Tag: New York State

Where Fall Creek Turns: An Esker’s Quiet Authority in Malloryville Preserve, New York

An ancient esker redirects Fall Creek at Malloryville Preserve, revealing how Ice Age meltwater shaped the land and still quietly governs water and wandering feet.

MichaelStephenWills16 Comments

The esker rises like a glacier’s spine, a long-backed remnant left behind where an ice mountain learned how to leave quietly. It is not loud geology—no cliffs shouting their age, no cataracts announcing force—but a patient, sinuous fact. A frozen river’s footprint, pressed into the land and then abandoned, it lies there still, grading itself gently on both sides, as if unwilling to offend gravity or time.

At first glance, it could pass for a human thing: a railroad berm, a raised roadbed, an engineer’s solution. Yet this ice-scribe ridge was shaped without blueprints, drafted by meltwater racing beneath a retreating glacier, carrying gravel like a hoard of stories. The stones settled where the ice allowed them, stacked by pressure and patience, forming a ridge long enough—nine-tenths of a mile—to tell a stream where it must turn.

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.

Fall Creek arrives with purpose, confident in its descent, until it meets the esker and must reconsider. Here the water performs bows, an abrupt acknowledgment of authority. The creek becomes a liquid negotiator, redirected by the ridge’s quiet insistence. This is the esker’s work: not domination, but persuasion. Land teaching water a new sentence.

This video provides a better feeling for the esker. To do this from WordPress Reader, you need to first click the title of this post to open a new page.

Standing at the foot of the esker, the slope to the right reveals itself slowly. It does not announce, I am important. Instead, it waits to be noticed. A swamp settles nearby, the water-mirror lowland, collecting what seeps and lingers. Together, ridge and wetland form a conversation: height and hollow, drain and gather, spine and lung.

Before there was signage, before placards translated glacial grammar into public language, the land already knew itself. Knowledge preceded explanation. My son and I pitched a tent atop a kame at our front door — another ice-left hill, a deposit of ancient momentum. That night, the ground beneath us was older than memory and younger than myth. Camping there was not recreation so much as apprenticeship.

A kame is a meltwater’s knuckle, rounded and abrupt, shaped by collapse rather than flow. To sleep upon it is to rest on uncertainty made solid. The tent fabric whispered in the breeze, a thin membrane between human breath and glacial aftermath. Fireflies stitched brief constellations above the grass, while the earth held fast, remembering ice that no longer needed remembering.

Walking along Fall Creek later, watching it turn west where the kame insists upon geometry, one begins to sense the land’s authorship. This is not random scenery. It is edited terrain. Each ridge, each bend, each saturated hollow is a sentence left behind by ice that once covered everything and then, mercifully, withdrew.

The esker itself is a time-ladder, inviting slow ascent. Step by step, gravel shifts underfoot—rounded stones, carried far from their origins, now loyal to this place. Each stone is a traveler without a passport, naturalized by pressure and pause. Together they hold their line, resisting erosion not by hardness alone, but by collective agreement.

From above, the ridge reveals its length, its deliberate curve. It does not hurry. It does not apologize. It simply is, a memory ridge, reminding the present that absence can be as powerful as presence. The glacier is gone, yet its handwriting remains legible.

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

In the nearby swamp, water pools in dark reflection. Frogs tune their throats. Sedges write vertical poetry. This is the after-ice sanctuary, where meltwater’s descendants linger and life reclaims the margins. The esker drains; the swamp receives. Between them flows a balance older than names.

To walk here is to practice a different kind of attention. The land does not reward speed. It rewards listening. The ridge asks you to follow its curve, to feel how it shapes movement, how it choreographs water, wildlife, and wandering humans alike. It is a path-without-intention, yet it guides all who encounter it.

Long after the tent is folded, after the creek continues its bent course, after the placards fade and are replaced, the esker will remain. It will continue directing water, lifting footsteps, and teaching geometry to anyone willing to notice.

Eskers and kames are the glacier’s farewell letter, written in gravel, signed by time, and left open for reading.

Click Me for the first post of this series.

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.

Glacial Kettle Bog Wonders: Photographing Pitcher Plants at the O.D. Engeln Preserve in Freeville

Step onto Freeville’s O.D. Engeln Preserve boardwalk and meet purple pitcher plants in a glacial kettle bog—carnivorous beauty, hidden blooms, and macro-photo magic.

MichaelStephenWills3 Comments

Seen from 1000 feet above in Google Earth, the O.D. (Von) Engeln Preserve at Malloryville Road lays itself out in two glacial “kettles,” pond and bog; a simple diagram drawn by ice and time, then complicated by everything that has happened since. In my photograph, taken from the bog observation platform on a July morning, the sky is rinsed blue, clouds billow, conifers stitch along the rim around open space. Step closer, or lower your lens, and the openness resolves into a crowded, intimate architecture of sedges and moss, twigs and standing water, sunlight and shadow.

I came here for a plant that does not announce itself the way wildflowers often do. The purple pitcher plant, Sarracenia purpurea, is a quiet scandal: a green vessel in a place where green should be satisfied simply to survive. I arrived equipped for attentiveness—an iPhone for the broad scene, and a Canon DSLR with the F2.8 100 mm macro lens for the stars of this bog. The macro lens is an instrument of humility. It forces you to admit that the important drama is often no bigger than your palm.

In earlier years, the pitchers could be found right where a visitor naturally looks—within the central cut-out of the observation deck, close enough to lean over and study. But the bog is not a museum display; it is a living negotiation. This season, highbush blueberries pressing in from the margin had crowded the pitchers out, pushing the flowering plants into the grasses eight to ten feet away. The shift is small in human terms, the kind of distance you cross without thinking. In bog terms, it is displacement—an erasure of a familiar scene, a reminder that rarity is not only about numbers but also about space.

The pitchers themselves—those “turtle socks,” as they’ve been nicknamed—sit at ground level in a rosette, their mouths open to weather. Sunlight floods the cups and turns them into something both domestic and uncanny: a set of green, veined slippers left out to air, or a cluster of small amphorae awaiting an offering. In the bog’s thin soil, nourishment is hard-won. The pitcher plant answers that poverty with invention. Instead of arguing with the chemistry of peat, it borrows from the animal world—luring and taking what the air can spare. The cup is a trap, yes, but also a reservoir: rainwater gathered and held, a miniature wetland that mirrors the preserve’s larger one.

There is a tension here that never quite resolves: the plant’s beauty, and the plant’s appetite. We admire the cup’s red veining, the glossy rim, the way the opening flares like a lip; then we remember what the lip is for. We admire the flower’s elegant sheltering forms; then we realize the shelter is also a funnel, a choreography. This is not cruelty—no more than winter is cruelty. It is adaptation made visible, a lesson in how form follows need, and how need can produce something unexpectedly lovely.

And yet the real marvel—the reason I came that day—rises above the traps on a strong stalk, lifted clear of the dangerous mouths below. The flower is not purple in the obvious way its common name promises. It is subtler and stranger: a suspended structure with the poise of a lantern and the protective logic of armor. It struck me as a flower unlike any I have experienced, resembling an insect carapace, with the reproductive element underneath a hood. That hooded design feels less like ornament than strategy—an architecture that guides a pollinator’s route, controlling entrances and exits the way the pitcher controls the fall of an insect.

Even the flower’s back side refuses to perform for the camera. From the posterior angle, “there are only bracts”—plain supporting structures, the botanical equivalent of scaffolding left in place once the facade is finished. The bog, too, shows its scaffolding everywhere: dead stems, old wood, peat-dark water, last year’s leaves. A preserve is never only what is blooming. It is what persists.

I found myself thinking about the details I wanted but could not quite capture that day: the downward facing hairs inside the pitcher—those one-way bristles that make retreat difficult once a victim has slipped in. I or my lens was not up to this challange. The shortcoming was minor, but instructive. The bog offers glimpses, not guarantees. It invites return visits, different light, different seasons, a different kind of patience.

Standing on the platform I felt the preserve’s central truth: these are landscapes shaped by constraint—by ice, by water, by nutrient scarcity, by the slow encroachment of shrubs—and yet they keep producing improbable forms. The purple pitcher plant is one of those forms: a green cup that drinks rain, a flower that wears a hood, a turtle sock that turns hunger into design. In a place where the ground itself seems to refuse abundance, the plant answers with a different kind of richness—an elegance that is also a solution.

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” →

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.

Cornell Botanic Gardens’ Monkey Run: History, Geology, and Scenic Fall Creek

A contemplative walk along Monkey Run where Fall Creek writes the valley’s history—sycamores, bridges, and Devonian stone speaking across seasons in Cornell’s living classroom.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

On a morning in late March, when the hills about Ithaca still hold the night’s frost in their shaded folds, I took the path called Monkey Run and went to see how Fall Creek spends its winter earnings. The air had the bright sting of thaw, a kind of vernal austerity that keeps a man honest in his steps. Along the high bank the sun spilled its coin onto the water, where it broke and flickered like a school of silver minnows. A rim of snow clung to the shale ledges, and the leaves of last year’s oaks—curled, fox-red, and faithful—whispered as if to keep the woods awake until spring fully claimed them.

Sunlit bend of Fall Creek viewed from a high bank at Monkey Run in early spring.

Monkey Run is one of the outlying parcels tended by Cornell Botanic Gardens—once called the Plantations, and now, more fittingly, named for the living charge it keeps. These gardens do not end at beds and borders; they encompass the wilder rooms of the county, more than a thousand hectares of glens, pastures, and ravines where the university’s first and oldest teacher—nature herself—still holds class. Fall Creek is one of her principal lecturers. Rising beyond the high country of Cayuga Heights and slipping under stone and snow, it shoulders its way across the campus, idles a while in Beebe Lake, and turns turbines of memory at Triphammer Falls before shouldering on toward the lake that receives nearly everything here—Cayuga—long, deep, and glacial in its thinking.

Tall white-barked sycamores leafless against a blue March sky at Monkey Run.

If you would learn a valley’s mind, walk a meander. The creek here composes with easy cursive, laying down a bar of gravel, nibbling at a bank of clay, then sweeping back to consider its work from the opposite shore. The geologist says the rock is Devonian, pages laid flat and damp with time, and the ice of ten thousand winters ago scoured them into the open. A creek is a patient mason, working without rest and never in anger. I admired these sycamores—their clean bones shining through the leafless canopy like the ribs of an old cathedral. Winter reveals their whiteness; summer grants them shade. A stand of white pines keeps a dark counsel in the background; on the muddy edge, green tongues of skunk cabbage push up, pledges made by the swamp to keep faith with the sun.

Rust-stained steel pier above calm water on Fall Creek along Monkey Run trail

I came down to the water near an old steel pier, a bridge remnant, hanging on each end without purpose. It wears graffiti the way a boulder wears lichen; human wishes, briefly rooted, coloring what they can. The river accepts it all, the pilings and the scribbles, the cast limb and the bottle’s glint, and continues its one unarguable gesture downstream. That is the old instruction of Fall Creek: use, refuse, endure. Before the university drew students from every quarter, the creek turned wheels and powered the small ambitions of a frontier town. Even the name Triphammer speaks of iron struck to purpose. Now the water powers something quieter: the studies of herons, the almanacs of kingfishers, the quick arithmetic of minnows over limestone.

Looking back while climbing the steep bluff

Steps cut from logs ascend the bluff, each tread pegged with iron, each rise a short confession of breath. I climbed to the ridge, paused halfway, and through the gray lace of March branches saw the creek shining at a bend far below. A man cannot help but measure his own life against such a course. The path goes up and down in obedient red blazes, but the water keeps its own counsel. Where the bank slumps the river shoulders through; where the bottom rises it lays down a mirror. In my youth I wanted the straight run, the short work. Now the curve pleases me. To go with the current and not be carried away—that is a lesson suitable to the grey in my beard.

Clear, shallow run of Fall Creek with shale bottom and pine stand in distance
Bluff overlooking Fall Creek in summer

When I returned five months later, on August 23, the same path had forgotten the word austerity. The cathedral of sycamore was fully leafed, the white pillars now vanished behind a nave of shade. The pines perfumed the air without trying. A new footbridge—clean timber arching like a bent bow—spanned one of the wet flats. Its braces, black-bolted and handsome, looked as if they would hold the weight of an ox team or a file of schoolchildren. Such crossings are a kind of promise from the present to the future: we found a way through here; may you, too. Below, the floor was upholstered with moss, oak leaves, and a scatter of pinecones—the slow currency of the woods accumulating interest.

Arched wooden footbridge in summer forest on Cornell’s Monkey Run trail.

Summer makes a confidant of every plant. Ferns unrolled their scripture at the bridge abutment; jewelweed held its tiny lanterns along the seeps; a kingfisher rattled downstream, blue lightning with a bill. The creek, glassy over its shale pavement, showed every wrinkle of its stride. I waded a little, feeling with the sole what the eye could not—where the current took an extra thought around a stone, where it forgot itself in a warm eddy. Trout lingered in the dimmer reaches, quick as commas; a great blue heron lifted off with that surprising tidiness of wing, ungainly only in our imagination.

In all seasons the trail carries two histories: one written in rock and water, the other in the footfall of people. Cornell’s founders, Ezra and Andrew White, believed the university should place the hand near the thing studied; here that principle is plain. Botany students take their lectures in leaf and bark; geologists read the creek banks as if the pages might soon turn by themselves; children learn the oldest calculus—how long a stick will float before it catches in the weeds. The caretakers from the Botanic Gardens mark, mend, and interpret, but they do not overtalk. The woods speak enough.

Moss, grass and pinecones on an overlook of Fall Creek

As the afternoon eased toward evening, I climbed once more to the bluff. The light had gone honey-colored and the leaves of the maples, those careful accountants of September, were just beginning to weigh their green against gold. I looked down on the bend where I’d stood in March—cold, bright, expectant—and felt the year’s circle gently close. As John Burroughs wrote, “The power to see straight is the rarest of gifts… to be able to detach yourself and see the thing as it actually is, uncolored or unmodified by your own… prepossessions… that is to be an observer and to read the book of nature aright.” Monkey Run obliges that humility. The creek moves as it always has—glacially taught, mill-forged, campus-wise, and freedom-loving—and the trail, with its modest stairs and honest bridges, invites us to walk beside it, to match our breath to its turnings, and to leave, if we can, a lighter trace than we found.

References

Ways of Nature (1905), “Reading the Book of Nature,” pp. 275–276 (The Writings of John Burroughs, Riverside ed., vol. XIV, Houghton Mifflin)

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

Glacial Echoes: Dryden Lake Park’s Mirror-Calm Morning in Upstate New York

Morning clouds hang over Dryden Lake as hills kindle first color; reflections hold breath while a lone walker reads the valley’s glacial and human-written past.

MichaelStephenWills11 Comments

He came to the water before the people woke, the road a still ribbon of cold tar snaking beneath the low hills. Mattocks of cloud hung over the valley and the lake took in the sky like a mirror dropped yet not broken. The trees were beginning to color. A patient fire working from within the leaves. He parked where the grass ran down to the shore and stood a long while without moving. Birds made small sounds in the reeds. Somewhere a single truck labored up the grade and was gone. The surface held the hills with a steadiness the hills themselves could not keep. He thought how the quiet of a place can be the loudest thing it owns.

He went along the margin along the damp sedges where old drift lay silvered and light as bones. A drowned trunk angled from the shallows. The lake was old in the way of things made by ice and time. A kettle in the outwash of the last glacier, some men said, a bowl left when the buried ice eased away. He pictured the ice receding into the valley heads, the meltwaters choked with gravel, a hand larger than memory scribing the floor of this country. The earth never told it plain but the lay of it was witness enough. Across later centuries men cribbed a dam across the outlet and drew the water to a shape that pleased them and served their work.

A trail ran the length of the water on the old rail bed. The ties were long gone and the iron and cinders buried under years of leaf fall and gravel. He had walked it as a boy beside his father and now he walked it alone. Benches stood at half-mile intervals like waystations in a country of small pilgrimages. The signs told what once was here and what remains. They had renamed the path for a townman who argued it into being after the railroad had passed from the world and the right-of-way grew up with sumac and rumor. It was an easy trail and he carried nothing. His hands hung at his sides as if the day might place something in them when it was ready.

In another era the lake was a workshop. Men whipsawed timber in the wet air and fed small mills with the grove’s dark boards. Winter flowed over the flats, and they built icehouses and set the blocks within like blue stone, an industry that died when cold could be called from a switch. The hills have learned to forget the noise of it, though on certain mornings the fog takes a shape and you could believe rising from the ponded sawdust and the lading of sleds. He thought of the labor of those gone hands and of how work is a scripture every place keeps in its own tongue.

Before any of that, the ground here was a summer camp. People came with the season and went with it, laying their fires in the lee of the knoll and taking fish where the cattails thin. He could feel them in the open places, not as ghosts but as the first understanding the land ever had of itself. The words used for them now are museum words, yet the wind still crosses the water as it did and empties the same smell of iron and leaf into the lungs of whoever stands to breathe.

The town took its name from a poet long dead, a scholar’s choosing in the years after the war for independence when this tract of country was parceled out to soldiers of that same war. Virgil lay to the east as if they were shelving Latin across a map. The creek that bears that name threads the villages and finds Fall Creek at Freeville, and the combined waters go their own slow way toward Cayuga where the glacial hand scooped deeper yet. He said these names under his breath and they tasted of chalk and river stone.

A kingfisher rattled across the cove. The fish rose in rings that spread and vanished like time seen from above. Out on the water an old man pushed a skiff with an electric motor that hummed like a trapped bee, for the lake allows no gas engines now. The wildlife area ran around the shore in a ragged collar of field and wetland and alder, near two hundred acres under the state’s keeping, and the lake itself a little over a hundred. He watched the man aim for the lily line and thought how rules arise from the wish that a thing endure, though nothing does. Still we make the rules and we keep them as if the earth were listening.

Wind came down the slope with a smell of rain. He turned back and the hills lay again in the water, entire, and for a moment he could not tell which world had claim to the other. He thought of the rails pulled up and the mills gone to weeds and of the icehouses fallen into their own shadows and he thought of the people before all that and of the long winter pressing its thumb into the land and lifting it away. He thought of his father walking the rail bed beside him a lifetime ago and saying nothing. There are places where the past crowds close and will not be argued with. He stood until the first drops dimpled the surface and the reflection shattered and reformed. A train no longer runs here. The only sound was the soft percussion of rain on water and the slow turning of the earth beneath both. He put his hand to the damp trunk of a fallen tree and felt the grain and the coolness and the old patient labor of rot. Then he went up from the reeds, his pockets full of acorns, and out to the road where his truck waited and the day, austere and sufficient, came along with him.

References

Geological History and Glacial Formation of the Finger Lakes

Jim Schug Trail

The Dryden Lake area in the 19th century

Indian Campsite on west side of Dryden Lake

Dryden New York (wikipedia)

Dryden Lake (New York State DEC)

Geohydrology, Water Quality, and Simulation of Groundwater Flow in the Stratified-Drift Aquifer System in Virgil Creek and Dryden Lake Valleys, Town of Dryden, Tompkins County, New York

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

The Mathematical Beauty of Autumn Leaves

Here I reflect on the mathematical beauty of falling leaves from two trees, revealing order amidst perceived chaos in nature’s patterns.

MichaelStephenWills17 Comments

Standing before these two trees on a unseasonably warm autumn day, I am struck by the intricate patterns of their fallen leaves. Against the vibrant green of the grass, the golden leaves form halos around the trunks, as if nature herself were sketching mandalas. There’s something profoundly mathematical about these arrangements—a quiet order amidst what might initially seem like chaos.

The first tree, its barren branches reaching skyward, stands on a carpet of yellow that radiates outward in near-perfect symmetry. The leaves have fallen in such a way that their density decreases as the distance from the trunk increases. It reminds me of the inverse square law—a principle in physics that governs how light, gravity, and sound diminish with distance. Here, instead of energy dispersing, it’s the leaves thinning out, their graceful scatter dictated by the wind’s whims and gravity’s pull. There’s an undeniable harmony in this seemingly random process, a convergence of natural forces creating an elegant gradient.

Stewart Park, Ithaca, New York

The second tree presents a different story, yet one equally mesmerizing. Its leaves, still clinging in part to the branches, form a looser ring at the base. The distribution is uneven, hinting at prevailing winds or the sheltering influence of nearby buildings. But even in this asymmetry, I see fractals—the self-similar patterns that repeat at different scales throughout nature. Look closely, and you’ll notice clusters of leaves mimicking the broader structure of the canopy above. It’s as if the tree’s essence is echoed in the ground below, a reminder of how deeply interconnected every part of a system can be.

Robinia pseudoacacia, commonly known as the black locust

These patterns invite reflection on the mathematical principles governing our world. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, and fractals—abstract concepts are not confined to textbooks. They are etched into the fabric of existence, visible in the spiral of a sunflower’s seeds, the curve of a nautilus shell, and the fall of leaves beneath a tree. Even the chaos of autumn is underpinned by order, a dance choreographed by countless variables: the angle of the branches, the strength of the wind, the moisture in the air.

I find myself wondering about the unseen forces at play. How many leaves fell straight down, obeying only gravity? How many were carried aloft by a breeze before settling farther afield? Could we model these patterns with algorithms, tracing the arc of each leaf’s descent? Would the data reveal a perfect equation, or would it remind us that some mysteries resist full comprehension?

As I stand here, I feel a deep gratitude for these natural equations. They ground me in the present moment while also connecting me to the infinite. The pattern of leaf fall is a reminder of life’s balance: chaos and order, randomness and structure, fleeting moments and timeless principles. The trees, now shedding their golden crowns, invite me to pause, observe, and marvel at the beautiful mathematics of autumn.

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

Buttonbush: The Secret Geometry of Wetlands

Discover the Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), a wetland shrub of spherical blooms, sustaining pollinators, birds, and waterfowl while reminding us of life’s enduring cycles

MichaelStephenWills9 Comments

In the quiet wetlands of late summer, when cattails lift their brown torches above the reeds and dragonflies skim the still water, there is a shrub that speaks in spheres. Its language is not the pointed spear of grass or the broad fan of lily pads, but the perfect symmetry of globes—round, intricate, and startling in their precision. This is the Buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis, a native of swamps, pond margins, and the soft, yielding soils where water shapes the land.

At first glance, its clusters might be mistaken for something fashioned by human hands: spiky balls arrayed along slender stems, each one a small planet bristling with tiny cells. Only in memory can we recall their summer incarnation, when each ball was a constellation of snowy blossoms, white tubular flowers extending like delicate pins from a spherical center. Bees and butterflies crowded them then, drunk on nectar, wings glinting in the sun. Hummingbirds darted in as though drawn by an unseen magnet, their beaks fitting perfectly into the narrow blossoms, a partnership written long ago in the shared script of evolution.

Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Now, in August’s waning light, those blossoms have folded back into seed, transforming into the russet orbs captured in the photograph. What was once nectar is now promise—food for ducks, shorebirds, and the small lives that depend on wetlands for sustenance. In the hands of buttonbush, time itself is circular. Flower becomes fruit, fruit becomes seed, seed becomes shrub, and the cycle spins quietly on, just as the spheres themselves suggest: complete, unbroken, eternal.

A Wetland Companion

Buttonbush is rarely alone. It thrives where cattails whisper, where pickerelweed thrusts up spikes of purple bloom, where the air holds the scent of waterlogged earth. Its roots grip the muck at the edges of ponds and rivers, holding soil against the restless tug of currents. In doing so, it becomes part of the unseen architecture that holds wetlands together, slowing erosion, filtering water, providing shelter for fish in the shade of its stems.

Pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) at Sapsucker Woods, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

This shrub, unassuming in stature, is an engineer of stability. It creates thickets where red-winged blackbirds perch, where frogs crouch in shade, where turtles bask on half-submerged branches. The wetlands of North America would be poorer without its presence, for it provides not just beauty but the scaffolding upon which entire communities of life depend.

The Human Thread

To the human eye, the buttonbush’s spherical blooms are so striking that they demand metaphor. Some have called them pincushions, others tiny planets, others fireworks arrested in mid-burst. Native American peoples, however, looked beyond metaphor to medicine. The bark and roots were used in remedies for ailments ranging from headaches to fevers, though with caution, for the plant holds mild toxicity when consumed raw. It is a reminder that many gifts of the natural world are edged with danger, and that wisdom lies in balance.

Today, gardeners and conservationists plant buttonbush intentionally. It is welcomed into rain gardens, where its thirst for moisture makes it a perfect ally for absorbing stormwater. It is used in wetland restoration projects, where its deep roots anchor new life. And it is cherished by those who walk the edges of ponds and discover in its round blossoms a geometry that feels both wild and deliberate, a gift of design from the living earth.

Fourth of July, 2019, Stewart Park

The Sphere as Symbol

Rachel Carson once wrote that in nature, “nothing exists alone.” The buttonbush embodies this truth with clarity. Its spheres are invitations, junctions where plant and pollinator meet, where flower and bird share a moment of mutual necessity. They are offerings to the eye as well, challenging us to see patterns where we might otherwise see only happenstance.

Standing before a buttonbush in bloom, one feels an almost childlike wonder: how could such symmetry arise unbidden from soil and sunlight? Yet this is the miracle of evolution, that order may spring from chance, that beauty may serve survival, that what pleases our senses also sustains life.

A Closing Reflection

In the wetlands, where water mirrors the sky, the buttonbush offers its own reflection of completeness. Its seed heads persist through autumn and winter, small orbs clinging even when leaves fall, reminders that the cycles of life turn steadily beneath the stillness.

To linger with buttonbush is to be reminded of nature’s quiet insistence on wholeness. It speaks in forms: round, repeating, enduring. To walk away from it is to carry a sense of connection, to know that in the pattern of its blooms we glimpse a truth both humble and profound—that life is not a line but a circle, and in every turning there is renewal.

For Further Reading

USDA NRCS. Plant Guide: Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis L.). United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. Available online: https://plants.usda.gov
– Provides detailed information on identification, habitat, and ecological role.

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Cephalanthus occidentalis (Common Buttonbush). Native Plant Information Network. Available online: https://www.wildflower.org/plants/result.php?id_plant=ceoc2
– Covers botanical features, bloom time, wildlife value, and landscape use.

Dirr, Michael A. Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses. 6th Edition. Stipes Publishing, 2009.
– Authoritative horticultural reference on Buttonbush and other shrubs.

Peterson, Roger Tory, and Margaret McKenny. A Field Guide to Wildflowers: Northeastern and North-central North America. Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
– Classic field guide covering buttonbush’s wetland habitat.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
– Source of the quoted passage: “In nature nothing exists alone.” (Chapter 2, “The Obligation to Endure”).

Moerman, Daniel E. Native American Ethnobotany. Timber Press, 1998.
– Comprehensive reference documenting traditional medicinal uses of Buttonbush among Native American peoples.

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

Wandering Glider: The Far-Traveling Dragonfly of Ithaca’s July Skies

A sun-worn dragonfly rests at journey’s end, its amber wings whispering of distant winds, silent skies, and the untold grace of nature’s farthest travelers.

MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

I found it trapped in the surface tension of standing water, motionless, its wings curled and clouded with the memory of flight. A dragonfly—worn, delicate, yet still resolute in form—lay before me like a token of the warm midsummer air that had lifted it through the fields and over the waters. July in Ithaca brings with it such winged travelers, borne on breezes scented with milkweed and bee balm, and this one, though grounded now, seemed still to carry the echo of great distances.

The dragonfly is not of the brooding sort; it lives neither in shadows nor secret places. It claims the sky as its own, ranging wide and far with a grace born of ceaseless motion. This particular specimen, its body some two inches in length and its wings veined like the bare branches of winter trees, bore the telltale marks of the Wandering Glider—Pantala flavescens. Each wing was tipped with a black bar, as though the artist who made it had laid down a final, definitive stroke to balance the creature in the air. Near the base, a wash of amber yellow glowed softly, like the last light of evening behind thin clouds.

There is something unquiet about the dragonfly. It does not hover long nor does it dawdle. It darts, it glides, it shimmers in and out of sight. It is a creature of action and of space. The glider, especially, seems to belong not to any one stream or meadow, but to the wind itself. Naturalists tell us this species is among the most traveled of all insects, crossing oceans, riding monsoons, appearing in lands where no memory of its departure remains. What must it see? What sunrises shimmer from its compound eyes, what shorelines flash beneath its outstretched wings?

In the dragonfly’s manner, I find no sign of labor, only the silent art of survival. It patrols its airspace like a hawk, yet it bears no menace, only the precise and relentless hunger of a born predator. With each dart and glide it performs a service to the air—clearing it of gnats and mosquitoes, feeding itself without waste. Nature, in her economy, grants no idle beauty, and the dragonfly is both elegant and essential.

As I gazed at the delicate carcass, I thought of the old philosophy that linked the soul’s journey to the flight of birds. But here, perhaps, is a more fitting image: this dragonfly, which lives but a brief summer, yet might travel farther in its span than many creatures do in a lifetime. We are apt to call it “wandering,” as though it lacked aim or anchor. But I think it follows a thread of purpose invisible to us—something stitched into the weave of wind and weather, of season and sun.

It had come far, and its journey was complete. My wife provided an empty saffron spice box to preserve and display it—for the grandchildren to marvel over.

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