Ithaca Recap: (Don’t) Let It Go

The Rim Trail in Ithaca.

It’s been a while since my last post. I didn't post about my last adventure day on my trip upstate, including a hike and a visit with a dear old friend, because the day ended really late and I was tired, and then last week I was sick and lazy and cleaning for Passover. But I’ll try to fill in the blanks now.

My second drive to Ithaca, by a route I had often taken in college, was fondly nostalgic, but more memorable for its strange lack of gas stations when I really needed one. The hike was pretty mediocre. It was nice, but it didn’t spark any kind of feelings in me one way or the other - no ecstasy, no agony.

Also no snow. I mean, yes, of course, some snow. But interestingly, in the most northern point of the state I had visited, I found the least-snow covered terrain. Much of the hike, through some pretty featureless woods lacking any kind of magnificent views (the more interesting hike, the Gorge Trail, was closed for the winter), was on solid dirt.

I can’t recommend the hike. It was pretty forgettable. I went to the Robert H. Treman State Park just outside the city of Ithaca to hike the Rim Trail, but the whole thing was poorly managed. The trailhead in the actual park was closed because it was across a frozen stream, so you had to follow some complicated directions out of the park and drive to a sketchy “parking lot” near an underpass to access the trail, but of course you didn’t find that out until you actually got all the way into the park, which I felt was very stupid. And there was no signage; you just had to follow a lightly beaten path which ran (sketchily) beneath the underpass.

Sketchy underpass.

The hike itself was pretty much what its shaky beginning promised. It was through woods, but there wasn’t much to see. I guess in the nice weather it would probably be a very enjoyable nature walk. Misled by the name of the trail, I kind of expected it to be on the rim of something, but it wasn’t. It just went up and down through the woods. It wasn’t very beautiful, it wasn’t very inspiring, and it wasn’t very interesting. It was fine. I tried to coax up some feelings of wonderment, but it was a hard sell and my emotions weren’t really into it. The trail ended at a lame gorge, beyond which was . . . a parking lot. And then I had to turn around and go all the way back.

Ooh. Aah.

I guess the four-mile hike (two miles there, two back) took about three hours, start to finish. It was chilly, but bearable; I didn’t even have to wear gloves most of the time. And, unlike my previous hikes, my feet were pretty dry at the end. There had been snow, but not enough to soak through my boots.

That was it. I drove from there to the Trip Hotel Ithaca, which had good reviews, but was pretty old and a little weird. The check-in process took forever because I had to wait for the guys ahead of me, construction workers from Rochester in town for a job, to get their reservation sorted with the less-than-genius gal at the reception desk.

One of the guys checking in was friendly, and shook my hand; the other abruptly left midway through arguing with the concierge (if you could call her that) to go smoke a cigarette outside. It was clear they were not from society’s upper echelons, and I wondered if I had chosen the right hotel, especially when the concierge first gave me the wrong key and then started describing in excruciating detail how to navigate the two corridors of the hotel to my room. I couldn’t help but notice the guy whose hand I had shaken paying very close attention as she told me which floor to go to and traced the path on a map of the hotel to -- and I abruptly interrupted her before she could literally announce my room number out loud. What the hell was wrong with this woman?

Now feeling a little paranoid, I went back to my car and drove around to my room, but waited for the other guys to go into the hotel before I did. Luckily they were out of sight when I finally made a dash for my room. It was fine, but the hotel was definitely not in its first youth. I put on the door chain (something I had started doing regularly since the Bel Air Motel fiasco in Gatlinburg) before showering and relaxing. (By the way, despite all of this foreshadowing, nothing happened and the hotel was totally fine.)

I left for Amy’s house in the evening, where she lives with her husband and three boys, the youngest of whom I had never met, and we sat and talked and ate for six hours. What’s absolutely amazing about Amy’s family is that despite being devout Christians they basically keep kosher. That has nothing to do with their religion; it’s just their diet. Amy is a very strict vegetarian, to the point that she only buys cheese without animal enzymes and makes her husband cook his infrequent meat meals on a grill in the garage and eat off it paper plates. Her oven has never had meat inside it, and all her dishes are dairy. They also eat organic without preservatives or dyes, so most of their food is certified kosher anyway! This essentially means that they observe the kosher laws more stringently than most Jews. I felt absolutely no compunction about eating the dinner they’d cooked (delicious homemade pizza and crepes for dessert), which for an observant Jew is such a rare pleasure when traveling.

I mean, it’s beyond a pleasure. It’s like you can breathe for once. Navigating the homes of people who don’t keep kosher is doable, but uncomfortable. It’s difficult to ask for paper plates and plastic cutlery with which to eat the special food that you brought without feeling as if you’re sending a message that their dishes and food aren’t good enough for you in some way. Even when they understand, even when they’re super accommodating and hospitable, I still feel some degree of awkwardness about it.

As a result, I sometimes make allowances that I know I shouldn’t, or that I know many people wouldn’t. I’d rather do that than have to explain that your best intentions weren’t good enough, that even though you went out of your way to buy the kosher xyz, you have rendered it unkosher by cooking it in your pot. I won’t do that.

But the happy point I’m making here is that at Amy’s, I didn’t have to. I had no doubt at all that everything she was feeding me was perfectly within the accepted limits of kashrut as I observe it. And since that is something that goes without saying at the home of any observant Jewish family, you might wonder why it was so amazing for me to encounter it in Ithaca. Well, it was amazing because she wasn’t Jewish, and because being religious has, in many ways, drawn a lot of lines between me and people who aren’t religious, or who aren’t Jewish - lines that I still find challenging to confront, even after having been observant for nearly seven years.

Amy was my roommate and closest friend for exactly one semester of college: fall semester of our sophomore year. She left Binghamton after that to get married and have a baby, and she ended up finishing her degree at Ithaca College part-time while being a full-time working mom and wife over the next several years. She is my role model and my hero, and has been for many years. Somehow, she manages to balance raising and homeschooling three incredibly well-behaved and sweet boys (with the help of her husband), a full-time career as an accountant, a wonderful marriage, and a fulfilling inner life. WHO DOES THAT?!?

I have always envied her for being so easily and early settled with a husband and a family. I envied her bucolic Ithaca life out in the country. Of course, I know her life isn’t perfect, no one’s is, they’ve had their struggles, like everyone. But coming from someone whose struggles were always tangled up with a messy love life or, more recently, no love life at all, her situation seemed idyllic to me. She was the complete opposite of pathetic, single, childless me.

That envy was never in any way malicious. I always told her I envied her, and she always answered me with her wise and wry observations about life. After I was a bridesmaid at her wedding at the end of sophomore year, I continued to see her fairly often, visiting every few months from Binghamton until I graduated. After that we kept in touch via looooong Facebook messages that we exchanged a few times a year, updating each other on our lives. Eventually, the time that would go by between the messages grew longer and longer, sometimes reaching a year before one of us would respond. But we never lost touch, and when I came up in 2013 on my last upstate trip, of course seeing her (and her adorable new baby) was a major priority. Amy’s just one of those people I can talk to like we saw each other yesterday and will see each other tomorrow.

This latest visit was no different. She showed me the changes in the house since I’d been there last, we discussed her three kids, her job, my decision to come back, my life in Israel, all kinds of things. I stayed until well past midnight just chatting, and I felt like I could have come back the next day and kept chatting for another six hours. It was lovely.

I felt sad that I didn’t live closer, that I couldn’t see her and her family more often, and that we didn’t have more time together. But after all, I’m back in the US now, and I don’t have to wait five years between visits anymore. But sometimes the very nearness is what keeps you apart; thinking you can see them any time means you actually see them never.

I like keeping up old friendships. The thing I’ve discovered is that you don’t get an infinite amount of special people you can really connect with in this life. When you find one, you should hold on. There will be obstacles (often geographical ones), life will intervene, there will be so many excuses not to keep in touch, but I think it’s a shame to let good friendships go. They’re pretty rare.

At Amy's wedding in 2007.

I guess there is something to be said for nostalgia, after all.