Sojourn in Squagonna

ByMarilyn Terrell
July 13, 2006
4 min read

Fresh from their recent flirtation with tropical storm Alberto, chief researcher Marilyn Terrell and her intrepid family took on another enemy of travel during their stay at a house they’d rented in central New York state last week:

The owners of the house showed up to welcome us, and so did the mosquitoes. It’s hard to shake hands and swat flying insects at the same time. Inside, the house swarmed with small, breakable objects displayed on every available surface—all for sale, the owners told us. It’s a good thing we decided not to bring our dog Sully, although the owners would have welcomed him (for a fee). One swipe of his tail could have added considerably to the cost of our weeklong stay.

The downside to a ‘pets welcome’ policy: It includes cats, as we found out when our kids’ eyes itched and swelled up. So, we spent as much time outdoors as possible, sitting around the campfire, even in the rain. On the bright side, as my husband observed, the rain kept down the mosquitoes.

I had found this house on craigslist: ‘4br—!!! Inexpensive cottage on the Seneca River/Finger Lakes sleeps 10!!!’ It was actually about an hour north of any of the Finger Lakes, in an area that was rather economically depressed, though rich in history: The Erie Canal still runs through it, the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy hunted its forests, it was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, and the first suffragettes got together in nearby Seneca Falls.

One advantage to a disappointing house rental is that it forces you to explore. We visited a lock on the Erie Canal, and my husband and I sang the Erie Canal Song for our bemused kids (we both grew up in New York and had to learn the song in fourth grade). We dipped our toes in the incomprehensibly huge Lake Ontario (I had to taste it to be convinced it wasn’t ocean). In the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge, we spotted a bald eagle nest with a chick inside on top of a telephone pole. At an organic winery along Seneca Lake we learned that no pesticides + no herbicides + no synthetic sulfites = no headaches! We checked out the Museum of the Earth where our kids searched for fossils and bought smash-your-own geodes, and hiked Watkins Glen, where the rain made the waterfalls even more impressive. We bought delicious mill-ground pancake mix from New Hope Mills, first opened 1823. In Auburn, an enthusiastic young curator gave us a private tour of a church whose interior was completely designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany, from the hand-laid mosaic floor, bas-relief walls and hand-carved pews to the colorful chandeliers that dangled like ice pops and the multi-dimensional stained glass windows.

To see if our kids’ allergies would clear up (they did), we spent one night in Ithaca and explored the vast campus of Cornell. The Peony Garden is exquisite, the Dairy Bar offers ice cream from Cornell cows, and they grow common weeds in display gardens for identification purposes. (Tip: When making reservations at a hotel near a college, ask if they have a special rate for college visitors. It saved us 30 bucks at Ithaca’s Hilton Garden Inn.)

On the way back from one of our field trips, I half-read a historical marker along the road and urged my husband to go back so I could read the whole thing (I can’t help it, it’s the researcher in me). I’m glad we did. The New York State Department of Education erected the sign in 1935, and identified this area along the Seneca River not far from our cottage as ‘Squagonna’—the aboriginal name for “Paradise of Musquitoes.”

Thankfully, this mozzie paradise is nowhere near Trumansburg, where IT is tempted to check out next week’s Finger Lakes GrassRoots Festival of Music & Dance. Even if it were, we’d gladly brave a few itchy bites to hear Michael Franti live.

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