Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder
ithaca sits surrounded by hills; the tops of the hills are flat. this is because they are not true hills, which rise up from the earth. they are plateau remnants; and the valleys are scratchmarks left by the fingers of glaciers when they reached down from the north.
the hills in ithaca are split open with cracks where merciless water flows. the shattered sides of the gorges crumble at the touch as though the hills could dissolve at any moment. beneath every bridge in cornell a net is spread to deter jumpers, and ducks swim peacefully in the water below.
there are always more secrets hidden in these folded hills. when i am home i hike with dad, our small anxious dog, and our large blind dog. i think of the extradimensional geometry of string theory with every discovery of something i had never seen before. we go as far from civilization as we can and hidden among the trees we find colonial graveyards, old stone walls, abandoned logging roads.
minnesota stretches out flat until farms meet clouds at the horizon. driving becomes a shifting study of parallax and perspective. the skyline of minneapolis rises out of the flat land like mount fuji exposed against the open sky. in ithaca the hills hold you in pockets with only a sliver of sky. the other side of the valley is laid out like an abstraction of a landscape, flat houses and barns, farms and forests in a formless pattern. but this is a map of somewhere else: your perspective is only a single point in the image seen by someone on the other side.
ithaca sits surrounded by the names of dead places and people. odysseus will never return here. nor will the cayuga people reclaim the lake that carries their name. it stretches north to the horizon from ithaca, as if reaching to ontario where the displaced survivors of the sullivan campaign took refuge.
the haudenosaunee reached minnesota, in their imperial phase as english proxies. hiawatha’s name is still spoken here, more often than i ever heard it in ithaca.