminum forms bearing unmistakably human molars. They appear to have dropped from the tree like strange metallic apples, a harvest that belongs less to botany than to anatomy. This disquieting grove is Untitled Tree (1997) by the American sculptor Rona Pondick.

The Artist of Hybrids

Pondick, born in Brooklyn in 1952 and trained at Queens College and the Yale School of Art, has spent decades exploring the language of the body in sculpture—often literally. Her work frequently uses casts of body parts, particularly teeth or her own head, creating forms that merge human anatomy with animals, plants, or everyday objects.

The result is a sculptural vocabulary that feels simultaneously ancient and uncanny. Critics often describe her work as “hybrid”—a blending of the human body with other forms, echoing mythic creatures such as sphinxes or centaurs while remaining distinctly contemporary.

Teeth have been a recurring motif in Pondick’s art since the 1980s, when she began casting them and embedding them in unexpected contexts. These fragments of the body carry a peculiar emotional charge: they evoke childhood, appetite, vulnerability, and mortality all at once.

A Sculpture That Feels Like a Dream

Created in 1997, Untitled Tree belongs to a group of works where Pondick began experimenting with trees as sculptural forms. She has explained that she sometimes uses actual branches or trunks as starting points for casting in metal, translating natural textures into aluminum or steel.

The Cornell sculpture is monumental yet restrained:

  • a cast-aluminum tree,
  • surrounded by dozens of small aluminum objects,
  • each about the size of a stone but bearing human teeth.

Seen from a distance, the scene reads like a quiet landscape intervention. Up close, however, it feels like a fragment from a surreal dream—a tree that has shed something disturbingly human.

The Poetry of the Fallen Teeth

Standing before it on that March afternoon, one might think of the sculpture as a botanical riddle.

Trees drop fruit.
They drop leaves.
In autumn they drop seeds.

But this tree has dropped teeth.

The idea is both playful and faintly macabre. The small aluminum forms resemble seeds, yet their teeth suggest the human mouth—the place of speech, hunger, laughter, and loss. The sculpture seems to whisper that the natural world and the human body are not separate realms but entwined systems of growth and decay.

In the red gravel circle beneath the tree, the objects appear almost archaeological, as though a curious species once grew here and shed fragments of itself into the soil.

Cornell’s Quiet Surrealist Grove

Placed on the lawn near the Johnson Museum’s striking I. M. Pei building, the sculpture forms a gentle conversation between art, architecture, and landscape. In winter the bare branches echo the skeletal trees around it. In summer the aluminum trunk gleams among living foliage.

And the scattered teeth remain—silent, patient, and oddly humorous.

They remind us that nature, like art, can be unsettling and beautiful at the same time.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Memories of Valentine’s Day: Family Beginnings and a Lifetime of Shared Journeys

A Valentine’s Day reflection spanning childhood, family, and partnership—where a homemade cake, a living room, and an ocean voyage reveal love’s enduring thread.

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

Our culture insists that Valentine’s Day is about hearts and chocolates, about gestures that can be wrapped, written, or eaten. My memories tell a longer and more intricate story. Valentine’s Day is thread that runs through decades—binding childhood, family, and shared journeys into a single, evolving narrative.

An early Valentine’s Day memory of mine is anchored in a living room at 107 Deepdale Parkway in Albertson, New York. It is 1959. The room is familiar and ordinary, yet in memory it glows with a particular warmth. My sister Theresa is two, Christine is four, and I am five. We are gathered together, small figures in a modest suburban home, unaware that this fleeting domestic moment will outlast nearly everything else in the room. What I remember most is not an event, but a feeling: the sense of being held within something stable and loving, a family rhythm that proved enduring.

Theresa (2), Michael (5), Christine (4) in the livingroom of 107 Deepdale Parkway, Albertson, New York on Valentines Day 1959

As the years passed, Valentine’s Day shifted its shape, as it does for everyone. Childhood gave way to adolescence, and later to adulthood, when the holiday began to carry expectations and interpretations shaped by romance and partnership. Yet even then, my earliest associations lingered beneath the surface. Valentine’s Day was was beyond an exchange between two people; it was about continuity, about the quiet reassurance that one was part of a larger story.

A part of our celebration this Valentine’s Day cake—chocolate, homemade, and unapologetically generous.  Baked by my wife, Pamela, whose acts of care often expressed themselves through the kitchen. The cake was not elaborate by modern standards, but it does not need to be. Its value lay in what it represented: time taken, effort given, and love made tangible. Long after the plates are washed, the memory of that cake remains inseparable from the idea of Valentine’s Day itself. Love, I learned early, could be simple, nourishing, and shared.

Chocolate Valentines Day cake by Pamela Wills

That understanding deepened over time, especially through my life with Pam. One Valentine’s Day memory stands apart not for its extravagance, but for its improbability. Pam and I found ourselves aboard the Oceania ship “Regatta”, sailing the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile. The vastness of the water, the steady rhythm of the ship, and the sense of being suspended between sky and sea created a striking contrast to the small living room of my childhood. Yet the emotional register was remarkably similar. Once again, Valentine’s Day was marked not by spectacle, but by presence.

The following day we reached Puerto Montt, a port city framed by water and volcanoes. The journey itself became a metaphor for the way love matures. Where childhood love had been rooted in home and routine, this later expression unfolded through shared experience and mutual trust. Standing on the deck together, watching the coastline emerge, I was struck by how Valentine’s Day had come to encompasses where we had been and where we were going.

Pam and I aboard the Oceania Regatta sailing the Pacific Ocean off Chile. The following day we reached Puerto Montt.

In that sense, Valentine’s Day functions much like memory itself. It selects certain moments and holds them fast, allowing others to fade. A cake, three young children in a living room, two partners standing together on the open sea. These are not scenes one could have predicted would endure, yet they do, because they are threaded with care, attention, and shared time.

Now, looking back across the span of years, I understand Valentine’s Day as a recurring prompt that asks us to remember where love first took root, how it was tended, and how it has carried us forward. The details change, but the essence remains remarkably constant.

In the end, Valentine’s Day does not demand grand gestures or perfect words. It asks only that we recognize the quiet continuity of love as it moves through our lives—sometimes in a childhood living room, sometimes on the open ocean, always leaving its mark in ways we only fully understand in retrospect.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Atkinson Hall and the Quiet Confidence of Good Design

A new Cornell building settles into its hillside, glass and weathered metal catching sky and trees—less a declaration than an invitation to pause, wander, and think together.

MichaelStephenWills10 Comments

Learning the Shape of a New Building

I first noticed the building from above.

Not in person—on my screen, late at night, when I should have been revising a draft and instead opened Google Earth the way some people open a window. There it was, just off Tower Road, close to Stocking Hall, pale and newly settled into the slope. From that height it looked careful rather than confident, as if it had arrived recently and was still deciding how much of itself to show.

Atkinson Hall, Google Earth from August 2023, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

I remember thinking: good placement on a former triangular parking lot. Enough distance from the older buildings to breathe, close enough to feel included. The hill does most of the work. You can see that even from an overhead height.

The next morning I walked there.

Atkinson Hall as viewed from the open field south of the Nevin Welcome Center of Cornell Botanic Gardens

Across the open field the building didn’t announce itself. Trees intervened—pines, bare hardwoods—so that it came into view in pieces: a curve of metal, a long line of glass, brick holding the ground. It felt less like approaching a destination than like gradually realizing you were already there. I liked that. Buildings that reveal themselves all at once tend to exhaust me.

The slope matters. You feel it in your legs as you walk, and the building seems to acknowledge it, stretching rather than standing tall. It does not pretend the land is flat. It follows the descent toward the creek, toward the older geological story underneath all of us.

Up close, the materials settle my attention.

North Side of Atkinson Hall, 350 Tower Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

Brick at the base—solid, Cornell-familiar, not trying to reinvent anything. Above it, bands of weathered metal curve gently, already carrying the muted browns of fallen leaves, old stone, and stream-worn shale—colors long familiar to the slopes and ravines that shape this campus. They look as though they have agreed to age, which feels like an underrated design choice. The glass holds the sky without insisting on transparency. Some days it reflects trees so clearly that the building nearly disappears into them.

Compare the facade brickwork of Warren Hall, one of the earliest buildings on the Cornell University campus, completed 1868. This is the southwest corner with facade signage, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

I stop near the windows longer than I intend to. The view steadies me. The hillside, the trees, the quiet persistence of winter light. My notebook stays closed for a few minutes. No one seems to mind.

View near Atkinson, Nevin Welcome Center, Cornell Botanical Gardens, 124 Comstock Knoll Dr, Ithaca, NY 14850

Inside, the building does not behave like a department.

That is the first thing I notice once I begin using it regularly. No single discipline claims the space. Offices and meeting rooms feel provisional, lightly held. Conversations drift. Someone from engineering crosses paths with someone from policy. A food systems researcher borrows a chair from a planner. No one looks lost.

It helps to remember who gathers here. The building hosts people from many parts of the university, each arriving with partial expertise, incomplete questions.

Cornell College / UnitAreas of Engagement
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS)Food systems, agroecology, climate resilience
College of EngineeringEnergy systems, materials, infrastructure
College of Arts and SciencesEarth systems, ecology, human dimensions
SC Johnson College of BusinessSustainable enterprise, supply chains
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP)Urban resilience, adaptive design
Cornell Law SchoolEnvironmental law and governance
Public & Global AffairsClimate policy, diplomacy

I keep this list taped inside my notebook. It reminds me that no one here is meant to arrive fully formed. The building expects us to be unfinished.

Cobblestones with fallen oak leaves along Feeny Way, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

There is a quiet confidence in how the place is run. Systems hum discreetly. Heat holds steady even when the weather rips. Somewhere nearby, unseen, a generator waits, a reassurance. Work continues. Conversations do not end mid-sentence. I think about this more than I expected to. Stability has become a form of generosity.

On certain afternoons I walk the exterior again before heading home.

The curves soften what could have been institutional. Corners ease into one another. Nothing feels sharp. The building does not posture or instruct. It listens. It seems content to let weather, foot traffic, and time finish the job.

I have overheard visitors describe it as “restrained.” I think that is right. It does not wear sustainability as an emblem. It does not ask to be admired. It offers something quieter: space to think without being hurried, to talk without being territorial.

From some angles it nearly disappears into the hillside. From others it asserts itself just enough to be useful. That balance feels intentional, and also rare.

When I sit near the glass and look out, I sometimes imagine the building learning us in return—our habits, our pauses, the way we linger in doorways when a conversation matters. It seems designed for that kind of noticing.

If I were forced to describe it the way a realtor might, I would say it is well built in all the ways that matter. The structure is sound. The site is excellent. The materials will age well. But what I would mean is something less technical.

It is a building willing to wait.

Seen from above, it is still new.
Seen from the field, it is already settled.
Seen from inside, it feels patient.

That patience makes room—for uncertainty, for collaboration, for the long work that does not resolve quickly. I think that is why I keep returning, even on days when I do not strictly need to be there.

The building does not ask what I am producing.
It asks only that I stay awhile.

And for now, that is enough.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Winter Walking at Taughannock Falls: Finding Connection and Quiet Along the Gorge Rim Trails

Winter distills Taughannock Gorge to stone, water, and silence, where careful footsteps along icy rim trails reveal deep connections between landscape, memory, and quiet joy.

MichaelStephenWills35 Comments

Winter pares the world down to its essential lines, and nowhere is that more apparent than on the rim trails of Taughannock Falls State Park. On a Wednesday afternoon walk, a three-mile pilgrimage, the gorge revealed itself as a living corridor of connections—between water and stone, past and present, effort and joy. The season sharpened every sensation: the crunch and slip of ice underfoot, the hush of leafless woods, the long exhale of the falls echoing unseen below.

From the overlook, the gorge opens like a vast stone book, its pages written in shale and time. Taughannock Falls drops away in the distance, not so much seen as felt—its presence announced by scale and gravity. Even before stepping onto the trail, the walk establishes its rhythm: pause, look, breathe. Winter insists on this slower tempo. Ice dictates caution, and caution invites attention.

Heading along the Rim Trail my progress became deliberate. The path, glazed in places with solid ice, turned each step into a negotiation. Yet this was no impediment to pleasure. Slowness allowed for noticing the quiet labor of the park maintenance crew, whose careful clearing and repairs spoke of spring already anticipated. Their work stitched the present moment to the coming season, a reminder that parks, like stories, are maintained through this unseen devotion.

The gorge itself is a system of thresholds. A bridge crossing the creek marks the transition from North to South Rim, but it also frames one of the most dramatic views in the park. Standing above the chasm, one senses connection: water flowing beneath, trails diverging and rejoining, human passage layered lightly atop geological endurance. The gorge is a conversation between forces, ongoing and unresolved.

Gorge Road, early November
Gorge Road, early November
From the South Rim Trail. Taughannock Falls, New York State Park, Ulysees, Tompkins County, Finger Lakes Region.
Click any photograph for a larger image

Ice eventually nudged my walk onto Gorge Road, which parallels the South Rim Trail like a quieter narrative strand. Here, the landscape shifts from wild drama to human memory. A curve in the road reveals a farmhouse, modest and fragile beside its outsized barn. In winter, the absence of leaves makes the scene stark and honest. The farmstead buildings do not ask for nostalgia; they simply stand, bearing witness to lives tethered to this steep land. The structures emerge gradually as I walk downhill, as if the land itself were choosing when to reveal them.

Overview of this small cemetery overlooking Cayuga Lake

A short detour leads to a small cemetery perched on a shelf above Cayuga Lake, near the Taughannock Farms Inn. In winter, cemeteries feel less like places of mourning and more like rooms of quiet conversation. Headstones rise from frozen ground, their inscriptions softened by time and distance. From this vantage point, lake and sky merge in pale bands, and the lives commemorated here feel gently folded into the larger story of the landscape. The dead, too, are part of the park’s web of connections.

Another detour brings the lower falls into view—a more intimate expression of the same water that plunges dramatically upstream. Here the sound is closer, the movement more conversational. It is easy to imagine this water traveling, moment by moment, linking ravine to lake, winter to spring, memory to presence.

One of many Rim Trail overlooks. That is the Gorge Trail, below.

Rejoining the rim trail for the final climb north, the gorge offers repeated overlooks where the Gorge Trail can be seen threading below. These moments collapse distance: walker and walker, above and below, bound by the same route at different elevations. Over the course of roughly three miles and almost 600 feet of cumulative elevation change, effort becomes its own reward. Two hours pass not as measured time but as a sustained attentiveness, a gift winter offers to those willing to meet it on its terms.

Walking these trails in winter is about entering a conversation with the land—listening to ice, stone, water, and history speak in a quieter register. The joy lies in connection: trail to trail, gorge to road, past to present, and walker to place. In winter, Taughannock invites, gently and honestly, those who are willing to walk slowly enough to see.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Bells for Christmas

The symbolic power of the numeral three, reflected in various cultural, religious, and secular contexts, underscores its universal significance. From the mystical trinities of gods to the practical applications in rhetoric and storytelling, and the fundamental structure of our physical world, the number three resonates with a sense of completeness, balance, and harmony. Its pervasive presence in different aspects of human thought and culture attests to its enduring and profound symbolism.

MichaelStephenWills40 Comments

Continue reading “Bells for Christmas” →

Fens, Bogs, and Flowing Water of Malloryville Preserve of Freeville, New York

Discover Malloryville Preserve in Freeville, New York—a hidden Finger Lakes wetland of fens, bogs, and flowing water where glacial history and rare plants meet.

MichaelStephenWills6 Comments

Water defines the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville long before we see or hear it. At first, it is only a dampness in the air, a coolness at ankle level, a dark sheen between sedge tussocks. In the space of a half-hour walk, we pass through fen, bog, marsh, and swamp, each distinct, yet bound together by the same slow, persistent flow.

Here we are traversing a swamp, our steps buoyed along on planking made from recycled plastic. The boardwalk floats visually above pools the color of tea, edged with moss and skunk cabbage. It’s easy to imagine what this crossing would have been like before the planks were laid—boots sinking, knees splashed, delicate plants crushed. The modern walkway is a quiet compromise: we may enter this saturated world without trampling it, a human gesture that matches the preserve’s ethos of protection and restraint.

The Malloryville wetlands lie in a low pocket along Fall Creek, a landscape shaped by the last ice age. As the glacier that once covered this region melted, torrents of water tunneled through the ice, depositing braided ridges of sand and gravel known as eskers. Today, more than a mile of these ancient riverbeds winds through the preserve, narrow wooded spines rising above the surrounding wetlands. From an esker crest, the pattern of water reveals itself: dark channels of open flow, pale pools rimmed with sedge, patches of sphagnum floating like cushions, and, farther off, the straight silver of Fall Creek.

But the story of Malloryville’s water begins far from these pools. Rain falls on the uplands as cool, slightly acidic water. It sinks through glacial till—a jumble left by the ice—and begins a long, blind journey underground. As it moves, the water reacts with the minerals it encounters. Where it brushes limestone or other carbonate-rich layers, it is slowly neutralized and picks up dissolved calcium and magnesium. By the time it resurfaces in low spots, it may be transformed from sour, soft rain to mineral-rich groundwater.

Those subtle chemical shifts are written onto the land. In some hollows, where water still mainly reflects its origin as rain, the environment becomes a bog—cold, acidic, nutrient-poor. Here, sphagnum moss knits a floating carpet, and only specialists such as leatherleaf and cranberries can endure. In other pockets, where groundwater welling up from below brings minerals, we find fens: lush, lime-touched wetlands offering niches for orchids, sedges, and the carnivorous pitcher plant. Marshes and swamps round out the spectrum, their standing water and wooded shade forming still more microhabitats.

In this small preserve, all these wetland types coexist side by side, threaded by water that often moves so slowly it appears not to move at all. The stillness is deceptive. A slight difference in elevation—barely the height of your boot—can determine whether water spreads and stagnates, seeps outward in a fan, or concentrates into a narrow, unseen channel. Hydrologists studying the area have shown that a water-table mound of only a few inches can redirect the underground flow and, over time, steer the evolution from open fen to peat-filled bog.

Human history here is entwined with that quiet power. The founders of the preserve, themselves from a dairy farming family, came to understand that the springs, seeps, and wetlands feeding Fall Creek were vulnerable. Gravel pits on nearby land had already bitten into the valley; another such excavation on this side would have severed the veins of water that sustain the fen and bog. Their years-long effort to protect the property culminated in a Nature Conservancy preserve whose very purpose is to safeguard water and the uncommon communities it supports.

The boardwalk under our feet is part of that story. Its recycled-plastic planks do not rot in constant dampness, and their smooth, slightly hollow sound reminds us with each step that we are guests in a place where soil never truly dries. At the edges of the walkway, tamarack and red maple lift their trunks from hummocks, their roots anchored in peat built grain by grain from centuries of water-logged plant remains. In the open patches, we can seek out pitcher plants, their flaring, water-filled leaves digesting unwary insects to make up for the nutrient-poor conditions.

Everywhere, water moves almost invisibly. It rises as a cold trickle at the base of the esker, fans through the moss as a thin sheet, and gathers again in dark, tannin-stained channels. It rarely speaks aloud; only in spring flood or after hard rain does it murmur against roots or tap lightly at the plastic planks. Yet its influence is written in every texture and color—emerald moss, rusty sedge, the silvery bark of birch leaning over a pool.

To walk in Malloryville is to learn to read this subtle handwriting. We begin by noticing the obvious: the wetness, the boardwalk, the glimpses of standing water. By the end of the walk, we are tracing gradients—how the plants shift with elevation, how the ground feels underfoot, how the air cools or warms by a degree or two. We sense the long journey of water from sky to stone to peatland to creek, and onward to Cayuga Lake and the wider world beyond.

Water, flowing quietly, almost soundlessly, with powerful effect: Malloryville Preserve, that power is persistence. It is the power to carve a valley, to build a peatland one stem at a time, to sustain rare communities of plants and animals in a modest corner of New York. To honor such water is to move carefully, speak softly, and remember that our presence, like our boardwalk, should allow the flow beneath to continue its ancient work.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Exploring Malloryville Preserve: A Hidden Glacial Wetland Gem in New York’s Finger Lakes

Explore the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, a hidden Finger Lakes wetland where glacial eskers, kettles, and springs reveal the deep story of ice and water.

MichaelStephenWills20 Comments

In the heart of upstate New York, the Finger Lakes region stretches out like a handprint left by the last great ice sheets—long, narrow lakes aligned north to south, their steep-sided valleys feeding into a lattice of creeks, waterfalls, and wetlands. It is a landscape defined by water and time: glaciers grinding south, then melting back north some 12,000 years ago, carving deep troughs, piling up ridges of gravel and sand, and leaving behind a terrain that is anything but simple.

The O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville, near the small village of Freeville, is one of the quiet places where that story is written most clearly on the land. It doesn’t shout like Taughannock Falls or Ithaca’s famous gorges. Instead, it whispers—through the curves of its hills, the softness of its ground, the unexpected appearance of a spring at the base of a gravel ridge. Here, in a relatively compact area, you can see how ice and water worked together to shape the Finger Lakes region we know today.

Overflow from a Kettle Pond threads through a meadow before feeding Fall Creek. The O.D.von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville.

By the time the preserve officially opened in 1997, the name O.D. von Engeln was already familiar to anyone curious about local geology. His classic book on the Finger Lakes helped generations of readers understand that the scenery around them was not random, but the result of powerful, understandable processes. Reading von Engeln, the rolling hills and quiet valleys near Freeville become more than background—they become evidence: of buried ice, rushing meltwater, and the slow settling of sediments into the forms we walk on now.

Malloryville is an outdoor classroom for that lesson. The preserve is built around a cluster of glacial landforms—eskers, kames, and kettles—that create a three-dimensional mosaic of ridges and hollows. Eskers, those long, winding gravel ridges left by rivers that once flowed inside the glacier, snake through the forest like frozen currents of stone. Kames—steep, irregular hills of sand and gravel—rise suddenly from the surrounding lowlands. Kettles, the depressions left behind when buried ice blocks melted away, now cradle wetlands and pools.

Beneath and between these features, groundwater is constantly on the move. It seeps through layers of sand and gravel, emerges as cold springs at the foot of slopes, and spreads out into swamps, fens, and marshes. In the Finger Lakes, water is always telling a story; at Malloryville, it’s simply easier to hear. Follow the trail and you move through a succession of wet worlds: a seep-fed fen with delicate mosses and sedges, a shrub swamp where skunk cabbage thrusts up in early spring, a cattail marsh that hums with birds and insects in summer.

For my family, the story of Malloryville began even before the preserve had a name. We lived nearby along Fall Creek, itself a thread in the larger fabric of the Cayuga Lake watershed. My son and I camped for the first time on top of an esker just beyond our front door, our tent perched on what I would later learn was the remnant of a stream that once tunneled through the base of a glacier. At the time, it was simply a magical narrow ridge in the woods. Only later, with von Engeln’s guidance and the preserve’s interpretive signs, did that ridge become a sentence in a much older, longer narrative.

That is one of the great gifts of the Finger Lakes: the chance to move from simple admiration—“this is beautiful”—to understanding—“this is how it came to be.” The steep slopes along Cayuga, Seneca, or Skaneateles; the drumlin fields near the north ends of the lakes; the hanging valleys and waterfalls; and the quiet wetlands of places like Malloryville are all chapters in the same glacial chronicle. Once you learn to read one place, you begin to read them all.

Walking into the O.D. von Engeln Preserve, you enter that story at a small, intimate scale. The parking area and trailhead give way quickly to a world where the ground feels different—sometimes firm and gravelly, sometimes soft and yielding underfoot. Wooden walkways and narrow paths thread through shady forest and open wetland. Each bend offers a subtle shift: a new plant community, a change in water clarity or flow, a small sign explaining what lies beneath your feet.

Fall Creek meanders through the esker fields of the Malloryville Preserve. Here is the view from an abandoned railroad bridge. The preserve is near Freeville in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

This is not grand scenery in the postcard sense; it is something quieter and deeper. Malloryville invites you to slow down and notice. To ask why a particular ridge is so narrow, why water emerges here but not there, why one hollow is filled with shrubs and another with moss and sedge. In learning those answers, you gain not only an appreciation for this modest preserve but also a richer understanding of the entire Finger Lakes region.

The Trout Lily (Erythronium americanum) is named for the mottled brown leaves resembling marking on trout.

In the end, the O.D. von Engeln Preserve at Malloryville is a lens—a way of seeing. Through it, the familiar landscapes of central New York—valleys, hills, streams, and lakes—come into sharper focus as the lasting work of ice and water. Stand on an esker, look across a kettle wetland, listen to the quiet trickle of a spring, and you are standing inside the very processes that shaped the Finger Lakes.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

Climbing Piestewa Peak: Multicultural Pilgrimage to a Phoenix Desert Dawn

In the cool predawn, strangers from every background climb a stone stairway above Phoenix, trading city lights for desert silence as sunrise spills gold across Piestewa Peak.

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

Arriving at 5 am there is a line of trucks and cars and Piestewa Peak parking almost full when I grab a spot in the predawn darkness. The desert air has that deep, merciful coolness it offers before sunrise, edged with the long-remembered scent of creosote. Car doors close with soft thuds, headlamps blink on, and a loose procession of strangers begins to funnel toward the trailhead like pilgrims, even now white and red headlamps sprinkle the upper slopes.

At first the climb exists only in a narrow cone of light, my lamp illuminates the scant gravel, uneven steps, and each scuff of boot or shoe sounds loud in the hush. Somewhere below, the city hums, but here the conversation is mostly breath and the occasional murmur of greeting as we fall into the rhythm of the climb.

My beam catches a young couple just ahead, their hands knotted together. They speak Spanish, laughing quietly as they miss a step and bump shoulders. Behind me an older man in a Veterans cap leans heavily on trekking poles, his companion—maybe daughter, maybe friend—matching her shorter stride to his with patient care. A group of women in bright leggings and braided hair moves past us in a burst of energy, their languages overlapping—English, maybe Vietnamese, something I cannot place—like the weaving of a rug. A man passes me, a drum on his back. Piestewa draws them all, before dawn, to this rib of stone in the center of the Phoenix basin.

As I stop to rest myself and turn off my headlamp, ahead the trail tilts steeper the steps fade to rock, irregular and unforgiving: a stairway carved from ancient volcanic bones. With my dark adaptation, surfaces reflect star and city light, leading the eye down the ridge toward the dark quilt of neighborhoods below. Later, captured in the photograph, those steps will twist away like a stone dragon’s spine, the city waking beyond in soft pastels. Now they are simply work for legs and lungs.

The desert plants materialize around us as shapes before they acquire color. Saguaros stand like sentinels along the slopes; their arms lifted in silhouette. Ocotillo rise as witchy bundles of sticks, each spine leafed out from October rains the leaves catching a little light. On a small plateau a family has paused; the father adjusts a tiny headlamp on his son, no more than six, who is insisting, with fierce determination, that he can carry his own water. “Almost there, campeón,” his father says, and the child straightens like a soldier.

The dark begins to soften at the edges. Over the eastern horizon a thin band of orange appears, a delicate seam between night and day. In one direction, the city stretches out in a glittering net of streetlights, the squares of parking lots and subdivisions catching the last of the darkness. In the other, the mountains are still black cutouts, their profiles sharp as paper against a gradually brightening sky. One of my images will hold that moment: the jagged ridge of Piestewa in shadow, the valley below already spangled with light, a single towering saguaro rooted at the cliff’s edge like a punctuation mark.

November 2025 while visiting Pam’s family in Phoenix

Higher up, the trail narrows and the rock turns rougher. We fall into single file, strangers linked by a line of effort. A runner comes flying down, feet barely touching stone, breath steady and controlled. “On your left,” he calls, and we part for him like water. A woman with a hijab tucked neatly under her ball cap leans against the retaining wall, stretching a calf muscle, her friend counting in accented English: “Ten more seconds, you can do it.” Near one bend a hiker pauses to press a hand against the rock face, whispering a quiet prayer in a language I do not recognize. It is a small, intimate moment, gone almost before I register it.

The last push to the saddle is steep, the steps uneven, the sky now a cascade of colors—copper, rose, faint lavender melting into a high dome of blue. The silhouettes of distant ranges sharpen: the Estrellas?, the Superstitions?, low ridges whose names I do not know. On the horizon, the first thin line of sun breaks free, setting fire to the edges of clouds. In another photograph, framed by dark rock and desert trees, that sunrise becomes a golden portal at the end of a shadowed corridor of stone.

We reach a broad ledge just shy of the summit as the light finally spills over us. People are already gathered there: a trio of college students taking selfies, a pair of retirees sharing thermos coffee, a solitary man sitting cross-legged with eyes closed, face open to the warmth. The city below is suddenly transformed. The carpet of lights dims, replaced by the clear geometry of streets and rooftops, golf courses and parking lots, all laid out like a model at our feet. The mountains that hem the basin—once anonymous shapes—now reveal their ridges and ravines in sharp relief.

For a few minutes conversation dies away. Everyone seems to feel the same thing: that fragile instant when the sun clears the horizon and the desert shifts from silver-blue to gold. The rocks around us, sharp and broken in the photographs, glow honey-colored. Saguaros catch light on their spines, each thorn a tiny ember. Even the dusty air seems to shimmer.

Down below, a new wave of hikers starts up the trail, latecomers walking into full daylight. We, the predawn climbers, share a small, quiet complicity. We have seen the city from the backside of night, watched the day arrive from a perch of jagged stone. Piestewa Peak has turned us, for an hour or two, into a single, breathing organism: many hearts, one climb, all of us stitched together by the steep path and the slow unveiling of the sun.

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.

The Dún Aonghasa cheval de fries field

…this defensive structure evokes the enormous scale of the struggles around this place of defense. 

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

A span of 10,000 years spreads between now and the first possibility of settlement on the island of Eire, then swept clean to bare rock by the weight of ice.  Current scholarship of the Dún Aonghasa ruins, Inishmore, County Galway, the Irish Republic place a settlement within the inner of the four dry stone rings after 6,500 years (1,500 BC or 3,500 years ago).  By way of scale, the first settlement took about 30 times the duration of the U.S. Constitution ratification through 2025: the last state, Rhode Island, ratified the Constitution 1789.

By 700 BC, 2,700 years ago, a series of upright, closely placed stones, were erected between the second and third rings called a cheval de fries field (“Frisian horses” in English) today, this defensive structure evokes the enormous scale of the struggles around this place of defense.  

This is a portion of that field, I believe, taken as Pam and I approach the inner ring entrance, walking a wide path cleared of barriers.  Click the photograph for a larger image with caption.

Click the link for my Getty IStock photography of the Aran Islands
Click me for the first post of this series, “Horse Trap on Inishmore.”

References: search wikipedia for “Dún Aonghasa” and Google “cheval de fries definition” and “Dún Aonghasa.”

Enter your email to receive notification of future postings. I will not sell or share your email address.